Queerness, Transness and Nonbinariness as Invitations for All of Us

The following is adapted from a sermon I was invited to share at a local queer-affirming church in observance of Pride.

We are here inside of Pride month, this season which grew out of celebrating the Stonewall Riots, a protest against police brutality. May we hold close Pride’s roots in popular resistance instead of losing yet another piece of our histories of liberation to cooptation and commodification.

And so in this season that celebrates resistance to hate, violence, and the abuse of power by the state, a time when we need this sort of resistance more than ever, I want to invite us into an exploration of queerness, transness and nonbinariness as invitations and guiding frameworks that might help us resist, survive and perhaps even thrive in the face of fascism and authoritarianism.

Queerness, transness and nonbinariness as invitations towards:

• More joy and aliveness

• The potency of our grief and rage

• Breaking down borders and binaries of all kinds

Alok Vaid-Menon, a gender-nonconforming transfeminine performance artist, writer and a leading voice for gender liberation and all things very queer, asks us the question:

“What part of you did you have to destroy in order to survive in this world?”

For so many of us, our gender expressions were not fully welcomed as children (or adults/ever!), sometimes more subtly socialized to conform, other times overtly and violently forced to cut off parts of ourselves to maintain safety and belonging with the people we depended on for survival.

This doesn’t apply only to trans people - cishet people can also have expansive gender expression that our current dominant gender narratives don’t leave space for.

(Take a moment to explore the Gender Unicorn if you’d like to reflect on this for yourself!)

As we fight for, cultivate and move towards communities where there is deeper and wider inclusion for queerness, nonbinariness and transness, all of us benefit.

Regardless of our own identities (which I would posit continue to change, evolve, expand, change again over time for many of us anyhow), we all win! Through a growing commitment to celebrating and practicing queerness in all its forms, there’s more space for a wider range of expression for all of us.

In other words, more of ourselves, more joy, more aliveness, maybe even thriving. Joy, especially queer joy, is such needed medicine for this moment.

And here’s what I love about queerness - it doesn’t just apply to gender and sexuality! We can queer our ways of thinking about family, of thinking about god, about religion, about politics, about nature, about anything! Queer as a verb, an action word. And the same goes for transness, for nonbinariness!

And as more of us get to reconnect with the exiled parts of ourselves, get to bring more of our full expression and aliveness and joy, the flip side of this can be connecting more to our grief and our rage as well.

Some of you may have an immediate reaction to that - why would I want to lean into something that invites more of my grief and rage!? I know this is what comes up for me at least - grief and rage are uncomfortable, dangerous even!

But as I have made it an intentional practice to connect more to both my grief and my rage, to hold community grief ritual space, to dignify and honor the wisdom of these necessary emotions, I have been learning to reclaim them for the life-force that they are.

As we see how we have been cut off of parts of ourselves, whether related to gender and sexuality, or other parts of our precious aliveness, as we really reckon with this loss, this impact, we might connect more to rage and anger.

Author Martin Prechtel reminds us that:

“Grief is praise, because it is the natural way love honors what it misses.”

And grief worker Francis Weller says:

“Grief and love are sisters, woven together from the beginning. Their kinship reminds us that there is no love that does not contain loss and no loss that is not a reminder of the love we carry for what we once held close.”

And as Joanna Macy reminds us, the grief that comes through deeply loving the earth and feeling our interbeing with all of life is the starting point for fighting for her/them:

“We are capable of suffering with our world, and that is the true meaning of compassion. It enables us to recognize our profound interconnectedness with all beings. Don't ever apologize for crying for the trees burning in the Amazon or over the waters polluted from mines in the Rockies. Don't apologize for the sorrow, grief, and rage you feel. It is a measure of your humanity and your maturity. It is a measure of your open heart, and as your heart breaks open there will be room for the world to heal. That is what is happening as we see people honestly confronting the sorrows of our time.”

Our grief points us towards what we love, and it is only when we have really connected to what we love that we become ready to fight for it.

So, queerness, transness and nonbinariness are inviting us to reclaim more of our aliveness. Through this, we may also start to connect to and feel more of our grief and rage. This supports our fierce commitment to fight for life in all its forms.

The last piece of the invitation I want to offer, that I think queerness, transness and nonbinariness invite us to consider, is around breaking down borders and binaries of all kinds.

I feel the edginess of bringing in the Christian Bible, and yet there are some gems in there! Before I shared these words as a sermon this past Sunday, we heard an invitation in the New Testament reading from Galatians 3 - a very radical declaration, that calls us to break down religious, geo-political, economic, class and gender divisions.

I’m sure for many of you, this might not feel that radical - of course I would be welcoming to folks of other faiths, other races, other immigration statuses than my own. And yes, let’s celebrate this and fight for these basic forms of humanity, now more than ever.

And as we feel into queerness, transness and nonbinariness as invitations, here’s the big question I’ve been sitting with at the edge of my own comfort zone lately, which I want to invite you into with me:

What other edges of inclusion/acceptance/diversity might we need to be stretching towards next/now?

What if this moment was inviting us to stretch across one of the deepest divides of our time, to folks on the political Right, to White Christian Right Trump supporters, (for some of us our own family and neighbors), as neighbors and kin?

What if finding a way to break down this border, this binary, was actually part of the way forward towards healing and liberation for all of us? Including those who we may feel//are perpetuating and supporting such deep hatred and violence in this moment?

Whew. Let’s just sit with that one for a moment. I know it makes me uncomfortable.

And this is when I wish for this medium of sharing to be much more interactive. :) I would love to hear how this is landing in you.

But for now, I’m just going to leave it as a big question for you to let simmer. Another invitation to consider in this month that is all about radical resistance, inclusion, acceptance, diversity.

May liberation for all of us really include all of us, and all parts of us. Not in a way that excuses violence and harm, but in a way that deeply calls forward the full expression and aliveness of every human, of all life.

What might these invitations be asking of you today? What seeds are they planting in your own life?

I’d love to hear what’s percolating. And may you be finding your own way to the gifts of these three invitations - more joy, more aliveness, more grief and rage, and less borders and binaries that deepen severance, isolation and harm.