Yes, We Can Change: Transliterature Thanks President Obama

"It may be incomplete, 
but it is a beginning, 
a step along the way."

Oscar Romero

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2008

The year is 2008, I am standing within the restricted area of Millennium Park where President-elect Barack Obama is about to accept his election to the Presidency of the United States. This is not the end of something but a new beginning. This is not a moment but a movement. On this day, I will still arguing with some friends and colleagues who found his campaign too idealistic, too idolizing of Obama as a champion. There was some of that, true, but that was a shallow reading of a lot of information I told them. If you listened when Senator Obama spoke on the campaign trail, he continually redirected the attention coming at him to others. Change was coming, he said, but not because of him as an individual but because of who we are as a fresh take on politics and social justice. Hope was renewed, but not because he would fix everything that was wrong but because we would give ourselves permission again to be critical but cynical about government, because we would try, really try, and try again even when we failed. More than any other slogan, Obama's message was condensed into the message, "Yes, we can." Can what? We can hope. That is allowed. That has merit. That does things in the world. We can change. That is allowed. That has value. Change is not only inevitably but can be used for good. And once things change, there will be no changing back. You can't make America anything it was again. You can only make it different. You can make it hope, make it change, and try to do better. That is what I heard him say, that is what I told others, and that is why I was there that night. You could call this the feeling that this was a historic moment. But studying history has taught me to see history as a movement more than a moment. History is where different pasts collide and battle for different futures. History is a record of change and movement. Things never go back to where you remember putting them. History is adaptation, the record of how we survive. History allows you to see the future as another element of the past. Those who build roads and cathedrals imagine the future feet that will walk on the stones they set. This night was not the grand opening of that Cathedral but the laying of the foundations. 

The other reason I was at Millennium Park was that I was offered one of a limited number of tickets as thanks for working on his campaign throughout 2008. I had piled into buses traveling around Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. We were be put into teams, given materials, and set off to visit homes. Usually, and most memorably, I was among the groups sent to check-in with those who have showed interest in Obama or Hillary Clinton early on. Our job was to see what their thoughts were, what information they needed, and to make sure they got out to vote. So many people I talked to on those canvassing trips were telling me how this was the first time they voted in a while or else the first time they ever voted. I recall walking toward a house, only to have one of the residents open the door, look at us in our buttons and shirts, and yell out, "Obama! We are voting for Obama! All of us. The whole family!" We asked if the woman or anyone in the house needed directions to the polling place. "Oh we are all going in a van, we are going to pick up our cousins too!" I had done canvassing on other campaigns and for other issues but nothing has beaten the energy of folks I encountered in the midwest in 2008. Talking to them affirmed for me why I too felt hopeful and capable: people were hopeful. Senator Obama was central to the campaign but what made the movement powerful was the collective energy and will to make things better in the country. The United States is gifted with a lot of energies that are often at cross-purposes, even within the Democratic Party. Yet in 2008, there was a reorientation of this willfulness toward a shared trajectory. Where it would land was uncertain but folks were on board for the ride.

I first heard of Barack Obama when he started running for an Illinois Senate seat. What made his arrival so striking was how I found about the campaign: my grandmother. My mother's mother is a proud Polish woman who does not like many people. She especially does not like many people of color. Before and since it was not uncommon to hear her blame everything from the economy, medical costs, to bad television on black and brown people. Then one day, my mom gets a call from her telling us that we have to go listen to this Senate candidate speak. "He sounds like Kennedy," she said. That is all she had to say. For Polish Democrat Catholics in Chicago, John F. Kennedy was the height of class and grace equal or above that of George Washington. Now, at the time I'm not sure whether my grandmother had actually ever seen a picture of Barack Obama or if she had only heard him on the radio but her sudden support for a man of color who would soon be our Senator and later our President was a real sign in our family that things were changing. Hope was appearing from households that had turned away and change was occurring in hearts that had been closed. Immediately after that phone call, my mother and I began listening to Obama speak. We kept on listening and we kept on being surprised by what we heard. Again, it was not only what he was saying but what others were saying about what he said. Now, my grandmother did not turn around suddenly or completely about people of color but in her now existed room for potential. No one in my family saw it coming when Senator Obama announced he was running for President. Once that became a possibility, we knew that was what we wanted to see. Early on, Obama didn't seem like he stood much of a chance against the other candidates. But surprise after surprise happened, then it was down to Hillary Clinton and him. Then just him. The old logic that said this couldn't happen was being proven wrong. There was reason to believe in change. There was reason to thing we can do something different. As a country, we can change.

Printing out my ticket and then arriving at Millenium Park did not feel like the final victory lap but the beginning of something new. It was something new for me as well. Obama was going to Washington DC and soon so would I. A few months after he moved into the White House, I moved into an apartment on the same street and just a few blocks away. When family would visit, I would take them to the end of my block, where you could look down the hill and see Obama's White House. Within our shared time at DC, I would be called down that hill to twice enter the White House and offer the administration my perspective on transgender and disability justice. As a whole, Washington DC was a town very much unlike Chicago and unlike anywhere else. What lay ahead of me on this night in Chicago was as much if not more uncertain as what lay ahead of President-elect Obama. But that was a good thing. When I feel at my most cynical and depresssive is when I feel the most certain about what the future holds. The humility of not knowing what comes next also offers the hope of the unexpected good. I will never know how the next eight years of my life would have gone without this night but I do know that I was more prepared to face the challenges and embody challenges to my future profession, the country, the church, and my own preconceptions because I entered this journey with a spirit of hope and a belief that yes, we can change. What I remember of that night is not only President-elect Obama and his family on stage but the ocean of people all around me, in the park and streets outside, and watching on television. This was about more than a person or a presidency. This was a moment that renewed our participation in a long collective movement. We would be the engine that got up this hill or not and he was to be our conductor, telling us, "Yes, we can."

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2012

The year is 2012, I have a fellowship from the Obama re-election campaign and am sitting in a DC satellite office as we wait for the voting results. We sit in a room full of old computers. A box of cheap flip cell phones stands in the corner. This is the office's phone bank which is now silent. No one left to call. No information to get to give. We collect in this room because there is room and chairs enough for us all to sit while we project the results on the wall. Unable to stay still, a naturally anxious workaholic, I am pacing the office seeing what little things can still be managed while the states are announced. Very much fitting in among those who work in politics and activism, I am not alone in this constant motion. I find others going through files, getting things ready to be moved to the next major campaign initiative. Some are sitting in one of the smaller call centers, checking polls on one of the computers. They are looking at different numbers than the general group, however. Pausing here for a while, I get another lesson on how to read polling information. States and the electoral college are the big, somewhat artless facts. The devil of elections are in the details. Specific districts reporting specific figures at specific times make a big difference. Elections are won and lost not only in swing states but swing districts. These districts can come down to a certain part of town, a certain school district, a certain church parish. And it doesn't only matter who wins and who loses. The margins matter. A close win or a big loss in certain districts can signify changes in attitude that will be exploitable years down the road. Certain districts will be marked as contestable. Already before 2012 is over, the 2014 and 2016 elections are being strategized. For folk who devote their lives to getting votes for initiatives and candidates, the work never stops. They are work addicts that never stop moving. They come to love the movement.

The years between 2008 and 2016 was a busy time full of plenty of work and movement. What will I say it was like to live during the Presidency of Barack Obama? Our oldest child was two when he took office and our youngest was born weeks before he was elected. Obama is the only president they have known. This is the way the world is to them. Soon, by contrast, they will begin to build memories of what this time meant to them. All of us will have to do this work, regardless of age. So what will we say? For me, I saw these years as one with her head thick in stacks of work. Others I knew were likewise making the most of every minute to be productive. The change was slow if it came at all and it was hard fought. In some ways, for the transgender community this was a time of significant shifts in awareness and systemic support. But these wins were met with violent hate and waves of anti-transgender legislation on the state and local level. After 2012, a witch hunt began in key states for transgender persons who were abused, humiliated, or killed. These rising waters of hate also grew among white supremacists and nationalists who executed their agenda and their frustration on black youths and immigrants. When those same hard movers and shakers got to work organizing resistances to these assaults, the rising tide of racism went into high-gear to label this new wave of black liberation and Civil Rights as terrorists. This is how it was. Social justice and welfare movements were busy building changes that would have lasting effects, often in ways that went unnoticed. Then supremacy groups reacted to set back the clock and undo the change. Then more work had to be done to protect those under attack by the groups. More often then not, the protections were too little if they came at all. This was the dance, move and counter-moves, netting progress in the end but with great personal costs.

The 2012 campaign demonstrated the ways in which tactical incremental changes, even if they are shaky, can shift the flow of events. The big question during the re-election campaign was the new Affordable Care Act, also called Obamacare. This was an issue I was geared for well before President Obama announced it. A registered nurse, my mother had been working for health insurance companies for years and still does to this day. I saw how the lack of the ACA, the transition to the ACA, and the results of the ACA revolutionized the medical field, especially how it was financed and who got care. As a transgender person, whose ability to claim my own body is dependent on health care providers, the ACA mattered. As a woman, whose collective agency over our bodies are constantly being tested, controlled, and undermined, the ACA mattered. The ACA was a matter of life and death, or a livable life and an unlivable life, for people with disabilities. Health insurance disproportionately affects and excludes people of color and those with transnational life stories. Now, saying the ACA mattered did not mean that it was perfect. It did not do all it needed to do or all President Obama wanted it to do. As with his first election, what mattered most was the discussion and the movement. Something needed to be done about healthcare and health insurance in this country. Something more still needs to be done years later. By pushing the ACA front and center, making it the focus of the 2012 election, President Obama shifted and set the conversation. Good or bad, this or that outcome, there would be a conversation about healthcare. One way or another, things would change. Unjust foundations that had been set for decades were beginning to move. The question, "what kind of healthcare does the public need?" replaced silence and the question, "does the public need healthcare?" Change came in a big, uncertain, imperfect way through the ACA but it came and its effects remain. The end effect of such movement, then, is the need for more movement.

What was it like living during the Presidency of Barack Obama? The answer to that question is uncertain because it depends on what it is like living in another time. What are the differences? What differences matter? Towards giving a reply, I can say what I was on my mind and heart as I stood in the doorway watching the election result be reported. I was dreaming about the future of the past. I was thinking about essays I would write and ways I would improve www.ThingsTransform.com, because medieval disability studies was very new and transgender literary and medieval studies were still in the womb. I was dreaming about the futures imagined by the past. Would the exclusion of transgender persons from jobs, schools, and healthcare continue? Would I be able to work in academia? Would I be able to care for a family? Is there room for me? More importantly, is there room for those who came after me? Most people were not asking these questions in 2012 because most people did not know much or anything about transgender. The future battles and arguments that would introduce new and old information, as well as new and old slurs and fears were only bubbling. What these other times look like was uncertain but I felt confident that we would meet them. By election night 2012, we were confident that President Obama and his movement would continue. The belief that things should be better and can be better was alive. This was a belief that was battle tested and ready for the next fight. In the back of the room and in the other offices, folks were already murmuring with plans on what we do next and what the next move would be. As the campaign ended, I knew that these workers would still be around, still making calls, polling, and pushing things forward little by little. I believe this because I saw their faces in the dark illuminated by computer screens and an old whirring projector. I saw the look in their eyes and knew what it meant. There was a whole lot of future ahead of us and whatever it held, we would meet it by stepping forward together.

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2016

Today feels like the last respite in a precious moment in time. The year 2016 has just been put to rest and today is President Obama's last day in office. I am savoring saying that Barack Obama is our President. I am savoring knowing that Barack Obama is President. A friend today said it felt like the deep breath before the plunge or the critical thinker's hesitation before being forced to drink hemlock. That flood of hate and poison that lies before us is the Trump Presidency. To this thought, echoing the Apology of Plato, one thinks then of Socrates's last words: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways — I to die, and you to live. Which is better God only knows." With so many artists and social justice activists dying in 2016, it seemed to some as though Socrate's wager was being tested. Is it better that we live into 2017 or is it better for them that they have avoided 2017? The hit musical, Hamilton tried to answer this question through the figure of George Washington who tells Alexander Hamilton (and the audience): "dying is easy, living is hard." Perhaps Limbo would be easier. When our family watched Groundhog's Day, our youngest child commented how nice it would be to trapped in a time-loop so Trump would never take office and President Obama would stay forever. On days like these, it is important that we remember who the President is and what this has been. This is not just a moment, it is a movement. The movement President Obama drove forward resists the desire to stay where and when we are forever and never allow for change. Sometimes the road to a better world takes unfortunate detours down troubling paths, but we cannot allow ourselves to become frozen in fear before the entrance to the woods. Our poets, Socrates and Dante chose to descend into the underworld if it was the only road that remained to the city on the hill.

In President Obama's final year, I was brought into the White House twice to lend my perspective and voice to decisions of administration. Following the model of the man in charge, when asked to talk of myself, I worked to pivot to all those who were not present in the room. I was not alone in that rhetoric of making room for the excluded. Consistently in both meetings, there was a shared spirit from the advisors to the President down to author-scholars that what we were about was the work of building roads so that others may walk on them. The questions and concerns of the Federal Government are often structural, certain in this administration, working with the knowledge that the biggest benefits may not be visible for generations. The words of Oscar Romero were are my mind then as they must have been when President Obama's when he visited his memorial at the end of his first term. "We plant the seeds that one day will grow," prays Romero. "We water seeds already planted, knowing that they hold future promise. We lay foundations that will need further development... We cannot do everything, and there is a sense of liberation in realizing that. This enables us to do something, and to do it very well. It may be incomplete, but it is a beginning, a step along the way... We may never see the end results, but that is the difference between the master builder and the worker. We are workers, not master builders; ministers, not messiahs. We are prophets of a future not our own" (A Step Along the Way, Romero). The White House is a big thing. The Federal Government is a big thing. The Presidency is a big thing. In their shadow, I feel like a small thing. Transliterature is a small thing. But in the spirit of middle-ness in the Middle Ages, in Romero, in Obama's Presidency, it is enough to move the collective work further down this relay race. To paraphrase an angel from another Middle Earth, we do not get to chose the time, place, and challenges we live in; but we do get to chose what to do with that time. All totaled, my couple afternoons and Obama's eight years in the President's home is a small thing that we will feel in generations to come.

Recently, I listened to an interview with Megan Mullally as she described meeting President Obama in the wake of the election. "Don't go," she pleaded. He pulled her in for a hug and told her, "I'm not going anywhere." When a President hands over the office of power to a new person and party, there is bound to be real irreversible change. President Obama is going away, in that sense. In another, he will remain with us as a citizen; a citizen that by custom and law retains the title President. Yet Obama's campaign and administration was never all about him. If we see the Obama Presidency as a movement rather than a moment, then hope and change is not ending. The movers are not leaving. Things will continue to transform. Transliterature is not going anywhere. So even if the movement in experience and reality is truly "not going anywhere" to the point of being stymied, by consistent forward pushing we can resist veering in dangerous and damaging directions. The next four years will not look like the last eight. Things change. The challenges in the next four years will be different from all those we faced before. Things change. Yet the fight for justice is the same. Amidst all this change, our central drives remain. Amidst the shutting down of borders and communications, movements remain.

Tonight we pack for one last family trip to Washington DC for some time. Tomorrow, the power of the presidency is handed over to another and the next day we will be a part of a nationwide Women's March. Our children have been asking us for months what we are going to do when Trump becomes President. Will we leave the country? What will he do to us when Trump becomes President? Will he make us (want to) leave the country? We tell them that we will remain. We tell them that we are not going anywhere. When others tell us to move, we will stand our ground and say, "you move." Our replies never seem enough. We struggle to articulate a response in how we live and continue to live. That is why we are taking them out of school so we can all join the Women's March in DC. We want to show them how we keep moving. We want them to see who else will be doing that moving with us. They will not fully understand everything that is going to happen, tomorrow, the next day, or for the next four years. We won't understand it all. But there is wisdom in the moving. There is grace in the moving. Their is hope and change in the moving. The moving reminds us that we can keep moving. We speak it through our feet. We hear it in our joints. Over Christmas, the Reverend bought us all matching light-up shoes which we will wear as we walk. Because often we come to see the way by the light of walking the way. We find the reason for keeping moving only after we are someways down the road. In the uncertainty of the road, we find paths and destinations that we could not have imagined before we began. In eight years, our bodies have changed. Our country has changed. That will not be stopped or stymied. No matter the promises of any candidate, there is no making things like they were again. The world has moved beneath our feet and the peoples that once lived there are not who they were. The only fixed things are the drive to move and mutate. Things transform. That is real. We did change. We will change. Thank you, President Obama for walking the way with us to show us, yes, we can.

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Let's feel this moment for a moment. Look back at the road we have come together. Allow yourself to feel the miles in your joints. That is the rhythm of bodies undergoing change. That is the hum of a movement coursing through our veins. Let's look back so that we might give thanks to President Obama for walking the way with us. Let's tell our story of the journey to remind ourselves that this is not a moment, it is a movement. Change continues. Things transform.

For teaching us that yes, we can change.

Thanks, Obama!

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LGBT Champions of Change: 

Transliterature at the White House

Queer Disability Day: 

Transliterature Returns to the White House

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Queer Disability Day: Transliterature Returns to the White House

"There is no way we will ever achieve justice
without recognizing these intersections...
that are written all over our bodies, our souls, 
our minds, our life experiences"

Finn Gardiner

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History

Today, July 28th, 2016, I sat beside my partner and listened to Sarah McBride become the first transgender person ever to address the Democratic National Convention. While she marked the significance of this moment in history, her primary concern was to call on Presidential nominee Hillary Clinton to keep to her promise to bring the nation back from the deep hatred being directed at the transgender community, "in our laws and in our hearts." An important part of McBride's address was the intersection of disability and transgender in her family's life and politics. During McBride's short speech, she remembered her husband, a transgender man, who died of cancer only days after they became married. For them, the terminal status of illness compounded the terminal status of being transgender in America. This is their truth but also the truth of countless members of the LGBTQ and disability community. Each of these cultural identities and circumstances come with social prejudice as well as needs that require a wider community for support. By the end of the address, lasting only a few minutes, both my fiance and myself were fighting tears. We understood first hand how the intersection of transgender, queer, and disability politics on the national stage has the potential to change history, policies, and community.

A month ago, on June 27th, 2016, I was handing my identification to secret service personnel at the gates to the White House as they pulled up my invitation for the Forum on LGBTQ and Disability Issues, nicknamed LGBTQ Disability Day. In many ways, my return to the seat of the Federal Government was an uncanny replay of my first invitation. I was trying hard to maintain a professional, confident look while being wracked by uncertainty as I waited in line, asking myself, "did the White House really mean to invite me to discuss the state of the country?" In other ways, this second visit was substantially different both in terms of the event and my role. In my first meeting, Champions of Change, I was invited as an author and literature critic to discuss my story and the stories of other transgender persons among a room of writers, filmmakers, and television professionals. This time, I was invited as a scholar and consultant on the intersection of transgender, queer, and disability issues, to share ideas and tactics with policy makers and community leaders. The freshly of the experience for me was echoed by the event. This was only the second time that such a forum was being held at the White House. It is only recently that the President's White House would call for such an event where transgender and disability are given such a central place in discussions of the Federal Government.

Marking the recent breakthroughs in the politics of LGBTQ and Disability communities, our forum also served to mark the President's declaration of the Stonewall Inn as a National Monument.  This was the first time that a specifically LGBTQ site was honored as an United States monument. Furthermore, the new status meant that  as a part of the national park service, the site would be preserved and curated by a specially devoted staff for perpetuity. This ensured that the progress towards justice was not just full of moments but enacted an ongoing movement connecting the past, present, and future. As the declaration was announced, I looked around at the room filled with LGBTQ and disability activists from across many generations. There were those with friends and family at Stonewall, those who fought for HIV/AIDs research, those who fought over the policies that became the American's with Disability Act, those who pushed for and ushered in Marriage Equality, as well as those fighting for causes in the transgender, intersex, and disability community that are yet to gain wide recognition in the public. It was evident that this is not the room where history is merely celebrated, those in this room make history happen. As a historian myself, I've long felt that a historical perspective is not one of passive recognition but of active participation in a web of ongoing struggles that implicate us across time.

It becomes more certain every day that my children will grow up in a country much different than the one I inherited. As mothers, my partner and I try to curate for them history as it is being made and remade. We will take them to the Stonewall Monument and give it to them as a piece of their history. This will involve assisting them in getting to the site as well as understanding the text they cannot read or images they cannot understand. And we will fight alongside those at the 2016 Forum on LGBTQ and Disability Issues to ensure that such locations continue to become more accessible to peoples with a wider range of embodiments. Because when we are older, maybe not even much older, our children may be taking us to the monument with the hope that their blind mother, hard of hearing mother, or their mother in a wheel chair can continue to experience that history with them. The act of making history is always a collective one. History is reaching across boundaries of time, space, and differences in life experience. In this work, the work of assuring disability access is central to making history. The declaration of a monument is not the end of a road of progress but a commitment to an ongoing collective struggle.

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Policy

The Forum was split into two major topics: policy and community organizing. Speakers were chosen for each half to lead the conversation and introduce main topics. The first discussion to begin was government and business policy regarding LGBTQ and Disability issues. None of the chosen leaders were legislators but all had some direct role in consultation, advocacy, or the writing of laws. The moderator, Curt Decker, Executive Director of the National Disability Rights Network, humorously observed that the discussion was "a little heavy on attorneys... but that's okay." In a couple instances, such as Senior Policy Advisor from the US Department of Labor's Office of Disability Employment Policy, Day Al-Mohamed, their job was to advise the Federal Government, White House and President on issues relating to these marginalized communities. Also speaking was Professor Chai Feldblum, Commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission who was instrumental in drafting and negotiating the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and the ADA Amendments Act of 2008. Feldblum told the story of the development of the ADA from AIDs Initiatives led by the queer community and the conversations where gay leaders insisted that AIDS legislation could not be effective and just without addressing the disability community. Updates were given on where various initiatives have succeed and where they have failed. This included a variety of resources with the room, including best practice programs and recent research. Statistics were shared with the room, such as the current number of homeless youth that are LGBTQ in general (40%), nearly half, and transgender in particular, (7%). Likewise, the number youth in foster care who are LGBTQ (20%), around one in five. In the world of government, business, and policy, these statistics are powerful in pressing the gears of the system towards change. That is the value of holding a Forum such as this, where initiatives can begin, stories can be told, and these numbers can get to those who can do some good with them.

A moment of silence for those killed and injured at the Pulse Nightclub shooting set the tone for the first half of the discussion. With many of those present knowing members of the community in Orlando, the danger and need was freshly evident for such conversations happening at the highest levels. The leaders recognized how the tragedy and its relate conversations embodied the intersection of LGBTQ and disability issues. On the one side, it is only ever a brief time after a shooting before the media turns to "mental illness" or even "mental disability" as a root cause for such violence. This reinforces stigmas that holds that everyone with mental illnesses or disabilities are therefor prone to violence. Yet it also opens up the possibility to discuss the utter failing of social support and care for those with certain illnesses. What cultural forces may drive a person to consider violence? How might a society that instills hatred (even self-hatred) of queer and transgender persons incite someone to acts of destruction? How might shame around mental illness dissuade someone from getting help? On the other side, because of the shooting, many of those who survive will not experience first hand the intersection of queerness and disability. What does it mean to be gay in a wheel chair? How does one navigate sex with chronic pain? How might homophobia compound recent mental traumas? In any case, the shooting makes evident how support for disability justice is an import part of LGBTQ justice and how support for queer justice is a natural extension of disability justice. Now, more than ever, we need to use collectivity to overcome the symptoms of hate, fear, ignorance, and division.

Addressing the many queer victims of the Orlando shooting who will be joining the disability community for the first time, Feldblum asked, "will they understand their lives are still worth living?" In other words, one can become disabled yet not affirm membership in the disability community or affirming a positive, disability politics. The process of coming out and claiming pride in one's sexuality may now need to be repeated because of one's embodiment. This will begin with attending to the ableism in the queer community and in queer self-perceptions. Many of the speakers noted the long road in policy making that has required significant cultural shifts in order to move forward. Al-Mohamed noted how the disability and queer justice movements "share similar pathways" in the movement of these identities as (1) something (2) to hide to something (3) to fix to something to accept (4) to something to include. These turning points often hinge around the constant need to widen conversations from individual struggles to environment prejudices. LGBTQ and Disability Justice demands that we learn to see violence and marginalization on a systematic level, with interpersonal conflicts existing as symptoms of a wider disease. This means being able to see how systems are built with homophobia, ableism, transphobia and other biases built into how they operate or what their perceived goals are. "You can change all the structures in the world and if the people who make those structures continue to hold bias and animus and oppression and prejudice inside them, they will recreate those systems even if they don't intend to." She called for the redirection of the resources used to fight terrorism oversees to addressing the "body terrorism" in this country being directed at people with disabilities, people of color, bodies that are trans, bodies that are queer.

At the end of the policy section, a colleague of mine stood up and asked, "when will we stop applauding the White House and start annoying it?" It was a question asked out of frustration over the snails pace and often swerving away from justice on the road of change in government. Many in the room echoed the same groans. One response to the question came from a policy maker told his long history of activism beginning in the AIDs Crisis. "We have been annoying the White House for a long time and the change has come at an incredibly slow pace," he admitted, "but we need to keep up that annoyance and we can't despair." Another person responded to my colleagues demand for action but acknowledging the need for partnership between policy-makers who deal with the slow grind of government and grassroots organizers who deal with the immediate needs and suffering of communities. With that reply, the policy meeting broke up and we were able to exchange thoughts and feelings while the Community Organizer meeting was being set up. The question hit at tensions between the two groups: how we speak, who we are, and the rate at which we tend to get things done. The critique issued by my colleague was especially resonant with activists and scholars whose job is to engage with the immediate needs and stories of people outside the walls of government.  While we were lucky enough to be invited into the room where government conversations happen, most of us would have to step back out among our friends and family, those in need and those dying, and we will be accountable to them. We will have to answer for the government we advised and its slow responses. It is our job on days such as this to think the slow thoughts of government but to feel the immediate hurt of society. In the end, it is our job to be annoying and the White Houses's job to continue to invite that annoyance, and do something with it.

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Community

When the leaders of the Community Organizer meeting started, we heard the stories of many different activists, most of whom were transgender (including non-binary, gender queer persons), people of color, as well as crip. All of the leaders chosen to stand and tell their stories evidenced something most of those in the room already knew. Our political fights are intensely personal. A non-binary writer and librarian, Cyree Jarelle Johnson told how their life-sustaining medical care has been many times halted and insurance payments denied because healthcare providers refused to recognize the authenticity of documents that represented the complexity of Jarelle's gender. These systemic fissures around how gender and illness are managed often ignore the immediate costs of those abandoned in the cracks. "Their mistake could cost me my life, what does it cost them?" asked Johnson. Furthermore, Johnson stressed the high percentage of autistic people of color or queer homeless people with mental illness killed by police. These are not statistics on a legislator's one-sheet, these are members of Johnson's community. As another member and advocate in the autistic community of color,  Ma'ayan Anafi, policy consular for the National Center for Transgender Equality, echoed the same intimacy and immediacy. Anafi spoke on the pressing need to address the day to day discrimination of LGBT and disabled people which results in lives lost and lives locked away in a cornucopia of oppressive social mechanisms, "police brutality, mass incarceration, and the school to prison pipeline." Each day we wait to turn silence into debate, debate into policy, policy into laws, and laws into action, more lives are lost. If we seem frustrated or annoying, it is because we come to this Forum with friends and family at home dying.

Too often, misunderstanding the reason behind the anger, those used to the slow trod of government find the intensity of activists to be petty. "There is a stereotype of the crazy trans woman that is used to silent trans women," says Martela, "but it is true that trans women are suffering mental illnesses that is the direct result of the oppression they are faced." This pressing precariousness was repeated in the stories Greta Gustava Martela about her life and the life of others who call her Trans Lifeline network. With between 40-50% of transgender persons attempting suicide, the community does not have time to wait around for incremental change. If 40-50% of cisgender people were dying off, State and Federal governments would not be delaying help or actively worsening the conditions of the community. "Suicide is something that happens in isolation," Martela told the Forum. This means that it is not enough to address the concerns of those invited to a room in the White House. Because most trans people become isolated not by choice, because of mounting oppression, they could never travel to Washington DC if they were invited. "Many transgender people feel afraid to leave their houses," Martela reported. Despite the many travel demands of my word, this was a truth that I have personally experienced when I don't have the energy to risk myself or weathered myself against the antagonism of those I encounter on the streets or public transit, in homes or businesses. We must constantly be considering who is not in the room, who does not have the power or the time to travel and make their voices to be heard. That means going slow and listening when activists and community members speak, discerning the countless silenced voices echoing at their back.

Beyond the intensity of the speech, listening can be difficult because of the many different levels at which a voice resonates. A significant theme throughout the community organizing portion of the forum was about the role of intersectionality in the lived politics of LGBTQ and Disability issues. President of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network of the Greater Boston Area, Finn Gardiner, recounted the time spent homeless and otherwise abandoned outside government safety nets because he is a black, queer, trans, autistic disabled person. He told stories about being called rational slurs in a classroom for kids with disabilities, discriminated against by black and gay men in a homeless shelter for being trans, outcast from a community because he is autistic. "You think I would fit in," said Gardiner, citing how his many intersectional identities open many roads for shared experiences, yet he is too often marginalized because of other elements of his identity. There is expectations for him to be outgoing because he is black, he confesses Gardiner, but that conflicts with the whole image of who he is. Discrimination never happens because of all his identities at once but neither does acceptance ever cover all of his identities. These labels are often too quick and too small. Intersectionality is a complex word that signifies the complexity of every particular person by acknowledging how all these smaller words exist in a shifting constellation. This lived and every changing complexity means that we need to meet people where they are at and listen better to understand the many places they have been. Only by dwelling at intersections can we hear the many different directions a person is speaking. From this information, we need to make communities and policies with roads forward for each different person.

As the Forum came to a close, the issue of intersectionality exploded the conversation with Forum leaders taking turns to nuance the idea. It is a privilege not to have to talk about intersections, admitted Martela, "to be able to talk about the one thing." This is a privilege not possessed by most of the speakers at the Forum and many of those outside the White House. "I don't think that people are allowed to live at all their intersections," Johnson with a Pokemon reference. "People look at you like you are trying to 'collect them all,' like you have to have all the problems." Adding to this, Anafi warned against the 'collect them all' model of intersectionality, insisting that it does now come into being by merely adding one identity with all its baggage to another. These identities are directly linked. Currently proud to claim themselves as gender non-binary, Johnson recalls being allowed to live as a gender non-conforming person because they were diagnosed on the Autism spectrum at three-years-old. If we utilize these enfolded identities, where intersectionality is central, we can multiply the avenues through which we relate and care for one another. "There is not a sharp line between those calling the [Trans Life]line and those staffing the line... We are creating disability in the trans community by the ways we are treating them," declares Martela. "Overwhelming, the people who are staffing Trans Lifeline are disabled trans people." As a way to close the Forum, this last point strikes across the personal, immediate, and intersectional emotion at the heart of such work. Community Organizing is how a people who are suffering help each other and help themselves. Yet this is not enough, without allies in the policy world who have the privilege to offer different forms of power, these organizations will remain relatively small and contingent on volunteers. Until the local is able to better speak with the global, change will remain unacceptably slow.

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Afterward

It is a few hours later now, McBride has surrendered the stage to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. If Clinton is elected, her White House will be different than the one to which I was invited. We count on that when that unimaginable thing happens every four to eight years, when one President steps down and another steps up. We count on there being a difference, we count on change. It will be different because she is a white woman and President Obama is a black man. It will be different because 2008 to 2016 will not be the same as 2017 onward. We count on change, we hope for progress. In 2016, we hear the Democratic nominee saying things we did not hear in 2008. We hear a full throated commitment to LGBT justice. We hear more about disability justice. We hear her talking about the hard road to affordable medicine, mental health assistance, and social access. "To make real change happen," says Clinton on the right of disabled children to public education access, "you have to change hearts and you have to change laws." If we believe that voting a person into office matters, we need to believe that the next White House will be different. If President Clinton invites me, I will come back. If it comes to it, if President Trump invites me, I will come back. But whatever the White House, whoever lives and works there, I will not fight to make America *something* again. I want change. I want to make America trans, not cis again. I want to make America queer, not straight again. I want to make America crip, not decry "Crippled America." That was why I went and why I return to the White House, because who enters the room where things happen changes the nature of the room and what happens. And I hear that sentiment, the same sentiments expressed in both of my recent visits, just now be repeated at the DNC with the words, "Americans don't say, 'I alone can fix it,' they say, 'we will fix it together'." That is a mission that I want to continue to be a part.

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LGBT Champions of Change: 

Transliterature Goes to the White House

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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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