Digital illustration of a large Black trans mother deity tenderly consoling a trans youth. The deity has a halo and is wearing a hooded purple cloak with patterns of animals, plants, insects, totems and magic swirls. Her large blue hands support a glowing pink circle of healing light around the head of the trans youth. The youth has their chin raised and their eyes closed, and wears a blouse and single hoop earring. Yellow text says “Divine Love Is Our Birthright” against a starry black background.

Divine Love Is Our Birthright

By Féi Hernandez with poetry by SA Smythe.

Our calling to the divine, otherworldly, and the liminal spaces we live in informed how we embarked on our respective journeys for this project. How do we give a face, a name, a word to the multitudes that enhance our majestic power and beauty as trans Black, indigenous, and people of color around the world?

We understood that in their unbordered livingness, our ancestors, animal guides, spirits, god(s) or source all carry various geographies, meaning, and knowledge, gracefully loving us in our totality through whispers, light pushes, and witnessing.

This set a sparkling spiral of creative energy to flow between and through us. Our final works demonstrate our efforts to bridge the ancient, present, and future across time and space to reflect what we think is needed to support our collective imagining of another, more just and tender world.

Our intention was to capture that liminal radiance and weave it into an eternal mosaic of intersectional trans, queer, Black, and indigenous resilience. We forcefully maintain that divine love is our birthright. We know that there is so much violence that pulls us from feeling fully loved and held, and so as an artist and a writer we felt compelled to create a clear cosmic pathway that links us to our greatest strength and source of our resistance: unyielding faith in our grandeur, in our beauty, in our joy.

We offer a poem and an art piece to help provide a sanctuary, a place to sit, to recognize that we are loved by our ancestors, held by divinity, and forevermore eternal. In commemoration of the 2019 Trans Day of Remembrance and Resilience, we honor how that love sustains us in the here and now, especially as the human kin we encounter slowly catch up and respond to our everyday call for what it would mean to fully love us, too.

We hope that these bridges help us meet the long line of ancestors, the stars, the present living, and future generations in one place full of enduring love, lasting protection, and otherwise community.

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