Disappear or Die: Southern Black Trans-Experience
Today we bless Tela La’Raine Love as she prepares for her gender reassignment surgery. Every day, Tela blesses this world with her courage, her determination, and her clear vision of a world where transwomen of color live safe, fulfilling, and long lives. Only in her 30’s, Tela serves as an elder, a mother, and a mentor to many young transwomen of color, struggling to survive in a culture that tells them to disappear or die.
Although we hope that “it gets better,” 2012 saw the 4th highest murder rate of LGBTQ and HIV-affected people (LGBTQH) in recorded history, according to the Hate Violence Report released annually by the National Coalition of Anti-Violence Programs (NCAVP-http://www.avp.org/about-avp/coalitions-a-collaborations/82-national-coalition-of-anti-violence-programs ).
People of color, transgender people, and gender non-conforming people continue to experience disproportionately higher rates of homicide. Black and African-American people “were particularly overrepresented in the homicide rates: over half of reported hate murders had Black or African-American victims, even though Black and African American people made up only 15% of total survivors and victims of hate crimes overall.” In 2012, LGBTQH people of color represented 53% of total reported survivors and victims of all hate crimes, but 73.1% of homicide victims. Living at the intersections of racial, gender, economic, and sexual oppression, trans-women of color are told to disappear or die.
In the midst of a dominant cultural narrative of oppression and repression, Tela Love is living into her journey towards wholeness with a spirit fully grounded in her inherent worth and dignity. She is the co-founder of New Legacy Ministries (http://www.newlegacystartstoday.com/), a grassroots organization striving to raise the voices of marginalized communities, especially transgender women of color, and create a spiritually welcoming and sustaining community.
Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience, will be a documentary of her experience as a openly HIV Positive trans-women of color in the south undergoing gender reassignment surgery June 18,2014. In sharing this personal window into her life, she understands that she is taking a risk. Traditionally trans-women have disappeared into the constructs of a patriarchal society after their surgery, rather than remain targets for hate and fear.
Tela realizes that she is allowing herself to be a target for greater judgment and persecution than that of which she already endures. However, inspired by the wisdom of Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from a Birmingham Jail that “silence is betrayal,” she has determined that she can be silent no more. She cannot be silent when waking from her nightmares of another young transgender woman being murdered or dying because she’s too ashamed to follow through with her HIV treatment after being diagnosed out of fear of being further alienated. Tela cannot be silent while there are little or no job opportunities for trans-women, while there are little or no housing opportunities (unless HIV infected), while black trans-women walk the streets in order to survive.
And neither, beloveds, can we. Our silence, too, is betrayal. Let us speak into the space of fear and hatred, ignorance and oppression. Let us bless Tela and every one of her sisters with the welcoming arms of beloved community. (https://www.facebook.com/Blacktranswomenarepowerful)
Please support the creation, production, and distribution of the documentary Disappear or Die: A Southern Black Trans-Experience. Together, let’s re-write the narrative of oppression into thriving, joyful beloved community.
Donations to support the creation of this documentary can be made via PayPal or sent to the Center for Ethical Living and Social Justice Renewal marked “Designated Donation: New Legacy Ministries” 2903 Jefferson Ave, 2nd FL, New Orleans, LA 70115.)
Healing of Memories
At this time of year, we have many opportunities to join together with family and friends, to celebrate, to tell stories, to share memories. Because these holidays are most often colored in happy hues and we look forward to good food and fun-filled events with family and friends, it is easy to focus on happy memories, memories that we treasure and tell again year after year.
But memories are not always happy. Bad things happen. Sometimes these memories are of personal tragedies, while other times they are related to larger national or cultural struggles. What do we do about those memories?
I recently read Redeeming the Past: My Journey from Freedom Fighter to Healer, a new memoir by Fr. Michael Lapsley, an Anglican priest from New Zealand who was sent by his religious order to South Africa in the early 1970s. The book describes his early years in apartheid South Africa and his growing identification as a white man with the struggle against apartheid and the ANC. These activities soon got him evicted from the country, first to Lesotho and finally to Zimbabwe. His continued activism resulted in a letter bombing in 1990 that cost him his hands and one eye. It was these injuries that led to him considering how memories of the apartheid oppression continued to impact him and many in South Africa, even after Mandela had been released, the ANC was unbanned, apartheid was dismantled, and a new non-racial constitutional democracy established.
His own testimony before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission began his process of considering how one can heal such memories. The TRC had provided a forum where victims could be heard and believed… could be listened to. Stories spilled out… many of terrible abuse at the hands of the apartheid state, but others by the hands of the liberation movement. “Every story was given equal dignity, and both were seen as wrongs” (p.142). Building on his personal story and his work with the Trauma Centre in Cape Town, he began to see that political freedom was important but not enough. “As a people, we were, and in many ways still are, imprisoned by the memories of the past” (p. 117). Fr. Michael began to see that the TRC was just a beginning. What was needed was a parallel process that would allow all those affected by the long history of oppression in South Africa to work through those memories with others and to in fact heal them. He sought a way to “break the chain of history” that stretched back to the earliest history of the region. He realised that oppressed people who see themselves as victims frequently become victimizers of others, justifying their actions because of past wrongs. This vicious cycle had to stop, but how?
From these experiences has grown his life ministry –the Institute for the Healing of Memories .The Institute facilitates 3-day workshops during which participants tell their stories and listen to the stories of others. The hurts visited one on another are acknowledged and understood. Participants are often able to come to a place where memories as well as relationships can be healed, allowing the possibility of the healing of society at large. While located in South Africa, Fr. Michael has taken the workshop to many other parts of the world where memories also need to be healed after conflict and oppression.
So my question in reading Fr. Michael’s memoir is, how might healing of memories be applied in our individual lives? All too often a victim’s stories seem to elicit the response from the “listener” of a similar experience (often with the implication that the listener’s experience was more difficult). Such “pity parties” often devolve into “my oppression is worse than your oppression.”
What might happen if I were to really listen to what the other person has to share, really listen. What might I learn? How might my attentive listening affect the speaker? What might the outcome be if we all were able to share our stories, our memories, in an accepting environment. What would happen if we each actually tried to hear each other?
Culture Shift
There is an old and often told story of a child walking along a beach, picking up stranded starfish and throwing them back into the ocean. In this story, an adult encounters the child and proclaims, “you can’t save them all. Your work doesn’t make a difference.” Replies the child, continuing in her labor “I made a difference in this one’s life. And this one’s life. And this one’s life.”
It is a powerful story about the importance of small acts.
And.
And it is cultural cover for a big lie. If that child doesn’t look beyond the stranded starfish to the re-graded shoreline, she cannot realize that the starfish are being stranded because the new vacation development changed the inflow and outflow of the tide. She cannot see the new drainage line funneling the city’s contaminated runoff into the sea to which she is returning the starfish.
Beloveds, let us commit to looking beyond the need presented in front of us and ask “why is this happening? What is going unquestioned in the larger system that allows people to be hungry, wetland to be destroyed, water to become scarce?”
And while we feed those who are hungry, let those of us who are not hungry recognize that we, too, are benefitting from a system that creates hungry people. Let us wonder, together, why this is – and then begin to work with those who are hungry to change the system that creates hungry people.
It is time for a culture shift, beloveds.
And.
And we are called to be a part of the change. Let the organizing begin.