Decolonize Medicine
What Are Our Medicines?
***We use the phrases "Black Trans" and "Afro-Trans" to denote African-descended individuals who live their day to the day lives beyond the cisgender binary - as Black Trans Womxn, Black Trans Mxn, Black Trans Non-Binary folks, Two-Spirit, and all the other multitudes of names we give and have yet to give to our fluid Black genders.***
What Is LMS's Decolonize Medicine Circle?
Decolonize Medicine (DM) is a series of community circles that engages Black folks in A) (re)learning from each other our African indigenous practices of medicine; B) undoing harmful internalized ideas we carry about our medical agency and (sub)humanity; and C) building a collective path towards abolishing the Medical Industrial Complex.
What is the Context for This Circle?
For centuries, the Medical Industrial Complex (MIC) has co-engineered a colonization practice that has displaced Black communities from our lands, our bodies, our indigeneity, our spirituality, our sources of care and safety, our medicines, our right to knowledge, and ultimately our health. This colonial project has especially impacted the wellbeing of Black Trans people. Due to the influence of the MIC, Black Trans folks now live in a world where our genders, sexualities, abilities, ethnicities, spiritualities, and other markers that speak to our fluid expansiveness are un-named, mis-named, or deemed as pathologies. And yet still, Black trans communities continue to steward medicines that anchor this world within non-colonial planes. Decolonize Medicine seeks to invite Black Trans folks into our powers as medicine makers and scholars while rallying us in co-building practices to abolish the MIC.
2021 & 2022 Theme for DM
LMS’s theme for 2021 and 2022, and for this current iteration of the DM series, centers around the invitation: “What Are Our Medicines?”. This invitation pulls from one principle of LMS’s Liberation Medicine framework which holds that each of us in the Black trans community is as much a healer as we are also in need of healing. By recognizing and nurturing our innate abilities as practitioners and scholars of medicine, and by bringing our Afro-indigenous skills/knowledge into a collective whole, we manifest a world where we can meet each other’s care needs without reliance on the MIC.
Facilitate A Circle for Decolonize Medicine!
We are seeking facilitation proposals from Black trans folks and would love to hear from you! We are actively welcoming Circle keepers from around the world and throughout the Black Trans diaspora. We truly believe that every Afro-trans person has a medicine to share
For this role, our ask is for you to boldly harness and share your own medicines - as a healer, creative, scholar, educator, artist, organizer, dream worker, tarot reader, diviner, witch, griot, body worker, mental health worker, spirit/soul worker, sex worker, gender expansivist, hair care specialist, hxstorian, alchemist, scientist, earth worker, herbalist, astrologist, musician, seer, dula, sound artist, visionary, any and all names/identities you may give to practices of yours that allow you and others in your community to live in wellness - within an interactive circle of other Black Trans individuals. If you are interested in facilitating a circle in the DM series, we invite you to contact us at liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com.
Past Circles in the DM Series
The Medical (Hx)Story of My Black Trans & Queer Body
A Narrative Gathering of How Black LGBTQ Folks Experience & Create Medicine
May 15 - July 17, 2019; Every Wednesday; 6 - 9 PM
Circle Holder: Ohenewaa
WHO: Black Trans And Queer Folks
WHERE: Seattle
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
Black Trans Medicine
Nov 11 - Dec 23, 2018 (Every Other Sunday); 3 - 5 PM
Circle Holder: Déjà Baptiste
WHO: Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming folks
WHERE: Confidential location in Capitol Hill
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
We are Black enough. We are Trans enough. We are Human enough. We are enough.
Inviting the Black Trans and Gender Non-Conforming (TGNC) community into a space of thriving, story-telling, ancestral re-connections, and medicinal concoctions.
Black Trans & Queer Healing: REST
July 27, 2018; 6 PM
WHO: Black Trans and Queer Folks
WHERE: Confidential location in Capitol Hill (NOT ADA Accessible)
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
A free-flow gathering for Black trans and queer folks to rest and root. Bring your words and silences, your gestures and expressions, your personal and material anchors - and simply be.
Re-Birthing Ourselves: Decolonizing The Stories Of Our Bodies
July 12, 2018; 6 P - 8 P
Circle Holder: Linda Chastine; Ohenewaa
WHO: Black Trans and Queer Folks
WHERE: Confidential location in Capitol Hill (ADA Accessible)
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
What does it mean to be present in our bodies, and to stay there? In this workshop of the Black LGBTQ Decolonizing Health Series, we will engage in deep personal reflections about the ways our bodies have been forced to disengage from our human experiences in response to colonial trauma, and healing rituals that can guide us on our journeys to reclaim and be at home in our bodies.
Displacement of Black Trans & Queer Folks from Blackness
Jun 14 & 27, 2018; 6 - 8 PM
Circle Holders: Déjà Baptiste; Ohenewaa
WHO: Black Trans and Queer Folks
WHERE: Confidential location in Capitol Hill (ADA Accessible)
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
At the last Decolonizing Health workshop ("We Carry Our Ancestry in Our Bodies"), DISPLACEMENT & DISCONNECTION from Blackness were themes that consistently came up. In this following 2-part conversation & healing circle, we will continue unpacking the positionality of Black queer and trans folks in relation to Blackness, how our identities and life experiences inform our (dis)placement, and the agency we have in re-constructing a Blackness that is Afro-queer and Afro-trans humanizing.
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Black Trans & Queer Healing: We Carry Our Ancestry in Our Bodies
May 17, 2018; 6 - 8 P
Circle Holders: Déjà Baptiste; Ohenewaa
WHO: Black Trans and Queer Folks
WHERE: Confidential location in Capitol Hill (ADA Accessible)
CONTACT: For more info + RSVP form, please email liberationmedicineschool@gmail.com
In this first session in the Decolonizing Health & Medicine series, Déjà Baptiste invites the Black queer &/ trans community* into a house of conversation about the indigenous memories our bodies carry. As a people whose ancestry has been violently erased from history - within both white and Black/Afro society - Black LBTQ folks go on extensive journeys into the past in order to affirm ourselves in the present. As we flip through the archives of history looking for reflections of ourselves that will affirm our right to exist, Déjà challenges the Black LGBTQ traveler to also look within ourselves - for our blood and bones carry the origin stories that we seek.