The Power of the Liminal Other

The Universe knows I am different. I was marked Other from birth.

Perhaps in innocent eyes, I would appear as a white hound with red ears. Perhaps in lost times, I would remain young as others aged around me. Perhaps in distant places, I would walk slowly, never to be captured by my pursuers.

Perhaps. But that last certainly wasn't true when I was a child.

I was caught, pushed down, teased, tormented, humiliated - all the casual cruelty of elementary school children that also included pulling wings off butterflies.

This treatment, the acknowledgement of Other within me, through me, and around me, is common to my community. Whether I was labeled "too sensitive," "a bit weird," or simply "from California," all attempted to explain why and how I was different. All attempted to describe how I was Other.

But all attempts to categorize me failed to express the truth of what makes me different, what sets me apart from the Apparent World, where everything is as it seems.

In truth, the explanation is simple: I am a transgender woman, I am liminal, and I have power.

The fall of the houses of Other

Throughout history, evidence of Other experiences abounds, although some require careful polishing of Medieval glosses to reveal. As the internet meme goes, once you see it, you cannot unsee it.

Communities of Others were set apart from normal people: on islands beyond choppy waters, across gorges bridged by ropes, atop mountains capped with snow. The communities were isolated not to protect normal people from the Others, but to shield the Others from being inundated by mundane petitions for healing, oracular feats, and conveyance of Sovereignty.

Neil Laird discovered countless examples of gay history cis/het-washed to be made palatable for modern television audiences and sensibilities. Josephine McCarthy speaks of communities that escaped sex and gender norms to practice their power in private, emerging long enough to declare the next King. Jhenah Telyndru created her Avalonian Tradition from Celtic mythology and patchy historical accounts of mysterious women in groups of Nine.

The Other was capable of the above and more: commanding weather, reading the future, curing illness, judging rulers. The Other was always magical, to be respected at pain of death. The Other was not to be pushed down with casual cruelty.

At least, not until a young, scrappy religion called Christianity required a method to boost membership in its ranks. Then the Other was condemned, their communities burned to the ground, their residents scattered to the Winds with the magic they represented.

The Other could not exist. There was only One Magic, this new religion claimed, and it suffered no Other.

Attracting kids and cats

In Christian leaders' eyes, the Other is too liminal - it blurs lines they require to be clear and stark. The Other is dangerous, unpredictable. Life without the Other is pious, albeit boring.

But what powers lie hidden within the Other that must be squelched in modern times?

I need only look at my community - the transgender community - for answers. A common transgender characteristic is skill at calming tempestuous children. Tantrums to upend nations (or at least a fast food restaurant) quieten when an Other draws near. Infant eyes goggle at Other auras.

An unusual attraction for cats is another common transgender characteristic. Even cats who dislike and fear humans pause to judge we Others with less critical felinity.

Those entities whose eyes have not been obscured by scales of fear feel the Other and embrace us. It is only a protracted attack against the transgender and homosexual experiences that allowed our power - our magic - to be obscured as evil.

What could be evil about skill with children or animals? On the surface, we Others seem useful to societies who utilize us as opposed to revile us.

The power in liminality

We Others can express the feminine and the masculine. We Others can begin and complete, quicken and nurture. We cross boundaries of activity as we fall short of lines of convention.

As a transgender woman, I consistently failed to fulfill the expectations of my social environment. That was enough to be ridiculed as one who struggles to fit in.

But for an entire political party, an entire religion, an entire society to hate me for being Other seems extreme. That hate goes far beyond thinking I'm only weird, beyond laughing at my awkward attempts at femininity. What I perceive is more than hate.

What I perceive is fear.

We Others are capable of straddling lines, of acting in a way that appears to contradict the Universe, and it grants us a power most can't tap. Those who hate me sense my power, and they fear I will rise to reclaim it.

The Otherworld is magic, and those without magic - those whose religion forbade magic and inadvertently left their followers helpless against it - cannot allow me to exist. I exceed the boundaries of what their limited worldview can contain.

Just as lepers were left outside the city gates, ostensibly to die, those who fear my power seek to ostracize me at least, to destroy all I stand for at best.

But the Other is not so easily banished.

What the Universe set in motion

Adults may choose to ignore the draw that lures kids and cats - or worse, train themselves not to perceive it. But they cannot fail to feel us in the instinctual bones left behind by fifty millennia of human evolution.

They sense me. They sense the Other. They believe laws can stop what the Universe set in motion.

They are wrong.

Humans may try to bury the best of our history, but energy cannot be destroyed, it can only be given new form. I will not be gone in years, decades, even centuries. I will remain, because I am of the fabric of the Universe.

I don't know what acts of good karma I performed across many lives to earn the privilege to bear my transgender title proudly. But I remember the parable that reminds leaders responsibility entails accountability, even if the religious leaders who condemn me do not.

I suspect most people who profess to hate the LGBTQ community are not aware why. They only parrot what religious or political leaders squawk in frantic exhortations of social peril. They fail to recognize their religious and political leaders only fear loss of social power.

But it is we the people who hold the power.

My transgender and nonbinary Brothers, Siblings, and Sisters: being Other is our gift. My gay, lesbian, and bisexual Siblings: what sets us apart makes us strong. My LGBTQ Allies: we are all of one species.

Reclaim your Other; reclaim your power; reclaim our planet. We hold the key to a better society, a better world, a better Universe.

We are Other and we are One.