Quest for the Spiritual: Reclaiming Lost Legacies, Creating New Ones
The Quest for BIPOC Trans-spiritual Leadership
This project has its errors and knowledge gaps, called lacunae. But its flaws of rapid creation and compilation in no way diminishes its incredible value. For it adds historical depth by contextualizing the interviews that six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders offered. They are and represent descendants of a long historical process. That process is a struggle for religious freedom. The six transspiritual leaders interviews carry that struggle forward. They are helping to move earthlings towards spiritual maturity on a planetary scale.
The timeline interrupts the tendency to think of BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders only as trans people working for trans liberation since 1995. We see them as a bit too ordinary, a bit too contemporary. It is easy to isolate them as only being part of a movement that is young and not see them tied to the Gay Liberation Movement that in 1950 began saying that third gender folk have a right to their spirituality and should have access to sacred space.
Far right opponents treat the entire LGBTQIA movement, particularly the trans movement, as people unworthy to live. This community is viewed as if they uniquely are living in sin. The right considers them as behaving inappropriately. Most churches still presume they can be saved only if they walk the narrow straits of the gender binary. BIPOC trans people are viewed in the eyes of the religious far right merely as a symbol of cultural degradation. To them BIPOC trans people, maybe all trans people, should disappear. In their jaded eyes, trans people seeking sacred communal space plainly demonstrate how America has fallen away from the stellar white Christian values forcibly installed on others in the colonial era when all Americans were engaged in nation-building.
Humans do not usually view BIPOC trans leaders as being spiritually inspired social change agents in a racialized struggle for religious freedom. Yet, this is the same goal millions of heteronormative people also have been chasing since 1438 when the Spanish Inquisition began. What more evidence of their humanity does one need?
BIPOC trans people do not show up everywhere in the timeline because a history of the lives they lived amongst their heternormative peers mostly have been lost. A history of their peers remains while their history has disappeared. Even while silenced they lived in obscurity among the members of their ethnic groups. Occasionally, they became prominent when one of them played a signficant role in metropolitan or national society.
Do not think they were not present at every instant among the conquistadors, in the Dismal Swamp, in the Ghost Dances, in the March on Washington, at Wounded Knee, and in the most recent presidential campaigns. Transspiritual leaders and other trans people always have been present in the secular and sacred histories of the BIPOC people. Day by day they have legitimated their need for sacred space and have found it in established institutions, and outside of them. Moreover, they continue to embody and enact their worthiness and spiritual potential.
Peering into the fertile womb of third gender space, Americans are healing and spiritually maturing. As they begin to see trans people as fellow humans, they are losing their need to weaponize scripture to exclude, demean and kill. As Americans grow spiritually into more acceptance of human variation, BIPOC trans people are moving off the streets and into trans-spiritual leadership in various religious and secular domains. It is an outcome of courageous spiritual practice, hard work, and perseverance that BIPOC third gender people are making themselves visible and are seizing sacred space. Their successes and ongoing efforts enable Americans to see and embrace BIPOC trans people, and all trans people, as equally worthy fellow humans.
No matter how bad things may look in the next period to come, transspiritual leaders are using sacred space to remind us that the light shall return and already is returning. A growing number of Americans today respect and love trans people and some of them follow transspiritual leadership. Progress has been painfully slow, but it is undeniable. The question remains: how can it be made sustainable?
Facing this question, today's BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are forging new sacred concepts. They rely on silence to inspire and inform their new cosmologies and theologies. They strive to attain and practice the spiritual leadership skills they require to neutralize the toxic dominance of inquisitional culture and to loosen the mental shackles of imperial spiritual whiteness.
They are laying claim to sacred spaces and their work will not always be confined to the church, synagogue, temple, or masjid. They are those institutions insisting on radical inclusion, to be sure, but like in the past, many will be doing their own thing. The few no longer contained by traditional religious will find grounding in their ethnic spiritual practices. And some will create new spiritual practices. Their will to serve, know and be in union with the divine is irrepressible.
For instance, the Black Trans Prayerbook is a novel initiative. Its co-authors, J Mase III and Dane Figueroa Edidi understand the wounds that occur when defiantly removing shackles from the mind (those installed by religious and other institutions of conventionality). While religions remain useful they do not encompass the entire spiritual domain of consciousness that remains to be explored. Working outside sacred spaces under the current conditons is can be scary and unnerving. Working within them can be taxing. So, Edidi and Mase are two transspiritual activists who urge BIPOC trans people to practice self-care.
They promote the view that racism and transphobia are haram (sin in Islam). Their "interfaith and beyond" compilation occurs in the spiritual hinterlands of America. It includes various visual and narrative genre featuring the prayers and art of Black Trans, Non-Binary and Intersex people. Their Black Trans Prayerbook is a call for the seizing and creation of sacred space in which the BIPOC trans community can be. Their
"What does it mean to have a faith practice that simultaneously challenges white supremacy and transphobia? Where is there a theological framework that centers the most marginalized and creates pathways towards an active spirituality moving alongside social justice? How might a spiritual practice not in tune with these questions cause harm?"
BIPOC trans-spiritual leadership and congregations offer much more than just their transness which according to Reverend Nicole Garcia, is secondary. Rather, when they enter sacred spaces and engage in spiritual projects what comes with them is a profound sense of compassion along with a profound sense of justice. Their theologies stand against exclusion and against the seemingly perpetual sin of anti-blackness. This they do refuse, and regard their stance for unity among all people as a sacred work to undertake because they truly do wish to heal the world.
See finally, the below offering of websites featuring the voices of BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders from the Americas and elsewhere.
