Hijab Butch Blues

by Lamya H.

What I want instead is to disappear. Stop living, more like. I just want to stop being alive. It’s a constant ache, this wanting to disappear.

Slowly, it starts to sink in that it’s racism that’s the problem, not race; that it’s white supremacy that’s the problem, not me; it’s white supremacy that needs to be fought and dismantled.

This idea of Allah as trans feels erased from the space, and maybe it’s dramatic to feel this way, but it feels as if the idea of transness itself has been erased from the space.

They cover themselves and are exiled to earth, a place where, among the legacy of their punishments to all of their descendants, is the consciousness, the rigidity of gender.

This rigidity of gender follows me like a punishment everywhere, across oceans and continents.

As if the only way to be trans is to transition to a binary gender, as if I can’t exist as I have been, in some space in between or beyond, using she or they pronouns and seething when people call me a woman and laughing when people tell me I should transition.

And gender is nowhere within these concepts that define the Divine. God is neither man nor woman nor masculine nor feminine, nor not masculine, nor not feminine. This God, who teaches us that we can be both and neither and all and beyond and capable of multiplicities and expansiveness. Nonbinary, genderqueer, They, this God that is the God, my God, my Allah. Who created the world and created language and created the first person, Adam, this first person who was man and woman and neither and both and not a mistake, never a mistake.