I was invited to share closing words at a Trans Day of Remembrance service on Sunday, November 16th, 2025, held by Saratoga Pride at the Wyckoff Center at Skidmore College.
I’ve shared what I wrote below.

I grew up in a Christian tradition that didn’t know how to handle queerness or grief. On my patient and kind days, I try to see the people I went to church with as caught up in the same cultural forces beyond our control, the same lies we didn’t know how to disprove. The religious practice we shared kept us trapped within it as much as it kept others outside of it. Now that I am out of that tradition (and out of the closet), I find myself carrying the same message to every queer-affirming space I’m in, religious or not: Thank you. I’m sorry.

Because the truth is that, no matter how much control I had, I know the harm that was done and is still being done by my siblings in Christ. I have repented of those beliefs and it is my mission to work against them, but the work is always not enough and too slow. I believe in change. I believe in redemption. I believe that even the hardest hearts can be softened, because I have felt my rocky heart break open. But in the time between now and that world when we can all live as we are in the fullness of peace and love, there is grief.

I learned how to grieve from the queer community, from days like the Trans Day of Remembrance. I learned that grief was not something that we can ignore or skip past, but something that must be felt with your whole chest. We grieve because the people we have lost matter. Their lives leave an empty space in the world that will never go away: we will just learn to live in a world without them. And yet, grief, like love, can change us in ways we never expected. It can drive us to commitment, and care, and fierce advocacy. May the grief we have shared today transform us and confirm us in our community and in our work.

Preparing for this service, I found myself dwelling on dancing. Seattle columnist Dan Savage has said, “During the darkest days of the AIDS crisis we buried our friends in the morning, we protested in the afternoon, and we danced all night, and it was the dance that kept us in the fight because it was the dance we were fighting for.”

My friends, we know the crisis we are in. We know the lives we have lost and the protests we have ahead. And we know that it is us we are fighting for, for trans and non-binary kids and adults to live a life in this world as who they are, with their whole chest, for the grief of these days to be behind us all, and the world ahead of us to be full of possibility.

While I alone cannot stop all the harm that is happening now and while I alone cannot undo all the harm that is done, I want to leave you with a poem about dancing, one that has healed some of the wounds my tradition brought upon me. It’s called Jesus at the Gay Bar, and it’s by Jay Hulme, from his collection, The Backwater Sermons.

He’s here in the midst of it –
right at the centre of the dance floor,
robes hitched up to His knees
to make it easy to spin.

At some point in the evening
a boy will touch the hem of His robe
and beg to be healed, beg to be
anything other than this;

and He will reach His arms out,
sweat-damp, and weary from dance.
He’ll cup this boy’s face in His hand
and say,

my beautiful child
there is nothing in this heart of yours
that ever needs to be healed.

May we know this for ourselves. May we, together (no matter what people say, no matter what the church says, no matter what the government proclaims, no matter what may come our way), may we believe for ourselves and hold as true for each other this truth: who we are doesn’t need to be healed. Who we are doesn’t need to be fixed. Queer, trans, enby, gay, bi, pan, femme, masc, ace, aro, demi, you are gorgeous as you are. You are good as you are. You are a shining bright spot in this world of woe, just as you are. Stay with us. Struggle alongside us. Yearn along with us. And like the glitter from the dance floor or the pride parade, we will not let you go. You are precious to us.

As we leave from this space, may we go as we are: queer and trans, cis and straight, reshaped by grief, surrounded in love, precious lives building a world where we can thrive.

May it be so.