A poem on being trans during Trump’s return

The day after the inauguration
I give myself my hormone shot.

Every Tuesday since
I have done so again

in spite

of blowhards’ orders for
two sexes and impermeable borders.

Hrt — dear dermal border crosser — pays no mind 
to the blustering of fools who know nothing

of what it is to sew oneself 
into one’s body with a needle

pierced through thigh muscle; stitches across 
the chest; new names spun by fumbling fingers

into the threads that stretch heartstring to heart-
string. What could they who sever heartstrings know

of the transtemporal tapestry that interweaves
our unnumbered stories, our numberless ways to be?

Even now, they try

to tear our truth out of all legal records,
to blot us out from history and medical texts —

but we suffuse humanity’s warp and weft:
cut us out, mere tatters will be left.

And it may be they’ll pry

our protections and passports, our vials and blue pills
from our still-warm, still-alive, still-trans and intersex hands —

but our tapestry is stronger than their will,
twined tighter than chromosomes, and

we’ll give them hell for every sundered string.
We’ll fight like hell until their bitter end.

For now, it is Tuesday again

and my hand, with its wedding ring
and thickened skin,

is steady as I plunge the needle in.

---

You are welcome to circulate this poem around, including on social media (please make sure to include image descriptions if you share screenshots) or at any type of gathering. Please credit Avery Arden (they/ze) of binarybreakingworship.com.

I also ask that you keep in mind that this poem is first and foremost a personal piece; I am not attempting to speak to what other trans and/or intersex persons are feeling right now. What is more, I hope it is clear that none of the various things mentioned — hormones, surgery, document changes — are at all necessary to be trans; I only center hrt here because of how it has been a grounding ritual for me these past weeks.

I welcome conversation, and would love to hear about your rituals, your remembrance, your resistance.

(By the way, this post’s title isn’t the poem title; it’s untitled / the first line kinda serves as the title.)

More about the poem:

Since Trump’s intentionally overwhelming first-day flood of executive orders, I’ve been trying to sort my tangled-up feelings:

• The rage and despair and dread inextricably mixed with love, and defiant dreams of a better world, and deepest pride in the vibrant, rebellious, eternal community of those whose very bodyminds expose Empire’s lie that humanity can be dichotomized.
• The whiplash of mundanity in times such as these — the way “life as usual” can lure us into passivity if we are not careful; but also the way our everyday rituals and tasks (like my weekly hormone shot) ground us, and can even be little acts of resistance to nourish our larger, communal resistance.
• The bitterness of all that could have been (and I’m not talking about a Democrat in the White House, upholding the same systems that enable a tyrant like Trump, just with more hand-wringing). The frustration that this is what it takes for more people to wake up to the evils that have festered in and fueled this nation from its conception. The relief that at least now there are more people ready to resist, and urgency to welcome and equip them.
• The preemptive grief for all we will lose. The determination to lose as few as possible — to pray for the dead and fight like hell for the living.

Before finally managing to get this poem written out, I was able to channel some of that tangle into helping More Light Presbyterians write our statement on Trump’s executive order against gender diversity. Along with concrete actions we can take to support trans and intersex persons right now (see the link for those), one of the parts I wrote was a closing message of love and promise to my trans and intersex kin:

Hateful people want nothing more than to see you feeling hopeless and abandoned—but we promise you, there will always be people in your corner, ready to protect you with our lives. We will not leave you to fight alone, no matter how dire things get. Cling to your community, nurture your spirit however you can, and remember:

Politicians were never going to save us. We keep us safe, trusting in the love and solidarity of the One who created each of us with purpose and delight (Genesis 1:31; Psalm 139:14).