first of all I can’t believe I had to
follow a lovey – I like great hi it’s
good afternoon I was born in a small
farm town in Iowa I came into the world
with two x-chromosomes and all the usual
things that go with that which is to say
female my parents named me handle Ruth
after my great grandmother and a great
aunt obviously a few things have changed
since then I’m a member of the
transgender community more accurately
and more specifically on what you call
gender non-binary or gender
non-conforming with all of the media and
political drama around my people
recently you’re probably more familiar
with us these days than you or even just
a few years ago but it’s important to
understand that there’s more to the
transgender community than just Caitlyn
Jenner and RuPaul’s Drag Race which is
why I’m here I’d like to share my story
with you hopefully broaden your
understanding of gender variation a
little bit and show that a very strict
either/or male/female binary model of
gender leaves a lot of people out so
like I said I was born female to put a
little bit more clearly I was assigned
female at Birth based on my Anatomy but
from the very start from the time I was
a little toddler I was a very Unger
lished little girl I hated dresses I
loved catching bugs and wrestling my
grandma once asked me what I wanted to
be when I grew up I told her I was gonna
be a man and have a wife but on the
other hand I left playing with makeup I
love jewelry something was purple and
involved feathers or rhinestones in any
capacity I was all about it so well I
didn’t I’ve never fought I was old boy
I knew I was a girl but I was just and I
was into some things that were typically
stereotypically girly but the bulk of it
was a very bad fit to say the least so
before we get deeper into my story we
should get a few terms straight to
understand it so we’re all on the same
page so I have a few slides to help us
with this so the first term is
biological sex when we talk about this
we’re talking about bodies right
chromosomes sex hormones like
testosterone and estrogen reproductive
organs in genitalia
usually your your biological sex is
presumed to be binary which means either
or male or female now there are some
notable exceptions to that but that’s a
whole nother TED talk and next we have
sexual orientation this is who you’re
drawn to romantically or sexually who
you want to be with so within that you
know as we all know there’s a lot of
different ways you can identify gay
straight bi and so forth gender identity
obviously this is a big one for us today
right this is your internal sense of
madness or womanís of being feeling
masculine or feminine now usually well
also remember if you really pick nothing
else away this is what your soul feels
like since well who you are the the most
core part of yourself ordinarily this
lines up with your biological sex
sometimes it doesn’t that’s when things
start to get interesting
an important thing to remember as we go
forward and just generally right is to
understand that biological sex gender
sexual orientation and gender identity
are not interchangeable terms these are
three very different distinct qualities
and just because any two of them line up
kind of the way that you can would
predict or expect them to doesn’t mean
the third one will which breaks the
cisgender so sis CIS is a Latin root
word meaning on the same side as so if
your biological sex and your gender
identity are in alignment if they agree
with each other if you’re born male and
you basically feel like a dude
regardless of who you’re attracted to
your sister or maybe we say sis for sure
trans means across from so transgender
means that your gender identity and your
biological sex are across from each
other to the greater or lesser degree
not all trans people take hormones not
all of us have any kind of gender
related surgery those are not the things
that define or legitimize a trans
identity right those are it’s that
internal sense of a crossness that does
and lastly have gender nonconformity
this is basically what you get when your
dress or your tone of voice or your
gestures or even the way that even
things that you’re interested in
we run counter to what your culture
expects or demands of you based on your
biological sex so I’m kind of a dramatic
example of this but women who wore pants
in the 30s were gender non-conforming
men who let their hair touch their
collar that you read out long enough not
to touch the collar in the 50s gender
non-conforming
right so this is really just a matter of
degree it’s now back to the corn fields
so I was this eccentric little kid
fortunately my parents are pretty
progressive they value self-expression
and creativity so as long as they kept
my room clean and got along with my
little sisters and did okay in school I
could basically play and dress as I
pleased so up until the time I was in
about third grade I lived in kind of an
androgynous utopia I was like running
around in the yard with no shirt on I’m
like peacock feather taped to my head
catching garter snakes and then I go
back inside and make sparkly ball gowns
for my stuffed animals of course that
era couldn’t last when I was about 10 or
11 my folks gave me a book on puberty
and reproduction and in that book there
were two facing pages of pictures
showing sexual development from infancy
to adulthood it’s female on one side and
male on the other and remember looking
at the female side and thinking oh no
within either the male side didn’t look
much better I looked at that and I was
just like yeah cuz it wasn’t like I was
pining to have chest hair and the penis
that I didn’t have I didn’t see myself
in either of those pictures and I
couldn’t explain myself because first of
all that was really embarrassing but
also I didn’t really have a frame of
reference to describe what I was going
through yeah it’s you may have heard
people say that like you know
transgender people are trapped in the
wrong body and that’s honestly that’s a
really sort of trite simplistic way to
look at it I describe myself my
experience of going through puberty as a
trans person was more like being forced
to put on a cheesy Halloween costume
that I didn’t like but I didn’t get to
pick out and I couldn’t take
in a way it would have been easier if I
could just have said well I was born in
the wrong body I should have been a boy
but that’s not what I was going through
and this was pre-internet so I saw no
reflections of myself in media and books
amongst my peers my family anywhere and
so there was a period of time where I
felt like how I would imagine like the
last dodo or the last Tasmanian wolf
must have felt like when they realized
that they were it and there were no
others like them and yet I managed I
mean don’t get me wrong I was pissed
okay I wrote a lot of really dark really
bad poetry as a teenager and listened to
some very aggressive music but the sense
of disconnect between my body and who I
actually felt myself to be it never
drove me to harm myself I never really
abused drugs or alcohol and I wasn’t all
that much more depressive than the
average adolescent and in that sense I
was extremely lucky because about 43
percent of trans youth report at least
some history of self-injury and 30
percent 300 report at least one suicide
attempt so what saved me the credit to
that goes to my family my parents parted
ways when I was about 12 and after that
my mother established a safe stable
accepting home for me and my two younger
sisters and she really didn’t know what
I was going through either you know she
didn’t have she had no more frame of
reference for it than I did but my mom
gave me the space to sort of find out to
figure out who I was and explore it so
and that without any judgment or or um
you know pressure to conform to what
everybody thought that you know a girl
how a girl should act or behave so that
meant if I wanted to wear like a huge
Amish farmers hat to school every day
for six months which I did
yeah I regret it
or or if I wanted to dress as a samurai
for a career day which I also totally
did that was my choice and my family
might have cringed the whole way that
they were with me you know the term safe
space like a pet let’s this is a safe
space is um it’s maybe a little bit
overused it’s become a little bit of a
punchline lately but that is exactly
what my family was for me and continues
to be to this day they’ve made they gave
me a rock-solid foundation from which I
could venture out into a world that was
not built for me they made what would
have been or what could have been a
deeply traumatic period of my life not
just survivable but manageable so
eventually graduate high school went to
the University of Iowa and started
studying sexuality gender studies and at
that point I learned those breakthroughs
is huge experience because I finally had
words to describe and explain my own
experience I had a vocabulary that I
could use to just to define myself and
equally importantly I also learned that
for thousands of years cultures from
Siberia to West Africa have had words
for third sex people or other genders
that embody both the masculine and the
feminine and that was a game changer
because really nothing boost your
self-confidence like understanding that
you’re walking archetype so after
college I went to move to New York City
and as the dust kind of settled from
that huge transition a lot of the
feelings of sort of dissatisfaction with
my physicality really started to kind of
reassert themselves and amplify and
again it wasn’t like I wanted to grow a
huge beard and change my name to Hank
it’s just that being perceived as
entirely female just seemed profoundly
inaccurate to me it was like there was
this radio static in the background all
the time and but at the same time I had
a good job have great friends I taken up
Brazilian Jujitsu
and started weight training pretty
seriously
ease the discomfort I felt with my
having a female body a little bit but
always there was that that’s static in
the background I was still wearing that
stupid Halloween costume and ultimately
the mental energy and sort of the
psychic real-estate that that took up
was exhausting and even though the
situation was bearable I came to finally
decided I could do better than bearable
bearable wasn’t going to cut it so I
started researching my options for what
I considered to be like a partial gender
transition and I say partial because
like I said there were things on the
there were masculine markers that I
wanted like a lower voice and ones that
I definitely did not was not interested
in like back here so if I had if I had
come through 10 or 15 years ago you know
the idea of having options like that of
picking and choosing really would not
have been possible because historically
you know once you come out as trans or
are diagnosed gender dysphoria you are
kind of expected to you know have
winning a progression from wherever you
started to living transitioning fully
and living as like the opposite gender
so fortunately for me there are a lot of
health care practitioners not nearly
enough but a lot of health care
practitioners now recognize that there’s
more than just two ways to be trans so
when I went to my queer friendly general
practitioner and stated my case she
didn’t even blink she asked me a bunch
of questions we talked for a long time
but she wrote me a prescription for
testosterone gel on the spot so I
started taking tea as we call it in 2003
it wasn’t quite as much as like a
typical trans man would take but it was
enough to stop my periods finally to to
sort of reorganize my body composition
narrow the hips broader the shoulders
and give me the milk open the millah
vocal stylings that you’re hearing today
and it was crazy as I became more as my
appearance became more ambiguous you
know people didn’t know what to make of
me but my student myself for me it was
just like cause the sense of relief
because finally I was starting to move
through the world as I always felt I
should have been which
as neither as a he or she but just as me
so now when I started taking
testosterone I had really no plans for
any kind of surgeries that wasn’t really
it wasn’t really on my menu yet because
even as unfilled as I was with having
breasts the idea of going under the
knife and having them removed was just
this monumental but this was this huge
thing I could I do that
and the reason why I felt that way
instead of being just different dudes
about it was that I could have probably
could lived my help my life the way I
was and it would have been again
bearable and that made me wonder it’s
like what was I trans enough to take
these radical steps was being profoundly
depressed or suicidal a prerequisite for
living the way I felt I wanted to live I
needed to live and then not for nothing
but I was single at the time and I
thought about you know what would
prospective partners think of this would
they think that you know what would they
be repulsed would they think that I was
not mutilated myself and so I really had
to get my head around the distinct
possibility that the price of truth for
me might be solitude but then I would
think about that static and that that
that inaccuracy and going through
decades of feeling that every single day
and then the choice really became not
much of a choice at all so in 2007 I did
my homework saved up a bunch of money
interviewed a couple of Surgeons and had
a elective bilateral mastectomy and
chest reconstruction in the effect of
that choice it kind of be summed up by
something my mom said to me she came out
from Iowa to take care of me after the
surgery and we were at brunch one day
before she flew home and she was like
you know she’s like this suits you today
I really don’t know how to describe it
other than to say you look more like
yourself and she was exactly right like
the package and finally matched the
so now at age 42 when people ask me how
I define my gender
I said I’m neither in both I’m female
but I don’t identify as a woman I’m
masculine but I don’t consider myself a
man my license and passports a female
and but everybody real even TSA agents
they just kind of glossed right over
that and just kind of assume I’m a gay
guy with fancy eye brows and what’s
ironically what’s interesting too is
that you know in going so hard for to
express my masculinity I’ve kind of come
back round and found an expression of
femininity that I’m comfortable kind of
claiming as my own so if you know I
don’t really care much about pronouns
one way or another they call me he/she I
don’t care but this what you’re seeing
today is kind of how I do she and moving
through the world as I have doing she
the way I do it has taught me a few
things and one of the most important is
that just because your culture doesn’t
acknowledge or value what you are does
not make what you are the problem I mean
I’ve always known exactly who I am and
what I am and this is it my culture just
doesn’t have a template for it and that
makes me living my life authentically
rather than just tolerably a radical act
whether I ever intended it to be that or
not but at the same time that also means
just living damn near impossible for
trans people who have been less lucky or
less privileged than I have been
especially trans women and particularly
trans women of color because this is no
joke out here I can stand here and talk
about doing she and like with my red lip
and all that but the fact of the matter
is is that gender nonconformity makes a
lot of people really uncomfortable and a
lot of those people are more than happy
to be violent and hateful as a result 28
trans people the vast majority of and
trans women of color were murdered in
the United States last year and those
however the rules are changing I work
with adolescents and young adults and I
can tell you right now that how you
present and define and describe your
gender is way down the list of the
things they gave a shit about because
what is a real man or a real woman
anyway like what makes you Bennett we’re
all real and I don’t think it’s too
radical to say that our hearts and souls
are too big to be crammed into little
boxes and have a little label slapped on
them doing that to yourself or forcing
other people to do it cripples us all it
prevents us from knowing ourselves and
connecting with each other so there’s
not a ton of non-binary people like me
out here but there’s more than you think
and a lot of us are just living regular
normal happy stable lives despite the
fact that we’re in a culture that’s you
know has prejudices and tells us that
were confused or were ill or perverse
we’re just living out of that’s box
how’d lis unlabeled so in closing I
would say this as you move through the
world if your kid or your friend or your
partner everybody just a little bit of a
room to find themselves and Express that
even if what they are is confusing or
complex doing that a benefit for you of
doing that is that you get to live in a
richer free or more interesting world
and the benefit to someone like myself
or to another little trans kid in Iowa
or in the Long Island suburbs or in an
apartment in the Bronx is if they’ll
understand that there is a place for
them and that just doesn’t save lives that saves souls thank you for listening