Every human being brings a truth into the world. Every human being is a messenger of God—not only Jesus or Buddha or Zarathustra; they know they are; others don’t know that they are. But the moment you are born you bring a truth in your being And unless that truth is expressed you will not feel contented. Unless you deliver the message to the world you will feel a deep discomfort because you are not fulfilling your duty towards existence. You have to sing the song of your heart. You have to dance your dance. You have to be utterly individual, not an imitation, not a carbon copy. You have to bring out your original face. The moment you are able to reveal your original face to the world, your life will be fulfilled. Tremendous joy arises out of it.
—Anonymous
Africa offered a grand stage upon which to try out my dance, to learn the words and music of the song of my heart, and what being myself might look and feel like—even if I began that dance with the wrong sheet of music. Attracted there at the incautious age of twenty-eight, and feeling sufficiently accomplished and confident in the progress of my architectural career to convince both myself and my young British spouse that we could be the authors of our lives and achieve our shared destiny wherever we chose, we saved and borrowed and sold possessions to cover the cost of our Pan Am tickets to Nairobi, Kenya. We were left with just enough money to survive in Africa for about two weeks. As it transpired, it was more than enough; I had job offers from local architectural practices within the first few days, and promptly settled into fulfilling a new role: expatriate professional, and “man of the world.” The trappings were evocative of adventure and daring: ample time to take a first-class (yet in reality inexpensive) berth on the old-world overnight train from Nairobi to Mombasa for unrushed weekends of scuba diving; the tropical pleasures of a beautifully landscaped Nairobi home complete with domestic staff and gardener; and (in time) membership at the fabled Muthaiga Country Club. That membership included access to the inner sanctum—their men’s bar—made famous by Meryl Streep’s re-enactment of Baroness Blixen’s brazen entry there in the 1985 film Out of Africa, which was filmed while I was living and working in Kenya but in a replica Muthaiga Club not far from the original. In retrospect, I suppose that my own (repeated) entries to that actual men’s bar were similarly brazen, which may explain why I never quite felt that it was “my” space. Chloe had no business being there!
Kenya offered me an adventuresome young gentlemen’s dream, and a singular opportunity to combine my exposure to all things British (from my years of architectural training and practice in England), my American can-do impetuousness, and my fascination with the wild and rugged wonders of equatorial Africa. There were safaris with expatriate friends deep into the bush in my clunky but dependable Toyota Land Cruiser, formal dances and lovely dinner parties, and engaging conversations with a rapidly diminishing population of aging British colonials who were an integral part of the recent history of Kenya. Having a white-tablecloth, best-china Christmas dinner (cooked and cleaned up afterward by the aforementioned domestic staff) atop trestle tables set out on the open plains of Tsavo Game Park, dressed in formal attire, and knocking back glasses of premium scotch—it was certainly unlike anything I had encountered before. If I had any feminine inclinations or subconscious awareness of Chloe, they (and she) were pushed down to an inaccessible part of my psyche. This was a man’s country and a man’s adventure, and I was immersed in the script of being the “bwana” (Swahili for man, “mabwana” in plural), enjoying elevated status, significant responsibility, and the choices that come with it. On “Africa time,” where nothing is hurried, there were also abundant opportunities to explore, hike, camp, rock climb, and windsurf (once barely making it through a family of hippos). I might be forgiven if I thought I cut a dashing figure, as I became one with that small and very white expatriate circle. I was living large, living male, but not listening to my life at all.
Africa has its own way of teaching humility, and it isn’t an optional lesson. My most important education in authenticity lay before me, but first I had to understand what it truly means to open my eyes, ears, and heart to grasp who I am. In time the unfiltered clear light of Africa even brought me face to face with the reality of being Chloe, but for that life-saving privilege I had to wait many years and pay a very high emotional price.
First, however, I had some important lessons to learn about the world. While I played among the affluent and privileged expatriates, all around me were Kenyan women, men, and children who suffered deprivation and loss of hope well beyond my ability to comprehend, or my inclination to learn about. The many countries that constitute Africa, to a degree like all countries everywhere, are each beset with extremes of wealth and poverty. For far too long I simply saw those who were among Kenya’s impoverished inhabitants as backdrop, cautiously avoiding any direct recognition of their individual humanity. It took two incidents to sweep away that convenient fiction and sense the world I was in.
In 1980 my first wife was hired to be the landscape architect in a project to renovate the Kenyan Presidential State Lodge at Sagana, on the slopes of Mt. Kenya; she would later win an international award for her work there. As her spouse, I got to tag along once on a site visit. From the vantage point of President Daniel arap Moi’s glamorous lodge, I had ample reason for abstracting away the more distant backdrop of pervasive poverty. After all, the sight of poverty was jarring and profoundly uncomfortable, and very much inconsistent with the tropical forest around me, alive with exuberant color and rich with sound and life. Yet poverty was never far away; even as I walked the grounds of the lodge I came upon a throng of very poor Kenyan children clustered on the other side of the tall, barbwire-topped, chain link perimeter fence. Full of smiles, wonder, and amusement at what we were doing, one young boy’s eyes caught mine. He couldn’t have been more than ten, yet our eyes locked in a long, warm stare. That connection was accepting, innocent, embracing, joyful, and deeply human; an exchange that negated countless differences of culture, age, relative affluence, education, personalities, and gender. I was sad at the time that I hadn’t learned the boy’s name, but I have since come to cherish his anonymity. He could have been anyone, and in a way he has become for me everyone—the essential common bond that all humans share when we are open to that sharing. On that day so many years ago, I felt his unique humanity as I am sure he did of me; from that point onward the challenge of reconciling my life of privilege amidst stark poverty became both deeply personal and spiritually irresistible. I still carry that young boy in my heart and mind, as I reflect on the human dignity that shone from within him. Somehow the Indiana Jones manly swagger suddenly lost much of its allure, as I learned essential lessons of compassion and solidarity.
The second wake-up call took the form of a tall, smartly dressed Kenyan teenager of perhaps eighteen who sidled up to me as I walked along a street in downtown Nairobi, one afternoon early in 1981. My original inclination was to ignore him, assuming he was a panhandler or that he otherwise viewed me as a tourist—an easy target ripe for exploitation. Sadly, he seemed all too aware of my remoteness and the reason behind it, and he promptly reassured me that he bore no ill intentions, nor was he seeking any money from me. He had a lovely smile and spoke excellent English, which he used to reassure me that his only reason for approaching me was to discover if I were American. I confirmed his supposition, and he then told me that he wished only to offer me his gratitude on behalf of all Kenyans. “No,” he stopped . . . “on behalf of all Africans.”
Now I was transfixed: What could possibly be the cause for such a communication, much less justify me to be its recipient? He proceeded to explain that when my president, then Jimmy Carter, had defended the human rights of all human beings everywhere, he and his friends felt embraced and honored. “I want to thank you that your president—the president of the United States of America—is a champion for my human rights, a Kenyan.” It was all he had to say, but his wide and warm smile communicated a sincerity that left me first feeling proudly patriotic, but quickly had me wondering what it all meant. Why had my president said such words? Where did I fit in to that message, and what was it all to me? I’m still searching for that answer. Being in Kenya suddenly was more than just an exotic adventure; it was to become a profoundly reflective journey with a moral awakening that began at that very moment.
Eight years later, on the heels of a failed marriage and the closure of my own economically unsuccessful architectural practice, I left that expatriate life in Kenya with my emotional treasury nearly bankrupt, and my moral awakening still a work in progress. I would have more to pay emotionally before Africa was through with its lessons. Another six years later would find me traveling from Washington, DC, to Durban, South Africa, with my second wife and our three-month-old son Ian, to step into the role of managing director of a new joint venture between my US based employer—a very large global engineering firm—and a local engineering firm. The new entity was called Siyakhana, which in Zulu roughly translates to “working together in harmony.” Siyakhana was a new town and regional planning firm, and my change of career represented a professional progression not unfamiliar to many architects. Both professions challenge their practitioners to integrate and harmonize complex systems and in so doing achieve desirable results; for the town planner, however, the end goal is not the creation of a building, but instead the satisfaction that comes with facilitating sustainable and popularly supported development for a community. Being new to South Africa, I was more than a little aware that I had much to learn in a very short time. Ever the optimist, I assumed my new role with energy and confidence. To my pleasure and great relief, Durban was also the home of two of my very best friends, Jenni and Dan Smit, whose Afrikaner lineage had not stood in the way of their courageous role in supporting the African National Congress and its aims throughout the years of the anti-apartheid struggle. Jenni and Dan warmly took us in and helped us to adapt to our new environment, and their two daughters, Alexia and Olivia, delighted in spending time with our very young son.
South Africa in 1995 had a remarkably different feel than Kenya. While being white, professional, and presenting as male still conferred status and privilege, the aura of the all-knowing expatriate was nowhere to be seen in this port city. In Durban there were very few Americans or other foreign residents from developed economies; indeed, many white South Africans were emigrating as fast as they could to the United States, Britain, Canada, New Zealand, or Australia. These were turbulent days in South Africa just after President Mandela had assumed power, with the future of the country very much in doubt. Racial tensions were always present if just below a veneer of civility, but as an American I was considered somehow unencumbered by my pale complexion—I wasn’t viewed as a personal accomplice to the troubled legacy of apartheid or colonialism. Black South Africans were much easier to befriend than black Kenyans had ever been, although the cause of that alienation from Kenyans had much to do with the separation and aloofness of my earlier Nairobi expatriate life.
The work I was to undertake in Durban was audacious, collaborating with South Africans to spatially reconfigure and heal those parts of South Africa that bore a deep, ugly thumbprint from earlier planners. Such planners had fulfilled the apartheid dream by segregating land use by race; they had also designed road layouts specifically to control access, thereby ensuring that potential disturbances quickly could be contained. Siyakhana emerged right in the middle of sweeping national change, as we facilitated processes that allowed very different people from across the economic, racial, social, educational, and gender spectrum to come together in “development forums” to air their respective and often conflicting arguments on how South Africa’s development funds ought to be spent. My colleagues and I had to learn to listen, to make sense of it all, to feel both the pain and the aspirations of people forged by years of struggle, and then to somehow translate it into policies and action plans. Africa was busy teaching me again.
In retrospect, the hubris of a white American architect—suddenly turned town planner—coming to Durban to help orchestrate a complex redesign of South African physical realities under conditions far more about cacophony than harmony is astounding. Once again, just who did I think I was? While shaped and seasoned by the many hard lessons of poverty in Kenya and throughout eastern Africa, and by my exposure to the multiple development challenges of many other African countries I had already visited on project work, nothing prepared me for the South Africa of 1995. My demeanor was far more subdued than in my decade in Kenya; I had begun to take notice of my emotional sensibilities as I listened and learned as quickly as I could. Many friends and professional colleagues helped me, not the least being the aforementioned Dan Smit—regarded as one of South Africa’s preeminent town planners. Dan graciously agreed to serve as chairman of Siyakhana, and his wise advice and my growing openness to listen to such wisdom saved me from many missteps. A South African engineer named Dean Barnes, with a prodigious record of having designed and implemented cost-effective ways to bring basic sanitary and water infrastructure to very poor communities, also provided invaluable support and guidance. Along with an intensive process of learning the ropes while being accountable to the two firms who were the demanding joint investors in Siyakhana, I was also pursuing the intensive lessons of what parenting meant. Christine had not been to Africa before, and frequently being stranded alone at home with a young child made her feel insecure, unsettled, and underappreciated. While I struggled to play the masculine role of competent, high-powered American executive backed up by the vast resources of a global engineering giant, I was losing the struggle to do justice to the lovingly masculine roles of husband and father. Priorities became skewed, and our marriage suffered extraordinary strains. Keeping the veneer in place became progressively more unsustainable. I wasn’t listening to her, and I wasn’t listening to my life. I also wasn’t listening to the Chloe within, yet she was making her presence known more and more each day.
Our son Ian attended a moms-and-tots play group that, because of white South African social conventions, was not open to dads except on rare occasions. One such time was at the annual Christmas holiday gathering, and Christine, our son Ian, and I were the only ones there who weren’t South Africans. Everyone was pleasant and conversational, but my favorite moment came when we gathered outside on the stone patio with the children to sing Christmas carols. Only then did I notice that every South African dad present had made his way upstairs to drink beer with the lads and watch the rugby on the television. Still, I was oddly aware that I was just where I was supposed to be, with the moms and tots, and I relished every minute of it. It was one small example of listening to my heart, listening to the Chloe within, and tapping into the joy and meaning that flowed from that special—if largely still muffled—source.
Our three years in South Africa exposed me to deep development challenges and possibilities, as South Africans taught me the sophisticated skills of effective public participation processes. Again and again in such gatherings, the issues that were most daunting were not the technical demands that planners are trained to take note of and be responsive to. Instead, those in the participatory workshops spoke of their aspirations, their dreams for a safer and happier future with ample opportunities for their children to grow and prosper in a multiracial society. Again and again, the participants in such workshops asked why the poor were poor, why the politicians were corrupt, why the women had no voice and few resources, why the perpetrators of violence against women and the poor enjoyed impunity, and why the whites still enjoyed disproportionate power and wealth. They asked what was to be done to make amends for years of suffering under apartheid, who was responsible for opening doors to the jobs and choices that still remained closed to them. They spoke a great deal about human rights and about the values so eloquently stated in their constitution, and—using human rights language—they asserted demands for fairness and justice. I felt mute, but I listened intently; I had never been trained to address such overtly moral concerns. Given the gravity and moral force of their claims, and their insistence that under the emerging new South Africa they be afforded the rights and freedoms that any dignified human being ought to enjoy, I keenly heard their passion but also knew that I was out of my element. They were asking questions at the heart ofwhat “development” ought to mean, and I had no answers. The patina surrounding my role as managing director of Siyakhana faded. That role began to feel hollow, my manly focus on professional performance felt less and less persuasive to me, and the pressures of my progressively unhappy marriage convinced me that it was time to change. I still wasn’t ready to understand and embrace my authentic self, but I knew all about reinvention and playing the next manly script. So I set about the task of reinventing myself yet again—in effect to avoid once more listening for the challenging messages that lay at the core of who I was. We left South Africa in June of 1998, and two months later in Maryland, I began doctoral studies in applied ethics and public policy.
It isn’t fair to describe my four years at the University of Maryland’s School of Public Policy as an all-encompassing distraction, although at times it felt so. Halfway through my studies we had a baby daughter, Audrey, and home life became busier—happier too. The children were their own wonderful distraction, and I found tremendous pleasure in continuing to immerse myself in certain parenting roles. Reading books at bedtime, lots of rambunctious playtime, presiding over most bath times; the pattern of bed-play-bath provided stability and pleasure and kept me from losing myself irretrievably in the world of the intellect. I invited my young son to participate in the redecoration of his bedroom, and together we chose wallpaper border trim embellished with motorcycles and bright colors, and he even “helped” me with the painting. We built elaborate structures out of Lego blocks and popsicle sticks and straws, and he joined me every summer in preparing, planting, and harvesting our small vegetable garden (leaving the weeding to me!). We collected and played marbles, and obtained pet goldfish (in ever larger quantities, in ever larger tanks—which I always somehow ended up cleaning). Together we would snare fireflies in small insect-catcher containers, and marvel at their glow. As Audrey became more mobile and independent, she would join our activities, bringing her own personality into everything we did. Yet even before she could crawl or walk, she was part of many shared childhood adventures. At the tender age of seven months, she made her Halloween mark trick-or-treating in an adorable M&M costume as Christine and I carried her around the neighborhood, with a costumed Ian and his friends at our side. Bath time was particularly fun for both children, with all manner of toys for them both to play and splash with, and seldom any hurry to rush the process.
Still, my doctoral studies demanded extraordinary time and effort, even if they were fascinating (if you don’t count the economics classes), and I benefited from the remarkable mentoring of the renowned philosopher, Professor David A. Crocker, who chaired my dissertation committee. By the conclusion of that dissertation I was comfortably fluent in and enjoying the application of the language of ethics and public policy, including but by no means limited to human rights. Having only Christine’s income for two years, and then the addition of very modest income derived from my part-time employment for the following two years, incurred enormous financial pressures on our family. Between the demands of balancing our budget and becoming adept at moral theory and its application, there was little time or resources for any other pursuits—like reflecting on my own identity, or listening for inner guidance. Still, I was becoming more acutely aware that by allowing myself to be distracted, even if for justifiable reasons, I was still running away from a confrontation with myself about myself. It would require that confrontation to take place and be resolved—by far the biggest challenge of my life—before I could circle around to using my skills as an ethicist to reflect upon what it means to be transgender, and more importantly, to be authentically myself. That has come to include much thinking through the question of whether there exists a human right or other persuasive moral basis upon which transgender persons can be justified in claiming a gender identity contrary to that which they were assigned at birth.
Before I could attempt an answer to such questions, I had to give some thought to what “gender” is, and that really only became my priority after my gender transition. It was then that I became aware that no consensus exists; prominent gender theorists such as Dr. Judith Butler have explained gender as something that is produced and performed, or more accurately that is produced through repeated performance.9 In her view (one most thoughtful transgender persons reject, myself included) gender emerges through a series of “acts” repeated by a person, and is always subject to further changes. To Butler, gender is conceptualized as repetitive social fictions that are created and built up over time, which in turn are embodied as “truth” or perceived as “natural” through the performance of what she termed “social scripts.” From Butler’s perspective, gender is performative but gender doesn’t express any inner or subconscious sense of identity—which is directly at odds with the sense of identity described by most transgender persons who feel so moved as to change their assigned gender identity. It’s an interesting theoretical debate, but in most developing countries the gender identity dialogue isn’t articulated in terms of “performative” versus “natural.” Instead, gender is culturally imposed and not subject to revision on any terms. Any attempt to deal with internal gender dissonance by rejecting your biological sex assignment and having the audacity to redefine your own gender identity and associated roles will leave such persons open to verbal assault, moral recriminations, exclusion, humiliation, or even violence. Such a beleaguered position is hardly a strong one from which to assert human rights claims.
Any moral consideration of such a claim must first begin with an assessment of whether “gender identity” is a clearly defined moral category. No one doubts that multiple and often conflicting perceptions of masculine and feminine exist (gender expression), but disagreements really come to the surface when we consider whether certain universal moral values ought to be assigned to or at least be more closely associated with “male” or “female” (gender identity). The situation gets even more complicated when the basis for gender assignment itself is open to moral questions—i.e., who has the right to assign a person’s gender identity and upon what basis?
As if the definitional and listing-authority questions regarding gender were not complicated enough, what constitutes authentic gender? Ought gender be considered within a binary structure, or should gender lie upon a gender continuum? There are even people—and I am not one of them—who reject the notion of gender categories altogether, and seek to be respected as dignified but ungendered human beings. Others make the moral (and often legal) case for a third gender which may or may not be defined to include (some) transgender persons.
For my own part, once I made significant progress in pursuing the arduous reflective work of coming to terms with my inner identity, I wished to be recognized—socially and legally—in the only gender identity that feels authentic, even if this entails enormous risks in my public presentation. I believe many transgender persons wish the same for themselves. For persons like us there is no acceptable option, and no closet to escape into. If we persist in the public presentation of an assigned gender that we know to be inauthentic we will experience the excruciating discomfort of gender dissonance. In time, such duplicity is simply unsupportable. It’s neither an exaggeration nor melodramatic at that juncture to describe my necessity to transition as a matter of life or death, and for many trans-gender persons that is a common threshold experience. I’m left with no doubt that continuing as Stephen would never have seen me through to the current year.
Universal human rights begin with equality, freedom, and dignity. Gender isn’t an equivalent foundational issue for most people, but it was—and is—for me. Those of us who constitute a relatively tiny minority at the fringes of society have a different and more vital relationship with gender. I know, and I’ve heard transgender friends express similar convictions, that my gender authenticity is so hardwired into my “self” that a life in the wrong body—wearing the “wrong face”—would be no life at all for me. If I and those like me cannot own our individual humanity, wear our own faces, and be respected as persons of equal dignity to all others—even if we are transgender, gender nonconforming, or intersex—no other human rights matter for us.
It doesn’t get any more basic than “self.” Unless we are self-ish, we are not present in this world.
If that line of thinking and the actions that flow from it lead to wearing the label of a human rights and social inclusion advocate, that’s a label I’ll wear with pride and determination. The roots of my advocacy for human dignity stretch back to my upbringing, to my extensive work as an international development practitioner, and to my scholarly endeavors in learning and using the persuasively strong human rights and social inclusion language, and the versatile vocabulary of ethics. No doubt, too, that my identity as a human rights and social inclusion activist was shaped by the direct integrity challenges I’ve faced throughout my unfolding gender history, and through coming to know and care for many human rights defenders globally. There are remarkable transgender and allied voices around the world speaking out strongly in support of the human dignity of transgender and intersex persons. There are also many allies of transgender human rights defenders outside the international LGBTQI community, people who’ve taken a committed stance to support transgender persons and our human rights claims.
One such ally played a big part in my African education. Professor Byaruhanga Rukooko is a warm and energetic philosopher who became a steadfast friend in 2005–2006, my pre-transition year as a Fulbright senior scholar at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda, and he has remained my firm friend throughout my transition. On numerous occasions, formally and informally, he’s joined with me in public outreach and in intellectual endeavors to raise awareness of the human dignity of all marginalized persons. Once, when I—as Chloe—returned to Kampala while still a political appointee of the US Agency for International Development (USAID), Rukooko accompanied me to a presentation to the Ugandan staff (“foreign service nationals”) of the US Embassy and USAID Mission there. The goal of the session was to explain to the Ugandans (and to those American staff who also chose to attend) why the US government supported the human rights of LGBTQI persons. While fully aware that this wasn’t a popular topic in the toxically-homophobic environment of Uganda, I thought that the gravitas of my senior stature in the US government and my usual ability to project a demeanor of likeability and trustworthiness would win hearts and minds. Instead, some of the Ugandans in attendance were openly alarmed and distraught by my promotion of the human rights and social inclusion of persons whom they generally felt to be despicable, ungodly, even subhuman. The mood in the room became less than cordial, and what civility remained deteriorated completely when I acknowledged that I, a woman, was (then) married to a woman. Loud argumentation and unruly accusations ensued: of my un-Christian behavior, of corrupting Uganda’s children, and of exporting Western moral decay. The situation was dramatically exacerbated when I made the unwise disclosure that I was not just married to a woman, but that I once had been embodied as a man. The atmosphere in that room, in the heart of the American Embassy surrounded by employees of the US government but in the very middle of Africa, suddenly felt confused, perplexed, hostile, even bordering on threatening. At that juncture, the distinguished Rukooko—a man held in very high regard by Ugandans as a senior academic—walked up to me and calmly put his arm around my shoulder. He looked out at his fellow Ugandans in the room with a quiet yet intense authority. After first clarifying that he was neither gay nor transgender, he simply said, “I am Chloe’s friend.” He did not have to say anything more; his face said it all. The session was over, but my friendship and respect for this courageous ally was forged unbreakably and forever. Africa had taught me another lesson.
My USAID appointment in October of 2011 had been to a new position, as Senior Advisor on Democracy, Human Rights, and Governance to USAID’s Africa Bureau’s Front Office. Within two weeks of starting, however, my job description also included helping USAID—agency wide—to articulate a clear policy position on the human rights of LGBTQI persons around the world. And while that Ugandan experience was the most edgy during my three years as a political appointee of President Barack Obama’s administration, the very fact of being the first transgender political appointee in the history of any US foreign affairs agency or department was, itself, central to my subsequent human rights and social inclusion activism.
In the federal government the promotion of policy positions and standards is a common duty of many senior political appointees, but that promotion is clearly limited to specific talking points that delineate the administration’s official position on a given topic. In short, at USAID I was speaking for the government, not for Chloe. Fortunately for me, my advocacy priorities with respect to democracy, good governance, and the human rights and social inclusion of all persons—including but by no means limited to LGBTQI persons—made sticking to the official talking points quite easy. The opportunities to speak were not limited to tense gatherings such as the one at the US Embassy in Kampala. They included three days speaking and guest-teaching at Dartmouth University in New Hampshire, several other one-day university visits, and a major conference of political scientists in San Diego (together with my aforementioned friend and colleague, Prof. Rukooko, on his first and only trip to the United States). I also spoke at two high-profile presentations at the White House, and once at the presidential retreat at Camp David. Public speaking comes easily to me, helped in no small measure by the long process of feminizing voice therapy that my outstanding voice coach had seen me through. Still, as much as what I said and the way in which I said it, the simple fact of being wholly present as a transgender political appointee—and simply of being transgender—was and remains a strong message.
This was particularly so during travel to meet senior government officials in developing countries. Until we figured it out, those of us on the USAID delegation were befuddled at the realization that such visits often were marked by very high attendance at only the initial meeting. In time we solved the riddle; the senior government official’s staff had Googled the background of the visiting USAID delegation and it was easy to find out that one of the distinguished visitors—me—had a rather unusual history. Most of the “surplus” attendees of these initial meetings were there to gawk, but they never stayed the full course of the meeting. As a well put-together and articulate woman of a certain age I offered no sensational or scandalous news value to them. One of my senior USAID colleagues began to refer to this as the “Chloe moment” of these bilateral visits, and he mused that the impression of a transgender woman carrying out a sophisticated and responsible role in an effective way may have been the most durable advocacy contribution of each of these visits.
In those days, my primary connection at the White House was Brian Bond, who was then the deputy director of public engagement while also serving as the White House’s LGBTQI liaison. On his initiative, he held monthly meetings of all three DC-based transgender political appointees: Amanda Simpson of the Department of Commerce (and later the Department of Defense), Dylan Orr of the Department of Labor, and me. Having a very senior White House official asking probing questions each month about how the Obama administration could do more for transgender persons domestically and abroad inspired me, as did Brian’s evident personal concern and commitment. When Brian left to take a position as the Democratic National Committee’s director of constituency outreach, his successor held these meetings irregularly, and then not at all. And now—well, the improbability that the new administration of President Trump would ever deign to appoint transgender persons, much less convene them at the White House on a regular basis to seek their input, says all one needs to know as to why I am a Democrat.
My focus on human rights and social inclusion however did not start with my political appointment. There is a continuity in my own human dignity narrative that has propelled my advocacy for human dignity internationally across my international development career, whether it’s been for downtrodden Filipinos compelled by their culture to accept their poverty and powerlessness, or for the dignity and rights of Ugandan widows who, upon the deaths of their husbands, had stood powerlessly as their children and lands had been reallocated to male relatives of the late husbands. I have advocated in Mexico City on behalf of and in solidarity with desperate Mexican parents whose demands for information about their “disappeared” college-aged children went unanswered by corrupt and callous Mexican police acting in league with narco gangs, and in Washington, DC, and Nairobi, Kenya, for threadbare and hungry Somali civilians with vacant gazes and little hope, displaced by seemingly never-ending conflict. The global assault on human dignity and rights proceeds apace on so many fronts, but I hold a special place in my heart and in my advocacy for transgender people and the whole LGBTQI community around the world.
While domestic human rights advocacy hasn’t been a focus of my career until recent political events forced me into something of a reorientation, I did once before pursue advocacy in my own state of Maryland through supporting that prolonged quest for recognition of the human and legal rights of transgender Marylanders—for people just like me. On March 4, 2009, I stood in front of the relevant committee of the Maryland State Senate as they took testimony regarding Maryland Senate Bill 566. This bill’s title was awkward but clear: Human Relations—Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity—Antidiscrimination. After waiting a very long time for my turn, I stood at the podium and explained—in the scant three minutes allocated to me—that my advocacy in support of this bill was seasoned and shaped by my status as a transgender woman and by my strong sense of my civic duty as a citizen of Maryland. I acknowledged the political realities at the outset—that the state senators really had no pragmatic reason to support our cause. We’re few in number, so our direct voting power isn’t a factor and our plight isn’t likely to attract the attention of most citizens, many of whom don’t even know we exist. Of those who do know, a proportion of them are only drawn to us for the wrong reasons, out of prurient fascination. Some Marylanders simply find the idea of us repugnant, while others feel compelled to honor their own moral and spiritual beliefs: to support such a bill would have been tantamount to sanctioning “deviant” behavior. They listened, wondering what I was driving at.
Jumping from politics to morality is ambitious in three minutes. I asserted that gender identity is fundamental to being human, and that discrimination against us as transgender persons denies our basic human integrity and negatively affects our ability to care for our families. I even quoted from the respected professor of philosophy and African American studies, Anthony Kwame Appiah: “Our moral modernity consists chiefly of extending the principle of equal respect to those who had previously been outside the compass of sympathy; in that sense, it has consisted in the ability to see similarity where our predecessors saw only difference. The wisdom was hard-won; it should not be lightly set aside.”
For transgender citizens of Maryland, State Senate Bill 566 would have cleared away much of the discrimination in employment, housing, credit, or public accommodations (including public restrooms) that assaulted our dignity and frustrated our efforts to find a life of meaning. The potential to live a truly human life of dignity, free of shame, rests in large measure with every person’s freedom to express their deepest convictions of their own gender identity. I argued that the state should embrace the concept of gender identity in this context, and provide the legislative framework that reflects these common but important values.
My time was almost up, but I quickly returned to Professor Appiah for one more brief quote: “What’s age-old is that when we are asked—and ask ourselves—who we are, we are being asked what we are as well.” Looking straight at the state senators, I asserted that what we are is simple. We’re human beings and citizens of Maryland, and that is all that must be known about us. Who we are is, however, complex—each of us has a story, a life, hopes, and aspirations just like any other citizen of Maryland. All that we were seeking was to be treated in like manner, free from discrimination in employment, housing, credit, or public accommodations. My time was up.
The bill never made it out of committee that year. It would not be until March of 2014 that my home state of Maryland finally passed such a bill. Maryland then joined sixteen other states and the District of Columbia in protecting the rights of transgender individuals from being discriminated against in terms of access to housing and jobs, along with other forms of exclusion. As for transgender persons in those other thirty-three states, they remain unprotected and disrespected, often at great peril to their well-being and aspirations. And now, in a wave of extreme conservative push-back sweeping this nation, twenty-nine state legislatures are considering the imposition of “bathroom bills” like North Carolina’s. If I travel within this country, I may soon have to learn yet another womanly skill: how to pee in the woods.
Still, there has been significant progress in achieving human rights protections and freedoms for lesbian, bisexual, and gay Americans, as the momentous Supreme Court decision on June 26, 2015, making same-sex marriage legal across this nation demonstrated conclusively. The momentum of this victory may be enough to carry over to improved rights for transgender Americans, although with Trump in the White House this conjecture may be premature. It is equally plausible that gay, bisexual, and lesbian Americans and their allies may feel that their work is now accomplished, and they may withdraw from further activism. We will only know through the passage of time. In the interim, the plight of transgen-der persons in the United States is only marginally improved (although violence against transgender women of color appears to be worsening), and in developing or repressive countries it remains bleak and as poorly understood by the general public there or here as the meaning of “trans-gender” itself.
The creation of standards of governance that are responsive to universal human rights and respectful of universal human dignity remains a distant goal. Even though I and nearly all transgender persons know or at least sense from an early age with uncanny (if often hard-to-articulate) clarity that the gender that we were labeled with at birth was wrong, despite the sexual characteristics of the bodies that we occupy, this is all very awkward for those in authority. They don’t know me or other transgender citizens and may feel they have no need to learn. We are few in number, and our stubborn pursuit of nonconforming gender identity often makes the general public uneasy. The transgender phenomenon also outrages many religious and cultural leaders (sometimes spilling over to mobilize hordes of extreme-right Internet trolls) who all fill the Internet and local media with caustic diatribes against transgender persons, cloaked in religious certitude and smug deprecation. In governments, those in authority would rather ignore the rights-based demands of transgender persons, as modest as such demands are. If pressed to do so by transgender activists or their allies, such authorities are prone to react in a punitive and repressive manner, hoping to deter or intimidate these odd persons who have had the temerity to make their day so uncomfortable—odd people such as me, Chloe.
If only they knew that it’s uncomfortable for us too. Having a brain that knows it’s in the wrong body is a tough concept to explain, especially since our claims for recognition of authentic gender identity almost always get conflated with the sexual orientation issues of lesbians, bisexuals, and gay persons. As I have noted earlier, all transgender folk get called gay, and in more than seventy-eight countries that label can lead to detention, arrest, or worse.
In a world replete with human rights abuses affecting vast numbers of people, the curious and awkward misfortunes of those with mismatched bodies—transgender folk like me—seem insignificant. Perhaps viewed through the blunt utilitarian calculus, that’s true. But when we dare to be self-ish, to stand up for the fundamental right just to be ourselves despite the audacity of transgressing that previously impassable barrier between the sexes and all that this barrier means, we make a powerful statement that human dignity matters.
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9. For further details on Judith Butler’s thinking, I would recommend her 1988 piece “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory,” in Theatre Journal 40, no. 4 (1988): pp. 519-531, and her 1990 book Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, published by Routledge.