I gave this speech in 2018 at the Universalist Unitarian church in Chattanooga, TN in honor of a Transgender Day of Remembrance service. I still read it for comfort.
“I look around this room and I see the descendants of the bravest people to ever live. Our heritage is loud and disruptive. We all know that Stonewall started with a thrown brick. We entered mainstream feminism when we grabbed the mic and told everyone to shut up and listen. We climb the walls of city hall and if they won’t give us a seat at the table we make the table into a runway. Somehow we are born with the ability to fly so long inside of our cages that we forget the door is closed. Our ancestors are, in humble terms, places where the divine realm touches the earth.
That’s a lot to live up to. That legacy can be heavy to carry. From Sylvia to Marsha to Laverne to Janet to Laura Jean Grace the Louboutins are hard to fill. To make inroads to acceptance we offer up these achievers as proof that we are worthy, that we are capable of greatness. We are. We are told to show a brave face to the world because our past is too proud for us to ever allow them to see us suffer. We are told we can’t let them see how they steal our joy.
I want to admit to you now that I can’t bear it sometimes. Times come when I don’t correct the ma’ams. Times come when the risk is too great and I go into the wrong bathroom. Sometimes I look at the names of the dead, read how their bodies have been violated with hatred and evil and I cannot stand witness to the honor they deserve. The world gathers today to read their names and speak their memory into being at least one more time.
I stand before you a lonely soul. Flawed, arrogant, bearing a sharp tongue doused in venom. Fearful of acting, fearful of idling. A man who puts on a smile and insists he isn’t affected, that deeper compassion dwells within born of suffering that has become the sunrise of my life – a sign that time marches on. A man hoping desperately to never become a name on that list, who fears that he will join that number before his life warrants something worth speaking of.
But I want to tell you something and I hope you know that I say it with love and I hope that you will try to believe me – if you never achieve anything great, if you make mistake after mistake and your life is useful as nothing but a cautionary tale for wayward souls – you are enough. You are enough. With all of our flaws and failings, we are worthy of the same respect and love as any other child of the universe. No one is required to be exceptional in order to prove they are a human being. I say it to you so that I can take the time to say it to myself. I am enough. I deserve happiness. I deserve to feel safe. My worthiness cannot be changed by my actions or my outsides.
Here, though, tonight – we are safe. Tonight we can pry open the shells we have to culture to keep our insides intact. We can take a moment now to honor the aches and pains. To know and accept for just a few seconds all that we have lost – all that has left us, the little defeats, the signs of acquiescence, the rationalizing and suppression, the doubt, the days lost to apathy and the nights lost to fear. The times we have to go along to get along. Friendships, places where we felt safe. Hopes we may have had. Futures that seem too far off to ever come.
We can honor the anger we feel towards a society that is designed to deny that we even exist. A blade, a bullet, angry hearts and fists are not the only ways this world kills us. Poverty, neglect, indifference, a medical marketplace that exploits our suffering for profit, fundamentalists and zealots who blaspheme the divine to justify their feeble fears, addictions amplified by these rejections and slights, abandonment by a lover or family or school or country or god- these are tiny deaths. One more step towards oblivion.
Think about all the people who have wronged you this year. All the faceless strangers we fear. Machines of oppression that seem impossible to destroy. Imagine everyone who we fear means us harm. Imagine that one day maybe they will change their minds. Imagine , bravely hope with me that they will someday look back on their prejudice, their fear with shame. Being wrong, changing your mind – that isn’t a story that is too popular in our culture. Moral authority only rests in being completely correct at all times. I can not for the life of me figure out why – no human being actually exists in this way. Fighting against change, the heart of conservatism, never succeeds. The only thing all humans do is transform. We aren’t the only ones who transition.
Dare to believe that we will live in a world someday where the list of the names that we read on November 20th grows shorter and shorter. Imagine that we don’t have to print them on sixteen pages. Imagine justice for the few who are left to be honored. Imagine children who do not fear the consequences of just being themselves. Imagine an America that finally, for once, means liberty and justice for all. For the other 364 days of the year I will give you cynical side eye but tonight I will let myself hope. Sometimes when we look around and the darkness is too much, wild hopes like these are the only thing that keep us off that list.
Here and now we can all hold these things and bear them together. The sadness, the despair, the anger, the indignities. Here and now we can have permission to let them fall off our backs. These burdens are not needed. We can leave them here as we step into a new year together. We can promise each other that we will help make the load a little lighter. Tomorrow we get a new chance, a new story that we all get to write together.”
Queer Pandemic 