To Trans: Meditations on Care and Re/Becoming

Turning toward hope and practices of collective care, I write beside the artworks on display at Autograph. What I offer, and what I believe the exhibiting artists also offer, is an invitation to activate a daily practice of care alongside a refusal to become a tourist in lives that are not your own.

As you encounter the artworks, your own lived experiences will overlap, in both the micro and the macro. I encourage you to invite conversation with yourself and those around you. Listen with an activated sense of receiving memories or insights as the most precious gift. Be mindful when speaking, especially where your instinct is to be the first voice heard. But if you normally find yourself the last to speak, I equally encourage you to feel recognised today.

These meditations encourage numerous marginalised and intersectional experiences to sit together. My words are but one voice; I place this carefully before you and welcome yours to sit in meditation beside it and others, asking with a collective intention, what might we surface together each day?

To begin, can you recall a moment from your childhood when a disinterested relative or elder in your life may have asked you “what do you want to be when you grow up?” Perhaps in truth it was said with heartfelt honesty but whether it was a throwaway question or not, did they take the time to really listen to the answer? Either way I suggest we pose that question to ourselves again, as frequently as we want, no matter our age, allowing for a different answer each time. But rather than using this question as means to make conversation, we must draw a renewed sense of care to our answers. This is an offer to listen to ourselves deeply and actively: to allow a myriad of responses to grow like seeds awaiting the nurturing care of your time.

Growth is rarely linear and certainly not always upwards, and there is opportunity to re/become who, or what we want to be, at any point in our journeys through life. Our Bodies Have Been Bridges demonstrates something similar in mapping three decades of artistry from Laura Aguilar, Tarrah Krajnak and Koyoltzintli in reclaiming a similar sense of re/becoming; a presence across time that can resist fixed ideas of who can be seen, and how. So, rather than allowing the question of growth to be relegated to our formative years; let us reinvent it today to ask, how do you perceive your being here, in this moment? Not the self, singular, but the self/s through which you manifest day to day — the multiplicity each of us already carries across worlds of work, family, play, politics, intimacy and life in general.

Our positionality and perspectives are in constant flux, I often try to capture this sense of oscillation through my use of a forward slash “/” in my writing, to invite an interpretation that is not binary but myriad in its possibilities. This can manifest through any number of ways such as the changes we want to bring about; the experiences perceived by us, through us, and upon us; or the certainty or uncertainty of the worlds we pass through.

The etymology of trans – from the Latin meaning "across," "beyond," or "on the other side of" – offers a useful way of thinking about how transness functions as a modifier. In terms like trans-art or trans-disciplinary, it signals movement across established boundaries, a form of extension that connects disparate fields or identities. Within the context of a transgender experience, this transness exceeds simple notions of transition from one fixed point to another; instead, it suggests flux, relationality, and an ongoing becoming.

Trans in this sense is not merely a crossing but a re/becoming. Moving beyond the limitation of subjective thresholds such as patriarchy, heteronormativity or xenophobic nationalism, to trans is to offer all communities increased freedom to exist.

Nationalistic, authoritarian and regressive political regimes often seek to enforce borders and their unilateral control. Yet borders are representative of more than just the geographical division between countries. Increasingly borders are defining the limits of our very being, imposing governance upon the ontological or societal. Here borders are defined arbitrarily by binary thinking of what a ruling doctrine considers right or wrong. A morality that can be corrupted by patriarchal and misogynistic language to impact the bodily autonomy of not only trans+ lives but also cis.² The impact then becoming exasperated for any intersectional community navigating such restriction. For example, when transmasculine folk seek healthcare around menstruation they can often encounter stigma, but when those from the global majority, the elderly or disabled seek advocacy and support, each can become a multiplier towards a bias that restricts access.

Where trans gestures beyond, queer unsettles. It disrupts the assumed stability of categories and meanings, exposing their contingency and performativity. Queerness disorients perception, opening-up space for ambiguity, multiplicity, and the refusal of normativity. But to trans is also to queer, therefore it is not in opposition but rather offers an extension of form. Queer shifts perception and challenges normativity in much the same way that to trans does, but a trans+ perception also offers a hopeful path towards re/becoming that does not dwell in the uncertainty. Both are essential parts of one another: trans enacts a reconfiguration of relational possibility, while queer ensures that no new configuration becomes static or closed.

Much like the artwork on display, emerging across time and the histories both personal and shared, to trans is to continually rediscover through encounters of care and hope. To trans is to build new worlds.