you are asked to take the place of your director on a steering committee for king county's annual homelessness count project. 

you add this to your growing list of meetings and to the list of duties not being paid their dime. 

you arrive to see that you are the only brown person in the room. 

the research team is all white and none are residents of WA. 

they share two tools they're employing for the count: a visual tally and a qualitative survey.

the visual tally is to be completed by volunteers who check off what they see as they roam around their assigned areas. 

the visual tally includes gender. 

the surveyor, by their own eyes and by their own ideas of what a "male", "female", or "transgender" person looks like, makes the determination of the gender of the person that they see. 

there is no conversation or interaction, just drive-by visual assumptions. 

you think about the flaws of relying on an arbitrary and binary system that dictates that a “male” looks a certain way, a “female” looks a certain way, and that a “transgender” person looks a certain way. 

you think about how this method inevitably misrepresents, under-represents, or excludes individuals who have the greatest history of barrier to homelessness services. 

you vocalize this. 

you say that as facilitators of a process that the county has long relied on for data to guide funding and policy decisions, we should regard our responsibility in being thoughtful and equitable about how we capture people's identities. 

to appeal to folks who don't care about gender disparities, you argue that this work wouldn't be producing valid or reliable data. 

a few people nod in agreement, but the research team deflects your points and the conversation ends. 

you leave the meeting and a county representative at the same meeting thanks you for sharing your thoughts and compliments you on your "eloquence." 

as if it's a surprise that brown folx can be eloquent. 

as if being complimented diffuses the nausea of all the emotional hustling you do to survive working inside of a system that's killing your people. 

this is the fxked up irony of the work - that we struggle in order to get free and fight to death in order to have life.

since birth, the world has worked to convince me to deny my own humanity.

from dress code,

to penmanship practice,

to english as a second language courses,

to early childhood bullying,

to shouts of "go back to your country" by white people at the store and white men at marches,

to the demand of my "coming out" story as a pre-condition to a job offer at a queer non-profit center,

to the catcalling and grabs at my body by strangers on the street,

to the fetishization of my identities by white bosses, artists, councilmembers and pastors.  

since birth, i've learned that the personal is political --

that my being is politicized. 

when colonization, migration, exploitation, and war

write themselves in our histories,

our existence is political.

as we grow more keen to the world's interactions with our bodies and histories,

we grow well-practiced in seeing ourselves first through the eyes of our oppressors

and this becomes a lens through which we respond to and interpret the world around us.

buried under these layers and bearing these lenses,

i am both made and am encouraged to reduce others to an object. 

what oppression does well is cut us into parcels,

and through this infliction,

we learn to throw daggers.

i've lost friends and comrades in this struggle,

not only to mortality, but to ego and trauma. 

little is glorious or easy about this struggle,

but i see no other fight that can be won before the fight for

my own humanity and gracious and critical spaces

where our full humanity can be held,

where our bodies can be free,

and where our love can grow radically.