“To my daughter I will say,
‘when the men come, set yourself on fire.’” – Warsan Shire, “In Love and In War”

Dear Coloured Trans Girls Who Like to Write,

The first stories we told were the ones we needed to survive. We told them silently, without words, as we hid under battered kitchen tables and threadbare couches while pounding feet and hungry fists went by. We told them secretly, in the darkened corners of our minds, and no one listened but our shadows. We pressed those stories inside ourselves as though planting seeds, and watered them with the moonlight that filtered through bedroom windows that overlooked alleyways where street youth came to gather, and fight, and make out, and shoot up. We let the stories grow in closets where we huddled, cocooned, waiting for a safe moment to emerge. We let them overtake us when hiding failed, sweeping our minds away to a distant place as our bodies surrendered to the hands of men who should have protected us. All of our stories began like this: someday, someday, someday.

As coloured trans girls who would be writers, myth-makers, artists, or poets, we begin from a place of story without language. The same systems of oppression that render our bodies and desires illegible and loathsome to mainstream society also make our voices either inaudible or inchoate to the ears of those in power. We are given no examples, no archetypes, no reflection. We do not speak to an experience that whites, cisgender bisexuals/gays/lesbians, or straight people of colour find easy to understand.

As coloured trans girls who would be writers, myth-makers, artists, or poets, we begin from a place of story without language.

We exist in the grey zone, the untranslatable place that exists between. To them, the geography of our stories is alien terrain, a terrifying zone. It is the roar of a river that threatens to overrun its banks. Do not write, white men tell us, we do not understand. Do not tell, white feminists say, we do not believe. Do not speak, we are so often told by our own Chinese, Vietnamese, South Asian, Indigenous, and Black communities, we do not want to hear.

You may occasionally be offered an opportunity to sell certain parts of our stories, in the same way that we are invited to sell certain parts of our bodies. We are a novelty flavour, an exotic animal in the zoo of minority literature, just as our bodies are fetishized commodities in the sexual market. If we smile for a photo op with the white gay and lesbian movement, we might be interviewed for a 50-word soundbite printed in a newspaper article. If you bleach the anger from your tongue and the brown from your face, if you wash the smell of ‘ethnic food’ from your hair and the scent of the street from your skin, you might publish a paper in a feminist journal. If you tone down the unsavoury details, if you avoid making white people cry, if you agree to teach people how not to be violent to you, step by painstaking step, if you don’t make the government look too bad, you might get a book deal or an arts grant.

Be a good, token, tame transsexual. Carve the ancestors out of your body, shave the fat off your belly, sever the fold between your eyelids. Cut out the dick from between your legs. Fit. Fit. Fit. Fit.

We are told to smile, to be nice, professional, reasonable, polite, even as the white gay editor slides his hand up our thighs. To wait our turn. To answer all questions, even the clueless and racist ones. To be an ambassador for your community, a credit to our races. To not challenge ‘progressives’ who tell you to wait in line for your turn at the human rights discussion table while trans girls all across the country live in a state of emergency without healthcare or social services. They are still settling the matter of gay marriage. Market yourself, they say. Make a Facebook page, a blog, a Twitter, a Tumblr. Somewhere last night, another Islan Nettles was beaten to death for the thousandth time. Pray that the next girl will not be you.

Accept advice from your editor that you should not be too melodramatic, that you should not alienate your readers by speaking in terms specific to trans girls of colour. You don’t want to be too ‘niche.’ Fit yourself to the marketable mold: be an inspiration, a feel-good after-school special, a rags-to-riches Cinderella in drag. Don’t be like those other trannies: the dirty ones, the sex workers, the ungrateful, unsellable, inedible Others. The ones who were too rough for publication, too angry for academia, too weird even for literary voyeurism. Be a good, token, tame transsexual. Carve the ancestors out of your body, shave the fat off your belly, sever the fold between your eyelids. Cut out the dick from between your legs. Fit. Fit. Fit. Fit.

I want to stop being that storyteller whose stories spell the death of our people. I want to dig up those bones that we have buried and scream until I am hoarse.

Dear coloured trans girls who like to write, I am writing this to you – to us – because I think we can do something different with our voices. I want to remember our ancestors, our courage, our power – to break through the censor of the misogynist literary world, to resist the co-option of the neoliberal white gay movement, to stand strong in the face of rejection from white feminists and conservative communities of colour. We do not have to choose the survival of one identity by sacrificing another, and we are no less valuable for being less visible. I want to stop being that storyteller whose stories spell the death of our people. I want to dig up those bones that we have buried and scream until I am hoarse. No more academic papers. No more television specials. No more racist, transphobic, exploitative porn. No more street violence. No more employment discrimination. No more political lip service to ‘social justice’ that saves no trans* people’s lives.

Coloured trans girls who like to write, I am sorry. Sometimes I spend so much time trying to tell the story I thought I was supposed to tell, the one that would make me rich and popular and famous, the one that fits the standards of academic and literary institutions, that I have nearly forgotten the stories that matter. The stories we told when there was nowhere to go, nowhere to hide. The story you told you when your father hit you for the first time. The story you told the first time you took money for sex, were arrested, attempted suicide, were chased by men not sure whether they wanted to rape or beat you. The story about someday. Someday, things will change. Someday, we will find the right words. Someday, we will be strong enough to set ourselves free.

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The stories that will free us appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“So what if we are really insignificant like the dot on the map from freshman year? 
Why does it matter? What if we are nothing? What if that is beautiful?” –Alok Vaid-Menon, “We Are Nothing (And That is Beautiful)”

Dear Janet,

I’m sort of ashamed to admit it, but the day your autobiography, Redefining Realness, was released I ran – literally ran, I slipped on the ice – to the first store in Montreal that had a copy in stock. Yours is the first book I’ve bought in years, but I knew I was going to put down money for this one. I had February 4 marked in my mental calendar, had been counting down the days till I could get your story in my fan-girlish hands. I took Redefining Realness home that afternoon and finished the first of several readings in the evening.

I have followed your career ever since you exploded onto the mainstream media and social justice scene, arguably as America’s most prominent transgender advocate, icon, and spokesperson. That’s probably a funny thing to read; it’s certainly strange to admit. I didn’t want you to be my transgender role model, my heroine – and you probably didn’t set out to be one. Yet here we stand in this twisted world full of invisible walls and violence, and you burn like a star leading the way to a different possibility for people like me. When I watch your interviews, when I read your story, I am flooded with complicated, conflicting emotions: gratitude, jealousy, cynicism, hope. I am so grateful for your existence; I am in awe of your accomplishment and strength.

But I am angry and sad that we exist in a time where trans women of colour who ‘make it’ personally and professionally, who live to adulthood, are exceptional.

But I am angry and sad that we exist in a time where trans women of colour who ‘make it’ personally and professionally, who live to adulthood, are exceptional. I wish that, instead of being a celebrity to me, you were someone who, given opportunity and time, could be a mentor and friend. I wish that the act of living as transfeminine people didn’t make us special, or even revolutionary. I wish we could be just ‘ordinary’ girls – who occasionally do special, revolutionary things.

In the author’s note to Redefining Realness, you write: “Being exceptional isn’t revolutionary. It’s lonely. It separates you from your community. Who are you, really, without community?” Reading these words, I started to cry. Alone in my room, I rocked and cried, threw your book at the wall, picked it up and smoothed the jacket, and cried some more. My whole life, I have been exceptional, had to be to survive. I don’t know how much longer I can be.

I grew up an ocean away from your own hometown of Honolulu, in Vancouver. Like you, I grew up in a racialized community, where race and class oppression were rarely spoken of, yet constantly felt. In my working class, East Asian family, exceptional achievement was the expectation. High academic performance was our holy grail, our golden ticket to class ascension, cultural assimilation, and living the model minority dream – a dream conceived and carried out over four generations of struggle and sacrifice. My older sister and I carried the hope of all our impoverished, migratory ancestors. Our assigned gender roles were unquestionable and rigidly enforced by our parents, peers, teachers, and elders. It was in this pressure cooker of social forces that my fledgling feminine identity was born – and, like you, I (barely) got through it all to become a university-educated writer, activist, and community worker.

I have made a living out of tokenism, of being the kind of queer person of colour who is palatable to powerful, liberal cis white people.

I have told and sold my story of by-the-bootstraps accomplishment more times than I can count. To friends and coworkers. To queer and racialized youth to whom I am trying to offer hope when there is none. To paying audiences. To lovers. To professors, philanthropists, community councils, and grant providers. I have made a living out of tokenism, of being the kind of queer person of colour who is palatable to powerful, liberal cis white people.

When I was 17, I was put on a plane to Toronto, where I told my story and was awarded a life-changing scholarship for “young leaders” that lifted me out of my racialized, working-class community of origin, out of my chosen community of streetwise, suicidal, resilient, incredible queer youth of colour, and into an elite Canadian university full of middle-class, cis white people. I have told my story of exceptionality so many times, so strategically, that it is no longer mine. Janet, I am so far from where I started that sometimes I don’t know who I am anymore. How do you remember who you are?

This year, I started a Masters degree in social work. You are one of perhaps three trans women of colour I know of who have a university degree (let alone two), and I am struck by how formal education is complex terrain for marginalized people, at once a privilege and a site of oppressive violence. I know so many trans women for whom post-secondary education is far from a possibility. I know of too many trans women who did not make it past high school, who did not live past high school. I think about all the trans women who are not in class beside me, because they were blocked or died before they could get here. I am haunted by Islan Nettles, and all the girls who die of transphobic violence, may they rest in peace. You write about survivor’s guilt in Redefining Realness, and I am right there with you.

I don’t want you to be exceptional, a transgender heroine, my icon by default as the only role model available to me, because I am terrified that I am not strong enough to follow in your footsteps.

And to be honest, I am not always so certain about survival. I want what you seem to have: beauty, family, a career, a loving partner, a body that I am comfortable with. Yet sometimes, getting there seems impossible – as you often acknowledge, to set your life as the standard for all trans women is unrealistic and inaccessible. Even with the privilege and gifts I have been given thus far, as I contemplate hormone therapy and surgery and breaking into a field notorious for its conservative politics, I am sometimes overwhelmed by the myth of my exceptionality, by the impossibility of going any farther than I have already come. I have made a lifetime of being calm and articulate in the face of systemic oppression. Janet, sometimes I am so, so scared.

I don’t want to be exceptional, a path-breaker, or a revolutionary leader, because that means that what I am doing – living as an out, vocal trans* person of colour – is near impossible. I am too tired to do the impossible anymore. I don’t want you to be exceptional, a transgender heroine, my icon by default as the only role model available to me, because I am terrified that I am not strong enough to follow in your footsteps. I don’t want us to have to be exceptional because exceptionality is the only option. I want us – all trans women – to be just ordinary girls, capable of extraordinary things.

Yet here we stand, in this twisted world. And if I must follow stars, then it is my honour to follow you, Ms. Janet Mock. The truth your book tells, that I am struggling to realize, is that the night sky is full of stars; that the trans* community is one in which each of us demonstrates exceptional resilience, resourcefulness, and strength. Maybe someday, they’ll see us all. Thank you so much for giving me your realness. Someday, I’ll find my own.

In solidarity, in sisterhood, in love,
Kai Cheng Thom

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post Just ordinary girls appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“I know the anger lies inside of me like I know the beat of my heart and the taste of my spit. It is easier to be furious than to be yearning. Easier to crucify myself in you than to take on the threatening universe of whiteness by admitting that we are worth wanting each other.” Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Dear Queer People of Colour (QPOC),

This is a love letter and a call to arms. This is a love letter and a challenge. This is a love letter and a manifesto, a celebration, a remembrance, a seduction, a warning, a modest proposition toward the liberation of Queer People of Colour struggling to see ourselves and each other amid the blinding whiteness of the ‘mainstream’ gay culture: yes, I am propositioning you, all of you. I am proposing that we have sex with each other for the revolution, that we eroticize each other for the revolution.

I am speaking in solidarity with those of you who, like me, have begun to question the construction of our desires as subordinate to that glorious subject, the young white body; those of us whose bodies have rarely or never appeared in our own sexual fantasies. I am speaking with gratitude to those of you, elders and mentors, who have been engaged in revolutionary loving for many years.

I am speaking in solidarity with those of you who, like me, have begun to question the construction of our desires as subordinate to that glorious subject, the young white body.

I am reaching out because it was in the shadow of the rainbow that I discovered my race: always Chinese, I had never thought of myself as simply “Asian,” never felt myself considered part of a faceless, sexless, sub-human mass until my first night on a gay dance floor. Because the most violent racist aggressions in my life have always come from white queers, and particularly white gay men.

This letter is for my best friend and chosen brother, a fiercely beautiful and intelligent East Asian diva who once told me that white men are “scientifically” better-looking than men of colour. For you, my unstoppable brother, from whom I learn so much and for whom I have no answers when you ask me if I think that your white boyfriends are fetishizing you, save that you are worth all the love in the world.

This is for you, the gorgeous brown boy whom I nearly fucked in a bathroom in a bar one night after doing a drag performance in Ontario. You called me the most beautiful boy you’d ever touched. I had to stop – I almost cried – when you said that, because even after years of learning makeup and glamour, of trying to reclaim my femininity and my Asianness as something sexual, I still couldn’t make myself believe those words. Because, in some twisted way, I thought that you deserved something better – more masculine, whiter – than me. Because I could see in the way you touched me that you had not yet had the kind of tender, consensual sex that I have fought for over the years, that you were used to the kind of violence with which coloured queers are so intimately familiar.

I want to tell you that I think your rage is powerful, is sexy, is a thousand times more attractive than the pale hypocritical politics thrown around like so much window-dressing in white queer activist spaces.

This is for the mixed-race activist who told me how she was driven from a white feminist, lesbian collective because her anger at being co-opted and invisibilized was considered “too divisive” and “too aggressive.” I want to tell you that I think your rage is powerful, is sexy, is a thousand times more attractive than the pale hypocritical politics thrown around like so much window-dressing in white queer activist spaces. The community I want is one with you burning bright and hot in it.

This is for all you black and brown femmes and bois, gaysians, coloured queens, Two-Spirit folks, QPOC, and mixed queers who have grown up in the shadow of the rainbow. All of us who ever searched for identity, for sex, for safety, for a saviour in the white sea of the gay community; who went online and saw ourselves immediately ruled out with petty, almost gleeful cruelty as sexual partners: no femmes, no fats, no Asians or Blacks, am I right? Who watched porn and Queer as Folk and Will and Grace and Looking and thought, where am I? Who defined our worth, our realness, our viability as queer people by our ability to attract white partners – who compromised our pleasure and integrity and safety for a dangerous, anonymous fuck that we didn’t enjoy. Who agreed to polyamorous relationships, ostensibly in the name of sexual liberation, but secretly because we were afraid that our white partners would leave us if we didn’t. Who sat ashamed and alone in STI clinics after sex we weren’t sure we agreed to, surrounded by “HIV/AIDS awareness” posters and pamphlets all featuring the glamourized bodies of white men so concerned by their own marginality but who never once thought of those shadowed brown bodies quietly dying outside the spotlight.

My dear QPOC, I think we deserve to desire each other. It is not easy to see ourselves as erotic, as possessing that power that we have come to associate with whiteness. But listen: we know the shape of each others’ scars. There is an intimacy that exists between us that is deeper than the dream of subordination we were taught to exalt.

What I want to learn about is what’s possible if only we started being tender, flirtatious, silly, serious, sexual, raw, delicate, deep with each other.

Because I know about those dreams. About solitary exploration, discovery, fear, elation, rejection under the covers in the quiet hours of the night, trying not to wake siblings and parents in the tiny living space you shared. I know about bleaching creams and body hair anxiety – the hair that refused to grow and the hair that refused to stop growing. About the muscle that wouldn’t come, the fat that wouldn’t cooperate. The dieting. The vomiting. The resignation that we could only ever be, at best, beautiful in spite of our race and not because of it.

And I know about being cruel to other queer people of colour. I know about competing for attention in a white space, about jealousy of those of us who could “pass” for white or conform more closely to a white standard of beauty. I know about rejecting our cultures, our parents, our pasts, as irresolvable with the mainstream gay political project of marriage rights, military participation, and capitalist ascension. You and I? We know all about cruelty, honey.

What I want to learn about is what’s possible if only we started being tender, flirtatious, silly, serious, sexual, raw, delicate, deep with each other. I want to remember the sacredness, the sensuality of hair that refuses to stop growing, of skin that will not lighten. Because, Queer People of Colour, you are so, so sexy. There’s pleasure beyond words in your mouth, and I want to find it with my tongue. There’s a revolution in my pants, and you are definitely invited. We can go slowly, we can always stop if it doesn’t work out. But I want to choose the possibility of you. And I want you to choose the possibility of me.

From Gaysia With Love,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post A modest proposition appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To: CeCe McDonald
OID#238072
Minnesota Correctional Facility – St. Cloud
2305 Minnesota Boulevard S.E.
St. Cloud, MN 56304
United States of America
The Other Side of Freedom

Re: The Making of Heroes

“How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
[…]
And if I
if I ever let love go
because the hatred and the whisperings
become a phantom dictate I o-
bey in lieu of impulse and realities
(the blossoming flamingos of my
wild mimosa trees)
then let love freeze me
out.
I must become
I must become a menace to my enemies”
June Jordan, “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”

Dear CeCe,
Hi, I’m Kai Cheng, a transfemme Asian writer and student living in Montreal, Canada. I’ve wanted to write to you for a long time now. It’s hard to put the feelings I have into the appropriate words, when we’ve never met and we’re so far apart. How do you write to a political icon and personal hero without sounding presumptuous or ridiculous? How do you say something meaningful to someone like you, who has lived through so much with such grace? When I read about you in the news, or think about your story, I am inspired to be brave, to be real, to speak and act in solidarity with my sisters in community. So I’m writing you this open letter to thank you for that, and to try and spread the gift of your story a little farther in the world.

For over a year and a half, the trans* community has waited for this day: the day you are released from a prison that you never should have been placed in, that should never have existed in the first place. Although I wish that there were no need to celebrate moments like this, that transphobia and racism and the prison industrial complex did not conspire to contain, incarcerate, and murder people for the ‘crimes’ of difference and fighting for survival, I can’t say that I’m not thrilled you’re getting out. It’s a complicated feeling, I suppose. Maybe you have complicated feelings of your own. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say that on this day, as on all days, I honour your strength, your courage, and your will to live and love. I honour the words and the wisdom you have given to queer and trans* communities through your blog and public statements. I honour your – I honour you.

When I read about you in the news, or think about your story, I am inspired to be brave, to be real, to speak and act in solidarity with my sisters in community.

I started this letter with an excerpt from June Jordan’s “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies” because I always appreciate the power and beauty of the poems you include in your blog posts. You remind me that poetry – poetry that tells it like it is, that makes space for our voices, that dreams for us a less vicious world than the one in which we currently live – is as much a part of fighting for life and revolution as other kinds of struggle. That poetry is, as Audre Lorde says, “not a luxury,” but a bridge between us. Jordan’s poem always makes me think of you.

I think about how three years ago, on a dark night, you were harassed and attacked by white, cisgendered men and women for no reason other than that you were there, and different; how you did what you had to in order to survive. How, for once, it was the white man who did not live, and how the judicial system – the institutional systems supposed to uphold justice in America – reacted to this outrage, this audacity of yours to live when statistics say you should have died. Just by living, you became a ‘menace’ to the state, to cisgender and white supremacy.

And I think about Islan Nettles, who was beaten to death in the streets of Harlem on another dark night this year. I think about all the unnamed trans women of colour who have been harassed and violated and attacked. I think about my own dark nights. It’s a strange, dark fairy tale of transformation, transition, and violence that we live and die in, CeCe. And yet, still, you find the light and wisdom inside yourself to talk of love, to write and tell us that love is unending.

I thought that freedom was keeping my head down, not rocking the boat, blending in as much as possible. I thought that you were free as long as you were quiet and followed the rules. I wish we had known each other then.

When I was growing up in Vancouver, I thought that I was totally unlovable – or at least, parts of me. All the part that walked ‘funny,’ that lisped and liked to put on makeup and dresses. The part that dreamed of kissing boys. The narrow eyes, the tan skin. Who was going to care about a queer freaky cross-dressing kid from the immigrant neighbourhood? Straight people love straight people. White gay men love white gay men. I thought I had to choose between loving myself – my gender, my sexual preferences – and freedom. I thought that freedom meant trying to carve out a place in the middle class. I thought that freedom was keeping my head down, not rocking the boat, blending in as much as possible. I thought that you were free as long as you were quiet and followed the rules. I wish we had known each other then.

I bet you didn’t intend or expect to end up becoming the leader and icon for trans* folks and queers of colour that you have – your words are always so full of grace and humility, your writing always remains mindful of the community, those who didn’t make it, those whom we’ve lost. But you did, you became a kind of hero for me and for others because yours is a story from the other side of freedom. Dear CeCe McDonald, I remember and stand with all imprisoned trans* people and against the prison industrial complex. I am so happy that you are free (or, a little freer). You’ve been teaching me about freedom for three years.

In love and solidarity,
Kai Cheng

CeCe McDonald will be released January 13. She will write a public statement once she is rested and has spent some time in privacy with people she is close to. Those wishing to send CeCe McDonald messages of support or financial/material solidarity are advised to watch the “Free CeCe McDonald” Facebook page. Also consider sending a donation to other incarcerated people or abolition movements.

According to her close supporters, “CeCe has one more request: after her release, she’d like to make a scrapbook documenting the worldwide support she’s received. If you’ve organized an event, held a sign at a rally, or created art inspired by CeCe, please send it to mpls4cece@gmail.com.”

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post The other side of freedom appeared first on The McGill Daily.

“‘Those white things have taken all I had or dreamed,’ she said, ‘and broke my heartstrings too. There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks.’” Toni Morrison, Beloved

Dear Well-Intentioned Liberal White People (WILWP),

So you want to talk about racism. Well, you should know: it’s going to hurt. To talk the truth about race and racism is a kind of surgery which cannot be anesthetized, sterilized, made painless and easy to consume. You need to feel something. Many things, actually: anger, sadness, fear, guilt, resentment, envy, despair – because that is what real relationships with real human beings are like, and I want you to experience me as a real human being. I don’t want to be a tool, a doll, a fetish, a caricature, a charity case, a monster, or a capital-E Expert in Interracial Politics anymore. You cannot really love any of those things. And I want you to love me; it’s what you taught me to want. I dare you to listen. I dare you to love me.

As a writer, performer, student, and community member engaged in critical dialogue on race and racism, there are certain questions that I am often asked by white people in my life: Why am I responsible for something that my ancestors did (i.e. colonization, slavery, forced migration, cultural genocide)? How long is long enough to feel guilty? If white people are always getting it wrong, why can’t you just tell me how to not be racist? If I don’t want to be an oppressor, what is my place in the struggle for racial liberation?

WILWP, here’s the thing: if you can’t figure it out on your own, I got nothin’. Over the years I have certainly learned a lot of academic theory, a lot of critical history, a lot of postmodern terminological jargon, and if pressed, I could formulate answers to these questions. I could talk about the ways in which the history of European colonization of Asia, the Americas, and Africa continue to shape the socioeconomic realities of the present. I could pull out Peggy McIntosh’s list of white privileges. I could refer you to pre-eminent critical race theorists, and I could cite statistics.

But frankly, I am plumb tired of doing that. You can look it up on the internet for yourself. To enter that discussion is to jump down an endless rabbit hole of contention to which there is no bottom, in which your racial privilege and angst are the perpetual centre of gravity. There is no relationship of love in the darkness of that debate, no way to make you understand, no reason for me to stay.

So let’s make a deal, WILWP. You don’t ask me to explain history’s connection to the present, and I won’t ask you to reimburse generations of poverty created by slavery and indentured servitude, head taxes, internment, and discriminatory education and employment practices. You don’t ask me when you can stop feeling guilty, and I don’t ask you when I’m going to get back those conversations I didn’t have with my grandparents because my family decided that I would have a better chance at life in Canada speaking English instead of an obscure Chinese village dialect. You don’t ask me what your place is in the “struggle for racial equality,” and I don’t tell you that you directly benefit from oppression that has resulted in my personal trauma. To borrow a phrase from the Daria theme song, “Excuse me, you’re standing on my neck.”

What I propose we talk about – what I think we must talk about – is not the theoretical position that white people should take in order to ‘liberate’ people of colour, but rather the positions that you already occupy. Well-intentioned white people, you are inextricably enmeshed in nearly every aspect of my life. You are my teachers, bosses, co-workers, roommates, friends, and sexual partners. And in every one of those roles, the fact of your race gives you some measure of power over me: the power to place yourself in the centre and me in the margin. Your well-intentioned questions, your desire to not feel guilty, your Hollywood White Saviour movies like The Help and The Last Samurai and Dances With Wolves, and your trips to dig wells in Africa and teach English in Korea do nothing to close the gap between us.

This is perhaps hurtful to read, WILWP, especially if you are someone who knows me well. If you are used to my generally gentle demeanor, my politically correct sense of humour, my middle-class living room manners, you may want to cry. Feel free. I will not tell you that your tears are worthless, though they are dangerous to people like me: white women’s tears have brought many a conversation to a halt, have gotten many people of colour imprisoned and fired for being ‘too aggressive.’

But I believe that tears can be healing as well. As a child, I learned not to cry, have in fact lost the ability to cry in confrontations, because they meant I only got hurt worse. Even people of colour’s tears are worth less than white ones. So let’s all cry if we need to. Talking about racism should cause you pain. Fear, and anger, and yes, guilt too. It means we are speaking the same language.

And what are we really talking about when we talk about race? Well, I don’t know about you, WILWP, and I don’t speak for other people of colour, but I am talking about how to love. Not in the superficial, “let’s just treat everyone the same and bake a cake of rainbows and smiles and eat it and be happy” sense, but about the kind of love that hurts. The kind that is complicated, the kind that struggles to breathe, that leaves bloody handprints on the side of the face. I am talking about the fact that if we are to be quite honest, we already know that there are no final answers to your questions, have always known. That you may not have chosen the legacy of your whiteness, but it is yours, and it is your responsibility to figure out how to heal the damage it has done. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to accept this. If you want to talk about race with me, you have to listen to the things that hurt, that scar and bleed – and love me anyway.

In truth,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post So you want to talk about racism appeared first on The McGill Daily.

Re: Our lives, intertwined

“The dead leave us starving with mouths full of love.” – Anne Michaels, “Memoriam”

Dear Islan,

Did you ever hear the story of Sadako Sasaki, the girl who folded 1,000 paper cranes? Sadako was two years old when American atom bombs exploded in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The radiation from the bombs fell like a shadow over Sadako’s destiny, poisoning her body, and at the age of ten, she was diagnosed with leukemia with less than a year to live. In the hospital, she began to fold paper cranes, in accordance with the Japanese legend that whoever folds 1,000 will be granted a wish by the gods. Sadako hoped to wish for life. But as her disease progressed, and it became clear that no number of paper cranes could alter her destiny, Sadako changed her wish. According to the story, she wrote a haiku on her last crane before she died:

“I shall write peace upon your wings, and you shall fly around the world so that children no longer have to die this way.”

On November 20, two days after the publication of this letter, it will be the Transgender Day of Remembrance once more. Every year, the list of our lost and murdered grows longer. This year, Islan, your name will be on it. And I will struggle, as I always do, to make sense of my connection with you, with the dead – whose shadows fall indelibly over my own destiny whether I like it or not.

It is a strange and selfish project to write letters to the departed. Every story we tell about the dead becomes, in the end, a story about the living. It is so easy, Islan, so tempting, to co-opt the story of your death to tell the story of my life – to hold you up as a symbol, a martyr, a political project in the name of liberation of all trans women of colour: Look at this beautiful, brown, murdered girl, I want to say, to shout, to scream. Look at her, beaten to death by a man on a Harlem street in the middle of the night for no other reason than she was a different kind of woman than the kind he wanted to rape. Look at me. This could happen to me. Save my life from Islan’s death.

Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening.

But I am starting to believe that kind of remembrance is an injustice all its own. You are not a symbol, a sign, or a sacrifice through which I, or anyone, can attain political currency. You weren’t someone that I knew in life; I cannot claim a false intimacy with you or the dreams that flew out of this shattered world when you were killed. This is the truth as I know it: you were 21 years old when you were murdered last summer. You were beautiful. You wanted to be a fashion designer. I would never have known about you had your death not made the news. And yet now, somehow, your shadow walks alongside mine.

I see you in the moonlight when I am walking home alone. When men stare and catcall and follow me on the street, demanding to know if I am a man or a woman. Your shadow walks alongside mine, and Gwen Araujo’s, and Lawrence King’s, and Marsha P. Johnson’s, and countless unnamed persons’ whose deaths will never make the headlines; I am followed in every step by a line of trans* people, many of colour, who died and never knew me. We never knew each other, Islan, but in the moonlight, we are kindred. Your name is written on my bones. I cannot forget. I am never alone.
Islan, I am starting to think that transgender people are a community connected by a web made of ghosts. Every story we tell of our dead is also a story of those of us who still live: a cautionary tale, a political fable, a remembrance of what happened, and what is still happening. Trans* youth are seven times more susceptible to suicide than the average youth; trans* people are disproportionately represented in homelessness, forced sex work, sexual assault and murder. It feels, sometimes, like there is nothing we can do to change our destinies – nothing except remember, and pray.

Islan, there comes a time, I think, when all of our stories, the details of our individual lives, must enter the line of ghosts. They must be folded into the greater narrative that is the struggle for freedom. Trans* people, people of colour, any of us marginalized in every way – we have two kinds of hope: the fire we use to fight the battles that we live, and the flames we pass on when we pass away. Your shadow dances beside mine, and someday mine will dance behind someone who lives while I am gone. And this is why I am writing you a letter for the Transgender Day of Remembrance, Islan, strange and selfish though it is – because, whether we like it or not, our stories will reach and touch people in ways we’ll never know. For the rest of my life, I will write letters to the departed, sending them out like cranes into this shattered world.

And maybe someday, children like us will never have to live or die this way.

Forever loving, remembering you,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

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To: Dan Savage
Writer of the “Savage Love” column, Founder of It Gets Better Project
An Open Letter

Re: It didn’t get better

Dear Dan Savage,

I think I need to begin this open letter by thanking you for any lives the It Gets Better Project has saved. This past summer, I spent some time as a youth worker at a community and resource centre for LGBTQ youth. During one evening drop-in session, one of the young people present started talking about how much he loved your videos, about the power and connection that your project can inspire. You, Dan Savage, are a powerful man. Yet as he spoke, I could not help feeling a sinking sensation of disconnection, alienation, even anger with this youth whom I served as a resource provider and confidant. For weeks, I struggled to decipher that moment – what was this feeling? Why was this feeling? Then I realized: it was jealousy, Dan, and bitterness. Jealousy of the hope he felt, which I did not. Bitterness, because I don’t believe that it gets better – not for everyone, anyway.

Three years ago, I was a confused, eighteen-year-old, Asian trans* kid in my second year of college when the original video you and your husband, Terry, made hit YouTube. It subsequently swept across Western media like the words of some gay prophet of the promised land: a paradise where gays can get married, adopt pretty children, and go on vacations skiing across mountains and strolling the starlit streets of Paris. We, queer children, can get to this heaven, you and Terry told us, if we “tough this period of it out” – if we don’t “let the bullies win” by committing suicide. If LGBTQ youth can just get through high school, you told us, things would get better.

As a community worker, for every young LGBTQ person I meet whose life will ‘get better’ like yours and Terry’s did, I see a dozen whose lives simply won’t.

At that time, the suicide attempt of my last year of high school was still a fresh scar. I only barely survived, mostly because I was too afraid of failure to complete it. Somehow, I won a scholarship to a university in a city across the country, clinging to the hope that things would get better – that I could find the promised land of a husband, a white-collar job. A year after your video was released I attempted suicide again, having been raped by white gay men several times over the course of my university experience.

I came much closer to success that second time: alone in my room, I swallowed a bottle of psychotropic medication, poisoning myself and triggering a chemically-induced bout of panic attacks, spasms, dehydration, and hallucinations. I spent some 48 hours writhing on the floor, terrified and literally out of my mind. At some point, I might have tried to go to the hospital, but I could not stand because my body was shaking too badly. No one came to help me. No one called when I didn’t show up for school or work. I remember lying there, still trembling slightly from the effects of the poison, dry-mouthed and delirious, as the sun came up, and thinking, well, it’s got to get better from here. It couldn’t possibly be worse, could it? That summer, I was raped by a white gay man yet again, this time by a friend of a friend who demanded that I serve him orange juice after penetrating me so roughly without a condom that he tore fissures in the surface of my anus, causing me to bleed for days.

So why am I telling you this, Dan? Why does my story, which admittedly is something of a killjoy, matter to the It Gets Better Project? I think it matters because I am not alone. As a community worker, for every young LGBTQ person I meet whose life will ‘get better’ like yours and Terry’s did, I see a dozen whose lives simply won’t. Toughing it out through the bullies doesn’t make poverty go away, or the foster care system less abusive, or medical services more accessible for trans* people. Getting through high school doesn’t change the fact that racism and transphobia mean trans women of colour are disproportionately sexually assaulted and forced into sex work and homelessness. Telling young people to dream big doesn’t always make it possible for them to get there.

For many of us, not only does the systemic discrimination and violence not end, but the elite few gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who do achieve wealth and power ignore and silence us.

It matters because, Dan, we really have to think about whom we are talking to and about when we spread the message that “it gets better.” Does it? For young, white and/or wealthy gay men and lesbians, surviving high school may indeed (though definitely not always) mean that the bullying ends, that fulfilling sexual lives may begin, that university and well-paying jobs can be found. For pretty much everyone else, this just isn’t true. For many of us, not only does the systemic discrimination and violence not end, but the elite few gays, lesbians, and bisexuals who do achieve wealth and power ignore and silence us – and in some cases, actively contribute to discrimination and sexual violence.

It matters because I’m not sure that the message that “it gets better” really means anything to the heterosexual, cisgender world other than that it’s up to LGBTQ folks to fend for ourselves, and they should maybe avoid actively beating us up or calling us dykes and fags.

I think that we need to make it better – we need to challenge this transphobic, homophobic, racist, ableist, classist world to wake up. We need more support and funding for queer youth centres and shelters, we need more research into the challenges of impoverished LGBTQ seniors, we need more media about queer people of colour, we need to get rid of prisons and cops who kill trans* people, and we need mental health services that understand and affirm us. We need to end street violence and gay rape culture that result in trans* femmes of colour like myself being harassed and assaulted every day.

I’m not telling you this because I want to shame you, or because I think your way of life is wrong, or because I think your work isn’t valuable to some. I’m telling you this because I survived – and while it didn’t get better, I did get stronger. But not everyone survives, and not everyone is strong in the same way. I’m telling you because I want to honour those of us who didn’t live, and because I want you to do that with me. I’m telling you because, like I said, you are a powerful man, and I am willing to bet that you don’t just want to tell young queer people to live – you want to give them something to live for. I want that too. Help me get there?

In solidarity,
Kai Cheng Thom

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

The post It didn’t get better appeared first on The McGill Daily.

To: Random White Cisgender Guy
Somewhere on the Streets of Montreal
An Open Letter

Re: Forgiveness and the Making of Monsters

Dear Random Guy Who Tried to Break into My House and Rape Me,

You know, when I was little, my father used to tell me that there were monsters that lived in the alley behind our house. These monsters, he said, awoke at night to stalk the streets of our neighbourhood and eat naughty children who disobeyed their parents. This was why I should always listen to my father, stay in at night and go to bed on time, eat all my rice, be quiet and sit still, and never, ever talk to strangers. If I behaved, if I obeyed, if I was a good little boy, then I would be safe.

When I set out to write this letter, Random Guy, I wanted to be angry. I wanted to write a searing critique of your behaviour in the context of patriarchal violence and rape culture that would make you feel ashamed and small and pathetic. I wanted to be a Strong Independent Woman, a militant radical feminist. I wanted to hate you; wanted to justify that hatred with such fiery poetic eloquence that not even you could disagree. And I know I have the right to hate you, Random Guy. When you try to rape someone, they have the right to hate you.

But the truth is, I don’t hate you. I don’t feel angry – I never did. Not this summer when you rang my doorbell at midnight and told me through the locked door that you had seen me on the street and followed me home. Not when you told me that you thought I was beautiful. Not when you demanded to come inside. Not when you looked me in the eyes and sadistically asked me if I was scared. Not even as you started to pound on the door and pry at the lock. I never once felt rage as I ran upstairs and tried calling all of my big, cisgender male friends, none of whom answered. Not as I gave up and called the police, not when they arrived and told me that they couldn’t detain you because you “hadn’t really threatened me.” I didn’t hate you then, didn’t hate you after, and I don’t hate you now, no matter how much I wish I did.

What I did feel was fear. I did feel terrified, knowing that just on the other side of the door, there was someone who had picked me out, tracked me, who had definite intentions to harm me. I felt the terror of knowing that my body, my personhood, and my desires are less than inconsequential to you. And I felt shame. I was ashamed of being so weak, when for so long I have been able to rely on my strength. Ashamed that I called the police, who are responsible for the brutalization and deaths of so many of my transgender sisters. I was ashamed that I had brought the horror of you upon myself.

You see, Random Guy, I believed my father. I internalized the story that it is the weak, the deviant, the naughty, the disobedient, the careless and stupid whom are singled out as prey by the predators of the night. For all my feminist learning, I have yet to unlearn the notion that it is my fault for choosing to walk home alone at night, for presenting my body as ‘feminine,’ for being unable to defend myself against you on my own.

I was raised not just by my father, but by this racist, transphobic nation to not be angry, to not know how to hate predatory white men like you. I grew up keeping my feelings inside ‘for my own safety,’ just as I kept my body confined to spaces that grow ever tighter as I age. I was taught to turn the other cheek – to consider your desires and freedoms as essentially more important and potent than mine. I was taught to dismiss my humanity so that society can forgive your monstrosity.

So it is with a strange compassion that I write this letter, Random Guy, an odd kind of forgiveness that causes me to consider the kind of life you must lead that has made you the monster that haunts my nighttime streets. How were you raised in order to think of me as a piece of meat for you to consume? How is it that power made you so broken? What part of your soul did privilege rob that you treat other people this way? How is it that you are not alone in this, but only one of many such monsters in infinite guises whom I, and my racialized and transgender siblings, meet every day?

The thing is, I don’t have the answer to these questions, Random Guy. You do. And it’s your job to answer them for us both. Because my job is to survive you. We are trapped in this nightmare of predator and prey, and you have the power to wake up first. And while I may not hate you yet, I must still be prepared for you. The next time we meet – and we will – I will have hatred on my side, or my sisters, or a knife. And one of us may not survive.

Never yours,

Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is an epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

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Re: Miracles and Revolution

“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting our time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” – Aboriginal activists group, Queensland, 1970s.

Dear Juliano,

You are never going to read this letter, and even if you could, it is doubtful that you would remember me. But I remember you. We met five years ago at Freedom Theatre in Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank of Palestine. You were giving a lecture on your use of theatre as a revolutionary practice to a group of expat foreign aid workers and students from Britain, Canada, and the United States who were there with the dubious project of ‘helping’ (read: ‘saving’) Palestine. I was there to visit friends, and wondering about my own political position in your home – self-declared saviour? Privileged foreigner engaged in ‘third world’ voyeurism? Activist? Learner? Or nothing at all? Juliano, this may sound trite, but you said something then that I have been thinking about ever since, that will remain in my heart for the rest of my life.

An American university student had just asked you if you could “explain the mentality” of teenage Palestinian suicide bombers. How, the student wanted to know, was it possible that people so young, with so much life ahead of them, could give up their lives so meaninglessly? Why would they kill themselves, knowing that their deaths could never create change in the face of the machine of the Israeli apartheid state? Didn’t they know that it was better to live and cling to hope, rather than die and forfeit hope altogether?

“You are asking the wrong question,” you replied, “You should be asking: What is the miracle at work that not all Palestinians have become suicide bombers already?”

There are rare, terrifying, incredible moments in life when the shadowed landscapes of our private experience are thrown into sudden illumination by the words of a stranger. Juliano, there could be no two lives more different than ours: you, a Palestinian activist and elder in your community; and me, a half-grown, Chinese-Canadian transgender kid struggling to figure out life. Yet I cannot deny that I felt that lightning flash of recognition as you spoke, that guttural sense that somehow what you were saying was related to my life and community as well as yours. And so I am writing you this open letter, despite the fact that you were assassinated two years ago, hoping that I do not presume too much, because I still believe that there is something vitally important about the resonance I felt in your words – and because I think that I may be finally beginning to understand.

I am starting to see that the colonial nation state – whether Israel, Canada, or the United States of America – has a specific project in mind, a project that does not include the bodies of those it deems unworthy to live within its borders. Everyday, trans* people of colour in North America experience violence in the streets and discrimination in educational and employment institutions; our mobility is limited and regulated by state borders, and we are routinely brutalized and killed by the police. Our experiences are by and large hidden from more privileged communities, and when our stories are made available to the general public, we are demonized and ridiculed. What would it mean to replace “transgender people of colour in North America” with “Palestinians and Israeli Arabs,” Juliano? Or “police” with “Israeli Defense Force”?

I am not trying to equate my oppression with yours, because that exercise would be both offensive and pointless. Vast differences do exist between us, and our positions in the colonial web of power, privilege, and violence that entraps this world are not the same. Yet I believe that we are also connected by this web, and this connection is an opportunity for shared understanding – to fight in solidarity.

For I am starting to see as well that there is a deep consequence to denying our parallel experiences – and there are forces invested in hiding them, in preventing us from having this conversation. There is a reason that Israel portrays itself as the only safe haven for queer people in the Middle East, just as there is a reason that the white, gay middle class in North America pretends that same-sex marriage is the only issue of concern to queer people here; this even as Palestinian queer people struggle for recognition of their existence and trans* people in North America mourn the deaths and rapes of our siblings. Our oppressions are connected, Juliano, and I wish you were alive to tell me whether you already knew this, whether you disagree.

But even though you are gone, I still want to tell you: it was your words that helped me see. Your words that helped me understand that the miracle you spoke of – the miracle that I have not yet died – lives in my body, and the bodies of all oppressed peoples who yet struggle to breathe in the confines of the margin. You made me understand that your war is interlinked with mine; your words helped me to understand that I inhabit a place of war. It took me nearly five years to understand this, Juliano, to understand that in fighting for myself I must fight for others and they for me, but now I see. I am ready. I do not forget.

Sincerely,
Kai Cheng

From Gaysia With Love is a bi-weekly, epistolary exploration of intersectionality by Kai Cheng Thom. They can be reached at fromgaysia@mcgilldaily.com.

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