trans healthcare

far away, in an unremarkable town, infinite unremarkable fruit hung from a tree. any hungry passer-by would claim its modest feast. as the years went though, a strange rumor was born in the town- that some peculiar folk plucked the fruit not as a cheap reprieve for their hunger but merely for its beauty. the general folk were enraged at the sheer possibility of this. they found nothing beautiful about the unremarkable fruit at all. they declared any such patron of unremarkable beauty a madman and thus, undeserving of the fruit. a red notice was then painted on the bark: “ONLY FOR THE HUNGRY” and a death sentence issued if a fruit was plucked but not eaten in the next seven minutes. 

& the first of our peculiar townsfolk fell dead thus, killed for even so much as pausing a moment to savour the sight of the plump, fleshy fruit, and its simpleton shine. such unjust killings did not bode well with the an angry few. riots and protests burst through the town, claiming fruit belonged to everyone.

some determined fellows shook the unremarkably beautiful fruit down from the tree. chanting slogans like- ‘if gravity is hunger, then so is love!’ 

so, the townsfolk called the wisest men from all corners of the town to sit in a circle under the great big tree and deliberate. (they all first hungrily ate a fruit each.) the men sat on their asses and discussed for hours, all the slimy details and eventually one announced- ‘we have understood that some townsfolk have the strangest disease. they have a deep lack of love in their lives and an unbearable loneliness. we are observing now though, through our impeccable sciences, that the cure to this disease is the smell of this fruit! this unremarkable fruit is pretty remarkable after all. these unfortunate ill queers must be given the fruit to heal, lest they infect the rest of us. but first we must test whether they are truly ill, and are, in fact, suffering from loneliness. only then will they be given the fruit. we shall make a fair test of this.’ 

as a narrator I’ll say this- that much loneliness is in all of us, so the test was fairly easy to pass.

so the hue and cry eventually died, the justice warriors had screamed ‘fruit should belong to all’ but they didn’t suppose it was that different from ‘fruit could belong to all’, and the town went back to business, one part of the tree was free food, and the other was rationed medicine. sure, there were few that hardly wore their loneliness on their sleeve and failed the test. there were few that waited in line for the test for years and years, and their turn just never came. they all died too, in their lonely ways, but ah, well, so it goes.

I guess what our hungry wise men missed was this- it is hunger that makes food beautiful.