The network is alive and well

~ Remelya Jackalope

The network is alive and well.

The Transcendence Care Network (TCN) is a thriving network of communities living through an incredibly hard time. There's a fullness of experience where people are showing up to do the work that needs to be done to solve unsolvable questions. It is in hard times when our choices often become a simpler, but more difficult to act on. So how are we thriving right now? We are making in-roads with people and communities where there have been disconnections. It's one of the most powerful things about our community. It's easy to look at something from afar and to create a story about it that fulfills a narrative, but that only digs trenches. In some places that's massively important and we all know what those situations are. That is not within the LGBTQIA+ community right now. Transcendence Care Network and our allies ask what more can we do for each other.

In the book, On Courage: How to Be a Dissident in an Age of Fear, by Julia Angwin and Ami Fields-Meyer that's what I talk about. Authoritarianism is asking how can we do less for each other. So we must ask each other how can we do more for each other.

I'd like to talk about what this looks like in practice and demystify it. I've been asking myself this question for a long time, and so the truth is that we can actually do quite a lot for each other. It still surprises me when I tell people that TCN offers holistic care services to trans people internationally and they act like we are doing the impossible. It is easy to say from the outside that we couldn't possibly be doing all that we are doing because so much of our society labels helping people as taboo. That's all that we are doing, is helping people figure out how to navigate their own lives in the face of making life-threatening decisions while holding the truth that we deserve to own homes, be paid a living wage, and have universal health care.

TCN also does a lot of work to not make our lives harder on ourselves by fighting within our LGBTQIA+ community or the Transcendence Care Network. It's shocking to me the ways in which people misuse the privilege of community to judge others in our network and don't apply transformative justice practices. Right now, we must work to find inroads with each other. Our network is moving in a trauma-informed direction that honors the stress of our current situations. In that, we are willing to find a path forward with people who are values-aligned, have a history of LGBTQIA+ activism, and are making the effort to do more for us and our community in this moment. We've seen great organizations stagnate or get caught up fighting other organizations or judging people for the decisions they've had to make while their lives are being threatened. What is below our baseline of care is a group that judges other orgs in the movement without honoring their sovereignty to allow those involved the dignity of speaking to their experiences and allowing who they are in the present to be representative of the accountability they are taking.

There are no perfect answers for what to do right now and everyone deserves to have their own boundaries, but when we publicly attack or privately harm other members of our community without taking transformative justice steps to create a path forward to work together despite our differences we are creating systems of social punitive damage that replicate prison systems. There is so much nuance here and I could write a whole book on this, but others already have. We Will Not Cancel Us, adrienne maree brown is a great place to start with this. Cancel Culture and whisper networks when used against trans people is a misuse of a system of protections that's meant to center BIPOC trans women.

We see this happen on an organizational level. What more can our allies do for trans people? Support repair and transformative justice process when they hear about a situation playing out publicly. What more can trans people do for trans people? Don't let rumors spread about the work we are doing. Go ask people what happened. Do the hard work of engaging with repair, and actually take steps towards accountability.

While I didn't expect to talk about this in a post about how our network is thriving what I will say is that we engage in repair conversations behind the scenes all the time. One of the reasons TCN is thriving is because we take in feedback, make changes, and we don't let our stories about organizations or people to dictate a decision that results in us disposing of people like so much of this culture does.

Through that we have blossoming and powerful community partnerships, we are building programs and systems that foster holistic care and wealth for trans people. We are looking for people who are interested in doing that with us. We want to find common ground with people and we are willing to find that in uncommon places, but we have been doing the work to remember who our allies are and what's our bigger purpose. There is so much power in harmony and love. There is so much power in redirecting someone's rage-filled anger to a place of understanding. Though that when people are hurting someone else we do what we can to stop that by helping the person who's under attack and then we help them to heal from that attack. After that we've gained a new friend, a new person in our network, and when we are doing that all over the Golden Trails of this world we are constantly finding new pathways where we can thrive.