What IS Love in 2022?

“Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word "love" here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace - not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.”

- James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time, 1963

I cohost a small but growing podcast from my home in the States. Our global audience is growing, and we have a weekly time slot on Medway Pride Radio in the UK. The podcast is really an extension of daily life between my fiancé, who happens to be a black, cis, queer man, and me, a white trans queer woman. We had always talked about race, orientation and gender around our table anyway, so we decided to record those discussions and see what happens. Those audience numbers that make a podcast financially viable are within sight. I’m grateful. Especially because we’re not trying to sell a particular idea beyond the fact that we live a fairly mundane life, love one another, and talk through stuff together. In much of this country (and sadly, this world) the very idea of us is incomprehensible. So I think this little show matters. Sure, I’d love you to give us a listen, dear reader, but that’s not why I sat down to write. I just wanted to open this essay with where I am currently.

Today, I live openly as a trans woman. But there are still conversations with blood family that have never taken place. May never take place. Because I do not foresee a time where I will offer explanation for my Being. Not again. I did enough of that when I came out as queer the first time (officially) to my blood relatives in 2012. For some it went swimmingly, for some it was a struggle, and for some it meant a growing distance that has only widened. Back then it was almost as if an apology -certainly an explanation- was owed to THEM regarding my right to exist and be happy. I suppose because they knew me a certain way, as presented by me for a time, and this somehow felt like a betrayal to them. Or something.

Since I have spent my entire life encouraging the growth of others, I’m going to make room for my own growth and evolution, without apology.

I never ended a marriage to pursue another relationship of any kind, even the relationship with myself. I don’t expect a medal, I’m certain they had many reasons to walk away, and I wish them both nothing but the best. Truly. But two marriages had crashed and burned by 2011, and I had to peel my own onion to get on with things. And so, deep and frequent introspection ensued -or resumed- as a result. I have come to know more of myself -warts and all- over these past 10 years than I had in the first 46. I’m loving and impatient. I’m driven and lazy. I’m fierce and I am frightened. I tend to be forthright these days, and I live with an integrity some find off putting, and that is for them to reckon with for themselves.

To get to here, I had to wrestle a lot of installed demons, and slay many dragons I once thought were my own. Don’t twist it- I can be as shitty and cranky as the next fifty-something broad born in NJ and honed in Philly- but I didn’t install my lack of self-esteem or my certainty that I must guard a “secret” too ugly for human consumption. I can remember back far enough in childhood to know I once thought I was wonderful. Turns out, I was the one who was correct back then, and I’ve been shoveling away layers of garbage ever since I remembered my intrinsic worth.

They asked me to wear a mask. Correction. They forced me to wear a mask. (And I am of course not talking about the little squares of cloth or paper some of y’all had such fits over protecting one another with more recently.)

Relentlessly and with physical force they “explained” that this world would crush one such as me if I didn’t toughen up and comply. Learn to conform to get by in this world! And boy howdy did I give it a go. But you know, I wasn’t content to stay where they told me to be. I kept meeting folks. New folks. Different folks. I kept seeing new and different ways of being in this world. I remained curious. And I grew. I learned more and more. I re-examined my positions and beliefs and stances. I thought that was what adulthood is supposed to be. Humans are supposed to want to keep growing, aren’t they?

My views of right and wrong have evolved dramatically over these years, yet for all the complexity in our world, my view remains pretty simple: “Is anyone being harmed?” Whether a belief, a public or organizational policy, the decision on how many places to set at your table, or which kids can play with your kids, we should all aim never to harm others whenever possible, especially as we endeavor to “protect” our own. Don’t just say Grace before a meal, LIVE it and extend it. I believe, more now than ever, there really are two driving forces in this world: Fear, and Love. And distinguishing between the two seems to be a problem for so many these days, including and perhaps especially, “Christians.”

People of every stripe and background who sell ideas know that fear sells out while love sits dusty on the shelf. Fear drives people to polls more often than love. The constant battle between what is labeled as good and what is labeled as evil rages on. And if your premise is that people are basically evil, that’s what you work from. It presupposes you’re one of “the good ones” of course, and you have overcome your “inherent evil nature” and therein lies an important key. Have you? And are we? See, I actually believe the opposite. I believe people at their core are usually, inherently, good as they enter this world. Once they take that first breath, it's all a crapshoot.

Is there a lot of horror in this world? Yes. There is a constant narrative fed by those who call themselves right while calling the rest wrong. Many do righteously carry knowable facts and reliable data, and many are willing to lie to “prove” the opposite to be “true.” But is the drama unfolding reflective of most folks? I don’t think it is. And I’m not talking about the real atrocities that do indeed happen in this world, either. I am talking about behavior such as labeling an entire batch of people “groomers” when you have not a clue what you are saying and don’t care if it is a destructive LIE. Ugly, baseless mudslinging is adolescent behavior.

I am told I was walking and talking at 9 months old. While my memory does not sharply extend that far back, I do remember glimpses of things that transpired before I turned 3. And my memory improves from there. I have known, courtesy of those charged with my care and their intimates, that I was always “different” from them. I was labeled a boy who was NOT a boy, and seen as a girl who was NOT a girl, and the near-constant correction from Everyone around me never changed a THING. I have ALWAYS been thus, and ever shall be. But y’all don’t wanna even SAY gay because it rubs off? Please. WE are just as ineffective at recruitment as y’all. Prolly more so. We just see one another and help pick up each other’s broken pieces.

Perhaps my mind and curiosity have always been more open than most because I was told early on I didn’t fit in. What’s that children's book? “Are You My Mother?” I mean, I knew the woman who held the title for my life, but I was always open to finding people who offered Love, and Grace, whether they resembled me or not. Because the ones who most resembled me also beat the snot outta me while claiming “my own good.”

So as I look at the folly of governmental intervention where trans kids are concerned, my blood does boil. I am deeply saddened. Because I WAS THAT KID. And like every other LGBTQ+ person on this planet, we discover our wiring, we do not install it. “God” does. And you can’t change it for us, you can only do us harm or walk beside us. Them’s your options.

Same goes for this abortion kerfuffle that has been raging since we dared admit that people have abortions.(By the way, they always WILL.) Because cis men can’t get pregnant but presumably (sometimes) want to at least claim kids, the very idea that “their” cis women could have any control over incubating the spawn is incomprehensible. What was happening before Rowe was horrifying. Back when a much saner Supreme Court grappled with the situation, they rightly concluded it was nobody else’s business but the pregnant person and their doctor. (See what I did there? I’m not excluding cis women, I’m INCLUDING everyone ELSE with the capacity for pregnancy. No one was harmed.)

It is also nobody else’s business how loving and attentive parents affirm their trans kids. Because the VAST majority of those kids are not going through “a phase,” but what if they are? Affirming them shows them LOVE from this world, and is completely reversible (and 100% noninvasive) until puberty. And then puberty blockers can offer a (reversible!) pause to continue to “think on it” and then those kids, together with their parents and trained medical professionals, can decide if introducing hormone therapy is right for THAT child. Nowhere in the equation is there room for government, the church, or YOU if you are not the kid, the parent or the doctor in the equation. Simple. Even if you don’t choose to understand all or any of it. It’s not yours To understand. Mind your business. As long as you value your right to wear glasses, boost your bust line, fix your teeth, take viagra, wear a wig or toupee or get “little procedures” you have to shut up about this. That’s how bodily autonomy WORKS. It’s all of us or none of us, and too many of y’all aren’t seeing that. Yet.

See, intervening between a pregnant human who doesn’t want to be pregnant and their doctor, or a child like ME and their family and doctors, DOES HARM. When you hear about a raped, pregnant 10 year-old and you pray for the fetus? You’re so far off base as to be AWOL from common decency. You checked your humanity in some church coat room and you need to go retrieve it. When you hear about yet another gender non-conforming kid taking their own life over sustained bullying, and you blame the kid for being weak or the parents for not “correcting” the non-conformity - I am here to remind you that you have now read my words. They’re here in plain English for you to digest as slowly as you might need. Our kids are dying and we who know them, are NOT okay with that.

I told you, the bullying we endure doesn’t come from us, and we are born as these glorious creatures -no one twisted us into it, and Jesus won’t “stop” it and neither will his “Dad.” If you believe “God doesn’t make mistakes” then how very dare you call any of US “mistakes?” I thought y’all liked to say you AREN’T “God?” Stop presuming you are. Humility among Christians used to be a thing.

The insidious thing for us is that we don’t get to choose which family we show up in. For every miracle child lucky enough to show up in a supportive home that will love them as they reveal who they are, we have the casualties of religion and ignorance that eventually escape one way or another, as I did. There is not one (real) happy “ex-gay” on this planet because that is Not A Thing. They are pretending -ALL of them. I know. I was there, too, after the “exorcism” and before I let sanity (and a bit of self compassion) reign.

Back to JB and the idea of love as “quest and daring and growth.” When we cling to the familiar because we fear that which we do not know, we constrict ourselves and the world around us. This is the root and perpetuation of Racism. Sexism. Patriarchy. Homophobia. Transphobia. Xenophobia. Fear-based Othering, all of it. And fear leads, as it always has, to all manner of atrocity. It leads to Death. Decay. Violence. Poverty. And all of that too often in the name of good old fashioned Christian “love,” generally, but not exclusively, in the hands of white folks.

What is your “quest” if you don’t want actual history taught, think folks like me are less than or not even real, and don’t trust pregnant folks with bodily autonomy? What are you “daring” by arming yourself to the teeth and fighting for the rights of weapons of war over the right to life of schoolchildren? What are you “daring” when your elected representatives demonstrably lie to the public they’ve sworn to serve, and you feel joy over that? And how can you ever say you are “grown” when you refuse to do just that, and don’t encourage it in your offspring? Or maybe you don’t really believe these things at all. Maybe you, like me, were told to by people you trusted. You can stop anytime. Just like I did. THAT is humility, friend.

There was a time in my life when I admired Christians, because the ones I encountered seemed to want to “help” people who were not like them. But some of them were missionaries wreaking havoc in other countries by imposing western “values” as the traditional values of others were neither valued nor respected. Savages in need of salvation or humans in need of peace from these saviors? And who decides all that again? Grace doesn’t need to be imposed. But religion often does.

It always comes back to why we are not happy to tend our own gardens, live our own lives, and allow others to do the same. Perhaps fearful people installed fear in us? Challenging our own beliefs and fears is harm reduction. That is also sound public policy. And honestly? That’s how you love your neighbor- by leaving us alone to tend our own gardens while you figure out why you don’t like your own.

One more thing. Redlining a neighborhood is NOT leaving us alone. Neither is burning a cross, burning a book, or otherwise marginalizing people you don’t identify with. Same goes for my hormone therapy, their abortion, and their right to worship or not as THEY see fit, not as you see fit for them.

If you do believe in an all-powerful God in heaven or elsewhere, my question to you is this: Why do you believe your God is so small as to require your intervention? Perhaps you are the one of little faith, and “God” really is bigger than all of Us. I do know Love is bigger and bolder and stronger than Fear, and Love WILL win.

Peace, Lovelies

-MM

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