Spring Equinox
Mourning, avenging, and celebrating my inner child
Welcome to Healing is My Special Interest, the newsletter at the intersection of late diagnosed neurodivergence and healing from high control religions. Thank you for being here, and for supporting this publication.
I am struggling with what to write these days. People want a pep talk, I think, on how to survive American Christian fascism. But I don’t have anything new to say these days, and I don’t feel like repeating myself over and over again. White supremacist patriarchal Christian men have teamed up with the richest people in the world so they can control the population with their terrifying vision for the world. And in order to gain power, both groups decided that trans people were one of the main targets they would turn into the cultural scapegoat — similar to what the Nazis did in Germany — a group I just so happen to be a part of.
I don’t have a pep talk in me right now about how to best survive these days. Most of my knowledge has been extremely hard won after growing up in a religious authoritarian home as a gender non-conforming kid. I am a public non-binary person who is exhausted by trying to convince people that the rights and dignity of people like me are worth standing up for. Most of my energies are going towards surviving, connecting to nature, nurturing my kids and my community, being witchy, making art, and refusing to let my every waking thought be on national politics (although it does happen quite a bit).
Either you get where I am at — probably because you have one or more marginalized identities — or you don’t.
Yesterday I added to the altar I have made to my younger self — closeted, yet also very non-binary coded — and I spent some time thinking about younger me. I do the work I do now for them, and for all the queer kids trapped in a religious authoritarian home or system where their survival is dependent on them learning how to abandon their true selves.
While I struggle (and work very hard) to get to a place where I don’t only feel doom and dread when I think about the future, connecting to my younger self helps me. They also felt so much doom and dread — they had been told their entire life the world was going to end soon — and look what happened: I kept surviving. And not only that, I learned how to be present to my own body enough where I learned to enjoy each day for the fleeting gift it is.
In my neck of the woods the daffodils and crocuses are blooming, and my peonies are starting to shoot out of the ground. Tomorrow is the spring equinox, proof that life continues on and the seasons are always shifting. In many ways it still feels like winter in my heart — the survivalist is still hunkering down, desperate to hear good news of a world waking up to the dangers of transphobia and xenophobia — but there is a slight thawing at the edges. I honor my younger self and commit ever more to loving them loudly in the ways they always deserved. No matter what comes next, I know that I am a person who chose to work towards a world where everyone could flourish instead of a few. I am a person who was strong enough to process the pain of an abusive Christian childhood, and to break those cycles of forcing the white supremacist heteronormativity on the next generation. I am a person who calls a genocide a genocide, who calls fascism what it is, who is consistent in their beliefs that never again means never again for anyone.
I am a part of a group that is being targeted for eradication. I am bound and determined to survive despite this. I sincerely hope you are all doing the work and are able to join me in this fight for human rights and for the survival of us all. Every child and every teenager deserves to have the chance at a future where they don’t have to hide who they are. I look at my altar, and then I look in the mirror. I manifest a world where every gender-queer person has moments of safety and connection to themselves. Where we are allowed to be humans, instead of God’s vessels designed to prop up one gender while oppressing the other. Where we are mourned and honored and even avenged.
I manifest a world where we all survive, thanks to the wider community rallying around us.
I manifest a world where you — my readers — decide that trans and non-binary people are worth basic human rights and dignity and you refuse to let us be the scapegoats in the Christian fascist agenda.
Where you stand up to the people in your life who are transphobic, and call it out every time you see it.
I don’t want to have to beg, so I won’t. If you haven’t explored your own transphobia yet, then this little newsletter essay certainly won’t help change your mind at how neatly you are fitting into the fascist agenda.
But I can see the patterns, as I always have: when you decide there is one marginalized group you are willing to sacrifice on the road to freedom, it never stops there. More and more people are added to the collection of disposable, expendable, necessary sacrifices.
Until one day you wake up and realize there is no one left to fight for freedom with you.
If you are interested in learning more about the assault on trans people, I highly recommend following journalists like Erin the in Morning.
ngl as a queer person, it sometimes feels really exhausting and pointless to try to communicate big, complicated ideas like liberation from amatonormativity and the gender binary and how those are tied to oppression and heteropatriarchal white supremacy when I get on social media and so many people (outside of my circles) are like "Men! Do you let your woman work outside the home?" and "My boyfriend says I can't disagree with him in public. How can I be more submissive without letting it bother me?" and "Poll: Should women be allowed to vote?" Like, we can't get on board with the very bare bones 101-level concepts of equality of HALF of the population after literally hundreds of years of public discourse, how on earth can I communicate "actually your unexamined self-concept is being weaponized as a tool of great harm and everything you think you know about others is wrong too" ha
Double dose of Prozac these days 💪🏼