the light against its being

On Sunday morning, a knock on the bedroom door woke me up.

“Are you interested in an event? A musical event?”

I consider myself a morning person, but Khalil starts each day at a thousand. Yesterday, it involved a 38-minute “musical event” with particularly involved choreography. 

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Lately, I’ve had renewed awareness of how hard this life is. I have very few friends who are not going through some profoundly painful experience: death and illness and money struggles and relationship deterioration. And, now more than ever, climate change related emergencies.

What do we do with all that pain? We can feel grateful for the times without crisis. We can work to observe how joy and pain can, sometimes, exist simultaneously. 

A few weeks ago, all across Canada, people protested the rights of trans children. We heard the event would be happening and planned to go and stand on the side of the counter-protesters. We put on our shirts “protect trans kids” and made posters and parked a few blocks away. Approaching the protest, I felt the bile rise up in my throat. 

photo credit M Forestell

There were so many people there, waving Canadian flags, screaming. A man drove by, swerving toward the counter-protestors, while recording himself flipping us off. 

A mother held up a sign: “My son is a boy and always will be.”

Statistically, that may be true, I thought. But if he isn’t, you are going to destroy him. 

Last week, Dax Sheperd interviewed Jonathan Van Ness and grilled them about puberty blockers and trans kids playing sports. Jonathan spoke with heart and intellect but, finally, they wept. “I am so tired,” they said. 

Something I find completely puzzling is this: puberty blockers, the very thing that so many people rail against, are nothing more than a pause button. They give a pre-teen or teen and their family a bit of time to decide what is true about that teen’s gender and what medical care is best for them. 

It’s not a lifetime commitment. It’s an opportunity for deliberation. Why are people so scared of giving a trans kid time to think? 

But also, honestly, for all of the people protesting a teenager's access to medical care, why do they care? For a group of people so focused on freedom, I would think they want to stay out of a person’s relationship with their doctor. 

But here I am, in the weeds. 

And what I really wanted to say is this. There were more people on our side at the protest. There was joy and there was singing and there were tears. I cried because of the hate and I cried because of the love. 

David and I stayed for two hours, but some others stayed for six. We did not back down. Every time a car passed, waving a flag and shouting, I turned my wheelchair toward them and found their eyes. I am not afraid of you. Every person on our side of the street heard that there were people coming who would make trans kids feel alone and afraid, and they took time and energy to be a force against that. It’s beautiful. 

Sometimes, when I think about what we owe trans kids, I think about a poem by Hafiz, a Sufi poet in the 1300s. He wrote:

How

did the rose

ever open its heart

and give to this world all of its beauty?

It felt the encouragement of light against its being,

otherwise we all remain too

frightened. 

But, actually, isn’t that what we should all be striving for? To help one another feel the light against our beings? 

This life is hard. Some of it we do to ourselves and to each other (and to our earth) and some we don’t. But what a miracle — an event — it is to witness when another person gives the world their beauty.