Note: This is a departure from my usual topics. Sadaqat/Sinéad O’Connor’s death has gutted me, so here is my tribute.

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Sinéad was the first Angry Woman rocker I fell in love with; before Ani DiFranco. Before Liz Phair. Before PJ Harvey. Sinéad’s howls and growls of pain, longing, and desire echoed my own heart, and her shaved-head-and-A-shirts aesthetic reflected and lent strength to my own rebellious and pissed0off image.

Sinéad’s death has brought forward an outpouring of tributes voicing both the personal and social impact of the singer most well-known for a heart-rending version of “Nothing Compares 2 U,” and tearing a picture of a pope on stage at Saturday Night Live in protest of child sexual abuse in the Catholic Church. Eschewing pop-stardom, Sinéad called herself a protest singer. She is quoted as basically having said it was not her career she ruined with her political act (and acts), but that she had ruined the careers of record execs who had a certain trajectory in mind for her.

Sinéad was a deeply fractured person, and she shared herself—fragment by fragment—fully with us. And in doing so, she gave us all permission to wear our own wounds on the outside. In her I saw my own scars. Over time this has only deepened. Discredited and discounted repeatedly as a crazy person, she stands in many people’s minds as a cautionary tale.

For others of us, those of us living in the margins, finding ways to survive with all of our broken parts held together with sheer conviction, she has served as a light in the darkness. Sinéad was never one to compromise her principles, nor her sense of self. She lived by what she felt to be true, what she knew, what she believed.

Known also as Shuhada’ Sadaqat, her life of questing and exploring allowed her to shift her views, learn, grow, expend, encompass, and morph until her final days, while still never losing her true core. Having converted to Islam, she was still the frank, emotionally articulate and raw beacon of honesty I felt knew, and deeply loved.

Sinéad was a beacon for young, genderqueer me for many reasons: her grace in holding strength and androgyny while never denying her feminism. Her “f*** you” to gender norms. Her beauty in austerity and edge. Her shaved head gleamed as a light in the dark for those of us who lived in female bodies (which I considered mine at the time, and still do on some level) who desperately wanted to be liberated from the shackles implied and enforced by the beauty standard.

Sinéad was a strong supporter of queer rights, and was variably queer identified herself. “I don’t believe in labels of any kind, put it that way. If I fall in love with someone, I wouldn’t give a s*** if they were a man or a woman,” Sinead said in an interview. Sinéad is lauded by the queer community as ally, an advocate, and an inspiration—and by many of us as a member of our community. She visibly and audibly kept her queer advocacy with her in her journey into Islam, at times mixing rainbows with her hijab.

And of course she was also a musical phenom. Her mix of punk sensibility and edge also remained with her in all her different musical experiments; the heartbreak in her voice was something she never lied about, never covered up.

There was no one like her. There will be no one like her again. I count myself blessed to have walked the earth at the same time as Shuhada’ Sadaqat. May peace be upon her.

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