Introduction
Abstract
From ancient Hawaiians, to Native Americans, to enslaved Africans, to immigrant Asians and Latinos, the pre-colonial, land-based ethnic societies who recognized more than two genders living among them held them sacred given their various spiritual and communal roles - protective, mediative, artistic, healing, and intercessory.
Back in those days, each ethnic group related to them respectfully and reverently called them different names. They were mahu in Hawaii or waria in Indonesia. The Hindu called them khawajasira. The Langi of Uganda called them mudoku dako. In Angola they were known as the quimbanda.
Colonization by "white" European Christians infused into the Americas an inquisitional mentality and genocidal desire. Colonizers tried to eliminate pre-colonial ethnic communities that culturally embraced people expressing divinely endowed third gender identities.
Trans-spiritual leaders who belong to ethnically diverse BIPOC communities stand proudly today on the shoulders of gender variant ethnic ancestors. These descendants are dislocated from the land, torn asunder from their original spiritual status and context, and today are called transgender in secular American society or two-spirit in Native American society.
Opposing forces still refuse the BIPOC trans-spirituals' right to worship their chosen concept of divinity - regardless of what religious practices they pursue. Some gains have been been made to include them in a few masjids, churches, temples, ashrams, and synagogues. But changes are slow, constraining, or fickle. Hence, the BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are re-establishing all kinds of sacred communities through their own efforts while reclaiming strength from their ancient heritages.
Six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are featured in this project. It registers their fight for sacred space and recognizes their need to be landed again. These leaders walk with their congregants in the light of the divine while holding their heads high, no longer allowing themselves to be religiously excluded nor historically erased.
Their movement aligns them with higher values and molds their mixed gender communities into spiritually grounded populations capable of creating positive change in the world. Their mission (to create sacred spaces in which BIPOC tran-spiritual people can safely participate in prayer, meditation, ritual, and healing) may seem to be a recent development, unique to trans communities, but nothing could be farther from the truth.
This project unveils BIPOC trans and gender non-conforming people as historical agents. Living still under a regime of white supremacy, they are engaged in the same struggles for religious freedom that they have fought for more than five hundred years right alongside millions of spiritually oppressed heteronormative ethnicities around the world.
Whether Your Stay Is Short or Long: Welcome Visitors!
May you linger here, dear visitor, and return as often as you can. For this labor of love is remediating a tremendous silence in world history. Thus, it is not a simple project you can peruse in a few minutes. It begs your time and repays you for investing in it.
Like when you go to a museum or historical exhbition at a National Park, you do not just hop in and out again. Instead, you dwell a spell. You spend the morning, evening or afternoon. You ponder what your docent has to say. You look, feel, and learn about the images you see. You linger more in reverie than in research. You contemplate how what you see relates to you and your experience.
Please approach this historical project this way. Learn about six contemporary BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders and their gender non-conforming ancestors. Notice that their origins are not merely biographical but are deeply historical. Their lives are produced by ancestral actions and decisions that brought them into being.
Invest yourself even if you must return again and again. Dwell in the spiritual domain of BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders evolving into the global leaders and healers they always have been destined to be.
The Project
This is a multi-media project. It operates better on a computer than on a phone. It compiles images, videos, letters, news articles, audio recordings, policy statements, government records, interviews, and draws information from scholarly research.
The project's focus is less on archival formality and more on providing access to a complex historical process. It offers insight into how diverse cultural experiences converged to create BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders and communities in America.
Interviews of the six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders report experiences that cannot be confined to the contemporary era but are reflected by and inflected in the assembled materials. Their stories convey how they embody the deep historical origins of their contemporary struggles.
This project explores how people and their actions created a trans-continental process of racialized historic social change in the sacred domain. It begins with communion about the land and its gifts, and in the spirit of respectful protocol, it acknowledges the land's original occupants. Many indigenous nations, like many other pre-colonial ethnic groups around the world, conceived of the divine as a genderless or gender non-conforming creator spirit or gaurdian consciousness.
After communion the exhibition explains what BIPOC means. It considers how diverse ethnic communities progressively forming BIPOC coaltions against anti-blackness still tend to exclude BIPOC gender non-conforming subjects. While they long for acceptance and integration into their native networks, trans people too often are forced to bond only with each other rather than with other members of their preferred home communities if they wish to survive.
The exhbition then delves into a centuries-long history of religious persecution in which anti-blackness was a central theme. It contends that this theme was transferred from Europe into the Americas. And, it considers how the lives of the current BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are grounded in geographically disparate historical events that this project maps in a timeline. Theirs is a religious and secular struggle for sacred space in which their racialized ethnic and gender non-conforming ancestors played divergent roles. Finally, it encourages the quest of the BIPOC trans-community and summarizes their historic efforts to create safe sacred space.
The Platform and Outline
Omeka is a generous host of this project. This platform allows exhibition content to be organized, interrelated, built up, layered, and narrated. Some sections are long; others are short. A strength of Omeka allows optional paths for visitors who can view whatever features they want and leave the rest. Scroll through and sample just the parts you want to see. For instance, someone not having time for or interest in the entire timeline can pick a decade as indicated in a row of dates at the top of the timeline.
Different project parts can be accessed by scrolling through to the end of the list of outline topics on the right. The outline links are tied to text, video, audio, website, or document files. Click any link to see topics in that section, open it, and when done with the video, audio, images or text, click the 'x' in the upper right-hand corner of the screen to return to the outline.
For a deeper dive into the historical context that brought these leaders into being, enter the exhibition below and go through the entire outline. Select topics in any order you want, but top to bottom of the outline is best.
If you just want to listen to the audio interviews of the six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders featured in this project, click here:
If you want to see the curator Dr. Enoch Page discussing the project with Doris Malkus, the archivist at LGBTQ-RAN (the organization that comissioned the project), click here: