Eleven years ago today, I stood up in front of my school community and, after getting a BIG laugh because I badly sang the Transformers theme, I said “I’m transgender.”
Eleven years feels like a long time. Things have changed in eleven years–thankfully, I have changed, a least a little. I want to reflect on that, on that question of change, because I think that time in my life is relevant to times today (see how I did that? That’s my being an historian!)
So, who was I eleven years ago? I was seventeen, and it felt like every free moment of my life was spent trying to change a world that was not changing fast enough. I knew injustice was happening around me, and I was only just beginning to grasp toward what would become a structural analysis of the world. There were many things I felt, but didn’t know.
Sure, I did other things; I wrote creatively, something I basically no longer do. I ran or co-ran so many clubs it makes me wonder how I did all of that. I watched movies, talked with my friends. I had a life, absolutely. But my life was also shadowed by certain things, and one of them was an impending sense of my messy relationship to the world, especially as I considered being transgender and what it meant to be out.
All of this feels especially important because here I am, eleven years later, watching the country I used to love and now have disgust for fall into fascism (not that it was particularly great before this–I know now about settler colonialism and racial capitalism and how both are integral to this country.) And because I was very aware, at seventeen and desperate for a life, of being a target. Some of this was lived experience–I had often been harassed by strangers for not quite making it as a girl, not quite making it as a boy. Physical attacks would come in the next year. Some of it, though, was what I’ll call “appropriated,” lifted from hearing stories about how targeted transgender people are, from obsessively reading the causes of death on the old Transgender Day of Remembrance list, to brushing up against violence in the first pieces of trans studies I was gifted by older friends. I did know, however young I was, that my encounters with violence softened by my whiteness, and I did not yet know how they were softened by my class.
But the violence was real, even if I did not personally experience it, and I was knee-deep in it. And 2011 was an odd political moment. We had not reached the “transgender tipping point,” which is a false temporality to describe a level of visibility that trans people have had before. Trans people, though targeted, were not the primary victims of fascism the way we are now. But I could feel it bubbling around me, though I wouldn’t be able to name it. My conversations, attempts at teaching moments in the 20 minute long GSA meetings that I spent up to 8 hours preparing for, might be familiar to us today: should transgender athletes be allowed to compete, was one that sticks in my memory in no small part because I feel particularly scarred by it (an early memory of dissociating, floating above myself watching me try to convince those around me that in fact there was not a problem with trans athletes competing. Another memory of playing what I now think of as a funny rhetorical game called “trans women/girls are bad at sports too.)”)
The question of transitional healthcare for youth was so far beyond me eleven years ago that the idea that it would be banned in places now seems unthinkable. I deliberately avoided the question eleven years ago today, not wanting to do anything that might seem unacceptable to my school’s administration–questions of my body, what I wanted to do with it, what I did with it, were to me obviously off the table. (Of course, this is not a strategy that works–it both raised questions for others, and is not a viable route, as we have seen for avoiding fascism’s brutality, in places where “social transition” is now being banned.) I also could not see through the mess of insurance–and especially trying to find care in Ohio, when I knew people who went all the way to Chicago to get care–nor was I in touch enough with my body to really know what I wanted or needed. I probably wouldn’t have gotten top surgery before age 26 at all had I not been on my own very good health insurance that paid for almost all of it. At the time, I certainly did not have the providers who were aware enough of what transitional care looked like to even think about ways of navigating it. This is not to say that young people were not getting access to care–it just says far more about my imagination, of what was possible, of what I forced myself to live with. Maybe this is why I am so defensive of young people’s right to access healthcare, of their right to health insurance that is not tied to a parent or guardian, why I loudly insist that actually minors should get surgery–like so many trans people who medically transitioned later, I see the years I spent not receiving care as “lost” years, as years I didn’t need to spend in so much pain.
My point is that what we are now, in many places, experiencing as de jure, I experienced as de facto. I see it less as a step back and more as a new phase, as a result perhaps of the kinds of politics we have pursued, as trans people and our allies. When I came out, I insisted that I didn’t need anything beyond a recognition of my name and pronouns changing. I didn’t even change the way I dressed–I lived “nonbinary” as “woman/girl-lite” because to do so would upset the order of the world. The path of least resistance allowed me to wriggle by, but it offered no liberation.
What has changed in the last eleven years, then, is perhaps not the politics of the world, which were already aggressively transphobic, but my own politics, and my demands on the politics of others. I have been nurtured by the radical writing of many–many transgender people, yes, and many people who we would not yet understand to be transgender. I have developed a better sense of what it means to live under fascism, and the ways that being transgender actually do demand change of the world: a change in healthcare, in the way we understand bodily autonomy, in what gender means at all. It also, under fascism, requires new forms of alliance, rethinking the binaries that we reinscribe, and requires something more of our allies.
Under fascism, allyship looks like breaking laws. When we become so criminalized that our very existence is illegal, in order to help us you need to break rules, laws. It’s no longer enough to show basic respect. We will need bodies to keep us and our families safe, we will need to become comfortable distributing “illegal substances,” learn what it might mean to develop a safe supply of HRT (and thus, we have a lot to learn from people who use drugs,) develop networks to support fugitives.
I speak dramatically not because I feel the same way I did eleven years ago–not because I am running on the desperation of youth and the lack of agency that we offer young people. I do so now because I feel clear-eyed, rational, because I want liberation for us all, and that means riding through this moment and rising through it. Little has changed from eleven years ago, but I feel more ready to face what I faced then–because I have changed, and I am grateful to those who buoyed me along to get here. I am asking you to change along with me too.
I am so proud of who've you've been and who you are today. Your compassion, intelligence, activism, and ability to educate are a gift to all of us. I know that we all shoulder responsibility to educate ourselves, too, but I appreciate your guidance and insights. Did I mention I love your sense of humor, too?! As your mom I may be a teeny bit biased, but mostly I feel pride and so lucky to know you as amazing human. Keep growing - it will benefit the world! I love you!
Thank you for writing and sharing this. It's amazing to me to consider I've known you almost the entire time you've been out. And I have . . . hmm, how to put it. . . a really deep-seated admiration for both who you've been and who you've become (and who you're becoming). I don't mean that in an inspo porn way - I just mean I've seen up close how hard some of this has been, and it takes a considerable amount of intestinal fortitude to get to where you are.
You'll perhaps enjoy this - organically, the other day, in this term's iteration of the history of gender and sexuality class, we got to a point of questioning whether anyone is genuinely "cis". It came out of a discussion of an essay by Jen Manion reflecting on teaching about female husbands, and I had a very clear moment of thinking "Ai would love that we got here." It's not an end point, but I love that this whole class of students is taking apart queerness with such energy and drive and asking these kinds of questions. Goodness knows where we'll be by term's end.