Weeknotes #23: Transgender Wintering
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Weeknotes #23: Transgender Wintering
You are reading ‘Like person, like coach’, a newsletter about being the coach you are whilst trying to contribute to a better world:
These two images are taken from two different movies, one Chilean and one French, about two trans women navigating different life situations but the same unwelcoming world. I love these movies because their message is complex and conveyed through beautiful photography. I chose these two photos for this week’s post because right now, in the UK and many other places in the world, trans people's lives are being questioned and endangered.
I am a transgender coach and just like the characters in these photos, I feel I am walking against the wind. We are losing our young in the clamour and we are losing each other. Last week I was reading through quotes from Katherine May’s ‘Wintering’ and was struck by many of her lines:
‘The times when we fall out of sync with everyday life remain taboo. We’re not raised to recognise wintering or to acknowledge its inevitability. Instead, we tend to see it as a humiliation, something that should be hidden from the view lest we shock the world too greatly. We put on a brave public face and grieve privately; we pretend not to see other people’s pain. We treat each wintering as an embrassing anomaly that should be hidden and ignored. This means we’ve made a secret of an entirely ordinary process and have thereby given those who endure it a pariah status, forcing them to drop out of everyday life in order to conceal their failure.
Yet we do this at a great cost. Wintering brings about some of the most profound and insightful moments of our human experience, and wisdom resides in those have wintered.’
- Wintering: The Power of Rest and Retreat in Difficult Times
and along very similar lines, Báyò once more:
‘Courage is not the knight rushing headlong into the flames; courage is not a choice we make. Courage is a disability, the animist strike of a wild god that breaks the thigh and makes you limp. Courage is a lisp. A crack. An autistic child sensing the world at its edges where it is still being made. Courage is meeting 'the heart' - where 'the heart' is the pulsating vitality of things, of ecological things, that bends you into new shapes. One does not "have" courage; one is summoned by it. Anointed by it. Touched by it.’
You can support the transgender community by:
* Signing up to Trans Awareness Training with Gendered Intelligence;
* Donating to the Colours Youth Network - uplifting, empowering and supporting young black and people of colour in the UK;
* Writing to your MP (template ready to go, just hit send) to ban traumatising conversion “therapy” on trans people in the UK.
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