Forgiveness Is How I Stay Alive

Spiritual Survival In the War of Trans Annihilation

It’s Easter Weekend, and a few days ago, the Supreme Court of the United Kingdom declared that trans women are not legally women, a ruling that is widely expected to have far-reaching consequences for trans women, transfeminine people, and quite possibly all trans people in Britain and beyond. The day of the ruling, infamous anti-trans rights advocate and multi-millionaire JK Rowling took to X/Twitter to post a photo of herself smoking a cigar and drinking a cocktail in celebration, rather like a villain out of a children’s novel. “I love it when a plan comes together,” read the photo’s caption, likely in reference to the fact that Rowling was a major donor to the legal challenge that resulted in the UK court’s ruling, and perhaps to her other contributions to the movement that spawned it.

Rowling’s fans erupted in rapturous proverbial applause online, while many trans people and allies voiced anger and outrage. As a trans woman myself, I share that outrage in theory. In practice, it is hard to summon anger, to feel the righteous fury that kept me going through much of the past two decades.

These days, in the face of the virulently transphobic moral panic that has become so firmly rooted in the culture of today’s authoritarian fascism, I mostly feel exhaustion, despair, and a sort of deep-seated revulsion for all the needless suffering caused by the hatred and cruelty of the dominant culture that is swallowing us all. In such moments, the vast ocean of hopelessness threatens to crush me, to annihilate me completely in haunting parallel to the way that the anti-trans movement aspires to annihilate trans people entirely.

I cannot help but think about January, the first trans woman I ever met, 18 years ago, who was stabbed to death in her own home. I can’t help but think about Cassandra Do, Shelby Tracy Tom, Sumaya Dalmar, Alloura Wells, Islan Nettles, Julie Berman, and so many, many more trans women who have been murdered in the web of my community and the communities connected to mine. There are people who do not want us on this earth, who are trying to annihilate us. They will try and try, and they will not stop; however misguided they may be, the fact remains that the impact of their actions is devastating and terrifying - and, it seems, some even celebrate devastating and terrifying us with a cocktail and cigar.

In moments like this, I am forced to confront the possibility that for all my naive longing to believe in the inherent goodness of human beings, there really is evil in this world: There people out there who have never met me who want to kill me. There are people out there who laugh because I live in fear.

And in such moments, the only thing that seems to help me hold on to the will to live - that pulls me back from the brink - is the practice of forgiveness.

***

Within the radical social justice movement - and, I would argue, much of mainstream culture as well - forgiveness has gotten something of a bad rap. Perhaps this is the result of rightful pushback against a toxic colonial culture that has for centuries enforced a rigid and violent interpretation of Christian values upon so many communities: Over and over again, we are told to turn the other cheek as if the Master’s bootheel weren’t firmly fixed upon our throats.

We are told to forgive conquerors and genocidaires as children in Palestine are bombed and burned to death, we are told forgive the billionaires currently sucking the planet dry of arable land and breathable air, we are told to forgive the people who take pleasure in cruelty and pay no attention to the fact that forgiveness has so rarely seemed to give cruelty pause. In this way, forgiveness becomes yet another tool in the Master’s hands, another cage in the mental prison that oppression forms around us.

Within the paradigm of domination, forgiveness is yet another pass for the banking executive as he robs the working and middle class of their savings, and forgiveness is another way of saying “boys will be boys” as women and queer people are harassed and sexually assaulted in the workplace. Within the paradigm of domination, forgiveness is a way of saying that in order to be good, we must be silent and surrender to abuse. Within the paradigm of domination, forgiveness is something that we are forced to give, and which we never receive.

So I am not surprised that when I get on my spiritual soapbox to talk about forgiveness, I am often regarded with pushback and suspicion by my activist peers. After everything we have survived, and everyone who didn’t, after everything that’s been done to us, what good could possibly come of forgiveness?

***

I cannot deny that much of my worldview on forgiveness has been deeply shaped by Christianity: My mother’s side of the family are Chinese Evangelical Christians, and I was also heavily exposed to both Catholicism and Anglicanism as a child. The story of Jesus and His sacrifice for the forgiveness of humanity’s sins still very much resonates in my heart - though I’ve also always known in my heart that I am a sinner and a heretic, because I don’t believe that anyone goes to Hell. I don’t believe there is a Hell, except for the ones we make on Earth, for ourselves and for other people.

Two years ago, I spoke at a college campus memorial for the Dec 6 Massacre, the largest mass shooting of women in the history of Canada. I was invited by a committee of organizers, all women, and yet still my appearance was heavily protested online by the anti-trans movement - to the extent that several hate articles were published about me in transphobic publications and shared several hundred times on X. My social media accounts were scrutinized, and a photograph of me and my spouse (who is not a public figure) was passed around the internet and mocked (though I still think we look rather cute in that picture). A few anonymous X accounts implied that I should be shot or burned to death.

In other words: many people who don’t know me were trying to make my life hell because I accepted an invitation to speak as a woman at a women’s memorial event. As it happens, the topic of my speech was the importance of extending solidarity and understanding across differences of perspective. The incident was certainly a test of that opinion. It raised a question that many of my readers and students have been asking all along: What are we to do when the people one is extending understanding and compassion to respond with rejection and hatred? What if some people can never be reached by the transformative power of revolutionary love, because they aren’t interested in revolutionary love?

***

When the story of Christ feels too limiting, or perhaps too corrupted by the legacy of colonization, I often find myself turning instead to another side of my cultural lineage: Chinese folk religion, Daoism, and Buddhism. When I was a child, I came across the story of the Chinese Princess Miao Shan, a story about mercy and forgiveness that has lingered with me and continues teaches me new things ever since.

In the story, the Princess Miao Shan is tortured by the King, her cruel father, because she refuses to marry the suitor he has chosen for her. Eventually, he tries to execute her, but she is whisked away by benevolent spirits and becomes an anonymous sage on a mountain.

Years later, the King is stricken ill and he is advised that he can only be cured if this anonymous sage will cut off their own hand and gouge out their own eye in order to make him medicine. Though the King cannot imagine that anyone would actually do this, he sends a messenger to make the request. The Princess does indeed decide to make the sacrifice. The King, restored to health, then journeys to meet the sage who saved his life, and upon discovering that she is daughter, falls to his knees and weeps, begging for forgiveness. The Princess does forgive him, and in this moment, she grows a thousand eyes and thousand arms and becomes the immortal bodhisattva, Kuan Yin, The Goddess of Mercy.

This story is, of course, shocking and confusing to many audiences in the way that many folk tales and Buddhist teaching stories involve gruesome and confusing elements. Certainly there are many possible interpretations, and one is simply that the story is very patriarchal, insisting upon the submission of women to men at all costs. Yet I do not believe, in my heart of hearts, that this is what the story is really about. To me, this is a story about the mysterious power of forgiveness to heal and transform us even in the midst of horrifying cruelty. Below, I offer offer two different, but complementary interpretations to this end:

Interpretation One:

The Princess Miao Shan starts off relatively powerless in the story - the recipient of abuse from her father that she can only endure. Yet by the time the tale has reached its second act, her father is at her mercy, and his life is in her hands. It would certainly be understandable (and maybe even thrilling and empowering in a certain way) if she were to then decide to preserve herself and let him die. Yet she does not. She forgives him and makes a sacrifice to save him - and in this third and final act of the story, she become supremely powerful, a goddess, far beyond the reach of mortal harm.

As a survivor of familial and intimate abuse, I’ve felt the pull of both kinds of power: The first is the power to set boundaries and to say “no” to an abuser, to set limits and to know oneself as separate from the abuser’s needs - personal power. It is an important and necessary power to develop on the journey through recovery from harm, and indeed, on the journey through life. Yet we can also get stuck in trying to reclaim our personal power. We can start to see ourselves solely through the lens of being a victim, and in so doing, lose sight of all the other parts of ourselves, including our own ability to do harm and our ability to experience ourselves as someone undefined by the harm that has happened to us.

The practice of forgiveness is one way to release ourselves from this trap. In this paradigm, forgiveness becomes another step in the reclamation of one’s power. When we forgive with full heart (and not because we are being forced to, or because we just think we “should”), then what we are declaring into being is that we are no longer defined by the suffering the other has caused us, and in fact we see that they are someone in need of our assistance. In order to access this power, forgiveness requires us to let go of our previous understanding of ourselves, a terrifying prospect and difficult work that is symbolized by the sacrifice of the Princess’s hand and eye - which are then replaced by a thousand divine arms and eyes, representing the possibility that lies on the other side.

Interpretation Two:

In the previous interpretation, we focus on the Princess as the central character with whom the reader is supposed to identify. However, we can also take a more depth psychology- inspired approach to this story. That is, we can start with the premise that the whole story represents a universal truth about human nature, and that each character represents a different part of the psyche.

Let’s imagine, then, that both the Princess and the King are parts of us: We might say that the Princess is the part of ourselves that is conscious and longing to be good, while the King represents the violent and dominating impulse within all of us. (In longer versions of the story, there are other characters who might represent other parts of the human psyche, but I’ll leave those aside for the purposes of this essay). The Princess resists the King’s demands, which is to say that most of us try to resist our own violent natures, but he is persistent and for a time, she has to retreat - just as all of us submit, at least occasionally, to our own worse natures.

Yet the King when in power gets sick and has to seek out help. When we are living from our violent and dominating nature, we are out of balance - we are psychologically and spiritually sick. He has to seek out help, and the Princess offers him her hand and her eye to consume. From a depth psychology perspective, I find this aspect of the story fascinating. To me, this reads as an incredibly evocative representation of the process of coming into deeper harmony with the parts of ourselves we do not like and try to repress - a process which most often can only occur when we do the extremely painful work of coming into contact with our deepest sufferings, our fear and our rage and then offering them love. To do so, once again, means giving up our current story of who we are (sacrificing the hand and the eye) in order to expand and deepen our knowledge of the self, which is represented by the transformation of the Princess into the Bodhisattva.

So there it is: When I feel lost and crushed by the weight of a world that wants to annihilate me, I come back to the story of Princess Miao Shan not only because I identify with the Princess, but also because I identify with the King, which frightens me. For so long, I lived in rage and cynicism, and I felt ashamed and terrified of that. For years, I wrote about revolutionary love, and now I think I am finally starting to understand what it means to turn that love on myself - including the parts of me that terrify me.

***
It’s just past midnight, which means that it is now Easter Sunday, which means that in the Christian tradition, Christ is risen once again. I like to think of the story of Christ as a very human one - a symbolic representation of the ways in which we all can descend into hatred and despair, only to rise again, reborn, from the embrace of the Divine. I like to think of Jesus and Kuan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, dancing together, laughing and crying and remembering all that they’ve lost and all that they’ve won. I like to think about those two deities lying naked in bed together, deep in the dark of the night, dreaming of a better world.

I forgive the people who want me dead. I’ll forgive them even as I fight them. I’ll forgive myself for wanting so much to just give up and go into that sweet night, even as I rise in grace and dignity. I will embrace my rage and feed it the flesh of my love, so that I can become something beyond anything that even authoritarian fascism could destroy.

I need every part of me in this dance and this struggle towards life: my compassion and my rage. Together, they make me sacred, make me capable of touching the divine, something that I will never allow any billionaire or bigot to take from me.

That, I think, is what forgiveness is for.