SAM I AM: On Trans Abundance in the Face of Violence
I found out about Sam Nordquist on Valentine’s day, shortly after I launched Your Trans Fundraiser. Sam was a Black trans man from Minnesota, who went to Central New York for love and was tortured and murdered instead. I’m a Black trans man from Central New York, who moved Minnesota to feel love. It was a decade ago when I was about his age. I also encountered profound violence, some of which had followed me here. But I was lucky enough to live through it. That we’re both Black trans men would have been enough to link our fates. That we intertwine in a shared pattern of movement over sacred earth, makes me feel as we’ve brushed spirits. It’s a prettier sentiment than being in negative seven at his vigil, where Attorney General Ellison and I brushed coats instead.
I’m a mutual aid organizer and fundraiser. I’m also a descendant of enslaved Africans, an anti-zionist Jew, and a transgender man. I’m watching America collapse inward on its unstable foundation of hatred. The vibration of the crumbling and Sam’s death in the strata reverberate a question through me. One I wish on an ancestral level that I didn’t have to ask:
How do people enduring genocide stay connected to their abundance?
MAKE YOUR WORTH BELIEVABLE IN YOUR BODY
The tagline of YTF is “Mutual aid education made for TGNC community.” It’s composed from the knowledge that TGNC people are so much more than any violence leveled against us. One of the roots in that knowledge to act on the recognition you exist beyond any dollar and every death. Your life may depend on what resources you gather, but it’s worth more than any amount that you do. Maybe you believe that, but how do you get your act together? What works for me is making my narrative around my value feel true in my body. Then, I move from there.
I’m a trans culture bearer through performance and a proud SAG-AFTRA member. I started in theater at 12. So I can tell you that characters in plays only begin to pop as an art when the lines and/or the emotional score are tied to a physical reality. Eventually, you show your work in front of an audience. Before that, you must practice holding that reality with others. But first, those lines or that score have to be believable in your body. I take this order of operations into acting like I’m worth more than any money I make. I wrote the 7 Conditions for this reason. I say them before I leave bed. I also journal them, I move with them voiceless and voiced throughout the day. But instead of for a character for one show, it’s a lifelong durational piece.
What are the truths of your abundance and how do you embody them?
REACH FIRST FOR THE PEOPLE WHO LOVE YOU, INCLUDING YOU
Across all of the manuals for YTF–from the free mini text message campaign to the Crowdfunding Starter Series–the most important piece of instruction is to ask people that love you first. And not just when it comes to money. When seeking any type of support, you should go to people who love you first. That’s such a hardcore reflex to train if you, like many TGNC folks, have had experiences where you’ve shared your needs and faced immediate brutality. Or you’ve seen too many people pay with their lives. Yet still, we must.
The in body picture of my child to young adulthood is one of trauma, made by long exposure to violence. Even after over a decade of investing in my mental healthcare, the sensations of loving myself and being loved by others are new by comparison. For years, I’ve been safe and had an excellent support system. However, I have to consciously practice daily to stay aware of the sensation. It’s another trans medicine; for me, as important as the ‘mones, but cis people can’t legislate it. When I lose the feel of that and call for what I need, it’s like trying to make a satellite call with yarn and a cup. I’m muffled from the tension of body memory warning me to hold back. I’m silencing myself where others used to. When I activate that sense memory of love first, then release a call to action to my loved ones, the returns are more love than I can keep track of.
How agile is your practice of reaching out to those your love? What does it feel like to activate from the sensation of being loved?
DO LESS
This is the simplest, but far from easy: Do Less. Right now, the assets on YTF measure about 40 pages of written material across manuals and a little over an hour and a half of video content. The majority of that is templates, the goal being for the TGNC user to raise more, with tools provided to do less work. By the end of my tenure in my last role in a multi-million dollar, national non-profit, I was creating templates that generated hundreds of thousands on a quarterly basis. Yet, I know queer humans. With every other template I wrote for YTF, I had to remind the user not to add more. I also had to put a list of things to avoid adding. Even with all that, I’m 100% certain that a handful of people will probably add more in a way that fucks up their flow. Why? Because for a lot of us, overachieving is a form of survival. Adding “more” regardless of need or quality, is a trauma response to feeing like you have no options.
Let me say one mo’ again: overachieving is a form of survival. Adding “more” regardless of need or quality, is a trauma response to feeing like you have no options. When I say this, I’m looking directly at the Black trans men who held the responsibility of the eldest daughter. Now, I’m looking in the mirror too, mind you. That’s why I also added copious reminders to take breaks and use alternate scheduling practices, like time chunking with the pomodoro technique. This is double important for people with cognitions prone to monotropism. Trauma to the level that our entire TGNC community experiences day to day and/or brains that lose time naturally, require constant reminders. Number one being that doing the most in a short amount of time actually isn’t healthy for you long term. And the whole center of fundraising mutual aid for your care is to be healthy and have a long term.
Are there areas of your life where you add to have a sense of more? Where can you dial back on doing and redirect to feeling-experiencing sensation in your body?
Sam should still be alive. If he’d ever come to the Twin Cities cities, I could easily see meeting him the way I met most of my younger trans cousins–In the living rooms and dining rooms of other Black trans people. I would have taken him to coffee and told him how weird Central New York can be. How the northern parts of the state where I’m from are full of prejudice, but that the mountains are full of ancient trans beauty. How Oneida is just as mysterious as Superior, but scary in a different way. I might have even travelled with him back there myself. But five, non-Black, transphobes took that possibility from us. I hope they get exactly what they deserve and more. We must mourn, even if we’re tired of crying at graves and at state capitols.
Ricardo Levins Morales said a few weeks ago at his book launch that we must “Grieve what is grievable. He also said despair is not a feeling, it’s is a nervous system disorder that keeps us from feeling. I will take it further and say that to make space to grieve in a society that eliminates opportunities to do so is an important action and the processing is a resource. One TGNC people can’t afford to misplace. We can’t change that in this moment of human existence, TGNC people experience violent disruption in our sense of self and communal worth. The tension between cultivating internal value in a world that devalues you is chronic pain.
Move only as fast as the slowest part of you. Don’t try to appease hate or cope with loss by being as hard on yourself as the world is. Staying connected with all the preciousness within and around us that no war, no legislation, no violent death can ever touch, is a big lift. But we will make it if we commit to helping one another support it.
Link to the GoFundMe for Sam’s family, here.
Qamar Yochanan (he/him) is an out and proud Black, transgender, Jewish artist, organizer, and development professional who has raised over half a million dollars in funds directly since 2020. Read more about him here
