One of the terrible things about life inside a closet is you never get to speak out loud as the person you know yourself to be. When you’re living in the closet, no one who loves you ever gets to call you the name you’ve always wanted to hear. For over two decades, Trans activists, artists, educators, and bloggers across the USA and around the world have worked to open closet doors for trannies. That’s over 20 years of hard work on local, regional, national and global levels. And now it looks like our combined work has brought us to a tipping point in the history of Transgender politics.
Yesterday, I read the news on Helen Boyd’s En|Gender website. The presidential campaign of Senator Barack Obama has publicly thanked the Trans Community for our support. I’m dizzy with joy that we’ve come so far in my lifetime, and this is a great opportunity to come together as a real community. There’s no monolithic transgender community in the world, and I hope there never will be. There are many Transgender communities, and all I want is for us to work more closely together with one another. We need to heal the divisions in our Trans world in the same way that we want Senator Obama to heal the terrible divisions resulting from eight years of government sanctioned and government sponsored oppression. So, how do we take a step from here on what’s going to be a long road toward Transgender unity? First, I think, we need to understand what it is that’s been keeping us apart for so long.
