This Is How We Come Together
Transforming their divisiveness into our cohesion
Every move they make is meant to divide us.
They are relentlessly laying the blame at the feet of trans women, declaring that trans women are ruining safe spaces for “real” women. They want us to police each other, prove at every public restroom that we are the kind of women who fit into their female ideal. If we shave our heads, if we have low voices, if we are very tall, if our breasts aren’t clearly displayed, if we wear pants or baggy clothes, if we don’t put on lipstick and mascara, will someone beat down our bathroom stalls and abuse us, “check us,” man-handle us, and photograph us to determine if we are the kind of women they like? Over and over, this has been happening to our sisters and siblings, trans and cis, gay and straight, all over the country. We are being monitored by the re-assertion of a fantasy of gender purity within a white supremacist, heteronormative, patriarchal, religious ideal. But gender nonconformity is the goal for all of us, no matter how much our self-expression may conform, because freedom is existence outside of someone else’s dogma. We will not be brainwashed into the belief that the people who radically reject false, constricting gender norms are the danger, when it is actually the men and women within patriarchy performing an “ideal” of strongman masculinity and demure or hyper-sexualized femininity who are the threat.
No. We will not comply.
They are sending masked, armed men into our communities, homes, workplaces, and grocery stores to profile and kidnap brown people of all ages, to beat them, harass them, and treat them not even as criminals—because we have laws for how to treat people accused of crimes—but as people who are inherently “other.” They claim to be keeping criminals off our streets. But we know this is a lie. They are asserting a white supremacist fantasy of “safety” that employs blame and projection, an attempt to control the masses through violence and fear. We are told to separate from those people to protect ourselves and our families, as if those people are not already our families. As if we do not know them, live with them, work with them, love them; as if we do not know the number of immigrants in our bloodlines.
No. We will not comply.
They pit the citizens of America, Iran, Israel, and Palestine against each other as if they think that we will fall for the idea that the wars created by these insecure, power-hungry, masculine-performing warmongers are wars of people against people, not wars of power, money, control, and narcissistic self-protection.
No. We will not fall for it.
This is how we come together.
We know that “When love is absent, power fills the void.”
So we will love each other fiercely and refuse to be pulled into their vacuum of “otherness.” We will reject the fear of their tyranny, which tries to destroy the very foundations of respect, compassion, and care.
We know that we share more with people in every country around the world than we do with our militaristic autocrats. We know that citizenship under a ruling order does not determine humanity or values. We know that America is a nation of immigrants, a nation of refugees, a nation of stolen land, and forced immigration. And we know that gender is not binary, that sex is not binary, that nature has been blending these opposites in countless ways since the beginning, and that it is always a rigid view of this and that, us and them, that is the true threat.
We will fight for our neighbors, not against them. We will protest all the wars and all the violence, and we will keep a keen, sharp eye on the people in power who seek to lay us one upon another until we are broken and torn apart.
No.
This is how we come together.
Monthly Sunday Gathering Next Week:
Sunday, July 6th, 10-11am PDT / 1-2pm EDT — Register here.
Monthly Men’s Groups:
Sunday, July 20th, 10-11:30am PDT / 1-2:30pm EDT — Register here.
I’m Satya Doyle Byock, psychotherapist, author of Quarterlife: The Search for Self in Early Adulthood, director of The Salome Institute of Jungian Studies, and co-host of a podcast on Jung’s Red Book. My work has been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, Oprah Daily, NPR, The BBC, Literary Hub, The Tamron Hall Show, and on podcasts such as Apple News in Conversation and The Joseph Campbell Foundation Podcast.
Hannah Arendt, profiled in a PBS American Masters Program available now, argued for action always. “Fearlessness is what love seeks… Such fearlessness exists only in the complete calm that can no longer be shaken by events expected of the future… Hence the only valid tense is the present, the Now.”
Beautiful, Satya. And the image at the end is everything.