"You Will Outlive Them"
The Truth in Nina Keith, Julie Byrne, and Taryn Blake Miller's Message of Trans Resistance and Survival
Come back, come back, come back
You are good luck
Don't need permission
Come back different
They'll never give in
It doesn't matter
You will outlive them
You’re a miracle
Don’t give in
You are a mountain
We'll come back different
I’ve mentioned in past substacks how much the lyrics of the song “Come Back Different” by Nina Keith, Julie Byrne, and Taryn Blake Miller mean to me. It’s high time I write about this incredible work of trans inspiration more fully.
This is the eleventh 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."
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.
Let’s start with listening to the song, because I’m going to struggle to describe it adequately:
According to an interview in FLOOD Magazine, the song originated as an inspired poem written by multi-instrumentalist, composer, and producer Nina Keith, who is also a trans woman. She sent the poem to Julie Byrne and Taryn Blake Miller (who also performs under the moniker Your Friend) — two musicians known for their rich and spiritual vocals. Miller is also trans and (unrelated to this piece, really) I feel an affinity to them as we both share Kansas origins. Byrne and Miller sent Keith recordings of them individually singing her poem in various melodies, which she then arranged them along with instrumentation into a 200-track piece. For those of us who aren’t producers, that’s a lot of layers and samples. And you hear it in the finished product. The depth in each moment of the song is breathtaking, and the evolution of the track across time is similarly full. I can’t think of a better word for it. It feels like Nina Keith took four minutes and managed to stretch the bounds of what could fit in that amount of space and time without making it feel overstimulating, stuffed, or overwhelming. And I feel filled up spiritually, kinetically when I listen to this.
I cry most times I listen to this song.
The opening music calls to mind images of a mountain stream glistening in the sunlight. The vocalizations have a hymnal quality to them (a theme I’ve noticed on TRANSA). I associate to the spiritual experience of plunging into a cold natural body of water. Though musically we’re not quite there yet, the promise of cleansing and awakening is beckoning. In the background of the song we hear someone singing “come back, come back, come back” in this ethereal way, and I imagine some manifestation of transness (be it trancestors or a more diffuse spirit of resistance and creation) calling to someone who is hurting, lost, feeling crushed by the weight of what trans people are facing, considering whether they can really live as they desire. I imagine I’m that person. And as we hear the other opening lines of the poem — “you are good luck” (though I hear it “you are good, love”), “don’t need permission” — I am stepping into this mountain stream. The music emboldens me, reminds me of who I am, reminds me of what survives these efforts to constrain me. “Come back different.” I’m being invited to change, to shed what doesn’t suit me. And I submerge myself into the water. My senses, deadened from a depression, start to come alive. “They’ll never give in; it doesn’t matter.” The life charges back into me. I propel my head and upper body out of the water and into the warm sunlight. “You will outlive them.” The beat kicks in. I have emerged different, I am changing, I am coming back to life. I imagine closing my eyes and feeling the warmth in my now fully awakened senses. I spin around and splash. I smile in a way that my whole body, mind, and spirit embody.
And y’all that’s just the first half of the song. The music evolves into an incredible chorus of vocal layers, telling the listener “you are a miracle,” “you are a mountain,” and instructing them not to “give in.” An embodied praising of the multidimensionality of all of us — but that trans people are particularly aware of and in touch with.
As the song begins to close, the shimmering returns, and other pieces of the song fall away. I imagine stepping out of the water and into the world I had once been beaten down by, ready to take it on in my true and full form.
[The song’s closing is actually mixed into the opening of the next track — a perfect transition. So we emerge from this baptismal awakening into Rachika Nayar’s cover of the Mortal Coil version of Tim Buckley’s “Song to the Siren” featuring Julianna Barwick and Cassandra Croft. I may write about this next. The two pair so powerfully.]
This is the kind of trans survival I’m interested in. Embodied. Awakened. Full of life. Expanding the bounds of what human form and experience can hold.
There is also an immortality in this kind of survival: “You will outlive them.” I wrote about the idea of mortality and survival in my reflection on the beginning of the new Audre Lorde biography, Survival is a Promise:
How limiting it is to speak only of death as an ending. Lorde does have an afterlife, as will each of us - not necessarily (in my belief system) in a heaven or some astral realm, but in the people and creatures we touch and the lessons we’ve taught that continue on. Our afterlives are contained in the ripples of our legacies. We use the phrase “she is survived by” so routinely in obituaries and memoriams that I hadn’t thought about the phrasing. Our survival is not limited to our physical existence but includes the people we shaped even in small ways throughout our lives and beyond them.
So many of us right now are reaching into archives of trans history to find strength and connection and meaning. Trans historical fiction author Milo Todd often repeats “the ghosts of history are watching, kissing our foreheads,” calling to mind a vision of transcestors who are proud of us, who care about us. The trans people of the future will need to find us in the archives and feel our pride and care and strength. Therapist, trans woman, and writer Kai Cheng Thom wrote about her commitments as a future transcestor and how this is a reason to survive in an important piece about trans community suicide intervention titled We Must Live for One Another:
“It is often this commitment to the future of trans people around me—the future of my loved ones, my trans sisters, brothers and siblings, the future of my trans mentees and daughters—that keeps me going and gives me strength in the midst of hopelessness and horror.”
And critically, in this musical experience (I’m feel resistant to continue to only call it a song) Nina Keith, Julie Byrne, and Taryn Blake Miller have created, our survival, our aliveness and immortality, isn’t attached to any action from the oppressors or oppressive systems that object to and reject us. We don’t need to convince them. They may never change — in contrast to all of us trans folk, who have found power and beauty and creation in change. They may never understand or accept us or allow us to be different and liberated. But we don’t actually need that allowance. We don’t need their permission. “It doesn’t matter.” We can still come back different, still change, still be free, still survive and live — and actually do that in ways beyond what they’ll have access to.
This song also feels like a promise of a future we’re working towards, even if just by staying alive and living as fully as we can. In the aforementioned FLOOD interview, Keith states, “There’s a future where people are less whack and embarrassing about all of this. That future is very real to me—like, I can feel it in my body. The transphobic people I grew up with are getting pregnant with children who will grow up to educate them and let them know that they’re a disgrace.” Hell yeah.
One last thing: A lil’ plug for a webinar I’m giving this Friday, which you can attend live or sign up to receive access to a recording. I’ll be talking about how therapists can help trans and nonbinary clients manage the distress they are feeling about the hostile and threatening and already violent sociopolitical climate. I will be drawing from a lot of themes I’ve written about on this substack (including themes from today’s post), and talking through how we can adapt them into psychotherapeutic contexts. Learn more and register here. (Trans therapists are invited to register for free; it’s sliding scale for everyone else.)