"Every Beat of My Heart is a Merciful Act of God"
On Gossip (the band) and the Powerful Defiance of Trans and Queer Life
This is the seventh installment of my weekly series of Friday music shares. Today I’m writing about Gossip and their song Act of God. I’m using this song and Gossip’s music in general as a jumping off point to reflect on the beautiful defiance inherent in trans and queer lives. Here’s the song:
Have you ever stopped and thought about all that is keeping you alive in any given moment? Even on a purely biological level, countless systems within you must move in seamless choreography to create and sustain life. This is part of what I think of when Beth Ditto croons “Every beat of my heart is a merciful act of god” on Gossip’s song “Act of God.” Every heartbeat is a tiny miracle of coordination and electricity. It begins with a spark from the sinoatrial node—a cluster of cells in the right atrium often called the heart’s natural pacemaker. That signal travels through a complex network, telling the heart's chambers when to contract and when to rest, pushing blood through our bodies with rhythmic precision. This happens over and over, day and night, without our conscious effort. That it works at all—let alone with such persistence and (general) reliability—is nothing short of spectacular.
I’m interested in the reference to god here, because Beth Ditto has previously described Gossip’s origins as developing alongside her rejection and fleeing of the Christian culture she grew up in. What does it mean for a queer singer to invoke god here? It could be interpreted religiously, which would be radical in and of itself: saying ‘Yes, I - a very queer person - am alive because of the compassion of a god who wants me alive.’ But given Ditto’s history, I don’t hear it that way. I hear it the way we more commonly use the phrase “act of god”: to mean an incredible act of nature. The rest of the song suggests that the incredible act of nature is her surviving heartbreak - her heart continuing to beat (all that anatomical choreography) even as she faces loss and grief.
My plan for this week was to write about this song as an anthem of resilience. But I saw Gossip perform on Thursday night in Boston, and as I watched this unapologetically queer Southern woman on stage with two openly trans badass musicians (Bijoux Cone and Teddy Kwo - the latter is also Ditto’s long-time romantic partner), I felt something different. I didn’t experience a sense of resonating resilience when she sang; instead, I felt like the whole room throbbed with trans and queer defiance. I wanted to shout in the face of the proponents of Project 2025 (et al): my trans heart is beating, motherfuckers.
And not only is it that I am alive in all my transness, but that I, too, am a part of the incredible natural world; I too am alive due to a beautiful network of anatomical choreography and a world that provides the precise conditions to nurture and maintain such life. Fuck yeah and fuck you if you can’t see that. The cursing is the closest I can get to capturing the collective charge of that show, of all the queer and trans people scream-singing along that our heartbeats are all acts of god. We were having a party celebrating ourselves and celebrating this incredible queer and trans band and the music they create, and I almost felt sorry for the people whose judgments of us meant they would never know that kind of power and love and beauty.
May of Gossip’s other songs also extoll and exude queer and trans defiance and beauty. There’s the classic “Standing in the Way of Control”:
We’re standing in the way of control
We live our lives
Survive the only way that we know
And a similar spirit abounds in “Move in the Right Direction”:
When I was a youth worker in a small trans youth group in 2011 or 2012, I had each young person choose a song that might motivate them when they were dealing with hard things, and then I made them all mix CDs of everyone’s songs. This was my contribution.
Keeping my head up, looking forward
Reminiscing will get you nowhere
Never say never, starting over
It's not perfect, but it's getting closerI will hold back tears
So I can move in the right direction
I have faced my fears
Now, I can move in the right direction
I'm doing fine
One step closer every day at the time
I won't lose my mind
Lose my mind
And honestly I often cry when I try to sing along to “Pop Goes the World”:
For once
We'll do what come naturally
We'll approach it casually
With no apology
For once
We will have the final say
Goodbye to yesterday
Cause we know we're here to stay
There’s more, but I won’t assume you want me to go through their whole discography. Trust me, I could!!
Gossip was among of the first examples I had of women acknowledging attraction to other women. Beth Ditto and her original bandmates hailed from Arkansas. Her early music, which I discovered them when I was the only openly gay1 student at my North Carolina high school, included themes of queer attraction and break-ups, all sung with a thick southern accent. The queer loneliness2 of my adolescent environment meant that musicians like Beth Ditto and Tegan and Sara and Des Ark meant a lot to me. To hear women’s voices singing - often casually - about queer love and queer life was reassuring.
And here is that other part of why “Act of God” moves me so much: this presentation of queerness as natural. Transness as natural.
Today is my 15th anniversary of starting testosterone. Later this year, we’ll be at my 15 year anniversary of my legal name change and my gender-affirming surgery. A trans person I know recently observed to me that because of their particular trans trajectory, they could set aside their transness and “blend in” to cis society if they needed to, but they knew I could not. It struck me because I hadn’t even considered blending in as a cis person or thought explicitly about the fact that I ultimately couldn’t.3 Of course I couldn’t. The idea of living as a cis woman is so unnatural to me that it didn’t even occur to me to name that I couldn’t. I, like most trans people, have asked myself what I might be able to survive under a future political regime that may criminalize gender affirmation, but my questions were “can I survive losing legal access to testosterone?,” “can I survive not being on testosterone?,” and “can I survive having legal documents that say I’m female?” I never asked myself “can I live as a woman?” I told my partner that the idea of living as a woman is shakingly unfathomable. I woke up to my transness when I was 21 and I started testosterone when I was 22 and still in college. I’m 37. I’ve never lived as a woman.4 Anyway, this is all to say that for me, maleness is what is natural. Transness is my natural state. Queerness and transness are what developed and survived in defiance of society’s external efforts to shape me into something unnatural to me. Just as they have developed and survived in so many others, as well.
Transness is so natural that aggressive efforts to repress and smother it fail time and time again. We are the dandelions that grow up in the cracks in the pavement. Every beat of my trans heart is an incredible act of nature both in its mystifying biological mechanisms and in its defiance of cisnormative systems and anti-trans oppression. If you’re a trans person, read that line again, slowly. Let it charge you with our collective power. Our trans hearts are beating, motherfuckers.
Also if you want to have even more of a sense of why I have so much admiration and appreciation for Beth Ditto, here is a clip of her from 2017 in Trump’s first presidency, speaking about trans rights and trans and queer community and then launching into a live rendition of Standing in the Way of Control:
Having not yet realized I was a man and come out as trans, but being fully aware of my primary attraction to women.
Which is to say I had some close and wonderful friends but no queer community or even representation.
Upon scrutiny, I mean. A major privilege and safety factor I have is that the general cis person assumes I’m a cisgender man upon first assessment or casual interaction.
I barely even lived as a girl truthfully, spending a lot of my childhood, adolescence, and emerging adulthood rather androgynous and untied to my female sex assignment.