Gender Me Not

gender me not

gender me not

design and photography by jonathon duarte type set in garamond, helvetica, and adobe caslon pro printed and assembled in el paso, texas

On Thursday, June 2, 2016, Senator José Rodríguez, in partnership with Equality Texas, hosted two informational events in El Paso: a workshop on transgender healthcare, and a community forum on issues facing the larger LGBTQ community.

LGBTQ Inclusive Healthcare: Understanding Dynamics in Transgender Health Care A free development workshop for healthcare professionals, focused on effective inclusion practices for LGBTQ patients.

Conversations are Important: Holistic Views of Issues Facing the LGBTQ Community Free and open to the public, focused on how to have important conversations about LGBTQ people with their friends, co-workers, and neighbors.

“Civil rights are for all people. The best antidote to hate and fear is knowledge, and we must make sure our communities are armed with the information they need to dismiss the myths,” Rodríguez said. “That includes hearing the stories of those who have been voiceless for too long.”

These are those stories.

claudia delfin

i felt so content but felt guilty because i had to hide

I can clearly remember as a young boy at six I felt that I did not relate with the other boys. I enjoyed seeing the little girl’s dresses’, I visualized in my mind how I would look wearing one. I hated being told to play with the boys like basketball. As I grew in my teenage years I started joining the gymnastics team at school. I can recall at age 15 I started letting my hair grow and would wear my sister’s makeup and clothes when no one was home. I felt so content but felt guilty because I had to hide. The era I transitioned and I came out as transgender was different in the mid eighties there was much stigma and Tran’s women dying from AIDS. I was bullied in high school and was shunned down. I always wanted to be in the cheerleading team. As a senior I made the squad but with the condition that I cut my hair and not wear makeup. I hated it, not being able to be what I really felt within. I graduated high school and started taking hormones. By the early nineties is when I started living as a woman as Claudia. I have surpassed three decades of stigma, ridicule, bullying and others understanding me as a Tran’s woman. I realized I had to be independent and responsible to achieve my goals in life. I have accomplished many as well I am grateful I have a supportive family. I always wanted to be a mother and I was blessed to be given the opportunity to be one to a beautiful young lady. Gio, my daughter will graduate next month from high school and has given me to acquire mother instincts.

I also am an educator on substance abuse and communicable diseases. I also advocate at El Paso for the Trans community. I have being in media to educate the community on the transgender umbrella. I also train professionals and clinicians on GLBTQI. I recently was recognized by the state of being the outreach worker of the year for the state level. I feel confident and use this asset to help transgender who are coming out. I truly believe that a transgender person needs to accept themselves and love who they are to accomplish goals in life. I strongly encourage education, to be able to see what are transgender and its challenges. I’m truly blessed to be 48 and to have transitioned for the past thirty years.

benjamin nathanael reyes

my story When you look at me, what is it you see?

Do you see a man, so virile and strong; Or do you see a woman, kind and meek; Or perhaps an it that you think is wrong?

If you saw me, would you sit and break bread, Or would you assault me with prejudice?

Would you accept me without fear or dread, Or ostracize me as your nemesis?

I ask you this without angry contempt, Rather as one sibling to another, For the essence in you is also kept Within me, tethering us together.

Yet, regardless of how you see me today, Know that I have been wonderfully made.

Know that I have been wonderfully made; A man and woman within me reside; A king and queen together rule inside, Creating my essence that never fades.

They are both my source of beauty and worth; In their absence, I cannot be made whole.

The perfect halves that encompass my soul, The two spirits that have formed me since birth.

Yet, it took time for me to accept them And to understand that I am neither Man or woman, but somewhere in between.

In the end, I know I am masc and femme, A human being blessed by the Aether To identify as non-binary.

To identify as non-binary Can present equally struggles and strife Professionally and personally, As some think you’re doing wrong in your life.

It takes courage and strength to live in truth And to face “love” hidden in bigotry.

The path we take is not easy or smooth, But still worth embarking on this journey.

I am trans-femme, two-spirit, genderqueer; I stand with my siblings: trans, cis, other.

In the presence of oppression and fear, We will join hands and face it together.

So now, you can answer my inquiry: When you look at me, what is it you see?

know that i have been wonderfully made

i’m just a son, a husband, a future dad

mason 29 he/him

I was 5 years old when I asked my dad if there was something wrong with me.

I could see how people treated the other boys and I couldn’t understand why they were treating me differently or why they couldn’t see me as a boy. Instead of telling me it was a phase or trying to make me think I was a girl, he started to look for information about the subject and educated himself about it. He passed away when I was 10 and my mom raised me in a family that was transphobic and sexist, among other things. However, thanks to my wife, I got away from that life, and now I’m surrounded by a real family that would do anything to see me happy and healthy.

Coming from Monterrey, Mexico, it is one of the most important cities in Mexico but also one of the most conservative ones. I was physically and verbally attacked a few times, faced discrimination in my job or trying to find a new one.

Things got better for me when I started my hormone therapy, but living there made me realize how bad things can get if trans people don’t get the protection they desperately need. Most people don’t know what transgender people look like and they let other people tell them they should be afraid. This is what we look like—I’m just a son, a husband, a future dad. You’ve seen us now please, get to know us, you’ll see there’s nothing to fear.

michele 24 she/her

I grew up in a open and accepting family, so when my friend—now my husband—first came out to me as trans seven years ago, I didn’t feel fear, anger, disgust, disappointment. Instead, my heart broke for my friend because I had finally understood all the pain he had been going through for so many years that never seemed to add up. During this time, I saw him lose friends and family members due to them not understanding or simply refusing to see what he was going through. And though at that time I had never knew of someone in the trans or gender non-conforming community—all the information I had was based off of derogatory jokes and distorted references in the media—I made it a mission of mine to understand what he was going through, and help educate others about the trans* community.

Since then, I’ve seen how transitioning has changed my husband. He’s happier, more confident, more comfortable with himself. Surrounding himself with the friends and family that love and support him has made all the difference. And after all of this, I’ve seen that if I and my family and friends can be strong allies of the community, than others can, too.

parvaneh 25 he/him

i would lay in bed night after night praying to god that i would wake up in the body i felt i should be in

Around the time I realized my existence in the world, I knew something was different, but I wasn’t sure what it was yet. You see, growing up I never saw myself as a girl. I would always watch my dad get ready in the mornings and couldn’t wait to grow up to be just like him. So imagine my confusion when my parents would try and dress me like my three older sisters. I didn’t understand why I had to wear dresses when my dad never had to. As I got older, I knew those thoughts and behaviors could not be voiced, especially not in a middle eastern family who lived in Iran and stuck by the traditional gender roles. I would lay in bed night after night praying to God that I would wake up in the body I felt I should be in.

When my prayers went unanswered, I felt ashamed and disgusted at who I was and fell into a deep depression and contemplated suicide around the age of 11.

As time passed, I became more confident in myself, so much so that I began to go against the views of my family and friends and started wearing clothing that I felt fit me best. I know the stares I received and what strangers would say behind my back, but I didn’t realize at the time that by being myself I could be subjected to violence. Until I was beaten up in the women’s bathroom by three individuals who followed me in. Almost two years has passed since that incident, and I am still uncomfortable using public restrooms. I hope by sharing my story someone else could relate and know that it is okay to be themselves. Now I shop at the men’s department and I know it may not be a big deal for a lot of people, but for me it’s the start of my transition and taking back my identity.

veronica garcia

It took me a long time to get down to the business of becoming me.

I think mostly because for so long I didn’t even have the language to be able to reflect on my own feelings and experiences of gender and sexuality, much less, to be able to articulate these to anyone else.

Today, I’m a lot of things, including a daughter, a granddaughter, a learner, a dreamer, a friend, and a sister. In general, I think gender works better for me as performance art than as a prescriptive for social norms or as a rigid legal institution. I don’t want to ever feel like I’ve sacrificed any opportunity to be fully me in this lifetime, just to accommodate someone else’s arbitrary expectations or beliefs about gender.

I use the words genderqueer, Chicana, and woman to describe my own identity, my perception of myself and the spaces where I find a sense of home and belonging. For me, to say I’m genderqueer means that even though I also identify as a woman, I’m making up my own way to be a woman, always. Every day I indulge a full range of options about how I’m going to dress, groom, and carry my body in this world. And the decisions I make about these things should not in any way impact my safety or my access to education, quality health care, fair and just employment, affordable housing, and certainly not public restrooms.

i don’t want to ever feel like i’ve sacrificed any opportunity to be fully me in this lifetime

adriano kristian perez

I

f there’s a single thing you need to know about me to put my life into context, it’s that I never felt like I belonged anywhere.

I grew up on the border, going back and forth, from el paso to juarez and back again. I grew up in a broken and dysfunctional family with half-siblings on both sides that had already grown up together, with each other. I spent more time with my mother than with anyone else and for most of my life I didn’t really have a choice to decide who I was. It was decided for me.

I first came out as bisexual in high school. I went to an all-girl’s school and eventually felt it necessary to identify as a lesbian in order to find some kind of community. I had learned I could be queer and I had learned that I could define my gender expression, but it wasn’t until I stumbled upon the trans tumblr community that I knew I could identify as anything other than female—and that I could do something about it.

I was 18 when I started binding my chest. 19, when I first tried to transition. Thousands of miles away from home in New York, I was 21 when I finally started my medical transition. Three months later I was passing. Two months after that I changed my name.

Suddenly people cared to use it. One month later I drove across texas to have top surgery in san antonio.

My family didn’t find out about my surgery until, almost exactly, one year later. My mother immediately flooded my phone with texts, calls, and voicemails. I was 500 miles away at a conference.

I didn’t read them. I didn’t answer them. I skimmed through one, heard anger and decided I needed none of it. She told me not to come home.

Exactly a year before, at the same conference, strangers that had known me for a day bought buttons from me so I could pay for food. Internet friends that had donated to my gofundme let me sleep on their couches before my surgery. My elementary school best friend drove me to the hospital at 5 in the morning… and again the next day when my drainage tube was clogged. When I told my now-best-friend-then-stranger I was afraid of going home, she let me stay with her for three days.

I don’t think my mother kicked me out because I’m trans or even because I no longer had breasts—something she had told me not to do. My mother was abusive long before I ever came out as anything.

I don’t need people to tell me “she’ll come around.” I don’t need or want her to.

My friends, my partner, hell, even complete strangers have been more loving and more of a family than any family I was born into.

I was trans without hormones and I was trans when I still had breasts. I chose to transition so I could live how I wanted. And when it didn’t suit her, I chose to leave her.

victoria quevedo she/her “Sometimes you are invisible I have no idea what this must feel like to pass right by your people and not be recognized, to not be seen.

Cuz me, I cannot hide unless I am seen as something I really am not.”

– Ivan Coyote

I met my best friend eight years ago, when they used the pronoun they were assigned and the name they were given at birth. One day they told me that they were going to transition, and asked me to use “they/them” and a name they had chosen. Even though they were my first trans friend, I didn’t question them, think their identity was confusing, or in any way negative. To this day I am at turns heartbroken and at turns full of anger when people react with anything but an open heart. My friend didn’t change that day. They just went on being someone I loved dearly. They taught me a lot, and I continue to educate myself about how to make safe and inclusive spaces for trans, gender queer, and gender nonconforming people.

I knew that Adriano was trans when we met because they are very open about it, and people in our Danza Azteca group told me about the amazing trans danzante who had recently joined. But I had to drop hints that I was queer since our society’s sadly inadequate concept of sexuality means that my long hair and shaved legs announces to the world that I must be straight.

Every time Adriano tells new people that they are trans, I brace for the invasive or offensive comments. I worry when Adriano uses a public bathroom or they travel to a new city. But my fears are nothing compared to how it must feel to actually be the one facing the barrage of ignorant questions, oppressive laws, or threats of physical violence. I know that I play a role in creating a future where all spaces are safe for LGBTQIA people, especially for trans people. But now matter how much I write or how many conversations I have, I never feel like I am doing enough or that we, as a community, are able to move fast enough to prevent hateful policies from being written and passed into law.

At the end of the day, we are two people sharing a life. We walk our dog, eat dinner, make a mess of, and clean our apartment together. The biggest difference between being with Adriano and being with any else I have dated is that I feel completely in love, I feel like I can be my authentic queer self, and I feel like I have finally met my person. And that is the most important thing that I want people to know about our relationship.

gender-me-not by madelyn spring

I lost my gender somewhere. Somewhere, perhaps, between the “hey grrrl”s and the compulsory formal wear and the long stretches of barefoot solitude, the pronoun I carried slipped between my fingers.

It was like waking up and putting on that pair of jeans – that pair of jeans that you wear because everyone says they look good on you, but they don’t feel quite right – and suddenly you realize that you don’t have to keep wearing them.

So what if I am not butch or femme, straight or gay, boy or girl?

What if I am queer but not urban, fierce but not loud? What if I am simply mountain, if my bones are filled with birch sap and my lungs stretch to fit every flake of the coming winter; if my strong legs are grown from huckleberries I pluck with the swiftness of an Arctic Tern and I measure time by harvest and sun-cycle instead of deadline and hour?

What if my gender isn’t bowties and oxfords and Judith Butler, but rather rooted in the rural, where I can love a landscape and build a home, and the question isn’t what I am but what I do?

These days I wake up in the morning and want to shed the palimpsests of “she / her / she” like a snakeskin, then slip into the sunlight and the loving arms of those who assume nothing.

I’m done with jeans. I’m done with being who I think you want me to be. I’m done with clothes and words that no longer fit my body.

I’m done with lovers who can’t hold my truth. I’m done with saying “yes” when I mean “no”.

Because I don’t want to be wanted, kissed, loved, or fucked, as a girl or riot grrrl, woman or lady, but as a person built of sun and sustenance, as a living love who reaches for the rocky ridges and eases their heart open again each morning, who falls into each poem like surrender. who sweats and strains and crumbles and builds and smells like woodsmoke and tea and wool, who weaves their own peace in nests of silence and sky and glows like a moonlit honeycomb as soon as I leave the highway for the hills that embrace me and water the roots of this wild and tender gender-me-not.

if you will just change by franky doodle

all events sponsored by

OFFICE of TEX AS STATE SENATOR JOSÉ RODR ÍGUEZ EQUALIT Y TEX AS M ANO y COR AZÓN MULTICULTUR AL HEALTH CARE SOLUTIONS an organization founded out of Sen. Rodríguez’s healthcare district advisory committee which hosts ongoing culturally-appropriate training for healthcare professionals TEX AS TECH UNIVERSIT Y HEALTH SCIENCES CENTER EL PASO OFFICE of DIVERSIT Y, INCLUSION and GLOBAL HEALTH BOR DER R AC an approved continuing education provider The PUR PLE PAGES of EL PASO EL PASO SUN CIT Y PR IDE TEX AS FREEDOM NET WORK UNITE for REPRODUCTIVE and GENDER EQUIT Y