Against homophobic & transphobic Christianity
Photo: Olga Marina Segura
we reject everything that harms Black queer and trans people
Almost every month in 2023, a transgender person is murdered in the United States.
Fernielli Mary Mora, 25, was found dead in her Bronx apartment in July.
In June, 29-year-old Chanell Perez was shot and killed in Puerto Rico.
In April, Ashley Burton, 37, and Koko Da Doll, 35, were shot and killed in Atlanta; and Banko Brown, 24, was shot and killed after leaving a Walgreens in San Francisco.
In March, 18-year-old Tasiyah “Siyah” Woodland was killed in Mechanicsville, Md.
In February, Zachee Imanitwitaho, 26, was shot and killed in Louisville.
In January, Jasmine Mack, 36, was fatally stabbed in Washington, D.C. And 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán was killed by Atlanta police.
Last month, 28-year-old O’Shae Sibley was fatally stabbed in Brooklyn for voguing to Beyoncé.
Sibley’s alleged killer is a 17-year-old boy from a Russian family.
When news first circulated about Sibley’s death, NYPD sources said the suspect was a Muslim man offended by Sibley’s dancing. Many struggled to understand the connections between toxic masculinity and faith. Many used this as an opportunity for, at worst, Islamophobia; at best, an example of how quickly disinformation travels and its dangers.
The 17-year-old’s attorney describes him as “a good Christian boy.” His family states he is hard-working and committed to finishing high school.
Yet how could “a good Christian kid” do this?
We live in a world where we can no longer ignore the fundamental role US Christianity—born out of patriarchal, colonialist subjugation—plays in the violence committed by cis-gender men and boys. We cannot ignore how deeply intertwined Christianity is with homophobic and transphobic violence, both by the state and interpersonal.
Religion and Patriarchal Violence
At Sibley’s memorials in New York City last weekend, organizer and Black Trans Liberation co-founder Qween Jean reminded audiences that queer and trans Black people have always existed. Their histories and stories have always been crucial to understanding America.
Part of the state’s violence is actively erasing Black queer history. At the Friday memorial, several protestors described how poorly understood, outside Black queer spaces, this history continues to be. We must learn queer history and understand the violence we see nationwide. We must support Black trans and queer organizers, many of whom are already struggling with housing and food needs, however we can. For example, following O’Shae’s murder, the queer NYC community created mutual aid opportunities to support O’Shae’s family and community.
We must condemn and reject systems and institutions contributing to transphobic and homophobic violence.
We must analyze how Black queer and trans people exist and resist in a world built on destroying and murdering them. How and why the state continues to subjugate this community. How the state creates the material conditions the Black queer community lives in, and why this community faces higher rates of assault, murder, and discrimination. Why the state violently galvanizes cis-gender boys and men.
Photo: Olga Marina Segura
Our state governments continue to propose and pass legislation to further strip the rights and dignities of queer people. Over 600 pieces of legislation were proposed this year. Seventy have passed. According to Track Trans Legislation, only five states have not introduced legislation this year. They are Vermont, New York, Wisconsin, Massachusetts, and Delaware.
Not introducing legislation, however, does not make a state, including liberal ones like New York, safer for Black queer and trans people. For instance everywhere trans people face greater levels of homelessness and hunger.
The Harms of the Patriarchy
We live in a society harmed by capitalism. A society harmed by the patriarchy.
The intersections of these two systems create a culture and government currently incapable of meeting the material, emotional, and mental needs of workers nationwide. This creates a world in which late adolescent violence becomes integral to manhood. This is a world that teaches boys and men that to be good and worthy is to be any and all things white, cis, Christian; a world that teaches young boys that anything unlike them must be violated, taken, killed.
Before stabbing O’Shae, the 17-year-old and several other friends yelled homophobic slurs at them. While his friends retreated, the 17-year-old stabbed O’Shae in the chest. Men are socialized into thinking they can recover their humanity through violence against women, children, and queer people; recover whatever sense of potency from the loss of what patriarchal, colonialist oppression has also stripped from them.
Men will never recover through violence, yet the violence continues.
Why are so many femmes, children, and queer people dying at the hands of seemingly religious cis-gender men and boys?
What is the God that exists in the imagination that says that a queer or trans body is a threat that needs to be policed?
What is the image of God that invites this type of violence?
There is a nihilism that we must contend with. Life is not meaningless if we understand that our liberation lies in recognizing and fighting against any and all oppression and subjugation, especially that of the queer and trans community. Regardless of ideology, people are killing queer and trans women, men, and children. We are killing each other.
We have allowed faithful language/practices to be weaponized by the right. The people who practice the faith and who tell us stories about what it means to be faithful continue to, at best, ignore how deeply instrumental white Christianity is in almost every harm caused under patriarchal, oppressive systems. At worst, reduce the violence to “those men over there who voted for Trump.”
The violence we see by good Christian boys and men today is directly connected and rooted in the Christianity used to justify building economies and countries on the profits of chattel slavery.
To fully embody the abolition/leftist practices we are writing and struggling through, the faithful must understand how deeply the patriarchy/misogyny is mixed with how we understand our faith and live our lives. We cannot exist in a world where pastors or politicians or bishops spew homophobic and transphobic, anti-Black rhetoric because it is empowering cis-gender men and boys who have already existed being told that those who are not cis-gender men must labor for them.
Fighting Violence with Queer Liberation
I keep returning to Da’Shaun L. Harrison’s Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness As Anti-Blackness. Harrison writes: “At the root, liberation must mean cultural revolution as well as a destruction of the sociopolitical institutions that hold these systems in place, which means that abolition cannot be the end; it must only be the beginning.”
There is a desperation in my city, across the nation. I often, at my most desolate, give in to the fear-mongering of local media and police. I want to give in to the fear and retreat from my community, naively opting to believe I can be safer alone. Abolition invites me to challenge this thinking. It invites me to hope and organize even when I do not believe in the work.
It forces me to think about liberation and revolution rooted in the resistance and love of my community.
The memorial ball for O’Shae on Friday was deeply spiritual. Qween and others prayed often throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Their prayers were real and did not ignore the reason everyone was gathered that night. Every day, our country escalates violence against the queer and trans community, erasing queer rights and history, the ball organizers reminded us. Every day, the state continues to surveil and criminalize them. Every day the state demonstrates how hellbent it is on destroying the lives and revolutionary histories of Black queer and trans people.
Qween described how O’Shae’s blood was still visible on the pavement at the Mobil gas station in Brooklyn. How deeply Christ-like. The rhetoric defending the alleged killer is such a corruption of the cross, like so much of the white, religious weaponization we see in America. So much mainstream religion here is dangerous and antithetical to what Christ symbolizes. An abolitionist, queer-liberated world is the cross. It is resistance and courage and love, the cross.
In solidarity,
Olga