The Trans Learn Tings Manifesto
The Trans Learn Tings is terrain, pulse, method, and memory. It is the ground beneath Bespokecurry, where practice, creativity, and ancestral knowledge converge.
This manifesto introduces the currents and nodes that shape life, embodiment, and liberation.
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To be Black is to already exist beyond the terms of this world.
This work is about what becomes possible when we stop performing our way back into something that was never built to hold us.
My pronouns are they/them—not only because I exist outside of the binary, but because I carry the lineages of my ancestors within me, plural and present.
Who and how I choose to love is not up for negotiation. It is not a question to be answered, but a truth to be lived.
Essay 1 – Trans Learn Tings-Unlearning The Bespokecurry Cosmos
Bespokecurry is the cosmos. A living expanse where embodiment, ancestral knowledge, and imagination converge. Here, creativity is not a hobby—it is the ground, the water, the pulse beneath your feet.
Within this cosmos flows the Trans Learn Tings, a terrain that holds what is alive, what persists, and what demands practice over performance. It is a place of movement, of ritual, of careful attention to bodies, spirits, and ideas. It is here that the currents of the Watering Whole shift, diagramming flows of embodiment through symbols, Adinkra, and other languages of knowing. It is here that water is not just water, but methodology; a mirror, a teacher, a slow revolution.
The Trans Learn Tings connects the threads of creation. Black Beauty School rises here, a home of skill, study, and mastery. Within it, Litmus tests the currents of practice, and the Copper Method teaches intentional care for Afro hair, a theory and methodology born from alignment, history, and love. These spaces are not separate—they are living, overlapping constellations of knowledge and craft.
Across the terrain you will find traces of the Tings: a living index of embodied medicine and spiritual techn(know)logies, practices for the body, the mind, and the ancestral memory carried within them. Flowing with them are the Six Waters and their companion cannabis notes, both guides and companions for ritual, reflection, and presence.
The Embodiment Diagram and the Watering Whole mark the paths, showing how energy, awareness, and relational responsibility move through the Trans Learn Tings. The Body Politic Knewsletter circulates insight, reflection, and guidance across the cosmos, carrying the pulse of what it means to practice liberation in everyday life.
Adornments appear too. Bead & Cowrie carries ancestral memory in jewelry that moves with the body, honoring lineage, presence, and Black aesthetics. Blaxk Curry and the African Innovative Healing Production Company offer tools, rituals, and practices for creative and transformative work, while The Lab opens immersive containers for study, reflection, and experimentation. Fungi Tings Field Notes explores the Black body, gut, and consciousness.
Every node, every practice, every current in the Trans Learn Tings is distinct, yet every part flows into the whole. This page is not meant to replicate the detail you will find in each space—it is a portal, a map, a pulse. To enter the Trans Learn Tings is to understand the terrain: the soil is philosophy, the water is method, and the air carries imagination.
This is your orientation. A breath. A moment to feel the ground beneath you before stepping deeper. The essays that follow, the rituals that breathe, the creations that manifest—everything arises from this terrain.
The Trans Learn Tings is alive. It asks nothing of you but presence.
Essay 2 - Patriarchy Shape-Shifts: How Power Persists in Queer and Marginalized Spaces
Patriarchy does not vanish when bodies change.
It does not dissolve when identities bend or break.
It does not retreat when marginalization presses in.
Patriarchy shape-shifts.
It moves like water, slow and patient, finding the cracks and the currents where it can flow unseen.
Even in spaces that call themselves radical, it persists.
Even among the queers, the trans, the Black, the brown, the ancestral, the displaced—it waits.
It waits in visibility, in proximity, in who is protected, and who is exposed.
It survives in the cliques, the hierarchies, the “inside” and the “outside.”
It survives in performance, in the pretense of alignment, in gestures that say one thing but act another.
It survives by adapting to the languages we think will free us.
We want to believe that identity transforms power.
We want to believe that queerness is automatically liberation.
We want to believe that marginalized bodies cannot reproduce domination.
But liberation is practice.
Power is structural.
Hierarchy is learned.
Recognizing this is not cynicism—it is the beginning of strategy.
To dismantle domination, you must first see how it moves.
To move beyond performance, you must understand the terrain.
I have watched patriarchy survive transition.
I have seen it survive queerness.
I have felt it survive marginalization.
And I have learned how to chart my own course around it.
It is not enough to name it.
It is not enough to critique it.
It is enough to practice differently.
To move like water.
To erode without destroying.
To embody what cannot be performed.
Patriarchy shape-shifts.
So too must our liberation.
I went to school to study performance.
I earned two degrees in theater not because I wanted the spotlight,
but because it was the only way I could see.
Performance was survival.
A mask. A lens. A shield.
I learned how to move my body so the world would not touch the parts it could not understand.
I learned how to speak so I could be heard without being felt.
I learned how to perform what my life required before I could inhabit it fully.
But liberation is not performance.
Embodiment is not theater.
The stage teaches craft, but it cannot teach what lives in the marrow, in the rhythm of breath, in the architecture of a Black body moving through space and time.
I realized I had gone to school to learn what I could no longer do:
to live without pretense, to act with integrity, to inhabit my own self without apology.
In the Trans Learn Tings, we measure success differently.
We measure by presence. By alignment. By the way knowledge circulates through bodies.
By how rituals, Tings, and water-methods shape life from inside, not from what the audience sees.
Performance can seduce. It can protect. It can even teach.
But performance is always temporary.
Embodiment endures.
Embodiment moves.
Embodiment transforms.
To embody is to practice with relational accountability.
To embody is to honor lineage, creativity, and the body as site of knowledge.
To embody is to resist structures that rely on spectacle instead of truth.
The work of liberation begins where performance ends.
The body becomes the canvas, the instrument, the altar.
Everything learned on stage finds its deeper purpose:
not to impress, not to shield, but to awaken.
I carry the lessons of theater still,
but now my movement is not measured by applause,
my words are not measured by reaction,
my power is measured by alignment:
with ancestors, with imagination, with the Trans Learn Tings, and with myself.
Performance taught me survival.
Embodiment teaches me revolution.
Essay 3 - Performance vs Embodiment: Learning What Cannot Be Performed
Pronouns matter.
They name us, they honor us, they make the invisible visible.
They are a gateway.
But language alone cannot dismantle hierarchy.
It cannot teach embodiment.
It cannot restructure power.
In queer and trans spaces, I have seen words wielded like weapons.
I have seen pronouns become shields and swords while praxis—the lived work, the embodiment, the relational practice—remains hollow.
I have watched people debate language fiercely,
yet step into patterns that reproduce domination, hierarchy, and harm.
This is not critique for cruelty.
It is observation.
It is clarity.
To honor pronouns without practicing alignment is to perform liberation.
To speak solidarity without acting with care is theater.
To claim nonbinaryness, queerness, transness without examining relational power is illusion.
Praxis requires presence.
Praxis requires courage.
Praxis requires humility.
It asks you to show up for what cannot be performed.
It asks you to bear witness to how your actions ripple across bodies and communities.
It asks that liberation be embodied, not recited.
In the Trans Learn Tings, pronouns are never dismissed.
They are doors, not destinations.
They point toward relational alignment, toward care, toward the slow work of transformation.
Language is a beginning, not the end.
It is a vessel for praxis, but never a substitute.
The work of liberation is always felt,
not simply spoken.
It is always practiced,
not simply declared.
It is always embodied,
not simply printed on a page or typed into a profile.
Pronouns matter.
Praxis matters more.
Essay 4 - Pronouns vs Praxis: Language Alone Cannot Liberate
Essay 5 - Performed Revolution vs Embodied Revolution: Crossing and Creating Worlds
Some people move through transition to reach the other side of what has always been.
They perform revolution.
I move through transition to reach the other side of what has never existed.
I embody revolution.
Performed revolution is spectacular.
It dazzles. It signals. It declares.
It uses aesthetics, gestures, and pronouns to mark a break from the past.
It is necessary. It can inspire.
But it is fragile.
It rests on recognition, validation, and the gaze of others.
Its power lives in perception, not in practice.
Embodied revolution is quieter, deeper, slower.
It courses through breath, through ritual, through the alignment of mind, body, and cosmos.
It flows in the Tings, the Six Waters, the Watering Whole.
It lives in care, in repair, in the labor of practicing differently every day.
The difference is not subtle.
Performed revolution moves outward.
Embodied revolution moves inward and outward simultaneously.
Performed revolution can be copied.
Embodied revolution cannot. It is singular, situated, alive.
Some measure revolution by the clamor, the applause, the virality.
I measure it by presence, accountability, alignment, relational integrity.
Performed revolution says: “Look, I am free.”
Embodied revolution whispers: “We are becoming free, together.”
Performed revolution can collapse when the audience turns away.
Embodied revolution persists, because it is rooted in practice, history, and care.
Some people cross the binary to prove a point.
I cross the binary to inhabit what has no precedent.
To create, not mimic.
To live, not perform.
The Trans Learn Tings is the terrain for this work.
Here, embodied revolution is nurtured, witnessed, and practiced.
Here, the tools, the rituals, the Tings, and the water all flow toward alignment.
Here, transformation is felt, not declared.
Performed revolution is the opening.
Embodied revolution is the path.
And this is the path I choose, every day.
Essay 6 - Water as Methodology: Flowing Through Liberation
Water moves without permission.
It does not ask.
It does not fight the shore.
It finds the cracks, the curves, the hidden channels, and it flows.
It teaches patience without passivity, persistence without violence, presence without performance.
In the Trans Learn Tings, water is not metaphor.
It is method.
It is pedagogy.
It is revolution in motion.
The Six Waters are guides through this philosophy.
Each current carries a lesson: reflection, alignment, care, erosion, expansion, and return.
They are not steps on a ladder—they are rivers, flowing through one another, reshaping the terrain as they go.
The Six Waters Cannabis Field Notes add presence, ritual, and reflection, grounding awareness in body, breath, and ancestral memory.
Water teaches us to move around obstacles, not against them.
To carve paths without destroying the terrain.
To embody power without domination.
To change what must be changed, and let what must remain, remain.
The Watering Whole, alongside the Embodiment Diagram, maps this flow across body, mind, and cosmos.
It reminds us that liberation is not a moment—it is a current.
That embodied knowledge is always relational, always moving, always alive.
This is the practice of liberation:
moving like water.
persisting like water.
transforming like water.
Water does not perform power.
Water embodies it.
And in the Trans Learn Tings, we learn from water, not because it teaches easily,
but because it never lies.
Because it moves us toward what has always been possible—and what has never yet existed.
Essay 7 - The Trans Learn Tings: Terrain, Practice, and Possibility
The Trans Learn Tings is more than a place.
It is terrain, pulse, method, and memory.
It is the ground beneath Bespokecurry, where everything takes shape, grows, and transforms.
Here, Black creativity, embodiment, and ancestral knowledge converge.
Here, practice is not performance, and liberation is not spectacle.
Here, theory and method meet life, flowing together like water through a living ecosystem.
The Trans Learn Tings is threaded with currents of care and craft:
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Tings, a living index of embodied medicine and spiritual tech(know)logies, guide practice, memory, and ritual.
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Six Waters and their companion cannabis notes move through bodies and time, shaping reflection, alignment, and presence.
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The Watering Whole, woven with Adinkra and other embodied symbols, maps the flow of knowledge through self, community, and cosmos.
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Bead & Cowrie jewelry carries ancestral memory in adornment, linking body, lineage, and beauty.
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Blaxk Curry, the African innovative healing production company, produces rituals, tools, and experiences that expand practice into creation.
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The Lab offers immersive courseworks and study containers where theory, ritual, and creativity are experienced, embodied, and tested.
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The Afroscape Book, a field guide in motion, translates Afro hair, body, and atmosphere into a living system—where hair functions as antenna, color as signal, and care as sustained relationship over time.
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Fungi Tings explores fungal intelligence as method—decay, transformation, and regulation—revealing how what breaks down becomes the ground for new life, perception, and emotional recalibration. (coming soon)
The terrain also connects and overlaps with Black Beauty School, home to Litmus and the Copper Method, where Afro hair care is theorized, practiced, and aligned with care, history, and intentionality.
These spaces do not exist in isolation—they are nodes in a living ecosystem. One practice, one ritual, one innovation reverberates through the others, carrying knowledge, lineage, and transformation.
The Trans Learn Tings is not static.
It moves.
It breathes.
It demands attention, participation, and presence.
It is the soil where Tings take root, the water that nourishes transformation, and the air that carries imagination.
To enter the Trans Learn Tings is to step into a terrain where embodiment, creativity, ancestral memory, and innovation are inseparable.
Every essay in this manifesto, every ritual, every course, every adornment, every tool lives here.
The Trans Learn Tings is both the container and the current.
It is terrain and tide.
It is philosophy and practice.
It is the foundation for what has always been and what has never yet existed.
Enter fully.
Move like water.
Practice, witness, transform.
The Trans Learn Tings awaits.
