By Glori Tuitt, 2020 Trans Day of Resilience Artist
This Trans Day of Resilience, I want all my trans siblings to remember: the potluck has room for you.
Whatever you bring to the table — sadness, joy, whatever — is welcome. Bring your gift. Your humanity is a gift. Your vulnerability is a gift. Your breakdown? A gift. There’s no one thing we need — just all of you, in your totality.
The potluck has room.
This year has been overwhelming. It’s the deadliest recorded year for trans-related violence, and we just lost another sister the other week. The loss, the pain, is real.
There’s this expectation — for any marginalized person, but especially Black trans women — that we’ll be martyrs for freedom. I painted this artwork for TDOR so you know there’s permission to breathe. To cry. To be sad. To not always fight.
I painted with balance in mind. How do I make the figures seem powerful, defiant, divine — but still human? The bottom brush strokes, the embers, the parts of their bodies dissolving or fading into the background, represent a teetering in and out of control — because that’s how I feel, how a lot of us feel.
I first encountered Trans Day of Remembrance in college. It was a candlelight vigil steeped in sadness. Then in 2019, I was chosen to work on Forward Together’s Trans Day of Resilience art project, and it was a total 180. It was hopeful, more inspiring, more exciting. I felt like I could shift the day to whatever I wanted it to be.
This year feels more complicated. The most beautiful, inspiring, ground-shaking people I know are the ones who have to go without so much. It’s baffling. Infuriating. The worlds we dream of, the bodies we’re inhabiting, the souls we’re cultivating are so fucking amazing and worthy of respect and praise and love. I want this to be known.
I want us to get everything we deserve. My greatest hope for trans people of color? I want this imagination thing — this hope thing — to stop feeling so radical. I want trans people to feel like it isn’t ridiculous to be dreamers, to have aspirations.
I hope this Trans Day of Resilience zine, with all its art and poetry inside, makes you feel like it’s in your grasp to do literally anything, go anywhere, live to whatever age, leap back and forth between several forms of being. I hope it brings you closer to your dreams, because you deserve them.
Download the free zine, then share it with someone else who could use a potluck today. There’s room.
