AN INTRODUCTION
Jennifer Finney Boylan
ONE EVENING IN JUNE OF 2006, I unexpectedly found myself stranded at a Kentucky hotel that was, at that same moment, hosting something called the National Ventriloquists’ Association Convention. As I settled into the hotel bar after supper, the place was erupting with puppeteers, marionettists, and voice-throwers of every stripe. Many of the conventioneers were gathered at a long table eating pizza, wooden figures at their sides. Others swayed to the music of Elvis Presley on the dance floor, arms draped around their dummies.
Later, a dude at the bar tried to pick me up, using something he called “the muffle voice.” It was, I admit, vaguely flattering. But I declined my suitor’s generous offer, being married then, as now, to the woman who had wed me as a man in 1988 and to whom I had stayed married, even as I emerged as trans and became female 12 years later. Had he—or anyone that night—asked me about the particulars of my marriage, demanding an explanation for its seemingly unfathomable mysteries, I might have said, It’s because we love each other. And I would have said this in my own voice.
But no one asked. Instead, I lingered happily over that pint of Guinness and observed the world around me, a world that you must admit contains no shortage of miracles and wonder.
Just shy of midnight, there was a bar brawl. Cartoon voices were raised in anger; a dummy flew through the air. The fellow at my side (the same one who had tried to pick me up using his muffle voice) summarized the trouble for me in a single phrase. “It’s always the same story,” he said. “A couple of comedians in a room is a conversation. But a couple of ventriloquists is an argument.”
Since 2003, I’ve been an itinerant author, devoted, in my own awkward fashion, to shining a light on civil rights for transgender people using the medium of story. I’ve spoken to groups of stunned people who apparently had never laid eyes upon a trans person before; I’ve also addressed young scholars so sophisticated about gender issues that my homely little stories and fables were greeted with exhausted eye-rolling and a chorus of disappointed, audible groans. I’ve listened to what must be more than 5, 000 different trans people by now, as well as the sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, and the many others that love them. In listening to them, I’ve often been put in mind of a phrase my mother liked to say: “It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.” There are lots of different stories out there, told by so many different people, each of them trying, sometimes against long odds, to find their voices.
The more trans people I talk to, in fact, the clearer it is to me that we are all being guided by different stars. And some of us aren’t being guided at all; we’re just walking forward, one foot after another, trying to survive each day the best we can. I keep returning to the expression I heard at that Kentucky bar: a group of comedians is a conversation; a group of ventriloquists is an argument. In my head, I rewrite it this way: a group of gay people is a conversation; a group of trans people is an argument.
At the heart of our disagreements are the many differences in our experiences. Among transgender folks, our experiences vary wildly from each other not least because of differences in class, race, education, sexuality, marital status, politics, and social privilege. It can truly be disheartening, sometimes, to encounter a person who feels some of the things that you have felt, only to discover, at that same moment, that the two of you hardly agree on anything at all, and that the subject about which you most disagree is the one thing you supposedly have in common.
If ours is an occasionally contentious community, it’s also a community that is filled with breathtaking courage and compassion. The fact that many trans people are among the most disenfranchised and at-risk individuals in the world also means that we are frequently called upon to watch each other’s backs, to exhibit a kind of loyalty and solidarity and courage that can only leave one stunned and amazed at the resilience of the human spirit.
In preparation for writing this introduction, I interviewed the youngest trans person I know—15-year-old Nicole Maines—and her father, Wayne, a man who at one time was about as conservative as an American man can be, and who has now become one of the country’s leading advocates for trans youth. “You have to love your child,” Wayne Maines said to me. “Everybody wants the same thing. They want to be loved, they want to be respected, they want to have a bright future like everybody else. Just let people be who they need to be.”
“I think I see the dark corners of the world a lot easier now,” Nicole said, concerning the trouble she’d experienced at her middle school. “But at the same time, I’ve been exposed to this whole network of allies and supporters. And so, for every dark corner, there is a wall that the sun is shining on.”
“If I’m on a mission for anything,” Wayne said, “it’s to make sure my daughter has the same rights and the same opportunities as her classmates.” His eyes welled up, and tears rolled down his cheek. “I get emotional. But we have to let go of what we think we’re supposed to be. That’s why we’re here on earth. You adjust.”
The wide range of opinions and insights on trans experience can also be seen as a sign of health, the mark of a gender culture that is flourishing, abounding in a variety of ways of being. If I’ve met over 5, 000 trans people, I’ve probably heard 5, 000 different explanations of what it means to be trans, and what our defining experiences are.
It’s worth reviewing what some of our disagreements are, here, at the outset of a volume that we hope will celebrate the many, many different ways there are of being trans. But as a first principle, it might be worth suggesting that the single most important element for understanding gender variance—or anything, for that matter—is love.
I came out to my own mother in 2002. At the time, she was well into her eighties—a conservative, deeply religious Republican woman from the Main Line of Philadelphia, whose name, incredibly, was Hildegarde. In coming out to Mom, at the age of 43, I feared I would be rejected, that I would have to proceed in the world without her.
Instead, in response to my confession, she took me in her arms and wiped the tears from my cheeks. “Love will prevail,” she said, and then quoted First Corinthians. “Faith, hope, and love abideth these three. But the greatest of these is love.”
Mom didn’t know what it meant to be transgender—a term that wasn’t even coined until she was in her seventies. But she knew that the thing I needed at that moment, both as her child and as a human, was love, and she did not pause in embracing me, even before she came—as she did, in the years that followed—to more intimately understand the issues.
Let’s take a look at some of the different ways there are of being trans.
Some of us see ourselves as people born with a unique birth defect, one that can be “cured” by the intervention of the medical profession, and think of that journey in terms of physical transition.
Some of us see ourselves as people who want to celebrate the fantasy aspects of gender, who want to enjoy the sense of escape and joy and eros that embracing an alter ego sometimes provides.
Some of us see ourselves as people who reject the medical community and who are less interested in winding up at one gender destination or another than in the journey itself, a voyage that may or may not have a clear end point.
Some of us hope to free ourselves from the binary poles of gender, want a personal and political liberation from the tyranny of culturally defined gender markers, and wish to express ourselves as we please, anywhere along the wide spectrum.
Some of us go through medical transition and then assume a new identity, and in so doing—to use the word trans people use—“go stealth,” meshing as seamlessly as possible with society post transition. Sometimes post-op stealth-goers no longer even identify as trans and look back at their days in their former sex in the same way a naturalized citizen might look back at a country in which they were born and then fled.
Some of us see our experience as being best understood through scholarly theory. For some of us, gender theory not only provides us with language for thinking about ourselves; it places our quest for self within the long tradition of philosophical inquiry.
Some of us are still seeking for the right words to describe ourselves, and for the best way to frame the discourse regarding our people. Some of us are not even particularly comfortable with the term “transgender.”
Some of us have found that our sense of self has changed over time. Some of us, to be sure, “always knew” what we needed and who we needed to be. For others, that sense of identity has emerged only slowly, or morphed over time, or even fluctuated daily like the tides. Some of us don’t have a single word for what we are, for what we feel, or what we need, and view the lack of a single label for our gendered selves as a fortune, not a curse.
With all this wide range of opinion, it’s no wonder men and women who wish to be our allies—not to mention members of the trans community themselves—can find themselves perplexed.
There are so many, many ways of being us.
If we know anything, it’s that trans identity and trans experience are a work in progress, a domain in which the discourse itself is still in a state of evolution and growth.
Which is why, when people ask me, “How can we help?” I sometimes think the most useful answer may be the one my mother suggested: Let love prevail.
Or, to put it another way: Open your heart, and see what happens.
In this book you’ll find a set of resources for, and an archive of testimony about, the many different kinds of experiences that happen in the lives of transgender people and the people that love them. You will likely find the wide range of those experiences, cultural and medical and political, staggering. There will be plenty of stories and reflections that seem contradictory, which seem to belie the thought that any set of human aspirations so divergent from each other could all be thought of as part of a single phenomenon.
And yet, it is this abundance that is the strength of our movement. How could we ever expect that a community as rich and diverse as our own would ever have a single truth?
It is only in speaking our truth—and in learning the truth of others—that we can ever hope to be free.
Early in my own transition, back in 2000, I used to make what I called “milk runs” en femme to towns where I did not know anyone, to see how well I could pass in the world as a woman. It was a frightening prospect, at a time when no one at my place of work—Colby College, in Waterville, Maine, where I was a professor of English—knew I was emerging as trans. I was an awkward, frightened soul back then, wearing too much makeup, teetering in heels I did not know how to walk in, crowned by a wig that could have doubled, in its spare time, as a sparrow’s nest. How I found the courage to drive from my home down to Freeport, Maine, to try on corduroy skirts at L.L. Bean, I cannot tell you. I remember the mantra I used to have back then, though. I used to whisper it to myself as I walked through the world: Be brave. You are trying to learn something.
One day, I found myself trying on jeans in The Gap. It was clear from the expression on the saleswoman’s face that I was not “passing”—nowhere near it. I told myself to be brave, but it wasn’t much help. The thing I was learning—and not, as it turned out, for the last time—was how hard all of this was going to be, and how very difficult it was going to be for me to find my voice in the world that now lay before me.
As I exited the store, I passed a woman and her daughter, who were on their way in. The little girl looked at me, with my curious makeup and my unfortunate wig, and she turned to her mother.
“Momma,” she said, in a voice of astonishment. “Who was that?”
“That, honey,” the woman replied to her daughter. “That was a human being.”
Belgrade Lakes, Maine