trans creation + spirituality
euphoria // something that may shock and discredit you by daniel m. lavery // the incredulity of saint thomas by caravaggio + id:TRANS by elisabeth ohlson wallin // @violenceenthusiast // paris is burning // laverne cox // POSE // the transgender prophet by matthew merrick // SOPHIE by @222xen on twitter // weeds by torrin a. greathouse
[Image description: a collection of multimedia quotes.
1: a screenshot showing the moon at dusk between two large hills. The caption says “At least to me, being trans is spiritual.”
2: text that says, “As my friend Julian puts it, only half winkingly: ‘God blessed me by making me transsexual for the same reason God made wheat but not bread and fruit but not wine, so that humanity might share in the act of creation.’”
3: A painting next to a photo recreating it. The photo shows three men clustered around Jesus. One is poking his finger in a wound on his chest. In the photo, the wound is a top surgery scar.
4: a post by violenceEnthusiast that says “i hold it as absolute truth that being trans is holy. not only because i have found a welcoming home unlike any other in the trans community but because what is divinity if not creation and what is being trans if not creating your own path. transness is not a burden, it’s a gift. life as a trans person is not easy, obviously, and not everyone is going to feel the same about their transness. but to me, it’s a beautiful and expansive thing, meant to be reveled in.
5: two screenshots of a Black woman wearing a yellow one-piece swimsuit on a beach. The subtitled lyrics say “I am what I am, I am my own special creation.”
6: text that says “You might not see it right now but you are here for a divine purpose and so you have to survive. You have to survive.”
7: two screenshots of Lulu, a Latina woman, saying “How lucky are we? We create ourselves.”
8: text that says “i say this; [highlighting begins] transgender people are holy. [highlighting ends] i say we have overcome the chaos of nature and the order of civilization. i say we are the alchemical ideal. We are the rectification of disparate things, [highlighting begins] destruction and creation in equal measure, [highlighting ends] the unification of masculine and feminine, the reunion of body and soul. we do these things in our every breath.”
9: a drawing of SOPHIE from the waist up, a nude white woman with red hair. She is applying lipstick while smoking. She is quoted as saying “God is trans. Transness is a blessing.”
10: highlighted text that says “Even in the harshest season, / we survive. We bloom forever / where we are told we don’t belong.”
11: a poem titled So Wrote The Sages.
I try to lay out for you the scripture of me, but you will not read it: you understand red letters, neat footnotes, the strict and silent, the solemn, the breathless
and I’m sorry but I left
my mouth wraps vowels and voiceless fricatives in my mother tongue. I have margins, the space in me where my mishnah goes. You say why should you do this when G-d has given, He wrote your body in his image and
first of all, if celiac and spinal tumors form His grand design
He can take the whole thing but second if we presume the body you made a gift He gave, a precious ineffable wrapped in leaves of light, then how more immutable that than six hundred thirteen laid out crisp and neat as children with first-day notebooks open to clean pages? How, then, this fleeting and mortal thing, this bone, marrow and fascia, more sturdy and lasting than stone tablets, than prayer-stuffed walls whispering wishes to sunset? Must I maintain this cracked and fragile frame, this loose collection of joints and sighs, to the groaning detriment of my silk smoke soul, the slippery breath in this glass bottle of me, the note resonant, hollow and brief, skimming across the top?
Let me explain: I am made in His image as every verse burned into neurons and memorized from bet, the beginning, through to Simchat Torah, wound back again. I will write in the margins of me. I will bake the clay of me in this oven I deem kosher, though let the streams jump their banks and the trees dance to defy me. See, I have inscribed immutable truth: here, writ large across my body. The words were given to us here on Earth, and every gift leaves the giver’s hands. I will fill each page of me until I cannot cram another yud in anywhere, and I will leave no crease or corner of this bequest unshaped, unexplored, unstudied, unknown. I know no red letters, no word too sacred to question. My body is given to me, here, on Earth.
This, too, is Torah.
End image description]
