The Complexity of Passing: Maintaining Identity as a Trans Person

for those of you who haven't taken seats yet could you find your seats so we can begin thanks and again good evening and welcome to tonight's keynote lecture featuring Chase Ross's talk entitled the complexity of passing maintaining identity as a trans person we're excited to have everyone here tonight this is the first Bastion series lecture of the school year so thank you all for coming this is a great turnout and we're really excited for Chase's talk and to have a great discussion tonight I'm Gary Marquardt I'm an associate professor of history and co-faculty fellow for diversity and inclusion at Westminster College before we get to tonight's introduction of Chase Ross I'd like to speak for a moment about the BW Bastion Foundation that generously and graciously sponsors the Bastion Foundation lecture series at Westminster College the foundation established in 1996 by Bruce W Bastian strives to build community and understanding by supporting local and National institutions I'm going to put this over here since I'm not looking over there constantly financial support is directed to to educational Outreach cultural and HIV AIDS programs a strong commitment is placed on programs and organizations that benefit encourage and preserve the rights in individuals and flip the script here promote equality for the gay lesbian bisexual and transgender community the diversity lecture series theme this for this year is Sebastian Foundation diversity lecture series is diversity and the future of higher education this theorem acknowledges the often challenged yet persistent expansion of ideas identities and voices in today's colleges and universities it calls for critical inquiry into the role of diversity in the development and implementation of current and future policies and practices in higher education it also facilitates multiple opportunities to explore this ambitious and provocative subject matter along with a series of lectures signature lectures the leaders invited to contribute to this inquiry include Scholars practitioners and activists engaging with westminster's students staff faculty and community members and classroom activities group conversations panel discussions and other formats closely engage with this theme in creative and innovative ways future Bastion diversity lecture series events will be announced at the end of this talk by my colleague Dr Tamara Stevenson a couple of final things first we'd like to extend a special welcome to Dustin shrekengoz I hope I got that right Dustin thank you and the members of the Human Rights Commission so thank you all for coming and from what I hear Dustin is a 2009 Alum of Westminster College so thank you [Applause] finally I'd like to now hand it over to Westminster student Levi Rose Barrett who will be introducing tonight's speaker thank you very much for attending oh hello and I'm very honored to introduce Chase Ross how many of you have seen Chase's videos before cool okay so those of you who haven't I'm going to show a Quick Clip matter [Laughter] where is it coming from foreign oh my God stop it there's a big difference between sex and gender if I'm on the right track baby I was gonna survive oh my God is my hairline starting to recede you don't know about the YouTube trans Community you need to get on that seriously okay so if you want to see the rest it's on YouTube Chase's channel is uppercase Chase one um so Chase is the found one of the founding members of transtastic uh Ross has produced videos that cover topics and mental health issues that affect the trans Community such as dysphoria depression anxiety internalized transphobia and misgendering videos on how to navigate assist sexist society such as the bathroom issue confronting white male privilege transitioning detransitioning effects of testosterone use fighting back fighting back toxic masculinity and gender roles he has also made videos for friends and family of trans people such as respecting pronouns and preferred names what is dysphoria and how not to out trans people his videos also provide sex education that is not simply informative but also affirms gender non-conforming identities in sexualities his work combines social media research and activism that connects various social groups as a YouTuber chases and invaluable resource for the trans Community his work stands out because he delivers important information through his own lived experience for a community that is constantly constricted by a medical narrative embedded in illness Ross provides a humanized narrative although I technically met him a couple of days ago I feel like I've known him for years when I began the process of articulating my own gender identity I found solace in solidarity in his videos not to mention he's hilarious and has two amazing cats um but in all honesty his presence here at Westminster College means more than just a presentation on transculture it brings in bringing his work to us Ross is helping create a space where trans narratives which are often marginalized if not silenced are being placed at the Forefront of the Bastion Foundation diversity lecture series this demonstrates a commitment by the college to be more inclusive of trans people but it should not begin and end here Ross's videos helped me develop healthier practices in facilitating dialogue and discussion with family friends and how to best navigate spaces that are not welcoming of trans people I'm sure that his lecture today will encourage us all as a community to continue to create an inclusive space for all gender non-conforming students staff and faculty please join me in giving a warm welcome to chase Ross hello can you hear me I don't know how close I have to be to this thing okay I regret telling you that it's okay to show this video I haven't watched it in a very long time oh my God I'm so embarrassed I don't look like that anymore anyways um as Levi said my name is Chase I'm a grad student in sociology at Concordia University in Montreal Canada so it was uh quite a ride to get all the way here I will say that Utah is very dry okay and I'm saying this in the beginning because I'm going to be drinking a lot of water like I'm I'm drying up already also this mic is like awkwardly positioned so maybe I can just do it like this yeah okay so I'm going to be reading off of my iPad in the first part of this presentation because I'm talking about my research that I've done um and then later on we're just gonna like talk um yeah so um what I like to do in my life is kind of bring in my academic and my YouTube life and kind of like put it together and create like a body of knowledge with those two things so the first part of this presentation I'm talking about the research that I did for my honors um research about two years ago um funny enough the name of the paper was called the importance of passing and today it's called the complexities of passing because you can't just talk about passing without talking about why it's important and then why it's problematic why it isn't problem yeah um yeah so the problematic part I'm gonna go into just a little bit later on but I think it's really important that we just you know kind of just talk about why it's important so before I do that I need to do a small trans 101 just in case someone walked in here and they don't know what's going on um so first off I'm a trans guy that means that I was assigned female at Birth um some people like to use the word born female I don't like to use that I use assigned female at Birth because that's the gender that I was assigned at Birth and it's a gender I don't identify with um so basically I just transitioned from female to male um I found out I was trans from YouTube I went on YouTube when I was 15 and I saw a bunch of trans YouTubers and I was like oh that me and uh foreign do you like staring at this in the background while I'm here is that like is that is it a good comparison I love comparisons yeah so at 19 I started hormones and then at 22 I got Top surgery um but when I say like I decided to transition I only say that because a lot of people think that being Transit is like a decision or it's a choice it's definitely not I did not choose this life it chose me but I say decide to transition because not everybody transitions not everybody goes on hormones not everybody wants to pass not everybody does pass so basically I'm just one trans person I don't represent the entire trans Community I try to say this as much as I can in my YouTube videos just because I feel like sometimes I might be like the first point of entry for a lot of people in what being trans is about and I'm always nervous that people are going to think that I'm like the voice of trans people I'm really not I'm just one person so I'm representing my own experiences and the research that I'm doing is really just the experience of the people that were in my research so um yeah we'll see how that how that works out um so first I really want to talk about what is passing because I'm using that word a lot um and I think it's really important that we actually know terminology I'm going to use um I'm I've decided to not use that much no okay so for my academic stuff I wanted to make sure that it's accessible as possible so I'm not going to make it like super academic just because I want everybody to be able to understand what I'm saying I do that in my research too just because I think it's important that everybody knows what I'm talking about especially trans research because there's not that much out there so I feel like I mean you're trans and you want to read research on yourself you want to be able to understand it so that's hopefully I can do that tonight all right so where was I all right so passing is very important but it's also problematic right but what is it so for me personally like I said I was born female in transition to male so there was a shift from when people saw me as female and then I started hormones because that's what I needed and then people started to read me as male so that's what passing is being read as the gender you identify with that is probably the simplest definition that I could give it's a lot more complex and that's what we're getting into tonight but but really the gender that you identify with when people read you is that you're good to go you're passing so um sorry this iPad thing I feel so technology tonight I have it on paper too but you know too old school this is 2015. so uh like I said first part of this presentation I'm going to be talking about the academic stuff so the research that I did I did uh interviews with eight different trans men from uh Canada in the United States these were Skype interviews so I didn't travel all over the place that would have been fun but I like doing Skype interviews the people can be in their pajamas and like do whatever they want in the interview and it's more personal that way especially when you're talking about something that's maybe a little too personal like passing and safety and like violence and stuff like that so I thought that that would be probably the best um the best thing to do and I'm talking about safety and I really want to focus on that as a big theme when I'm talking about passing as being important because that's probably the the thing that we need to focus on the most is safety um so going into the research I really don't want to bore you with like the long literature review like that's what usually you would do when you're talking about research I'm not going to do that and one of the reasons is because there's not that much research done on trans people like there is but a lot of the research is done by non-trans people and there's absolutely no problem with that like it's fine you can do research on trans people if you're not trans but a lot of the research that I have read and seen by non-trans people about trans people the author usually just focuses on the conclusion and themselves in the paper they don't actually focus on the trans narratives and the trans lives which is what we need the most we need to understand that trans people aren't just subjects to research that trans people are actually humans that have stories that are different we're all the same so to me that's really problematic that we don't have that much research that's why I'm doing research the research that I did in my honors like I said is the importance of passing I related it to masculinity identity and safety I've done research in the past on uh trans men on Grindr and other social media gay dating app type stuff I've done uh research on issues within the community and right now I'm working on my Master's thesis which is about trans men identity and Tattoos so kind of seems random but there's a connection for some reason when you go to a trans conference there's one thing that we all have in common except being trans everyone has tattoos I don't know why so that's why I'm trying to figure out there has to be a connection and if there isn't then no Masters for me Okay so uh let's focus on the importance of passing and let's go into the research so I divided it into two subsections I guess how people felt before they started passing and how people felt after they started passing so those were the themes that I was able to get out from the interviews um before these participants started to started to pass they felt like they were playing a role like they were acting in society and putting on a performance which I thought was really interesting because there's a lot of theory that actually talks about that but like I said I'm not going to bore you with Theory because it's no it's not for here um so I'm going to give you a quote from one of the participants I like to say I was an actor before I started tea and started passing because what I did in public was not at all what I held in my own mind when I was with my friends and family I could be my regular self and then with people I was just meeting I was kind of an [ __ ] because I thought that's what I needed to be to pass so another participant did this thing he called it a stage voice so he did it on purpose to make his voice deeper um he told me that it it like really hurt his voice like really deep in it but he he felt like he needed to do that to try to pass as much as possible because he was not on hormones yet and he I mean it was hard for him to to deal with Society because obviously Society has these preconceived notions if you look female bodied people are going to gender you as female even if you inside you know that you're male unfortunately that's just how Society works another part of this everyday acting uh was that these men overcompensated their masculinity so they didn't and this is kind of hard to talk about though because everybody has kind of a different definition of what masculinity is and how people perform masculinity and gender and stuff like that so just for the sake of Simplicity we'll just talk about like society's view of masculinity and like men so like the tall white non-trans straight muscular arrogant blah blah let's just keep their words not mine um yeah so six out of the eight participants um actually adapted more masculine behaviors so one of them even said at the beginning of my transition I felt like I needed to ask act more masculine um so they they felt like if they weren't acting masculine and overcompensating this masculinity and they knew that it was over the top they admitted it to me like almost all of them um they felt like people were gonna know that they are trans and they didn't want to be like they don't not found out but they didn't want to be outed by either their voice or their mannerism so they really tried to play up that masculine role all right so now safety now this part might be just a little bit hard to talk about only because some of these people um they dealt with a lot of emotional and physical violence so I'm not going to be graphic but I'm just letting you know in case you need to know that um so there was one participant um and this story was kind of hard to hear because he told me that when he came out his parents actually sent him to a mental institution and he stayed there for about a year and then he was able to get out but he decided to stay there because he didn't want to be near his parents so he finished high school there and then he was able to like leave and go to college and like not deal with his parents anymore but the fact that he decided to stay in the mental institution just says something about the abuse that he was getting from his parents and he talked a lot about that but I don't want to get into that because it's it's just it's a lot other people were kicked out which is a narrative that we hear a lot about LGBT youth um even people who are a bit older their parents don't accept them and you know they get kicked out of their homes and it's just it's not fun so um this is the part where about seven to eight I think yeah seven out of eight participants agreed that passing was actually crucial and even vital to their survival so that was a bit intense um and this brings up to the issue of bathrooms the good old bathroom issue that I feel like all trans people have at least one bathroom story um which actually I can prove this with my research also I just want to say that I did only interview eight people so that doesn't mean that every trans person has this exact same narrative it's not like the most comprehensive trans study in the world but um when I interviewed them five of the participants actually mentioned bathrooms without me ever mentioning it in the interviews and the other three that never mentioned it at the end of the interview I just I wanted to know if they had any stories maybe they had forgotten about it so I asked them like oh do you have anything to say about bathrooms and they all kind of looked at me like obviously so that was um a bit intense some of the stories were just horrible some people were verbally harassed this one person got out of the stall and was actually punched in the face which was just a bit ridiculous and also that was in Canada not that I'm saying that that would happen in the U.S okay I'm digging myself into a hole I'm just gonna drink some water uh um and uh I believe it was yeah so three of the three of the participants told me that they were so nervous to use public bathrooms that they didn't and this led all three of them to get bladder infections um because they held in they held it in for too long now I know that you're not really supposed to put yourself in the research it's supposed to be objective outside view but um just for this presentation this also happened to me so when I thought I was the only one but when I was doing these interviews and I heard that other people also had this happen to them so what happened to me was I refused to do the public bathrooms I felt like I didn't pass and that I was scared that I was either going to get yelled at in the women's bathroom or beat up in the men's bathroom so I didn't want to deal with any of that so I ended up having a really bad bladder infection and I was catheterized for two months and that was during my first semester of University so can you imagine the stress of having to deal with all these doctors and nurses that I have no idea what trans is and like misgendering you all over the place and like saying some really weird things that you would never think doctors would say and then starting school all while yeah it was not a fun thing to do so that's something that um I'm glad that the school here has gender-neutral bathrooms because mine didn't and even the college that I went to before I went to the school that I go to they worked for seven years to get a gender neutral bathroom and they have one and people keep vandalizing it they're not happy with that it just it's it's great that there is at least one though so maybe less people will deal with bladder infections um because that's not fun so uh this this is actually really interesting because one of the participants was actually so scared to go into the men's bathroom that he actually used the women's bathroom but in order to do that this is the quote from him I would just pop out my CH pop out of my chest a little bit and I would use the women's bathroom and be like ooh I would try really hard to be feminine like hi thank you haha I felt like I had to pass as female so it's almost like this person is trying so hard to pass and be seen as male and as their true self but they um I just went all the way to the beginning but they they have to like switch it over and try to pass this female I can't even imagine the emotional like how much emotional work you need to do to be able to do that it's just it's it's it's it's very brave um so yeah so one last thing before I move on to how they felt after they started passing which is a lot more positive than it is now um because this is a bit boring and sad um I feel like we can't we can't we have to talk about self-esteem and Body Image when we talk about passing because it's really important because you want to be seen as who you are inside and um all of these men were 18 to 25 years old so they had already all gone through female puberty so they all knew that they were supposed to go through male puberty at a much earlier age so all of them actually said that because they had to go through the puberty that they really were not supposed to go through it lowered their self-esteem a lot more because then you start to develop things that you really don't want um and believing that they didn't pass as men in society these men projected these views onto themselves and it created more negative outlooks on their body image um but thankfully this starts to change once they start passing but like what exactly changes right because you go from one day where you're not passing to the other where you are passing something has to happen um the two key words here are validation and confidence so it's a lot happier than being beat up in the bathroom which is great because that is not fun so um validation is really important for these trans men especially um because all eight told me that right before they started passing they passed at least once before they were on hormones and they all said that it felt amazing um so being validated and like a little like just a little sliver and then going back to not being validated it was really hard for them but after they started to pass as like 100 male in society um they they they all said that the feeling of validation and identity was so much stronger in them and one of the best quotes that could ever I think from from this from these interviews that could ever describe what passing and how to feel after passing and you know validation is this is the quote I kind of just exist now so this person no longer has to worry about passing in society they can just live their life um which was which was really really nice to hear after a lot of the horrible stuff that was said and now these these people who are passing you know and feeling validated are able to see their bodies um as slowly as the bodies that they're trying to slowly as the bodies that they know that they're supposed to have like it's a slow process it doesn't just happen overnight which I talk about later on um so this is the quote here that was really interesting I hate that passing is so important because when you say passing you feel like you're wearing a disguise and like you're fooling people but it's like passing is having is finally having people see you the way you feel excuse me this finally being able to pass and being seen is the way that you feel gave these men a lot of confidence and there's some really great quotes I'm not going to like say them all because it's long so one of them is just I'm really happy um with how I look and how I feel and how it all matches and then someone um this one's kind of funny it's a it's a good feeling to me being really hairy I like it it makes me feel really great and I don't know it gives me this weird feeling of confidence I think that passing has helped me feel better about myself since these individuals were being perceived as who they are and who they they knew they were for years before they started to pass they started to feel better about themselves um and what I found interesting was that because these men were trying to pass and they were beginning to form alternate forms of masculinity by modifying their bodies and projecting their mannerisms in whatever way that they felt comfortable with so in being able to pass these individuals were able to bring out and embrace this previously repressed feminine self and and translated into their own form of masculinity so I think that this is true because I've seen this a lot in the community non-research related but a lot of trans men after they start passing Embrace their feminine side so they're able to show I guess more emotion these are very stereotypical Society things but as we know Society is not nice to people who are a bit different um so yeah it happened to me definitely in the beginning of my transition I felt like I had to be like the most manliest man ever I was very rude and it was not embarrassing I'm sure that there are videos out there of me being like Macho it's embarrassing they're still up there though I don't take anything down I should though um but but yeah so after I started passing it wasn't like instant it was after maybe about two years I realized that I was being like really rude to people and I was the mannerisms that I had were not what I felt like I felt like I was wearing a mask even though I was passing so it was like a different layer so I decided you know to stop this overcompensation of masculinity because I pass and actually embrace my feminine side and I was able to do that and that led to a lot of people thinking that I'm gay which whatever Society has this issue I guess with men who are a bit feminine apparently they're automatically gay but I mean I don't really care so it doesn't really matter but I'm sure that other people would care because it's very insulting to some person some people I guess who identify themselves as solely straight and people automatically would see them as gay just because they embracing their feminine sides it's not really um it's not really fun so I just want to finish off the academic part just by saying that we can't dismiss passing for these trans guy be trans guys because it's crucial to the identity development and selfhood um okay so I'm just gonna have a sit before we move on to the fun stuff so hopefully that like you understood a little bit I really wanted to divide up this presentation into two parts only because um I do a lot of academic stuff but I do a lot of YouTube stuff probably more of the YouTube stuff though I should probably be focusing more on my masters but um but I I feel like the first part was kind of like like a like a like a thesis defense and this part is maybe a YouTube video so I wish I could like walk around because if you've ever watched any of my videos I cannot stand still I don't even know how I'm not moving right now maybe I'm just like nervous I'm just like glued to this but yeah so um what I want to talk about now is the concept of passing and why it's problematic so like we know it's important we understand biggest thing being safety these men feel like they need to pass in order to feel safe bathrooms is the biggest issue but now um when we talk about why it's problematic it doesn't get complicated it's just that we need to break it down into certain different aspects so um it's the concept of passing so it's like the concept it's not the word because the word is just a word it's the concept of passing that implies that if you don't pass you're not trans and that is a narrative that I see a lot in the community and outside of the community so a lot of people say things that are really inappropriate where if you don't pass as the gender that you want so it will just use me as an example right now if I didn't pass as male then I wouldn't be trans which is really confusing and I guess hard for some people to understand but it does happen in the community um and that's something that I just want to like I'm going to show you a video after of something that a project that I did years ago that kind of talks about that which was really great um but I think that the biggest issue well um with this is that it really just implies that you need to pass to be trans so that also implies that you need to be on hormones and that some people can pass without hormones but usually people take hormones but um I don't think that people realize that not everybody who is trans wants to pass or needs to pass or wants to go on hormones or needs to have surgery or wants to have surgery and I don't think that a lot of people realize that not everybody has access to transitioning there's a really big problem with access some people can't access doctors issues with money and family and safety and stuff like that so that's never taken into consideration um with that which is just a little bit ridiculous so um there's a lot of people in the community that think that there's like a specific way to transition so and it's almost like you have to do it in order in order to be trans and it doesn't really make any sense so you have to figure out that you're trans you have to go to therapy you have to get your letter for hormones and your diagnosis you have to go on hormones you have to have surgery name change all this like all this trans stuff you need to all do it and then you're trans checked off um no this no no no this is um a big problem and I hate to say that I've seen it a lot in the community probably even more in the community than outside I guess I spend more of my time inside the community though um like I've seen it on Facebook on like Instagram on Twitter on Tumblr and um but like I think that my only issue is that I don't understand how people who are not in your body and in your mind know how you feel because they have no idea how you feel and that happened to me a lot I started to talk about being trans enough in one of my videos and I got a lot of hate from people in the community because all I said was if you identify as trans you're trans like it's literally as easy as that and some people were not happy with me for saying that because they said well identify as a potato it doesn't mean I'm a Potato like literally like it made absolutely no sense I don't understand where these people came from but they're real they're still doing it they're potatoes like in the video the guy literally said like I love that starchy goodness I didn't understand what the guy was saying but I don't even yeah so um I I got a lot of hate for that and also because I didn't come out as an at an early age even though I knew I was trans at an early age and I didn't tell my dad he kind of found out on Facebook don't do that by the way do not let your parents find out on Facebook by accident that was not fun getting a phone call what are these pills you're taking they're not pills by the way um so I came up with a I came up with a project I'm just gonna put this here so the water doesn't accidentally um I came up with the project uh called the trans enough project and I got a whole bunch of people to send me clips of why they have ever felt not trans Enough by either people in community and stuff like that so I won't I'm going to share a little bit of it because it's a bit long um but I just want to show you just some clips of what these people have said I'm not sure if it's actually only trans men but just let's let's yeah let's take a look so it's not going to be this video though also I don't think I'm in this video I might be but near the end so you won't see that and this video is about uh where is this yeah so I also got hate for doing this project but um yeah let's just watch it and then we'll talk I'm not trans enough because I feel really comfortable around a group of lesbians because I identify as a man but I still enjoy watching American Idol because even though I was assigned female at Birth I still am attracted to men so wouldn't it have been easier just to stay a girl you won't be able to hear that one yeah I don't know why it's so low my editing skills weren't as good back then I was never a Butch lesbian before I came out I looked like a pretty typical housewife with a husband and a kid all the time my body is I didn't always know that I was trans didn't always know that I was male I'm not upset that I can still sing in the female range and have actively tried to continue to increase my rangeability people say that I'm not trans enough because I want to give birth to a child I never hated any part of my body I hate it when people tell me that oh you're not trans because you weren't unhappy um before and because you need to want to be male and the thing is I don't want to be male I don't want to be female people seem to think that all trans people [ __ ] hate themselves or their bodies don't get me wrong I hate aspects of my body I have size 38G great big [ __ ] tits 38f if you're American I kill I probably should have edited that one out I forgot about the swearing think of the children's ridiculous that people are gonna accept someone um as male only that's wait I'll keep going so I can take a sip hormones into their body and to get surgery those two things are very drastic medical decisions that not everybody wants to go through if you want to identify as male and not bind that's totally cool yeah sometimes I do all right so this project is obviously it's like a seven minute video so I got a lot of clips for it which was great because I didn't think that I was going to get any I thought I was going to get maybe like four and I was gonna just have to do the whole video by myself but um I've been asked for four years now since this video is up to do a second one which I am going to be doing now so if you want to submit a video I'll give you like my card and we can talk about that um but so these people um in the video Don't abide by the standard way of transitioning which doesn't exist by the way but according to the people who are in the community who believe that there's a specific way to transition um this video was not they were they were not happy with this which sorry you're probably thinking like why does it matter so much about how maybe a small population the community thinks about maybe like the larger population that knows that it's okay to transition whatever you want like however you want like everybody is different but it hurts when it's a small group in the community I feel like it hurts more when you're getting hate from the community than outside of the community because those are the people you're supposed to relate to and they're supposed to really like we're both supposed to be friends and allies to each other and support each other because being trans is really hard sometimes but there's a lot of hate within the community which is very unfortunate um and to have people tell you that you're not trans enough and like the most vulnerable time of your life when you're transitioning actively transitioning is just like it's not it's not fun it's it's yeah but I mean with that I really want to dive deeper because I know that this video doesn't really talk about passing but it does talk about trans enough so it is kind of all related in this circle um but I I kind of want to talk about um the issue that uh what is it I'm showing a video right after this I just I don't remember this iPad thing is like not working for me now I know for next time um right so when somebody tells you that they're trans it can be a shock 100 I'm not denying that um it can get it takes time to get used to like we don't expect you to use the right name and right pronoun right away I mean I guess some people would but we know it's a shock especially if they're like your kid or your sibling or a really close friend that you grew up with sometimes it's hard but the one thing that I would really recommend not doing is don't ever say something like you don't look act or sound male so I'm only going to use your pronouns and your name once you start passing like that's not that's not good like we can't do that that's that's not appropriate it makes it seem like passing is the essence of being trans like it's the only way to be trans is to pass like it's not the only answer there there are multiple ways to be trans so I did find a really good video by Janet Mock and she's a trans activist of everyone started to look up there um and I wanted to just show the video where she talks about passing because this was a video that really helped me um write this today just I am a woman I live my life as a woman and that's how I should be perceived I'm not passing as anything I'm being myself is it loud enough I don't feel like it is I'm trying to put the volume up but it's not working trying to be stealth about that I'm trying to press that button it's not working I've been trying I've been trying I can't do anything so I guess we just won't make any noise and just listen attentively okay no more laughing I have such um complicated relationship with the concept of passing period not even applying it to my own life but just the idea that to pass means that you're passing is something that you're not right passing comes off as if you're you are actively right because it's a verb you're actively engaging in in some kind of trickery or deception and so that's where I get irritated with passing because anytime that I walk on the street my gender is visible I am a woman people see me and take me as a woman and that is not passing that's me just being but once I disclose that I am trans things change and then I become an oddity I become an object something that is objectified and gawked over and my humanity and Womanhood is then checked and put into question so I can just imagine someone who does not have the conditional privilege of passing having to have to deal with that all the time so those are the the layered relationships with the lived experiences of being a woman that is often seen as CIS all right and if anybody doesn't know what CIS mean it just means non-trans so it's like the opposite of being trans you're just not trans CIS but I won't use that word maybe I use it once um so in this video she makes a really good point that I honestly it was perfect for this um lecture presentation keynote whatever I'm doing right now talking leaning um it's that the concept of passing makes it seem like you're trying to pass as something that you're not and that is just like one other layer of the problematic concept of passing it's it's seen it's seen as no it's like I'm trying to explain I'm just going to read it here I feel like maybe it's just hard for people to understand that you're not passing as something that you're not we've always felt like this we've always known that we were supposed to be in this body and being able to finally pass and be seen as who we are is amazing I mean I guess technically physically you could say that we are passing as something different than we originally were physically but you can't say that emotionally you absolutely cannot because emotionally we're the same inside of our brain how we were when we realized we were trans to when we transition but physically if you do take hormones like example if a person decides to take hormones and have surgery the body does look different but it's still your body you weren't born in the wrong body you're still it's still your body you just need to modify a little bit just so that it can actually match how you feel inside um so she talks a bit about conditional privilege so she's seen a cyst so she's if somebody doesn't know who she is they wouldn't know that she's trans so that is the conditional privilege that she's talking about and I also have this privilege that if a person doesn't know I mean I don't usually come into a room of 200 people and like I'm trans I don't usually do that um well I mean I guess I make videos so more people than in this room has seen those videos so whatever but um usually if I don't tell somebody that I'm trans they won't know they'll just think I'm a non-trans person so a CIS person um but with this conditional privilege of um finally being seen as yourself but not having anybody know that you're trans some people really really they want that they don't want anybody to know that they're trans which is absolutely fine everybody transitions differently not everybody needs to share their trans status with a room full of people or anybody in their life if they don't want to I choose to tell people that I'm trans because we have a lot of discrimination in the community from the outside and we have a lot of people who don't really know a lot about trans things and I feel like I'm maybe a little more sympathetic towards people who don't really understand trans lives where I will take the time to answer questions just because I know that people are curious we all are curious that's I mean it's human nature to be curious some of the questions that you know that you get are not the nicest questions ever but it is um it does suck that trans people do have to kind of take it upon ourselves to fight all of our own battles all the time um I have gotten used to this because of you too because of all that hate that I got from the trans enough project which affected me a lot in the beginning I kind of like grew away from that and now if anybody hates on me I just kind of laugh at them like thank you for the extra view like it's just it is exactly exactly like that yes thank you for the extra view um I don't even remember what I was talking about now um but um yeah some people don't like that I literally don't remember because I was doing this thing it's okay now you can say that you messed up the presentation of Chase Ross oh my God I'm almost done um yeah so uh yeah so this whole passing is something that you're not is I mean there's honestly this could definitely be like a whole different presentation but um let's not go in there what I really wanted to talk about was all these negative terms that get thrown around in and outside of the community they usually get thrown around because of the media and we all know that the media isn't too great with trans representation even on the news even on TV shows even on movies um and I mean that once again is another talk trans representation in the media is just so big right now I mean it's like really in to be trans like I'm not saying that people are transitioning because it's cool I'm just saying that a lot of the people in the media now know what trans people are and want to maybe talk about their stories but they're not doing it in the best way that they could there is one example of a show that I really enjoyed and if there's any other example we could talk about it maybe later on in the Q a but transparent is a show I think Amazon put it together there's it's about an older trans woman who comes out I think in her 60s like it's it's she's like it's it's a really really good show but there's one scene that a lot of people talk about in the community and it's probably the scene that represents trans people the most that I've seen so in one of the scenes she has all this female clothes and she decides to throw it all out but then later on she has she gets more clothes so this whole like knowing that you're trans buying all this clothes and things that match your identity and who you are throwing it out and then doing the whole cycle all over again is so common for Trans people I did that when I was like 15 16. I spent a lot of my dad's money on his credit card doing that um buying and throwing out stuff because I I was like oh I'm trans I was like oh no I can't do this I don't want to be trans this is I don't want to be hated on by Society like this is too bad I I know I'm like this but I don't want to be like this and then after a while I was like I can't repress this anymore I'm trans I can't keep throwing things out I need to keep them um but this this scene in the in the show is probably did more for Trans representation in my opinion than the entire character of not the entire character but like the character on Degrassi the trans character um the trans character spoiler alert dies um but did I literally just spoil this for you I am so oh my God I am so sorry I will buy you supper I'm so sorry oh my God I was sure everyone had seen it's been like three years okay well I'm gonna spoil it a little more is that okay okay oh I literally feel so bad right now that was not staged um oh my God okay yes so um the character is texting and driving gets into an accident so sorry gets into a coma the doctors say we cannot help your child because he's on hormone blockers and then he dies um hormone blockers are literally just hormone blockers they won't prevent you from saving someone's life so that representation was just ridiculous now I know that they're not equating trans people and like this person died because they're trans I know that they're not doing that but having a trans person deal with something that's medicalized like hormones which is something that a lot of trans people do and then they die having those three three things together kind of has makes this Association that trans people are doomed especially if you look at all of the other media around trans people trans people always have sad stories they always die they always something really bad always happens to them um where are the stories about the trans people who are happy who have like lives and who don't make their lives all about being trans who are maybe a little further into their transitions that's kind of the representation that we would need and I think that if we had something like that in the media which I mean there are some little things but they're not well known they're only known in the community so it needs to be brought up but if we had that I feel like more people in society would be able to understand that everybody who's trans is different everybody transitions differently and I don't know I feel like they would just be like a good idea to just have some real representation um I feel like something was moving behind me it's a curse because I spoiled it for you okay anyways um so I think that was that okay no um yeah so I had like a bunch of quotes from people I went online and I just asked a whole bunch of people like oh what do you think passing like what does passing mean to you and I had a whole bunch of quotes just in case my talk wasn't long enough I think I think it's good plus these are really long like people gave me some really great answers I will say one thing though I think I got maybe 30 people emailing me and just messaging me about what their definition and what passing means to them all of the information that I got from those quotes match the research that I did which was really interesting because that research was done two years ago and it was like approved by the ethics board and and I did like actual interviews but it was interesting that people mentioned bathrooms and people mentioned safety and people mention all these things that I just mentioned but I never prompted any of that stuff so I thought that that was really interesting so just to kind of finish this off I just want to maybe just go back to understanding why you know passing is important and why it's also problematic so the research that I did I I knew when I was doing the research and when I titled it the importance of passing that one day I would talk about it in a problematic way because you can't say the importance of passing and not talk about why it's also really um complex and why there's also really a lot of problematic aspects to passing just because it's the concept itself of course you can want to pass and you could pass as male and if you're a trans guy I'm really only talking about my experiences um as being Trans in the research that I've done like I've been saying this whole time but um I just really hope that we can understand that it is important and it is needed for safety reasons mostly obviously body image self-esteem all of that is super important too but I think that safety is the most important part and I also think that we need to understand that if people who are trans don't want to pass or don't need to pass or don't want to go on hormones they are still trans so I I think that that's like maybe the one thing that I want to focus on if the person identifies as trans they're trans so I think that's it for now I do want to open up the Q a after just right after I finish this um because I know that I talked about safety and I talked a lot about trans men and there is a very big issue of violence against trans women especially trans women of color and it's it's gotten like there's a lot more reports of it maybe it's just being more reported now who knows um I did not speak about those experiences because I am not a trans woman I don't know those I don't have those experiences so I mean we could open it up and see what we can say about that if we wanted to talk about that just because it's a really big issue in you know in society um but yeah I hope that we uh yeah okay I'm done now yeah foreign okay so I wanna we're gonna do the Q a in like five seconds but I want to take a selfie of all of us is that okay yeah okay so I'm like the selfie Master for some reason I don't know why I can get everybody in this I don't know if I can do it with this though maybe one or two people might be like your hand is in it so you know tag yourself on Instagram but is that okay are we good with that okay yes okay I was thinking maybe because it's this arm that I use I guess I have to scream since I'm not going to be near the mic hold on I'm not in it though [Music] you have to be in it yeah okay [Laughter] [Laughter] [Music] I'm cutting off the people there hold on [Music] [Laughter] so should we do the Q a now is that what we do now yeah are we like are they yeah okay are we like screaming questions is there a mic I stand up to ask questions okay can I have the things to throw to people that's [Music] that's something else so you ask a question you get a bracelet you don't have to ask questions I'm kidding anxiety like I understand or they say trans rights are human rights there's two colors purple and blue okay um I'll just throw them at you hopefully you get them if not I'll just throw the whole bag all right uh questions okay yes um so in breaking down the language surrounding the word passing um I think it's it's great that um like from your words and Janet Mock's words um I feel like kind of what I got out of it is like let's shatter the illusion that's not as important except in terms of like safety and respecting people's identities um but uh I guess what I'm thinking about is the um in inflation of the value that is placed on that word and what that does to trans people after they are passing um because as a trans person who doesn't have any problems passing um I feel a sense of Disconnect from my own Community because I passed and therefore I have made it and I'm not queer anymore but I am and everybody reminds me that anytime they know that I'm trans but I feel like in the beginning stages of transitioning you don't understand um that uh I guess Invasion um that happens when you are out as trans um so I guess I I'd be I'd love it if we could talk a little bit about that because that's that's something that kind of breaks my heart because you know my my people can't see me yeah I know that's definitely a problem like visibility I had that problem too in the beginning um especially with queer visibility like I felt like my queer identity was erased when I started to pass as male because I no longer looked Butch which is what is not what I wanted but it was the closest thing to queer sorry to trans and to mail that I could get um but it is a big problem when you start passing and the community kind of doesn't see you anymore so you kind of have to be like loud and like I'm still here um yeah exactly and then when you create it it creates a dynamic with the person that you're telling that you're trans that communicates to them even though this is not what you're saying that they have access to your body and yeah no it's so like being out as Trans on a public consistently public level um yeah risks your safety as well as you know not passing definitely and I've known some people who who were passing for years that didn't really want to hang out with people who were a bit younger in their transition I guess that didn't pass because they were scared that they would no longer pass themselves so it was hard for people to navigate like I want to hang out with my community but I also want to remain stealth so not having people know that you're trans so it's definitely yeah that's definitely a like a an issue that I haven't really talked about in my videos but it's really you know it's really interesting especially for the people who are people in the community call it post T but you're not really ever post T you're always on hormones um but people I guess post passing maybe that should be this no um uh because that's oh my God that's so problematic um uh yeah um there should be a discussion about people who are passing but are no longer visible in the community this yeah that's that's really good yeah I don't really know what else to add to that because no no it's okay it's just it's great I've never even thought about that like in detail I'll make a video about it yeah uh second um and you kind of seem to identify some people as like actually trans like is that how some people want to identify as like in in the transitioning stage or or is it kind of horrible to like reach I guess the other side um it really depends on the person some people identify themselves as trans no matter what stage that you're that they're at so even while they're transitioning even before they transition right so that's what they do but what I didn't talk about in here because that's a much larger subject is people who identify themselves as non-binary and either choose or don't choose to transition so um I know some people who are non-binary who identify themselves as trans but don't want to transition so that's why I mean that gets into like a lot of complicated terminology and stuff like that um but I when I was talking about trans people I was talking about the people who identify themselves as trans so if there are non-binary people who only identify as non-binary as not as trans as well some of the things that I did talk about can't definitely apply to them um but some things maybe don't apply because we're not it's not like we're different but I mean we're all human beings right like that's the point we just need to see other people as human beings and I feel like we might be able to treat each other better um but we don't we do have all different experiences yeah so it's really just how the person identifies themselves yes um how do you feel like the medicalization of trans people like restricts um like both a gender presentation and expression like what do you think are the effects um like leading medical language and like diagnoses to get insurance to get these things covered like what are your yeah that's a really big issue like inside the community where there's half of the people who identify themselves as having a medical condition that needs to be treated with medical things like hormones and surgery and stuff like that and then there's the other side where it's just like trans is an identity I do need hormones but I don't want it to be categorized as a medical condition because it is it's because the name of like the appropriate diagnosis name is gender dysphoria and usually you need this diagnosis before you can go on hormones or before you can have surgery so it is a really big problem for a lot of people who don't have access to therapy there are different places that you can actually get on hormones without having letters and stuff like that but you still need to see a doctor which is very important if you're on hormones um but it does create a big problem um with stigma because a lot of people see it as like a mental disorder which it's not and I mean it's hard for people to I think understand that because of where the diagnosis lies and what book it's in right um and like what section it's in and stuff like that just because if if it's categorized as a medical condition usually people associate that with being sick and that's not fun and you don't want people to see you as being sick because you're not you're just you're yourself you're trans there's just you just need to do certain things you know to be able to feel like yourself some people don't need medical intervention I guess if I could use that word um whereas some people really need it I needed it I went on hormones I had Top surgery that's what I needed to be me um but it does create a lot of barriers especially in society because some people like if you don't have the surgery then you're not trans there's no such thing as the surgery like there's no one surgery and I use this metaphor in a classroom and it sounds that face um it's not like you go into a hospital and you come out with a new skin I wasn't as graphic as I was in the classroom I there you go um so it's not like you go into the hospital come out new skin right it doesn't work like that and I think that Society has an issue understanding that and I didn't talk about this and I wanted to and I'm just remembering it now um Caitlyn Jenner had the interview in March I believe she came out as trans it was a great interview blah blah two months later we see her on the cover of Vanity Fair and she is like fabulous and she looks amazing she's very feminine but it's like that two-month period between the interview and the magazine she didn't exist so I feel like a lot of people's perception of trans people is like you come out you disappear you come out like this like it doesn't happen like that like there's no like you go in there's one surgery that like gives you new skin and like facial hair right away like it's a process it takes a lot as you can see that's not me but before it was hahaha before it was me in the in the [ __ ] trans guy say video like I look different and that was like in 2012 and like it it was to me I feel like it was like super long ago but also it wasn't um but I looked different even like three years four years so it's really it's like a process so yeah yes just look at me I won't spoil anything for you Okay so safety issue of what you've been talking about because like for the first time I'm kind of like what she would call stealth I go like a big public high school and I'm constantly scared because I'm generally passed very well but like there I have like 90% of the time and it's really scary that just hearing the comments people like about like 80 people it's a really derogatory degrees and now you're scared that if I get like found out like it really scares me like that so I I guess my question is like does this scared part ever go away that's a good question um I when I started to transition I wasn't sure if I wanted to be stealth so like having no one know that I'm trans or be super out as I am now I obviously made a decision to be really out and I think one of the reasons was because I was so scared which I know isn't reassuring um I'm sorry uh I was just it wasn't scared of safety it was just I felt like I needed to help the community that helped me so much when I needed it so that's why I decided to be as out as I am but I do know that there are people who have been stealth since high school and the fear does go away because once you realize that you pass 100 of the time in every single aspect of your life I feel that you like you don't think about it anymore it's like even though I talk about trans things all the time I make YouTube videos like three times a week I all my researches on trans things I still sometimes don't think about me being trans like it comes to a point where that just happens which is really into interesting because it's all I talk about but it's still like that there's still like a disconnect which I think is really interesting especially because I've been transitioning since I was like I really I realized I was trans like nine years ago so I mean it doesn't take that long because I started hormones later on but yeah I definitely think that you it's not that you get used to the scared feeling but I do think that you like there's a shift in how you start to think about how other people see you and then you don't even think about it anymore which feels great bathroom stories happens it's not fun at all also I realize that I haven't been giving out bracelets so everyone gets one later on oh so many yes um as trans people how do you think it's best to support and be allies for people who don't want to medically transition as trans people yeah I think that the biggest thing is understanding that however the person identifies as valid 100 um I feel like a lot of trans people who are transitioning might have an issue or like in the beginning an issue with pronouns that they're not used to like it's an issue for people outside the community it's an issue for people inside the community I find like people who use they pronouns some people might not be used to that at all who are in the community um so I think just respect is like the biggest word for that um and being an ally so if anybody if you ever hear people talking you know badly about trans people to always I mean if it's safe to do so obviously don't ever put yourself in a position that you're not going to be safe but um try to say something there there's this thing that I that I do when I try to call people out and I don't I try to do it in a way that the person is going to understand that I'm not trying to be rude but they're being rude so it's like the like I feel like I've taught that it sounds really weird in the mic though in like real life in real life I'm again digging myself into a hole Yeah I think just respecting uh people because I feel like a lot of people just believe that there's only two genders but then there's a lot of non-binary people obviously who identify as other genders or no genders and identify with other pronouns other than they and I think maybe bringing that up to the conversation so that people know that there's not just you know male and female and also that trans isn't a third gender I think is also like I know that that's not like Ally for just non-binary people but it's like Ally for everyone Trends is not a third gender it's just like it's just like I get it not a state of being but you are trans usually transitioning to one gender from another two yeah let's pretend that made sense is that good okay sorry I ran out of water so that's what's happening now oh no you don't have to get up I feel bad uh yes sorry uh so at least the perception I've kind of gotten from the stories that have been told it seems that even now in 2015 the treatment of trans people is very reminiscent of the treatment of other members of the lgbtq plus Community decades ago so how do we bring that treatment of trans people into the current the current time and kind of as a a follow-through of that how do I as a CIS person be a better Ally towards the trans Community I think that the biggest thing is representation and talking and maybe putting a face to trans lives because I feel like a lot of people just like know what trans is like oh Caitlyn Jenner oh Chaz Bono like they just know these names but they don't know like they think that they know their story but you know like a two-hour interview about your life isn't your life you know so I feel like having trans people actually talk um like this just about their life and about experiences that they've had and putting a face to the trans experience even though everybody has a different experience you know we're still trans that I think would be fantastic into getting like great representation and people really understanding oh you're actually human like you're not just this like person that like steps outside of society and like wants to be different um for sure and for I'm just gonna get water I'm dying thanks I don't understand why this place is so dry I'll just leave this here if this falls on you I'm sorry spoiler alert I'm never gonna live that down by the way I'm gonna think about that till the day I die I'm gonna make a video about it so how to be a good assist Ally is like one of the questions that I think is like the most common and it's hard to answer because I feel like so many different people in the trans Community have different things that they want from people right but I think that the biggest thing in being a CIS Ally is that like not calling yourself a CIS Ally to to people without saying something about being trans like if somebody says something rude about trans like I'm not saying that anybody would do this I'm just saying like just in case um don't ever just say like oh I missed this Ally That's not right no j yeah um actually facing what the issue is if it's safe to do so obviously um is probably one of the most important things but also in doing so never outing anybody because I think that that is a problem that I've seen with a lot of CIS allies who are trying so hard to like make sure that everybody understands that being trans is just you know you're just trans like a person is still a person but they accidentally out people like in their classes or that they know in their real life like that's that's you can't do that right because the person might not unless the person literally tells you you could tell anybody that I'm trans you know then obviously it's fine but um in most aspects people just like to keep that to themselves and like if they want to come out they can come out so I think that maybe that like is probably one of the most important things like never out anybody yeah but it's because there's so many different layers in how to be an ally which I actually did a class discussion yesterday and somebody asked that and I've actually never made a video about that because I feel like it's so complex but so many people are asking that question now that I feel like I have to in a good way because I think it's really important I mean I have videos about like you know family and friend like how to treat trans people if you're family friends but I've never really made one about like how to be like a good CIS Ally yeah that's good yeah um so I found out about being trans through YouTube and stuff as well and I got a lot of validation and comfort through your videos but I there was something that like I had to figure out on my own and so I was wondering what you think isn't talked about enough for people that are coming out and basically only know about the trans community Through like social media like what's not being talked about or not through the trans Community Mental Health is probably one of the biggest ones because there's so much stigma around it because we don't want to be considered like sick medical condition that we don't talk about the mental health issues that we have like depression but there's a lot of depression and anxiety that is caused by being trans yes but there's a lot of like I'm I have depression not because I'm trans or you know so on so I feel like talking about mental health and taking care of yourself when you're starting to transition is really important because I feel like so many people focus on how other people are going to perceive them they focus on themselves like I need to pass as male so I'm gonna like deepen my voice and I'm gonna wear all this like masculine clothes and all these things that you would do in order to try to pass I'm going to go on hormones but I feel like there's like an aspect of self-care that we completely forget in this community and we need to really we need to take care of ourselves because in the long run it's really important to like find ourselves through the self-care cycle I guess that sounds really weird but no I didn't do that and I wish that someone had talked about that because it took me a long time to realize that it's okay to talk about mental health issues and it's okay to like take time and be like I need time for myself um and not related to trans things or related to trans things like it's it's it's hard to separate those two but it's like a I feel like they're you're right some things are not talked about and I feel like some things can't be talked about because you need to experience them yourself but it would be great if there was a manual on how to transition but there's not because everyone transitions differently right but maybe just like like hints and stuff like that would be great but it's hard yeah for sure so you mentioned earlier about people using the wrong name and misgendering you until you pass and then using the pronouns and name you identify with um so I feel like this affects people that are in the beginning stages of their their transition because the ideal world fastest wouldn't exist uh because there is no such thing as passing in my head I do and always have identified as a man um but sometimes we let other people be the judge of that and I feel like that personally affects me like me every day um so like what what are your thoughts on how we go about like combating that and um I always say that my least favorite question is when people ask me about pronouns I prefer because I know what's pronouns I prefer but I don't like I have this problem where I don't want to make someone else uncomfortable and I don't want to like put my safety in danger so like it gets it gets complicated and really hard and sometimes with like that's like my least favorite question and it should be like the most important one but like because it shows that actually people cared and like want to see me the way that I feel inside but uh it's it's like the hardest question for me to answer and I always like I feel like I turn bright red and I'm like oh my God I don't know like I don't care right now whatever no it's yeah the preferred pronoun thing is like super important but I know people who hate that because they feel like other people who are asking that question don't see them as like male or something like that which I understand but also I think people are just trying now to be respectful of people's identities which is great um but I think like maybe dealing with being misgendered and stuff like that like um is something that I still deal with which is shocking my dad and my stepmom still call me my my old name and use female pronouns which I literally do not understand how that is still happening I've been on hormones for almost six years now I have a beard like thank God there was a shift though where we would go to the grocery store and then I would be embarrassed when he used to be like she blah blah and now he's embarrassed when he says it because you can't say she and look at me like who you're talking about yeah but so I think that in the early stages of being misgendered early stages of transition when you're being misgendered it's like it's it's hard because you want to finally be seen as who you are like so badly um and I think that like when it's because I didn't really talk about pronouns in the research which I don't know why I didn't do that but when there's that switch when you start to pass it like starts to feel so good when you finally start to get gendered properly and people are actually using the right pronouns for you um but I feel like because I'm still dealing with misgendering I don't know how to deal with it like it's very weird because even like other people in my family do it like I just I maybe I'm the one who never said it out loud like you cannot do this but I feel like I have like many times but know that's it yeah they asked me if they could color by my old name and I was like yeah I was like that you got two weeks and then that's it like we're gonna get it out of your system and then after that like just stayed in the shower alone like no see don't do that no the deadline that's good you have until November 1st like and then what no bracelet spoiler alert also spoil I got no okay I don't know did that answer your question okay yes what is the best way that in the college classroom we could ask and invite students to tell us birth name something I started doing last semester and I'm still struggling with the idea of am I outing someone am I you know what it what is the best way that I can do it like I did love like the first week I let them know I'm gonna ask you are welcome to you don't have to um and I want to give them the space and I want to use the proper I want to develop it right the way it's supposed to be but what is the best way to do that I think letting people know before class starts like letting just like the student body know that it's an option because I feel like even at my school nobody knew that you could like change your name on your ID and that was like a real big issue and then people just had issues in classes and stuff like that so maybe letting students know that it exists and I think you said you put in the syllabus right yeah um I think the way that you do it is actually really great because you give them a week to think about you got the weekend you know to think about your pronouns um but also the fact that you don't have to do it um the issue of like potentially outing someone is like very scary and I would also be scared but if I had to do it in a classroom if I was teaching a class I would definitely do it like that um I just thought like if you were to ask for people's pronouns and the person didn't want to I was just thinking they could just say pass but here let me do the thing again forget where I'm at in my conversation I'm so bad um yeah um yeah I don't know their answer the question yeah a little bit I feel like there's more to that but I have never really thought about that because my university has never done that and I've been there for like six years because I did my ba and I'm doing my ma now so it's not like I'm there forever but I am though but I'm here instead of doing my thesis was there a question in the front yeah okay um I thought you said you're never gonna come back from the bus I like or I would say like 2012 you um did some videos about going on TV and then going off tea and having experience like I guess like maybe this question only pertains to me but like I know that I think or I I very firmly believe that like to go on TV and be able to pass and like have my body feel like right that would be the right thing for me and I'm also very scared of you know depression quality or like depression after surgery and I guess like what do you do um because no one ever talked about mental health I had no idea what to do but thankfully I was able to process it slowly um so just a little background I after being one year on hormones I decided to go off of hormones for 10 months um I did that because it was a personal choice knowing like going on hormones I knew I was going to change to me the changes were too fast I don't like back then I didn't like changes that were that quick so I decided just to go off of it just I just needed to go off it I knew I was going to go back on it eventually I was not de-transitioning I was still identifying as male I'm still trans I'm still me still using male pronouns but I decided to go off of hormones um that came with a lot of hate from the community which is one of the reasons why I got so depressed because people in the community started hating on me because I was openly talking about not being on hormones anymore which happens doesn't happen to a lot of people but now I've seen maybe two other people talk openly about like how they needed to go on off of hormones and then just go back on a bit later on um I was being seen by a doctor everything was fine but it was really hard to deal with alone because no one had ever I've never seen anybody else back then when I did when off of hormones process the hate that you get from the community and like the confusion that you get from people outside because like oh wait are you not trans anymore because of you went off of hormones but um I think the biggest aspect was post-op depression which I did not know existed I think I had two high expectations about what my top surgery was going to look like because I had been waiting seven years for it and I wanted it to look exactly like I had seen in the pictures because I was looking at like the specific surgeon forever and it wasn't 100 what I wanted um it's fine like 95 percent what I wanted but I'm picky I guess and that five percent just like threw me off and then it it was horrible but I think just realizing that in that moment you knew that you needed to do that for yourself I try not to regret anything I don't regret going on T I don't regret going off of tea it taught me so much about myself I don't regret having surgery and not specifying what I wanted like nothing because I know that at that moment that's what I wanted right so that's what I try to do I know that maybe now I'm not happy with the decisions that I've made in the past but it doesn't matter because that's what I wanted so I've like been able to process them be like I did it and now I'm here I wouldn't be here if all of these things wouldn't have happened right so I don't know if that makes sense yeah okay one more question one more question yes um I was wondering if you could elaborate a little bit more on your thoughts about non-binary identities and passing and how those interact especially with alternate pronouns yeah I think it's really tricky for society to like really understand that and I think it's even harder in the not harder just hard period in the community um especially for those people who think that there's a specific way to be trans because I know a lot of non-binary people who identify themselves as trans um which is fine you identify as you know you identify as whatever you want that's you you know um but I think that passing is a really tricky thing for people who are non-binary because there is a lot of different pronouns that people use theirs they them pronouns and then there's a whole bunch of different pronouns that people have never even heard of pronounce that I've never even heard of that would probably take me maybe like a couple of days to get used to um and I I wish that I had an answer for how we could be better allies to people who are non-binary and use different pronouns and different things like that but I feel like societies like views of what men and women in the categories that were always placed in is so ingrained into us even into people in the community who are transitioning who know about like you know male and female and people who are different and have different genders and a gender identities um I feel like it's even hard for us to understand that people are different and don't fit in those boxes that we we love we love these boxes apparently like we need to be in a box when there's like a squiggly line in the middle that exists but nobody likes to talk about it so maybe giving more representation to that squiggly and then I'm sorry I like to say that I'm a squiggly like you you need yeah more representative so when I was talking about like being a good Ally and like and um talking about like representation and stuff like that right talking about trans lives is really important but also we can't forget the people who identify as trans and are non-binary or who are just non-binary so also talking about those voices which I think I feel like there is one TV show that I saw that might have had a non-binary character I don't remember which one it is which is I should know this I don't even know what I'm talking about but um slowly slowly getting more representation I don't know does that make sense I feel like yeah okay thank you oh yeah this stuff ah so thank you before I hand out these I obviously want to thank the school for having me here this has been such an amazing experience honestly to come to this to come to this Utah to come to you Jesus it's getting late it's like past my bedtime what time is it for me so it's nine o'clock so it's not nine it's 11 for me because I'm from the other side um the other side um it's a it's been really great to be here to be in a different environment even though it's dry to like speak to different students in classes and have like lunches and stuff I'm like really honored to be here this is great so thank you all for coming also this has been really fun um so I'm just should I just like throw these okay yeah let's do that okay so he's gonna hand them out and then officially no no uh Levi will hand them out and then if you if you want to come talk to me I will be on wait the side follow the purple hair and come to talk to me if you'd like sounds good evening everyone I'm Tamara Stevenson co-faculty fellow of diversity and inclusion with Dr Gary Marquardt that you met at the beginning help me salute Chase Ross again for an amazing amazing lecture his lecture certainly challenges and provokes thought as well as demonstrates personal and academic boldness integrity and persistence to live and do some great things he shares some really relatable human stories which in some instances were really difficult to hear but then we also saw that these stories and these these spaces that wasn't the end of the matter that there is better and there's more Victorious stories to come forth so thank you again from coming from wet humid Montreal it's snowing in Montreal right now let's keep it as far as I'm because I know I understand I need to I need to accept that I actually live in Utah now and snow does matter here so but thank you for coming to dry solid but it's beautiful here Salt Lake City to share your stories your scholarly work your personal stories and then when you combine those two along with your amazing YouTube uh personality upper uppercase Chase one you are becoming a major voice in this work so when you get worldwide exposure we here tonight can say we knew him when so our next Bastion Foundation diversity lecture series is next month Wednesday November 18th here in this room featuring Dr ebony zamani Gallagher from who is the director of the office of Community College research and Leadership at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign to talk about community colleges and actual actualizing access in a burgeoning new America and I have another announcements okay so again that's next month Wednesday November 18th right here at 7 30 pm next week during Pride week here at Westminster alphabet soup is putting on a how to be a trans Ally so if you would like to hear more about that learn more about that please check out the 8th swc website or even simpler Google alphabet soup at our web at the Westminster website and we'll get you to we'll direct you if you need to call we'll do that too we will find what you need to get you where you need to go thank you again for our first Bastion series we are near capacity crowd so thank you for encouraging me with your presence here tonight so good night safe travels and Chase as you're he's already shared he would love to talk to you but he might need a restroom break so so please be patient so thank you again and good night [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Westminster University

Views: 141,545

Keywords: diversity, westminster college, b.w. bastian foundation, lecture, transgender, gender identity

Id: N22M2JN-la0

Length: 100min 27sec (6027 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 01 2016