Sure, now you know,
now it's obvious, what with the light
of the Lord streaming through the nine
windows of my soul and the music of rain
following in my wake and the ordinary air
on fire every blessed day I waken the world.—Philip Levine
Performing magic can be a battle of the nerves. As I explained in a recent post, a lot needs to go right during a magic trick, and a lot can go wrong. With those kinds of odds, it’s a wonder anyone would want to attempt to perform magic for a living. Who needs all that anxiety day in and day out?
I do, apparently. The simple fact is that I can’t not do magic. The magic bug bit me early, at age seven, not uncommon for magicians. It has been the core of my identity ever since. Once you know you are a magician, you can’t turn back.
I wonder whether it is like that for a child who can’t shake the feeling that they were born in the wrong body. Despite what the anti-trans crowd wants to believe, many trans folk do sense their true self at an early age. In “Self-Made Man,” an essay published in the UK literary magazine, Granta, author Mark Gevisser wrote that in 2009, “just over half of the adult transgender participants in an online survey in Britain said they knew they were ‘in the wrong body’ by the time they were six.”
When our government forced the removal of references to T, Q (queer), I (intersex), and the plus symbol (+), it was denying, incredulously, that a huge swath of humanity exists. That plus symbol accounts for millions of human beings who simply want to live their lives. A Wikipedia entry on gender identity provides an alphabetical list of gender identities, from Abinary to Xenogender. There are more than one hundred listed.
In a world supposedly created by a loving God, shouldn’t everyone get to be who they are? The obvious answer is yes. But what if you don’t believe in God or have a more complex view of creation? Well, then, even more so.
Theoretical mathematicians tell us that before the Big Bang there was a singularity. I’ll let Google’s AI handle this one:
According to the Big Bang theory, the "singularity" before the Big Bang is a theoretical point in space-time where all matter, energy, and space were concentrated into an infinitely small point with infinite density, essentially representing the beginning of the universe as we know it; it's a state where our current understanding of physics breaks down, meaning we can't definitively say what existed "before" this point.
Sometimes I like to think that everything that ever was or ever will be was contained in that infinitely small point with infinite density. Before there was time, everything that ever was or ever will be — well, it just was. So you and I were in there somewhere, because we exist now.
So say I, anyway. And it is just me being an armchair philosopher practicing sacred mathematics. But, to borrow a line from Hemingway, isn’t it pretty to think so? Because it means that somewhere, the person you are still growing into already existed and is just waiting for you to meet up. Talk about a great first date.
We can’t not be who we were meant to be, and no one has the right to take that away from us, maniacal government interruptions notwithstanding. It’s why we take to the balustrades when our freedom is threatened—or the freedom of those we love, including our trans siblings. I find something inexorable and undeniable in that. And hopeful. It’s the “shall” in We Shall Overcome. Meanwhile, every act of selfhood is an act of insistence and resistance. What’s happening now is impedance, but, by God, we will have our dignity.
Come to think of it, maybe this is not sacred math but sacred physics. Not sure. I just know it’s sacred. That’s all I got. Discuss.