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I would like to welcome everyone to the fourth annual True Spirit Conference, with the emphasis on welcome.

Welcome, because the path that brought you here has been a long, hard one — even if you just came from across the street.

Because the paths each of us took to be here today are so crucial to why we are here, I want to start by talking about my path.

My path began in a white, middle-class, 50s, Leave-it-to-Beaver home in California. It had many of the features we’ve come to expect of such homes and lives, except that I fairly quickly threw a wrench into it: I came out as Lesbian at age 16. Not only as Lesbian, but as a Lesbian activist. Within two years, I’d co-founded a Gay student group, was the only openly Lesbian staffer at the local women’s center, and was giving presentations to high school students on Gay issues. Within 4 years, I’d enrolled in the most radical women’s studies program at the time, at San Francisco State University. Within 5 years, I was co-chairing the San Francisco Committee for the very first March on Washington for Lesbian and Gay Rights. Within 8 years, I’d won a fellowship as the first open Lesbian the Congressional Caucus for Women’s Issues had ever had.

Now Marcelle was interesting. Compared to my upbringing in white bread suburbia, Marcelle was a bit of rough. She rode a motorcycle, first of all. I’d never been on one of those; I was too scared. She worked as a security guard, whereas I was working as a Legislative Assistant for a Member of Congress. She was flunking out of college, whereas I was already in graduate school. She was VERY butch, whereas I was kiki verging on femme. And she was Black, while I was white.

I was ready — in some ways, eager — to engage with those differences. What I was *not* willing to do, however, was cope with the other difference she revealed to me shortly after we began dating. Whereas I was a dyed-in-the-wool Lesbian Feminist who had actually built not only her identity and her social circle but also her academic and professional career on that Lesbian Feminist identity, Marcelle told me she was actually not a lesbian, but a man.

A motorcycle I could deal with. Graveyard shift security work I could deal with. Flunking out of college I could *maybe* deal with. Black I could deal with. Butch I could *certainly* deal with.

That was when we dealt with our first major difference, and I resisted. I set the groundrules: if Marcelle wanted to be with me, she’d have to remain SHE. I was very attracted and interested, but I was not going to give up my identity for someone else.

And that’s the way we left it, for 9 years. During those nine years — as with many long-term relationships, both intimate relationships and community relationships — the other differences we started out with all melted away. I grew, grudgingly, to tolerate the motorcycle, and sometimes -- truth be told -- even liked it, like when I got to shock the Congressional Police by roaring up in a skirt on the back of this motorcycle and then giving a juicy kiss to the black-leather-clad woman driver. Marcelle caught up with me academically, and passed me professionally. We realized that we grew up pretty much with the same class expectations and values, and that those similarities vastly overwhelmed our different racial and geographic backgrounds.

We also forged a united stance to present to the world. We began calling ourselves "educators." We were out as Lesbians pretty much everywhere, and pushed the envelope through things like legally hyphenating our names and being interviewed and photographed by the Washington Post in an article on Lesbians buying homes and having children together. For we decided that, too: that we would have a child, by donor insemination, and that Marcelle would bear the child.

It was around that time that we saw a video that included FTM Max Valerio, who was taped saying that he struggled with his identity for a long time because he didn’t like men. And then one day it dawned on him that a lot of genetic men didn’t like men as a group, either.

That statement really got to me, because besides MY identity, one of the primary reasons I was blocking Marcelle was because she was anti-male. So on the way to our car from the theater, I asked Marcelle if she still thought about changing gender. Her response shocked me.

I took a few more silent steps and said, "then I think I need to stop blocking you."

For me, that was a leap totally into the unknown. I felt like I had just jumped off a cliff into really thick fog. I knew I could no longer block Marcelle — that it wasn’t right for me to deny him something he thought about every single day — but I had NO clue what that decision would mean for me. If I could manage to think about it all, I thought about it in terms of how he’d sacrificed his identity for me for 9 years, now it was my turn to sacrifice my identity for him. But I had no clue what that would mean. None.

As the days wore on, I decided that there were *some* things I could hold onto. One was our identity as educators. So I told Marcelle that if he did transition, we needed to do it publicly. Another reason I wanted to do it publicly is that I was a columnist in the Washington Blade, which at least then was the largest-circulation Lesbian and Gay paper in the country. I did not want them to have to deal with rumors that one of their Lesbian columnists was actually married to a man: I wanted to be up-front about what was happening.

So we started coming out. We came out to our Lesbian couples’ group, we came out to our Gay meditation group and our Gay science fiction group, we came out to our Lesbian neighbors, we came out to our friends, we came out in the pages of the Washington Blade. Some of the conversations were very affirming. Some of them were incredibly hard and painful. Our couples group spent weeks and weeks meeting and sending written surveys and talking about what to "do" about us, at one point suggesting that despite the fact that it was a couples’ support group, perhaps I could be welcome to attend without my partner.

But I also got furious, because I found out that FOUR other Lesbian couples WE KNEW and talked to all the time ALSO had an FTM-identified member. FOUR of them. I was stunned. If any ONE of us had EVER broken the silence, ALL of our lives would’ve been different. And, in fact, they were: once Marcelle and I came out, at least one of these couples fairly quickly ended up going through transition.

That’s how I transitioned into a new area to educate about: the presence of FTM-identified lesbians in our community, and the need to begin talking about that and making it possible for these couples to come out of isolation and out of the closet.

I soon realized that I had another community to educate. It turned out that whereas I had come out of a Lesbian community in which couples were presumed equal partners, Marcelle’s transition had put us into a community where equal partnerships were NOT the norm. The first two FTM conferences I attended shocked me because they assumed that for couples in which one partner was an FTM and the other wasn’t, they would be interested in totally different things. So they had two tracks of programming: one for FTMs and a separate one for partners. The quality of those tracks were quite different. At one conference they even scheduled a shopping trip for the partners while the guys talked about hormones and surgeries. "Show and Tells" were closed to female partners, because some FTMs said we weren’t "safe" to show their bodies to. No partners spoke at any of the plenaries. A committee that was formed to help organize future conferences had no partners on it at all.

I cried all the way to the airport and all the way through the flight home and cried myself to sleep that night.

When I quit blocking Marcelle’s transition, I expected that we were going to have some trouble staying within our Lesbian community, but I had no idea I never conceived of the possibility that I wouldn’t be welcomed within the FTM community, either. To have to fight with my community of 20 years over my continued right to belong to it and to have my partner’s new community brand me as "not one of us" felt unbelievably painful.

So the next day I wrote an open letter to the organizers of the conference, explaining what I thought was wrong with how the partners were treated, and suggesting a different way. A few people supported me, but many were absolutely appalled. I was told that FTMs had to wrench their own community from the MTFs, and the partners would have to follow that model and create our own, separate organizations and conferences. I was told that whereas Marcelle and I might have been equal when we were both Lesbians, now that he was a man and I was a woman, our interests were no longer the same and I couldn’t expect to be equal any more. I was accused repeatedly of trying to destroy the FTM community, and told that what I should REALLY be doing was focusing my all my anger on the Lesbian community for not continuing to include me.

One person *did* get what I was saying, and that was Gary Bowen. Gary had started American Boyz as a local support group about a year or so before this happened, and he immediately changed AmBoyz’s mandate to include a term he coined, "SOFFAs" — significant others, friends, family and allies. He offered me sympathy, and advice, and a whole lot of encouragement.

He offered me a place where I was welcome as I was — a female partner with a Lesbian history, an activist, an educator, an organizer, a Scorpio. He said to me, "Work with me. We can do good work together."

So for the past four years, I’ve been extremely active with American Boyz. On the SOFFA side alone, we created the national SOFFA resource list, which was 19 pages long the last time I printed it out. We created some Questions and Answer sheets about SOFFAs. We created a model of a conference where, for the most part, SOFFA issues and panelists are integrated into just about all the workshops, working on the belief that transitioning or living as FTM affects the whole family and the whole friendship network, and that the whole group needs to be moved along, together. We created the Transgender Aging Network and then ElderTG, to fill a gaping hole in knowledge and advocacy and services. We began attracting other SOFFA activists like Jodi Burchell, who now publishes Our SOFFA Voice, and Lee Smith, who organized much of the Southern states for AmBoyz, and Scott, who is now AmBoyz’s National SOFFA Liaison. We created an email list specifically for SOFFA activists, which we informally call the "SOFFA Burn Recovery Unit."

Because the truth is, we get burned. The path that has brought me here today has been hard not just because it challenged so much of what I thought about myself and Marcelle and our child and the world, but because on it, I’ve been wounded many, many times.

What amazes me about so many of these wounds is how weird they are, particularly when they’re compared with other wounds. Let me give you some examples.

Now some of these wounds, it’s very important to note, predate the time when I knew I was on a transgender path. One of the older ones dates from when I co-chaired the San Francisco Committee for the March on Washington. To my everlasting grief and shame, that committee dissolved before the March could even happen because we were unable to adequately cope with internal charges of racism.

That wound can be paired with one from my grandmother — who refused to will me her favorite ring because she didn’t want to risk my Black partner getting it — and one from my parents, who greeted news of their pending grandparenthood with dismay that we were going to make life even worse for our child by choosing the Black parent to give birth.

Another set of wounds includes some from trans people who have told me that because I am not myself trans, I am not part of their community and should quit speaking publicly about trans issues.

Those are matched with the wounds I bear from some Lesbians who insist that calling myself a Lesbian insults and oppresses them, saying that if I wanted to be a good ally to them, I’d quit calling myself that when I clearly now have heterosexual privilege.

That heterosexual privilege has earned me different wounds. The most recent one was inflicted this past Christmas when a mother at my son’s school said she wouldn’t accept the "Love Makes A Family" book that we wanted to donate to the school auction because it wasn’t appropriate for young children to see queer families. She assumed that because we look straight, we would of course share her prejudices. She also had no idea that WE are in the book; that what she was telling me that the children of my son’s school should not be exposed to our family.

Currently, I am being wounded by being a Californian facing the current anti-gay marriage initiative there. Daily I’m told that my desire to protect and honor same-sex marriages is actually a thinly-disguised attempt to *destroy* heterosexual ones, even though it’s not clear which category my *own* marriage may end up falling in. That anti-het label was just matched this week with one from a Gay publisher who, even knowing my history and identity, publicly called me anti-Gay because I dared to tell him that it wasn’t appropriate to call an MTF "he."

Now it’s important that you understand that I’m not standing before you claiming to be a victim, a martyr, or a hero. What I am saying is that every single one of us — no matter how much privilege and ease it looks like we live with — would not be in this room if we had not walked difficult, dangerous paths to get here. We have ALL refused to accept the paths that everyone laid out for us. Nearly ALL of us have had to struggle with our own identities, first defining what those identities are and then asserting them even when everyone around us told us we were wrong. EVERY one of us has had to struggle with others’ identities and needs, trying to figure out what could be left behind and what was core to who we are and could not be abandoned. We have ALL struggled to grow and learn and find what we needed to know, often with few supports or resources.

AND we have ALL challenged people around us. And what happens when you challenge people to look at life differently? To perhaps even re-consider some of their most core beliefs about things like gender, and sexuality, and biology, and who’s worthy of respect and rights and who’s not? They defend themselves, sometimes with no concept of how sharp are the weapons they’re wielding to defend against what we’re saying. And so ALL of us have been wounded, sometimes in the most amazing and weird ways, or we would not be here today.

We have ALL -- every single one of us here today -- walked paths full of hardships, and joys, of challenges, and triumphs.

So we come to this weekend, this gathering, as wounded survivors. We will undoubtedly all be strengthened by the community and the information that is offered here, BUT I WANT MORE.

I want us — I challenge us — to go farther than we’ve ever gone before. I challenge us to create the HOME none of us has ever had before.

A home where EVERYONE is SAFE. By safe, I mean that we recognize that every one of us walked a long, hard path to get here, and we have all been wounded. We are all used to having to fight to be heard and struggle to be honored. We carry countless wounds, and countless chips on our shoulders. Know this. Honor this. When you listen, remember that wounded people sometimes talk from their pain rather than from some place that’s easier to hear. Try to be gentle with them, with us.

I want a home where people TAKE RESPONSIBILITY for TAKING CARE OF THEMSELVES. One of the reasons I wanted to talk today about some of the difficulties I’ve had with the trans and lesbian and other communities is because the truth is, making our communities work for us is WORK. It’s HARD. It’s hard to be continually putting yourself out there, continually trying to make people understand how your path is different than theirs but is equally deserving of respect, and continually facing the often hostile reactions of people who aren’t yet ready to change yet again just to accommodate you.

But you know what? You *have* to do it. If you don’t take responsibility for making sure your story is heard and your needs are considered and if you don’t DO something to make the changes that you need happen, you are not doing justice to the path that got you here today. Please say "ouch" when someone says something that hurts you — practice now, please: OUCH! — and then try to help them re-frame what they’re saying in a way that simultaneously honors their reality and doesn’t dishonor yours. That also means *DO YOUR EVALUATIONS!* If you’re not in a place right now where you can help make our organizations and our conferences better by helping organize them yourself, then you MUST at least help us meet the diverse needs of our community by helping articulate those needs.

Finally, I want a home where EVERYONE’s path is HEARD and HONORED. I was granted the tremendous honor of talking publicly about parts of my path. *Everyone* here needs the chance to have the healing that comes from telling your path and having an attentive listener honor it. Please make every effort this weekend to meet with at least one person and find a quiet place where each of you can tell your path. If you can trade path stories with someone who has walked a very different path from yours, that would be best.

To get us started, I beg your indulgence in broadly sketching the paths of those who are here with us today. What I would like you to do is stand or ask someone to stand for you whenever you hear me begin to talk about a set of identities you belong to. You may end up standing several times; most of us fall into several categories. If you’re not sure whether an identity fits you, I invite you to "try it on" by standing with others who do claim that identity.

While we do this, I want to remind people that I’m going to be talking about *collective* paths, which means that some -- maybe a lot -- of what I say won’t fit you, personally. PLEASE take what I say tonight and — at least once later this weekend — fix it. Make it yours by telling someone how YOUR path has been.

I’d like to begin by asking the FTMs, the transmen, the MTMs to stand or ask someone to stand in your stead. If you’re not sure if you’re FTM but think you might be, go ahead and stand among this group to see how it feels.

The path that you took to get here today has been a long one, indeed. It started the moment you were born and they said, "It’s a girl!" They continued to say that throughout your childhood, even though you may have told them it wasn’t right. Maybe they called you other things, too: tomboy, willful, pervert, dyke. Some of you had adults who were willing to let you dress and act as you chose, but many of you grew up surrounded by people telling you you were wrong, mistaken, maybe even a mistake. Many of you were devastated when puberty hit and instead of growing a penis, you grew breasts and started to bleed. Many of you considered — or even attempted — suicide. Some of you became good girls and even good wives, trying your damnedest to do what everyone told you to do. Others of you took the path of dykehood, defiantly proclaiming your unwillingness to let society limit you and your sexuality. Some of you even tried Lesbian separatism, in the hope that it would help you wrestle down the masculinity within.

Somewhere, sometime you began to realize that you could, maybe, live as a man. Some of you did this early on, living as men from the earliest moments you could. Others of you struggled alone with the feelings within for years, perhaps only learning about FTMs by chance. Many of you have had to fight the gatekeepers, the professionals who determine what you can and can’t do with your body, and who have often -- in the name of "helping" -- tried to force you into yet another set of way-too-small identity boxes. Many of you have lost family, friends, lovers, and even children in order to stand before us today as the amazing people you are: FTM, transman, MTM, man, male.....what else do you call yourself?

Now I’d like the partners of the FTMs to stand or ask someone to stand for you.

Your paths have also been long, and very diverse. But they begin to take a common shape around the time that each of you met your FTM partner. Some of you are straight women who perhaps hadn’t given a lot of thought to transsexuals or even gender until you met a man who sooner or later told you he wasn’t like other men you’d dated. Some of you have kept this information private, walling off parts of your lives and concerns from others’ eyes, perhaps worrying about what will happen if the secret ever gets out. Others of you have chosen to share the information, and have had to deal with whatever reactions others have had to you and your partner.

Some of you were straight men, partnered with women — or so you thought. You have had to cope with profound changes in your relationship, and severe challenges to your concepts of masculinity and femininity. You’ve had to face head-on whether you’re willing to face homophobia on the streets, in the workplace, in your family, maybe even in yourself in order to preserve your marriage or relationship.

Some of you are bi or gay men. You have grappled with your own or others’ conceptions of whether the penis makes the man. Perhaps you’ve even had to fight for your lover’s place within your community. You’ve probably learned more than you’d ever thought possible about hormones and surgery and packing.

Some of you are Lesbians or bi women. For many of you, your partnership has been wrenching not only to your sense of maleness and femaleness, but to your own sexual identity and to your community. You have faced at least two comings-out, each fraught with different sets of fear and loss.

Some of you are yourselves transgendered or transsexual. For some of you, this partnership has been a joy, an all-too-rare chance to simultaneously be affirmed and affirming around gender issues. For others of you, the partnership has challenged you in ways you didn’t think possible, given all that you have gone through yourself.

ALL of the partner paths involve challenge: challenge to the beliefs we grew up with, challenge to the beliefs we hold about who we and who our partners are, challenge to the beliefs about how relationships are supposed to work. But all of you have surmounted enough of those challenges to be here with us today: partners, wives, husbands, SOs, lovers...what other names do you use for yourself?

Now I’d like the butch women, the effeminate men, the androgynes, the femmes, and the genderfucks to stand or have someone stand in your place.

Most of you were labeled from an early age: sissy, pansy, fag, tomboy, dyke, queer. For decades, you have had to fight — sometimes literally — for the right to define gender in ways that make others uncomfortable. Some of you have paid serious prices for your unwillingness to toe the gender lines. But the work that you have done and that you continue to do every day by putting your gender-transgressive bodies out on the street benefits all of us. We thank you for that work, butches, femmes, gay men, queers, pansies, sissies, dykes, stone butches, fairies, genderfucks, .....(motion for other names)

Now I’d like to have the parents, the children, and the family members of transgendered people stand or ask someone to stand for you.

Let’s start with the children. Maybe your parent changed genders before you were born or old enough to notice, or maybe you grew up with a parent of one gender who’s now living another one. Either way, you have had to cope with a world who tells you your family isn’t "normal," that there’s something wrong with your parent or parents, or maybe even something that’s wrong with you. But you — and we — know that is not true. That what is going on in your family is a loving, if sometimes awkward and painful, searching for a way to allow all of you the freedom to be who you really are.

It’s hard to tell when the rest of you knew you were on the path you’re on. Maybe you knew from the moment that child was born that he or she had placed you on a path different from that of most parents and family members. Or maybe you had no clue, until that child was well-grown. Maybe you were that child’s advocate from the earliest moment, fighting day care providers, schools, health care providers, and other relatives to protect that child and make sure that child would be able to blossom into that very special being you knew was in there. Or maybe you weren’t able to be what you now wish you had been. Maybe the path was too lonely, too strange, too frightening for you, and you skirted it for many, many years.

Sooner or later, however, all of you stepped onto the path, even if today is the first day you’ve done so. It’s a path in which you have had to give up the vision you may have had for that child you knew, and embrace another vision. It’s a path in which you’ve been called not only to learn things you never knew, but to teach them to others. It’s a path where you’ve had to weigh and compare love, family commitment, the beliefs you were brought up with, your hopes and your dreams, and that child’s hopes and dreams and, maybe, give some of those things up. But we are here today to tell you that if you ever had doubts, we know you have made the right choice: sons and daughters, mothers and fathers, sisters, brothers, uncles, aunts.....who else is here?

Now I would like to ask our allies to stand or have someone stand for you: the MTFs, the service providers, the friends, the co-workers, the community allies.

First, the male-to-females. You have all walked your own long paths to claim your womanhood, often struggling against not only your families and your service providers, but the communities to which you rightfully belonged. Despite the difficultness of your own paths, today you have found the grace and generosity to be here with us, to share with us and be our allies.

The service providers have also walked a long path, and are here most likely with at least a bit of trepidation. For our communities have a love/hate relationship with those who are supposed to help us along the paths we walk. Yet not one of you who is here with us today got here easily. Probably none of you even heard about us when you received your training. Yet each of you somehow either found us or recognized you were one of us, and -- much more than that -- decided that we were worthy of the tremendous amount of work it has taken you to learn who we are and how you could assist us on our paths. Many of you have even gone further, making sure that your professional peers learn about us and making sure that they are able to respectfully and competently serve us.

The friends, the co-workers, and our other community allies deserve a special notice. You, more than anyone, did not have to be here today. You, more than anyone else, could have chosen as some of your peers did, and walked away from the challenges that the gender community poses. But you didn’t. You looked at the individual or the group of individuals before you and said, "You are worth it to me. I will learn what I need to learn in order to support you." We thank you, our trans sisters, doctors, surgeons, therapists, friends, co-workers, buddies....(motion for other names)

I’d like to ask the people of color, those who grew up or still are poor, persons with disabilities, and immigrants to stand or have someone stand for you.

Each of you has already stood at least once before, but the collective path I described was too simplified to say much about your particular path. Because your particular path has been through a country that assumes people aren’t like you. It assumes that people are white and middle class and able-bodied and speak English and have always been here. So your path has involved not only gender issues and sexual orientation issues and commitments to transgendered people, but also countering a whole additional set of prejudices, and ignorance, and systems that weren’t set up for "your kind:" people of color, persons with disabilities, poor people, immigrants......what other names do you call yourself?

Finally, I ask everyone who holds dear an identity that I have not spoken of today to please stand or have someone stand for you.

You, my dear friends, are on some of the most difficult paths of all. You, too, have trod amazingly long and perilous paths in order to be with us here today and yet — after an outrageously long speech detailing a hundred different types of participants in this conference — at least one of your core names hasn’t been spoken. I want it spoken. The names you call your paths are:_____

We honor you for your brave willingness to name your path in a place where it’s not often enough named, and to teach us what it means.

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