Trauma and reparations

Self-diagnosing to save democracy

I realise my last post might have caused harm by using LGBTQIA2S+ instead of 2SLGBTQQIAA+. This is because the former rolls off my tongue so easily given how many times a day I identify myself with it, especially the plus. But I also recognise that my subjugation of the omni-indigenous 2-Spirit to the end of the series is due to a suppression of generational trauma. Because about a year ago, I discovered I am more than an ever-expanding gender identity. According to Ancestry.com, I am descended from a Machapungan queen. That’s right, the tribe you’ve never heard of as a result of your whiteness. And because my tribe died out. So upon learning this, I immediately sublimated it as if it never happened.

The repressed memory of this online discovery came crashing through my consciousness a few weeks ago during the middle of Black History Month. As I always practice intentional inclusion, I had educated myself on TikTok and learned from a number of influencers of colour about the importance of giving money to black people at this time. Good allies know that the best way to make them feel empowered is to stop them on the street and explain you know that however much you have to offer will never be enough. Just insist they take it anyway.

The confusion on so many black British faces as I made my rounds shattered the false serenity of my present. If only my moment of reintroduction to Ethelia had happened in private, although reliving trauma for all to see allows iPhone owners to bear witness and confront their living complicity in past violence. I refer of course to Queen Ethelia of the Machapunga who married the Chief of the Nanticoke, not to their daughter of the same name who married some rando called John Squires. Despite his settler-colonialist status, some of the letters in his surname seem to indicate that he was queer, intersex, and epigenetically sexual, so probably they/them.

Still, the trauma that has inscribed itself on my DNA comes from the moment Ethelia mère witnessed the betrothal of her likely two-spirit offspring to an Englishman. Her grandson might have become the next Nanticoke chief, but everyone knows that every interracial marriage along the 17^th Century eastern seaboard was an act of genocide. The event remains so raw, I can’t count the generations between us.

Thankfully there is a silver lining. Previously I had thought I was owed reparations due to the number of earldoms primogeniture denied me. But now, interminably paralysed by my indigenous erasure, the payout will be enormous. Plus, I can finally understand why I’ve been rendered obsolete by the consumerist capitalist patriarchy. On the one hand, my Machapunga-Nanticoke identity compounds with the Mi’kmac we once intuited in my cis birthing parent’s grandfather. On the other, 23andMe may have downgraded my .001% Polynesian identity to Anatolian, but that’s still Asian. So I’m like the landing of a transpacific raft in 1957 and a descendant in Alex Haley’s Roots all rolled into one. Authentic and ahistorically accurate.

I am Kon-Tiki. I am Kunta Kinte.

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There’s further trauma though. Not because everyone has trauma and we should make this the primary focus of every adult and every child’s every waking hour, but because I went to church again. I found out that the priest I mentioned prior to my awakening at the thought-reform facility—the one who ignored 10/7 and posted instead on 10/8 that he had turned down an invitation to go on Big Brother, LOL—once marched into the Lord Provost of Glasgow’s office with the mayor of Bethlehem and demanded the city condemn Israel for whatever crime against humanity they were committing that time. Knowing what an advocate he/him is, I thought it was safe to return.

How wrong I was. Sure, there is now a white-haired Scotsman who sits in the front pew with a keffiyeh around his neck and Palestinian flag draped across his shoulders, so even if he’s unapologetically white at least there is the security of knowing he is an ally. Except all he actually did was sit there and scowl at the rest of us as we took Communion. I was hoping for greater resistance. Plus, during the intercessions there was no prayer for Aaron Bushnell, no whiff of an allusion to this brave hero who lit himself on fire in front of the Israeli Embassy in DC in order to Free Palestine. If Presidential candidates brother Cornel West and Dr. Jill Stein can praise his “extraordinary courage and commitment” and, in her case, appropriately appropriate a Black phrase to pray that that Bushnell “Rest in power”, then surely Scottish Episcopalians have a responsibility to pay their respects to self-immolation. What would Jesus do, you believers in “life” ask? Suicidally virtue signal himself on the cross, you Brexit-voting, MAGA-loving, subhuman gammon.

Anyway, no such expressions of love were uttered in the intercessions, and the silence on Bushnell meant I didn’t feel safe. They didn’t even remember trans prisoner Tiffany Scott or denounce the BBC for deadnaming her and dodging her pronouns. Society was merely waiting for her no longer to be a threat to young girls and female nurses when she was killed in a prison that didn’t match her gender. Church did have some new buttons on the youth board at the back, including one with a Queer Liberation fist, but I will need to double my Diazepam prescription before going back.

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Speaking of Presidential candidates, one palliative to the burden of my mounting trauma is that the Democrats are trying to save democracy by fighting to keep the opposition off the ballot. Not just Trump but RFKJ in the swing states, where democracy is most at risk if people are given the opportunity to choose someone other than Biden, West, or Stein. It’s not universally understood what makes RFKJ so dangerous, but my faith in the legacy media to put the proper fear in us shall not be shaken. Or maybe someone can create a meme so we don’t have to think about it.

I can’t choose to opt out of the nightmares of my ancestry any more than I can pretend my mirrorgender identity is a choice. Being plus, plus, plus is hard work and disproportionately affects those of us who were forced to speak White Language Supremacy growing up. Therefore, I intentionally commit myself to the single-party state. May we eradicate every tribe that fails to recite the creed of inclusion. May the terror of racism and climate apocalypse be on every tongue so that when November 5^th comes the Elect may cloak themselves and set themselves alight in righteousness. Let the fornicators who attempt to seduce us with the language of adaptation or titillate us with the benefits of nuclear energy be shown the way to the flames of Hell.

And finally, may anyone who refuses to smash the gender binary or agree that Sam Smith looked sensational in their cheerleader skirt—and fit AF walking for Vivienne Westwood—be cast to the depths where a pair of humping nonbinary orcas can eat them for dinner.

In this house, we believe in zero objections to our revolution. Disagreement creates trauma on a scale our ancestors could never have imagined. Refuse to comply, and we all die.