Cover image: Transgender Day of Remembrance, 2016

1. Ritual is at the core of what we do;
2. Ritual is a submission to the universe, a proposal, a call and response with community; ritual is community;
3. Ritual is to be practiced, and it requires belief; 
4. A trans ritual is, of course, about change; 
5. Ritual begets transformation;
6. But this transformation is not permanent--it requires continues submission to the ritual, or to the growth established during said ritual;
7. Ritual in performance is a process in which audience members can be made complicit in the events before them; audience members must believe and participate for this to work; audience members must feel in their body the thing happening before them; audience members must be made to recognize this performance as part of their world, not adjacent or exterior;
8. Ritual invokes spirits; many of these spirits are our ancestors; I encourage us to think about both our blood and chosen families as ancestors; and beyond as well; just as I invoke Divine and Lou Sullivan in my performance of self, we as trans-theatre makers must invoke those who inspire us, create us, and stay beside us;
9. We invoke spirits in our words, as I have here, through our movements echoing their own, through our aesthetics mutating meaning into image, coding a language only we can speak;
10. Ritual involves death; something must be destroyed;
11. Ritual is also healing;
12. As Auntie Kate wrote: trans people trace their roots to early cultures' shamanic rituals of transformation. They were tricksters, the jokers and jesters and poets; they were the whores and the priestesses. As whores and poets, they traded in love. As jesters and priestesses, our queer ancestors traded in the healing arts. Our ancestors played around with gender, as well as with sexuality. And their rituals were theater. Our ancestors performed their rituals, their theater, to heal themselves, and to heal their tribes;