By Kelly M. Marshall
I’m standing in line to check out at my local grocery store. COVID-19 is breathing down my neck: as an entity, as a presence, as an atmosphere. Behind my homemade fabric face mask and my meticulously sanitized disposable gloves, I’m buying two weeks of groceries for my queer household.
When I get to the cashier, she can’t see my beard under my face mask and misgenders me, calling me “ma’am” as we complete the transaction. I’m simultaneously calm and annoyed. In this moment, her perception of my gender does and doesn’t matter.
A sudden surge of queasy dysphoria wars with my rational mind. As I leave the store, pushing my cart full of groceries, my stomach lurches and twists. I put my groceries in the truck and sit there in the safety of the enclosed vehicle. I take slow breaths and connect with my nervous system. I sense my heartbeat. I drink water. I sit in stillness until I feel solid, rooted back into my body. Then, I drive home.
Right now, I’m obsessed with this question, and puzzling its answer: what is queer trauma, and how does it differ from or overlap with other systemic traumas? How is it personal? How is it universal? How do we discover it, feel it, process it, digest it, and heal from it?
As a community, we queers and gender non-conforming folks have experienced trauma since the dawn of humanity. We have vacillated between being revered as healers, shamans, and catalysts for social change and being reviled as outliers, deviants, and perverts. We’ve straddled the line of these dualities and we have always transcended them. But what toll does that take on us, as human beings and as a collective?
I can only speak from my personal experience and hope that it parallels with a wider narrative. My voice is one of many.
My core wound comes from a pervasive sensation of not belonging and of not being allowed, of silence and of separation from my whole authentic self. It comes from a fear of being too much, too emotional, too queer, too needy, too vast, too complex, too complicated, too whatever for this oppressive, white supremacist, heteropatriarchal culture.
A belief that my basic needs are too much. A deep awareness that certain aspects of my whole self are not easily accepted, allowed, or absorbed by mainstream culture. The understanding that it’s physically dangerous for me to be who I am and to be visible and vocal about it. So, I have tried to edit myself to fit in, to feel safer, to feel allowed. This is the crux of systemic trauma.
Queer trauma can be categorized as transgenerational or intergenerational trauma. Beyond that, it is intersectional with racial trauma and poverty trauma. This is trauma that we’ve inherited from those who have come before us in our movements for equality and civil rights, such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. It can be felt in the collective identity of resilience and pride that we all share with one another, especially when we demonstrate.
This time in history is especially affecting, because of its parallels with the Stonewall Riots, with the shootings at Pulse, and with the HIV/AIDS epidemic. It’s further triggered by the murders of Tony McDade, Dominique Remmie Fells, Riah Milton, and countless other queer and trans Black people, and the outrage and uprisings in the civil rights movements. Finally, the vehemently anti-trans, anti-queer, and racist, white supremacy rhetoric of the Trump administration is a pall that weighs heavily on all of us.
If queer folks are feeling particularly raw right now, it is because our collective historical trauma is being aggressively evoked, across multiplicities.
Trauma is not separate from the body. This is an important distinction to make, because often, we think of trauma as something that happens purely in the mind. According to the work I do with others, trauma resides in the nervous system, and it lives in the very cells of our bodies. It governs the flow of information from our deep subconscious memories and our waking lives to the intelligence of our bodies, our fight and flight responses, and our deep animal natures.
Trauma tells us how to survive. We need our nervous systems to adapt to the environments we were conditioned in, to stay safe. We need our subconscious minds to read the environment for cues of safety or danger, especially as a marginalized person. Sometimes our ability to notice these things can be the difference between life and death. Sometimes we end up leaning too heavily on hypervigilance, especially in a time like this. Sometimes hypervigilance and a lifetime of trauma can start to steal our sense of joy and resilience. We can’t relax, even when there are signs that we can rest.
What do we do if our bodies, our brains, and our nervous systems begin to betray us and work against us when we are trying to do more than survive? How do we shift the patterns of how trauma disrupts our relationships, our healing, our work, and our efforts to thrive? When we are raised in an actively hostile environment, whether it is overt or subtle, we sense this. We respond, react, and adapt to survive. But how do we go beyond survival mode? How do we thrive?
We cultivate resilience. In a sense, we show up to our lives anyway, with a sense of cautious curiosity. We begin to attune to the messages of our bodies and our nervous systems and the internal GPS of our emotions and reactions to what is happening. And then we notice our reactions: do we get angry in response to what is happening? Do we want to flee, or hide, or withdraw from the situation? Do we freeze up? Do we have a hard time deciding what to do and so we do nothing?
What are the signals that our bodies are sending us? Are we queasy? Are we tired? Exhausted? Are our hands sweating? Are our minds racing? Every moment, we are receiving feedback from our nervous system about our environment, both in the local and in the global sense.
Those reactions in and of themselves are cues that the deep intelligence of our nervous system is awake and telling us something. Next, we bear witness to these reactions and responses. We hold space for these reactions, by ourselves or with trusted others, in the ways that we have historically avoided them because they are uncomfortable or scary to witness.
It is only in community that we can truly heal. It is only when we are witnessed and held in community that we can begin the process of undoing trauma. Fortunately for queers, we have created a culture of community. We live together, work together, celebrate together, play together, and grieve together. When we come together in face-to-face connection (whether physically distanced or digital) we are able to co-regulate our nervous systems with one another, to calm, to soothe, to laugh, and to build resilience, both in our hearts and our nervous systems.
It may seem antithetical, but the best way to build resilience and strength in the face of all of this adversity is to find ways to play, to connect, to create pleasure and art, to (safely) touch, to dance, to move, to sing or hum. Deep and slow mindful breathing, swimming in cold water, lots of naps, and regular exercise also help. According to Polyvagal Theory, these practices engage the ventral branch of the vagal nerve, which is responsible for modulating your body’s response to stressful and triggering stimuli, and is instrumental in creating trauma resiliency.
Before we became so civilized (read: colonized), these practices were built into our human culture in order to help us cope with traumatic events. Now, they’re read as self-care. But vagally toning practices are not just self-care; they’re essential practices for community care, sustainability for activism and movement, and they’re care for your sense of resiliency after a traumatic event.
Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence. It is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.” Erika Huggins, a human rights activist and Black Panther leader, is known for being a devotee of yoga and meditation. Angela Davis has expressed her thoughts numerous times on the subject: “I think our notions of what counts as radical have changed over time. Self-care and healing and attention to the body and the spiritual dimension—all of this is now a part of radical social justice struggles.”
Our fight for LGBTQ+ equity and the liberation of BIPOC folks from a racist society are inextricably linked and bound up in our embodied experiences of systemic trauma. But we cannot win this fight without resiliency, self-care, and recognizing the wisdom of our nervous systems and responding to its needs. We cannot complete a marathon without training and care, and a focus on sustainability. Understanding how trauma affects our bodies and our nervous systems as marginalized people is essential to our success in obtaining justice for all.
