“Before babies are born they live in the sky where they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place and calling babies down to earth is not an easy thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course of human lives.
This is what the Hmong children of my generation are told by our mothers and fathers, by our grandmothers and grandfathers.
They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That the people who we would become we had inside of us from the beginning, and the people whose worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong inside of us, we have always known.
From the sky, I would come again.”
--Prologue to The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang
“Do you think our souls wanted to be us? Do you think they chose our bodies and our lives?” Brie’s brother asked me, his eyes twinkling and his smile bright as he looked at me steadily across the campfire. The Arizona sky was above us, pitch black and bright with stars.
My breath caught in my chest for a moment. This question, bigger than what could be contained in a single moment, was a question about consent. Is our existence a choice, or were we forced into being? This was a question about who we really are, a question about time and space (has everything that will happen already happened?), and a question about spirituality. This was a question that I had thought about a lot recently.
“Yes,” I said firmly. “But it’s not a one-time choice. For me, I think our lives are a constant process of negotiation and conversation with our lives, with Love, and with the Universe. I think that if we think about life as a choice rather than as a demand; as a conscious and creative design process rather than as a movie we are watching playing on a screen; a lucid dream that we can control rather than one that we are just watching play out...then the conversation we are constantly having with our lives changes from an experience of coercion to one of consent.”
For me, this conversation with the Universe is ongoing. As soon as I feel like I’m being forced to do anything, I find myself getting resentful and angry; I feel trapped and suffocated. I started feeling this way a lot. So I started pausing and saying, is this what I want? How can I make a decision that would put me on a path that I chose rather than feeling like a marionette on a string, being pulled this way and that, but without any real agency in my own life? Sometimes, the Universe would answer back: You are free to be your Highest Self.
When I felt this message, this deep inner Knowing that nobody was holding me back except for myself, I had to look at myself in the mirror and take responsibility for my life, knowing that everything I was doing was a choice.
(Now, of course, we can also get into the structural and cultural aspects of choice. Is it my choice that I live in a free market, cash, and wage labor economy and therefore must work in order to eat? No. But within those cages—what some people call “cultural hegemony,” or forces of power so insidious that we don’t even realize they’re there—we have some choices. More on that later.)
But these choices can’t be known without a conversation. Sometimes that conversation is with yourself, or with your soul, or a trusted friend. Sometimes that conversation is with the Universe.
The Universe delivers packages to us each day. Some are big, like a job offer, pregnancy, a lover, experience or life packages that set us on a course. Some are small, like pain, anger or jealousy, information packages that tells us what needs to change in our life that day or that year.
For me, I had an important conversation with the Universe the day I came out as trans. I consented to taking Baby Sam into my life. I CHOSE to come out as Sam. You can’t choose whether you’re trans or cis, whether you’re gay or straight. But you can choose whether or not to come out. And that’s what I decided that day. Here’s what it felt like:
A hand reached down and unzipped my heart. A zigzag pattern unfolded into the darkness, a double helix pattern, my strands of DNA breaking out into infinity.
“This was encoded into your DNA a long time ago,” God said.
“It’s time for your spirit transplant,” the Universe said.
Only a few moments earlier, Saar had been sitting in their apartment and praying to the Universe, “Show me what I need to know. Tell me what you need to tell me.”
“The answer is inside you. It’s been there all along. You keep asking for answers, but it’s not outside. You need to go inward,” God said.
And so I did. I spiraled downward. I kept spiraling until I came to the zipper, the double helix pattern, as it was unzipping the code. I saw Sarah, with white porcelain skin and a tall, slender body, floating away down the river.
In Sarah’s place was a Spirit named Sam, a spirit that had been there all along but was waiting for the full adoption and paperwork to be signed. In that moment, Sam jumped right into my heart and excitedly asked to be taken home.
“Are you sure you want to do this?” God asked. “You are agreeing to a lifetime of care for this Spirit.”
Some people get pets or have kids.
I got a boy named Sam.
I showed Sam the world I had been preparing for his arrival: a PhD, living in Prague, practicing martial arts.
Sam was delighted.
“It’s perfect,” he breathed. “This is the best day of my life.”
“There’s only one thing, Sam,” I said, my heart beating in my chest and jumping into my throat. “You have a female body.”
Sam said, “What a cool superpower.”
I burst into tears at this.
“That’s all I wanted. All I wanted was for you to be happy,” I said.
“Of course, this is more than enough. I am happy. I’m so happy,” Sam said.
“This is your world, it’s your playground, go create the life you want. Just follow the values, agreements, and rules that we agreed on,” I said.
The agreements I made with Sam were:
• I will never abandon you
• I will never forget about you
• I will always take care of you
• Your needs come before others’
• Live by your values: Love, Communication and Play
• Take care of your body
• Remember the three givens for life: movement, fuel, hydration
I was able to see from a Witness perspective the split between my ego—which I’ve nicknamed “Daddy Sam” here—and my inner essence—which I’ve nicknamed Baby Sam.
During the conversation, Daddy Sam kept butting in and saying things like, “I’m so sorry, you’ve been given a female body, it’s a bit older, got some baggage, not the best model out there...”
“NO! Stop saying that,” Sam shot back. “It’s perfect. I love it. It’s like a new car.”
Daddy Sam had spent years preparing the body and the life for Baby Sam, and Baby Sam was thrilled. It wasn’t a brand new sports car convertible, but it had character.
They agreed: “Sorry” was not allowed anymore to apologize for Sam’s body or life.
Daddy Sam was firm with Baby Sam: “It’s your job to play and to play creatively.”
Daddy Sam had some intrusive thoughts about expecting Sam to be grateful, or asking Sam for some kind of payment or return on his investment for adopting him.
But no. This agreement—the agreement to allow Sam to come into the world and be taken care of and live his fullest and best life—was not based on debt and payment. This agreement was based on pure love and love alone. It’s not like a contract where Sam was in debt or owed Daddy Sam anything. Daddy Sam had signed the adoption paperwork. Not our of expectation but out of pure Love and had given over his body like a new used car for Baby Sam to drive around in. Daddy Sam was giving up the driver’s seat that he had perfected for so long and handing over the keys to Baby Sam.
This was given out of pure Love and nothing else. Nothing was owed as an exchange for adopting Sam. Sam never asked to be born. It was bestowed upon him and his life and his world as a gift, not a burden. It was bestowed from the creative powers of the Universe out of love, not obligation.
This story illustrates my experience of coming out and how I understand life and spirit as a consensual relationship with the universe.
No, we didn’t ask to be born. But maybe our spirits did choose us. When I started thinking about my life as a consensual process, one that I agreed to and chose rather than one that was forced upon me, I started seeing that I could design my life and make choices that aligned with my values and allowed me to live with integrity. Coming out as trans was the first step.
Some people say CAFAB, or Coercively Assigned Female At Birth, to indicate that they never chose their gender, but that it was imposed on them by society’s expectations of biological sex to map onto the cultural expectations of gender. I won’t go that far, but I will say that my trans experience is one of taking back control over my body and gender in a way that is aligned with my life and my values of integrity, openness, vulnerability and authenticity. I am bringing my body back under consent of me and my life. Rather than my body out there in the world, going through the motions and playing along with society’s rules, I decided that I’m going to design my body the way that manifests the fullest, truest and most beautiful aspect of my spirit in its purest form. My body is mine to create in the mystery and beauty of life on earth.
Before this moment where I chose to come out, I had thought about consent many times before. Consent is a topic covered by many social and political theorists, such as Gramsci, and I had considered this question in the context of Chinese authoritarianism—are Chinese people consenting to rule by the Communist Party even if there aren’t elections?—as well as the cultural hegemony of consumerism and materialism—is it really our choice if we don’t know that there is a choice? Do we really want those things—the house, the car, the job—or is it just our culture telling us that we should want those things?
I had thought about consent in terms of sexual assault. I had thought about consent in terms of Indigenous or colonized land—is it consent if the people doing the consenting didn’t have the epistemological framework to understand land ownership, what they were giving up and the implications of it?
I had thought about consent in terms of my own research. What does it mean to give informed consent to be a part of a research project in China, as a vulnerable population in a dangerous and constantly changing situation, and is it fully informed consent if you can’t check to make sure that they would still want their stories to be told? Is it still exploitation if they gave informed consent?
And now, in the moments of coming out as trans, I was thinking about consent in terms of my own life and body: did our souls choose us and our lives? We never asked to be born. We didn’t ask our parents to have us. Yet, is our current manifestation of our lives here on earth an ongoing conversation of consent with the Universe? Are we forced into our current situations, or did we choose them? And is the transformation that occurs with hormones and surgery of a queer person consenting with nature and the Universe to change the body back to the way it was always meant to be? How is the adoption of Sam into my life part of my consensual relationship with the Universe to evolve into my Highest Self?
All of these question haunted me. I told Brie I wanted to write a book about it. She said, why don’t you start with a blog post? So here I am.
Yes, we all live within constraints, and often constraints with real material effects including institutional and structural inequality: gender, race, and capitalism just to name a few. But within those cages we have some time and space to move around--the time is exactly one lifetime, the space is the earth. What have you been wanting to do or be in your life? Do you think your life and your body right now are under consent or coercion when it comes to yourself and the path you are on?
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