For Trans and Gender-Diverse People, Community Is a Verb (Exclusive)
It's a curious thing to come into yourself, like a bodily homecoming – a returning that brings you so much joy – and to find that the more aligned and yourself you feel, the more hostile the world beyond your body becomes.
There are myriad explanations for why people feel affronted by gender variance, and why trans and gender diverse communities – especially those who are racialized, and especially those who express femininity – are once again facing hatred that at best, tires and erodes the soul, and at worst, steals life through acts of depraved violence. But in a world that continues to insist on the expulsion of trans and gender diverse people not only from public life, but also from the public imagination, I am choosing to place my emphasis on the ways in which trans and gender diverse people insist on living.
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Two years ago, around a table at a dinner party in a friend's sharehouse, over full-bodied wine and empty plates still glistening with rich bolognese sauce, a friend of mine clinked their glass. We were packed like sardines into a living room that'd been rearranged to make way for foldout plastic tables that could accommodate 18.Bits of light from the candlesticks wedged into the necks of old wine bottles glinted in eyes and across cheeks. This friend who had quietened the group asked, when do you feel most free?
Despite resonating in part with those who described feeling most free when they're on their own, devoid of attachment, I couldn't help but think of a party I'd recently been to during Pride where, for the first time, I'd taped my chest flat and taken to the dance floor without a shirt on, feeling the sun hooked into my shoulder blades. I remember how I'd realized, in that moment, that I feel most free when I am in attachment. Most free when I am bound to others. Because my friends keep talking about community, and what I think they really mean by this is freedom to feel into and fall into the arms of those willing to hold us. Freedom, in this sense, is being able to express yourself and be witnessed, relished, celebrated, called out, called in, held.
I am most free when I am in connection, when I'm on a dance floor, or at a protest – arms linked – or in a cuddle puddle in the late afternoon or in the last hours before daybreak. I am most free when I am beholden to others. I am most free when a friend who's been recently evicted is snoring on my fold-out couch. Or when another friend knocks on my door, having come do my laundry while I'm nursing my broken ankle. Or when we're all together, cleaning out a friend's house in the wake of a devastating flood, cutting waterlogged furniture with a chainsaw into pieces that'll be light enough for us to carry out to the street. I am most free when I am in connection, because I know my liberation is bound up with yours.
Once, I wrote the sentence: I find myself wondering, more and more, if being trans will always feel this humiliating.
When I find this quote in an old journal, I think back to when I was young, when I was lean muscle and all limb, before my body swelled and became something like a shadow, outside and beyond, stalking the edge of me. Back in that beautiful before, when I first learned how to hold my breath through the pearlescent belly of a wave, bursting out its broken shoulder, into the light of day. I think about the boys I hung out with, in the back alleys of my youth, bombing hills so steep my heart got stuck in my throat. How once I got death wobbles and jumped off my skateboard and landed so hard on my left leg, I threw my pelvis out of place. How I thrashed my body, over and over, injury after injury, so that by the time I was 15 I had a file at the emergency department three inches thick. How maybe I thrashed my body to stop it changing. Or, maybe I just liked moving.
That's how I describe being trans. For me, it's all about movement. The walking and the running and the flying and the swimming. Because, even now, I don't know where I'm going, only that I am going.
It therefore makes sense to me that the people who've taught me community is a verb, are, first and foremost, my trans siblings. Learning community as a thing that is made through ongoing actions – housing friends, meal drops, carpooling, helping with rent, sharing work, information and resources, showing up to protests and direct actions in support of and in solidarity with all marginalized communities – is something my friends have taught me through their own ongoing doings. I've come to understand 'queer,' too, as a doing, predicated on its ongoing actions.
'Queer,' to me, is visionary and imaginative ways of caring that ultimately carves out space for futures in which all of us live. I consider myself especially indebted to the First Nations friends in my life where I live in what we now call'Australia' who, in the face of ongoing colonisation and systemic oppression, embody community as a way of being, as a way of moving, as a way of resisting, and as a way of surviving.
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I think of that quote again – I find myself wondering, more and more, if being trans will always feel this humiliating – as institutions render us illegible and illegal, and JK Rowling celebrates her losses with a cigar.
And I take, instead, to the water with my friends, and we let the water carry what we can't, because it's in the water, with them, all of us together, that I swim through humiliation and learn humility. My lover glides up against my chest and I feel an explosion of futures being felt as I feel myself. I dive under the surface and open my eyes, even though the saltwater stings, just to watch my friends. They kick and glide through pillars of yellow light, and I grin and shake, because it feels so good to be in the water, swimming with these people who know, like I do, that our survival has always depended on our movement. I start to laugh underwater, and my love for them escapes me in bright blue bursts.
Against all of it. I love, I love, I love!
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A Language of Limbs by Dylin Hardcastle comes out June 3 and is available for preorder now, wherever books are sold.
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