Elegy for the Ones Who Never Got to Be: Trans Day of Remembrance 2022

Delivered as a speech for Canadian Heritage on 16 November 2022.

We usually hold these events for ourselves. Trans Day of Remembrance is a somber occasion we mark with candlelight, elegies, and promises to the future. Every year, hundreds of us breathe our last in Brazil and Turkey and the United States and, yes, here in Canada, and every year those of us who feel safe all being in one place at a known time gather and make our sad pledge: remember the dead and fight like hell for the living. They died unloved and endure one more cruel indignity by way of obituaries and funeral services that don’t acknowledge who they really were, and we place one wholly inadequate bandage on that wound by insisting: they never saw your light, but we did. And we will not forget.

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Elegy for the Ones Who Never Got to Be: Trans Day of Remembrance 2022
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Of Largest Lineage

I come from huge families. My mother was one of seven, and my father’s mother was one of nine. Between them, I have fourteen first cousins, at least five second cousins, eleven first cousins once removed that I know about, and more miscellaneous spouses and siblings than I care to track.

Mom never forgave her siblings for moving away from each other. Most of the brood ended up within driving distance of one another in the Great Northeastern Conurbation, albeit in three different states, but one stayed in Puerto Rico, one followed work to North Carolina, and Mom followed the needs of her husband’s family and moved to Miami. Most of the seven are involved in the US military in some way, and some of my cousins continued that legacy, and that meant being passed around bases and active duty for years at a time, far from their kin.

Dad’s family all ended up in Miami, sooner or later. My grandmother used to visit relatives in Cuba, but she is long gone, and it is likely they are as well. Most of Dad’s side of the family made Miami their first home outside of Cuba, but Dad’s path passed through New Jersey first. I grew up there, getting acquainted with Mom’s nearby relatives first and not really recognizing Dad’s side of the family until they became our frequent reality after the move. Even then, Dad was an only child, so all of the relatives were a generation apart from me, whereas my maternal cousins were close to my age, so Dad’s family and I are not well acquainted.

After picking through the family tree to survey my safety within it, I find this a tragedy.

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Of Largest Lineage

We Are Not Ironic Comeuppance

There are two comments that are rarely far off when self-proclaimed allies encounter anti-queer politicians.

“I bet he’s secretly queer.”

“I hope he ends up with a queer kid.”

Naïve, ironic, and insensitive in the trademark way of ignorant would-be allies, these comments rankle deeply. Much has been written about how the first of the two effectively assigns all responsibility for society-wide anti-queerness on queer people and absolves from same the straight people who invented and perpetrate it, so today’s topic is the other one.

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We Are Not Ironic Comeuppance

Trans Team Rocket Viewing Guide

Pokémon fanfiction has a fairly high barrier for entry, even for readers. As of the most recent update to Bulbapedia, there are 941 episodes of the Pokémon anime that have been broadcast in English, and several more available in the original Japanese, with 19 movies set between them. This adds up to more than 347 hours of viewing—more than 14 continuous days—accumulated over the twenty years that the Pokémon cartoon has aired on American television. This is an undertaking for obsessives of a caliber far, far greater than mine, and is certainly not necessary for understanding or appreciating my Trans Team Rocket fanfiction universe. So, I have prepared a curated viewing list to enable would-be admirers of my fiction to apprise themselves of necessary backstory before diving into the Trans Team Rocket world. Continue reading “Trans Team Rocket Viewing Guide”

Trans Team Rocket Viewing Guide

Cracking the Closet Door: Covert Transition

The time between one’s first questions about their gender and the resolution thereof can be anxious and scary. Transition is a big deal, and contrary to the bigoted idea that it’s something we do on a lark or for fun, most of us agonize over that decision for a long time, for many reasons. Many of us fear how our social environs would react if they knew we harbored such questions, and especially how they’d react to us deciding to transition. Another lot of us figure out what we’d like to do long before we’re comfortable doing it, and must exist in that dysphoric hinterland until our circumstances free us.

For this in-between group I inhabited for years before I recognized where I was heading, there are options. There are many ways to explore one’s gender or assuage dysphoria until one feels safe acting on it in larger, more visible ways, discreetly and at one’s own pace. What follows is specifically from a transfeminine perspective, but will contain occasional nods to transmasculine variants.

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Cracking the Closet Door: Covert Transition

Jessie and James Deserve Better

The pair of Team Rocket agents Jessie and James (Musashi and Kojiro in the original Japanese) are fixtures of the Pokémon animated series. The series subjects them to endless misfortune, and they never achieve their stated goals. They spend much of each episode in various states of explosion, and the warmest welcome they manage among the protagonists is occasional deep mistrust rather than overt hostility. They have earned the love of fans for their insistent theatrics, incompetence as thieves, and impressive fashion sense, but the show itself is much less consistent.

They deserve better.

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Jessie and James Deserve Better

Girl Pattern, Boy Pattern

Parents who want to do right by their children have a lot on their plate, and I do not envy their task.  It is far too easy for even the best of us to end up duplicating the errors that were inflicted on us, or picking up new ones from parenting trends with little basis in reality.

One reality that many well-meaning parents don’t know how to acknowledge is how to make sure that their children don’t fear disclosing their membership in gender and sexual minorities.  This society is hideously transantagonistic, and children notice this well before they have a word for it, and that can make them scared even when they shouldn’t be.

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Girl Pattern, Boy Pattern