You are Beloved

Thoughts on Transgender Day of Remembrance

I can’t say their name, because of patient privacy. Also, being a pediatric chaplain requires me to forget the details of their stories. A filtration process, if you will, that allows me to continue to do the work of showing up when children are sick and, in some cases, dying. Which is exactly what was happening to this trans teenager after hanging themselves. I know they were beloved, because I witnessed the love manifest in their room, people never leaving their bedside. But what I did not witness was their life outside the hospital, before.

I wonder what it felt like for them, in the early days of their knowing — that what their body and soul knew to be true wasn’t what they had been told. Assigned. Trained to be. It must have felt so unbelievably confusing, as if being a young person isn’t already confusing. Trying to make sense of a world that does not make sense.

It reminds me of my own childhood body/gender confusion. Having been molested multiple times at a young age, I no longer wanted to be a girl. So, on days when my mother made me wear dresses to school, I hid in the bushes and changed into pants. But my gender confusion was the result of something done to me (by boys and men). It was not in response to an inner knowing of who I was, as distinct from who the world told me I had to be.

I remember this teenager, who was tremendously loved. Only they didn’t feel loved in all the ways we need to love children. As a family. A neighborhood. A community of peers and teachers and principals and nurses and doctors. Places of worship, if that’s your thing. And every part of this ecosystem needs to be unified with the same message: You are Beloved. That’s it. No adding to the confusion inherent in being a young person, that they will be beloved if only. We need to stop doing this and keep it simple: You are beloved. You are beloved.