Help Bisma / Phul Lift Up Lavender Phoenix!

My name is bisma/phul; I’m LavNix’s Cultural Strategy Organizer. I invite you to honor my flight and joy as a T-fairy-- a trans lesbian Muslim Pakistani. 🧚

Lavender Phoenix’s community is teaching me that if I am going to organize for a future that keeps me and others like me in joy, I have to live in my body. In big and small conversations with our members, I feel like I have found it—community, that is. I have found a purpose to my work, a deep wiring to self-determination, and a community to organize with over dinner conversations. I get to experience the simple joys of exploring how lesbianism is related to community safety over cheesecake. Where the bounds of exploring our queer ancestry feels like natural progression in my hang outs with trans comrades. 

I feel so seen, my mistakes are encouraged, and even though I don’t know the future, I could sit in so much joy about the unknown. I feel honored to be in the presence of people who just truly care about each others’ safety and growth. This represents LavNix to me: a deep community outside the shackles of white supremacy where my culture and transness can thrive in the same breath. 

These are the hardest things for me to reckon with as an organizer—that my emotions matter, the way I hurt matters, and they typically point to something I wasn’t addressing. I’ve previously learned to suppress the parts of me that hurt for the sake of something bigger. Now, I’m learning to reconfigure myself to be in love with myself, my intersections, and to use my emotions as I’m organizing.  I am learning that the antidote to intergenerational trauma is intergenerational love. 🤲🏽 

That’s why I am coming to you with a strong ask for support: This Give OUT Day, the only national day of giving for LGBTQ+ organizations, LavNix is raising $50,000 by Weds., 6/28. Will you give $90 to support the development of my community at Lavender Phoenix?

Here are some other amounts that would be *oh so meaningful* if you donated: 

• $800: in honor of the 80 interviews with our movement elders that were transcribed this year as part of the Dragon Fruit Museum. 
• $200: for the 20 trans API volunteers training to become peer counselors!
• $120: to mark the 12 months I have been on staff at Lavender Phoenix 
• $50: in honor of our 5 member-led committees working to build our community’s power!
• $30: in honor of the 3 years I have flown as a non-binary T-fairy 🧚🏽 

In deep love and community,

Bisma / phul ✨