Remembering Bodies: Part 2/5, Dead Bodies

the flowers are dying. their petals– brilliant, we know gaudy, they say– float weightlessly to the ground careful to not disturb the air around them, while the rest of our colourful garden shrieks at another lost friend

Transgender bodies are those of people who don’t fit into the binary society has created to strangle us. They are bodies who deny the binary system simply by existing. Our resistance and existence seem tacky to the rest of the world because why can’t you just be happy with the body God gave you?

For our continued will to survive, we have withstood heartbreak and wounds that will never fully heal in order to remember: this body is a body and it is my body and I do what I want with it.

And so, for our ingratitude, one that became many becomes none.

Throughout history, transgender people have been mysteries and embarrassments. They have been subject to torture, experimentation and fetishization, but it is difficult to learn about this tragedy because the mainstream history education prefers a Euro-centric and binary view of history. It can be noted that it would be difficult to name any historical figures as transgender or queer because the labels in themselves restrict the multiple identities that could have existed that as a modern, Western-controlled society we do not have the words to describe.

Perhaps, there is not a particular person to blame for this erasure of trans bodies, however, as South Africans, we have allowed ourselves to get absorbed into conversations that avoid the real issue: We have the loudest voices on racism but we fail to notice how the number of queer people dying. It is as if we have decided human means black or white, but it is still up to debate whether those who ignore the norm deserve a place in our society.

Trans bodies are bodies that cannot be described with our usual blunt language; it frightens people how we confuse their binary senses. And humans hate being afraid.