To be queer is to reinvent yourself. To toss aside the self-image that was handed to you as an infant, to craft a new identity — and maybe even choose a new name. And yet, anyone who joins the LGBTQIA+ community has to reckon with the weight of the past.
Lately, I’ve been obsessing over the concept of queer generational trauma: the pain passed down to us from our ancestors, which we bequeath in turn to those who come after us. It feels like a strange concept at first. Most of us aren’t necessarily raised in queer families, and we don’t grow up steeped in the history of the struggle for liberation. (In part, because the rich and powerful do everything in their power to keep it that way.)
But if queer culture is real, something that is passed down and continues across lifetimes, then queer generational trauma must also be a thing. You can’t pass down culture without also sharing the pain that birthed it. And the same way that queer culture infuses us with resilience and strength for the battles ahead, embodying the pain of our forebears reminds us of the reason we have to fight in the first place. Both things are gifts, in different ways.
In my upcoming novel Lessons in Magic and Disaster, a trans woman named Jamie teaches her heartbroken mother Serena, a lesbian, how to do magic. The more I wrote, the more I delved into Serena’s grief and rage, which meant doing some research about the challenges lesbians faced in the 1990s and 2000s. That gave me insight into the transphobia Jamie faces here and now. I started reading up on the subject of Jamie’s PhD dissertation, which deals with (almost certainly) queer authors and artists of the 1730s and 1740s.
What I found knocked me sideways: an ornate tapestry of repression and punishment, stretching back 300 years. Same shit, different decades (or centuries). In particular, I was startled to discover just how similar the fuckery aimed at 1990s lesbians was to the dehumanizing tactics trans people are facing today. People warned that lesbians could not be trusted with children, and in some famous cases like Bottoms v Bottoms, courts took children away from their lesbian parents. Lesbians were threatened with violence, and one lesbian bar was fire-bombed in Atlanta. Books like Heather Has Two Mommies faced the same attempted censorship as Genderqueer.
Meanwhile, artists of the Georgian era, like the gender-nonconforming actor/writer Charlotte Charke, had their gender expression and sexuality scrutinized and faced similar punishments as today’s queers. At one point, an utterly penniless Charke could only get work as an actor if she wrote to the newspapers reassuring audiences she was no longer performing male roles, in male garb.
My small, intimate family story was becoming something much bigger: a document of historical pain.
Obviously not all queer people have queer biological parents. Still, making Jamie a second-generation queer, raised by a lesbian couple among other queer families, turned out to be a fruitful way of thinking about how the weight of past moral injury seeps into our bones and sinews. The struggle for liberation carries on from generation to generation, and the scars of past battles continue to affect us in the present. Jamie says she was raised in a household that was warm, loving, and paranoid — because of the ever-present fear that the shitheads could arrive at any moment. Because your family might not be safe even in a progressive city. Jamie’s queer birth family felt like a way of literalizing a metaphor, or making an abstract phenomenon more concrete.
The framework of “generational trauma” (also called “legacy trauma,” “transgenerational trauma” or “intergenerational trauma“) was developed to talk about the descendants of survivors of the Holocaust, Japanese internment, chattel slavery, and other atrocities. There’s some evidence suggesting trauma can actually be passed down epigenetically to one’s descendants, because our bodies store and transmit stress, but the science on that is far from settled.
Social work professor and mental health expert Maria Yellow Horse Brave Heart defines historical trauma as “cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma,” such as massacres and other genocidal acts aimed at Indigenous people, and adds that this trauma is accompanied by unresolved grief.
In my experience, queer generational trauma seems to operate in a few different ways:
1. Many of us have depended on elders for guidance and encouragement. These elders put on a brave face but inevitably bequeathed to us their memories of past mistreatment, often in spite of their own best intentions.
2. There’s the gagging ouroboros of history: At a certain point, you have to realize you’re beating your fists against a wall that bears the indents of countless fists, going back forever.
3. And finally, many of us struggle to find community and feel disconnected from those who came before, which ironically makes the weight of history harder to bear.
When I started volunteering for tiny indie queer publishing ventures 25 years ago, I loved the intensity of the people I was working with. The whimsy, the hunger for transgressive storytelling. It took a long time to realize how many of the people around me had been through stuff I could barely imagine and had lost more than I could ever know, including the AIDS pandemic and the Reagan-Bush onslaught. All around me, people were devouring life as if they’d been hungry forever.
But when I think about encountering the lingering toxic waste of past trauma, what I remember is being around trans people who’d transitioned earlier than me, and feeling like they were kind of uptight. Judgy, even. The ways they tried to police my own self-presentation and instruct me on the “right” way to be trans and to talk about myself. One trans woman, only a few years further along in her transition than me, refused to be seen in public with me because two trans women standing together would attract too much of the wrong attention. Trans women lectured me on the foundation garments I should wear to pad my hips, as if there was something wrong with my own pre-estrogen body shape. They obsessed about “passing,” about embodying various femme stereotypes.
I found myself rebelling against my own elders by being more outrageous and colorful, not less. I slowly came to understand they were trying to protect me — albeit in the most fucked-up way possible.
Some of this behavior was because they’d come out during a time when trans people had to follow a strict rulebook or else be prevented from transitioning. But much of this was rooted in hypervigilance, low self-esteem, anxiety, depression. The memory of past discrimination and abuse expressing itself as a kind of grouchiness and strictness. It took me a long time to realize the bad advice I received from older trans people was their own long-buried stress bubbling up to their surface. As with all trauma, generational trauma causes all these — hypervigilance, anxiety, depression and low self-esteem — which can appear outwardly like being a tightly-wound jerk.
Coming out in the late 1990s and early 2000s meant I arrived at the start of a long period of greater acceptance, peppered with setbacks like the Defense of Marriage Act and California’s Proposition H. The people who came before me were burdened with the knowledge that this never lasts.
It’s not that queer history repeats itself; it’s more like queer people are trapped on a super heavy pendulum that swings back and forth between acceptance — or perhaps indulgence — and hatred. Like the Scissor Sisters, people simply cannot make up their minds whether we should live or die.
And I’m starting to feel as though we have a very limited ability to shift the momentum of that pendulum. In this, we are in the same situation as many other marginalized groups, except that there is a particular disgust and loathing buried in many people’s psyches for those of us whose sexuality or gender expressions challenge easy expectations about what our bodies mean and what they are for.
Nobody ever told me the pendulum would swing back in a hateful direction. Nobody told me not to take the good times for granted, not to count on more and more acknowledgment of the vital role that queers creators play in shaping culture.
What I did hear, again and again, was: Don’t sell out. Don’t compromise who you are to go “mainstream.” Do not ever turn your back on your community or take your community for granted. Those tiny indie queer magazines and book publishers I mentioned earlier, whose editorial stuff I was fortunate to join, were constantly sending out warnings about the folly of assuming that white patriarchal capitalism could be on our side.
So now I’m in the position of trying to be there for younger trans people, or in some cases, trans people my own age who are just starting their own transitions. I organize local get-togethers for trans folks, and I also try to be a comforting presence in other ways. What I try not to do is overwhelm anyone with the shit I went through back in the 2000s: the microaggressions and macroaggressions, the job discrimination, the stalking and harassment. It’s not like they don’t know or as if this isn’t still happening to lots of people today. But the last thing I would ever want to do is make already anxious people more anxious in service of centering myself. (And of course, I try extra hard not to judge or police anybody, because fuck that.)
Still, mentorship necessarily involves an element of sharing trauma. To let people know they’re not alone and they’re not imagining any of this bullshit. Part of being supportive to newer trans and queer people is teaching them whatever survival strategies I’ve learned, and those survival strategies are rooted in trauma. I’m trying to be there for others, the same way others were there for me when I started out, but hopefully without sharing quite as much pain along the way.
I started out by saying queer generational trauma exists because of the same reasons queer culture exists, but I want to turn that on its head and point out that along with the memories of hard times, we are also passing down generational wealth.
I can read about Miss Major and Sylvia Rivera. I can read the writings of James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Justin Chin, and countless others. There is so much beautiful artwork, so much indelible music. The riches we share are so much greater than the memories of hardship. And I see queer artists today building on that legacy in so many ways, saying: Let them try to erase us. We are handing down our stories and dreams along with our trauma, and those things are often inseparable.
Even the realization that we are the inheritors of pain is its own form of treasure, because it’s a story about survival, and it reminds us to be kinder to ourselves.
Every generation wants, and deserves, to live freer than the last. We don’t just fight for our own ability to breathe easy, but also so that the people who come after us won’t ever have to deal with the shit we’ve marinated in.
Lessons in Magic and Disaster by Charlie Jane Anders comes out August 19 and is available for preorder.
