the open door

I sincerely wonder sometimes what cis people think when they see the phrase “trans community.” I’m serious, I do think about it. Language is like a mixing console: it is a series of inputs and outputs. It has to lead somewhere. When the headline on a media outlet’s Instagram reads, “Community grieves…”, what are those words plugged in to?

You see what I’m getting at. It wouldn’t surprise me if some winced a littled bit at that particular usage, the seeming ubiquity of it. What community? What claim do you possibly think you have on someone you don’t know? What justifies you to take it personally what happens to them? Are you simply worried that you’re next?

We are, collectively, often in this position: trans culture is so miraculously insulated from the currents of the outside world that the trans person who wishes to address herself to the universal finds herself backed up several steps before a natural starting point, explaining this and that. Easier to not bother with it at all. Just say what you mean, and those who understand will understand. But, also, I sympathize with the cis person who finds us opaque; to a significant degree, we have made ourselves so.

This is to say that I’ve been watching the conversation online about the senseless murder of nineteen-year-old Juniper Blessing, a trans student at the University of Washington in Seattle, of whom I don’t have much to say besides it feels like I recognize her. In the available photographs, she vaguely resembles another trans woman acquaintance of mine, about half a decade older than her. The same hair, almost the same face. I stopped to have an awkward fifteen-second conversation with her in a train station the other day. We didn’t know each other well enough to talk with true freedom, but neither could we ignore each other. When I make this connection, the death of the stranger snaps into focus. A pure coincidence, but perhaps an inevitable one.

This is to say that community means community: the people you know. Past, present, future, and merely hypothetical; distant, close, and merely sensed. Some people, you may never exchange more than a few words with, but you know them by the warmth they radiate into the rooms you’re both in. And in these crowded rooms, these recursive dating pools, friend groups, and clusters of collaborators, people lapse readily from background to foreground. How often have I been in some crowded room and there’s someone new there? Trans people notice when someone is new, and ask, who does she know? Who’s he friends with? Someone has left the door open. Maybe, also, the thought that someone knows better than you do where the doors are, and how to leave them open. I see the new people, and I mostly don’t think about them, but the fact that they’re there is important to the texture of my life. I would notice if they didn’t keep arriving, seemingly from nowhere, surprising me again and again.

But of course, in the way we use it, community also means a sort of shared pact. Death before detransition: it rings hollow, doesn’t it? In times like this, you see people making demands of the community that everyone knows it can’t be equal to. It is too aporetic, too diffuse of a thing. If we’re being honest, it is a constellation of thousands upon thousands of individual friendships, desire paths drawn through the broader world and, ultimately, tending to dissolve back into it. The community can provide—inefficiently, sporadically, and incompletely. The community can shun, neglect, tear down—usually temporarily and incompletely. And it can grieve. But it can’t protect: it is not a shield. But who else cares for us. Can’t we do more for each other. Yes.

Looked at one way, what we have—ourselves, each other—doesn’t seem like enough. But I do sort of believe in all that mythic resilience we’ve been hearing so much about. The trick is to not talk about it, but just look around and observe it. It’s really not that hard to believe that we are good at surviving. We’ve all made a bet on living, and thus we’re bound to each other, because we all know the stakes of any individual life. We know that this knowledge is insufficient, or at least it can’t save each one of us, and perhaps, it is not even enough to save all of us—but we do have a firm, intimate possession of it.