Letter from a trans activist to her grandmother: "These are times of injustice"

In a society that has historically denied us its love, in a difficult context for the trans community where militancy and activism erode our bodies, facing the enormous burden and consequences of visibility, the pain that seems to be the only possible reality, thinking about affective bonds can be a caress.

July 17, 2018

By Keili González, from Nogoyá, Entre Ríos. Dear Grandmother: Today, words fail me. I strain my throat to escape this dry knot that traps a scream. I write to you because I miss your mate sessions, my cheeks long for your kisses, because my eyes cannot see your smile, my very marrow does not purr, it does not dance today. Eroded by an incessant struggle, thinking of you is a band-aid for this pain that will not stop bleeding. Time has stood still. My body seems unable to endure. I push this cart. These are difficult times. Guilt has been my best treacherous friend, the challenge seems to be defined as "waiting." My dark-skinned, tobacco-colored woman with nails heavy with weariness, whom life forged through hard knocks, I write to you because your memories make me a wellspring; the wrinkles on your hands and your tears are the story that this heteropatriarchal and sexist society has buried. I search, I don't know where, for that strength of the trans grandmother who sheltered me. That strength that, to the rhythm of my arrival at your ranch, where you hid your saints among candles, you often told me you didn't understand. The southern village sheltered you, the castor bean plant was your roof during the harsh summers, which you scrubbed with rags in the flat ground between basins. The kettle's shouts announced its arrival; that bag of affection was its target; the bitter mate was the intermediary for those long, sweaty conversations. In that moment, I would tell you that your party would make a big change: demagoguery is strong, and so is injustice. "Worry about your allies and not about those who criticize you," you would say. Today I sense that I too fell into those models of conceiving a struggle; I know that self-destruction is not the answer; it seems my heels no longer click on the path, that's the reckoning. I thought being intelligent meant solving problems. How naive this body is; one can't do everything, and meanwhile, the days go by. Frustration has become ingrained in me and keeps me in agony. The mere thought of trying overwhelms me. I was taught to put myself above myself, to overcome myself, as if I were my own problem to be conquered. Of course! I'm not omnipotent, what did I think? Dangers lurk around every corner, and needs can't be met with willpower and effort alone. It was true, plans fail, my dear! My fears haunt me now. Living between guilt and chance made me feel incapable of managing my own life, a sad system that presents it to me as an individual problem that my denial won't change. Help me, you've been through this, and back then, the harsh machismo diluted it. Believing that everything can be solved with willpower has been the problem of habit. "Be patient with yourself," you would tell me. There is no personal willpower capable of that, nor any space of equality built from a hierarchical position. Realizing that I won't recover from everything and that I don't have to do it all the time, or do it alone, that what's natural is cultural, here the utopian aspect of what seems to be reality returns .

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