A few years ago, I was waiting in the mid-afternoon limbo between meetings of the recovery group I used to call home. At the time, members could still smoke in the building between meetings (with a thirty-minute margin on either side), and a fuzzy blue halo was circling just beneath the ceiling as I overheard someone talking about a friend of mine. My friend had moved away before I started coming to meetings; we met in a different setting, as queer people both enrolled at the local university, both invested in a campus climate that would allow that community to thrive.
It took me a moment to realize that the man speaking was talking about my friend. He wasn’t using my friend’s name, and the language he was using seemed to apply to someone else–until he scoffed, shrugged, and tacked on, “…or whatever… he, she, it…” He muttered some limp, mean-spirited epithets to show his distaste for having to qualify what he’d said.
I walked out of the building and took a couple of quick laps around the parking lot, where another older white man had once told me that I would “grow out of” wearing nail polish after a few more months’ sobriety. I paced away the urge to yell at the old-timer who had gone to deliberate lengths to invalidate my friend’s identity.
My friend was miles away, but daring to publicly transition as a member of this group had been enough to invoke this old man’s bile years after the fact.
I thought of the signs on the walls inside. You are not alone. Hope is found here. Live and let live.
That last one, which I had once dismissed as a cliché, now posed a question: who, exactly, was my recovery community willing to “let live”?
* * *
Transgender Day of Remembrance is held annually on November 20th to honor the memories of trans people we have lost. It’s more accurate to say “trans people who’ve been taken from us”, but lost is a kinder word. It disavows blame, implies the possibility of reunion. Lost is a white lie we tell ourselves to ease the hurt of each life stolen.
Multiple studies have affirmed that trans people are at an elevated risk of developing substance use disorders, due in part to the effects of gender-based discrimination. However, queer populations remain marginalized in public health discourse. Research regarding opioid use and overdose among 2SLGBTQIA+ people is still sparse. A recent review of findings on opioid use outcomes for queer people determined that, out of 113 studies, “only two included transgender or gender diverse samples; only one explicitly measured gender identity” as a contributing factor in participants’ relationship to opioids.
Disproportionate rates of substance use by trans people have been attributed to “minority stress” and co-occurring mental health concerns. The logic here seems obvious: it’s pretty stressful to have the mere fact of our existence called an agenda, something to be debated. It’s difficult to feel mentally healthy when we are met with ugliness, disgust, and violence because we had the audacity just to be.
Trans people are more than four times more likely to be the victims of violent crime. Of the recorded instances of fatal violence against trans individuals this year, more than 90% of the victims were Black, Indigenous, and/or people of color. Recent publications suggest that as many as 81% of trans adults have considered suicide.
Reducing the horror of these realities to something quantifiable—a grim march of percentages and statistics—always feels like a disservice to the human beings those numbers represent. Expressing grief this big in numbers, relegating trans lives to the abstract. Another act of violence.
* * *
Being trans in recovery, much like being trans in higher education, means constantly having to carve out space in worlds that were not designed to admit us. Dutifully delivering my pronouns every time I introduce myself (knowing even as I speak that I will be called “he” five times for each time I am called “they”), I pry that door open a little wider. I see a little more light from the other side, however briefly, before the wood slams back into the frame.
As I write this, I grieve the theft of another life: Shauntelle Rose Hammonds, who I first met at the ARHE conference in Boston in 2019. Shauntelle was one of the fiercest recovery advocates I have ever known; a breaker of barriers, never silent in the face of injustice. A woman dedicated to lessening the pain that our communities know as closely as our lungs know air. A woman whose being, whose life, and whose death, might be dismissed in a moment. Waved away as the latest in an endless column of numbers, a footnote to a line that begins, “More research is needed”. An outside issue.
I keep thinking about those photographs that look like a single image from a distance, but upon closer inspection are made up of thousands of smaller photographs, arranged like pixels according to their color and shade to create a “bigger” picture. Being trans in recovery is like being one of those little images—even as we are memorialized, we are obscured by the larger, communal tragedy in which we have taken our places. If we survive, our stories become pieces in a mosaic others will point to and say, “this is what recovery looks like.” But the picture doesn’t look like us.
* * *
This is not the post I set out to write. I did not intend to write anger, or sorrow. I wanted to write something that would tell my trans family, Hope is found here. You are not alone. Instead, I write in defiance of remembrance. I write from the outrage that Transgender Day of Remembrance must be observed in the first place; that we are still dying so often, so young, and so easily that our eulogies are still being delivered en masse.
But mostly I write to you. To my colleagues, my communities, my friends. And I write to say: do not remember us. Don’t let us become numbers, or stories, or the basis for research, recommendations, or reprovals. Don’t create spaces to honor us and mourn that we never got to live in them. Do not wait to look back on us.
Look at us, now, and keep us here.
Kit Emslie (they/them/theirs)
Assistant Director, Collegiate Recovery & Intervention Services
The University of Alabama at Birmingham
Contact: kpemslie@uab.edu
ARHE is grateful to those who wish to share their experiences through our blog. The views and opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of ARHE.