“T4T” is where trans folks can speak with each other directly, from the heart, without having to make ourselves legible to cis society. Here, we will tell stories that center our joy and our pleasure, our rage and our resilience, our quirks, our dreams, our love. Here, no experience or idea is too niche or too wacky — we care about what you care about. Read more from the series here.
Talking to Reverend Valerie Spencer is pure magic, like being hooked up to an IV drip of grown woman trans splendor. She speaks in sermons, punctuated by historical analysis, but also “spells and incantations, baby,” as she’d put it, her voice smooth as silk.
Spencer grew up in Los Angeles, under the roof of Ms. Luella Gilmore, her birth mother. This is where, the reverend tells me, she learned what love looked like. “When I transitioned, the first thing I did was call my mother. I said, ‘Lulu, when I come home, I'm going to be a girl,’” she recalls. “This was a Black woman in the eighties, in the hood, who told me, ‘Okay. Come on home, and we'll pack up your stuff.’”
Together, they filled a suitcase with her old boy clothes and dropped them off at a halfway house down the street. “Every day after that, when she got off work, she’d stop by the thrift store and buy me a little piece or two. She couldn't get them shoes together, because the girl had feet. But every day she would get me something,” Spencer says.
Gilmore taught Spencer more than acceptance; she showed her child what community care looked like. “My mother was doing case management before it was even called that. If you got put out your house because you were gay, my mother would tell you, ‘What's your mama name? Give me her number.’ And she’d go into her room, close the door, and call your mama and plead your case to get you back in your house,” she explains. “And if that didn’t work, she’d let you stay with us. I never had to go out in the streets to party. All the sissies and little baby dykes, they were at my place.”
Her sense of belonging expanded when she joined Unity Fellowship Church and came under the spiritual guidance of its founder, Archbishop Carl Bean. At Unity, Bean employed “liberation theology, but with all of the rituals and sounds of the Black church,” Spencer remembers. “And completely gay-affirming.”
Unity was a place where queer and trans people could join in worshipping a God that, Spencer says, “had no hands, but our hands, no feet but our feet, no mouthpiece, but our mouthpiece.”
Unity was also where a young Valerie Spencer met another woman who would reshape the trajectory of her life: HIV activist Connie Norman. Spencer had stepped out to get some air during church service when she ran into Norman in the back, smoking a cigarette. “‘I’m dying,’ Connie told me. ‘And I want you to take over everything that I do to make sure our tranny sisters have what they need,” the reverend recalls.
The words stirred something in Spencer, who at the time lived for little else than passing. “Honey, if you were a trans woman in those days, your number one mission was to look as pussy as possible,” she says. “In terms of goals and ambitions, hopes and dreams, that was not for girls like us. Our only job was to survive, and that meant being fish. Period.”
Connie’s charge gave Spencer something else to live for beyond seeing tomorrow: Minority AIDS Project, a direct-support and education organization founded in and run out of Unity. She worked at MAP for a decade — a time in which she became a leader in the field of LGBTQ+ public health advocacy. “We had no idea that we were blazing pathways for trans people,” Spencer says of her early days as an organizer. “We were just doing what needed to be done — trying to respond to HIV, to murder, to crisis.”
These days, Spencer is striving to find deeper ways of responding to the wounds inflicted by HIV/AIDS. “After many, many years as a leader in HIV advocacy, I assessed that [the virus] wasn’t the central problem. You can pass out all the condoms you want, but too often you go over to a client’s house and they’d have boxes and drawers of them. They were continuing to put themselves at risk,” Spencer tells me. “The central problem is that we have been so bruised by this world that we put ourselves in danger. Pastors told us we were filthy rags in the eyes of God, so how do you behave in a self-sustaining manner after that?”
To address this psychic injury, Spencer started her own organization, Holistic Empowerment Institute, which she founded last year as a place to blend behavioral health education with intentional Spiritual Integration, or what she calls “the sacred.”
“And when I talk about ‘the sacred,’ I'm talking about those homegrown, spiritual interventions that we do. Like singing in the choir, planting gardens, going kiki with the girls,” she explains.
These interventions, of course, come during a time of coordinated attack against our people. With political efforts to limit access to gender-affirming care sweeping the country, the right-wing weaponization of our lives has reached an ungodly boil. Thankfully, there are still folks like Rev. Valerie Spencer around to remind us that we’ve overcome so much already. And so to close this Pride month, we asked the reverend to offer some words for our community — specifically our youth — about love, about resilience, and about the inherent divinity of our trans lives.
— Wren Sanders
I want to begin by telling you that I love you. Just because. You are loved for no reason beyond the fact that you exist, beautiful young queer and trans people.
Secondly, I want you to know that none of this — these public policies, the hate, none of it — has ever been about you. They don't know you. They don't know your power. They don't know your narrative. They don't know your nuance. They’ve never tapped you as a resource, foolishly. They’ve never asked you about your cultural contributions, foolishly. It’s never been you. It’s always been a matter of the limitations within their social imagination. A matter of the way they teach and understand humanity, which is flawed.
What we’re all seeing in both peaceful and very violent outbursts is humanity crying out. People want to be themselves, and they can tell that they’ve been hoodwinked. They’ve been victimized by white supremacy into believing their color makes them better. We need to correct that. We need to call Humanity Protective Services and report that.
In the midst of this, your role, queer young people, is to remain true to who you are, to tap into that truth and to live in it fully. That’s your birthright, your sacred duty.
Remember, to be trans is one of the most spiritual things one can ever be in and of itself — even should you never pray. We are the rare people that caught a glimpse of God being itself as us, dancing around as us. And when we begin to move toward that vision, that is divine. That is creation. We tweak, shift and season ourselves in our own way, and the creator says, “that’s cool,” knowing that the most important creation of all is autonomy.
At the same time, we do want to be critical about our motivations. You don’t want to be chasing a carrot that isn’t leading to a sugar cube. If you’re getting surgery because you think it will lead to family acceptance, we need to query that. If you think having a vagina means you’ll never experience abuse, we need to speak truth to that, too. Especially for trans women, sometimes we have to say, “Enough.” I am passable enough. We have to know our beauty. We have to give ourselves an enough because we live in a system that’s designed to make us want only more. Sometimes, we need to trade transitioning for transitioned.
In truth, I believe all that talk about genitalia is really a distraction created by the medical community and patriarchy as a whole. You are not trans because of your genitalia. Keep it, get another one, put it in the freezer. Do what you need to do, but know that you are trans because of your intuitive abilities to heal.
We hear spirit, we just do. We feel it, sense it, know it. And oh goodness, we call it different things. We call it “individuality.” We call it “gender justice.” We call it “being my true self.” We call it “nonconforming.” But make no mistake: you may feel your gender in your body, but your transness lives beyond it. That’s spirit. That’s divine.
Now, I do have a personal request as your eternal auntie and someone who loves you so dearly. Please, while you’re here, turn this motherfucker out! Invent, take over, express, be vivid, be queer. Let them have it. Let them envy it.
Show them what our excellence looks like. They’ve been spoonfed a daily diet of queer deficit, queer pain, queer confusion, for decades. All they seem to know is how hard our lives are, how sad it is that we’re not accepted. Show them your shine! Show them what magna cum laude looks like, queer style. Show them what PhDs look like, queer style. Show them what this world can look like, queer style. Not that “gay and lesbian, LGBT” talk. No, no, no. Not that manufactured, Eurocentric, corporate, capitalistic packaged narrative. I’m talking faggot style, sissy style, punk, bulldagger, drag queen style. Show them that excellence, that innovation.
And, lastly, while you do, don’t ever lose sight of your internal sacredness. That can look like engaging in a spiritual practice that involves God. It may not involve God — your choice. That may involve religion or not — your choice. But hold close that divinity you possess within, that connection to creation. That, more than anything, will be the fuel that pulls you through. It will be your light in the darkness, your voice in the crowd. Spirit speaks to us on every channel. It’s in our music, our fashion, our prayer, our sex. It’s the key.
Young queer and trans people, keep listening.
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