BURN SCOTUS
As a non-binary person, the way I look and was born will always come first. And I’m okay with that. My privilege is being adjacent to the cisgender male identity. I was assigned male-at-birth, so the effects of the Supreme Court’s ruling to overturn Roe v. Wade & Planned Parenthood v. Casey, I can't share in.
Going into this trip, I spiraled into a million emotions from nervousness about how I would sleep to dreading overwhelming days of constant people and noise. But now, as I near the end, there looms the reality that the identity I share with millions across the country and billions across the world threatens so many.
San Francisco Pride brimmed and buzzed with the frivolity that joy in the wake of fascism and abuses of power enlightened me. It opened my mind to the fact that my existence would not be silent. For a moment, as the sun burned the bridge of my nose and spread warmth and the haze of summer, I basked in the unquiet of my surroundings.
Pride was beautiful but also political and humanistic, which feels ironic, but it’s so very innate to what Pride is—the queer experience is a testament to identity, politics, choice.
Looking back, I’ve been privileged to surround myself with friends who have supported me and family who have grown to support me for who I am. Of course, there are times where it feels a little more difficult, but, overall, I feel supported. Outside of myself.
The reckoning of being a queer person is, wholeheartedly, I expect to be the only person like me when I enter a room. Similarly, I expect the same for being a Black queer person.
You see, as queer people, we live in a constant state of fear, perhaps even terror, that each and every day, every step, every breath we take is defiance to the relentless hammer of patriarchy.
The devastation that the rights and privileges of so many lay in the palms of basically a geriatric facility—let’s say, it was a humbling experience to still exist in the brightness of what felt like lemonade but also the sticky mess of politics. But that’s what being Black and queer and non-binary means. But that’s also what the ramifications of the SCOTUS ruling mean—devastation to so many lives. Disruption to freedom. Disturbance for choice.
The ramifications of the SCOTUS ruling about Roe & Casey will devastate so many lives—so many queer lives. And I want to emphasize that because we hold this idea and these beliefs of cissexism and hetero-centrism. We surround ourselves with concepts of justice and social liberation but these concepts align singularly with whiteness, with gender binaries, with minimal experiences that fetter limited danger.
It also has horrible implications for queer people.
The intrinsic truth of the queer identity, the queer of color identity, is it will always be politicized. I will always be the scope and the center of a conversation about where I belong, where I don’t belong, when I am allowed to be heard, and when I am supposed to remain silent. There will always be someone/s intruding into who I am as a person, as an existence, as life on this spiraling rock who has an opinion on who I might love and who I might not.
The current intrusion are the likes of Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and their decades-long journey to overturn, undermine, and disintegrate the foundations of civil equity. Same-sex marriage is at risk. Reproductive rights are at risk yet we refuse to listen to the people—the Black and Brown and the Queer people—who have been calling for the codification of Roe & Obergefell.
There’s a problem—there will always be a problem with power and people. We will never sit at the table because the table is not built big enough, because our president, our justices, our representatives refuse to build a bigger one. The voices are crying into the void because we fail to recognize that equity, equality, justice, liberty are intertwined with Amero-centricism, cis and heteronormativity and the erasure of Black and Brown voices.
All of which is so ingrained into our lives that there sits an insurmountable list of names of cisgender, or heterosexual, or white—or a combination of two, or all three—who have weaponized privilege and bias and implications towards the mistreatment of marginalized people. And then have those same people utilize their positions against us.
I could go on about the implicities and the underlying reactions and our innate feelings, but that’s so cumbersome and redundant to what I want to share.
One of the beautiful things about this trip for me is that it showed me that my resilience is anger and that my anger is more than just emotion, but also fuel in solidarity with my stubbornness. I learned a lot about myself that I woul;dn’t have if I hadn’t gone on this trip. The biggest lesson was authentic to who I am and what I need to do to ensure space for others like me and beyond me.
This trip and what I want to bring back from it is how my privilege exerts a means for oppression, bigotry, and exclusion. How I occupy a space and what does that mean. What my reactions, thoughts, feelings stem from. Where do I place judgment. When do I consider the other person and their identity in the backdrop of my biases.
And these are questions I wished so many people would ask—questions I wished our supreme court would ask.
My identity, my love, my being a part of this community is a debate. It is a conversation and it will always be at the forefront of the minds of Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh. It is men and people like them who will remain bothered with who I am and the very ground I step on. When I love who I wish to love, they will be infuriated that I exist. When I am who I am meant to be they will be enraged.
San Francisco showed me a lot and taught me a lot and changed me a lot. It allowed me to see that so many things in the name of a better world are not going to come from an examination of systems but a termination of systems—transformation does not happen in a vacuum; it happens in uprooting; it must catch flame.
