On Transitioning

I realized the true nature of myself from the driver’s seat of a Subaru Forester, moonlight shining, humidity fogging the mirror. It was heart-pounding, hands-sweating raw terror. I had spent years cloaking myself in faux happiness. Distracting audiences with stunning visual arrays, I had perfected the art of moving through the world as a “woman.” Yet inside was a thriving oceanic universe of sadness. A school of fish called Worry. Sea urchins of Fear latched to rocks of Suffering. When I finally worked up the courage to shine a light into the choppy waters, I discovered that I was transgender. It was an all-time low in my life full of not knowing.

My encounter with Buddhism happened four years before the evening in the Subaru. I was already suffering, and slowly unfolding my identity in the rural South. That suffering carried me on waves to the shores of Buddhist refuge. The Deep South is not a great place to try to find Buddhist communities, so I read every book that I could get my hands on. The Dalai Lama’s easy-to-understand texts on happiness and compassion were my salve. Over time, I realized that just reading books and trying to be more compassionate were not enough. I was full of questions and I wanted to find a teacher to guide my spiritual path. My self-realization of my own identity only fueled this desire. I bounced from Shambhala Centers to Insight Meditation lectures to a traditional Tibetan monastery. Each community had the dharma. Yet, I never felt quite at home in spaces guided by straight, cisgender people. I was the outsider being asked to conform.

After a few weeks attending meditation sessions, I would present the teachers of these centers with my suffering. I found their responses were often the same. “Just sit with it;” “feel your fear;” “drop your labels;” “notice your sadness.” I grappled with these responses because they made me feel not seen. I was already intimate with my fears and sorrow! Merely arriving at the decision to transition at all requires such a depth of practice. Yet, I figured it was my lack of understanding of Buddhism that was the problem, so I would return and press for a deeper teaching. Maybe there was something I was missing? Yet, I continued to clash with teachers who chose not to acknowledge my trans body and its relationship to the dharma. I found that my transgender identity unsettled these teachers. When I would present questions of transition, identity, and the intersectionality of the dharma, one teacher would simply change the subject. When I persisted, I was told, “Such questions are not true spiritual practice.” I suspect that my body, sitting in the interview room, acted as a lamp shining on the numerous privileges of identities the teachers held, and the ways those identities shape exclusion within the sangha. In these times I would fall back on my books. I would read anything I could get my hands on, and developed an independent practice of studying the precepts. When I read the precept of right livelihood, I knew at my core that living my life as anything other than who I am would be to break the precept. Right livelihood is to not waste one’s life. And to attempt to live a life in the skin of another—to not acknowledge my nature as a transgender person—is to live a life of a lie. So, I would move on and try another sangha.

I found solace in the emphasis on the bodhisattva path, the history of bearing witness, and how those two things deeply overlap with my social justice work in the transgender community.

For nearly eight years I practiced alone, unable to find a teacher and sangha who valued my transgender body and the framework through which I experienced the dharma. In 2015, my work as an American Sign Language interpreter connected me to Ōshin Jennings, a Deaf Zen Buddhist priest. He invited me to join him on a monthlong summer retreat with his home temple, the Village Zendo in New York. I eagerly signed up to join him despite knowing nothing about Zen. For a month I lived with and practiced alongside an entire sangha of outsiders—queers, folks living with HIV, musicians, artists, writers, people with disabilities, people of color, and immigrants. I felt finally at home. I seamlessly transitioned from my self-taught studies into Zen practice. I found solace in the emphasis on the bodhisattva path, the history of bearing witness, and how those two things deeply overlap with my social justice work in the transgender community. My first dokusan with Roshi Enkyo O’Hara was one of the most tense moments of the summer ango. I remember my heart racing, muscles tense, and my awkward attempts at a full prostration. I didn’t know what to do, or how to say it. I was afraid of making mistakes. When I finally disclosed my transgender identity, instead of recoiling like past teachers have, she softened and smiled. I was finally seen!

It wasn’t long before I was challenged by the baffling teachings on non-self and emptiness. As Zenju Earthlyn Manuel writes in The Way of Tenderness, in Zen traditions “to speak of identity was a mark of being unenlightened.” Even though I witnessed the Village Zendo’s welcoming space of one’s identity, I found myself thinking that the only way I could be a real Buddhist would be to stop focusing on my transgender identity. I put my identity aside and just listened. What I discovered through this listening practice is that Zen Buddhist teachings and history allow for transgender experiences.

While many sanghas are hesitant to accept transgender people, they also honor one of the most transgender-like bodhisattvas—Kanzeon. More widely known as Avalokiteśvara, Kanzeon represents compassion and commitment to the bodhisattva path. From the beginning of my Buddhist practice, I have always felt a strong affinity with Kanzeon. Their desire to bear witness to all the suffering in the world and to find a way to put an end to it resonates with my own social justice practice. The Lotus Sutra describes Kanzeon as a being that can take any form and gender in order to bring the dharma to multiple audiences and save all sentient beings. Throughout history, Buddhists have been unable to agree if Kanzeon is male or female. Cultures have depicted Kanzeon as male, female, and even without gender at all. Buddhists have accepted this fluid representation of Kanzeon throughout history. I view the acceptance of Kanzeon’s shifting depiction as a practice in the acceptance of the impermanent self. Why then do so many Buddhist sanghas struggle to accept transgender people in Buddhist spaces? Perhaps it is easier to accept the concept of one fixed expression of gender in the abstract, but when confronted with gender fluidity in the dokusan room, many struggle. I continue to ask myself “Why?”

In addition to grappling with the sangha’s fixed perceptions of gender, I also struggled with some core teachings. In Zen practice, the concept of non-self is a fundamental teaching that arises in most chants and koans. Yet I found myself sweating on the zabuton, afraid of the implications. How could I be trans if there is non-self? If there is non-self, then who is doing transitioning? If there is transitioning, then what is transitioning? At my core, I knew that duality is in the eye of the viewer. Who is looking at me, and who is witnessing that moment’s identity? How do those labels slough off like the charred skin of an onion, exposing new meaning beneath it? While those labels can change, the “I” is still there. That “I” still is shaped by my transgender experience. That “I” is still transitioning in time and space.

The Song of the Jeweled Mirror Awareness says:

filling a silver bowl with snow,
hiding a heron in the moonlight,
taken as similar they are not the same,
when you mix them you know where they are

When I first chanted these lines, I found myself responding to the concept of nothing being lost when we recognize both interdependence and also the differences in front of us. Transitioning is eternal. It’s more than moving from one gender to another, one identity to another. Our self shifts in space and time constantly. Our bodies grow and decay. The events around us transition into other things. Our sorrow transitions into happiness, and happiness into sorrow. What we call “self” is not a permanent definition but an evolving language. The Song of the Jeweled Mirror Awareness slowly began to chip away at my fixed notions of my self. I began to see how the world viewed my transgender self, but also how I helped create those narratives.

Indeed, this unraveling of fixed ideas of my self is what guided me to my final piece of text where I found acceptance of transgender bodies and identities in the dharma. The Zen Peacemakers’ three tenets are:

Not Knowing
Bearing Witness
Taking Action

Not knowing is to engage with your life without fixed ideas and attachments to self. This moment-by-moment practice allows room for the unknown to arise, which in turn can create space for the honoring of multiple gender expressions in sangha spaces. If we abandon what we believe we know to be true about gender, then we create shifts that welcome transgender bodies and experiences into our sanghas. When I began this journey, I feared my experience of not knowing. It felt as if I was at the bottom of a tumultuous ocean. Now I realize that this very thing that I feared guided me down the spiritual path that I was searching for all along.

Bearing witness builds off our practice of not knowing and opens our eyes to the multitudes of experiences in the world. It is to listen without judgment. To witness with full engagement of one’s heart. I often wonder how different my experiences would have been with Buddhist teachers in the past if they had chosen to bear witness to my suffering instead of attempting to find a solution to it. In my own practice, bearing witness means listening to those who have been excluded from spaces. The exclusion does not begin nor end at the temple gate.

The final tenet, taking action, is to respond from our wisdom of not knowing and bearing witness. It is to act at precisely the right moment. After many months of my listening practice, I realized that simply abandoning my transgender identity in Buddhist spaces wasn’t a solution. Rather, I need to honor the multifaceted ways through which I experience the dharma, while also abandoning my fixed notions. From this place, I can take action to encourage the creation of inclusive sanghas.

These teachings have guided me on this discovery of the meaning of self. Through my journey sailing on these choppy waters, I have questioned how we can create more inclusive sanghas for transgender people. It’s the responsibility of not only the transgender member, but the entire sangha, to examine our fixed notions of our self and see the ways those ideas create exclusion. My path from acknowledgment of my transgender identity to spiritual development cannot be unwound. I am both transgender and Buddhist—Buddhist and transgender. I am neither one nor the other, but both at the same time.

♦

From Transcending by Kevin Manders and Elizabeth Marston (anthology editors), published by North Atlantic Books, copyright © 2019 by Kevin Manders and Elizabeth Marston. Reprinted by permission of North Atlantic Books.