W422 Blast Off at the Speed of Light

"That sounds like Team Rocket," a friend quips.  I had just shared our list of course objectives with them.  Of all the classes I've ever taken, this one excites me the most.  I think it has the greatest potential to enhance my personal life - I'm a transgender community organizer.  Sure my intended degree is accounting and my work history is insurance, but that's just how I earn money.  Community building is what I'm doing with my life.

• To create public spaces for creative/critical thought and action 

The most difficult part, when I came to realize that I'm transgender, was the complete lack of public examples for me to draw from.  How can I know that I'm even possible, if I'm the first one I've ever met?  This struck me as deeply unjust (especially since we are everywhere), so I set out to create online space and connect with others who were doing the same.  At first it was rough: a small blog here, a tiny group there.  But over the years, we reached out to more and more people with the message "you matter to me; I'm here for you".

• To recognize and creatively reframe binary oppositions of thought and language

On the one hand, I'm tired of being expected to remind everyone that I exist, whenever they fall back into binary ways of framing the world.  My inconvenient existence doesn't mean I signed up for teaching unpaid lessons on demand.  On the other, I can't really avoid the clash that comes when I take up space in a binary world, and it would be better for my mental health to engage in a dynamic that reminds others where their responsibilities lie, in a way that enables both of us to live better lives.

• To work with and against the “enabling constraints” of various forms of discourse

"The Discourse".  Every trans person I know refers to it with a tone of scorn in their writing, but we can't help but keep circling back around to it.  To a certain extent, the gender binary (the legal and social imposition of a male/female dichotomy beginning at birth) is an enabling constraint.  We seek to be liberated from the binary, but while the binary framework still exists, we are able to use its language to describe certain sexist dynamics in ways that otherwise wouldn't make sense.  I admit that is circular reasoning and will have to think on this further.  I'll have plenty of time for that; The Discourse isn't going anywhere soon.

• To learn how to make good use of diversity and difference as the necessary “friction” of creativity

Oh geez y'all don't even realize.  Everyone is trans.  I could say "anyone is trans", but I don't think that captures the reality.  Think of some kind of person, any kind of person at all: there is someone in existence who fulfills all of those qualities and is also transgender.  This creates all kinds of interesting (to say the least) conflicts.  For example, most transgender people would like everyone to know that our experiences are vastly different from those of Caitlyn Jenner, but the media keeps portraying her as a trans archetype.  The resulting in-community dialog has resulted in all sorts of new understandings of what it looks like when transmisogyny plays out in the media and amongst ourselves, and how we can create healthier messages of support and celebration for our diversity as a collection of unique individuals.  This dialog isn't something that will make the headlines, though, not like reality TV celebrities do.  Do not expect our revolution to be televised.

• To shape writerly identities that foster both personal growth and social change. 

I hope so.  Part of me worries this will lead to more talk less action.  But I hope to direct my talk into actions, to allow the writing to become what grounds me when I move in the world.

• To understand how discourse is shaped by specific spaces and places and how those assist and/or disrupt community formation. 

This was very obvious in St Louis, where the address of the community meeting venue would more or less determine the racial composition of the attendees.  Too often I saw meetings advertised for south city, and sure enough it would be 90% white.  The black population primarily resided in the north, and were more likely to rely on public transportation, so why didn't we situate more meetings near them and let the white folks with cars absorb the inconvenience?  I don't have any nice answers to that question.

• To write yourselves into forms, identities, and spaces that matter to you and that will bring you into deeper engagement with diverse communities. 

Writing myself into the world is often times the only way I can see myself in existence.  Forms with drop-down menus only offering "Mr/Mrs/Miss" are a fantasy; my reality is a long-form response.   We flee from spaces where we cannot exist.  We whisper to each other where we may thrive, and there we gather.  As mentioned above, this can sometimes result in our biases granting access to too narrow of a demographic, forgetting that where we seek the comfort of similarity we must also embrace difference.  I don't think this tension can ever be resolved - I hope it never is!  So much of our dynamic creativity would be diminished.  We must constantly reinvent ourselves to truly thrive, and I enjoy every minute of it.