Thursday, December 17, 2015

"Cultural Territories of Disability" with Simi Linton


"What passes for disability representation in the arts 
is instead mostly fantasy about us."

Simi Linton
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Disability and Democracy

On December 3rd, 2015, Simi Linton spoke to a collection of several classes, as well as faculty and students in GWU's Crip/Queer Studies contingent. Her remarks, which she entitled, "Cultural Territories of Disability," took on the form of a seminar style dialog with the audience. Over the hour and a half, she examined the history and current contexts of disability in the public, the role of disability arts in democracy, and engaged students with a screening of some of her films that illustrate the lived affects art has on people with a diversity of embodiments. Professor David Mitchell introduced Linton and explained that her work has already been an influential part of his course which was now in its final weeks. Indeed, the event was a special treat for students who were able to receive a clarification and continuation of thoughts they had been stewing on all semester.

Throughout her talk, Linton expanded on what she meant by "bringing disability activism into the democracy through the arts." Turning back to the audience, she opened up the questions to the audience, "what is democracy?" and, "how does art influence disabling systems of power?" Various responses were offered, ranging from the formal center of government, major corporations, the media, and the micro-encounters of daily life. Democracy as an idea is then more than a mode of ruling a nation but a way of looking at society as made up of micro-communities of power that are constantly in flux. In such a view, it is not enough to simply pass legislation or elect representatives, but transform needs to occur along massively distributed and systematic channels. It is along these channels that power flows, in contrast to other theories of social interaction that put a greater emphasis on centers or organs of authority. As much as disability justice needs to penetrate these bastions of rulership in order to effect change, it also needs to effect the network of ideas, emotions, and daily acts that are not localizable to one place or person. Power exists between people, not merely in them.


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The Cultural Authority of Disability

At the start of her talk, Linton explained how her first book came out of a dinner at a restaurant with the desire to portray disability as an active mode of embodying the self and society rather than a passive state. As a discerning period, Linton decided that working in the academy would put too many limitations on her time, work, and conversations. In the end, she decided to leave the ivory tower of teaching, "to bring disability into the public" and use the arts to reorient societal orientations, "the cultural authority of disability." Disability justice requires mass participation in order to transform the physical and societal environments that disable those with non-normative embodiments. As Linton brought the audience into the conversation on disability culture, she spurred competition between classes in order to get a diversity of vantage points and to push the attending classes to see crip cultural authority as a good worth fighting to develop. 

At another stopping point, Linton and Mitchell discussed disability justice as working to move beyond the compulsory struggle "to be like the able-bodied" and to move instead into offering distinct vantages and goods as different kinds of crip bodies. This form of disability studies effectively is about a change of perspective, turning from exterior social view of disability to seeing the self and society from the disabled vantage. This "vantage," Linton stresses, combines a better understanding of crip knowledge (i.e. vantage points, the places and modes of how people perceive) and of crip power (i.e. advantage, the areas in which crip embodiments are better attuned to the world; perhaps suggestion a new way of conceiving of the "dis-advantage" of "dis-ability"). An implicit part of this shift in crip culture and justice is the movement of disability from being an object of study for those in the center of cultural authority to placing disability in the center of things then reviewing and reorienting from that vantage.


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Architecture of Exclusion 

Over the years disability representation and accommodations have increased under the banner of "multiculturalism," admits Linton, but observes that people often mistake and undermine what it means. In regards to the current state of multiculturalism in arts and the democracy, especially as it relates to disability, Linton notes, "more people know what multiculturalism is against rather than what it is for." As with feminism being portrayed as mere antagonism to men and masculinity, people (especially people of privilege) see multiculturalism as a demanding force (much like a whining child) to which they must continually make concessions. By this view, diversity is that ever present nag that invades the media and communities of straight, white ablebodied cisgender men and takes away things from them bit by bit. They frustratedly ask, "when is it enough for you people?" Yet this attitude shows that despite the little accommodations made, those people in power have not changed their sense of values. Disability and diversity (whether its women, people of color, queers, or trans people) remain groups of "others" who are less and have less than them. This vantage refuses to see diversity itself as a strength or the gifts that diverse peoples possess. But this concession of ideology would require the admission that for all their power, people of privilege are actually less able, less knowing, less rich than those over which they lord their whiteness or normativity. Once the admission is made, "their difference from me has value, authority, and power," suddenly disability and diversity becomes something to be desired and welcomed, not merely accommodated.

The need for the transformation of democracy is evident then not only in the big injustice of government but in the "micro-aggressions" that occur in every day life. Working with a term that has received some use and misunderstanding, Linton defines and nuances meaning of micro-aggressions as the daily acts of ableism that occur despite major social victories. Often, in fact, the "backlash" after concessions are finally made (however small) to disability justice can drastically increase in number and forms after a few major concessions. One example that Linton called on to illustrate this is what she calls, "the Architecture of Exclusion." She defines this as architecture that reflects a dismissal, devaluing, or even frustration with disability as a result of unwillingly making the concessions to design, such as ramps or automatic doors. In one case, documented in one of her films, the ramp of an art center was so hidden that it not only took her away and out of sight from the public (as if she in her wheelchair was a problem for the building's aesthetic) but was covered and narrow so that she felt isolated and confined. The ramp did not allow for her to travel alongside friends and thus cut off her ability to converse with others who used the ramp with her. Evidently, the ramp was not built for the pleasure of people in wheel chairs and indeed wanted them out of the way as much as possible. The cumulative effect was that she felt alienated and marginalized by the building's unwelcoming layout at the same moments concessions are being made.

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Other Crip/Queer Events at GWU




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As a writer, consultant and public speaker, Simi Linton is one of America’s foremost experts on disability and the arts. She works with a diverse range of cultural organizations – theatre companies, film and television producers, museums, non-profit arts companies, universities, and other groups across the country – to improve and increase the way disability is represented and depicted in all art forms.

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Sunday, December 13, 2015

Transgender and Childhood: Sympathizing with Stefonknee Wolscht


"It's a fresh start...
I'm living life like I couldn't"

Stephanie Wolscht
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Sister // Cister

I am sitting in the Glenbard West auditorium in Glen, Ellyn Illinois waiting for my sister to take the stage with the rest of her ballet class. I am eight years old. She is six. My sister has been practicing for weeks after kindergarten with a class of other young girls. The routines are basic - bending the knee, pointing the feet, small jumps (hops). The most difficult task for children at this stage seems to be coordination. The whole group must remember the moves, or be able to know enough to closely follow the teacher as she mirrors the positions off to the side, and execute them as a set. This involves working together over many nights to become comfortable with the other girls, be able to read and anticipate the other girls' movements, and work together as a cohesive group. Even if the leaps aren't very high (they are hops) and the poses are not perfectly straight lines, the overall effect of seven to nine girls moving in sequence to the music is fun and adorable. Beyond excellence in fine arts, the real goal of the dance class is to learn what it means to work as a group - and being able to perform the role of sweet girls in pink and black tights sufficiently for an auditorium of shutter-bug parents. Each used enough film to permit sending a copy to all friends and family who will feign interest (Note: growing up in the late 1980's we were decades away from the instant point-n-click digital phone cameras that make filming my own daughters much cheaper and more exact). All in all, between the group-building and performance, my sister and these girls were being indoctrinated into white, middle-class midwestern girlhood. And my sister looked damn cute doing it.

Listening to the violins and cellos launch the young ballerinas into a routine of circles, leaps, and bended knees, I remember a distant sadness tinged with frustration. I desired to be up there with my sister. This was not simply an attraction to the art-form and the pretty pixie-like outfits that accompanied it, but the fellowship with the other girls. Yet for my identification, traits, and desires I was assigned male at birth. So much of my life could have been different except for the trajectory that one final syllable of a three word sentence from a doctor ("It's a boy") that directed me for two decades. Had the medical professional clairvoyance to utter "girl" at the end or the radical pragmatism not to reduce the complex mental, emotional, sexual, hormonal, social system of gender down to a few misleading aspects of my biology my life could have turned out much differently. Certainly, if the field had been the same or leveled between my sister and me, I would have been down there with her on stage, dancing my little ballerina heart out. That however was not the way things happened then and there. As part of the educational and socializing process of making me into a proper boy, I had been daily drawn away from female friends and activities and oriented towards games with boys. While decidedly geeky boys, a few with feminine or queer flourishes of their own, the culture and community I was paired with kept the dance shoes and leaps at a distance from me. The closest I was ever brought was these old, knitted wool seats over metal frames that gave me a clear view of my sister and the education she was receiving.

Ironically, my sister eventually quit ballet. As we grew up and each learned to assert our own desires and disgusts, my sister increasingly threw away the pink and the frilly, while I coveted them even in their going. I didn't begrudge her discarding ballet or the other normative accouterment of girlhood, although I was sad to learn that she did so out of pressure from her friends. They were hers to do with what she would. Yet in ways neither of us had complete control over how we were and would become women. Don't get me wrong, some of it she was able to own and enjoy. Other parts she would reclaim later in life. She can tart it up with the best of us now that we are adults and be a real knock out. She can also knock you out with a right hook to the face if you call her that in the wrong tone. (Note: despite being younger, my cute but stone-cold tough sister looked out for me a lot growing up and still does today). All things considered, for myself, I simply envied her ability to say "No" to ballet; even as we are never offered a full choice. There were parts of girl culture I may not have wanted either, especially its compulsory surrender and subjugation to the power and privilege the boys were being prepared to inherit from the reigning forms of patriarchy.  Those I would not wish on any girl. Yet I desired the choice, the liberty, the power of refusing a thing that was offered. I wanted the offer to come as though this too were my birthright, as if the sisterhood welcomed me as own of its own. Without such doors being opened and young trans girls invited inside, it can and did take years for me to knock on those gates on my own - and where I found them barred against me to push, pry, and break down the barricades - and claim the womanhood (along with the assorted dance shoes and lessons) that I was not offered.


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The Loss of Stephanie Wolscht

"She said stop being trans or leave. So that - to me - stop being trans was not something I could do," says Stefonknee Wolscht as part of the Transgender Project film series. "I was trans before me married. I was a trans parent for twenty-three years. It floored me. It scared me. Because I didn't know how to not be trans." At the age of forty-six, Wolscht came out as a trans woman to her family, a wife and seven children. After her wife's rejection of her, she became alienated from her family of many years, a loss anti-transgender media blames on her decision to transition. In fact, while Wolscht experienced homelessness as well as joblessness because of being transgender, the press continues to publish stories of her life, painting her as a villain: Transgender father Stefonknee Wolschtt (52) leaves family to live life as six-year-old girl. As a result, Wolscht moved forward, making changes to her life on the basis that she would never be accepted by her current family. "It's a fresh start," says Wolscht. "I can't deny that I was married. I cant deny I have children. But I've moved forward. I have gone back to be a child.... I just live my life like I couldn't when I was in school." She now has new adopted parents and sister. At first she lived as eight-years-old until her younger sister wanted to be the older sibling. At her sister's request, she now lives as a six-year-old. In addition to her new family life, Wolscht also works a snow-plow and helps raise awareness about the diversity of ways and reasons to transition gender. She remains a practicing Catholic as well as a transgender advocate. In particular, she pushes what she calls, "play therapy." "No medication, no suicide thoughts," claims Wolscht. "And I just get to play." As part of the Transgender Project, Wolscht's story furthers its goal to archive and reflect, "the broad diversity that exists within the trans community itself." Rather than trying to judge and stratify the different people and ways to be trans, the Transgender Project shares and celebrates lives from across Canada as as the personal, particular stories they are.

Despite and because of the counter-normative aspects of Wolstch's story, there are reasons to sympathize with and defend her story. Her narrative came to me through a friend who wanted my opinion on an article, "Fifty-Two Year Old Man Living As Six-Year Old Girl. Seriously." First, it should be observed that in this relatively short article references as it's only scholarly authority Dr. Paul McHugh, a former psychiatrist-in-chief at John Hopkins Hospital, one of the only professional psychiatrists in the academy that out right opposes "transgenderism" as a mental disease to be fixed. Dr. McHugh's anti-transgender theories have been debunked by decades of scholarship and professional health organizations, includingThe American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Psychiatric Society, the American Public Health Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender HealthYet nearly every time an article or group wishes to demonize a transgender person they trot him out as their source. That sets up this article from the onset as an attack against the transgender justice movement by pulling out members of the transgender community that may be considered less palatable as a way of painting the whole community. We saw similar attacks happening simply when transgender was used as an analogy in the discussion of a "trans racial" person. Before saying anything else, we must ask the question: why do we need to give an opinion about this person? What is to be gained by judging, condemning, or promoting this person's story? The age and the gender matter do not seem automatically related. The subculture of living as a different age has many members although it is rather taboo still to the public. 

Where I see transgender and transitioning age intersecting is evident in her story: that society had already turned its back on her, she was already marginalized, already queer, so what is to be gained by playing by society's rules? "I'm gender queer, I'm queer... I'm queer," Wolscht stutters in her interview, acknowledging the many ways that she diverges away from normative rules of gender, sexuality, and maturity. Indeed, Wolstch's story shows how culture tells us that there are only a few acceptable ways to be normal but nearly infinite ways to be different, so why not revel in that freedom that comes with being an outcast? Dealing with the absences and failures of our childhood during adulthood is something we all experience in our own ways. For the trans community this is often goes beyond those of non-transgender people. One important issue that I believe her story brings to the forefront is that because many trans people are not able to transition until later in life, many of us are denied the childhoods of our cisters and cis-brothers. People are more aware of the effects of transition on our future trajectories but not enough consider the lived experiences that transitioning has on our pasts. I've had close friends looking through pictures of us all together in high-school, point to me pre-transition and ask, "Who is that?" Others tell me, "I keep thinking that is your brother, not you!" I bring this up to substantiate my empathy for a trans woman who has decided to live out the girlhood she was denied as a child. For her this is not necessarily a regression, more like a do-over or an example of living one's lifetime non-linearly. "There are days I forget my past," claims Wolscht. "I can actually go a week without even thinking about what was before."  Again, how many of us watch movies, buy classic games, eat foods, or go places that we did as a child or were denied as a child as a form of revisiting and taking ownership of our childhood.




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Once Again from the Beginning

I am in the Glenbard West auditorium waiting for a new class of ballet students to take the stage. I am eighteen and working the sound and light board earning money as a theater technician for the school. I press a button on the light board to bring up the next program in the cue. The stage shifts from moody blues and purples to a friendly pink and yellow. A whole change in emotion and experience with a simple click of a button. If only life and gender were so simple. Stepping out of the booth, I pad down the steps of the balcony overlooking the stage and floor seating below. Dim pink lights spill over the performers and paints my face. The music is so sweet I can feel it in my teeth. The high notes are spiking the sound system causing the compressors to kick in momentarily and equalize the volume. I take note to lower the levels on the mixing board. Before I head back up, I observe the performers and audience. There are a few more boys on stage. A few more dads in the audience too. But had any of those boys (or fathers for that matter) said, "I'm actually a girl," that would be a sissone en avent too far. This was a time and place where you would hear, "It's okay to be gay!" spoken in public by the same people who in private would say, "did you hear that Tim and Jill's daughter is a lesbian? I feel so sorry for them." As far as I recall, I never heard the word "transgender" spoken aloud in my town. Even in PRISM, our "gay-straight alliance" (a phrase which more or less accurately described a group that for most of my years consisted of one open gay man and a bunch of "straight" friends from theater - most of whom would come out or transition in college), we would use the term LGBT without ever stating aloud what the T represented. No, as far as Glen Ellyn was willing to admit and accept, there were no open and proud trans kids in its school. At some point, I turned back to the lighting and sound booth to make this a great show for for all those trans kids who were and weren't yet welcomed; plus their cisters and brothers too.

It wasn't until years later, in college, that I finally signed myself up for ballet courses. I was a couple years into my public transition. My friends and roommates knew I had started taking lessons but few of them knew my history with dance. They saw black tights and new shoes. I saw a new chance to own my life. No, I wasn't claiming or trying to be eight - or six - years old. But I was finally giving myself something I hadn't been offered as a child. I was giving myself permission to dance. I had also given myself permission to go further. After all, ballet is never simply about the dancing. Over my years in college, I came out as a woman, and as transgender. Transitioning to bring my life and body back in line took work, coming in many forms and stages. I don't need to go through them here and now. Importantly, once again, most my friends were women; many of them dancers. Because I transitioned later, as a young woman, my friends and I did not share the same kind of girlhood, that time had passed. One possible exception became evident when I came out to my sister, however. By another uncanny twist of personality, at the same time that I was in college becoming a ballerina, my sister was in high school, adopting to wearing a black leather jacket and working with the technical theater kids in the sound and lighting booth. This would be a profession and a look she would keep and add modify (with buzzed hair and nose-ring) into her twenties as she pursues work in the film industry. She can also be sweet and pretty as hell. When I came out to her, told her I was transitioning, she laughed. Not at me but at herself. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "growing up I just always said you were one pair of tits away from being my sister. Now I feel bad." Don't, I told her as we hugged. She was right. It was a wisdom and truth she derived from our experiences together from when I first held her in my arms as a newborn until we held each other in my college apartment. We had a different childhood but we were always there for each other, in our own ways, as sister and cister. That's something I'd never want to change.
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Sunday, December 6, 2015

#TransformHate: On Violence Against Transgender Women


"It feels better biting down"

Lorde
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Someone, maybe me, should say something intellectual, researched, and articulate about assault against women, queers, and trans persons of all kinds, but that is not me right now. This is now. This is personal.

I was recently victim to multiple kinds and levels of assault on a train car filled by young cismen. Days later, I'm still angry.

Thought about tweets I made on how my PhD, family, articles, and invites to the White House don't matter to actors of public violence.

If I am found raped, beaten or dead on a train in Baltimore, the perpetrators won't have asked or cared about my credentials.


No one who has ever shouted at me, mocked me, stared at me, moved their children away from me, taken my picture, or touched me in public without my permission have ever asked me who I am.

Who I am doesn't protect me. I have a box full of the names and stories of people whose names and stories didn't protect them. Hate doesn't ask.

In life we are made individual & isolated, in death we are all alike & together; in a box that asks the question: will you be me when I'm gone? 


The anger won't heal me. But there it is. Men put it in me like a rapist's child. It's an invader in my body & it grows. For me, the labor is mine, to birth it into something better than those who gave it me.

A feminist friend of mine once asked, "What's the point in fighting anymore? Nothing is going to change." The best I can offer is to say, we fight because we can't not fight. Because it feels better biting down.

#TransformHate

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Monday, November 30, 2015

LGBT Champions of Change: Transliterature at the White House


"Many transgender and gender nonconforming Americans 
have braved tragedy, discrimination, and violence 
simply for being who they are"

President Obama
Transgender Day of Remembrance
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Transliterature 
Goes to Washington

On November 23rd, 2015, I attended the White Houses's event to observe the Transgender Day of Remembrance and to honor LGBT Champions of Change in the arts. I was contacted earlier in the month with the invite in recognition of my scholarship, particularly my work with Transliterature and the Transform Talks. Despite numerous official documents being sent my way, it was not until I passed through the second of two security check-points, twice body-scanned, and twice interviewed that I began to believe that the White House was really allowing me - even inviting me - to enter. The security guards gave me a green pass-card with the letter "A" emblazoned on it in black. The card had a metallic chain that allowed it to hang around my neck so everyone could see at a glance whether or not I was welcome inside our national locum sanctum. As a transgender woman, I often am made to feel unwelcome in many places but here, today, this green card was an affirmation that I am accepted at the White House. I was invited to attend the national transgender day of remembrance and to celebrate those LGBTQI Champions of Change working in the arts. Until recently, this meeting would be unthinkable. It was not until 2015 that the word "transgender" was even spoken publicly by a U.S. president, much less would there be an event at the White House with the word prominently posted on it and named as the target demographic of those invited, remembered, and honored. This meeting was one powerful sign that the "Change" President Obama promised back in the 2008 election is underway. The change was not complete. Nor was the change embodied in a single candidate. Rather, change was being invited to the White House. It was brought in the present collection of activists and artists.

Ahead of me in line to enter the White House was members of the cast from Amazon's Transparent. The crowds shifted and I lost sight of them, unable to make out particular persons as we were shepherded down hallways and through locked doors. I began to fall back, not wanting to wander the halls of the chief executive building alone, I mingled in with those who were the next in the door. Behind me, I gathered, were producers of the Danish Girl. Only later would I come to realize how intermeshed the creative talents are making these groundbreaking pieces of transgender media. The drive to reclaim transgender stories and tell the untold histories brings together film and TV makers to share resources, struggles, and successes. With goals beyond merely entertaining an audience or profiting a production company, people are eager and willing to work with anyone who can help further transgender discourse and justice. I learned all this in our conversations on upcoming media and scholarship. I also learned this as we burst through a door into a coat-check area and I almost fell right into Jeffrey Tambor, the lead actor of Transparent (2014-), a show on Amazon Prime based on the true life story of a trans parent who transitioned later in life and her family's reactions. As soon as I walked in and found an empty space to stand, he acknowledged those I had entered with as colleagues and then came over to me. Hand extended, he said, "Hello, my name is Jeffrey. Honored to meet you!" In the discussions and meetings to follow, the openness to affirm and collaborate with the work of those present was evident.

During our conversations I was thrilled to discover that the production team for Transparent aimed to further the penetration and integration of trans creative workers into the TV and film industry by designating that at least 20% of their hires would be from the transgender community. This included writers, actors, and producers but also technicians, set builders, lighting experts, and assistants. "Many trans people have a desire to work in film but aren't given the entry level or advancement opportunities required to make a living in the industry," said one of the producers. "That is why we make it a point to hire, train, and promote trans talents. We want to make sure that they leave our production team with experience that will serve them as they continue on in their careers." This is the sentiment of artists and activists who understand that social justice is not just about changing narratives and representations but the systematic structures that determine what bodies are allowed to succeed financially, socially, or politically. Each of the speakers for Transparent and the Danish Girl echoed the intersectional and systematic calls for justice of the other speakers. Throughout the day, the LGBT Champions for Change demonstrated that society will never be able to fully affirm #translivesmatter without also affirming #blacklivesmatter, without crip allies, without intersex siblings, without straight, cisgender, white women, without men of privilege stepping from secure places of authority to redirect their power towards collective justice. Change is antithetical to polite politics as usual. Change means that the safe and familiar may have to pass away in order for a better world to be forged from the remains.


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Championing
Systematic Change

After an hour of coffee and mingling, the official event began as the group filed into seats for a series of panels where guest speakers recounted the histories, literature (including film and TV), and activism currently being explored in LGBTQI politics. While the panels were framed by official and mainstream projects, including a beautiful rendition of the National Anthem by Alex Newell who played the transgender woman of color, Unique, on Glee, nonetheless, the content of the event pushed radical and intersectional social justice agendas. Among the most radical calls for justice was a thread that ran throughout the day on reparations for oppressed minorities. The discussion began, as it should, with the still pressing need for reparations for African-Americans to further the realignment of society after the nation's violent history of chattel slavery. The White House continues to stand as one of the countless American institutions built on the backs of slaves who are yet to be properly compensated for generations of exploited labor and abuse. Echoing a theme of the event, social justice demands more than representational concessions but seismic structural reforms that forever changes the map of cultural powers in the country. It is not enough to affirm, like, or speak support for #blacklivesmatter. Rather, society needs to shake ups in police protocols, hiring practices, and cultural orientations. The White House's Raffi Freedman-Gurspan, a transgender woman of color recently hired to direct outreach and recruitment for the Office of Presidential Personnel, noted the ways the White House affirms the call for systematic changes through strategic hires and training for members from across marginalized communities.

Aditi Hardikar, the LGBT Liaison to the White House, stressed the intersectional scope of the day's discussions in her opening remarks on the use of the term transgender and LGBT in the event's title, which she admitted represents in limited language an eye towards a wider discourse on other queer, gender non-conforming, and intersex communities. Indeed, the call for reparations was taken up later in the day by intersex activists seeking justice for the innumerable intersex children currently and historically surgically altered by doctors at birth. Such doctors follow an intersexist belief that a child must match expected ideals of cisgender male/female embodiment. As a result, doctors have and continue to alter the genitals of children born with non-normative intersexual embodiments in order to bring them back in line with norms. In the process, doctors make decisions about the gender expression that child should be raised to emulate. This surgical alteration and cultural limiting of intersex children's lives can cause significant gender dysphoria and other anxieties about the body - in many cases resulting in depression and suicide. A keystone of intersex activism is the demand that such medical practices be stopped immediately and children allowed to develop outside the gender binary and to chose their own gender presentation. Furthermore, the champions for change called for reparations from the doctors and hospitals who surgically altered the intersex children's sex and gender - often causing a lack of sexual sensation and trauma for the rest of their lives. By holding the medical industry financially responsible for these systematic malpractices, the intersex community can rebuild lives and the place of non-binary persons in society. Throughout the day, the concept of reparations was reimagined as a way to reorient cultural narratives and power.

While remarks and promises were fairly measured from the official representatives of the White House, notably Senior Advisor to the President, Valerie Jarrett, and the Secretary of Housing and Urban Development, Julian Castro, there was an evident ownership and pride in hosting scholars, activists, and artists to say the things that need to be said, to point where we need to go, and to provide the muscle to get there. Jarret spoke on the President's recent observance of Transgender Remembrance day and the specific emphasis was given to the tragic stories of trans women of color being killed at an accelerated rate. As Castro concluded in his address, America needs to stop seeing people of color as a problem for the LGBT community and instead see people of color as an undervalued, underutilized source of power where LGBT change can erupt. Of the many statements that summarized the radical statements not only said in the White House that day but the statement that the occurrence such an event embodied, Alexandra Billings perhaps put it the most succinctly, "I think we need to be really mindful," Billings said. "This is not only historic, all of us in this room, but this is divine intervention at its most astonishing. I am of a generation where this would not only be impossible but illegal." Indeed, for all the flaws and failures of government, an African-American President of the United States, the first in the office to utter the word transgender publicly, to support an event where artists and activists called for radical change, solidarity, and reparations is significant. Yet Billings reminded everyone present to remain vigilant. "I think in order for us to continue to change the world," Billings added, "we need to remember there are people on the outside who need to be comforted, educated, and honored; especially the voiceless." Even as we remember our fallen and celebrate our champions, we must ever press forward into the margins.


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A Day to Remember


Beyond the formal meetings and panels, the event kept to the goal of remembrance, bringing people working along different ends of art and activism to weave together the disparate threads of transgender history. With Jeffrey Tambor, I discussed family. As the lead in Transparent, Tambor plays Maura Pfefferman, a transgender woman who transitions late in her life after having three children, who call her Moppa. The show is not only about Maura but rather - as my own mother has observed - more about her family as they experience the transition together. Transparent understands that no trans person's experiences, no life, occurs in complete isolation. Even the points of conflict and separation demarcate another place our lives take shape. We become like life-sized statues, brought into shape both by what is preserved (highlighted) and what is removed. Tambor's family lives in New York and is awaiting the upcoming winter. He asks about my family. I tell him about my partner and our two young girls. We talk about the difficulty in raising children who recognize and value their queer, trans family in a world that does not reflect their lives back to them. Art is often more of a mirror than a window and raising children with so few representations on TV or in the movies that allow them to reflect back on the particularity of their family can be difficult. This is one reason queer, femme, trans, crip, people of color are often better at creativity and understanding metaphors in literature, I often say. We know the world is not built for us and does not tell our story, so we must always translate things for our own use and contemplation. In this way, the lives of children with a trans parent at once suffer a loss but also gain an acute power that will allow them to better understand and transform the world around them. At the end of our conversation, after I shared about the girls, my voice was cracking. Stepping forward, embracing me, Moppa gave me a big hug.

In another moment, I got to have a conversation walking down the halls of the White House with Bradley Whitford about transgender politics and the history. Whitford is well known for these "walk-and-talks" from his role, Josh Lyman on the West Wing. But today the discussion progressed through a shared interest in the erased pre- and early modern history of transgender. "This is nothing new," Whitford said. "I just saw a great production of Twelfth Night and I kept on thinking, 'this is nothing new.'" That is interesting, I replied. I pointed out that Shakespeare not only imagines those assigned women bucking the system to live as men, but specifically had Viola call themselves Cesario, "an eunuch." Shakespeare's London was no stranger to trans and non-binary genders. Castrate and effeminate boys were a staple of the London theater, playing primarily female roles. Then again, there were the trans men of London, such as Moll "Cutpurse" Frith who was so well known that nearly every other major playwright included him or referred to him in their productions of London Comedies. But in creating roles such as Cesario, Shakespeare pointed to the many trans masculine personas that filled his world and creative environment. Eunuchs and other castrates, while different than current day trans women or men, constituted a unique gender - physically, socially, legally, and theologically. Cesario the Eunuch is a singer because while London knew few eunuchs in person - they may not know one by sight - the eunuch/castrati voice was a staple in English theater to such an extent that plays included the stage direction "eunuchs play music off stage" without the audience needing to be told it was eunuchs singing. "This is nothing new," I agreed with Whitford. In so many ways, what we do on this day in the White House is not the forging of a new path but the remembering of an old, long, hard fought road.

At the end of a day that seemed to occur all at once in some kind of temporal ball of yarn, I felt the weight of histories many crossing trajectories leaving me floating as others flew off in diverse directions. Time is sprawling, time is deep. Henri Bergson called the inconstant lived perception of time "duration" to distinguished it from the ordered clock-work of measured time. We punctuate our lives with moments, progressions, and cycles. The repetition of events occurs through rituals, where we are brought back again and affirm a shared experience with others from different points in history. Together, across time, we endure.  We call such temporal quilting points where disparate threads of life are woven together "days of remembrance." On these days we passively remember - we bring the forgotten parts of our past back into lived memory. On these days, we actively re-member - we bring the discarded, lost, and erased members of our community and our bodies back together. In our search for that which has been cut off and rejected, we become like Chaucer's Pardoner, digging through the trash heaps of history and society to reclaim and re-narrate the forgotten parts of the past back the world. Some may call this literary dumpster diving, selling trash to an exploited market, but by rebranding the discarded and refused, these projects in historical activism set a new value for lives in the present. In this way, the restructuring of time becomes a critical project of activism. The front line of our activism may be in our past, marking the endurance of lives and imagining a history for a people too often isolate in and by the time of a hateful world. On such occasions when we get to momentarily step aside from our timelines to remember, honor, and observe, we come to recon how much comes into being out of and remains interdependent on relationships to create, sustain, and resurrect them. Another way to say this is: all things endure or fade behind the walls of time's oubliettes because of love or the lack of love.


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"I think we need to be really mindful. This is not only historic, all of us in this room, but this is divine intervention at its most astonishing. I am of a generation where this would not only be impossible but illegal. So I think in order for us to continue to change the world, we need to remember there are people on the outside who need to be comforted, educated, and honored - especially the voiceless"

Alexandra Billings
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Monday, November 16, 2015

“Re-membering the Transgender Community” on November 21st


"Are you, are you coming to the tree, 
wear a necklace of hope, 
side by side with me?"

The Hanging Tree
Suzanne Collins
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A Transform Talk Workshop with Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski

1:00Pm November 21st, 2015
at the Immanuel Congregational Church
10 Woodland St
Hartford, CT 06105

Can you remember Yaz'min Shansez? Yaz'min was a thirty-one years old trans woman of color who lived in Myers, Florida. If you were walking down a [this] particular alley on June 19th, you would have seen her body laying behind a garbage bin, filling the private drive with the smell of burning flesh. If you were there a little earlier, you would have seen her body being set on fire. Can you re-member that? Can you bring back a member of the trans community? Are you, are you going stand in her place?

Can you remember Betty Skinner? Betty was a fifty-two year old disabled trans woman, confined to a senior assisted living complex in Cleveland, where she was found dead. Unable to leave her bed during the attack, Betty's life ended when her head was bashed in. Controlled, bound, and alone, no one was there to help Betty nor to identify her murderers. The police have no suspects. Can you re-member what so many turned their back on? Can you re-collect the divided and secluded members of the trans community?

The month of November has been marked as Transgender History Month, with Nov. 20th set as a Transgender Remembrance Day. Remembering is not merely about a special feeling or thought. It is about re-collecting fragments of a divided and erased history. Yet how do we re-write a history that has largely be left out of the headlines, a history that has not been written? It is about re-membering a community that is decimated on a daily basis. Yet how do we resurrect those denied a livable life? Many of these wounds will never heal. The best alternative we have may be to help them scar. We can do this by being the voice of the forgotten and being the bodies of the dismembered. We can remember the transgender community by becoming active members of it. This does not necessarily mean transforming ones body or gender presentation, but it does mean changing one's relations and politics. It means not viewing the oppression and violence as something that happens to "them" but as the potential for power and resistance that can happen through "us" if we share our pain and our life, our losses and our gifts.

This year, all are invited to an hour and a half Transform Talk Workshop on “Re-membering the Transgender Community,” run by Ph.D. Candidate Gabrielle M.W. Bychowski, a writer and scholar of transgender history and theology Together we will share stories, remember erased histories, hear the voices of those we’ve lost, and together affirm the dignity of all lives, but especially those whose dignity and lives have been taken. While they were alive, their identities and stories were not heard. In death, we are the caretakers of their afterlives in this world and have this chance to give them the audience that they were denied in life.


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A breakdown of the  schedule:

  • 20 Min: Introduction to Transgender Terminology and "Draw Your Gender" Exercise
  • 30 Min: Talk on Re-Membering Transgender w/Writings from Passed Away Trans Persons
  • 20 Min: Questions and Group Sharing
  • 10 Min: "You Can Be Me When I'm Gone" Name-Tag Exercise*
  • 10 Min: "TransformWords" (ex. TransformChurch, TransformSchool, etc.) Prayer/Words of Affirmation.

(*Participants are invited to take home the name-tag of the deceased transgender person along with the small summary sheet with some biographical information on the person)

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Transform Talks:
Workshops for staff & communities on gender & disability

In recent years, I've consulted for acting troupes, businesses, churches, and educators on how to build more accessible, welcoming, and critical spaces for a wider diversity of persons. I have collected and expanded this material into workshops on gender, sexuality, and disability. The new program is geared to a variety of communities and workplaces. These, "Transform Talks" are available on different levels to suit a host of particular needs. Short, 1-2 hour bootcamps will help orient staff, faculty, and minsters on (1) key language, (2) best practices, and (3) context and background in targeted communities. Longer day to weekend long seminars will also be available where team members can become better oriented and trained in diversity, including (1) getting to know important stories and histories, (2) workshopping situations, and (3) transforming social and physical spaces to be safe and fruitful for a wider range of lives.

Prices vary depending on needs and duration. 
Contact mbychows@gwu.edu for more information.
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