Open Letter

On Queer Rage, Sacred Fire, and the Politics of Survival

To the ones who refuse to be flattened into silence:

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Freud’s decree that therapists must be “impenetrable mirrors” once felt like armor. Early in my training, I wore that clinical neutrality like a second skin—a shield against the dizzying vulnerability of bearing witness. But mirrors, I’ve learned, are instruments of erasure. They cannot reflect the fractal beauty of queer survival, the way trauma hums in the nervous system, how love persists like a blade of grass through concrete. I shatter the mandate. I choose prism—refracting truth in every defiant hue. My queerness is not incidental; it is the backbone of my practice, the lineage I carry forward: Marsha’s riotous laughter, Sylvia’s unyielding rage, Audre’s clarion call to speak even when your voice shakes.

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While excavating the genealogy of queer shame—its roots in colonial pyres, Victorian asylums, the cold precision of pathologizing texts—I found our present staring back. The same hands that burned Two-Spirit healers now pen bills to ban gender-affirming care. The same moral panic that labeled us “degenerate” now weaponizes “protection” to erase trans children. History is not a shadow. It is a siege.

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Audre Lorde reminds us, “Anger is loaded with information and energy.” Yet, we are told to pacify, to redirect, to let it go. But what if our anger is not a problem to be solved but a roadmap to truth? A visceral response to injustice, a pulse of survival. To pathologize it is to strip it of its wisdom. This practice does not dull rage—it hones it, refines it into clarity, into action, into revolution.

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Let me be unequivocal: When a government outlaws the word gay in classrooms, it is not safeguarding innocence—it is severing lifelines. When it restricts access to puberty blockers, it is not debating medicine—it is amputating futures. When it deadnames trans inmates, forcing them into cages that deny their truth, it is not policy—it is slow-motion murder.

This is not hyperbole. It is diagnosis. As clinicians, we know the cost: the 15-year-old who maps exit routes in their mind, the queer elder whose hypervigilance is misread as “paranoia,” the way shame metastasizes when survival demands silence. Audre Lorde wrote, “Your silence will not protect you.” Let me amend this: Our silence will not save them.

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The political landscape mirrors our psychic one. Fear hijacks the nervous system, pushing us into survival mode. When uncertainty looms, people do not vote with logic but with their amygdala—the brain’s fear centre. Trump’s election was not a triumph of policy but of primitive neurobiology. The rhetoric of danger, of invasion, of loss activates ancestral wiring: fight, flee, freeze. Rational discourse crumbles beneath the weight of existential terror. A nation in survival mode does not seek progress; it seeks refuge in the familiar, even when that familiarity is violence.

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Here is my practice: It is not neutral. It is relational alchemy. When your voice fractures mid-sentence, I will not “reflect” your pain like a sterile surface. I will say: “Your rage is holy here.” When you ask, “Am I too much?” I will not pathologize your survival. I will say: “Your nervous system is a sage. Let it speak.” When you grieve a world that grinds your bones to dust, I will not rush to “reframe.” We will light a candle for the selves you’ve buried, and let the ashes fertilize new growth.

This room is not a clinic. It is a somatic rebellion. Together, we trace the colonial fingerprints on your shame—the way it calcifies your breath, knots your shoulders—and reclaim your body as sovereign ground. We decode the stories your symptoms hold: the ancestral grief, the survival genius masked as “dysfunction.” We wield DSM-V codes as crowbars, prying open spaces for your wholeness.

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To you, reading this: You, who’ve been told your love is a diagnosis, your identity a controversy, your existence a debate—this is your summons.

Come as you are: feral with grief, electric with hope. We will not “treat” your queerness. We will interrogate the systems that exiled it. We will not ask you to “cope” with oppression. We will dismantle its architecture and call it healing. We will be unflinching. We will cite studies on minority stress and recite Essex Hemphill’s verses. We will hold the brick from Stonewall in one hand, a therapist’s license in the other, and build altars to what they tried to burn.

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Therapy here is not repair work. It is reclamation.

They demand mirrors? We ignite. They enforce silence? We thunder. They build cages? We become the sky.

The future is not a straight line—it is a collision of stardust and survival, a chorus of voices howling, “We are not vanishing.”

In solidarity, sacred rage, and the relentless pursuit of liberation,

Yann