I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Jasper Moriarty. In xyr first post with us, xe discusses xyr struggle with balancing self-care with activist work. Thanks for sharing with us, Jasper!
Trigger Warnings: mention of death and rape threats
Alternatively titled: A Struggle For Balance
My activism is a crucial part of my life, despite my strange relationship with it. It’s not quite splitting (something that happens in Borderline Personality Disorder, where a person is unable to integrate the good and bad qualities of something/someone and therefore keeps them distinctly separate), but I would call it somewhat comparable.
Over the past few years, I’ve worked hard to try to participate in activism that was relevant to my interests and identities, and also to recruit others into that activism. Trans folk, and trans women in particular, have long had an inclination and good reason to hide from society, to “go stealth” as we call it in the community. Societal pressures pushed us into a permanent closet that more closely resembled a mausoleum than the relative comfort of the closet. Our past was dead and our present remained cold and isolated, with few if any places we could reveal our history in a safe and confidential space.
Most of us can recognize homophobia in everyday life in certain situations: derogatory remarks, violence in newspapers, magazines, and headlines, perhaps something that has been done to us personally, like bullying, loss of a job, friends, family, or exile from communities and homes. In a lot of these cases, it is pretty clear what is happening and why. But when some of this stuff happens as a child, or can have another context put to it that makes the lines a little blurry, it’s more difficult to separate fact from fiction, and to identify behaviors and incidents for what they really are.
