Queer Caucus Roundtable Opening Remarks

[[For access purposes, below are my opening remarks for the Queer Caucus Roundtable: “This World is Not Enough: LGBTQ Rhetorics and Belonging-in-Difference”]]

The title for this panel, "this world is not enough," comes from José Esteban Munoz. He writes, "…we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing."

And that quote captures how – for me – queer and trans life embodies this year's conference theme. I don't know that any aspect of my life felt so much like "Doing Hope in Desperate Times" as choosing trans life-- as starting hormone replacement therapy deep in 2020, after having just moved to Texas amid Stay-at-Home orders, in a year when my chronic illness escalated into adrenal insufficiency—during which unanticipated stress risked triggering cardiovascular failure—I thought, sure, now is the time to do puberty again.

I didn't see it at the time, but the very act of choosing transition was me deciding that there was a future worth trying and possibly failing for. 

Beyond that very specific context, though, for queer and trans folks of color, claiming who we are often requires believing in a world that is not yet here. And to get there—to even know that it's possible, to have faith that it can be conjured… we have to find one another. We have to learn to build together—a process that is not easy or straightforward, especially when you come together with disparate histories, in hostile spaces, with memories of betrayal or wounding.

The world we need is not yet here. "LGBTQ" is not yet a community, but we keep trying, because—as women of color, queer of color, and trans of color scholar/activists have taught us—coalition is not a destination but a process. A commitment to one another that we choose over and over again.

So thank you to everyone for choosing to join us this morning, and I'd also like to thank my co-panelists for answering my call and coming together for this conversation today.