I want to share with you an experience I had recently. On January 16th, the ITL was invited to share at the Community House Presbyterian Church on Pittsburgh's North Side. Flanked by Mad and Jen's husband Bob, I listened as Reverend Wayne Peck recounted the story of the Epiphany: when the Wise Men came to realize just what role Jesus was to play and brought gifts to him. What I took from the sermon were the themes of light, of new ways of seeing, of new ways of thinking that causes you to act. I was raised Jewish and so going to Church has been a kind of novelty to me. I like the ways in which Community House creates its own community through real sharing, support, and common goals.
In the themes of spreading awareness, new ways of seeing, etc., the ITL was invited to come share a little bit about the project and I was asked to share a bit about myself. I was nervous to introduce myself and talk about what it means to me to be transgender but I felt strongly that sharing my experience was important in this context. Over the course of about a minute I said that it's important for me and for my community to share my experience of being transgender, in part because one would probably not know that about me upon first impressions. I also relayed how detrimental it can be to feel at odds with oneself--how that reduces one's desire to self-care and take care of others.
I believe there are many overlapping themes between coming out as transgender and acquiring any new identity through big life changes. Like being in recovery, like becoming a parent, like beginning to question authority figures, like making a major career change. And when a person transforms, their story changes. Stories of transformation are universal. We learn about ourselves, each other and the world through storytelling. So what does it mean when some people's stories are told, not by themselves, but by others and without regard for compassion and authenticity? We lose unique perspectives of the world, and the world becomes smaller, regulated by those with the power to tell others' stories. Being trans is about having a unique story to tell. One that can be (and is often) erased by those who would choose to have us not exist.
I want to share a quote that I came across while researching for my senior thesis. In the early 1980's Sandy Stone wrote "The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto" in response to Janice Raymond's transphobic "The Transsexual Empire: The Making of the She-Male". You can find Ms. Stone's pivotal text through the super-amazing zinelibrary.info site. This essay changed my life and I think about it often, and all the ways we closet ourselves, and all the ways the personal really is political.
She writes:
[T]ranssexuals must take responsibility for all of their history, to begin to rearticulate their lives not as a series of erasures…but as a political action begun by reappropriating difference and reclaiming the power of the refigured and reinscribed body...
I could not ask a transsexual for anything more inconceivable than to forgo passing, to be consciously "read", to read oneself aloud--and by this troubling and productive reading, to begin to write oneself into the discourses by which one has been written--in effect, then, to be come a ...posttranssexual. Still, transsexuals know that silence can be an extremely high price to pay for acceptance. I want to speak directly to the brothers and sisters who may read/"read" this and say: I ask all of us to use the strength which brought us through the effort of restructuring identity, and which has also helped us to live in silence and denial, for a re-visioning of our lives. I know you feel that most of the work is behind you and that the price of invisibility is not great. But, although individual change is the foundation of all things, it is not the end of all things. Perhaps it's time to begin laying the groundwork for the next transformation.
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| From bird of paradise |
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Thanks for reading,
Rayden
