We're Grieving

Reflections on Trans Loss, "Point of Disgust" by Perfume Genius and Alan Sparhawk, and Kintsugi

“I’m afraid I’ve been broken by the past year.” “I am so damn tired, and feel like I have been grieving nonstop for a year… I miss what my life was - and what I thought it would be.” These statements — one from a client and the other from a colleague and friend, both of whom are trans people living in America — have been echoing through my mind the past couple of days. Alongside them are associations to kintsugi, the Japanese art of mending broken pottery with visible lacquer combined with precious metals, and a friend who at her mother’s funeral explained that her grief was uglier and messier than memorial services typically allow for and then invited everyone to just scream with her. There’s something here about the honesty of true grief, of not trying to hide the ways we are broken. And the importance of not running from our grieving, broken selves. It is in this context that I am listening to and sharing Perfume Genius and Alan Sparhawk’s collaborative version of the Low song “Point of Disgust,” track 23 of TRANSA.

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This is the tenth installment of my (mostly) weekly music sharing/writing series, and I am happy to be returning to TRANSA. TRANSA (stylized as TRAИƧA) is a project presented by activist and musical non-profit Red Hot Organization and produced by Massima Bell and Dust Reid. In short, this is a musical celebration of transness and what trans people offer the world. In the words of the TRANSA team, this album is "a spiritual journey across 8 chapters and 46 songs, spotlighting the gifts of many of the most daring, imaginative trans and nonbinary artists working today. It softens the edges of the world we know, and invokes powerful dreams of the futures that might one day thunder from its cracks." For Massima and Dust, the word transa means "to love without limits" and "you are more than you know."

Cover art for TRANSA

The album features collaborations from 100 artists across genres and the spectrums of gender and transness/cisness, from icons and well-known musicians like Sade, Sam Smith, Laura Jane Grace, Moses Sumney, Allison Russell, Perfume Genius, and Beverly Glenn-Copeland to more obscure but equally visionary creators. It also includes multiple spoken word poems (by poets such as Eileen Myles, Marsha P. Johnson, and Nsámbu Za Suékama) set to music.

The chapters of TRANSA follow the journey trans people make as individuals and as a collective: Womb of the Soul, Survival, Dark Night, Awakening, Grief, Acceptance, Liberation, and Reinvention. You can read more about how TRANSA has been a source of radical hope for me here. And check out the full tracklist and order details here.

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“Point of Disgust” is in the Grief chapter, and this is fitting for multiple reasons. As Juan Velasquez put it in his interview with Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius and Alan Sparhawk (one of the founding members of Low), “This track feels like it’s about acceptance and finding ‘what’s next’ in grief, rather than moving on.” That impression resonates with me and is evoked by both the lyrical content and the instrumentation/arrangement. Hear for yourself what I’m talking about:

“Once I was lost / To the point of disgust”
This opening line signals a profound alienation from the self. “Lost” here isn’t just confused — it’s a collapse of internal coherence, a drowning in shame or despair so deep it turns into revulsion. The narrator describes struggling to bear what their life had become.

“I had in my sight / Lack of vision / Lack of light”
In this section, the narrator describes witnessing one's own blindness, paradoxically seeing one’s inability to see — an existential conundrum. "Lack of light" suggests an absence of hope, clarity, or moral direction.

“I fell hard / I fell fast / Mercy me / It’ll never last”

This stanza could be a description of a further collapse to rock bottom, but sounds like the way we talk about becoming transfixed by a person: “falling hard and fast” for someone or maybe for some circumstance in their life, but knowing it spells disaster because we doubt the relationship or goodness can survive. In the context of TRANSA and my own life I think about the intoxication I once had with the belief/experience that mainstream culture and politics were embracing trans people and our rights. Notably these lines are a departure from the original lyrics, which are “I held hard, I held fast.”

“And then in the dust / All the things we discussed / Were thrown to the wind / So at last / We begin”
This is a turning point in the song. "In the dust" implies something settled, decayed, or defeated. Whatever was once held onto (perhaps a relationship, perhaps rights, a particular vision of the future) has been “thrown to the wind”—given up or destroyed. And yet, the closing line, “So at last / We begin,” is quietly radical. It suggests that after losing everything — after disgust, collapse, and letting go — something new might emerge. The song ends not with triumph, but with the faintest possibility of starting over. As Velasquez said, not moving on from grief or gaining back what was lost but asking “what’s next” in grief.

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The song was originally written by Mimi Parker, who founded Low with Sparhawk in 1993 after being romantically partnered since they were teenagers. Tragically, Parker died in 2022 from ovarian cancer diagnosed in 2020. Parker and Sparhawk had been together for more than 40 years, creating music and family (she is also survived by their two children). I am moved to tears imagining the process of Sparhawk working with Hadreas to recreate Parker’s music and words, to perform this evolution of what he used to perform with her. “What’s next” in grief.

Notably, Sparhawk said that he was honored to work with this song as a part of this project, specifically, because both he and Parker cared dearly about trans issues and held them near to their hearts.

Here is a beautiful video of Parker and Sparhawk performing “Point of Disgust” in 2012. (The recorded performance is from Audio-Files, a 30min music special produced briefly on BYU-TV.)

In an interview less than two years after her death, Sparhawk reflected “If you fall in love, you know that could happen — That person is so real and then they’re gone.” Mercy me / It’ll never last.

The song closes with an adaptation of the refrain: ‘Cause we fall hard / We fall fast / Mercy Me / It Never Lasts, which to me is this acknowledgment of the human nature of becoming attached to impermanent things.

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Returning to the Perfume Genius and Alan Sparhawk TRANSA version, I think this song asks the question of “what’s next” in the grief that trans people are feeling. The TRANSA project was conceptualized before the Trump administration returned to the executive branch, though amidst the anti-trans backlash at the state level around the country, as well as abroad. The grief a trans person may experience in their life could be about what transition and living in an affirmed way can cost us. What we lose on our way to building a fuller life that has room for our whole self. The grief is also about mourning at a more collective and systemic level, in the ways my colleague and client were discussing. What is lost when we have to fight as a community for our rights, fight for access to resources, resist marginalization, battle for self-love in the face of anti-trans messaging.

We don’t get back what is lost to this.

There will never be a version of my life where my 37th year on this planet wasn’t filled with helping community members find reasons to stay alive amid increasing sociopolitical violence, where my 35th year didn’t include getting doxxed and brutally harassed for being trans and advocating for gender-affirming care. I don’t get back the hours spent in disgust with my body when my internalized transphobia wanted me to look more like a cisgender man. I won’t know what planning for building a family looks like in a time where I am not fearful about potential parental rights or the validity of my marriage in the eyes of a hostile federal government. I cannot erase the experiences of knowing my loved ones are scared about my safety. I cannot erase the experiences of being scared for the safety of others in my community. I cannot undo the survivor’s guilt I have felt for outliving multiple trans youth I cared for.

We have been broken by this. Maybe broken over and over again. And how we live with and in this grief is messy, ugly, rageful.

And we are not broken beyond repair. Actually that’s not quite right. We actually are broken in ways that cannot be restored to our original condition. But something essential in and of us remains — survives the breaking. And something new and beautiful and meaningful can be created from the broken parts. As the practice of Kintsugi reminds us, “being broken is simply part of [our] story, rather than the end.”¹ ²

An example of Keiko Ikoma's kintsugi work

What’s next in our grief?

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Further reading/viewing/listening/learning:

Read the full 2024 Guardian article on / interview with Alan Sparhawk, in which he reflects on Mimi Parker’s death and his life and music-making in grief here: www.theguardian.com/music/article/2024/jul/19/lows-alan-sparhawk-on-the-death-of-his-wife-and-bandmate-mimi-parker-if-you-fall-in-love-you-know-this-could-happen

Listen to the original album version of “Point of Disgust” on Low’s 2002 record Trust here:

More on Kintsugi:

In 2021, SUM gallery³ featured an exhibition titled Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments 願片大量転生 (Ganhen Tairyou Tensei) by artists Eva Wong and Naoko Fukumaru, the latter of whom uses kintsugi practices as the foundation of her sculpture art. This is how the gallery described the exhibition:

Eva Wong and Naoko Fukumaru’s collaboration brings together the traditional Japanese practices of Origami and Kintsugi to tell a tale of queer transformation. This exhibit will showcase 1000 Origami butterflies, made by community members from our Butterfly Workshops, bursting out of a Kintsugi cocoon. The written wishes of our workshop participants will be hidden within the folds of each butterfly, carried away to be answered by the gods. Kintsugi, long considered a metaphor for the embracing of one’s imperfections, is the art of repairing broken pottery by mending the cracks with gold; paired with the butterfly’s story of transformation, Mass Reincarnation of Wish Fragments reflects themes that are common in 2SLGBTQ+ culture, especially the transgender experience.

Listen to the artists describe their work below:

Fukumaru was also featured in a 2024 exhibit on Kintsugi at the Art Gallery of Greater Victoria. As a part of the exhibit, they screened “Kintsugi, The Art of Repair”, 2024, featuring Naoko Fukumaru.⁴ View an excerpt containing Fukumara working and describing her art below:

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1. This is how Kintsugi is defined by A. Onyx Fujii and Asher Pandjiris, the founders of Kintsugi Therapist Collective: “Kintsugi is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer combined with precious metals. The intention of this method is to highlight the beauty of brokenness and repair, identifying both as important aspects of the history of the object, rather than flaws to hide or disguise. The significance of kintsugi has roots in wabi-sabi, the Japanese philosophy of radical acceptance of the inherent nature of imperfection in life. With kintsugi, by emphasizing the cracks in the repair process, there is a valuing of the wear of an object and a recognition that being broken is simply a part of its story, rather than its end.” Onyx and Asher also wrote a manifesto in part about the importance of mental health practitioners resisting the capitalistic western/white ideal of cloaking our brokenness, titled We Need Not Be Fine.

2. Kintsugi images from the Garland Magazine article on Keiko Ikoma's work.

3. SUM is a queer art gallery located in so-called British Columbia on the sovereign, unceded land of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ (Tsleil-Waututh) Peoples. You can read more about them at their website.

4. Film by CBC Creator Network. Emily Robertson - Director, Cinematographer & Editor (@wild.flower.productions ), Mieke de Vries, Producer & Story Editor (@sensoryqueer).