happy pride, despite the circumstances
sholem aleichem,
[cw: transphobia, current events, psych wards]
In our parsha, the promised land is described as ocheles yoshveha: one who eats her inhabitants.
I was visiting with chosen family last Shabbos, catching up after I had moved away a year ago. I shared that I was applying for high-school teaching jobs — “for as long as that’s legal.” I wasn’t joking, exactly. The authoritarians running this country certainly do not want trans teachers — trans anything — and the forces that might stop or slow them seem at best disinterested in the fight.
I don’t share these thoughts and feelings to contribute to panic. I am, personally, at much less risk than many. And perhaps what I fear will not come to pass; many are indeed fighting for our future as I write. But as the conditions for trans people in this country continue to worsen, it is difficult not to consider as real possibilities those things which, a few years ago, lived for me only in dystopian fiction.
Every day, I feel the weight of my ancestors’ decisions to flee their countries before being devoured. I know people who have fled mine already, people in circumstances much like my own.
In 2020, I started obsessively reading post-apocalyptic pandemic fiction. Lately, my obsessive reading has turned toward christofascist dystopias — The Handmaid’s Tale, After the Revolution, Native Tongue.
As terrifying as these stories are, there are moments in them of friendship, of love, of joy, of peace. I read these stories to try to convince myself that this country cannot devour me whole, that there can be joy, peace, and love despite the conditions approaching us.
The circumstances have been reduced; for those of us who still have circumstances.
But a chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. I am alive, I live, I breathe, I put my hand out, unfolded, into the sunlight.
[Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, Chapter 10]
I took my first steps of transition in 2011, painting my nails in my one-room “converted” motel apartment in upstate New York. A few years later, I began medical and legal transition. It wasn’t easy, but I could be optimistic. My student health insurance covered my medical transition, and legal transition (where I lived) was only getting easier.
Very few trans people in history have had such fortunate circumstances.
Can I confess to a dark thought? Sometimes, when things are really bad, I wish I’d never transitioned. That’s like saying I wish I was dead. But maybe I wish that too, in a way that might be impossible for you to understand unless you’re trans yourself. I didn’t know what joy was until I came out. I didn’t really care about anything. Not other people, or society, least of all myself. And when things get really bad, I wonder, would I have been better off that way? With no soul? Could I have just kept that void inside and filled it with rage or alcohol or whatever else people self-medicate with? Could I have survived without ever having known love, beauty, happiness? If I were just empty, just filled with nothing? I wouldn’t call this feeling regret: it’s not about wanting to undo the past. It’s a fear of the future. Fear of the absence of a future.
[Abigail Thorn, “The Outer Worlds: Coping with Nihilism”, 11:50, official captions]
It’s davka this fear — of the absence of a future, of this country devouring me whole — that drives my obsession with dystopia, with seeing a future despite a profound reduction in circumstances.
I’m not skilled at seeing futures on my own. I brought this up once, in group, on a psych ward. I was advised to practice instead the skill of gratitude for present conditions. This seemed impossible to me: each present condition for which I’m grateful contains within it the fear of a different future.
Biblical Hebrew has no way of saying thanks. The word l’hodot means “to praise”. Now, praise and thanks obviously go together and are closely linked. But the way that a Modern Hebrew speaker might say “todah” — if you said something like that in Biblical times it would mean something like “praise you”. And building on something that my teacher Bernie Steinberg said to me many years ago, I’ve tried to argue that the relationship between praise and thanks…is that praise is what happens to thanks when I forget about myself.
Thanks is “oh god you are so wonderful you gave me this child”.
Praise is “oh god you are so wonderful”.
The part that is about me falls away.
[R’ Shai Held, Psalm for Shabbat, 9:35, transcript mine]
Praise is not about my subjective experience, but rather about revealing my sense of awe.
In the way that a person seeks a secret chamber or hidden wealth under the earth…so must one dig…to reveal the treasure of the awe of heaven, that is hidden and concealed in the understanding of the heart…which is of a quality and level beyond specific circumstances.
[Tanya, 42]
Gratitude depends on circumstances. But beyond any specific circumstance is the awe that there are circumstances at all.
This awe is hidden, but it is always there, an inheritance of love from our ancestors. And we can touch it at any time. We only have to turn away from our experience of a thing and toward the inwardness and life of the thing itself.
The essential thing [in finding this hidden awe] is the practice: to train one’s mind and thought always, to keep fixed in one’s heart and mind always, that all one perceives with one’s body, the heaven and the earth and all that fills it, all of them are outer garments of the King, of the Holy Blessed One. By this means, one will always remember their inwardness and life.
[Tanya, 42]
A chair, sunlight, flowers: these are not to be dismissed. These are not just my circumstances to be personally grateful for, these are garments of haShem to be amazed by, with inwardness and life of their own.
Dear friends, I do not know what circumstances the future holds for us. But there is awe beyond all circumstance, and with it the possibility of peace, joy, love —
Happy Pride, transsexuals, despite the circumstances.
ada
p.s. If gratitude journaling works for you, thank gd, keep doing it.
p.p.s. The Tanya speaks specifically about Jews and in certain physical metaphors (“see with your eyes”). I chose to universalize both in my translation choices, but wish to note this as a matter of intellectual honesty.