Portion of the exhibit “Crossing Boundaries: Portraits of a Transgender West”
I recently experienced an exhibit highlighting the history of transgender people on the West Coast from 1860-1940 at the Oregon Historical Society. It captured details of people moving out West to be themselves, the instability they experienced wondering when they would be discovered, the beauty of a gender affirming surgery happening in 1918, and the persistent cycles of trans erasure and sensationalization.
Trans visibility and accurate representations of our experiences—not through the lens of cisgender commentators—is critical to our shared solidarity and recognizing we are not alone. Growing up in the 1990s, I had no easily available trans representation. I remember finding a trans woman’s blog and desperately trying to hold onto the idea that I could be myself. That it was possible. Ultimately I succumbed to feelings that something was wrong with me and if I just ignored it that it would go away. I repressed my identity for over two decades, keeping it from everyone including myself. I ultimately was able to acknowledge and discover my identity thanks to the openness of a friend sharing her experiences.
Being a visibly transgender person can take on many forms. Some of us may not pass as cisgender. Some of us, myself included, explicitly reject the concept—viewing it as a negative reinforcement of a constrictive and arbitrary system. Some individuals choose to be transparent about their transness and reinforce that we do not need to be ashamed about our existence. We are not inferior, but a beautiful artifact of biological diversity.
A Paradoxical Situation
The act of being visible is a paradoxical situation. It’s empowering to be unapologetically myself. Visibility helps other queer folx overcome barriers of acknowledging their own existence. It is grounding to see common or shared experiences with others. It helps to recognize the possibility—to take those initial terrifying steps. Visibility can also enable connections for good faith conversations and humanize our existence. At the same time, being visible opens up an individual to expending additional emotional labor in a myriad of ways including:
- Increased risk of bigoted actions
- Bearing the burden of explaining the impact of marginalization to others who don’t want to do their own research
- Determining boundaries of what they are willing to share and in what contexts
- Needing to defend and maintain those boundaries when they are inevitably pressed
- Being asked to provide responses as a representative of a people group as if the diversity of many experiences can be captured by one or a few individuals
The concept of visibility also helps reaffirm the humanity of a marginalized group—marginalized people groups are made up of people after all. Rhetoric used to maintain the status quo of oppression seeks to dehumanize individuals, to make them a thing that can be ostracized, vilified, and stripped of dignity. Along with dehumanization, oppressive systems often create and perpetuate stigma on the affected group. In her book Sexed Up Julia Serano discusses the use of stigma as a means of dehumanizing people. She writes:
Stigmas are marked traits that are viewed extremely negatively, so much, that they seem to “discredit” and “spoil” a person’s entire identity. Not only are stigmas treated as if they “contaminate” every aspect of the person in question (their motives, opinions, disposition, trustworthiness), but they can also “spread from the stigmatized individual to his close connections”— a phenomenon [Erving] Goffman called courtesy stigma.
Trans individuals continue to face a recurring loop of erasure reinforcing the stigma of our existence. People are buried under the wrong name. Trans people are sensationalized when they are found out and in obituaries which deadname and misgender them. This is happening now similar to how it happened in the 1800s. Yet the narrative persists that our existence is something novel, something that is spreading. Our history was burned in Nazi Germany with the destruction of Magnus Hirschfield’s Institute of Sexology in 1933. Our queer elders died in the AIDS epidemic with the intentional delay of acknowledging its existence and funding research for years. We have been systematically erased so that oppressive structures can continue to claim that we are something new. That we aren’t to be trusted. That we are worthy of the stigma they thrust upon us.
Visibility Tanking
One of my friends, Erin, shared the concept of visibility tanking where people don’t try to blend in or pretend to be cisgender. It is a form of expressing trans joy and the beauty of our experiences. Our active enjoyment of life and love for ourselves is an act of resistance to societal stigma and those who seek to erase us. This empowers the individual as well. If I’m not trying to hide my gender queerness, bigotry which seeks to expose me has far less power. If someone calls out that I’m genderqueer or deadnames me, it shows far more about them than it does me. I don’t choose to hide these things. My transness isn’t something to be ashamed of. It’s a beautiful artifact of biological diversity—one that I cherish.
One area I choose to be visible in is my participation in sports. That in itself has been a journey. My local cycling community was a wonderful and supportive place for my first year racing. The women and non-binary people I race with have been amazing and welcoming sources of explicit inclusion, including when online transphobic remarks about my participation eventually and consistently came. They supported me when dealing with bigotry online. We have had so many amazing conversations about intersectional feminism and real issues impacting women’s sports. We’ve pushed each other to race harder and celebrated our growth over the season.
A side effect of visibility that I wasn’t expecting was the joyous moments of queer solidarity. It’s one of the things that continues to give me hope amidst the current political hellscape around me. Seeing this exhibit was one of them. I was surrounded by other genderqueer people sharing the experience about our trans elders. It is celebrating the existence of this exhibit while sharing sorrow that we continue to deal with the same cycles.
Some of those cycles are breaking, and I’m blessed to experience some of them. While at the exhibit, a child came up to me and my friend. They commented on how much they liked my friend’s outfit before commenting on my hair. They jumped as my friend and I both said thank you. I don’t know anything about this child, but I do know that they were excited to both see and talk to some genderqueers at an exhibit about transgender history in the west. While I grew up not knowing there were other people like me, I’m grateful to be part of breaking that cycle.