Hibernation

Putting Stained Glass Woman to Bed For A Time

I’m standing in solidarity at a union protest.

It’s years before I figure out that I’m trans. My dad died a couple of months ago, a lingering death from pancreatic cancer, and less than a month after B—’s dad dropped dead—no sign, no warning, just fell down, dead—on a camping trip. I’m raw and hurting and alone and my union is in the middle of a bitter contract dispute.

I’ve always been a union girl, even before I knew I was a girl.

Our grievance chair is leading this one, a stand-up protest at the university senate, where our President has to make an appearance. And appear he does, unsurprisingly, to give his State of the University address. The grievance chair, to my right, starts shouting at him, a hard, clarion. Others, around me, join in.

I suddenly feel like I’m about to die, hammered on all sides by my colleagues’ voices.

I can’t make a sound, and the shouts of rage around me grow and grow and grow.

I flee, barely keeping myself from running, all the way back to my office. I lock the door, collapse into my chair, and I cry and cry, drowning in the cPTSD I won’t be properly diagnosed with for another couple of years.

Shards I Can’t Fix

I’ve talked a lot about my trauma around here. The hurts I lug around with me, whether I want to or not, and that drag at me as I do my best to live a life of love and light. I’ve talked about how I picked it up in my childhood, how I’ve been through years of trauma therapy to help heal those hurts.

But not every trauma trigger is safe to heal.

The truth of the matter is that I continue to have two trauma triggers that I haven’t been able to resolve, and they’ve become a problem lately:

1. People shouting in rage. Doesn’t even have to be at me. Just the shouting. Doesn’t even have to be in person, or audible—text does it too. The rage behind the words is what gets me.

2. People taking what I or someone else has said, twisting it to mean something very different from what was originally said, and using it to attack the person who said it.

   1. I know this one probably seems oddly specific. The shortest version of the story is that, when I was a kid, people would twist the things I said to get me in trouble with authorities—school administrators, parents, what have you. They did it a lot. Enough that, now, when someone distorts what I say, I expect harsh and overwhelming retaliation.

   2. Again, while it’s worst if I’m the one being targeted with this, just seeing it, hearing it, being in its presence, can set me off too.

I haven’t shared these details before because, frankly, in doing so, I am laying out tools that people could use to hurt me. As a trans woman, in the world we live in? Not generally a good move.

But the next part won’t make any sense to anyone if I don’t.

Panic

If you’ve been anywhere near any sort of trans community recently, you know just as well as I that everyone is… on edge doesn’t begin to cover it. Panicked, and very understandably so. Enraged. Hurt.

Screaming.

Everyone, everywhere, in our community right now is howling at the top of their lungs.

It’s not like it’s not justified. It’s not like the emergency isn’t real. Every digital decibel is objectively necessary. We have to fight, and win, because the consequences of losing are beyond unthinkable. The time for celebrating the simple joys of transition has passed, and everyone is moving to a war footing.

But war footings also call for us to look for infiltrators. Traitors. Those who’d work against us from inside the movement.

Because of this, there’s been a lot of lateral violence in the trans community lately, as people have lashed out at others for being some degree of philosophically impure. Trans folks have been parsing each others’ statements in great depth, drawing meaning out of them that was never there to begin with, magnifying errors of judgment or fact, and stripping away any chance at repair or forgiveness. And they’ve been very publicly throwing each other away, discarding our siblings as somehow fatally-flawed because of that failure.

Now, of all times, when we need to hold together the most.

In the queer community, of all places, when the very heart of queerness is failure.

I’ve caught a share of that lateral violence in the last few weeks. I’ve witnessed far, far more.

Meanwhile, the other side is screaming just as loudly, with just as much rage. Ignorant—the hateful-and-rude-and-violent meaning of the word, rather than uneducated—and spiteful and gleeful in their readiness to exterminate us all.

Stained Glass Woman articles are what they are because I try really hard to listen to my community. The things I write come from hearing and seeing what people are struggling with, what they’re wondering, what they’re celebrating and ought to be amplified. I listen, I hit the books, I research, and then I write.

And right now? I find myself crouched and sobbing in the middle of a battlefield, hammered on every side by walls of digital and physical rage that grab on to a terrified little girl inside of me and won’t let go.

The real

Recently, at work, my colleagues and I found dozens of flyers posted all around our classrooms, on student bulletin boards—students’ flyers had been moved out of the way to make space for them—everywhere.

Including directly across the hallway from the office door of a trans colleague of mine.

It’s petty, tin-pot dictator bullshit. Bootlicking, and for dollar-store Musollini, which is even more embarrassing for the guy who printed and posted them all. And yeah, we know who it is.

But it’s where I work. A direct and deliberate attempt to intimidate queer and Black students at the university. And it’s hate and rage I have to deal with directly, on a daily basis. Sure, it’s a hostile work environment. Obviously, it’s illegal. But the guy who did it is a cis, straight, white Christian guy. The people who’d need to choose to enforce those rules are all cis, straight, white, mostly-Christian guys.

You know how that story goes. I didn’t even bother complaining about it. What’s the point? They’d roll their eyes, call me a tranny behind closed doors, and nothing would change.

But it means there’s no escape for me.

No rest. No chance to heal. The world is screaming at me no matter where I go.

And it’s bad enough that my therapist offered to write me an accommodation-request letter for my cPTSD for work, before I’d even seen these flyers.

She doesn’t make offers like that if things aren’t real bad.

What’s next

I won’t mince words: Stained Glass Woman is going on an extended hiatus, and I’m going to be a lot less active, especially as an activist, on most social media.

How long? September 15, at the earliest.

A friend and I are under contract to write a scholarly book. It’s been going well, but we have more work to do, and our contractual delivery date is September 15th. For now, the creative energy I have needs to go toward that, and I’ve got a lot less creative energy than I normally do as I fight my cPTSD.

Put another way: you can’t pour from an empty cup, and my cup does not exactly runneth over right now.

With a little luck, the political insanity we’re living through will have run aground by then, beached on the shoals of a nation of 330,000,000 bipedal cats who have never, ever happily done what they’re told, no matter what it is, and the legal system they’ve created to enforce their refusal to comply. It’s what happened the last time we dealt with the orange jackass. It’s what I think is honestly most likely to happen this time, even in the face of the avalanche of wildly illegal executive orders he’s been issuing.

I hope, by then, I’ll be able to rouse from this long hibernation refreshed and hungry and with new science to celebrate.

But until then: please, care for your trans siblings, the people around you who are in the exact same crisis as you are. You might not like them. You might not agree with them.

But please, dear god, link arms with them. Hold each other together. Fight as comrades. Forgive each other’s failings as best you can.

We get through this as one, or not at all.