How We Live: Words from a Suicidal Transgender Community

"Trans folks are doing their part to hold 
their community together and we've never been 
more proud of the work we are doing."

The Trans Lifeline
(877) 565-8860

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Once when I was being considered for a job, I was told the committee was hesitating because I wore "too much black." I told them that is why I was valuable. In a community care job where most people wore pastels, there are people (maybe even the pastel wearers) who need to see someone who looks like me. I need to see someone like me. I need to see someone like you. That's how those who already feel excluded feel like they have a chance. That's how we survive. That's how we live.

The transgender community continues to fall victim to suicide at an alarming rate. Studies show that 41% to 50% of transgender persons will attempt suicide. Those who leave notes cite an unlivable life in an antagonistic and oppressive world. Today, after the election of Donald Trump to President of the United States, the Trans Lifelife, a support system for the suicidal trans community, reports 288 calls within the first 24 hours. Transgender issues has been a target for most of the Republican candidates and the election of the new President leaves many trans persons fearful and despairing. If the community needed a final push to confirm the collective animosity toward them, this seals it for many. Others despair because they identify or ally themselves with other communities targeted by the Trump campaign. The saying "It Gets Better" aimed to support LGBTQ youth and encourage them not to take their lives seems hallow today for much of the community. It gets worse it seems. This is a hard reality that many knew all too well already. Yet here we are: queer crip trans women of color, members of the Jewish or Muslim faith, immigrants and refugees. We have lived and died before through hardships. We die and live now.

I don't have convincing words for those intent in dying. Life is too big and too hard, like death is too big and too hard. I can't tell someone who feels betrayed by their job, community, or country that it gets better. I don't know what better looks like for you and I can't promise that image of the world will ever materialize. I can't argue with you but I can keep on living. You can see that. And that is a real thing. If you can keep on living, we can see it together. And that will be a real thing. When I feel so overwhelmed by the world that I am disoriented by disbelief, my partner and I play a game from the book, the Hunger Games. We take turns listing things that are real. First and foremost, you and me, us, we are alive right now. That is real. The country may vote despite us or against us. In their game, we may lose. But by living, we win at a more important game. That is real.

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I've seen impossible and irrational things. I've seen the bad. And that is too real. It can seem so real one does not need to talk about or believe it. It can feel more big and more real than us. But in the face of that certitude of badness, the impossible happens: we live. People look at us and yell things at us. People pull weapons on us, they have on me. People make it clear we are not welcome or reject us for a job; however our value and qualifications. We make them uncomfortable and they make us feel afraid, ashamed, even suicidal. The image of world we are given is one that would rather not include us. That is a real thing. We may feel we should give that image of the world a favor by removing ourselves. But that is not the only world we can see. I've seen impossible and irrational things.

I've seen trans women not get the job either and have nowhere to call home. I've talked to those who have worked the streets and lived on the streets. Some people look at them with pity or condescension. But those women are living a life the world says shouldn't exist. I've read the words of trans men incarcerated in mental hospitals and forced to embody an unlivable life. They attempted suicide. They failed. And the confess they failed on purpose. Their mind, body, and heart chose death. But some impossible part of them kept them alive. Then there are those autistic, trans, queer, people of color shot down in the streets. Then there are those children who walk into oncoming traffic. Even those killed by their own hands seemed killed by the world and under the flag emblazoned with the image of their exclusion. Yet even then, they lived. That is a real thing.

The story of Dylan Scholinski is real. "Suicide is a selfish act," said one of the medical staff after Dylan Scholinski's suicide attempt, "Do you know that?" (The Last Time I Wore A Dress 73). They called him selfish but it they who isolated him. Scholinski grew up in the next town over from me in the same Polish community. He would have attended my high school if he hadn't been committed to a mental asylum for being transgender. In his memoir, he recounts being isolated from the public and then the small community in the hospital. Alone may be a better word than selfish. In her suicide note, Leelach Alcorn also recounts being isolated before her successful attempt. “I was completely alone for 5 months,” Alcorn writes, “No friends, no support, no love.” If isolation, exclusion, and loneliness is how we die, being present and real for one another is how we live.

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There are no words to promise you life or a better world. That is impossible. But I can show you impossible lives and worlds that exist all around us; in our jobs, our communities, and our country. By witnessing to the impossible we can hold on to the life it materializes and envisions. We can live it, become it, and it can be real. There are those who believe that the most valuable Life and those like it have been killed in the most merciless ways, yet they become images of resurrection and hope. There are those who believe that the most valuable persons have been rejected in the most hateful way, yet they become images of consolation and recommitment. There are those whose valuable bodies and minds and spirits turn against them in the most unlivable way, yet they become images of life and reality.

I do wear more colors today but I wear other things as well. I wear "I Will Go With You Buttons" to protest anti-transgender bathroom laws. I wear a tank top that reads, "This is What A Feminist Medievalist Looks Like." I wear black because too many, friends and family I know and you know, then too many we don't know, feel isolated, angry, and suicidal. We need to be able to mourn the lives that were and will not be. Others need to see that. We need to see that. Because that is real. But beyond the fabric thin messages, who I march and stand beside is what makes me visible in certain ways and a witness others. There are times that brings victories and there are times when it feels like it does little. Yet in these times, to live would be enough. To help one another live is more than enough - for now.

In an irrationally bad world, we can irrationally live. That is how we live. That is what you see, what I see, and what those we don't believe in us see. Today I don't work for that job but I serve a wider community. I get up in the morning and I see my children to school. I get on clothes and see my partner to an appointment. I go to class and I see the next generation of minds. They see me and I see them. I write this and you see me and I see you. That is real. That is how we live.

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Losing Home: the Rape of Transgender Lives in Exile & Pride

"My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile"

Exile and Pride
Eli Clare

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The Place of the Hermit

Growing up in Port Orford, Oregon, near Route 101, Eli Clare felt at home with the land but alienated from the society that defined the place and those who lived there. A coastal town, it is located near Siskiyou National Forest that provided logging jobs for Clare's family and many in the area. As he walked home along a road following the Elk River, Clare would watch logs gloat down the waters and fisherman dipping in their lines. These walks through the woods or up mountains were among the moments where Clare felt most at home in the place where he was being raised. Yet among the community of the logging town, the young transgender youth often felt like an outsider. "I watched and listened to the girls in my school talk about boys, go behind the equipment shed to kiss them, later in algebra class about fucking them," recounts Clare of his school days, describing his emotions as like a metaphorical wall between himself and the the girls of the town, "I watched from the other side of a stone wall, a wall that was part self-preservation, part bones and blood aloneness, part impossible assumptions I could not shape my body around" (124). Although he lived in the same forests as his schoolmates, he was unable to feel welcome in the space because of the cisgender and heterosexual norms of girlhood that organized the lives in the town. Clare puts these feelings into metaphors drawn from around him. Walls, especially made of stone, were all around him. They defined the physical place. Yet it was his  social place, being raised as a girl, and his work to relate to his body and his environments in ways that his body resisted. As a result, he felt alone and without a place in Port Orford. 

The effect of these stone walls was to turn this small Oregon town into a kind of machine that produced and housed proper cisgender heterosexual girls. Despite feeling alienated in his social environment, Clare recounts trying to survive in the town by allowing himself, to degrees, to submit to its production of straight feminine girls. "I pull out an old photo of myself from the night of my high school graduation," Clare recalls looking at on old album of his childhood home, "I wear a white dress, flowers embroidered on the front panel, the plainest, simplest dress my mother would let me buy. I look painfully uncomfortable, as if I have no idea what to do with my body, hands clasped awkwardly behind me, shoulders caved inward, immobilized, almost fearful beneath my smile. I am in clumsy, unconsenting drag. This is one of the last times I wore a dress" (136). While the physical space of Oregon make no special demands of femininity on Clare, the place he lives is defined by such rules imposed on bodies it marks are female. Once described as a wall, the physical and metaphorical boundaries that Port Orford places on Clare's body become as close to him as an flowery dress. The wall metaphor placed Clare on the outside but the dress makes him feel alienated from his surroundings within an encircling embroidered garment. Inside the linen walls that wrap him in girlhood, Clare feels like a foreigner in his own body. Often transgender experiences are compared to drag. Usually this is a conflation of a trans person's post-transitioned inability to pass and a Drag performer's intentional performative gender that emphasizes its own points of failure to create a sense of shock. Yet Clare turns this around and suggests that the transgender person does not point to the artificiality and failure of their gender after transition but before transition, to reveal the socially constructed walls placed around them.

Being put in the place of a girl, Clare began to feel his body was taken away from him. Port Orford did not feel like a home to him and in time neither did his body. "I do understand how certain clothes make me feel inside my body," explains Clare (135). Certain clothes marked Clare as automated as a girl, as though Clare was not resident, at home, or in control of his body. Meanwhile, other clothes marked his body as in his control, free to move and dress as he will; but these were the clothes marked for men. "For me, Vogue and Glamour held none of the appeal that Walt Maya did, dressed in his checkered shirt, cowboy boots, and wide-brimmed hat," explains Clare (136). "I joined the boys in their emulation. I knew early on the feel of boots and denim, knew I would never learn to walk in a skirt." Just as Clare could watch girls from the other side of a figurative wall, so too he could watch boys from the other side of a  paneled dress. He was trapped in the place, the physical clothing and the cultural associations of girls while he watched boys living the life he wanted on the other side of a gender divide. Had the strict cisgender mechanisms that produced girls and boys had more lubrication, allowed for parts to move more freely, then perhaps Clare could have had an easier time moving from one social position to another. As it is, he experienced a lot of friction as he tried to transition and became marked as a failed girl rather than as a trans man. "I tried to wear skirts my mother sewed for me... I failed," admits Clare. "I loved my work boots and overalls long after the other girls had discovered pantyhose and mini-skirts. But failing left a hole in my heart; I wanted to belong somewhere." (124). Rather than be allowed to move from one place, one gender designation, to another, he became marked as defective and felt as though he lost his body, his home, and his place in the world

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Losing Home

Stating that gender and sexism is in the environment can bring subtle aspects to the forefront, such as clothing, but this does not discount personal agents in the ecology of household that persons in their place (or disrupting a place's sense of comfort) can directly and violently control a life. Indeed, in naming what gave Clare the deepest feeling of "losing home," he names the rape and sexual abuse he received from his father. "I could start with the ways my body has been stolen from me," writes Clare. "Start slowly, reluctantly, with my parents. My father who raised me, his eldest daughter, as an almost son. My father who started raping me so young I can't remember when he first forced his penis into me." (125). In the grim details of his father's rape of his body, Clare marks a point in which the loss of a sense of home moved from a distant wall, to intimate apparel, and through the threshold of his body as his father violently penetrated him. The father who gave him a place to live, and room to explore his masculinity, chose instead the most direct and penetrative way to vacate Clare's power from his body. In each way, the rape demonstrates itself as an assertion of ownership and power. "I could start with the brutal, intimate details of my father's thievery, of his hands clamping around my neck, tearing into me, claiming my body as his own" (128). However he allowed Clare to wander towards masculinity in his public presentation, in privacy he put Clare in the place of a girl; a girlhood defined by sexual violence and submission. To be put in the place of a girl, in the Clare house, was to have one's body taken.

Although the theft of his body is direct and personal, Clare nonetheless views the rape as a part of the wider environments sexist system of taking control over bodies. In these details, Clare fears the mechanisms of such power can be forgotten. "I lose the bigger picture," worries Clare, "forget that woven through and around the private and intimate is always the public and political" (128). By examining the rape not as isolated incidents of an unusually violent man, Clare opens up his story to wider questions of gender and sexuality. "How did my father's violence, his brutal taking of me over and over again, help shape and damage my body, my sexuality, my gender identity?" asks Clare (126). This process worries him because such discourses around the relation between rape and queer gender or sexuality usually take the perfunctory form of cause and effect. "Will my words be used against me, twisted to bolster the belief that sexual abuse causes homosexuality, contorted to provide evidence that transgressive gender identity is linked directly  to neglect?" (125).  Rape is taken as the cause of a girl fleeing femininity to live as a man or else to be sexually engaged with only women. This conclusion however depends on an arrangement of the facts only in a particular flow of causation. This is the "twisting" that Clare fears. Such a twisting begins by assuming cisgender and heterosexuality is the natural starting position and transgender and queerness as the artificial, rather than normative manhood and girlhood as one the the chief products of such highly gendered structures of power. Indeed, this irony is evidence by the contradicting supposition of cause and effect. Non-normative gender and sexuality is supposed to come from too much (even violent) impositions of gender, concluding it as a kind of failure or overcompensation. Yet transgender and queerness is also supposed to come from neglect, as though they are the natural state that has not been properly imposed out of the life by such over-acting parents.

Yet by allowing such questions, asserting there is a relation between sexist environments and rape, Clare can ask other questions as well. "How did his non-abusive treatment of me as an almost son interact with the ways in which his fists and penis and knives told me in no uncertain terms that I was a girl?" (126). Opening up the conversation, Clare is able to turn the tables on sexist assumptions about queerness and rape. Rather than assume that rape causes non-normative genders and sexualities, Clare asks the necessary question if rape is intended to form or fix straight men and women. The masculine behavior came before and around the rape, it was during the rape that Clare was put in a humbled female position. By admitting these questions, Clare points to the lack of easy answers and thus the evident lack of stable genders in the environment where he lived. "How did his gendered abuse - and in this culture vaginal rape is certainly gendered - reinforce my sense of not being a girl?" adds Clare. "How did watching him sexually abuse other children - both boys and girls - complicate what I knew of being a girl, being a boy?" (126). Rape is a performance and an act which speaks of power dynamics in the environment. Fort Orford was not simple a place for cisgender heterosexual boys and girls, nor simply the place where they were made into normative men and women, but a place where gender was always already unstable and unraveling. The need to put Clare in the place of a girl, emphasized how he was not at home in that place. Taking away Clare's power revealed that he had power to take. Likewise, it teaches the lessons that straight, cisgender male supremacy needs to take power from others in order to maintain its dominance. It needs to police the borders of gender because those who live in the space are not naturally bound by the sexist social laws of place and position. 

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The World of the Exile

"I wanted to be a hermit," declares Clare on recalling his overall feeling during his childhood, "to live alone with my stones and trees, neither boy nor a girl." (124). For all the difficulty that his physical body and environment posed for him, it is his social body and environment that made him feel alienated and not at home in either. The matter of his body remained relatively the same but their meaning for him was continually being defined for him by his father and the patriarchy. "My father raped me for many reasons," analyzes Clare, "and inside his acts of violence I learned about what it meant to be female, to be a child, to live in my particular body, and those lessons served the larger power structure and hierarchy as well" (129). The woodlands and the flesh are spaces where many different sort of lives could have been explored by Clare but in the toxic social environment of Port Orford life was continually being put in its place. Indeed, Clare lived a life full of of contradiction, as both boy and girl, but overall was the command that whatever or whoever he is that he learns his place under the power of men. In the end, the rape did not assert for Clare was not the stability of masculinity or femininity, heterosexuality or homosexuality, but the lack of stability and security in his body and his home. "I lived by splitting body from mind, body from consciousness, body from physical sensation, body from emotion," writes Clare (131). "My body became an empty house, one to which I seldom returned. I lived in exile." In the end, the gender dysphoria Clare felt, the alienation from his body, in some ways points to the violence and instability of gender in the place where he grew. To be clear, it is not Clare's masculinity or attraction to women that came from this toxic environment but rather the suffering that walled off his transition to these places and yet also painfully made sure he never felt at home in femininity or attraction to men. The suffering did not put him in the place of a man or a girl but took from him the power to feel at home in any place. It made him an exile. 

If the imposition of walls, coverings, and bindings are the tools that cause the loss of a sense of place, what then are such exiles and hermits left to imagine the world? Upon considering the lessons of force and repression, Clare decides that putting up such blocks in the discourse of his own body and environment will likewise fail to describe his experiences. Clare writes, "this strategy of denial, rejecting any possibility of connection between abuse and gender identity, abused and sexuality, slams a door on the messy reality of how our bodies are stolen" (125). Theft does not mean the annihilation of the valued objects, be they bodies, land, or power. Rather the loss of home is a rearrangement and cordoning off of objects in the space. Certain bodies are not allowed to interact with other bodies, such as women sexually with other women or trans men with boots and overalls. Instead, they become jealously guarded by certain bodies from other bodies, such as the violent force of such men to claim sexual access to these young girls or to the right to wear such masculine trappings in public. The logic of claiming or stealing a place is not about creating or destroying lives but about controlling them. "We live in a time of epidemic child abuse, in a world where sexual and physical violence against children isn't only a personal tragedy and symptom of power run amok," concludes Clare, "but also a form of social control"(128-129). Putting up walls, around land, a community, a person, or a story, does not fundamentally change what is being contained or excluded, rather it attempts to control them by making them submit to personal possession. Such a possessor sets the manner and possibility of how people and the world relate to one another. For Clare's father, it seemed less important whether Clare was a boy or a girl, but rather that he could determine when he could claim himself as a boy and when Clare's father could violently claim him as his girl.

There is nothing in the woods or the water that make Port Orford a place for straight cisgender girls and men, but not queer transgender youth. Nor is it simply that things, like social progress, move slower there by nature. Often when such places are shrugged off by urban queers or defended by locals as obviously conservative, what is meant is that these are places where violent male supremacy, the isolation of gay men and lesbians, and the hatred of trans persons dominate. Such places exist because they are occupied territories and the people living there are subject to patriarchal control. The rejection from female community and the occupation of Clare's body by his father evidence how these places are defined by such power dynamics. "What a better way to maintain a power structure," asks Clare, "than to drill the lessons of who is dominant and who is subordinate into the bodies of children." (129). Such overt acts of violence may or may not rare, Clare was subject and witness to many of them, but the lessons of them serve more than personal ends. Rape or the fear of rape, exclusion or the fear of exclusion, are one of the chief weapons that keep men and women, boys and girls in their place in Port Orford. Those who step out of line become targets for abuse. "And here is the answer to my fear: Child abuse is not the cause of but rather a response to - among other things - transgressive gender identity and/or sexuality" (129). Clare lived as a boy before he was put in the place of a girl by his mother's dresses or his father's rape. His transgressive gender and sexuality did not come from abuse. Although Clare admits, "I feel safer, somewhat buffered from men's violence against women, walking the streets after dark, knowing my night time outline and stride are frequently read as male." (127). Rather, for young Clare, the abuse came in response to his gender transgression. The abuse may have come regardless. Walls are not only put up for those who would climb over them but to make a statement not to try. This is how any why hatred inscribes itself in the environment and the bodies of a place like Port Orford.

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More on Eli Clare:

"Reclaiming Home: the Pilgrimage of Transgender in Exile and Pride"

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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, including: The 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 Health. Yet 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.

We don't know how Stefonknee Wolscht's story ends. 

As of the time of this post, she is currently missing.

She was last seen on December 6th, 2015. 

We pray and hope for her safety.

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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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Read more diverse stories

from the Transgender Project

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#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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Center for Transgender Equality

Community Resources for Responding to Trans Violence

Forge

Resources for Trans Violence Survivors

Transgender Care Listings

Violence Recovery Resources

The Pandora Project

Support and Resources for LGBT Survivors of Rape and Sexual Abuse

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