Baccalaureate Speech

I've taught for seven years at a wonderful prep school, St. George's in Newport, Rhode Island, and am now excited to head off to new adventures!

This year's senior class generously gave me the honor of delivering the baccalaureate address.  It was hard to choose a topic!  I wanted to avoid the cliched graduation speech, yet I wanted to offer some good advice.  I wanted to appreciate them as an individual class, but also make the message applicable to the whole school. I wanted some humor in there, but I didn't want to be flippant.

So... with huge congratulations to SG's class of 2013... I offered this speech.  I hope you enjoy the video!

The Speech

(Link to video is in the upper right corner)

Reflections on Giving a Talk on Transgender Identity to Teens

Yesterday I traveled up to my alma mater, Phillips Exeter, to give a talk to a group of students about transgender identity.  It was a sort of "Transgender 101," using my life story as a way to introduce them to concepts around gender.  I have to say that I love giving these talks -- I feel that it really makes a difference in creating understanding and tolerance.  Also, I love the questions that I get and how thought-provoking they can be.

There were many great questions yesterday, but the one that I've been thinking about since then is one that I get most times that I give a talk (whatever the composition of the audience) and that is: do you consider yourself straight?  

I usually give the same answer I give to "which sex box (M or F) do you check?"  which is: given the options,  I go for straight (or M).  But... I wish it were a fill in the blank sort of question.  And in that case, I'd go for Queer.  The students last night pressed me on this (and I'm glad they did).  

To start with, I gave them my premise that sexual orientation (gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, etc.) depends upon gender identity.  That is, you can't be a lesbian (a woman attracted to women) without first knowing you are a woman.  So, in my case, with a gender identity of transgender (again, given the fill in the blank option), no sexual orientation fits easily.  It looks straight, but it's really bent.  

I'm not sure that I convinced my audience (or explained it as well as I ought to have), so I find myself still pondering over how to tackle this question the next time it comes up.  And also wondering if there are other (better?) words out there than queer.  I'll keep searching...

FtM Across Nineteen Years (almost) Part One...

Lately, many forces in my life have been conspiring to make me think about transgender issues.  The fiction and nonfiction I've been writing... the speaking engagement I recently had... workshops at school that I've been asked to teach... I haven't done this much thinking and writing and speaking on transgender issues since my first year in college.  

When I spoke at Phillips Exeter last weekend, the other speaker was Ritch Savin-Williams, and he gave a great talk, part of which concerned the changes in gay (and lesbian) identity over time. (Check out his website here.)  He looked at terminology, perception, and self-definition.  All of that got me thinking about the same question for transgender identity.  

I can pretty much count on getting the following question when I speak: How'd you know you were transgender?  The answer I'd like to give is an obnoxious one: It wasn't knowing so much as being.  What I really say is: I knew my whole life in the sense that it was something I felt.  Sometimes a negative feeling (I know I'm not a girl) and sometimes a positive feeling (usually when someone mistook me for a boy).  But I didn't know I was transgender -- in a sense anyway -- until I had the word to go with it.  And that wasn't until high school.

At this moment, I haven't looked at the particulars of when the term transgender arose and how it was minted and so on.  But in my own personal cosmos, I remember hearing the term used by a health teacher at school (also the advisor of the Gay-Straight Alliance) and then, soon after, coming across the article "The Body Lies" by Amy Bloom in The New Yorker (July 18, 1994).  Until today, it had been nineteen years since I’d seen (or thought of, really) that article (link to the magazine's homepage here -- if you want to access the article, you need to subscribe, I believe).  What I recalled: a photograph of two transgender men, looking at themselves in the mirror.  What else?  The pure excitement, hands-shaking-as-I-turned-the-pages excitement, of thinking… Oh. My. God. This is what I am. 

It was almost exactly a year later that I came out as transgender. 

All of this came to mind in a rush as I left the speaking gig at Exeter this past weekend.  The strangeness of the terminology in the article, the fear and excitement of the word and what it seemed to suggest and allow.  And then I thought of a more recent New Yorker article, one from the March 18, 2013 edition: Margaret Talbot’s “About a Boy.”

I wondered what putting them side-by-side would say about the changes in transgender identity, specifically FtM identity.  Selfishly, I wondered what the comparison might say about me, if it would shed any particular light.

So... I'll continue this topic tomorrow, ruminating on the articles closely.

"This I Believe Archive"

If you missed the live version today, you can listen to my "This I Believe" segment by following this link:

Identity Archived

Tomorrow 8/1... on Rhode Island National Public Radio... you can tune in to hear me read my essay on "This I Believe."  It should air twice in the morning and once in the evening.  I'll post the link once it has been archived.  For those not in the Rhode Island area, you can stream the station live:  http://www.ripr.org/
Enjoy!