In May of 2014,
Time Magazine said that our society had reached the transgender tipping point.
And that was the headline on the cover of the magazine that month,
and they paired that with a photo of actress Laverne Cox.
And you may know Laverne Cox's name,
she is the actress who plays Sophia Burset
on the incredibly popular Netflix show "Orange is the New Black".
Now, I often talk about Laverne Cox
because she has a pretty important position in terms of the acting world.
She is one of the few people
who plays a trans character, but is also trans herself.
She identifies in the same way as her character.
So Sophia identifies as a transgender woman,
and Laverne Cox holds that same identity.
Now, lots of people know Laverne Cox,
which is why I bring her up often
when I do trainings about transgender identity.
But, in those trainings, questions quickly emerge,
and those questions tend to revolve around language and words.
So here is just a handful, a tiny sliver of words
that the trans community uses
to talk about their own experiences of gender.
And again, there are lots more out there
than just the ones that you see on this screen.
We could fill up this screen, and fill up many, many TED talks
with just talking about these different identities.
But I bring this up
because the trans dictionary is not complete, and it's changing.
So if these words, you've never heard these before,
I'm not surprised.
Right now, online, the trans community is still making new words
to describe their experiences and describe their own ideas
about their gender identity.
And that's what's amazing right now,
and potentially some of the reasons
why that Time Magazine piece talked about the transgender tipping point.
The Internet allows trans folks to access each other
in ways that's amazing.
So communities have started to be built
in really dramatic and impressive ways.
And because these trans folks are able to connect with one another,
language has emerged, and language has evolved.
Let me situate myself in this conversation.
I identify as a female-to-male trans man.
So that means for me, that I was assigned female at birth
though that didn't really jive
with how I thought of myself, and how I existed in the world.
I was raised in Alabama,
which, if any of you know anything about the South,
the South has very specific ideas about gender;
very specific ideas about what it means
to be masculine or feminine, or male or female,
and I didn't really fit into those ideas.
And that was OK for a while.
I existed in sort of a tomboy space,
for most of my young adulthood, or my young childhood,
and I didn't get a lot of flack for that.
I wasn't really bullied all that much,
until about middle school, junior high.
And that's really when I got the very clear message
that I was not performing my gender
in the way other people expected me to.
And I tried to modify it; I tried to meet people's expectations,
but I just failed over and over again because it didn't feel genuine to me.
It didn't feel right.
But I had no idea how to talk about that.
I didn't have any words to understand what that meant for a long time.
Until I was about 23, 24 years old.
So those of you who are in your 30s,
- the "old folks" in the room to the high school students -
you might remember
an early social media platform called LiveJournal.
LiveJournal was a place where relatively emo kids like me
would talk about our parents, and how mean they were,
and I would moan and groan over the new Dashboard Confessional album.
(Laughter)
But it was also a place where you could connect with folks.
You could connect with folks who shared your identities,
or shared interests that you had.
So you had your own personal blog page,
but you also had a space where you could join community groups.
One day, while I was just roaming through LiveJournal, bored after class,
I found a page dedicated to talking about FTM trans people.
I found a blog entry by this kid who was my same age,
and his name was Blake.
He was talking about how he came to understand his gender identity,
and the words that he used to describe it,
and his journey on how he understood what it meant to be
a transgender person and a transgender man.
Within the course of that one blog entry,
my whole idea of myself shifted.
I had finally found language.
I had finally found the words to understand myself
through the words of someone else.
I had never had that before, and it was incredibly powerful.
Because language is super important.
Language is crucial to understanding ourselves,
and understanding the position that we hold within society.
So any of you who have tried to learn a new language,
or you grew up in a household where multiple languages were spoken,
you know the importance of shared definitions and shared meanings of words.
But even though we might speak the same technical language,
it doesn't mean we understand the words that a cultural group may use
that we don't belong to,
or the way that language evolves and changes over time.
So I want to talk about some of these terms that were on that earlier slide,
and I'll start with the term "transgender".
Transgender was coined in the 1960s,
though it didn't really get adopted for wide use
until the late 1980s to 1990s.
And there's lots of different definitions of transgender out there,
but my personal favorite is the one that's on the screen.
This is from Susan Stryker, she's a trans author, historian, activist,
and she says that her understanding of the word "trangender",
it's "the movement across a socially imposed boundary
away from an unchosen starting place."
And the reason why I like this definition so much
is that it highlights that I didn't get to pick where I started from.
I was born female assigned at birth and was raised accordingly.
But it does highlight that you can move away from that.
And often, when we talk about trans folks moving away
from that unchosen starting point,
we're talking about transition.
And the term "transition" can mean a lot of different things.
There's no one way to transition,
and there's no one right way to be trans.
But transition often refers to social transitions and medical transitions.
So a social transition involves essentially the coming out process:
discovering for yourself, "What are the words that feel comfortable for me?",
"How do I think about my gender?",
and then communicating that to other people.
Be it saying, you know,
"My name is Jay now, I want you to call me that,
and I want you to use male pronouns when you refer to me."
And claiming a transgender identity,
whatever that might mean for the person.
And a medical transition refers to medical interventions
that you could do to your body.
Medical interventions are vast,
there's lots of different types of them,
but not all trans people want or need medical transition.
So, some trans folks say, "This is absolutely necessary."
"I need access to this kind of care to feel comfortable with my body,
to align my body with the way that I think,
align it with my mind."
But again, not all trans people do this.
So there are some folks who say, "I don't need that."
"I feel OK with my body; I don't need to necessarily modify it too much,"
- lots of different variations of the way that folks can medically transition.
But I'll also put a caveat in here
that medical transition is expensive.
It's not covered under health insurance often,
so it's out of pocket expenses.
We're talking about often medically necessary care
that people have to pay for themselves.
And this can range anywhere from 5,000 dollars,
on the low end of the various surgical procedures that are out there,
upwards to 30,000-50,000 dollars for just one procedure.
So this is cost prohibitive often as well for some folks.
So it's not for everyone,
not every trans person goes through a transition in exactly the same way.
But let's get back to some of the words
that we were talking about on that earlier slide,
and let's get back to some historical words
that you may know about the trans community.
So there have been a lot of words that have been used to refer to trans folks,
and some of them have fallen out of fashion.
Some of them are not being used widely.
And some of these words can even be harmful and hurtful
for trans folks to hear.
So I'll talk about the term "transexual" in a minute,
but I'll start with "transvestite".
So the term "transvestite" was used widely in the 60s and 70s
among transgender communities to refer to themselves.
It was a word that trans folks adopted.
And even to the point
of one of the earliest social movements that we know of for transgender people
included the word "transvestite" in the name.
"STAR" stands for Straight Transvestite Action Revolutionaries.
This group which was started by two of the pioneers
in terms of transgender history in the United States,
Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera,
was a New York City-based group
that advocated for young trans, queer, people of color,
folks who were experiencing homelessness and poverty,
in an attempt to advocate for the cause.
So this word was used as an affirming term,
though, con temporarily, this term is largely offensive.
The term "transvestite" is not used by and large really at all today
within the modern transgender community.
We'll go back to the word "transexual".
"Transexual" as a term is really the oldest word that we have
to refer to folks who feel
that their body doesn't align in the same way as their mind.
So, "transsexual" con temporarily is still used, and it refers to
someone who wants to undergo medical transition
or who has undergone medical transition.
And "transsexual" is a word that has a lot of baggage for the transgender community.
Some folks in the community say,
"That's the word that I use, that's how I understand my gender."
Other folks say, "I really dislike that word; it makes me feel uncomfortable."
And I tend to fall on the "I don't like this word;
it makes me feel uncomfortable" side of that coin.
For me at least, the term "transsexual" has the word "sex" in it;
that kind of makes us think "trans" is not really a gender identity,
but it has something to do with sexuality and sexual orientation.
And for me, that feels gross; it feels kind of icky.
Though I would never tell another person, another trans person,
say, "You can't use that word because I don't like it."
If someone identifies as a transsexual, cool, no big deal.
I don't identify as a transsexual; I prefer the term transgender myself,
but I'm not going to tell another person
what words they should use to describe themselves.
But I will caution you
that the term transsexual is probably not the best word
that you should use on a day to day basis
unless you know
that that person identifies as a transsexual instead of transgender.
So this idea about language though;
I want to come back to contemporary thinking about language
in the trans community.
There's a number of different ways
to think about the words that the transgender community uses,
and I want to pose a suggestion as to how we can think about it.
So, we can think about transgender identities
as binary transgender identities and non-binary transgender identities.
Two different ways to think about
trans folks and the way that we think about our genders.
So when I say "binary", I'm referring to
when we have two categories that are completely opposite of one another,
never the twain shall meet.
So, we live in a very binary world:
male-female, gay-straight, black-white,
especially as it relates to gender.
We have a lot of assumptions about gender
based on this binary idea that there are only men and women,
and they are two totally different groups
that don't have anything in common with one another.
We have trans identities that myself and other folks
who work in transgender activism are starting to call "binary identies",
so I consider myself to have a relatively binary trans identity:
I transitioned from female to male.
There are other folks who transitioned from male to female.
Celebrities like Janet Mock, Caitlyn Jenner,
and Laverne Cox who we talked about earlier,
but also there are trans men who are relatively famous
like Chaz Bono.
The media talks about binary identities
as it relates to transgender people.
This is largely why we don't often know, non-binary identity folks.
Because I think, my understanding of this is
that binary identities reinforce our gender ideas.
They make sense; we don't have to challenge a bunch of stuff
to talk about binary identities like I have;
it's something that folks can wrap their minds around
with a little bit of education.
But what the media leaves out
are folks who essentially give a big middle finger to the binary.
They say, "Screw your ideas about gender.
"The ideas we have in society we have about gender are essentially stupid,
and I want to make them-- I want to mess them up."
Non-binary identities, there's a list of some of them here
- I'm not going to define all of them.
You all have the Google machine;
you all have the power to look these things up -
but I'll give you a couple examples
of folks I know who have these non-binary identities.
So first, as someone who identifies as a non-binary trans woman,
she lives in California, she's a college student in her 20s
and works at a local nonprofit
that works with high school gay-straight alliances.
And for her, being a non-binary trans woman
means that she blurs the line of femininity.
She mostly presents in relatively feminine ways,
she goes by a feminine name, she wears typically female clothes,
but combines those feminine attributes
occasionally, with completely rocking out a mustache and a goatee.
Because for her, she's not just feminine.
And to think about herself in just that narrow way
seems inauthentic to her.
She wants to embrace her whole self, and that involves her facial hair.
Another example of a non-binary identity is a friend who I know from the South,
and they identify as agender.
They use the gender-neutral pronoun "they"
- it's not a binary gender term -
and for them, they say, "I don't have a gender.
"I am genderless, or gender is at least not a very important part of my life;
it's not a way that I think of myself primarily."
So these non-binary identities are challenging our ideas about gender
in ways that binary identities sometimes don't do as well.
They are constantly saying,
"Your understanding of gender in the world is silly,
and we don't need it; we can live outside of these boxes."
So what does all of this mean?
What do you do with all of this information?
I have some suggestions for you and some advice, if you'll indulge me.
The first is listen and learn.
Listen to trans folks when we talk about our experiences,
listen to how we say the words that are important to us,
reflect those words back to us,
and be comfortable learning new things.
Lots in the landscape of trans identities could be relatively new.
Be OK with that.
It's all right; we'll all get through it together.
Challenge assumptions,
Challenge those things that nag you in the back of your head,
and you don't know why.
So stop thinking about people's body parts
or what their name used to be,
or what's really going on with them.
Take people at their face value.
Someone says that this is how they identify, be cool with that.
And when you think about binary identity ideas,
try to challenge those.
And say, "Those don't necessarily matter."
And be an ally.
Just like the transgender dictionary has changed over time,
the word "ally" has undergone
a pretty massive transformation in the past five years.
Among activist circles, "ally" used to be this identity term:
"I'm an ally," and you get to claim it.
Almost like a noun.
"Ally" is no longer a noun. "Ally" is more thought about as a verb.
"Ally" is something that you earn. You do something to become an ally.
You can also think about an accomplice.
An ally means being an accomplice with the trans community
not just sitting on the sidelines saying, "Yeah you do that,"
but it's being active and involved.
So ways that you can be an ally involve showing up at trans events.
Omaha has a large and thriving trans community and we do stuff.
Feel free to come.
When you're invited, we'd love to have folks come to transgender events.
Speak up for us when we can't maybe do it for ourselves.
Don't speak over us, don't speak for us,
but sometimes it's unsafe for us to speak out,
and call someone when they're doing stuff that's a little transphobic.
So you might be better positioned to do that than I might be.
It might be really unhealthy for me to do that,
but you could do that with relative ease.
And also, now that you know better, do better and help all of us
not just some of us, break through.
Thank you.
(Applause)