THE HARDEST PART // NOTES FROM THE POPE
The Vatican has issued a statement rejecting trans people, saying they ‘annihilate…the concept of nature’.
It seems like religious organizations are being asked to make new ways of being in the world to match the global climate, to realize maybe they’d been wrong about the queers all those years ago, like they were wrong about many many things over the years.
But time and time again the church is digging its heels in.
First the United church and now the Vatican has spoken.
Annihilate. The. Concept. Of. Nature.
That stings extra.
And yet.
That’s not the hardest part.
THE HARDEST PART IS LISTENING TO PEOPLE THAT I LOVE SAY SOME VERSION OF:
"It's okay that they tell me/my kids to hate you, that you’re less than, not right, broken, an annihilation, because I just won't listen to that part. The other parts are really convenient for me, it's been a tradition in my family, the hate isn't THAT BAD. I barely notice it."
I do. I notice THE HATE.
In every micro aggression I notice it.
It hurts me in a way that I can’t even put into words. It cuts away at my being. It makes me a sad person.
A person who tries to tell myself that they just don’t understand, they don’t understand how much it hurts, how it makes me question everything about myself.
How it makes me wonder if maybe I really am broken.
I hope that if they did understand how it makes me feel, how deeply it cuts, they would take a stand too. They would speak up in their own communities. That they would take a stand with their dollars, with their attendance, with their words and their actions.
I KNOW I’M NOT INNOCENT
I'm sure I do the same thing in other places in my life.
This is me asking my friends to call me out on it so I can do better too.
And I hope that when they do call me out on it that I shut up, listen, and believe them.
Maybe if we all got a little more comfortable saying the real important things to our friends, and actually started taking about more than is on the surface then we’d all be a little less lonely, we’d all feel a little more understood.