Being Trans: The Creative

Whew. Do you think I got all of my defensiveness around trans identity out of my system yet? 

I’m ready to move on from defending trans identity to envisioning a better future where we don’t even need that label anymore.

How can we get there? How can we build a world without labels for our identities? How do we evolve our species to think beyond these boxes and labels?

Creativity. 

What is the relationship between creativity and evolution? 

My 10-year long practice training jiujitsu offers some insights. Creativity is what sets apart good and great jiujitsu. Without creativity, you cannot progress to the higher belts of jiujitsu--a brown belt will not become a black belt without creativity. 

Once martial artists reach the higher levels, their jiujitsu starts to evolve. Evolution of their own jiujitsu and evolution of the sport as a whole does not come by studying moves and replicating what other people do. 

Progress comes at the higher levels when practitioners start inventing their own jiujitsu. New jiujitsu moves come out every year with new names designated for the people who invented them: De La Riva, Worm Guard, and the Berimbolo to name a few moves invented by a person and spread across the world. 

Creativity embraces wholeness. As the jiujitsu journey progresses, the pieces of the puzzle will start to come together into a whole picture.

The higher belts start to progress further by taking one move from a position and seeing how they can use it in a different position. Ultimately, at the higher levels, each jiujitsu practitioner brings a bunch of different pieces together in a creative way that is unique to them and their own jiujitsu journey. Jiujitsu is an example of where going to the next belt signifies that you are evolving in your own game by integrating different moves together: linking sequences, translating concepts in multiple scenarios, and setting up chains of offense and defense.

In the same way, we can evolve our understanding of gender not by watching others, but by making new definitions of gender. We take different pieces of the puzzle--hormones, clothes, behavior, surgery-- and try them out, take risks, open up to failure, integrate lessons from those failures, and build a new conception of gender.

 

Transness is just one piece of the puzzle in a larger mosaic of artistic expression and creativity. Right now I am choosing to be creative with my gender. But you don’t have to change your gender to be creative. There are lots of ways to be creative as a way to evolve yourself and the human consciousness so that we can build a better future.

 

Creativity is about the moments where you combine garlic and salt to the onions over a sizzling skillet in that just-right way. Creativity is the joke made during a conversation with friends. The blog you wrote that only six people read. The song you wrote that only three people listen to. The play you wrote that only your kids appreciate. The book you wrote that only your mom reads. It doesn’t matter what the outcome is. The joy and the evolving is in the process of making the thing.

 

What can you do today to nurture and cultivate your creative self? Sing in the shower? Doodle in your notebook? Start a YouTube channel? Write in your journal?

 

Maybe it’s something bigger. Maybe you’ve always wanted to be an artist. Start that co-operative living community. Renovate your house. Write fan fiction. Publish that magazine article. Perform at an open mic night. Try your hand at stand up comedy.

 

Creativity is incredibly vulnerable and includes some inherent risk. You might get boo’d off the stage. You might go hungry as a starving artist. You might get rejected.

 

In all of the above examples, from gender to jiujitsu to cooking, the evolution comes when the action is about process, not product; when our goal is experimentation, not outcome. This is where our human species can evolve. The more we keep our noses in our screens and our fingers on our keypads and our brains focused on someone else's dreams, the less time we have to think of new and better solutions for our current world.

 

We can do better as humans. We’ve got a climate change disaster on our hands. We’ve got trans people getting murdered almost every day. We’ve got a military police state while white terrorists shoot up schools, churches, and grocery stores. We’re in the middle of a pandemic. There are concentration camps holding over one million Muslims in China. 

We need creative solutions for these problems. Being stuck in our one-way mindset is not going to solve them. And it starts with baby steps. Like singing in the shower and trying new spices in that soup simmering on the stove.