“Before babies are born they live in the sky where they fly among the clouds. The sky is a happy place and calling babies down to earth is not an easy thing to do. From the sky, babies can see the course of human lives.
This is what the Hmong children of my generation are told by our mothers and fathers, by our grandmothers and grandfathers.
They teach us that we have chosen our lives. That the people who we would become we had inside of us from the beginning, and the people whose worlds we share, whose memories we hold strong inside of us, we have always known.
From the sky, I would come again.”
–Prologue to The Latehomecomer by Kao Kalia Yang
Nobody asked to be born. But maybe our Spirits chose us. When I started thinking about my life as a consensual process, one that I agreed to and chose rather than one that was forced upon me, I started seeing that I could design my life. I wanted to make choices that aligned with my values and allowed me to live with integrity. Coming out as trans was the first step.
My trans experience is one of taking back control over my body and gender in a way that is aligned with my life and my values of integrity, openness, vulnerability, and authenticity. I am bringing my body back under consent of me and my life. Rather than my body out there in the world, going through the motions and playing along with society’s rules, I decided that I’m going to design my body the way that manifests the fullest, truest and most beautiful aspect of my spirit in its purest form. My body is mine to create in the mystery and beauty of life on earth.
Before coming out as trans, I had thought about consent many times before.
I had thought about consent in terms of sexual assault—is it consent if you’re drunk? I had thought about consent in terms of the takeover of Indigenous and colonized land by white settlers—is it consent if they didn’t understand land ownership, what they were giving up and the implications of it?
I had thought about consent in terms of my own research. What does it mean to give informed consent to be a part of a research project in China, as a vulnerable population in a dangerous and constantly changing situation, and is it fully informed consent if you can’t check to make sure that they would still want their stories to be told? Is it still exploitation if they gave informed consent?
Yes, we all live within constraints, and often constraints with real material effects including institutional and structural inequality: gender, race, and capitalism just to name a few. But within those cages we have some time and space to move around–the time is exactly one lifetime, the space is the earth. What have you been wanting to do or be in your life? Do you think your life and your body right now are under consent or coercion when it comes to yourself and the path you are on?
