Keeping my back to the filling room, I raised my arm and started to write on the oversized pad, “C-O-U-R…” The letters seemed so small as they fell off to the right. Would people in the back be able to see? I was nervous, uncertain. I  flipped to the next huge white sheet. Be legible, I told myself, not neurotic. Slowly and carefully, I got the full Mark Twain quote on the paper. It was about confronting fear, about courage. It seemed appropriate for a transgender conference, for a writing empowerment workshop, for setting the tone for telling our stories.

This seminar was my idea, my initial reason to attend the 21st annual Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta this past weekend. The rest — the book signing, the discussion moderation and the panel at the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH) Symposium that followed — came once I’d decided to attend. I had no idea what to expect from this trip.

I tried to mentally prepare for the possibility that only a few people would show up at my writing workshop–it was scheduled at 9am on Friday morning, set up against a couple of surgery seminars that are always big hits at these types of conferences. But there were people in my room, almost twenty. They introduced themselves; we had a group discussion about the power of writing; we talked about fears and obstacles, about the responsibilities of representing trans people, about tension and audience. During the prompted writing exercise, the sounds from the next room were distractingly loud–someone was talking about nipple placement in chest reconstruction while a baby cried. Dear god, I thought, I hope they can write through the noise. I hope someone is using this material.

I hadn’t intended for them to share their writing. I asked them only to share the experience of writing. But a latecomer raised her hand. She wore a pearl necklace and a crafty dress with a print of all the NFL teams. She sat up straight, flashed a huge smile, and began to read about searching the card catalog at the library. “Translate, no. Transvaal, no….” She finally came to the word she was looking for: transvestite. She smiled proudly, like a glorious 1950s housewife showing off a freshly baked apple pie.

Another person raised their hand to read. They had distinguished white hair, thick silver hoop earrings, a gender-neutral name, and presented as a man. They started with a flattering description of me, but the piece moved to the recent deaths of friends and ended with a James Joyce quote. After the seminar, they made me promise to “save a dance at the ball for a 280 lbs Canuck,” their words not mine. I nodded in agreement because this person was pretty awesome, and I wasn’t planning to attend the final gala — balls aren’t really my thing.

Two days later, I was milling around the hotel lobby before the big event, and a different workshop participant approached me to say how much they’d enjoyed my seminar, that it was the highlight of the conference. I was floored, both by the statement and by the fact that this person had a beautiful black headband holding back her hair. It took a moment to register, for my eyes to trail down and notice her evening gown. I had mistakenly assumed during the workshop that he was a trans man.

It had actually taken me the duration of the conference to realize that some of the participants were cross-dressers, here because this was a safe space to express and explore that side of themselves. It had also taken me a while to realize that for some of the transsexual women, this was the first safe space they could be in public as themselves, as women, and use their preferred name. I heard stories about how a few of the women had been scared to come out of their rooms as themselves when they’d first arrived and had to be coaxed out by supportive friends who’d encouraged them to attend through the internet. People had arrived from towns or small cities, from other locations in the South. The majority were significantly older than me. Many were white.

This segment of the population, of my community, of the transgender umbrella that I desire to hold up despite our fractured interests, was completely new to me. Due to developmental biology, social stigmas, cultural norms surrounding men and women, and varied desires, the transgender experience is hugely different on my side of the spectrum, the female-to-male side, than on the other side.

Although there were some trans guys in attendance, many more this year than in years past, that wasn’t really my scene either. I don’t relate to the “born in the wrong body” thing, don’t identify as man but as gender-fluid or genderqueer, and connect the most to people–trans or cis–who buck the binary, oppose the concept of normalization, and express themselves creatively. I found myself disappointed that in the only workshop for trans guys not tied to medical transition, we spent the entire time, a whole hour, talking about one guy’s phalloplasty. Don’t get me wrong, I was fascinated, intrigued, curious, and entertained, but there were surgery workshops to talk about this subject. I guess I wanted to talk about things that weren’t so cockcentric. We spend so much time asking the world not to talk about what’s between our legs, and this is what we’re going to go on-and-on-and-on about behind closed doors…?

This conference wasn’t for me as a trans person, someone with an enormous and diverse trans network in San Francisco. This was for people who may never have been in a room with a dozen people like themselves before. And the things I saw, the way people supported each other–gave away their phone numbers and said, “I’m here,” or followed up with anyone clearly struggling in a workshop, or hugged strangers who looked like they needed a hug–was unlike anything I’d seen before. Every look and word and smile seemed to say: “You are not alone.”

But this conference was for me as a person. Much like many others there, I had to leave my home, my comfort zone, my life, to try something new, to stand up in front of a roomful of strangers and lead my first writing workshop. It was only when my workshop participant approached me before the gala, startled me with her evening gown and told me that the workshop was the highlight of her conference, that I understood how important this trip was for me. I took a moment to acknowledge the fears I’d faced, the courage I had summoned, and felt myself at one with my community.

The great thing about ending a huge project  is that there’s space. This is also the scary thing. It begs the question, “What next?” in both my writing and my life. I have ideas, yes. Plans, kinda. But also uncertainty, openness, and a tiny bit of faith in my instinctual ability, cultivated over the years, to make minor decisions and take small steps that are right for me.

At the beginning of the month, I decided to start working on a potential idea for another book, something that I had been thinking about for a while. I created a folder on my desktop called “Explorations.” Naming folders has always played a role in my process. I probably have a hundred folders associated with Nina Here Nor There. I title drafts with version numbers, keep “cut” files of everything delete even though I never return to these, and title my folders things like Ch 1, Revised Ch 1, New Ch 1, NEW Ch 1, NEW NEW Ch 1, Almost Final Ch 1, Closer to Final Ch 1, Finalish, Final, FINAL, FINAL for real… And I could go on.

I’d never started with a folder called “Explorations” before. It’s because I’d never considered actually starting a book before. The last one happened by accident, or rather, the exploration phase, which lasted over a year, was organic. I wrote about what compelled me and shared my work. Then, in one moment, a writer/teacher read my thirty-page assignment and said with complete clarity and vision, “This is a book,” and I knew.

I do not have a book right now, and I’m trying to get used to that, to hang out in my folder called “Explorations.” It actually has a subdivision now. Within a few days, I lost interest in my original idea and began exploring a new one. I will have to wait, write patiently to see if either of these move beyond spikes of curiosity and can fuel a sustainable passion. A long-form project is not something I’m willing to commit to lightly.

A year-and-a-half ago, I made a list of all the things I would/could do once my book was completed. Revisiting the list, I’m glad to see that I’m actually doing these things, loving them, going much farther into the yoga, teaching, reading, and leisure than I could’ve anticipated at the time. Somewhere in my mind, I must have thought I’d take a few months off from investing in a writing project, and then I’d leap into something new. I’m just beginning to notice that “Explorations” is not just a folder on my desktop, but my current way of engaging with the world.

Within this space, this enormous freedom, there are the voices of doubt and worry, so extreme, so constant, so inevitable, the only way to strip them of their power is to relegate them to the background, turn the chatter into a near-comforting white noise. Or maybe to address my deepest fear: What happens if I never publish another book for the rest of my life? I think there’s a great consolation prize: I get to live my life. And that has always provided me with the best material.

As if writing an entire memoir and a half-dozen short bios wasn’t self-absorbed enough, last week I wrote a “Long Bio” for my author site. I’ve been questioning whether I want to keep it up. Maybe it’s because it’s housed on my author site instead of here on my blog in between a ton of other posts, but something about my long bio is so painfully definitive, or maybe just painful. I read it and ask myself: Is that really your life story? There was so much more potential, space, a thousand different ways to tell the story before I attempted to summarize the last thirty-something years of my life in a couple pages. This is the challenge with any writing, I suppose. And yet with a bio, locking it down seems even harder than usual, as if I’ve given up the power to reinvent my past and reshape my history.

Well, unless I give my bio another go around… Until then, here it is.

I like to write semi-personal book reviews. The Rumpus has a great forum for this. The opening to my recent column for The Rumpus is below. Go here to read the whole essay.

“During the writing of my own transgender memoir, I sent in a submission to the anthology, Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation, edited by S. Bear Bergman and the original gender outlaw, Kate Bornstein.

Despite having a book deal in the transgender genre, I apparently was not a gender-fluid rebel, a gender-variant gunslinger, a hard-as-nails genderqueer. My personal essay was rejected. When I eventually found the book in the store, it was with a slightly bruised ego that I scanned the table of contents looking for a friendly fight. “What do ya got?” I challenged Shawna Virago as I turned to her story, ‘She-Male Rising.’”

Read more…

So, that’s not exactly what happened. You know how I have this book coming out on May 10, well, *I* created an author site, my virtual web home. As long as you can remember, “I before E, except after C” the URL should stick into your brain: www.nickkrieger.com.

My site is where I’ll put all my event listings, reviews, videos, new projects, and inappropriate sundries. And this blog will remain here, as is-ish, for me to share news, rants, rambles, and of course, a yoga post or two.

Back to the creation of my site and the *I* of which I speak. I learned a great deal about web design in the past two months: I am capable of spending more time spinning around web copy than my actual writing; I can tweak html, css, and php files, effectively implementing one random bit of code in about 3 hours time; if I sit down on Friday to work on my site, there goes the weekend; decorating a website is as stressful and anxiety provoking as decorating my apartment, which is why I have a mental block on the latter.

But mostly I learned there’s too much I cannot do, like logos, graphics, design, actual coding, making my site beautiful, or even deciding how to best brand or represent myself in conjunction with my book and my writing. Most importantly, I learned that sometimes you need a professional. Enter Jenn Cole Design. Basically, Jenn performed one of those acts of sheer design magic in which she knew exactly what I wanted before I even knew to think of it. After each idea she proposed, I’d mull it over, come up with a handful of alternatives, and then decide to go with her original visual or copy suggestion. You should really check out my author site, because Jenn made it rad.

For those of you who’ve seen me, or a picture of me, in the past couple years, you may notice the sweet, young, boy version of me in the upper right corner. To show a pre-hormones picture was a decision I made for a few reasons: it accurately reflects me as the character in my book, which is, in part, an homage to my boyhood; the picture is from a photo shoot the week I started hormones, and for me, that day, that shoot, was the closest I came to having a ritual of good-bye; there are current pictures on my author site, and there will be many more down the line, and I don’t want to consciously and concretely divide my life into before and after when that is not my experience of it. Change is a constant for me. Some changes are just more visibly obvious.

It’s pretty funny. At least I think so. You should probably check it out. Plus, there’s a picture of me.

“A Higher Education,” By Nick Krieger

Lately, everyone has been asking me about the one thing I’d prefer not to talk about: my book. This is rather unfortunate because, well, what’s going on is I’m supposed to be telling everyone about it–self-promoting, social networking, publicity planning, tweeting (not gonna happen)–all of which makes me yearn for the good old days: my alarm would go off at 4:45am, I’d mumble, “Time to make the donuts,” then I’d put on the coffee and shower, eat three bowls of cereal while trying not to scare my housemate taking his middle-of-the-night piss, procrastinate on Facebook from 5:15 – 5:30am, and finally write for a solid three-and-a-half hours before going to work. It was simple. Routine. And even though the “What if this thing fucking sucks” fear plagued me often, the beauty of a crappy writing day is it’s still a writing day–you know, part of the process. For me writing is also meditative, calming, and now I’m feeling a little ungrounded without my regular writing practice.

I just can’t get into the rhythm of my new mornings. I get up closer to 6am now. At my desk, I open spreadsheets with lists of media outlets, and I look at the news trying to think of articles to pitch. I run through my contacts searching for a friend who has a sister who writes reviews for a major newspaper. I make notes for my new web site, new Facebook page, and organize my email list so I can blast the same information through all channels of communication. I think about marketing with integrity, my great desire to share my book and connect with people, my great fear of foisting it on people. That said..

You can pre-order the book through my publisher Beacon Press, or on Amazon, or through IndieBound.

It is way harder than writing a blog. And don’t get me started on writing memoir, which is perhaps the hardest kind of book, maybe not to write, but to live with writing. We’ll save that dumb move of mine for another day. But writing a book is harder than writing blog posts because I have to think about things like characters, description, narrative, plot, scene. Not just once, but like, in every chapter, for many, many chapters. Then, there are the words themselves, approximately 65,000. And I fondle all of them, even the little ones—conjunctions and articles–and I’m not talking one-night stand fondle either—I have full-on relationships with each word. My brain feels like mush, like split pea soup. And I can’t tell if that’s a metaphor or a cliche. Because I’ve lost all perspective. Which is why I’m deleting the next five paragraphs or random incoherency I spewed in the past couple days and ending this post. Apparently writing a book is so hard, I can’t even blog. At least not right now.

This weekend I interviewed a trans artist friend of mine. We spoke about his music, dance, writing, as well as my writing, about our identities, trans experience, activism, being “out” in the public eye, and the intersection of it all. Before we met, I’d found myself oddly interested in a fact about him and his work for a reason I couldn’t explain. He’d recorded a song, “Little Girl,” that for the first time in music history had a transman sing alongside his former voice.

I understood that the song was groundbreaking, but when I heard him speak so emotionally about how personally definitive this song was, it got my thinking about something that was already on my mind a lot, the working title of my manuscript in-progress (or the “book” or “memoir,” as I also call it, though those words are really too far ahead of where I am).

My manuscript is tentatively titled, “Nina Here Nor There,” a phrase I don’t say aloud very often though I type and read the phrase all the time, consider its unspokenness between me and new friends who discover my blog and now know my former name. So, it felt a bit weird when I actually said the title during the interview, as if I were breaking the seal on something I could potentially see for the rest of my life. Some of my trepidation comes from that, the title of my first book is simply, in and of itself, a huge deal, but there’s also the concern over making my birth name so visible.

I recently read S. Bear Bergman’s collection of essays, “The Nearest Exit May Be Behind You“–most of them about being a former dyke, queer, Jewish, tranny with faggy tendencies. Let’s just say I had a love/hate relationship with the book, as can only be the case when faced with a writer and person so similar and yet so so so so different from me. (I also had complete respect and admiration for hir and hir work.) Bear, who prefers gender neutral pronouns, is very open in hir essay, “What’s in a Name?” about stating hir birth name. Ze makes it clear that certainly family members, airline personnel, and other people with special privileges, can refer to hir birth name.

Reading the essay as a trans person, I completely understood the underlying message, or at least my interpretation of it: There’s a time and a place for given, birth or legal names. This doesn’t make them real names (that’s Bear’s main point) or names to be used at the discretion of others (that’s my point). After Bear published the book, ze pointed out on hir blog that the media included hir given name in reviews–as if it would be remiss to forget this “fact” the “real” truth. I wondered how these reviewers had missed the whole point of that crucial essay.

Ever since then, I’d been profoundly afraid of what the media, the greater public, will do with my former name on my book, how they will abuse it. Until recently, I’d been saying one of my reasons for wanting “Nina” on the cover of my book was to commemorate it, memorialize it, give it a sort of gravestone. In my book, the characters refer to the narrator as “Nina” a handful of times, and each time I write those moments, I hold this name close to my heart.

The reality is, I see “Nina” more often than others probably realize, almost daily. It’s on mail, my taxes, my driver’s license, passport and any piece of important paperwork. I hear it at the doctor, dentist, library, and occasionally the gym. It’s on the bottom, my signage, of very old strings of emails at work, and on all my travel bookings. The super cute woman who cleans our house (and whom I have a crush on) says, “Hello, Nina” when she calls once a month. It took me six months to figure out why I couldn’t tell her my new name. I love the way she says “Nina.” It’s so beautiful. Too beautiful to tell her the truth and have it disappear from her mouth.

Sometimes, I miss “Nina.” Not as my name, but as the name that was once mine. Sometimes, when I meet new people, when I get over my fear that they’re not  seeing me in a way resonates with how I see myself–the trauma of a many years being seen as a woman–I want to pull them aside, whisper in their ear, “For thirty years of my life, my name was Nina. Thirty years of my life. That was me. How I was known. Nina.” Sometimes, when I’m with trans folk and we don’t have to protect ourselves so fiercely, we drop our guards and remind each other, again and again, to mourn.

This weekend, when my trans friend spoke about the combination of his voices on one track, he captured the fear he felt on the cusp of potentially losing his voice (or whatever the uncertain results would be to his vocal chords), the fear of losing everything, of letting it all go. Another thing he said, one of the many that I’m sure I’ll be thinking on for days, was how trans stories are really human stories, striking at something that’s often hard to see in the shock-and-awe factor of gender transition–the universality of the trans experience, of the way people change. My book, while also being an alternative transgender narrative, is, in more general terms, a story about a person finding the courage to let go of who she was.

Hearing my friend speak of his definitive song made me think, at least for the time being, it would be cathartic, empowering, triumphant to have both my names on the cover of my book. How often do any of us get to hold who we once we were and who we are in one place, or have such a defining way to mark the journey, both the fear and the reward. For him, it was through music, his voice. For me, a writer, it is through my words.

Nina. Nick.

There’s a lifetime between those words. Or at least a book.

Last week I had one of those total and complete writing breakdowns. I’d share the trigger, but I really don’t think it matters. Every rejection, criticism, negative word and thought about my writing banged against my skull. I lacked powers of description, I couldn’t find my voice, would I ever learn to use a metaphor, my dialogue was flat filler. I couldn’t come up with anything I could do well other than develop synonyms for failure, inadequacy and shortcoming.

This was about 8 on a weekday morning. I’d been at my computer since 6:30, staring at the screen and trying to convince myself I didn’t suck. Convincing myself required way more strength than I had, so I got in my bed and cried. It was the first time I cried since starting testosterone, and I felt relieved, both because I could still and for the release.

In my torrent of despair, everything swirled. I would never finish my book, which meant I wouldn’t have anything. Like money. This thought almost made me laugh because I hold no hope of making money on writing–not now, not ever. I started thinking about how I wouldn’t be able talk about my writing in public and feel accomplished and proud and important, but it’s been a long time since I cared about those things, since I tried to earn love through my writing.

I was in bed, staring at the ceiling, wondering what it was that I was really so afraid of losing. The sun streamed through my windows and it was really bright in my room, as it always is around that time. I get up early, so for me, eight feels like noon. Then, I realized what I was afraid of: having nothing to do before going to my job, of getting up and going to my job first thing in the morning, of having my job be the focus of my life. If I didn’t write or didn’t have a reason to write or became too scared to face my writing demons, I would lose my mornings, my time for me, my meditation, my peace, my will to fucking survive, and my consolation for doing so.

I can’t say I picked myself up right away. I basically spent the next two days begging every friend and mentor to tell me what I needed to hear, “Nick, you are a good writer. You can do this.” And although I have boosted myself upon their words in the past week, it is mostly an awareness of why I write that has kept me going, a feeling and place I refuse to give up, a time before I’ve spoken a word aloud. My space heater is on high, the remnants of night still linger outside my window, my desk is bathed in the glow of only a small lamp; I am a dot of light in the dark world, reaching out in calm desperation.

Paul Auster has written fifteen novels and claims he doesn’t know why he writes. But he knows why I do…

“I don’t know why I write. If I knew the answer, I probably wouldn’t have to. But it is a compulsion. You don’t choose it, it chooses you. And I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody. When young people say I want to be a novelist, I’d say, think very carefully about it. There will be very few rewards, you probably won’t make any money, you probably won’t become famous, and you will spend your whole life locked up in a room by yourself worrying about how to survive. You have to have a tremendous taste for solitude. I think all writers are a bit crazy; Damaged souls, incapable of doing anything else. On the other hand, when I am writing, even though it’s hard and I do struggle often, I am happier than when I’m not writing. I feel alive. Whereas when I’m not writing, I feel like your common every-day neurotic. I feel that the act of writing, in and of itself, is a tool towards probing that which you wouldn’t without that pen in your hand. It’s a strange, almost neurological phenomenon, and the words seem to generate more words—but only when you’re writing. You can’t do it in your head. There are certain phrases in books of mine, and I don’t know where they came from, or how I was capable of thinking up these formulations. It’s only in the heat of composition that these things occur to you.”

-Paul Auster (from The Rumpus interview)

As we move from the arts and film portion (my preferred one) of this year’s Pride festivities to the final drunk and debauched weekend, I feel compelled to comment on some of what I’ve witnessed and experienced.

To kick things off, I attended Fresh Meat, an annual queer/trans performance (mostly dance) that I’d been wanting to go to for years, but never actually did. I think it was hard for me to accept or even believe that in the last five or so years, I went from being a tomboy who obsessed over the sports pages and watched SportsCenter religiously to being an artsy boy who uses the sports pages for kindling and would rather watch gender-variant folks doing modern dance or clog around the stage than even discuss who was in the NBA finals.

I particularly liked Sean Dorsey Dance’s Uncovered: The Diary Project (the full-length version is even better), themed around the diaries of transsexual gay man and pioneer, Lou Sullivan, and a performance piece by D’Lo, who blew me away with hir ability to perform a variety of genders, unraveling the complexities within each, and rocked my heart with the love that s/he expressed for hir bois, reminding me how my expanding network of trans-masculine people is my own source of personal strength.

Perhaps what moved me most about this night was the realization of how many of us there are out there, enough not just for one trans dance troupe, but for every variety of performance and dance — tap, modern, hip-hop, rock, folk — and that we exist across and through every culture, ethnicity, and race. There was a moment when I was sitting there in the audience and I thought, “This explosion of creativity, of self-expression, a sense of openness, support and community, this best represents the world that I want to live in.”

The next day, I watched Boy I Am, a documentary, and the best trans film I’ve ever seen, that played in Frameline two years ago and has nothing to do with this year’s events, except that I watched it in the middle of them. Between this and Fresh Meat, I heard and saw people binding (with ace bandages, layered sports bras, and tanktop binders like the ones I used to wear from Underworks) for the first time since my own surgery, and had what I felt like was a post-traumatic stress response.

I remember a few years ago when a good friend of mine told me he found binding “comfortable,” and how shocked I was, having just started to experience the excessive sweating, chafing, and constriction of crushing my breasts against my chest. I didn’t argue with him, nor did I argue with my father who referred to my behavior as self-injurious. It was destructive, but it was also palliative. Binding was a survival technique, not that I could’ve said that at the time — to acknowledge my struggle, the physical agony that somehow alleviated the mental and emotional agony, was impossible.

I was just developing a transgender identity back then, one that wasn’t predicated on a desire to become a man, the sense that I was a man, or any desire to take on perceived male social or sex roles, but rather an increasing awareness of the deep discomfort with the gendered parts of my body in a way that seemed so different from standard body image issues surrounding things like weight. I struggled with my desire for top surgery as a cosmetic modification and was fearful that speaking about it like that would do a disservice to trans people fighting desperately for health insurance to cover what is most often construed by the industry as “elective” surgery. For awhile, I convinced myself it was elective, at least for me, because to feel like I didn’t have a choice, that I couldn’t fight it, that I would have to accept the phenomenal challenge of being transgender was too hard.

I’ve changed. We all do. But it is still my fear, especially in discussing/writing about transgender subjects, that I will regret my words, take a stance that is not politically forward thinking to the cause of greater acceptance, understanding, and visibility. At least 70% of my trans friends cannot afford the $8,000 for top surgery and may never be able to on their own. They are not working towards a trans identity like I was; they have one. And as I continue to step up to the challenge of embracing myself as transgender, it is remarkable how I am still one of the privileged, the lucky ones, to be white and raised upper middle class, is to be instilled with the foundation and expectation that I always get what I want, even if it’s something socially deviant like having my breasts cut off.

I have sat with one of my old binders by my side (I gave the rest away to friends) as a writing prod, but it did nothing compared to the trigger of seeing other human beings wearing them, the ache in my heart for the pain I couldn’t let myself feel, and the empathy for those who don’t know what it is like to take a deep breath, who must convince themselves that suffocation is comfortable.

The best film I saw in this year’s film festival was “Diagnosing Difference,” a one-hour documentary analyzing, deconstructing and ripping apart the DSM-IV criteria for Gender Identity Disorder. I *had* to procure a letter diagnosing me with this something that is significantly easier to do these days, and although I’ve read extensively on the hoops that those before me had to jump through, hearing someone like Shawna Virago describe going to a gender dysphoria clinic and having to reiterate the standard narrative or the “transgender myth” still moved me.

I’m still trying to understand on how pathology has affected me (my solution was to handle it with humor), how it affects social (non)-acceptance of trans folk, and working to see more clearly how services can be accessed if a medical as opposed to psychological diagnosis is rendered, or if there’s a better solution, something I feel like this movie talked around. But maybe I’m dense. Or looking for simple answers to something that is still being problematized.

There were two thoughts that are not particularly profound, but that resonated with me in that lightbulb kind of way. One was the focus on the word “stereotypical” and how the diagnostic criteria considers it a disease to oppose gender stereotypes. Wow. Need I say more. I believe it was Dylan Scholinski, author of Last Time I Wore a Dress, institutionalized in part for gender identity disorder (an archaic form of treatment reminiscent of electroshock therapy for homosexuals pre-1973) who spoke eloquently (and I’m paraphrasing) about how much sense it makes to question our genders, explore ourselves, build consciousness around who we are, that to miss out on that journey in life is abnormal. It is that sentiment that makes me feel the gift of being transgender for the ways in which it grounds me and connects me to others who care about self-awarenss.

Susan Stryker, my favorite queer “celebrity” (activist/historian/filmmaker/writer/theorist/insightful and brilliant mind) said the simplest and for me, the most mindblowing thing: that because of including GLB and T together, people outside the queer community tend to think of transgender as a sexual orientation. Oh fuck, I thought, if we’re still doing remedial education, which of course we are, the complexity with which I want to discuss my ideas and experience is not only going to get lost on people, but could be catastrophically misleading. For example, living for so many years as a dyke allowed me to see my masculine reflection in my more feminine partners and allowed me to take refuge in a community that embraced masculinity. And where I am now, I see my desire to embrace masculinity as almost a posturing for my unrecognized maleness that is now full of feminine (or rather effeminate) traits. But it’s a bad idea to say something like that to someone like my brother who associates my “gender thing” with my “gay thing” and doesn’t understand that sexual orientation, sex and gender are all different and that masculinity does NOT necessarily correlate with being male.

Finally, I attended the annual Transforming Community event last night in which a handful of diverse queer/transgender people read or spoke about their experiences, followed by a Q&A, more like a conversation, with the audience. Afterwards, my companion said she heard and felt a great deal of pain in the room. On some level, I felt the same way, but of course sexual abuse, violence, discrimination, and improsonment are painful, and for a moment I had some concern that I was dangerously inured to what almost seems standard for gender-variant people. I wanted to go deeper into what was so upsetting and it came in a moment when I could see the trauma in the face of Felicia Elizondo, a community elder who for the sake of this post can be best described as a person who has worked and fought to make my existence possible, and her resistence to the word queer. Of all the horrors she experienced in her life, the one that was most moving to me was seeing her struggle to try to embrace the only word I can find that encompasses me, a word we’ve supposedly “reclaimed. But for the first time ever, watching this transgender activist and leader try to heal from the damage that this word cause, I felt I didn’t have the right to throw it around, to take it as mine.

In the end, I think what I found most painful was what was beneath the surface — that despite our likeness, we are still so different and that the inspiration of our uniqueness is also tinged with loneliness, something that seems dispiriting in a battle whose key feature, for the rest of my lifetime I imagine at least, will be us against the world, not us against us. As with most things honest and compassionate, there was little that was truly divisive during this event, and the conversation, in both intent and practice, increased my awarenss of others and my confidence that in our ability to listen and care, we are building a greater unification. The pervasive sentiment of the evening that rose above the aggrieved voices was that we are each entitled and deserve our own experience and identity and that nobody else’s experience invalidates or erases our own.

A few things I expect to think more about are the “good human being” model of educating society vs. the raising hell model of forced change, and Yosenio V. Lewis’ comment, “There is no art without activism and no activism without art,” and the role I, as a writer, a queer and trans person, and a burgeoning activist can and will play in continuing this conversation.

The most meaningful question I was ever asked and reminded of by teachers repeatedly in graduate school for creative writing was, “Where do you want to enter the dialogue?” It had never occured to me to frame a book in that way, as another voice in one long conversation. This is very hard to do. It requires a person to understand both the historical and contemporary discussion, and there is a great deal of listening needed in order to gather the courage to speak, or for me, anyways. I hope that what I write (and will be published in my memoir as the case now seems to be) contributes and pushes forward the conversations of my community, as well as educates and of course entertains, just like the events of this past week did.

So now it’s time for the party portion of Pride… After all that we’ve been through, I think we deserve the celebration.