Your non-conforming body would be worshiped as a blessing on the village.

A love letter.

I’m sharing this with permission. Beyond a few additional embellishments/finessing of prose, it’s a letter I wrote to a dear friend. I wanted to remind them of something so easily forgotten in this world full of “traditional values” and “issue voters” and “presidential decrees”. On this International Transgender Day of Visibility I thought it was something that people like us, the “gender non-conforming” need to be reminded of.

This isn’t based in any specific cultural history; it isn’t my exegesis or born out of detailed research. It’s a love letter. I sent it to them, and now I’m sending it to you.

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In another time, in another place, things would be different.

The village, the clan, the community, whatever term they’d use at this particular moment of human history, would look upon you and marvel. They’d gaze upon you and the only way they’d understand what they saw was the certainty that a demigod walked among them.

Your parents would be treated with respect and deference.

Your father would be seen as “in tune with the will of the gods”. He’d be seen as blessed to have his hands and his hips guided to his wife by the divine on that fateful night. He’ll never again pay for a drink, and when the other men bicker about a fence-line or who owed who which livestock, all he’d need to do is clear his throat. The heat in the other men’s voices would cool and they’d find the common ground.

And you mother? Oh, it would be known that she, among all the women in the village, was chosen to perform the most dangerous task of all. The gods gazed upon her and saw that only her body had the strength to be the vessel for a god. Only she had the compassion and heart to raise a child such as you, one brimming with power and purpose. She’d be looked upon with reverence, because she bore you into the world, into this village, into this community.

All of this because of the existence of you.

There would be stories told about your birth, about your childhood. Villagers will embellish, sure. Night after night, year after year the tales would grow. Sometimes the parables of your life claimed you were born with immediate strength. Still only an infant, you lifted the fallen ox cart that pinned your father against the rock wall in the narrow pass. Other times they claimed your strength was discovered in moments of calamity and fear. That very same cart, that same narrow pass, same dire circumstances but in another telling you are entering your teenage years, small and terrified at your father’s gasps of pain you pulled at the overturned cart, never expecting it to budge, but finding you could easily lift it away. Your tear-stained terror evaporating when you discovered you were something special.

But they wouldn’t need to embellish all the stories.

The ones about your care and kindness to small things? Those stories never needed sprucing up, no embellishment required. You, tears in your eyes, yes, but the only one in the village with the will the cut open the belly of the braying animal that was beyond saving to rescue the welp still within her. The first one to charge out into the storm, barrelling through fields, your voice roaring over the crash of thunder to call the name of the child absent from the headcount.

All of this because of the body you inhabit.

This body and all the ways it doesn’t “fit” into what people expect, its size, its shape, in another time, in another place, would be worshiped. The dotting crones would argue, some insisting you be bathed in sacred forest streams fed from the water that tumbled down the black volcanic stone of the caldera wall. Others would swear that the salt of the ocean waves on your skin is the way honour the gods. You’d sit and smile at them, having resolved to do both to take no chances, while they daubed your salted skin and rainwater soaked hair with ochre. While they decorated you with sacred sigils and marks of the gods.

Women in the village would gaze upon you and silently pray that the swelling in their womb would produce a child that was like you, a child that had your height, your reach, your capacity to endure. The men would look to you and hope that you’d be the one they had the honour to stand next to when the bandits inevitably raided. Those tense days after the harvest was brought in would gnaw at them as they wondered when the alarm call would come. But you standing ready, eyes on the tree line, reminds them that when the invaders boil from the woods, no harm could befall them if they stand at your side.

You. Magnificent you. The blessing. The sign from the gods.

Your existence proves they want this village to prosper, to survive. That maybe, sometime in the future some calamity would befall, but the gods had placed you there to single-handedly fight off the wolf hoard or to carry the village on your back through the flood waters. Even if none of that came to pass, it wouldn’t make you any less special. You’d still be seen as a blessing. Even as your body gave out, as it let you down. The way its ligaments stretch too far, the way the quakes and cramps wrack your limbs, the way your joints are losing their grip on your bones, even these would be seen as “a sign”, even these burdens too would be told of in stories as your “curse”.

For a mortal person was not meant to have the body of a god.

Inevitably the dull clay that we’re all made from will crumble, but the people of village will understand. You may not realise but they have seen the truth that lives in your heart. Yes, for them this body is a blessing to have in their community, but for you it is a daily reminder. Every day you look at your hands, your arms your feet and wish that they were not yours, that someone else had been born into this vessel and that you could just be “normal” like the rest of them. They know how all these years you’ve struggled with the feeling that your body “wasn’t yours”, and seen how every day you put that feeling aside for the good of the village.

They’ve always understood and they treasured you all the more.

So, as that dull clay crumbles, they’ll carry you on palanquins and litters. Someone will always be there to help get your feet under you to rise to your full height or to help you down onto the softest bedding in the village. Towards the end you’ll see that the people of the village look at you differently from how they did when you were young and fit and shining. Those little girls? The ones born of women who prayed for them to be like you? They’ve grown up and are soon to be mothers themselves. They don’t pray that the child forming in their belly is strong like you how their mothers did with them. No, they look on you and pray that the children they carry are as loved by the village as you are. And the men who hoped to fight by your side? The ones who knew that if they stuck by you no harm could befall them? They are too old to be much good in a fight now. But their sons? Their sons look to you, and they see the reason why they should stand together to protect the village.

You. Magnificent you. The blessing, the sign from the gods.

They’ll have compassion for you all the way to the end and beyond. So much so that when another child is born into the village, one who is like you, one who is so uniquely different, they will cry out your name as though you’ve been returned to them. You, their shining example that the gods are watching, the living proof that the divine walks among us.

With love,

–S