Trans Life-Cycle, Land, and Community Stewardship Center

I am working towards establishing a land and community stewardship center focused on supporting the trans life cycle. After years facilitating youth in land and community stewardship projects, I yearn for a space centering trans lives and stewardship. I am especially interested in how we experience and ritualize all the transitions in our lives from birth to death. Integral to this is how we tend to the intersectionality of our identities by adapting our inherited rituals to include our trans experience. There are many queer land-based projects out there: Queer the Land, Queer Nature, St. Louis Trans Memorial Garden, and more. Many trans folks are also working in land stewardship projects not specific to trans or queer identity. And of course we have many community centers dedicated to specific identities and experiences to which trans people are connected. After observing and working at these intersections for many years, my sense is that we need more spaces that support the trans life-cycle within a land-based framework.

Another dimension of this project that feels especially important to me is a space to explore and support trans aging, end of life and death care. I have a particular interest in human composting and incorporating trans bodies back into the land. There is something compelling to me about visibilizing and collectivizing the care work we do for trans bodies at end of life and after death because we do carry so many stories of unjust death and disenfranchised loss. At this time in our world trans folks are more likely to experience sudden traumatic death due to violences of homicide and suicide. This is especially the case for Black and Indigenous Trans Femmes. Collectively we carry these stories as well as the stories of both the community care work we do for each other and the ways systems expose us to further bias and violence. Cultural projects can help us hold and metabolize and respond to these realities. I am inspired by community grief and loss cultural resource centers such as A Resting Place, which centers AAPI grief especially related to traumatic loss shaped by structural violences of racism and xenophobia in Seattle’s International District. I feel hopeful that a Trans Life Cycle garden could be another node in this network of liberatory community care work especially as we face heightened erasure of our lives. More to come on this project as it develops. Collaborators welcome!