Free Mom Hugs

on remembering the good in the world

Content Warning: Intense discussion of death and violence against Black transfem youth

I recently decided to do something hard. For my honors thesis, I’m going to study the ways transmisogyny operates in women’s spaces, particularly women’s colleges. To do so, I’ll need to read a variety of texts dealing, often directly, with experiences that I personally have had or fear having. It’s going to be worth it; this work is deeply important to me, and I think important in general. But it’s not going to be easy.

Yesterday, I had a moment of remembering how hard this may be. Sitting in an ostensibly cozy study room at a vaulted wooden table amidst warm, orange light, I encountered violence on the page. I’d been reading about violence all day, annotating Gayle Salamon’s revelatory study, The Life and Death of Latisha King. But it hadn’t really gotten to me, not too deeply; I’d been managing to compartmentalize, to put some space between my own hurt and the hurt being recounted as I read. Then, that shifted.

It’s one thing to read about violence you — in a twisted, unacceptable way — have come to expect. Shocking but not surprising. Young white supremacists enacting racist, transmisogynist terror is something that, in this broken world, I have come to understand as common. Not natural, but common. It’s another thing, though, to read about the quieter, more banal kinds of terror. In my case yesterday, I encountered depictions of school teachers taking the killer’s side. They, too, were shocked and disgusted by the gender expression of a young Black trans girl. They sympathized with what happened next.

I wanted to throw up, reading about that. I got sad, then angry. Mostly angry. What a particular kind of evil that is, to be a teacher, entrusted with children’s lives and souls and coming-into-this-world, and to betray them, to hate them. It made me question whether there is anything good left in this world.

But then I paused. I put the book down, and despite the urge to throw myself into the darkness and let it consume me, I paused. I called my best friend and told them how I felt, how I needed to scream. They did not minimize the hurt, but nor did they feed it. They helped me remember: there is good, too.

As we were talking, I recalled something good, indeed. Sitting on my bookshelf, in my room, my home, is a little puff of yarn. That’s its physical form, anyways. In spirit and affect, it is a hug.

I got the hug — a “portable mom hug,” as it was described to me in the moment — at a pride parade a few years ago. Volunteers from the group Free Mom Hugs were out doing their thing, giving hugs to queer and trans people who might need them for all number of reasons, and this volunteer in particular had taken it a step further. She had spent hours before that day — the big event for free mom huggers, pride is — preparing and crafting and pouring love into something to be held. I hold that love, now. It sits on my bookshelf. It reminds me what is good.

I am going to keep reading, keep learning, keep fighting, keep insisting that this world is a violent one and that we must try to change that. We must bear witness to the horrors of anti-Blackness, of transphobia and misogyny and transmisogyny in particular, of all that hurts people, hurts us. And we must remember what is good, too. When we want to scream, we should scream; and then we should find a hug where we can.

We must confront all the bad, understand it, fight it, end it. But we can’t forget the good.

Love is all around us.

With love — Lily