"Are We Really One Family?"

A moving essay from "Father Tony" at The Bilerico Project:

No matter how hard I try to understand the strife experienced by trans folks, I will always stumble in my appreciation. In this regard, a parallel can be drawn between the trans community and my Jewish friends. I don't opine about the Holocaust with them because the depth of their feeling about it is off limits to me. There are some rooms I cannot enter with them. The same is true with my trans friends.


I think the best we can do for our friends and family who have suffered something we have been spared is to grant space to such a person and to guard the door of their pain whenever they are on the other side of it. Some pain is survived but never shed. We can never say to our trans friends or our Jewish friends "Snap out of it!" as Cher said to Nicholas Cage in Moon Struck. We can never be, as was Ron Gold, dismissive of others.


There never comes a day when someone can erase an old and serious pain. Even when you look in the mirror with pride at having become the authentic person you were always meant to be, even on the day of your hardest won victories, at the finish line, you break down in tears not because the struggle is over but because the struggle is yours forever.


This undeniable fact of the human experience must be embraced and honored by all who claim to be inclusive.

Click here to read the rest of the essay.