MANY VOICES, ONE CALL
Many Voices, One Call is SUNY Schenectady's student-centered podcast for courageous, honest, open, and unscripted conversations about all those things that move us, make us curious, and concern us -- as students, faculty, staff, or simple, as people!
MANY VOICES, ONE CALL
Many Voices - One Call: Season Four/Episode Five: "Beyond Mere Survival: Celebrating Trans Visibility, Joy, and Resilience"
Gender diversity isn't new! What is new is our growing willingness to acknowledge, document, and celebrate transgender and gender-independent people and experiences.
Join co-hosts Archer and Babette for a thought-provoking conversation about not only the realities faced by trans students, faculty, and staff today, but also about how colonization, historical erasure, and language have shaped what we believe to be true about our own selves and desires. Contributing to this discussion are Ashley Hopkins-Benton, who curates the LGBTQ+ collection at the New York State Museum; Courtney D'Allaird, Associate Director for Intercultural Student Engagement at SUNY Albany; and Amy Student, Academic Advisor, as well as Maura Davis, TRIO Academic Specialist.
This conversation is a timely reminder of why visibility matters – not just for current students navigating their identities, but for creating a more accepting world for everyone. After all, as one guest observes, many of us have been subjected to "messages of shame" at some point in our lives -- shame about our "bodies, our gender, or about our love." And this is simply why all of us deserve access to spaces that foster joy, community, and the liberty to discover our own authentic self!
Thank you all for listening this season! Stay strong, stay confident, and keep shooting for the stars–you’ll get there! We hope that you will join us for our next season, premiering in the Fall 2025 semester.
Links to Resources:
Pride Center of the Capital Region
The views voiced on this episode reflect the lived experiences and uncensored opinions of the guests; they do not necessarily capture the full diversity of attitudes within a larger community, nor do they express an official view of SUNY Schenectady.
Babette Faehmel: 0:00
Welcome to “Many Voices, One Call”. My name is Babette Faehmel, history professor here at the college, and today is a very special episode. First of all, it's the season finale and also, this is the last episode for me and student co-host, Archer Abbott, to be together, because Archer is graduating and planning on going on to (hopefully) SUNY Albany for sociology and—as it is the tradition since Alexandre Lumbala left us—the last episode, where a student co-host is participating, will be when they take charge. So this episode today is entirely produced and conceptualized by Archer. Archer–take it from here?
Archer Abbott: 1:00
Absolutely! So, welcome everybody, I'm very glad that everyone's here! This is an episode about trans and gender independent students. And we have some guests in the studio, so why don't I start with Dr Faehmel—you didn't give your pronouns…?
Babette Faehmel: 1:12
I did not. My pronouns are she/her… She/her.
Amy Student: 1:20
My name's Amy Student. I'm an academic advisor here, and I also am the co-chair of the Pride Alliance on campus, and my pronouns are she and her.
Ashley Hopkins-Benton: 1:30
My name is Ashley Hopkins-Benton. I'm a senior historian and curator of social history at the New York State Museum, and my pronouns are she/her.
Courtney D'Allaird: 1:38
Courtney D'Allard, associate director for intercultural student engagement at the University of Albany. My pronouns are they and them—feel free to talk about me later.
Maura Davis: 1:45
Hi, my name is Maura Davis. I am an academic specialist with the TRIO Student Support Services Program here at SUNY Schenectady and my pronouns are she/he/they.
Archer Abbott: 1:56
And, of course, you all know me—my name is Archer and my pronouns are they/them. Unfortunately, we do not have any students joining us in the studio today–other than myself–because it's finals time, so what can you expect?
Babette Faehmel: 2:10
Right.
Archer Abbott: 2:13
That being said, so to everybody here what kind of challenges do you see your students facing?
Amy Student: 2:24
So, um, I'd say the biggest one that I hear a lot in our club meetings is safety. Um, being a trans or non-binary or someone on the gender spectrum... It can come with a lot of fear. Fear from oppression, fear from retaliation, and so I think that that's kind of like the biggest thing that we talk about in club. And we create a safe space.
Babette Faehmel: 2:50
Just to clarify, would you say the sense of safety as far as being in the classroom is concerned, or in the college, or…?
Amy Student: 3:00
I think the college does a really good job of creating a safe space. There are certainly individuals who could do a better job of understanding pronouns and maybe just being open-minded to our students, but I think the fear mostly comes from maybe other students in their class who may be a little older and less accepting, or from the outside—you know—families or strangers even.
Babette Faehmel: 3:25
Mmm—Okay.
Maura Davis: 3:27
Yeah, I think one of the challenges that I hear about most often—because I'm in a position where we're often involved in day-to-day activities, not the big overarching things—is students being seen as just more than their gender identity. Often—we do have a very accepting campus here, so I have students who feel very good socially, who do feel safe—probably thanks to Amy and thanks to the Pride Alliance and all the great resources that we have here. But then, extending beyond that, being seen as more than this identity on campus, being seen, you know, as a powerhouse in their major or, you know, a really good club advisor. You know there's a lot of different things, I think. So sometimes just coming back to the “How does my identity fit with all the other parts of my identity?” and “How can I be seen as a complete picture?”, is something that we kind of navigate a lot in my office.
Babette Faehmel: 4:26
Mm-hmm. What's it like at SUNY Albany, Courtney?
Courtney D'Allaird: 4:31
The University of Albany has come, you know, miles since I first started—I think back in 2016. So it's been a really amazing journey. But I think we're seeing, because of the climate outside of the campus and at the general state and federal level, so much questioning and challenging of their identities that we are seeing a disproportionate amount of trans and non-binary students coming forward and with, just you know, the everyday worries and struggles of a student, compounded with the fear of what's going to happen with my family. “Can I get documents?”, “Can people keep me from going to school or living with them?”, “Will I be able to travel?”; and so I think those things just become layered.
You know, the dream is just to maybe be a student in a class that's doing well. But often, disproportionately, we're kind of singled out if they think we're visible in some kind of way. And so for UAlbany, we have tons of resources, we have tons of services, but we can't get inside of every student's mind and calm those fears. They have to also One: identify those resources and then reach out. So we do a lot of peer-to-peer work, because it's students with other students who often relay the support and the opportunities for them.
Babette Faehmel: 5:45
That was actually—Amy, what you said and also, Maura, what you said—was also my impression, and I was hoping that it would be correct that students actually do feel quite safe in the classroom, and that the challenge occurs when they venture out because, like, some of them use different pronouns and even different names when they are in the college in class than they use outside. So I'm glad that we are at least providing that kind of safe space here.
Maura Davis: 6:18
Yeah, absolutely. Within the TRIO program, we're a very, very diverse program. Our demographics draw from pretty much every corner of the school—if you can find a student here, you can probably find that same student demographic in TRIO. So we've got a very supportive environment where the students do get to focus on, you know, the other aspects of their identity—just being a student, being a college student, being– “How do I fit in my class?”, “How am I going to get this homework done?”, you know, “Who am I going to work with on this group project and why isn't that other guy pulling their weight?”—and it's very peer-to-peer. We have a lot of really great support. But I think what does happen is sometimes, when they venture outside of that environment, the dissonance becomes more pronounced. Right? Because they're in a space where they can focus on things that they want to focus on, and not necessarily have to carve out space for their gender identity at every turn. It's just accepted, and then–
So, I think there's a lot of friction that I see with moving outside the school versus moving inside the school, and—even just different spaces in the school might feel more accommodating or less—depending on the student, and their identity, and also their personality; there's always a lot of factors at play. I think overall, we have a pretty inclusive environment here. Where most students that I meet, I get to meet as their true selves. The person they want to present to me is the person they feel comfortable coming in and being like, “This is me. This is my authentic self.”
Babette Faehmel: 7:52
Yeah.
Amy Student: 7:53
I feel blessed to meet students who– as who they are as well, especially in Pride Alliance. One of our rules—we have a couple of rules as a group—and one of them is “What happens in Pride Alliance stays in Pride Alliance” because we know that there are students who are in various stages of coming out, or in various stages of understanding their identity, and so we would never want to like intentionally out a student or, you know, misgender them if they're going through some kind of transition. So… We put those rules in place so that we can be more accommodating and accepting for our students.
Maura Davis: 8:29
I was gonna jokingly ask if the first rule of Pride Alliance was that “We don't talk about Pride Alliance”...
Amy Student: 8:36
Lovingly, so yes!
Maura Davis: 8:37
That's excellent!
Babette Faehmel: 8:39
So I think, when, um, one of the things that sometimes people—I don't know—grapple with?– Struggle with?– or are confused by is that, um, for some, for some people who maybe do not have, like, a close relationship to the topic, um, maybe don't know any trans or gender independent people, for them it seems like ‘this is such a new thing’, ‘this is so weird, and it wasn't there when I was young’. But we have the fortune—we have a historian here, other than me, and a museum curator. So, Ashley, you curated the LGBTQIA+ exhibit or the collection at the New York State Museum, correct?
So, um, great. So, what can you tell us about, well, the history and the roots of this community in New York State?
Ashley Hopkins-Benton: 9:27
So it's a community that I am very much still learning about myself, but in terms of our entire LGBTQIA+ collection, I think it's really important to have those personalized stories and those physical artifacts that tell this story throughout time, and I think that then in turn helps in two ways. It helps members of the community be able to see representation in all of the, you know—we talk about representation in movies and books and television—but I think it's really important in the historical record and in museums as well. And then, also, for allies to be able to make those connections throughout history—and to see that these stories have always existed—really helps develop compassion, and a better ability to relate and think in compassionate ways.
Archer Abbott: 10:21
So, because you've studied history and you've curated the museum, what do you see as the biggest challenges in history that might be resurfacing now for trans and gender-independent students?
Ashley Hopkins-Benton: 10:34
Well, let me mention first a challenge in museums that is a big challenge that I fight with all the time. Museums and archives were often founded as places that collected the history of rich white cis men. And, as we look at our collections, and we realize that they need to be expanded and we start to collect these new things, we one: work against the fact that we don't have diverse collections to begin with. And then, we work against the ideas of the people that we're talking to. Of, “You don't want my collections”, “You don't care about these stories”. And even just at the New York State Museum, as we've started to do LGBTQ+ stories in the galleries tours, more than once I've had people come and say, “I didn't know you were interested in that! I have this box of things in my basement—I thought nobody wanted them!”—and they're really important, exciting artifacts that have really deep, important stories. So there's a lot of levels to overcome this absence that we have right now. And I think, for us, we've made great strides with gay and lesbian collections and bisexual a little bit, but gender-related collections are something that we're still very much working on. It's a very small piece right now.
But that said, I think history has a lot to tell us about the struggles that the community has faced. We can look at, kind of, the specific legislation that targeted communities and how people fought back against it. And the fact that those fight-backs came early—and we think about the kinds of organizing that were happening, the kinds of collaborations, are all really important messages that we can look at today.
Babette Faehmel: 12:22
When did people– You said the ‘fighting back’ started early. What exactly were you having in mind?
Ashley Hopkins-Benton: 12:31
I think about Compton's Cafeteria in San Francisco, and they’re a very diverse group which included a lot of gender nonconforming people, especially people of color. They were facing arrest because they were hanging out at a cafeteria and it was kind of a safe space for them, but it was not a space that they were spending a lot of money [at]. And management had issues with that, so they called the police, and at one point they fought back and said, ‘We're not going to take this anymore’ and that really started the ball rolling. And then you have events like Stonewall, where they stand up to the police and start having more conversations about ‘How can we be organized?’, ‘How can we fight back against these injustices?’
Courtney D'Allaird: 13:16
I'm going to jump in here—Courtney D'Allaird from University of Albany—I think archives are definitely under-talked about, right? As a resource and as a place, they definitely haven't been curated in a lot of different ways. Our university archives are amazing places that can be rich histories of our clubs, right? Like, our students leave every four years, but the record of, like, how long their club has been here, and the kinds of things their club did, can be kept in our own archives. Uh, in my, in my grad work and travel, I worked for UC Riverside curating their archives—their LGBT archives—and then at the University of Albany, I worked through all the archives back from the 1950s when Harvey Milk was a student there, all the way up—just to find our history, right? Because there's this idea that we didn't exist or we didn't, right–
There's no footsteps in the sand to follow, but the reality is we have always been here. We have always been here in different ways. We have not always been recorded properly and, and even if we have, those records have often been destroyed, and I think we're seeing those same kinds of notes and fears and experiences as we look at the erasure of—not just LGBTQ+ people—but trans and gender nonconforming, or gender independent people, specifically. Like, why is it that group that is disproportionately being targeted with rhetoric but also specifically erasure?
Amy Student: 14:34
Right, 1% of the population…
Courtney D'Allaird: 14:38
Depending on how you count it—how they like to talk about us!
But I found a lot of really amazing things, um, at the University of Albany archives. For one, um, Marsha P. Johnson had come to Albany just after Stonewall in 1971, and was just at an event, and then we had these great photos of her at an event in Albany, after Stonewall. So there's, like, these really great notes of resistance, but if you're looking at a picture—and you don't know what you're looking at, you don't know that that's Marsha P. Johnson—you will miss it.
And we keep a 1974…?—I don't want to get it wrong—1972 yearbook at the University of Albany which is actually very coveted. It's felt-covered. He wanted people to sleep with it—the curator of it. It’s one of our first and most well-documented history of LGBT life and culture, not just for UAlbany but also the surrounding– and connection to the community. And, from what I have been audibly told in history, it was also denounced on the floor of the New York State Senate for its representation. So we keep a copy of that in our center for students to also remember they're part of something larger.
Maura Davis: 15:43
That's incredible and it reminds me of a story that occurred here with a student. I was working in the Learning Center at this time, and this student was a recent graduate of Niskayuna High School. They'd been very proudly part of the LGBTQIA+ Alliance there—it's called Visibility. But there was this deep mythos: nobody knew when, where, how Visibility had started or who had started it. Which was interesting for him to find out when I mentioned one day, that me and two of my best friends actually started the– and it was in 1996.
It was in a time where we literally started out calling it the Gay-Straight Alliance. I mean, we didn't really even have– it was three kids being like ‘Well, what if we just had an alliance that reflected our actual friend group?’ And my friend Allison and my friend Jeff—gay woman and a straight man—started it. And then they asked us “Hey, do you guys want to be part of this so we can make it a club?” And so we did. Um, that year we threw the first ‘alternative prom’—it was actually so cool that it became more popular than the mainstream prom. And I hadn't realized that– I mean, to me, this is just 1996 (I'm dating myself here). That isn’t a while back, and to find out that the history of one club at the high school had been lost that quickly—that nobody even knew we'd called it the Gay-Straight Alliance—or that one of the founding members had been a cisgendered heterosexual man!
So we lose history. I think that speaks to just how fast we can lose these things when they're not documented. And apparently the student went back to Niskayuna High School and said ‘Hey, guess what? I found out the origin stories of our club!’ So now we have it on paper again! I actually brought in my yearbook and I showed him the photos of those of us who– just, like, you can go back to the yearbooks and you can actually, you can find us there! So…
Babette Faehmel: 17:45
And you know, but you don't just lose the history, right? I mean, like, obviously it's dramatic in and by itself—you lose the history! But also, you lose knowledge about people and identities, and I mean part of the reason, I think, why some of the anti-trans rhetoric and actions right now are falling onto fertile ground is because it falls on a ground of rather, I mean, like large-scale—I don't want to say ignorance—but just like a lack of information, or a lack of reliable information. And, I mean, so, how is that– I mean what are some of the, kind of, like, myths, or like, misinformation-pieces that are circulating most widely from your knowledge?
Amy Student: 18:31
I think that fear can sometimes keep people from trying to understand identity. Like there's a fear that if I ask what your pronouns are, that you're going to be somehow hurting feelings or making people feel uncomfortable. But in reality that's how we figure those things out. And it's not–
Another rule in Pride Alliance is to assume positive intent; that people are coming to you and asking, you know, “What are your pronouns?”, “What is your identity?”, so that they get it right. And so being open to potentially getting it wrong, and saying you're sorry, and just moving on really quickly from it and doing better in the future is, I guess, the best way to just deal with it head on. But people are afraid of that repercussion—like some popular TikTokers will go into stores and, you know, make it seem like that their gender expression is one way than the other, and then they get people in trouble—so I think there's a fear, like, from these small individuals. They give off a sense of ‘You're gonna get in big trouble if you get somebody's pronouns wrong’ when in reality, it's mostly just trying to understand who that person is by asking questions.
Babette Faehmel: 19:48
Well, that's interesting. I would have expected you to say that– for people to say their pronouns when their gender presentation is fairly, like, non-ambivalent, seems silly, or unnecessary—but that's another way of looking at it that I wasn't even considering.
Yeah. Courtney, what do you hear from students in terms of like, myths and misinformation, or from your experience at UAlbany?
Courtney D'Allaird: 20:22
Myths and misinformation. It's always interesting when you hear the same thing over and over again, because that tells you that something else is happening, right? Like what do people think they know, that they have the same question over and over again? Like, ‘Which bathroom do you use?’, like right? Like, ‘I use the one that is open’...
Right? Like, the bathroom is the last place where we've said, like, who should go into it, not what is inside of it. Have you ever noticed that? Like there's no other room labeled like, “Only people with red hair should go in there” or something like that.
It's the last place we still have that, but then it becomes really obvious—and I think the same thing is with pronouns—we think that's like a really obvious thing that makes us feel ‘if we're questioning this, we're questioning everything’, but reality is pronouns are a translational issue, right. They're a communication tool, and in the English language we actually have 80 known pronouns that have ever been used in the English language—ever been published in the English language. Right? Don't ask me about them all… He, she, they—that's what I got for you today. But there's tons of ways, but only 50% of all the world's languages use pronouns at all. And if you shape it like that, then you have bigger questions than like “What are your pronouns?” Why do we use pronouns in the English language? Why do all colonial languages have pronouns? Right, um, French, and Spanish, and some other languages?
We don't just gender people—we gender objects—it's about our connection to things. But these are also cultures and, and language that had gender hierarchies, ‘We had to label you because we are also talking about how we honor you’. And so, talking about people as, you know, we say ‘women drivers’, we say ‘she's doing this’—we don't even know who's in the car. We're evoking a cultural message about gender and about women.
And pronouns do that in our culture, and so we need them to communicate because if we didn't have them, we wouldn't know– we could use your name, but if we don't know your name, we don't have anything else. And at the same time, we have had to learn how to ask them, which has made a lot of people really conscious about that issue. So I think that there's this myth of ‘we're not here, and if we are here, it's because we're asking you to tell us your pronouns, and that then there's no other space– When there's no space in language for us, there's then no space for our bodies. How do our bodies navigate places? How do we exist in public? How do we use public facilities? How will we navigate classrooms? How will we tell stories? How will we talk about our families? And that undermines a lot of people's whole version of their reality. Right– Even if the reality is we have always been here, just as we are.
Maura Davis: 23:02
That’s an interesting comment on the actual linguistics of using pronouns, because I lived for 10 years in Japan, which is a language that does not require them. We don't often use them. The language does have them, but we actually had to design them from scratch when we started interacting with European culture and we wanted to translate Dutch medical textbooks. And so we had to come up with, ‘Well, I need a word for he versus she.’, I think we had an ‘I’ and a ‘you’. Those even get used very, very rarely.
When you're talking about yourself in Japanese, I would simply use my own name—I would use anybody's name. So, I've had friends that I have absolutely no idea what their gender identity is. My friend Nikne– I use they/them to describe this person in English, but it's more of a ‘Who's on the phone?’ ‘I don't know.’ ‘Well, tell them, I'll call them back.’ kind of they, because my language requires grammatically that I have a pronoun to talk about a friend who doesn't use pronouns at all—It's not really part of their identity.
I know everything important about them. I know they will run into traffic to pet a good dog, I know that they're an amazing photographer but never want to be in pictures. But I do not know what pronouns they would choose in English, simply because it's not culturally or linguistically relevant. And so, I think once you do get into that idea of ‘How many languages even use pronouns, and why do we use them, and why would they even have them?’, it starts to open the doors of ‘This isn't necessarily jarring a worldview that's absolute’ across the world. There's a lot of people, a lot of places, functioning just fine without these concepts even touching their lives, right? So we don't necessarily have to disassemble something ‘objectively absolute’ because it's not objectively absolute—it's very cultural and it's linguistic, and there's very practical reasons that we have to have them in English.
So that was a really interesting observation.
Babette Faehmel: 25:16
Yeah, not only is it practical and makes sense to use them, and to be very conscious about them because we imbue them with so much meaning in the English language, but also—I mean, Archer gave me a lot of readings to do as homework for today—and I was really intrigued by this study by the Trevor Project that I found, where they found that transgender and non-binary youths who reported having their pronouns respected attempted suicide at half the rate of those who did not have their pronouns respected. And that in and by itself, I think, is a clear value and really highlights the importance of it. What does it mean to have your pronouns respected? You're being seen as the person you are.
Amy Student: 26:05
It can mean everything.
Babette Faehmel: 26:06
Right, right, yeah, exactly, exactly! So, that in itself is meaningful.
Archer Abbott: 26:15
Um, so, in line with the, the misconceptions, um, uh, I think that a lot of, a lot of the reason why there's so much fear around these identities now is because people don't understand what they are. They don't understand the definitions and even among people who do identify as something other than cisgender, there's a lot of misconceptions and infighting about definitions within the community because they're– as, as um others have said here, there's not a lot of like history that we can look back on and say like definitively, “Oh, they came up with this. That is the definition.” And the earliest history that we have, at least in the United States that I'm– that was widely accepted was created by cisgender people to describe and ‘other’, um, LGBTQ+ people. So we– the, the, the language and the way that we approach things has to continually evolve as we learn more and actually settle on definitions, um—not that there should be a huge amount of importance on definitions, but um…
What, how… How do you, um, when you, uh, curate, like curate the museum, or when you, um, do research on these identities or whatnot, how do you um describe them—so we can, we can establish things for the audience?
Ashley Hopkins-Benton: 27:50
Well, you're right, the terminology has changed dramatically over time. A lot of the terms that we would use today didn't exist for people back then. So, frequently if we're talking about a historical figure, we will say ‘This person may have identified in this way today’ and if we have a word that they used at that time, we will also include that information, like ‘At this time they identified as this’. I think a great example, going back to those pictures of– from the SUNY Albany yearbook and I had an interview that I did with someone and they were talking about the foundations of the Pride Center and how we had– and he said we had a drag queen—that's what she called herself, she identified as a drag queen—come up and speak to us about their problems.
So, I try to use really expansive language and talk about modern terms and historical terms. I also really struggle with the perceptions of the term ‘queer’ in the museum space. We've had a lot of conversations where there are very much people in the community who still are not comfortable with that term. But when we're talking about historical figures, it's a really helpful umbrella term to say that ‘Maybe this person was not cis’, ‘Maybe they were not heterosexual, but we don't know exactly how they identified’. But I think, at the same time, it's important to be able to acknowledge them and talk about their stories.
Babette Faehmel: 29:20
I think it's also, I mean, it's just important, I think, to just normalize the fact that terms, and terminology changes. I mean, it does constantly, right? I mean, before we started recording, I told you about– that I still remember the first student who used the word ‘cisgender’ and I just basically looked stupid and I said like, ‘What is that?’ Um, and then well, he explained, ‘It's like when you are um, when you are birthed, like—gender at birth— like, corresponds with your gender identity.’ And like ‘okay, all right, okay, so now we're using cisgender.’ And I'm, as a historian, you're just totally used to that, right? It's just yeah, things change.
Courtney D'Allaird: 30:02
I love language, and I love the history and origin of terms. I'm also a sociologist at heart, but also in practice, and every single word in the LGBT community has a really interesting history. What is the one that we want to unpack right now? Or are we just–
Maura Davis: 30:22
I'd love to hear more about the term queer.
Courtney D'Allaird: 30:24
The word queer. I love, I love the word queer right, like, I definitely use it to talk about myself because I don't talk– talk about my gender and that; I'm talking about my relationships. Right, the way that I navigate gender in relationship to other people, and so that really gives me the room, personally, to move. But I think I also honor, when I usually talk about myself as queer, that the word queer has a history here—and it was used specifically as a negative thing. My dad growing up played a game called “smear the queer”. Have you ever heard of this?
It's like ‘reverse tag’, right, like—or ‘kill the messenger’—that might be a similar thing that people remember. Right, like, one person was ‘queer’ and everybody else was supposed to jump them…? What's the message? Children's games teach us about things, right, in the world and our environment. And that was a game—he's 74 now (if you're listening, hi, dad), he's 74 now and he remembers playing this game called ‘smear the queer’. So he didn't have to know what queer meant, he just knew that it was bad. Right, you didn't want to be the queer, because everybody's going to jump you! Later on, as you grow up and somebody sees that word, like, you evoke the history and memory of being a child and ‘Let's all go after that person’. Everybody's on the same page. But queer doesn't start out like that. Queer starts out as ‘He was a queer sort of fellow. He was eccentric, and interesting—worldly.’ They had traveled all over, they had books and things, right. You wanted to know them. They were intriguing! This is, of course, a European history of the English word queer; to be different right, um, in an intriguing sort of way. But when it came over to the United States it was about being the same.
My dad grew up in uh, what, it's probably like Lansingburgh, Troy. And, you know, it was about having those little houses that were all the same, and the little family that was all the same, and not standing out, and blending in, and doing your duty and all of those things. And so being different and standing out was bad. Right, um, and so that's how queer– the word queer in the United States becomes something bad and wrong and it's– it becomes a synonym with that. Today we're reclaiming that and we're saying ‘Hey, we're just different’, right we're– ‘we're worldly and intriguing, and–’ you know what I mean? I'm different not just in how I express myself through relationships, but through gender and expectations and how I– and, by default, how I see the world.
So I love the word queer and its evolution, but I also hold the very real fact that people have been targeted and beaten and have lost their lives hearing that word. And as a community that doesn't have a single origin– singular origin, and we're not going to be born all together in one place or in families, we have to honor the diversity of that reality, um, and bridge our multi-generations of both beautiful joy, and powerful pain.
Babette Faehmel: 33:02
Yeah, yeah, oh my god, yeah, that's beautifully said. I have to say, like I really like the word queer, too, and for me, this is just like a totally, like, empowering, affirming term. Probably because I like queer as folk, as a show, and which– which relates to, like, the importance of representation and of upper-population in popular culture. Um, and this might also, like, come back to, like, the lack of information and lack of support for transgender and gender independent folks because, like, I mean, at one point, like everybody I know—no matter how old they were—had at least one LGBTQ+, like, acquaintance, or friend, or knew somebody who was gay or lesbian and, like, knew characters from popular media, popular culture that they kind of liked. And with transgender, it might be still like in the beginning stages, even though there are some like representations, but not as, like, joyful as I think, as, um– as with queer culture.
Courtney D'Allaird: 34:09
See, I just think we didn't have the language, right? Because we definitely had the representation like Joan of Arc. I mean: Joan of Arc! I mean, let’s– let’s talk about it.
I love that– the new meme that's going around that says they didn't burn witches: they burned women. Right? Like, we have this language where we misconstrued—intentionally because language is powerful, right. And we need it because we're trying to communicate. We're trying to communicate one of the most hard things to communicate. We have museums, dedicated libraries, dedicated selfies in your phone; dedicated to trying to capture the human experience. But if we don't have language, it's hard to convey ourselves and to record ourselves over time. And so I love the human condition because it is so vast, but the representation has always been there. If you find, unfortunately, we do have these histories of people destroying very specifically these records, not wanting our images to be something that has– is, is eternal, is natural, is evolutionary, right, um, instead we poise them inside of Greek myths, right. It’s one of the reasons we used to call transgender people ‘hermaphrodites’ right. Today you use that word and you're like, ‘What is that?’ But what if I said it like [pronounced like Aphrodite] “Hermaphrodite”. You know who Hermaphrodite is now, or don't you, in your mind? It was the same word, it's just a different accent—Hermes and Aphrodite had a child, had both male and female genitalia—[pronounced like Aphrodite] ‘Hermaphrodite’. So it was medical communications that said we're going to diagnose children as hermaphrodites… a Greek god/myth, right—or spirituality—which way we want to look at it. And the community after that said, ‘We are not this medical term, we are intersex.’ Right, it's like the, the words we choose for ourselves versus the words that get put on us by medical communities, by powerful communities—that's really the challenge we have with the language—is that these words have–
There are words that have been chosen for us. There are words that we have always had in every culture throughout time, but they get erased, and so we often have to start over and over again.
Maura Davis: 36:15
Yeah, there was, um—I'm not going to even make a gamble—but there were certain Native American tribes, um, who it was a very common thing to identify a child, as they used to call them ‘Oh, you're two spirits’, right, so… And it was a way to talk about; you don't hit a male or female binary and these people had a place in society—and they were revered. And they were revered as, almost, often, more spiritual than the average person because they had access to the ‘divine masculine’ and the ‘divine feminine’, so I– It's really interesting how this language gets lost so quickly.
Courtney D'Allaird: 36:58
It is, but it's also very easily co-opted. I was in a recent program about two-spirit, and I like to ask myself really simple questions when we're talking about any community. And so I thought to myself, “Why would indigenous people say two?” Why would they say two? They wouldn't say two, they didn't have two, they didn't believe in two, right? What they said—and you can go back to some of the original transcriptions of indigenous people talking to a group in a room—where they said ‘We have many spirits, like your two spirits.’ So they were– this is, again, a translational issue between colonizers, right, between Dutch or whoever that were coming. They said, ‘We have many spirits—we see many spirits—like your two spirit’. And what did we latch on to?
Maura Davis: 37:43
The two!
Courtney D'Allaird: 37:44
We latched on to two because it fit our, our framework! We were like ‘Oh, it's okay as long as there are two spirits.’ That recreates the version of the world, right, as just having that two, binary—the masculine and the feminine only. When, right, like I mean, there is no true binary—name me one true binary that is not man-made, just one—like… salt and pepper? You know you should use other spices. Right? Like there's, there's no, like, ‘on and off’ switch—what about dimmers now?
There’s no– and, again: human made, right? Zeros and ones, and the computer is human made. Like, there is no true binary in life in any single situation. If you can find me one, please email me. There just isn't one. And when you come at something with that level of understanding each time you hear something like that, you can challenge it. And I think that's why trans and non-binary people are so disproportionately focused on, because we fundamentally challenge the power structure of gender—not just as biologically given at birth or ordained by a divine person upon your… phallus—but as, fundamentally, the human condition is so vast that it can't be planned for or neatly put into boxes, which makes it harder to plan power.
Babette Faehmel: 39:00
Yeah, that's true, absolutely. I always found it kind of, um, well… once you have a label, you have a limit. I mean, it just like fences you in, and, um, it– like so, so many—like, from, from the historical record—so many people cannot identify fully with, with the label. Like no matter, like if it's queer, if it's lesbian, if it's homosexual, but because, because I mean, our experiences just are, like, extremely fluid and broad, and sometimes it's impossible to put in words. And I, I personally, I'm fine with, like, fluidity and non-defined—not being non-defined—but, as you said, it also makes it impossible for, for like a census to capture me and to count people and to, like, well, exercise power.
Courtney D'Allaird: 39:49
Yeah, well then, ‘how would we know how many women, or people, could give birth at any given time’, right? And then, ‘how could we forecast out the, the birthing schedule? It's very deep, I will digress.
Maura Davis: 40:01
No, that’s, that's really interesting because what it brings to mind for me is just how diverse our student population is.
Archer Abbott: 40:07
Yeah!
Maura Davis: 40:08
So, we have people who are coming in with that very colonial binary, and then we have people from cultures that are so vastly different from that. And they're all right here on campus and we're all interacting, um, and I think that's one of the things that I've observed, at least, with our student body, right. Is, even just within, like, the LGBTQIA+ community here on campus, you get so many different people coming in from so many different cultural backgrounds, with so many different experiences—some that have been wildly oppressive and others that have been wildly celebratory. So to watch these things intersect in my students—and sometimes that causes a lot of friction, I mean. You know, in the queer community we can still have a lot of internalized transphobia or homophobia—it's things that we're holding even within ourselves. And I do watch students sort of come together where one person, you know, has a lot of trauma regarding one aspect of gender identity, while another person has grown up with zero trauma, and no limits, and a very celebratory family or environment, and sometimes that can get hard, and sometimes that could be divisive.
But I love seeing the really productive conversations that come out of it because I think one thing the students here definitely share is an innate curiosity about each other. And whatever you've got going with Pride Alliance and assuming a positive intent when you come into a conversation, that's largely what I see happen with the students is, even if we're coming from vastly different experiences within the community itself. I watch people make space for each other all the time with these things and it's, it's really interesting to hear—and it blows my mind because I learn things every day. I mean, I'm learning things here, right? And watching them get that same experience of, maybe, ‘this is the way I lived it’ and then seeing the other side of the coin from somebody who comes from a completely different cultural background or completely different– just,
Because language shapes cognition a lot, too. So ‘what did we grow up speaking’, right? Um, there's these little things that are embedded. Um, like, there's, there's a kanji, and I'm gonna say that in Japanese, but it's the Chinese figures as well, Chinese orthography. At one point, that the word for noisy was just three women all together… Right and this is embedded and some people don't even notice that until you talk to somebody who's learned the language from the outside—I noticed this immediately. The idea– the ‘anzen’ in Japanese—it's a woman under a roof—you've got the woman inside the house, right? ‘Safety’, right? So, these little things—it's different in every culture. So when we bring something different, even just these tiny little things can provoke such a big conversation. I think that's super important.
Archer Abbott: 43:14
I mean, I think that gets to the heart of everything, is that– they all– I mean, everybody– There's so much diversity that it's hard to pin down, um, an identity, or even just a feeling or an idea because there’s just so much range between different people, and the cultures they come from, and how they were raised, where they were raised—every little factor that contributes to their identity—making every experience different. And we normalize that when it comes to cisgendered people, like, ‘Oh yeah, two women aren't going to have the same experience, that's normal. They're gonna look completely different, they're gonna act completely different, fine’. But when it comes to LGBTQ+ people, I think the fear kind of spurs others to try to put labels on us and put us into boxes to make it easier for them to identify us—but you can't do that! And that's why, that's why there's so much fear and misconceptions going around because there's so much range of experience—even queer, even, uh, queer and LGBTQ+ people don't understand things about each other, like you were saying—there's so much curiosity, there's so much you can learn every day from other people. It's just, yeah…
Maura Davis: 44:29
Yeah, I hope that would make a little bit more space for allies to feel comfortable with their discomfort—to know that growing is uncomfortable and you're going to maybe trip over things—but to value that curiosity more than hesitation. Because, you know, if we– we inside the community aren't navigating these exact same things. It's not like everybody in this community, we're all on the same page. We're constantly learning about each other, we constantly make missteps, we constantly learn new things. And sometimes we unintentionally offend each other and sometimes we learn from those moments. So this isn't something that like– it's okay to be uncomfortable, it's okay not to know. And every time I see students putting themselves in that space of getting comfortable with that discomfort and asking questions that might feel really awkward. I love it when I watch students come from the outside and give this kind of, like, almost an offended look or like a shocked look, like ‘what's going to come of that’, and then to see the conversation continue, because we kind of do. Maybe it's good to wake up, maybe it's good to be a little uncomfortable with the conversation at moments, and I, I love how brave they are in taking that on.
Babette Faehmel: 45:55
It would also take power away from, from those who are, like, trying to rattle you and to like say something offensive because they expect you to get all, like, I don't know, like, uncomfortable and whatever. Um, it's just normal! It's just normal to not know things and to figure things out and to learn new things—and it includes learning new things about yourself. I mean, sometimes we just don't, we just, like, we have a feeling and it's impossible to put into words, and then maybe we read something or we meet someone and we have a conversation and all of a sudden there's, like, it makes more sense. I mean, that's just part of, of learning and growing and being a human! But I also think that that's kind of the fear of not only LGBTQ+ identities or trans identities, but also like college and like ‘what happens to my child if I let them go there, out there into the world and learn these things that are not part of my upbringing?’ Well, that's kind of like a generational, like, routine! We learn new things.
Courtney D'Allaird: 47:01
On our campuses, the real challenge is “how do we hold it?”, “How do we hold all that?”, “How do we hold all those identities and life experiences?” At UAlbany, we have 18,000 new students that come to our campus. And I like to say in our office, “Our job is to help them come to that campus—full of 18,000 new people—and to find themselves.” Right, connect with their life experiences. But then the next opportunity we have is to help them not only learn about themselves, but to learn about identities and experiences they don't happen to have. If you can hold it even in that small—well, 18,000 isn’t small, right? How big is that? [Counts under breath] Um, but even if you can hold it at that level, then they're going to go out into the world and they have to hold a city or a town or a state. Alright, and then you gotta start small. Start, start with yourself, right? Get to know yourself in the context of all that beauty and difference, and then learn about other experiences, because you'll be redoing that your whole life.
Babette Faehmel: 47:54
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.
Archer Abbott: 47:57
I mean, as much as you can learn about yourself, because it's an ongoing journey, but…
Amy Student: 48:02
Always! You'll never stop.
Archer Abbott: 48:03
Yep!
Amy Student: 48:04
No matter how old you get.
Maura Davis: 48:05
Yeah, absolutely! I meet a lot of students who, um, I'll meet them and I'll meet them with one name, one set of pronouns, one, um, gender identity, one sexual identity, and that will grow! And it will grow vastly, and it's not necessarily that they're meeting other people like them and going ‘Oh! Oh well, I see, by an identity and that person… They're meeting people that are different from them. And they're not just seeing themselves reflected back, and they're not getting this confirmation bias, which I think is what a lot of people are concerned is going to happen when people step into such a broad environment. They're going to walk up to someone with values different than the family they came from and go ‘Okay, that's me now. I see myself in that person’ when we're actually more likely to get a bigger picture of just how vast a human experience can be. And it's really interesting to meet students as their identities change and as they realize, ‘Oh, I don't have to have the set of prescribed ‘queer experiences’ in order to quote-unquote ‘qualify’ for this word that describes me well.’
I'm 43, and for a long time I considered myself an ally to the trans and genderqueer and genderfluid community, because it didn't occur to me that I could be experiencing these things—I felt like I had to have gender dysphoria.
Archer Abbott 49:38
YEEEAAAHHHHH!
Maura Davis: 49:39
Right? With no experience of gender dysphoria, ‘that's what makes you trans or non-binary’, right? While for me, it was a constant cycle of gender euphoria, um, where I felt like everything has always fit. I remember being like five and being in the toy store and being like, “Well, why aren't all the toys that I like in the girl’s aisle? Because you've said I was a girl, so why are some of the ones I like in the boy aisle? Well, I could be a boy too, I guess”, right? You know, so for me, it was like my things and then the other things, but I never really felt any dysphoria. It took a long time. It took a long time– Honestly, it wasn't until the age of the internet where I started interacting anonymously with people, and people will respond to my actual text with ‘Oh, he's right. I agree with him’ and realizing that that felt just as correct for me as ‘She's right, I agree with her’, and realizing that both of these experiences really did match up with my experience. So that idea of ‘in 18,000 people’, finding yourself—as you said—that's going to be an ongoing journey through your entire life. Um, it doesn't stop when you graduate college. There's no moment where you're like, ‘This is my final Pokemon form’, right? You know, there could be just stages of evolution throughout your entire life, so I love that we're preparing them and preparing students to, kind of, hold space, right? How do we hold all this at once is a question that just gets bigger and bigger as we go through our lives.
Amy Student: 51:15
I love watching them come to those conclusions–
Maura Davis: 51:17
YESSS!
Amy Student: 51:18
–and, like, growing in that. I don't know, it's just– my queer little heart just explodes when I see them do what they want to do!
Maura Davis: 51:23
Yes! When they realize…! I had a student who realized that they identify as she/her—they, they always have! They've always been the woman they are now—they just don't… they're not a makeup person, not a super quote-unquote ‘girly-girl’—they don't tick these boxes. And we're constantly, like, joking now—we're like, “Is it dysphoria or is it unreasonable beauty standards for women?”, right? Which– which one is it, right? Because they're just a ‘jeans and t-shirts’ girl who throws her hair up in a bun every day and goes to work. Right, and that was a challenge for this person, um to, to find their real identity, and it's so– It's great when you, when you see them hit that moment of ‘I am who I am and I don't actually have to perform it in a certain way, I can just live this way’, it's one of the most– It makes my ‘queer little heart’ blow up, too, quite honestly. Because I mean, it's all you can really hope for.
Babette Faehmel: 52:24
Yeah, see, and it does make, I mean it warms my heart too. At the same time. I mean, like, for instance, you mentioned social media, right? And I know that definitely does not warm everybody's heart to think that, um, their kids find in social media a community that, um, well ‘gives them ideas’. Right, and I can, I mean, I can see the rationale here, or I can see that there's some reason to it, to think about that. But I also have to say, as a historian, I find that completely normal and completely– like it happens all the time. I mean, like, I don't know, but– World War II is, by historians of gay America, called the ‘big national coming-out experience’ because you had these people away from their families of origin and into like one, like, same-sex environments and discover, ‘Oh yeah, I like this!’ And then, I mean, it's just, it– it happens!
And, and I, I mean I remember I'm– I went to, uh, college in the 90’s and our big revelation was Judith Butler, “Gender Trouble”. And no, oh my god, I'm not– It's totally fine to feel that all these ideas about what it means to be female do not describe me. It's just, it’s okay—it's nothing about me—it's how language and identity works, so. Um, yeah, but if you, uhh… I mean there's comfort and stability, and comfort and safety, and then the add-on challenge right now is that I think, um, we have come to see science as, like, ‘having an agenda’–period. ‘All,’ kind of, like, ‘science is now political’, and if you do not subscribe to that ‘agenda’, then that science must be unreliable. And that's another thing that we, I think we are grappling with. So, Archer, do you want to pivot to trans joy at this point?
Archer Abbott: 54:27
Yeah! Um, I actually wanted to segue off of what you said about gender dysphoria. I think a lot of people—going in with, like, trying to label our identities for us—they kind of expect they, they expect us to suffer and, like, have, like, have– you have to experience gender dysphoria, you have to experience bullying, you have to, like, wanna like– experience suicidality or depression or something, and they view it– They often view trans people and gender independent people and identifying that way, as a death sentence, or something close to it. They see it as a negative that their child will have to fall victim to if they, you know, get– ‘have those ideas in their head’. And, moving away from that—I think that enough of the news cycle and everything focuses on trans suffering and whatnot. So, I think it's important to center trans joy, especially now! And, uh, there were already a lot of conversations about uh, uh, seeing your students come out and and find out who they are and continue on that journey, um, for, for all of you personally, if you have any uh stories of others that you've encountered or of yourselves coming out or on your journey, um, I would love to hear that! Uh, give some inspiration!
Amy Student: 55:52
I can share! So my partner is transgender. When we met, he was presenting as a female—very girly, lots of makeup, you know, traditional feminine traits, I suppose, you know, dresses—and being with me, as a queer person who had dated you know all over and all kinds of people, they– he felt comfortable to come out as trans to me very early in our relationship and it's been awesome to watch him turn into the man that he is today. And he's gone through like years—you know we've been together for almost five years—so it's watching, you know, from very girly to, you know, trying out different… you know, they call it, like, the second puberty, right? Like trying out different outfits, and styles, and hair. So it's been, like, really nice to see him blossom into the person that he wants to be, but also that he trusted me to be there for the ride. And not to say that it didn't come with its own set of, you know, challenges for me—you know, starting to date a woman, and then now being with a man it definitely was something that we had to, you know, work through. But it's been worth the work and I apply what I've learned, you know, pretty regularly to my students and I talk about our relationship and how it's– It's awesome! So I'm just, you know, happy to have been the person that he needed to come out and be himself.
Archer Abbott: 57:40
That's really great!
Amy Student: 57:41
Yeah, I love him.
Maura Davis: 57:44
While I've been working here, I've had two co-workers who have transitioned, and to watch the amazing level of acceptance from our departments and especially from our students–
One of my co-workers was incredibly worried about what her relationship with one of the students that she's been very close with, who trusted her, you know would that– Would that change when she came out as a trans woman? And to watch this student—we didn't know what the student's background was with this community, if they even had any context for what would be going on—no problem. It was like a three-minute adjustment. And they sat down, they had the conversation and five minutes later I came by and they're working together just like they always had been, on school-oriented things and the conversation had just moved that easily.
So watching that acceptance here and being part of that has been really fantastic– I'm just sort of a walking ball of gender euphoria, I feel like, because I present what you would expect as female—when we walk through a binary world and we have these ideas about them. I use she/her, that's fine, and I have long hair, and most people when they look at me they go, ‘Ah, a girl! Hello, she/her’, and I'm not going to correct you because that's me, it's me as well. So I often, sometimes feel like I'm the invisible, the invisible genderfluid person and very invisible on the queer spectrum.
But at the same time I get so much joy encountering other people who are like, ‘Oh hey, me too!’ Because when I do offer up my pronouns, I find out that I've been in a room with three other people who also—I call them dealer's choice—they all feel the same to me. Um, so finding somebody else, you know, finding many other people who– with gender fluid identities—which I think is the closest I can come to expressing the, the word I would use for, for me—um, just having those moments of joy where it does happen to come to the forefront. Um, we were listing pronouns in a workshop I was doing the other day and I said mine are she/he/they, and three other people, that I'd known for a while, said the exact same thing and it was like, ‘Oh! Hey!’, right? So these kind of moments of just connection that you don't expect in the middle of your day, I think, is my favorite part of the work day and the experience of working with such a diverse group of people here.
Amy Student: 1:00:53
What you said about that student picking up quickly on you know the the pronouns of the instructor. It made me think about my niece and nephew, who are eight, and when we told them about ryan coming out, um, and how he's a boy now, um, and so we're. You know we're not calling him the dead name anymore and all that, it was the easiest conversation ever to have with at that time they were six. My mom messed up during the course of that day and I remember my six-year-old nephew being like he's a boy now and they just picked right up on it. That's amazing. Being like he's a boy now. Kids are very and they just like picked right up on it. So that's amazing. Yeah, it was cute. It made me think of that.
Maura Davis: 1:01:38
I think that speaks to the potential in every human, because when you, when you meet small children before they're socialized with the idea about what these things would mean and attaching social meaning to them, attaching predictive elements to them, attaching predictive elements to it, right? Giving a kid information, because they're they're in the phase where they're learning what words for everything are, right? So it gives me hope when I see kids especially because it's like we all do have that potential in us to accept the person in front of us, right? It’s so pure and so easy, right?
Amy Student: 1:02:17
It's [inaudible]. Duh!
Maura Davis: 1:02:18
Exactly.
Courtney D'Allaird: 1:02:20
It turns out we're just all navigating messages of gender our whole lives, right? We're not just taught to be good, when we're a kid. We're taught to be a good girl or a good boy, and to perform in a certain way. And even when those things don't feel exactly right or we feel like we can't connect with other people, we struggle to be heard by those who are older than us or who are performing and are invested, and have been invested for some time, in gender performance, in a certain way, for power and for understanding of their own lives. And so young people are often telling us who they are… telling us who they are in profound and interesting ways, and they can see the world from multiple perspectives as well. So I think cultivating that and not fearing it, is the big opportunity that we have as adults, as we get very narrow in our understanding of power and ourselves, that so many people, like, when I think back to, like, what must it have been like for women to be able to wear pants in public, right? That was probably a really euphoric moment. Or like, um, Prom for some people was, like, really euphoric for them and their own gender expression. Whereas, like in those same kinds of milestones as trans people, we run into a roadblock and the roadblock is either other people can can create space for us to also have joy, because joy is not limited, right? Joy, love, care – those things are not limited. Our capacity, our time — those things can be limited. But the actual feeling isn't limited. And when we also can be in those spaces, when we create more space for people to exist in the myriad of ways that they do, we simultaneously, as you were saying in your own stories, we simultaneously give people – everyone – the right to exist just exactly as they are. Complicated in a very simplified system, that has told us what is good or valuable about our bodies. When our bodies are different sizes and different shapes, and we do or don't like makeup. That still makes us just as much a woman or a man or a non-binary person, as any other person you know.
Like Dolly Parton says, like, figure out who you are and do it on purpose. Like, she knows that she's performing a level of gender that doesn't even exist. Right? It doesn't even exist! But she knows she's performing. She talks about it all the time, and she, I think, she even said that if she had been assigned male at birth, she would be a drag queen. Because she understands the level of performativity that she's doing. It's just like RuPaul says, ‘you're born naked and the rest is drag.’ We are all performing inside of this system.
And I think when you can find joy in any of that, right? When you can find joy and, hopefully, not just survival, in all of that. Where we're not just performing in order to survive, but we're performing in ways that make us feel alive and connected and we find other people that see us in that, then that is the profound human experience we're all kind of searching for. Which is just those moments of joy and connection.
Um, and I find that I, as a teacher, right? Like when I see and I interact with other students who are coming into that understanding… Or, I can remember that I didn't know anyone that was trans as a teacher until I had a grad student who was a teacher of gender and sexuality, in … in college. You know, being a teacher now and having trans and non-binary students, um, is a pretty … it's a pretty cool joy for me, and I don't have to share that with them. You know what I mean? I just see myself... It's just like, I'm sure that there's teachers out there that can connect with that joy of seeing somebody that reflected maybe even a previous student or yourself in there. Um and really being proud to be a teacher with them, and so I find a lot of joy in that.
I think, as a young queer person, who didn't have the language, and didn't have community… I actually hung out at the community college here a lot. I grew up in Scotia, across the bridge,... And uh we didn't have a lot of safe spaces… Like, to find that now and to create them. Um, I was very, I was very easily targeted by those systems when I was younger because I was seen in those systems as being transgressive or different. Right? Even if I didn't know that I was being different. Like, other people knew. And they were, and I could feel what I, what I called, um, hearing the silence. Like I could feel that something was off when I talked about something, or when I did something. Nobody was saying anything to me. But you know, then I wasn't invited to parties or a birthday party. Those things can be devastating when you're a kid. You miss that birthday party and it's like ‘why weren't you invited’? But you know, I felt that you feel that little something is missing, something is disconnected. And you can gaslight yourself with that. You can be like, ‘oh it's me, I am the problem.’ Right? Something is not right with me, I must not fit in. And I hope that what we can relay in this episode, and in a variety of ways also, for just telling ourselves, that, however we are, right? Is perfectly perfect. Just imperfectly perfect. Like, to call myself, yeah.. But as I became less visible in my trans experience, it's harder to find community. It's harder for people to see us as part of the LGBTQ plus community. And so we do need symbols, and we need events, and we need, we need pride, right? We need those spaces where we can find each other and find community, Because, especially as I age, it's just easier to kind of blend into the background and be all about the next generation. But we need things that fill our cup, too.
So I mean I end up playing a lot of virtual reality. I love the virtual reality space for existence, and difference, and all of those things. But I just try to continually find joy, recognizing right now, so acutely, that you've, you know, we recognize your whole life… but so acutely being very focused on, and targeted for erasure, and not just erasure, but as seen as the problem. Um. I think when – again – we’re just creating space for ourselves to exist, even in the minutiae ways, is about that resilience and that long-term message that, hopefully, we pass to somebody else, and be, like, I see you, and break that silence.
Archer Abbott: 1:08:50
I mean, I know for me as a student, it's very inspiring to see people, um, like, LGBTQ people, in spaces like sociology, which is what I've always wanted to do. And even just the presence of diversity there creates the space – creates the support space – for whether, you know, whether you consent to that or not. Like, I feel camaraderie by seeing an email signature with pronouns on it, that are not what I would expect. You know? Just seeing people walk by, that have a pin, or they have like a rainbow bracelet on… I'm like, oh nice, this is a nice safe space. This is a nice, like, a nice safe space. And it's just, it's so important that not only, um, you know, fight for other people's rights, but you also fight to yourself be seen, and to have your identity, and be loud and proud with it – because you're going to inspire others around you!
Courtney D'Allaird: 1:09:45
People often question pride, right? They question, ‘why do we need to know when you come out,’ like, ‘why do we need to know,’ Courtney? Like people come out to me, I'm like ‘here's a sticker,’ what do you need? My nephew came out, or my cousin, my cousin came out. Make sure you edit that correctly. Uh, my cousin came out and he said I don't understand what the problem is. People hug me. And I'm like, well, that's not everybody's experience. But we come out … we don't come out for other people, right? We come out for us. We come out because we need people to know, because there's something inside of there that - err - that will be challenged. Like, I need you to know this, because I'm not safe otherwise. I'm not. I'm invisibilized otherwise. I need you to know, so that we can hold this together, so that I am not alone, holding this. But I think therein lies the beauty of what pride does. ‘Cause, there's a saying, a beloved LGBT saying, from the movie Rent, right? The opposite of war isn't peace, it's creation. And it's not peace, because war is about destruction. And peace doesn't do anything to rebuild that destruction. The opposite for us is pride, right? From violence, from erasure, from devastation, from demonization, is not benign neglect and silence. It's pride.
Pride combats the messages of shame that we have all been told to feel about our bodies, about our gender, about our love, about our connection to other people. And when we show up in Pride, we fundamentally rebuild what shame has taken us from, taken from us for generations. And so, as we enter into June and Pride month, right, just remember that that is why we have Pride, that is why we march, that is why we stand and that's why we stay.
Babette Faehmel: 1:11:30
That is pretty much the perfect last word for this episode, considering that we're coming up on, uh, our about one hour recording time. This was really, really, really awesome. Archer, how do you feel about it?
Archer Abbott: 1:11:45
I think this was great. That was a perfect ending and I'm so happy that you all showed out today. I'm sorry it was a little… we had some technical difficulties and whatnot. But it was great.
Courtney D'Allaird: 1:11:56
Nobody knows.
Babette Faehmel: 1:11:59
Alright. Okay, well. Once again: thank you, um, Courtney, um, Ashley, and Amy, and Maura, and Archer. Last time!
So, Many Voices, One Call is made possible thanks to the contributions of the SUNY Schenectady Foundation. We are especially grateful for the School of Music and in particular Sten Isachsen’s continuing generous support with the technical details. The recording and editing of the podcast was possible thanks to Jayden Mignot. Heather Meany, Karen Tansky, and Jessica McHugh-Green deserve credit for promoting the podcast. Thanks also go to Vice President of Academic Affairs, Mark Meacham, College President Steady Moono, the Student Government Association and the Student Activities Advisor. Bye, thank you.
That was, oh my God.
Amy Student: 1:12:49
That was really great.