Freedom to BE: why there will never be a monolithic definition of trans*

By Michael Kipp

On February 13th, Facebook unveiled 56 custom gender options, a feature many had been requesting for years. And the new options don’t just fall under the trans* umbrella — they include terms like “cisgender woman” and “cis male.” Users can also change their preferred pronoun to gender-neutral “they.”

Of course, most Facebook users will keep the default options — and even many trans people who identify with the binary gender identities of male or female will feel comfortable sticking with them. But having more options than “he” and “she” is another step toward increasing mainstream acknowledgement of the enormous diversity of gender identities and expressions in the human experience.

The recent buzz around gender and trans identities extends well beyond the changes on Facebook. Laverne Cox, an actress, activist and trans woman who stars in the popular Netflix series Orange is the New Black, did her own part in moving the conversation in January when she was interviewed by Katie Couric on her self-titled ABC show Katie. (Online at ofcnow.co/kc)

Earlier on the show, Carmen Carrera, a transgender supermodel who starred in the third season of RuPaul’s Drag Race declined to talk about whether she has had bottom surgery. Instead, Carrera wanted to talk about her modeling career and life goals.

When Couric asked Cox if she felt the same, Cox said “I think that the preoccupation with transition and with surgery objectifies trans people” — and that by focusing on trans bodies, we don’t focus on the oppression and discrimination that is the lived reality of many trans people. The rate of homicides against trans women, for example, is the highest of any segment of the LGBTQ community, and the unemployment rate for trans people is twice the national average — four times that for trans people of color.

Cox reflected publicly on the exchange that month in Houston during a speech for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s Creating Change conference. At the largest annual LGBTQ conference in the nation, she spoke of the interview’s significance: “Never before have I seen, in mainstream media, a discussion about what is appropriate and not appropriate to ask trans people.”

Setting boundaries around what is appropriate isn’t intended to “demonize” Couric, Cox said. Couric is simply following a conversation about transition and surgery that has been going on for 60 years.

Cox told the audience, “We are changing the conversation right now.”

Another powerful figure changing that conversation is author, speaker and transgender rights activist Janet Mock. In a Feb. 5 interview with CNN host Piers Morgan for Piers Morgan Live, she said, “This is the conversation I think our country is going through…how, then, do we report on these lives without sensationalizing?” (Online at ofcnow.co/pm)

That interview was a follow-up spurred by Mock’s tweets criticizing the way she was portrayed on the same program a day earlier, when she’d gone on to discuss her new memoir, Redefining Realness: My Path to Womanhood, Identity, Love & So Much More. After the program aired Mock learned the shows editors had presented her with the on-screen description “Was a boy until age 18;” she addressed that and some of the language from the interview dialog that Morgan used to refer to her gender. At one point, the host had stated “you used to be, yourself, a man.”

Mock, and many trans people, do not see themselves as having been born one gender and later switching  to another — rather, many see themselves as having been labeled at birth and raised as a gender that was, for them, inaccurate to how they feel.

“I was born a baby, who was assigned male at birth. I did not identify or live my life as a boy,” Mock explained. “As soon as I had enough agency in my life to grow up, I became who I am. And this did not start at 18 when I went to Thailand to have surgery. It started when I was six years old. And my parents saw me for who I was and allowed me to live my life.”

While the follow-up interview has been reacted to with controversy, it’s significant that Mock and Morgan are having this discussion at all — it’s a big step to see mainstream journalists publicly educated about how many trans people really see themselves or prefer to be depicted. Like Carmen Carrera and Laverne Cox, Mock is challenging the sensationalization and objectification of trans people and advocating for a change in the conversation.

Their efforts and the efforts of all the trans people willing to publicly share their stories are working to humanize the media’s trans* narrative and create a safer space for the diverse voices and experiences under the trans* umbrella.

“It’s Not a Joke, It’s Our Story”

“I know I confused a lot of people, and some people thought I lost my mind.” Tony Perry said, laughing to himself.

“I had a couple of death threats.”

Two years ago, Perry was one of the sources in Out Front’s March 14, 2012 cover story on trans identities — known at the time as Victoria Mykels-Sexton, a trans woman and drag performer. Perry emphasized the difference between performing in drag and being transgender — that drag is a persona and being transgender is who a person is in their soul.

True to that sentiment, Perry began to sow the seeds for living more authentically. Even before the 2012 story was published, Perry had stopped taking estrogen, he said. He began going to the gym to lose the weight and breast tissue the hormone had given him.

This process culminated in a powerful reclaiming of his identity and expression in October 2013. He cut his hair short and began presenting as male again.

Like transitioning to a female presentation, transitioning to a male presentation has, for Perry, brought a mix of support and scrutiny.

“I’ve had people who are amazing support,” he said. “One of them, he himself used to be trans — he used to live as a woman…he gets it.”

Perry said that the biological mother of a drag daughter who passed away to suicide a few years ago reached out to Perry and said she was there and proud he was being himself. Like Perry, his drag daughter transitioned and wanted to be seen as male again.

Unfortunately, our own communities — drag, trans, and otherwise — are not immune from gender policing.

When asked if there was pressure to transition in his 20s to Victoria, Perry said, “Some in the trans community (were) making me believe that’s how I was going to progress my drag career…but drag is just drag, you know what I mean? And I have, for the last maybe five years, known (being a woman full-time) is not what I want to do.”

Most people in the trans community have been supportive of Perry’s recent transition to a male presentation, he said. Yet that support is starkly contrasted with a couple of death threats from within the same community.

“Their conflict was that I’m ‘setting back the movement,’ and I’m ‘making it look like a joke,’” Perry said. “It’s not a joke, it’s our story…it’s how you have to write it. And I chose that I don’t want my shell to be a woman anymore.”

Perry continues to perform in drag as Victoria, which, for some, brought another conflict between Perry’s identity and their expectations. People wondered what it meant to see him as Victoria on stage when he no longer identifies as Victoria in life — for Perry, it’s a costume for a show, he said.

When asked about his personal identity, he said he’s two spirit. “I’m just a boy that happens to be in touch with both my feminine and masculine sides…I got the chance to have a dual spirit. And that’s exactly what I have. I recognize that now…I just know that I have a double spirit, a double soul.”

Two spirit is sometimes categorized under the trans* umbrella — a Native American cultural identity that is actually an umbrella term itself, encompassing the spiritual and social roles of gender-variant people across many tribes. Two spirit was, and is, considered a sacred identity, and they often take the roles of healers and medicine persons. Perry has Native American ancestry from both Navajo and Cherokee tribes.

A powerful 2009 documentary film Two Spirits tells the story of 16-year-old Fred Martinez of Cortez, Colorado, a two spirit person, or nádleehí in Navajo, who was murdered in a brutal hate crime in 2001. The film has helped bring awareness to the identity.

In an interview with Democracy Now!, Laverne Cox said “there are as many genders, really, as there are people. I think what’s wonderful about what Facebook is doing is acknowledging that this is all okay.”

“We Have the Freedom to Change”

When Dylan Scholinski recalled a coworker who struggled to call him by male pronouns, he explained that the man found him attractive — and to identify Scholinski as a male would make his coworker question his own identity as a straight man.

Identifying as bisexual, Scholinski wondered what would happen if he, himself, woke up tomorrow with a realization that he was straight — would he panic and wonder if he’d been lying all along?

But he doesn’t think it’s a lie to allow your self-understanding to progress. “When we have those realizations, we assume that we weren’t being truthful, and I don’t think that’s true — or, that the person was not being truthful. We have epiphanies, we have realizations, when they’re necessary and when we’re ready. And we have the freedom to change.”

During his teens, Scholinski was institutionalized for being an “inappropriate female,” which he wrote about in 1997 in a memoir called, The Last Time I Wore a Dress. In 1995 he spoke at a UN conference on Women about his experience as a violation of human rights, and he was heavily involved in the gay and lesbian cause in college in the late 1980s.

An artist and activist at heart, he now works as a resident artist at REDLINE Denver, as the self-described founder and witness at Sent(a)mental Studios and the HAVEN Youth Project, and as an instructor at Jefferson County Open School.

Scholinski works with youth to help them discover their personal narrative and to claim the power of their voices in a shame-free space. Finding a voice was important in his own healing process, so he provides a safe and uncensored environment for their creative expression, for which he is a witness to.

Like Laverne Cox and Carmen Carrera, Dylan Scholinski sees the focus on trans bodies as problematic. His own interview with Katie Couric years ago, like the discussion between Janet Mock and Piers Morgan, was important because it was happening at all.

During his early morning interview, Scholinski imagined people getting ready for work in their underwear and pausing in front of the television, thinking, “’Whoa! Did I just hear ‘asexual’ and ‘sex reassignment?’”

“It was almost like a celebration that she was questioning,” he said, “that the conversation was happening.”

But his perspective now shows that what defines a victory in a movement may change as it progresses. “The fact that (surgery is) still the question, that that’s still the go-to place — that everyone is so concerned about what makes you one thing or the other, or more valid or less valid. Even in our own community, the conversations we have around ‘passing’ are so problematic,” he said.

Scholinski said he identifies more as genderqueer and he’d prefer to go by gender-neutral pronouns, but there isn’t a set of neutral pronouns that feels comfortable to him. Safety is also a motivator for using male pronouns.

“I’m a person who can’t argue and can’t dismiss the other part of me,” he said. “My whole life has been about balance: I’m never happy without being sad; I’m never sad without being happy. I’m never a guy without being a girl; I’m never a girl without being a guy…And when I feel the greatest, when I feel the strongest, is when I have that in check — that whole yin and yang. When I find that thing that’s been lost, and I pick it up, and I embrace it, and I love it — that’s balance.”

Speaking of balance, Scholinski also said he’s a Red Sox fan, is a big fan of tomatoes, and likes hoodies and caramel.

He jokes that there are still people who put articles in his mailbox any time they find one about gender. “There are so many articles that you could put in my mailbox,” he said.

“There’s More Than Enough Room for All of Us”

In a story shared at The Narrators, a monthly storytelling night held at the Deer Pile art gallery in Denver, Kelly Shortandqueer recalled his mother asking him why he couldn’t just be a masculine woman.

“In my head, I pictured a mythical seesaw of gender, where the tipping point went from butch woman to effeminate man — which is not quite how it works in real life.”

Shortandqueer works for the Gill Foundation and is one of the co-founders for the Denver Zine Library, a collection of 15,000 zines from around the world.

Like Scholinski, Shortandqueer said that the youth component of his work is part of what’s most exciting. It lets them know they have a voice, which is especially important for people whose identities aren’t reflected in mainstream media. He often connects with people who read his work and say they never knew anyone else felt the same way. 

Shortandqueer also appreciates the moments of education, when people read his zines and say, “‘I never even thought about that before.’”

“So there’s that teaching aspect to sharing our stories,” he said.

Shortandqueer was one of three storytellers from The Narrators chosen to have their stories re-purposed on stage with Off-Center, in three Friday-night performances at The Jones Theater on March 7th, 14th, and 21st. His story, a trans-twist on the theme “Lived/Re-Lived,” will be told by aerial performance artists.

Knowing that so many people are going to see it on stage, Shortandqueer said he feels the weight of responsibility. If someone hasn’t met a trans person before, that story is all they know — and as someone who doesn’t have a strictly binary identity, he wonders how that might impact their perception of someone who does.

“I don’t want my gender fluidity to make someone invalidate another trans person who does not feel the same way about gender as I do.”

Because he’s so willing and able to be out, he said, “I feel like I can help push the conversation along, whether that’s with my experience or trying to say, ‘Well, not everyone feels that way.’”

So for him it’s just as important to ask how he can tell his own story, without taking space away from someone else. “I’ve seen so many trans people speak that say, ‘This is how it is for trans people. This is how trans people feel.’ The reality is that many of us have very different experiences.”

Shortandqueer believes that every narrative allows for more nuanced conversations about identity, expanding on the binary trans-narrative and the genderqueer trans-narrative. While he admits bias as a storyteller, he believes the way to connect people with our lives as trans people is through telling our own stories.

In a room packed shoulder-to-shoulder, people spilling out the doorway of the Deer Pile and standing in the hall, Shortandqueer finishes his story.

“In order to make room for ourselves, it often feels like we have to take that space from each other. What I’ve come to realize is that there’s more than enough room for all of us.”

Bringing Love into the Conversation

When talking about the stories of trans* people and advancing the movement toward inclusiveness of diverse trans* identities and expressions, the greatest principle for respectful and authentic exchange and conversation is simple: love.

Love informs us on why we, regardless of our identities, should be concerned with honoring the identity and story of each trans* individual — or any individual.

In her Creating Change speech, Laverne Cox recalled the difficult conversations that she has with her friend Jeremiah, who is HIV-positive.

While they don’t always know what the right thing to say to each other is — to someone who is a trans woman, to someone who is HIV-positive — they have these difficult conversations anyway, with love, empathy, and a desire to understand more than they did before.

Cox said these are the kinds of conversations we, as the GLBTQ+ community, need to have more of — where we are there for each other “across difference.”

“Loving trans people, I believe, is a revolutionary act,” she said.

“And I believe when we love someone, we respect them, and we listen to them. We feel that their voice matters, and we let them dictate the terms of who they are and what their story is.”

It is these stories that humanize the trans* narrative.

Dedicated to Mike F., a friend who was gay-identified and taught me the power of self-love, loving others, and having conversations “across difference.” He passed to spina bifida complications in March 2012.