Trans

Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

A poem by Andrea Gibson

"Queer Youth Are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide

...

Means: 

You lived five times harder than you should have had to 

To still have a body when you graduated high school. 

…

Means: 

When your mother asked what was wrong, 

You were five times more likely to believe you’d lose 

Her if you spoke the truth. 

Means: 

You were told five times more often 

You’d go to hell when you died. 

…

Means: 

You were five times more inclined 

To triple-padlock your diary. 

Means:

You were five times more likely

To stop writing your story down."

Write a poem or essay that raises awareness for a cause you support: Trans rights. 

Trapped.

Suffocating

Living

Breathing

Dying. 

A pebble in the shoe. 

I don't know what to do.

Hiding behind a mask. 

My hands are tied behind my back. 

Dysphoria. 

Discomfort in the body. 

Disassociation during sex. 

If you don’t know, now you know. 

You can’t unsee what you just saw. 

Liberation. 

Truth. 

Beauty. 

Re-birth. 

Empathy might be impossible. 

The say, If you’re not trans, you just can’t know what it’s like. 

Or, can you? 

Has anyone made assumptions about your identity without asking you? 

Has anyone put you into a box? 

Has someone ever mistaken you for a different ethnicity? 

Has someone ever made assumptions about you based on what they could see?

Do you have an invisible disability?

Do you have an invisible truth? 

Coming out 

Caterpillar to butterfly

Baby to adolescent to adult. 

Teenager to grown up. 

Expansion. 

New me. 

Old me. 

Trauma. 

You lose friends.

You lose family. 

You lose community.

You lose social support. 

You experience rejection. 

You feel confused. 

You feel out of your body. 

You’re scared. 

You’re at risk. 

You’re a target. 

Every pronoun.

Every name. 

Every event. 

Every interaction. 

Is laced with fear and rejection. 

Trauma.

Sometimes it feels like de-transition is the only option. 

To just turn back the clock. 

To pretend that it never happened. 

To go back to the way things were. 

Nostalgia at its most toxic. 

Memory at its most warped. 

Wishing, hoping, wanting, desiring. 

Feeling like everything is just too hard. 

The only other option is suicide. 

To end it all in one stroke. 

Why not?

Life is meaningless anyway. 

Life is pointless anyway. 

Nothing means anything. 

There is no point. 

This moment? It means nothing. 

You’re going to die anyway. 

Why does it matter if it’s now or later? 

You are being invited to participate. 

It’s your choice to say yes or no. 

You are consenting to it. 

Trans kids. Trans people. 

Maybe we’re all crazy. 

Maybe we’re all brainwashed. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to get attention. 

Maybe we’re all just trying to be cool. 

Who cares what the reason is? 

Why does it matter? 

Maybe we are all just trying to be cool. Then, let us try to be cool. Accept and love us for that. We’re not hurting anyone. 

Nobody is asking you to understand. 

We are just asking to exist. 

Please don’t murder us. 

Just allow us to live. 

What is precarity?

Precarity is a concept developed by Judith Butler. Precarity means unstable employment and uncertain living conditions, which are entrenched in broader systemic frameworks built on inequality and exploitation. 

Precarity refers to lacking stable work and steady income, and the resulting harm, such as health risks due to malnutrition or inadequate health care, that accompany unreliable employment. In the precarity framework, lack of work is not due to laziness or ineptitude, but by political decisions or economic systems beyond one’s immediate control that create a situation of disadvantage for the purpose of exploitation. Precarity is not just any disadvantage, but specifically danger to one’s life due to lack of access to basic needs. While in other times and places, people with the least amount of economic resources are the most cared for. But not in the Western world, where our economy is instead built on exploitation of the most vulnerable. 

Informal, temporary, or contingent work is the predominant livelihood in the contemporary world, where examples of precarity are familiar: garbage picking (e.g., selling scrap metal or collecting plastic bottles for recycling), the gig economy (e.g., Uber driving), and selling petty commodities (e.g., street vendors selling USB cords, or small tourism trinkets). 

The modern world is no stranger to precarity, but minorities carry an unequal burden for precarious life. Our political-economic and social systems create this increased vulnerability based on the way bodies are characterized, especially along race and gender. In Butler’s (2009) words, precarity denotes a “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death” (p. 25). In other words, exploitative political-economic systems calculate certain bodies as more valuable to the community than others, with poor and disenfranchised minorities on the lowest priority for life and highest likelihood for precarity. They are seen as a burden and cast aside as extra bodies that are unnecessary and de-valued, all the while being exploited for their cheap labor. 

Precarity is not just about employment status, but also about one’s increased likelihood of sickness, harm or death. In my research, the Uyghurs found themselves in situations of precarity due to political-economic systemic violence that denoted them as "uncivilized terrorists" and restricted access to the resources—namely, jobs and housing—of the city. The precarious conditions of life in the city where I lived devalued Uyghur bodies and lives. Precarity set the stage for the dehumanization that allowed their mass internment in 2017. Precarity meant they were always at risk. 

The Uyghurs are of course not the only ones experiencing poverty of urban life, as well as the exhaustion, stress, and alienation familiar to so many. Around the world, rural migrants as well as urbanites are no stranger to hard times in the city, especially economic dispossession and precarious living conditions. While people everywhere face uncertain, or non-existent, job situations, precarity is often based on value placed on certain bodies, especially those with minority race and gender markers. The most vulnerable in our current global political-economic system are those with the least amount of economic resources. 

Consent or Coercion? What is true freedom?

I wrote in a previous post: "Gaining consent over our lives is the first step towards liberation and true freedom." 

We all love that intoxicating feeling of “this is MY life, this is MY time. I get to do what I want, nobody can tell me what to do.” But this idea of freedom is an illusion. Thinking this way is like driving on a highway at whatever speed because it’s MY car. No, that is not TRUE freedom. That is an illusion of freedom because that is your ego feeling free. And that illusion of freedom is how you end up hurting other people and violating consent. That is not true freedom. 

So what do I mean by “true freedom”? 

True freedom is when you can agree with other drivers on some rules of the road and drive in harmony with them. It is only then that we and everyone around us will experience true freedom. As long as we think, “I can do what I want,” you will be driven by an intoxicating power trip that affects other people, taking away their freedom without consent in both small and big ways. 

The freedom to be yourself doesn’t mean "fuck everyone." 

As long as you keep thinking that true freedom is just “doing whatever I want,” then you will keep getting into accidents because you’re not recognizing the other cars on the road.

True freedom means, “I have agreed to the rules of the road and I’ve learned the roads so I don’t need to check the map, and now I get to choose where I’m going.” You work with the other drivers to create a give and take, while also choosing the place you want to go and getting to the place you want to go the way you want to. That is true freedom. The freedom comes not in gripping the wheel and staring at Google maps telling you where to go. Freedom comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time.

True freedom is asking yourself, “Do I want to drive fast or slow? Take the interstate or a more scenic route?”

Maybe how you act doesn’t matter to you. Maybe you drive like an asshole, speeding and endangering everyone else on the road. Maybe you are a grumpy person, bitter and resentful and ungrateful. Maybe you are rude, and none of it matters to you because it just comes out of your mouth and through your body and goes into the universe and you don’t have to sit with that energy anymore. In fact, you might even feel better because you have expelled that negative energy. 

Maybe you don’t mean anything to yourself. This is perhaps the saddest part of it all. It’s not only that you don’t respect others. It’s that you don’t respect yourself. 

But you do mean something to other people. In this way, HOW YOU MOVE MATTERS. Maybe it doesn’t matter to you. But it does matter to other people. 

We are not aware of the ways that we live in unfreedom so much by cultural expectations and cultural hegemony, whether that be capitalism, patriarchy, or just other unspoken rules and expectations, including the unfreedom of individualism, consumerism and materialism, then we haven’t actually given consent to live these lives. 

We are just living while sleeping. We are asleep at the wheel. But the freedom comes not in gripping the wheel, it comes in letting go and singing along to the radio instead of focusing on the road and the map all the time. 

Consent or Coercion? Is it consent if you didn’t know there was a choice? How do we take back consent once we have been given the choice?

I wrote in my previous post: "The problem is that sometimes we give consent without knowing it. People think we've given consent when we have not, or we are unaware that the consent process is being assumed. Sometimes we give other entities permission to determine what we do with our bodies without knowing that we had a choice in the first place. We think we have no choice, or we don't know that there are other options." 

How do we cede sovereignty of our bodies without realizing it? How do we seem to allow people or institutions or social norms to obtain sovereignty over our bodies and lives? 

The movie the Matrix portrays the conflict between individuals who are ignorantly asleep and exploitative systems that are greedily eating on their energy. The question posed to Neo is: do you want to take the red pill or the blue pill? The two pills represent a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with the blue pill. Until this question is posed, consent has not been obtained. 

As in the movie, is it fully consensual to be in a tube being fed a simulation if you never chose it and didn’t know there was a choice? Once you are given the choice of red pill versus blue pill, and you understand the choice, then it is consensual. But if you don’t even know that the Matrix exists, are you truly giving your consent to be in a simulation? The answer is, I think: No, it's not consensual until the choice is presented.

The obtaining of consent without their knowledge is what happened with Indigenous land in North America. According to legend that is taught in schools as fact, Native Americans signed over their rights to the land to the white settlers. According to some historians, they, not knowing how to write or what a signature was, simply put an x-mark on some paper contracts and agreements that effectively ceded all of their land over to white settlers. In this way, some people argue that the Native Americans willingly consented to giving their land away. But is it really consent if you don’t have all the information you need to understand what that agreement was really about, and more importantly, if you don’t even have the epistemological framework to understand territory, private property and land ownership? 

Land is a type of territory, and bodies are also a type of territory. In politics, we often fight over the territory of the body.

COVID. Mask mandates. Vaccine requirements. Social distancing regulations.

Abortions in Texas.

Trans rights to use the bathroom and access health care.

MY BODY, MY CHOICE, yell the slogans. 

Our political climate is riddled with examples of the fight over bodily sovereignty. But what does it all really mean on the micro-scale, the scale of everyday life, the scale of the individual body? 

I also wrote in my previous post: "Gaining back consent over our bodies is the first step towards gaining back consent over our lives."

How can we start to go about doing that? Beauty is about exercising bodily sovereignty. Think about tattoos or body piercings, plastic surgery or hair dye, fashion choices or make-up. It’s about turning our bodies into art but also about self-expression. But it’s also a way of saying, “it’s my body and I’ll change it if I want to.” 

Doing what you want with your body is your choice alone–what kind of clothes you want to wear, what kind of haircut, what kind of facial hair, what kind of piercings and tattoos. You get to own your body, nobody else gets to determine who you are or your body for what it is. 

At the end of the day, we can never win if we are trying to mold to society’s expectations. Instead, we can take back sovereignty over our own bodies, which is about choosing how to adorn and present our bodies as a temple and as a celebration of our soul. You (yes, you!) have such a beautiful soul and it deserves to be honored in whatever physical manifestation you have and want to share. 

I know what it feels like to have a body that just doesn’t fit; a body that doesn’t fit right into clothes and doesn’t fit right into people’s expectations. No matter what happens, I will always have a female body and I will always feel wrong in it and it will never fit into what society expects or wants or glorifies. Many of us have bodies that don’t fit into what society wants or expects. But it’s not our fault that capitalism makes clothes only fit to certain body types. It's not our fault that patriarchy worships certain bodies and certain genders. Society polices our bodies as much as the government does. But it is our right to re-claim our bodies. 

Your body is yours. For whatever reason, God gave you the body you have, or your soul chose your body, or your genetics paired up exactly right to give you the body that you have. No matter how you look at it, your body is yours. 

If there’s one thing I hope for everyone, it would be for everyone to cultivate love for their body. It can be through sports or sex, of course. Those are two common ways. But it could also mean getting a piercing or a tattoo, or just buying some more nice clothes for yourself, or wearing a bracelet or chain, or cooking yourself some delicious food. It could mean doing your nails or getting a haircut or growing some facial hair or giving yourself a massage or doing some yoga. But your body is the one thing in this world that you can and do truly own, and it’s the one thing that will be with you for the rest of your life. You get to reclaim it for yourself, and nobody gets to take that away from you. We can take back consent over our own bodies in creative ways outside of the system. 

Consent or Coercion? What is the gray area and how is my body both mine and not mine?

 TRIGGER WARNING: DESCRIPTION OF NONCONSENSUAL SEXUAL ASSAULT 

I remember that night. We were playing pool. I was giddy and intoxicated with his attention. He asked stupid questions: “Where are you from? What do you do?” The alcohol was cold on my lips but warm in my chest. I felt hot fire in my veins. The liquid courage took control over my pre-frontal cortex, silencing that part of myself. My brain always tells me to doubt, doubt, doubt, whatever I am doing. It tells me, “You are wrong, ugly, nobody likes you, nobody wants to hear you.” So I kept drinking and the voice got quieter and quieter until it became silent. 

With the liquid courage, I became reckless and got into the passenger seat of the car with him behind the wheel, not knowing if he was sober and not caring, feeling high on possibility and filled with “fuck it” thoughts. 

When we exited the car, I jumped on his back and he carried me down the street as we howled with laughter. We stumbled into the bar. We danced, the fronts of our bodies smashed together. I don’t remember who else was there that night. It was the weekend after my birthday and I allowed myself to lose control in ways that I normally would have never allowed myself to: telling people I loved them, laughing loud, hugging anybody, telling the truth. I let loose that night, feeling free. The rest of my life was a cage. But with alcohol, I was free. Finally, nothing and nobody to tell me what to do or how to be. 

On the way home, I was in the passenger seat.

“Where am I taking you?” he asked.

“I’m down for whatever,” I say. 

“Let’s go to the crib,” I hear him say in a mumble with his hand over his mouth. Almost like he doesn’t want me to hear and object. Almost like he’s a little embarrassed and ashamed. 

Things started to get fuzzy. I was lying in bed and his fingers were jamming into me, rough and fast. I was so dry. It hurt. I pushed his hand away. He kept going. It hurt. I pushed his hand away again. 

“At least I just got a bikini wax, so I’m clean,” I thought to myself. “Nothing to be embarrassed about.” And everything went black. 

The next morning, I woke up and he saw I was awake. I felt my eyebrows furrow together. 

“Don’t worry, nothing happened. You kept pushing me away pretty hard so I stopped,” he smiled at me, chuckling. 

I smiled too. He liked me. I was worth something. My mouth was dry and sticky, my head hurt. I pecked him on the lips before I left and it immediately felt weird. I knew something was off. 

The next couple weeks unfurled quickly, me asking to see him, him avoiding me. I left for China not too long after that. I found out later that he was already involved with two other people at the time. I was crushed. He liked me! Or, I thought he liked me...

But people have different subjective experiences. For me, it was utter confusion. For him, it was just a fun night. 

Not only do people define consent differently, but they experience being and knowing differently in any situation depending on their unique history and the context of their life. How do you define consent when people have two completely different frames of reference? How do you define consent when there are two subjective meanings for and significance of the events that occurred?

Regardless of said subjectivity, I am angry about sexual harassment and assault. It’s not only because it’s the violation of someone’s body and the gross mis-use of power to take something that is not yours and make it your own. To steal for nothing more than your own pleasure. To take something without asking. To consider it yours. To claim ownership over something that was never yours to begin with. 

It is all of those things and those actions that make me so angry. And they are horrible things to do to the world. 

But I am also angry that people of all genders are feeling so desperately thirsty for human connection that they feel they have no other outlet, they are so alone and lonely and insecure. They are lacking the proper communication skills to the point that the only way they (we?) know how to move forward in life is to take without asking. Like a rubber band, they avoid and avoid and avoid and internalize and internalize and internalize then it snaps with harmful and painful force forward without control. And how that rubber band snaps and the people it hurts in the process matters. 

I, too, was like a rubber band that night, snapping without control with the help of alcohol. And I hurt myself in the process. It wasn't the first time and it won't be the last.

The problem is that sometimes we give consent without knowing it--or people think we've given consent when we have not, or are unaware that the consent process is being assumed. Sometimes we give other entities permission to determine what we do with our bodies without knowing that we had a choice in the first place. We think we have no choice, or we don't know that there are other options. 

But why am I writing about this topic? Why do I care and why should you care? 

How we conceptualize consent affects our politics, bodies, and culture. Gaining back consent over our bodies is the first step towards gaining back consent over our lives. And gaining consent over our lives is the first step towards liberation and true freedom. 

Individualism, choice and freedom is that the core of mainstream American society. American politics often revolve around decisions that determine sovereignty over our own bodies—from vaccine mandates to abortion, from same-sex marriage to seat belt laws. These are often questions of consent.

At the end of the day, it’s all about consent: who is making decisions about how I choose to move and be in the world? Is someone else controlling my body? Or do I exercise full sovereign control over my body? 

Consent or Coercion? Choice or Destiny?

 “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? 

30-Day Challenges: Mindful Eating, Part 4

One night, alone in my apartment in Prague, I sat on the floor with a stack of tortillas, hummus, and vegan cream cheese with a bar of chocolate all splayed out on the floor in front of me. I had a little picnic with myself right there on the floor. 

That is something Brie would never do. Brie always cooks and prepares her food so mindfully, so spiritually. For her, eating and sharing a meal is a spiritual experience and a spiritual practice. She would never, or at least I have never seen her, just grab a tortilla and dip it into hummus. She would take the time to get out a plate, napkin and maybe even a place mat. She would get a knife out and spread the hummus evenly over the tortilla and maybe add some cheese and fried mushrooms.

But not me. I just grab whatever I can. For me, eating fast accesses an animalistic or primal self inside me. Tapping into my lizard brain is SO satisfying. I love not thinking about it, but just digging into my food without much thought. For me, it’s like I just want to be in my body and let my lizard brain take over. I want to forget my civilized self and embrace my primitive self. There is also something so satisfying about the fact that it’s not something I normally do in front of Brie—to stuff my face or eat on the floor.

When I’m around Brie I try to eat mindfully. I know that chewing with my mouth open bothers her, and I try not to talk with my mouth full either. We did a month of mindful eating while she was in Prague, which included some silent time at the beginning of each meal as well, not talking unless to comment on the food. It was wonderful. And yet, there I was that night, sitting on the floor and filled with the pleasure of eating fast.

Eating mindlessly is something I let myself do only one of the days of Brie's trip to Europe. It was the day on the train heading from Berlin and Prague when my tattoo infection was at its worst. I didn’t care. I ate all the chocolate, all the nuts, all the chips, and all the grapes in our little snack bag. I just needed to feel soothed and calm for a while. Brie could tell, saying to me as I devoured the snacks: “Sometimes we need chocolate to soothe ourselves, don’t we?” 

That was the day I allowed us to watch Netflix together, something I normally don’t like to do, because it feels like we’re connecting with the screen but not with each other. But I needed it that day on the train; my arm on fire, itching and burning, orange pus leaking out. Throughout the train ride, we kept spare shirts cool with our drinking water and kept putting the soaked shirts on my arm like a bandage to calm the nerves and swelling and heat that was emanating off my skin. 

When Brie isn’t around, I like to eat the way I “normally” do: fast and with abandon and with my mouth open. I actually get a ton of pleasure out of eating with my mouth open, partially because I think that it genuinely does make my food taste better (this is what Chinese people believe—that the air oxygenates the food to make it more flavorful and I think they’re right! Beer tasters would agree), and also because it just makes me feel more relaxed and in my own body and enjoying my own personal experience in and with my body.

This way of eating is totally normal for me. For me to re-train my eating habits that have been ingrained since childhood, this is definitely one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. There are lots of things in our brains that are plastic and can be re-trained. But I’ll tell you from personal experience that eating is something so primal, so closely connected to our mothers and our families that re-training myself how to eat is so hard-wired it really does feel like learning how to walk and talk all over again. 

So there I was that night in Prague, heart aching and needing to be soothed, and all I needed in that moment was some chocolate, tortillas and hummus. And all I wanted in that moment was to eat it mindlessly. I wanted to just get lost in my phone and stuff my face. And so I did just that. And it felt amazing.

Being mindful and spiritual is great. But sometimes we just need to be animals and lose ourself in bodily pleasure. It's a combination of factors from purity culture to dieting culture, weight-loss mania and disordered body image. It's the way we were raised, and the way we live. It's not bad or good. It just is. What I want for my life is to be mindful of what I'm doing. If it means being mindful while I'm eating fast, then I'm okay with it. But it also means trying new things and new ways of being, and I'd like my entire life to be an experiment of doing and trying different things. And that is what the 30-Day Challenges are all about.