BIPOC Trans-spiritual Leaders: Six Insightful Oral Histories
How Were the Interviewees Chosen?
Creating a set of interviews relies on the accessibility of people willing to be interviewed. The task of recruiting and interviewing BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders for this project began mid-November 2023 and was completed end of April 2023. Online BIPOC and trans organizations, and BIPOC trans personalities across the BIPOC spectrum, were contacted by email or phone. Every effort was made to ensure the representation of each BIPOC constituency in the interviews and other content.
One goal was to add new interviews to LGBTQ-RAN's stellar collection. People who ideally would have been selected given their prominence as BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders either already had been interviewed or profiled by LGBTQ-RAN or by other organizations. Numerous others did not respond when contacted on multiple occasions.
African American Christians composed the most available cohort. There were ample opportunities to contact African American trans-spiritual leaders ministering in churches. That population provided three of the six interviews. That number would have been restricted to just one or two had more BIPOC trans people from other groups been available. There also were efforts to contact two African American Jews, but neither person seemed available despite numerous referrals and efforts to reach them. There were various attempts to recruit Asian Americans. Many were contacted but most of those were BIPOC trans leaders, but were not identifying as BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders.
A few indigenous organizations responded among the many contacted, and those few seemed interested, but ultimately none engaged. One Native American who initially agreed to be interviewed remained in communication for eight weeks but was finishing a Master's degree and starting a new position working with children. At a time when trans people are being accused of grooming children, that person who otherwise wanted an interview withdrew in the end, reporting that the political climate gave pause.
BIPOC trans organizations contacted may not have responded, given the burden that these organizations already have in advocating and caring for their constituents. This is especially the case in sacred communities where being trans or LGBTQI is even less accepted than being two-spirit, which in many Native American communities is still not well accepted.
For instance, an effort was made to recruit someone to interview from one very active South Asian organization in the Bay area. After writing them multiple times no one ever answered. They initially got a contact during Diwali and right after completing a major cultural event. In the Bay area, there was an attack on a Sikh person during this period. They likely were so busy they may not have had the energy or attention to respond to this small project that might not have registered as a top priority on their radar.
A broader spectrum of BIPOC interviews would have been preferable. Missing is any spiritual path organized around entheogens like marijuana, amanita, peyote, or ayahuasca. One effort to identify a Muslim trans person to interview failed due to the tight organizational prohibitions designed to protect trans people where that person was affiliated. Many efforts to contact Jewish and Buddhist trans people also did not succeed, although a few are visible online. Also contacted with no response were two trans people in the African diaspora who were not African Americans. Other non-Christian organizations and trans persons were contacted. For instance, there was assertive outreach to Buddhist organizations, and despite several responses, none of them panned out. There must have been someone representing other BIPOC trans-spiritual communities who would have wanted to be interviewed, but the timing was not right.
All this to say that the current set of interviews was not preferentially hand-picked. Each BIPOC trans-spiritual person who the curator knew was already part of the LGBTQ archive. Only one interviewee was referred by a person known to the curator. Trans organizations with a public face online referred four interviewees. The sixth interviewee the curator discovered on social media and recruited by making contact numerous times through that platform.
Initially, there were to be five interviews. A sixth one was added to include a youthful voice of an up-and-coming BIPOC trans-spiritual leader. So, the six interviewees selected were not intentionally chosen to exclude others. Five were random recruits, and one joined the project through an acquaintance. Still, it is a pretty robust set of six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders.
Interviewees
The six trans-spiritual interviews stack up as follows:
Click on the pictures. See audio link beneath each image.
Why These Interview Questions?
In preparing to conduct interviews, the curator listened to many other trans interviews available online, including those at LGBTQ-RAN. Almost without exception, they asked two main questions: how did you come out, and what organizational connections exemplify your work with the LGBTQ community? That strategy of documenting a movement is a pragmatic approach for some projects. It facilitates and organizational approach to trans history, but it did not seem to be the best approach for this project.
The road taken here was to inquire into how the BIPOC trans-spiritual leader describes their own life as an embodied spiritual experience. This approach proved to be a good one as each BIPOC trans-spiritual leader interviewed reported feeling relieved to find that this would not be the usual type of interview done with trans people. They were excited to be asked to share their concepts of spirituality, comment on their spiritual journey, and convey their spiritual aspirations for serving their constituents. They were willing to discuss how their spiritual path intersected or not with family, community, and various institutions, not just religious or spiritual ones.
The interviewees are not a cohort of notable BIPOC trans celebrities. Instead, they are everyday people having a self-aware trans-spiritual experience. In this regard, they were self-disclosing about describing the personal difficulties they have struggled with to demonstrate how they spiritually endured, and spiritually overcame. It would have been too narrow to inquire about their spiritual leadership in trans communities. Hence, each person speaks to how, as BIPOC-identified people, their trans-spiritual leadership has evolved and operates both in the trans community and in a broader social context.
Additionally, they offer their opinions about the spiritual condition of the trans community, the LGBTQIA2 community, the nation, and the world. At the end of each session, the interviewee seized an opportunity to speak directly to their higher power as they conceived of it regarding their aspirations for their constituents and the world. So, their revealing narratives focus more on their inner lives, spiritual practices, trans-spiritual leadership, and aspirations.
Note: To reach people across the country, all interviews were conducted on Zoom. This platform posed two problems. First, the Zoom image jumps back and forth based on who is speaking. This created video recordings distracting for the viewer, and these recording became an editing nightmare. So, it was a great loss of engagement with embodied personalities when the visual content was sacrificed. Second, holding a clear audio channel became a technical WiFi challenge for some interviewees. As a result, some information was lost or restated in several cases. In one interview, a speaker was asked many times to slow their speech to accommodate the delayed bandwidth speed. That interview still has slow periods, yet it is one of the most interesting.
BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders know that the colonizers' practices visited the rigid gender binary and racialized religious persecution on American soil in ways that reproduced anti-Indian, anti-black, and anti-queer American cultural traditions. They know how their subjection by settler proponents of a stigmatizing inquisitional culture conveys trauma and creates spiritual needs in BIPOC communities that other faith communities may have felt no compulsion to address or else such communities addressed their needs incompetently or insincerely.
The resultant spiritual impact of settler-imposed adversity has been disorienting and harmful for BIPOC people seeking new religious spaces they can call home. This point has been noted by another young black minister who is grappling with racism in the church:
The same issue is reiterated below by ARP, an Asian Buddhist young adult who writes:
...My mother was converted to catholicism as a teen, and I was raised catholic. My attempts to learn my traditional practices/beliefs/values have always been mediated by white people who have taken up all the positions of leadership and first contact with people in my situation who colonialism has robbed of understanding/language/spiritual practice, vs. people who have learned it as a result of colonial extraction. It's been a very challenging situation. Today I found a Buddhist community of my ethnicity, and I can't even begin to tell you how different and meaningful it was for me.
Thus, trans people are on a spiritual quest to heal the wounds of inquisitional culture. In the 21st century, BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders who seek the peace in which they can nurture others and themselves still find themselves grappling with repellent, if not violent, racism in churches. They find their fellow congregants quick to condemn any behavior they judge to be inconsistent with their inquisitionally inherited white Christian moral values that enshrine patriarchy, binary gender, and cisgender sexual relations under which they find themselves oppressed.
Rejecting these unhelpful spiritual conditions, BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders realize that nothing happens in America that does not reach back in time into other lands and other communities far away where the hearts of immigrant American communities still dwell. Those who cannot go home to join relatives and friends in their original spiritual practices turn to American churches, nature, or to America's indigenous traditions. in short, BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders are pushing against the gendered anti-blackness they experience as a religiously justified racial caste ideology and practice of systemic discrimination.
While most BIPOC groups emphasize a secular social justice mission, a few BIPOC coalitions are building platforms to advance their sacred agenda. The BIPOC spiritual coalitions they are creating declare the right of all BIPOCS to practice their traditional cosmologies and to recover the holy knowledge their people lost through colonization.
Achieving this is harder than invoking this dream, however. That is why all six BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders who contributed their stories to this exhibition agree on one point: there is an excellent need for sacred spaces that allow BIPOC trans people to do their spiritual work and enjoy spiritual companionship that radically accepts who they are. They are willing to do whatever work they must do to achieve this. Hence, they find themselves ready to change themselves in their efforts to change their societies. They seek to develop and deepen their spiritualities and uncover knowledge of their spiritual value to the community that has been hidden from view. The societal change they envision will heal the divisions sown among them by the settlers' politico-religious agents that continually are being reproduced.
As we shall see, some BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders prefer the familiarity, convention, and tradition of their historical Judaism, Islam, or Christianity. Meanwhile, others see themselves veering out of how they describe these major religions as highly ideological conceptual traps from which they seek passage into new spiritual practices. Some BIPOC trans-spiritual leaders in religions and some side-stepping religions are forging new theologies while creating sacred spaces to perform their spiritual practices. In short, the recent emergence of trans-spiritual leaders from BIPOC communities is a historically appropriate and inevitable endeavor requiring respect and support for new creating, designing, and building.