The world we live in is on fire at every level: On the grand scale, there is genocidal and colonial violence and warfare, environmental crisis and enormous socio-economic instability. Meanwhile, trans people have become the targets of a renewed moral panic spearheaded by some of the wealthiest, most powerful people on the planet, resulting in the introduction of legislation intended to strip us of our human rights at local and federal levels in multiple countries. Often, these threats hit close to home: Just a few months ago, a drag queen storytime at a local bookstore in my city was disrupted by a transphobic bomb threat.
It’s a terrifying time to be a queer person, and especially a trans person. How does one care for one’s mental health when the level of risk involved in simply going outside in public seems to grow by the day? When one is part of a despised minority population that billionaires and politicians seem to love using as a cudgel to whip the population into a frenzy of displaced fear and anger—all as a distraction from the fact that it is these very billionaires and politicians who are responsible for so much of the suffering on our planet?
What does it mean to be strong, to be brave, to be resilient in conditions like these? At times, it seems like an absurdity, an impossible task. At others, I remember the words of Black Transformative Justice practitioner, writer and activist Mariame Kaba that “hope is a discipline.” And I remember that queer and trans people are, perhaps, the best-qualified community to survive the end of the world as we know it. After all, we’ve done it so many times before.
As a child growing up in the 1990s, I was told many times both implicitly and explicitly that life as a queer person was dangerous, unacceptable and mutually exclusive with happiness. The queer children of my generation were raised in the shadow of the narrative that discrimination, violent hate crimes and HIV/AIDS would be the death of us.
We were taught that the weight of homophobia and transphobia would crush us, and we had better conform to societal norms and hide who we were if we wanted to survive. To live a meaningful life as an out trans woman of colour—as I do today—was so far from the realm of possibilities offered to us that most of us had no concept of such a thing. To come out, or to transition, was to entertain the end of one’s world.
Yet of course, many people had, in fact, come out in the generations before we were born. Lesbians, gays, bisexuals and yes, even trans people (and gender nonconforming people like the legendary Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson who did not always describe themselves as “trans” in the contemporary sense) had come out, built communities and subcultures, defended and cared for one another in the face of violent repression and the terror of the AIDS crisis.
It was these previous generations—no doubt themselves fumbling, uncertain and afraid in the face of their own crumbling world—who laid the foundations of the dream we still fight for today: A world in which all people can live in dignity, without the fear of violence and repression.
Upon those foundations, at the risk of coming across naive and corny, I truly do believe that we, the queer and trans people alive today, brought about transformative cultural change, deeply imperfect and often exclusive of the most marginalized communities though it was.
I believe this because of the sheer number of us who live out of the closet today. I believe this because of the hundreds of queer and trans youth I had the privilege of supporting as a social worker in my 20s. And I believe this because I am alive and considering the possibility of living into middle age in the next decade, which is a miracle beyond the imagining of the newly transitioned girl I was a decade ago. I take this as evidence that we queer and trans people must know something about survival under apocalyptic conditions—that we are, in a way, experts in the skills of adaptation, transformation and miraculous emergence.
In the mental health professions, “resilience” is often roughly defined as the ability to adapt to stressful circumstances while maintaining social, emotional and cognitive functionality. Frankly, when I was a social worker working with impoverished, marginally housed and often disabled queers, this definition seemed almost cruel. In an oppressive society, the imperative to be resilient so often becomes yet another capitalist demand to keep being productive at all costs; meanwhile, a supposed lack of resilience is weaponized to judge and blame individuals for struggling in a social landscape that is specifically designed to isolate and exploit them.
Yet today, as the bombs paid for by our tax dollars continue to fall on thousands of children an ocean away, as unprecedented hurricanes and forest fires ravage poor and racialized communities all over the planet and chorus of voices calling for bodies like mine to be eradicated from public life grows ever louder, I cannot help but think that queer resilience is more important than ever: not resilience as the stiff upper lip, not the grin-and-bear-it-with-grit-mindset-now-get-back-to-work mentality so popularized in dominant culture psychology today, but rather resilience as the spiritual commitment to our shared dignity and joy while remaining responsive to collective suffering.
Resilience reframed from the perspective of interpersonal connection rather than individual striving has deep roots in many communities and cultures, and offers us a different map for how to live in terrifying times than the one offered by mainstream medicine and psychotherapy.
Social work scholar and renowned researcher on resilience Michael Ungar writes that “if Freud had been an Indigenous Elder […] or a Chinese patriarch in a large extended family, he would have laughed at his small-minded theories that supposedly explained our relationships […] We are far more intertwined in social networks than we recognize.” Ungar argues that resilience is in fact dependent on the creation and maintenance of strong systems of social support.
Ungar and other scholars who align around this vision of resilience tend to further argue that social cohesion—that is, a shared sense of identity, emotional connection and purpose—is a key dimension of resilience in adversity. Evidence of this socially oriented framework of resilience can be found among communities of people who come together to practice mutual aid and solidarity in the wake of natural disasters, ethnic cleansing and
When I read arguments like these, I am reminded of the intergenerational wisdom of many oppressed communities—queer and trans people, and our historical forerunners from all around the world with complex and wide-ranging understandings of themselves in relation to sex and gender, most of all.
I am reminded that the practice of resilience for queer and trans people very rarely looks like practising yoga in an overpriced studio amid throngs of skinny white cis women, and perhaps even more rarely like wheeling and dealing amid the wolves of Wall Street. Perhaps for a handful of us, resilience has come to mean holding down a steady job (or two or three) and painstakingly carving out a facsimile of the white heterosexual nuclear family while grimly holding on to a spot in the rat race of a broken economy. Yet for most of us, resilience has always meant something different.
“Let us recall the resilience of the bathhouse, the ballroom, the midnight cruising grounds.”
How do queer and trans people survive the current apocalypse? The truth is, we will do it the way we always have. The truth is also that we will lose people along the way, as we sadly always have. Yet the knowledge of how to be with unbearable tragedy while continuing to celebrate the fact of our existence and possibility of hope is something that is deeply woven into the strands of our cultural memory.
If resilience is social networks, shared purpose and emotional connection, then let us recall the resilience of the bathhouse, the ballroom, the midnight cruising grounds, the places where a commitment to the life-giving power of pleasure gave birth to shared political purpose. Let us recall the resilience of protest and community organizing in response to police raids—of Stonewall, Sex Garage and Pussy Palace. The resilience of Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners, a group of U.K.-based queers who showed us the power of solidarity between queer struggles and the labour movement. The resilience response to the AIDS crisis that wove a quilt around the world. The resilience of lesbians who came together to provide care for dying gay men at a time when doctors were too afraid to provide them care for fear of contamination.
Wherever there is a history of homophobia and transphobia, we also find a history of our people celebrating community, mutual care and joy, of the ways in which we create beauty amidst the horrors.
What wisdom do our stories of resilience hold for queer and trans people in the current moment? I believe that the examples of the past offer us glimpses of the skills we can put into practice now as the tides of hatred rise around us.
“Our greatest power to resist oppression and death comes from our connections with one another.”
If we take queer ancestors as our possibility models, then the capacity to survive the terror and pain of this moment lies not in any individual’s mental fortitude, not in the wellness studio or on the meditation cushion, nor in the bubble bath (though there is nothing wrong with those things), perhaps not even in the therapist’s office. Our greatest power to resist oppression and death comes from our connections with one another, our ability to create community structures through which we can give and receive care, make art, share pleasure and raise our collective voices.
So when we are alone and feel the rush of fear or the creep of despair, I suspect that deepening into community is the answer. Asking for material support from community is, of course, an important strategy for individuals seeking resilience—offering support to others is also a powerful way of finding resilience in ourselves. Creating formal and informal spaces for rituals of connection is another way, from queer choirs and sports leagues to queer and trans spiritual circles to dance parties and erotic spaces.
As we seek and build community for the sake of resilience, it is also important to ask ourselves: What kind of community is most supportive of the spirit of being alive? For it is an open secret among queer and trans people that our communities can at times be just as cruel, punitive and exclusionary as the straight world that seeks to extinguish us.
The unconscious urge to re-create harmful patterns that seek to foster social cohesion by enacting social control must be acknowledged and addressed if we are to make communities that are truly deep wells of resilience for all. Developing strong methods of conflict resolution, transformative justice and creating safe avenues to prevent and respond to violence and abuse within our communities is, I suspect, the great task of our generation of queer and trans people as we come together to weather this moment—and the gift we stand to offer those who are coming next. For there will be many generations of queer and trans people who will come after us.
These generations will, no doubt, be just as afraid as we are now, as the Marsha P. Johnsons and Sylvia Riveras were in the ’70s, and as their forebears were before them. They will look to our stories to draw strength, and so we can draw purpose, hope and resolve from the knowledge that they are on their way. And I believe that in the end, it is not our suffering or our fear that they will find most memorable about the way we lived. It is our joy and our love.
Why you can trust Xtra
