Over the past six months, I’ve been in community with Trans Asian American therapists all across the United States through a project entitled Liminal Pathology (all on the Internet, of course, which in itself is so Trans). As a part of my Asian American Studies Honors Thesis program, I wanted to center the stories of those at the intersections of Trans and Asian American identity, particularly on their navigations of mental health and the healthcare industrial complex. 

I decided on this theme after observing my Asian American Studies (As. Am.) curricula and the field at large. Much of the existing scholarship in both Queer As. Am. Studies and As. Am. Mental Health barely skim the surface of Trans and Gender Expansive experiences. It’s not lost on me why this is the case. When my partner Cailey and I look around at the scholars attending national “As. Am.” conferences, the overwhelming majority of published writers are cis.

I have seen a few Gender Expansive/Trans grad students at these conferences, but it’s hard to approach them. Believe me, I’ve tried. It’s just scary. I think we’re both scared when we see each other. Whether it is for each other or because of each other, I don’t know. I’ve also never had a Trans professor the entire time I’ve been in undergrad. I don’t protest, but I am always aware of this in academia spaces. I expect to shrink aspects of me in the classroom.

“Obedience is a safer body than mine.”
Max Binder & Mo Crist

Looking around at my other Trans and Gender Expansive friends of color, all of them share struggles with mental illness. When your safety is contingent on forces outside of your control, you develop very keen survival instincts. You get creative about who you are around others, because you know the authentic you might invite violence. You try to create small pockets of security around you where there is none. Your actions are motivated by futurism — and not in the capitalist, economic mobility kind (most of the time). In a “I have to be hypervigilant about what comes next, because I don’t know what comes next,” kind of way.

So most of my found-family members are working multiple jobs on top of being students. All of us deal with food and housing insecurity on a semi-regular basis. Honestly, school is just not the most important thing in many of our lives. Academia is just a place you get your degree from, articles are just things to be spliced up and repackaged to get The Grade.

It’s just so much easier to write when your belly is full.

I spent a lot of time questioning if it was even ethical or worth the energy to do research. Is there a point to tossing more discourse into the colonial echo chamber of academia? What tangible good does this actually do for Trans people? Is this research just me being self-indulgent, so concerned about my own positionality that I’m assimilating to white elitism? What gives *me* the authority to talk about Transness? 

I sat weighing these questions in my mind for weeks. I made no progress on my research from the end of January-March. 

And then the Federal Appeals Court of Florida affirmed a school’s transphobic bathroom policy. It flagships a Florida Senate bill attacking Gender-Affirming Care for minors, and another bill preventing higher education institutions from subsidizing Gender-Affirming Care. Drag shows are criminalized in Tennessee. A mass exodus of Trans people flee the Southern United States. 

The news was alarming — literally, appearing on my Twitter feed like clockwork, nearly every day. I try not to seek out electoral political updates (or other potentially activating content) to preserve my own peace, but the sweeping quality of the anti-Trans onslaught was hard to ignore.

In our backyard here at UC Santa Barbara, the dictator of the alt-right fascist group gives an anti-Black, transphobic speech at Campbell Hall. I do not attend, but that didn’t stop a group of proud boys from yelling homophobic slurs at me walking down the street. Another proud boy forces me out of the local Catholic church. 

I don’t consider myself to be a particularly devout Catholic anymore. But I’ve been going to church for as long as I can remember. I still go to mass when I can, and pray the rosary when I make offerings to my Lola and Ninang. But it’s hard to feel connected when people, who claim to be servants of Christ, persecute you for being Trans. I was reading Assata Shakur’s autobiography while all of this was happening, and she taught me, amongst numerous other lessons, that religion is a double-edged sword. It can be used for liberation as much as it can be used for evil. 

In March, I counted three separate articles on my timeline about murdered Black and Latine Trans people in the U.S. — all in a span of just two days. One of them, a Black Trans man named Banko Brown, was shot at a Walgreens 45 minutes away from my house in the Bay Area. 

A found family member of mine is incarcerated. She is now in a men’s correctional facility.

“...But when I look in the mirror, I cannot tell if it is my reflection or someone else’s.”
Max Binder & Mo Crist

When I catch up with my found family, we come to each other with an intuitive understanding that none of us feels genuinely happy or well. There is a world of hurt behind each others’ eyes, and it’s far too much mileage to cover in a single conversation. To uproot the many tendrils of transphobia, transmisogyny, racism and capitalism threatening us everyday would compromise the carefully cultivated masks we put on. 

So we crack jokes. We tell each other sex horror stories that felt world-ending in the moment, but hilarious in retrospect. We gossip, rant about awful characters in queer TV shows. We go to the beach and play with our inner children. We laugh louder than anyone in the restaurant. Every cackle cauterizes the wound, and every wound becomes a scar, and every scar can start to fade away. 

Except I have never been one to leave a scab alone (I’m a brown person with eczema). I am far too curious for my own good. I pick and poke at the thing, knowing the wound will be opened again, but at least this time I know why it’s been opened. Call it my morbid curiosity. 

In a world devoid of logic, I still continue to ask why our wounds exist. It might be overly intellectualizing, but it is still an important line of inquiry. Because that then invites the question of, “How do you view your wounds, and then, how do you heal them?”

In “Pedagogy of the Oppressed,” leading critical pedagogy and ethnic studies scholar Paulo Freire says that critique alone is not strong enough to liberate the marginalized. It must always be accompanied by principled action. This is the definition of praxis. If we lack an imagination of how things can be different, our wounds remain open. Our unhealed spirits make our loved ones sick. 

I grappled with this in my own romantic partnership. Before I met Cailey, I was the kind of person that self-destructed at the slightest confrontation (still working on this. Though, after I was diagnosed with Borderline, I had a much better grasp of what I needed to work through). It nearly torpedoed our relationship. But they chose to remain patient with me. They never stopped being honest with me, even if they were unsure if I could hold their feelings. And they loved me, fiercely, through it all. The self respect I have now is, in many ways, because I have been loved well, not only by Cailey but all those who watered me. The life and world that we are building together is founded on hope.

“The role of the Artist is to make the Revolution irresistible.”
Toni Cade Bambara

And this is why I chose to continue the Liminal Pathology project, not in spite of collective and personal wounds, but informed by them. I believe that every Gender Expansive person is inherently a creative. We are artists of our own expression. We are ancestry alchemists. We Trans-cend the sociopolitical bounds of gender and dare to imagine something greater. We are living proof that human beings are not meant to be categorized and commodified. 

So there is a profound importance in highlighting stories of our resilience, as well as all the (un)wellness and pain that come with them. Our Transcestors not only model what it means to transgress gender, but also how to transmute violence and neglect into holistic love. It’s messy, oblong, even smothering at times, because all we know is to love in the shape of our souls. The law would like to see us as unidimensional, parsimonious, miserable beings, when in fact we cohabit the existence of pain and joy every day, all at the same time.

Through each conversation with my participants, we unpacked more and more complex feelings on family, capitalism, racism, higher ed and diversity politics. 

But we also laughed a lot. Sometimes we cried, because it was so nice to feel and express in the same way as someone else, and not have to over-explain why our neurodivergent brains do certain things or respond in certain ways. In our meetings, I talk how I would talk to my elders, because they are my elders. I consider them community now, and they affirm to me that I am their community too. 

No matter what happens with this research, even if this study is one drop in the ocean of academia, I am content with knowing that my community’s stories will be remembered somehow. 

I am content that this institution’s money (lol) is going straight into the pockets of gender anarchists, and that they don’t have to worry about not having the energy to cook, or not being able to afford their next meal. 

I am blessed to love so many beautiful, radical, compassionate Trans and Gender Expansive people. You know who you are. You keep me going. You give me strength. 

And most of all, I am content with the hope I’ve seen this project bring to Trans and Gender Expansive people. One of my elders said that this experience has grounded and affirmed that they are not in their anti-oppression journey alone. A nonbinary Asian student at UCSB read my research poster, and said that it expanded their idea of community. They were empowered to start seeking out mental health resources from those who represent all of their identities. 

These are the stories they don’t tell about us. These moments of hope and joy amidst all the dis-ease. This life is our thesis — that trauma healing is the ritual of living, with the good, the bad, the inbetween, and beyond. We are liminal, pathologized people, trying our best to make a case, every day, for our healing. 

I’d hate to leave this reflection with the predication that I’m an expert on all of this. I’m just a twenty-something boy lesbian from California, trying to figure it out as I go along. I welcome any contention, resistance or comment that might arise in you when reading this (after reading?). Email your thoughts to me, if you’d like. I believe strongly in the power of accountability to keep each other safe. My only prerogative is that this exists — for and by us. We have always deserved more than remembrance. We deserve abundance.

“We have to do it because we can no longer stay invisible. We have to be visible. We should not be ashamed of who we are. We have to show the world that we are numerous. There are many of us out there.”
Sylvia Rivera