TRANSformation

When I decided to retire, it was never one of my fantasies that I would hang out on the golf course or sit on the couch eating bonbons and watching soap operas (although the bonbon part has a certain appeal). I know that some folks long for a retirement steeped in leisure, but my own particular penchant is for keeping busy—in fact, not keeping busy is actually dangerous for my mental health. And I guess it’s no surprise that as someone who spent 60 years going back to school every fall, my idea of “busy” includes a whole lot of learning new stuff. Sometimes, this means taking classes—a pastime I have recently raved about here. Other times, though, it just means keeping my eyes and ears open for chances to learn something. Being in a college town helps, of course, as does having partner who is equally eager to keep learning.  

This last weekend, I had just such an opportunity. On Friday and Saturday, CU’s GLBTQ Resource Center hosted the 7^th annual “TRANSforming Gender Symposium,” a two-day focus on (perhaps obviously) transgender identity and experience. Notice, that’s 7^th annual! Given that trans issues are just now filtering into public (as opposed to activist or academic) consciousness, the fact that this is number 7 is really impressive. Each year, this remarkable event brings in nationally known experts on trans issues, adds a bunch of films and workshops led by local folks, and then invites the whole university and the surrounding community to come learn. The conference is designed to serve both the trans community and folks with other interests in the topic—personal, academic, professional, or simply human interests.

As with other conferences that I’ve written about, I struggle with how to discuss this experience: a “book report,” a story line,  an attempt at synthesis, a “highlights” reel? This time, I think I’ll just tell you about the very best parts of the conference (IMHO), thinking you might add these things to your list and leap at any opportunity to experience them yourself. 

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1.    The opening keynote: Eli Clair is a genderqueer writer and activist who has cerebral palsy, which expands his activism in complex and enlightening ways. Eli’s talk was about shame. Specifically, it was about body shame; more specifically, about body shame experienced by trans people and people with disabilities. His presentation was so powerful—lyrical and moving, and at the same time full of information and challenging analyses. I heard one participant refer to it as “academic poetry.”

Eli’s talk wove together personal experiences, links among queerness, disability, class, gender, and race, a poem about eating watermelon, and a recurrent admonition to resist shame. Deep and moving barely describe it. And then came the “Q and A,” which he prefers to call a “community discussion,” insisting he has no answers. But he sure had some thoughtful insights. For example, on the notion of trans identity as biologically based, Eli first acknowledged the importance to some trans folks of a medical diagnosis—it’s the only way to get insurance coverage for transition-related medical procedures and hormones. But on a more fundamental level, he wondered aloud what we tell ourselves when we excuse our identities by an appeal to a lack of choice, a “born that way” argument. Why, he asked, would anyone think that making an ethical choice is less valid than somehow becoming who we already are?

As for marriage and the all-out push for marriage equality, he says, as others have, first, it’s the battle we have. Whether or not it’s the one we might have chosen, it’s the one we have. But as it moves forward, we need to pay attention to who’s left behind. Sure, it will be nice for people to pass their pensions on to their partners. But what about those of us, he asked, who don’t have pensions and never will? 

While it’s true that I agree with the points Eli made—although he made them far more persuasively and poetically than I can—there was so much more to his presentation than his personal positions on thorny issues. His comments about shame, his poetry, his personal recollections were, simply, beautiful. I’m finding it hard to convey the impact of Eli’s presentation, so I’ll just encourage you to watch for a chance to hear him. You’ll be glad you did.

2.    The movie “Intersexion”: This is one of the very best documentary movies I have seen in a very long time. If you click on the link above (“Intersexion”), you can see a trailer that’ll give you a hint. I went to see this film because although I knew some stuff about intersex identity, I really didn’t know much. The “I” is only occasionally included in our alphabet soup (LGBTQI). When it is, the discussion almost always turns immediately awkward because (a) few folks know anything at all about intersex issues—at best, only that it describes folks who don’t fit the “gender binary”; and (b) people are uncomfortable with the  topic—not least because it involves discussions of genitalia and it so totally disrupts what seems like the most obvious of divisions: the biological division of people into female and male.

The movie is based on interviews with a number of intersex folks who have had a range of experiences—from multiple involuntary (and typically futile) surgeries to validating, supportive parents, and everything in between. Some still struggle mightily as adults; some are comfortably at home with their lives. The film also includes some interesting historical, medical, and other assorted factual information—some of which was new to me and some of which I knew about only through psychology’s sort of feeble attempts to address the issue.

Here are some of the things I learned: Intersex is not nearly as rare as we might think. About 1 in every 2000 kids is born with some constellation of characteristics that identify them as intersex. Yet we rarely (if ever) hear about it, so carefully have we hidden it from view, so invisibilized have all these folks been. As one person in the video says, “Intersex isn’t uncommon; it’s just unheard of.” Intersex isn’t just one entity; it includes a wide range of variations on the usual she/he, male/female dichotomy:  variations in genitalia (differences in the presence/absence and/or size of the penis, vagina, labia, testicles); differences in chromosomal make-up (combinations other than XX or XY,  like XXY, X0, XYY, etc.); differences in internal organs and their correspondence to external ones (penis with uterus, vagina with male gonads, all or none of the above, etc.); and lots of others.

The sample of folks interviewed here are likely more at ease with their identity than are many other intersex people—otherwise, they wouldn’t be willing to be on film. They surely represent a tiny slice of the whole population of intersex people. Watching the movie, I wondered to myself which of the many thousands of people I’ve known in my life might identify, if only privately, as intersex. How thoroughly we have stigmatized this human experience—this human variation that challenges our most simple and concrete certainties about the nature of reality—and at the expense of how many people. 

So, those are my personal favorites from a symposium with many other programs to choose from. I’ll be watching for it to come around again next year: the 8th annual TRANSforming Gender Symposium. Maybe you will too. They welcome out-of-state folks.

So much to learn, so little time.