We Need Trans Self Love Now
On February 27th, I will be offering my workshop, “LOVE YOUR TRANS SELF,” over zoom. This workshop came to me, fully formed, as I was floating in a sensory deprivation tank. I saw the logo, I saw the hot pink color, the bold black lettering, the meat of the workshop all at once. None of what I realized that I should share was a new insight or revelation — these are lessons and exercises that I have been moving through for years now. However, the urgency to share it now is no mistake.
Being Trans Right Now is Tough
To be trans right now is to be bombarded again and again by how little you are valued in this culture. When an entire political party has decided to play football with your life, your livelihood, your very existence, the force of hatred comes to bear on your life in ways that can feel inescapable.
It’s never been easy to be trans under the forces of colonialism and white supremacy, and still we have survived. We survive by taking care of ourselves and one another, by leaning into the sacred wisdom of our trans bodies, by learning to accept our whole selves as we are, by cultivated a love relationship with our bodies. This is challenging to do, especially when our attention and our communities are so scattered.
Finding Self Love
I’ve spent most of my life in self-hatred. My first memory of hating my body is one of my first memories, full stop. I was taught to betray myself in myriad ways through trauma and abuse, and for most of my life, I didn’t think that there was any other way to live. I’ve shifted dramatically over the past 8 years or so…first, accepting myself enough to medically transition. I didn’t feel love toward myself, but I practiced love for myself, bit by bit.
For me, that meant building relationships so I could leave an intensely abusive partner. It meant learning how to change my self-talk from cruel to neutral, and years later, to compassionate. It meant years and years of trauma therapy (which is ongoing, shout out to my therapist!). It meant allowing myself to be loved.
But the bulk of the lessons that I have to teach now have come through my experiences of chronic illness. Going through chronic illness, for me, meant reckoning with all of the ways that I had pushed myself beyond my capacity. It meant turning toward my body and learning how to hear it. It meant allying myself with my body in order to care for myself. It meant learning how to build trust after decades of betraying myself.
So when I laid there, floating in the salt water, in the darkness and the silence, and I saw bold lettering on a bright pink background that read, “LOVE YOUR TRANS SELF,” it lit me up from head to toe. And as I started to create the workshop itself, I realized that I had even more than I could fit in a few short hours. But most of all I realized that the practices that have shifted my relationship to myself have been those things which I could be consistent about, no matter how “small” they happened to be.
Eight years ago, when a therapist looked me in the eyes and told me that she believed I was a good person, I broke down sobbing because even hearing that felt unbearable to me. In a few days, I am teaching a workshop about self love. No part of this journey was fast — quick fixes aren’t real, and anyone who sells you on one is probably just trying to take your money. But practices, habits, devotional routines…each of these adds up to be much greater than the sum of its parts.
The Gifts of Self Love
Self love has enabled me to find relationships that sustain me. It has enabled me to extricate myself from harmful structures and find ways that are aligned with my values and fulfill my needs. It has allowed me to course correct without getting completely overwhelmed with self-doubt. It has helped me to hold the struggles, pain, trauma, and resilience of others. It has created space in me to witness myself and my community. I practice self love imperfectly, with a great deal of stopping and starting, wobbling, faltering, and frustration. But I continue to practice it, and imperfectly or not, my life continues to change as a result.
So when I say “We need trans self-love now,” this is why. Because this is how our community thrives. Love is an incredibly powerful force. When we cultivate love toward ourselves, we change the course of our lives. This practice also helps us learn how to cultivate our relationships with our community, with our friends, and with the earth. It creates a foundation upon which we can create the structures needed to sustain us, and those needed to break away from toxic individualism—a paradigm we can’t afford to continue on with.
My self love workshop offers specific practices and actions that you can begin working with today. I don’t expect everyone to get identical benefits from each practice, but you can take what resonates, what works, what feels doable, and leave the rest (or come back to it at a future point). And if you’re reading this at some future point after the workshop, remember that you can find your own path to self love through small actions that you continuously practice. Small ways of turning toward yourself, over time, change everything.