Kaitlyn Michele
03-06-2011, 09:34 AM
I read the following quote on a blog recently, and i'd like to share it with the group...
i know many of us go through ALOT of stuff, and it can be a never ending list of issues and problems...
but i find this to be an affirmation of what many of us are doing..which is to enjoy the gift of truth..
my dad was a big "no pain no gain" back in the 70's...it's certainly unfair to be born feeling wrong about your very self...
HOWEVER...if you are willing to look at this as a gift that FORCES you to consider your own truth..you may find your own reward..
all human's wear masks, we are the only one's i can think of that are FORCED to take them off.
anyway..these are just words, but i found comfort in them
________________
The quote follows:
I want to suggest that we believe in us because we, as a people, are marked above all by our integrity.
There is not much you can say that describes all trans people. We are a broad and heterogeneous bunch. But you can say this: contrary to what the cheap punchlines and propagandists, the frat boys and the Womyn's Landers, the sketch comedians and the murder defendants would have you believe, we are not united in a grand campaign of deceit. We may not be magical, or magically virtuous, but we are, as a people, astonishingly honest.
You look at those numbers we've let outline us-the grief and the blood and the hurt, writ vast and cruel-and that is a truth. But I believe the greater truth is us: we looked at that world-that heartless world that tears us up and turns us away from every hearth-fire-and we looked at the option of deceiving it into letting us in, the option of pretending to be something we weren't in order to survive, and we said, to a person: no. No, we will not lie, even in the face of starvation, of isolation, of loss, of torture, of death. No, even to escape the risk of a world that will never treat us right, we will not lie. We will not pretend. Not today. Not again. At some point, if you are here, and reading this, and calling yourself a trans person or something like, no matter how many compromises and illusions you had to throw up in front of you to make it to today alive, you eventually said "no more." You refused to lie, even if only to yourself.
I believe in trans people because, above all, we know something about the great and terrible worth of the truth. Not because we have paid that price-it has hit some of us harder, and some of us have come through nearly unscathed. Not because whatever we have suffered has made us more special than any other person. Because each of us is a person who looked out at a very dangerous, risky landscape and chose, eventually, to travel through it because the truth mattered most. We know something about the truth. We know what it is worth. And we, as a people, surrounded by those who do not believe us and want us to pretend for them that they are right, chose that truth knowing it might cost us everything.
i know many of us go through ALOT of stuff, and it can be a never ending list of issues and problems...
but i find this to be an affirmation of what many of us are doing..which is to enjoy the gift of truth..
my dad was a big "no pain no gain" back in the 70's...it's certainly unfair to be born feeling wrong about your very self...
HOWEVER...if you are willing to look at this as a gift that FORCES you to consider your own truth..you may find your own reward..
all human's wear masks, we are the only one's i can think of that are FORCED to take them off.
anyway..these are just words, but i found comfort in them
________________
The quote follows:
I want to suggest that we believe in us because we, as a people, are marked above all by our integrity.
There is not much you can say that describes all trans people. We are a broad and heterogeneous bunch. But you can say this: contrary to what the cheap punchlines and propagandists, the frat boys and the Womyn's Landers, the sketch comedians and the murder defendants would have you believe, we are not united in a grand campaign of deceit. We may not be magical, or magically virtuous, but we are, as a people, astonishingly honest.
You look at those numbers we've let outline us-the grief and the blood and the hurt, writ vast and cruel-and that is a truth. But I believe the greater truth is us: we looked at that world-that heartless world that tears us up and turns us away from every hearth-fire-and we looked at the option of deceiving it into letting us in, the option of pretending to be something we weren't in order to survive, and we said, to a person: no. No, we will not lie, even in the face of starvation, of isolation, of loss, of torture, of death. No, even to escape the risk of a world that will never treat us right, we will not lie. We will not pretend. Not today. Not again. At some point, if you are here, and reading this, and calling yourself a trans person or something like, no matter how many compromises and illusions you had to throw up in front of you to make it to today alive, you eventually said "no more." You refused to lie, even if only to yourself.
I believe in trans people because, above all, we know something about the great and terrible worth of the truth. Not because we have paid that price-it has hit some of us harder, and some of us have come through nearly unscathed. Not because whatever we have suffered has made us more special than any other person. Because each of us is a person who looked out at a very dangerous, risky landscape and chose, eventually, to travel through it because the truth mattered most. We know something about the truth. We know what it is worth. And we, as a people, surrounded by those who do not believe us and want us to pretend for them that they are right, chose that truth knowing it might cost us everything.