Sarah Holtz Interviews Sally Michelle Jackson, author/radio host

SMJ: Fort Worth, Texas, is a great town, but it wasn’t a great town to grow up being different without the internet because I considerably predate the internet. I didn’t know what to do. Before the internet, nobody was talking about anything.

The term then was “transsexual” and the only time you ever heard it was when it was the punchline of a joke or somebody talking about some depraved, deranged person that you didn’t want to be like, but that’s the only thing you ever heard about. You thought you were alone.

I went through in denial; “I can make this work. I can be who everybody else wants me to be” which is never a good way to lead your life. You need to be you no matter what you are. If you want to be a poet and your family wants you to be a doctor, it’s really a better idea if you write poetry instead.

I was in denial for basically 57 years trying hard to be who everybody wanted me to be and it wasn’t easy. Somebody said that transitioning at a later age will be very difficult for you because you weren’t socialized female.

What I realized after I started my transition was it wasn’t so difficult. I learned. I watched females to see how they sit, what their speech patterns were like. I let go of all the stuff that I was doing to try to pass as male. I don’t consider myself passing now. I was passing then. I spent 57 years playing a character.

SH: How did you become an advocate?

SMJ: By accident. It really was. It was a transgender suicide prevention site and forums. I had gone to the forums to get some information and started reading things from people who were basically saying goodbye and watched what the moderators were trying to do to help them.

One night a young man on Vancouver Island, not in Vancouver, but on Vancouver Island was up in the middle of the night and was basically saying his goodbyes to everybody because he was going to kill himself that night. The moderator was talking to him and saying all the right things, but the kid wasn’t connecting. I typed a message that I thought maybe he would see, and the moderator approved it. He read it and responded to me and we kept going like that, the three of us, for about 20 minutes. Then the moderator stopped typing. He was just reading and approving our conversation. About an hour or so later, he said he was really tired, and he wasn’t going to make any decisions tonight, but think about what we had been talking about. The moderator came on and said, “You have to give us 24 hours’ notice if you decide you’re going to.”

The next day about midday he came online and said that he had done some serious thinking the night before and he realized his cat was upset. The cat either slept in the living room or on his bed, but the cat stood in the doorway staring at him all night long and never moved. It was still there the next morning when he got up. He said, “I guess when you’re saying that people need you and would miss you, it’s really true.” He realized that even his cat would be very upset if he was gone. That was great.

They made me a moderator within a week and about two months later, he had had such a turnaround in his viewpoints and helping everybody else that he made him the youngest moderator that had ever been on the site at that point.

SH: What are some of the biggest challenges that you find in your advocacy work?

SMJ: There aren’t any real challenges when people invite you to come talk to them, but it’s when you’re being sent somewhere because somebody else felt they needed it, even if they’re there, it doesn’t help. If the people are in the room because they were forced to be there, that’s the big challenge because you have to win them over to listen to you in the first place.

I did a training at a sheriff’s department in another parish and everybody was so receptive to everything. I was told afterwards that they were there on their own time volunteering after their shifts and the room was packed. That was easy because they came to learn. They had a transgender officer and they realized that they had a larger transgender community than they thought, and they wanted to know how to deal with them properly because they didn’t want to be the problem in their department. That was the easiest group to work with that I’ve ever talked to; “Tell us more.”

It’s one of the things that people need to understand; when you’ve got someone who is very different from you, there is a tendency to want to back away because we’re afraid of the unknown. How do you get to learn about that unknown if you just keep backing away from it? The easiest way to find out what is going on in the LGBTQ community is to talk to somebody in the community and most of us are willing to talk. You have to open lines of communication because that’s the only way to avoid the perpetual fear which then goes to hate which then goes to violence. You can break that cycle early just by learning.

SH: I also read that you use the term “gender-gifted community.” Did you coin that term?

SMJ: I don’t remember if I was the first one to say it or responding to somebody else who had said it, but we decided that it would be a great way to get rid of the stigma of being transgender. We are gender-gifted. We have been able to see the world from both sides and a little view into the middle.

For those of us who went binary from one end to the other in either direction, we really have to work to understand the non-binary because we were there and we didn’t like it, but that’s where they feel comfortable and where they belong. I may not understand how anybody could feel comfortable there, but I know that’s where they belong, so I wanted to learn more to be able to support them too. There’s a lot of stuff you have to learn to really be an advocate, but you don’t have to learn that much to be an ally. All you have to learn is that you’re talking to a person.

SH: Thank you so much for talking with me today.

SMJ: Thank you. Glad to be able to help.

Sarah Holtz Interviews Anne-Marie Zanzal, counselor/consultant

AMZ: I’m somebody who probably questioned my sexuality when I was young, but I really didn’t know what to do with it because I came from a very traditional Catholic home and we didn’t talk about sex much less sexual identity. I got married because it was expected of me to do and that’s what I did. I had children.

I didn’t think about my sexuality much during that time and then when I hit about 40 (which is pretty typical for people who come out late in life) I started to think about my sexual identity. I read an article in, believe it or not, Oprah Winfrey magazine and it talked about the fluidities of women’s sexuality. At the time I thought, oh my gosh, that’s me. I guess for the first time I had hope.

Now I wish I could say that I came out at 42, but it was actually about ten years later. I took a fork in the road and ended up going to Yale Divinity School at that point. I ended up concentrating on a lot of other things.

I think my journey in particular was about dissociation. Being a lesbian was the background noise of my life. I had a restlessness of spirit that is indescribable unless you’ve had it.

SH: I also understand that there is a spiritual element to your story as well.

AMZ: I worked in hospice. It was really interesting, the years before I came out, I was working with people who were dying and saw a lot of transition in going from living to dying, which is a process for people.

I had a patient whose name was Mary and she was one of those people who signed onto hospice and thought she would die the next day because she signed on the dotted line, but she didn’t and she was hanging around for a long time and growing more and more frustrated.

She said, “I feel like I have been waiting for something my whole life.” I don’t know, that really, really struck me. It stayed with me. A month or two later, Mary died. I would say that 99.9% of all hospice deaths are very peaceful. Mary’s unfortunately was not. I held her while she died, and I told her she could go. I said, “You can go. You can go” and she did.
After my ordination, I told my therapist the story of Mary, because that’s what you do in therapy. I had some serious PTSD from that. I told her what Mary had said to me, that she felt like she had been waiting for something her whole life.

She of course being the consummate therapist says, “So Anne-Marie, what are you waiting for?” It was funny because it took me about one minute to answer. It was one of those sacred moments in your life in which I knew that if I spoke it out loud that everything was going to change. I just knew. I said to her that night, “I think I’m gay.”

I think now in retrospect, I kept trying to fill that void and that’s why I’ve done a lot of different things in my life, but finally, when I accepted the fact (I call it an acknowledgement) at 52 that I was a lesbian, that’s when I started the third and final time of my coming out. It was a really long process for me and it is for a lot of people.

SH: How have things come back together for you?

AMZ: Well, I think it has come back together slowly. I’m partnered now. I have been with my partner for two and a half years.

When you’ve come out yourself, it’s really important to find other people who understand that process. When I came out, I googled “late-life lesbian” and found, believe it or not, an online support group that is secret founded by a woman that lives in Nashville and I found support within that group. That was amazing.

When you listen to another person’s story, you are able to hear your own. I truly believe that. When I started to read other people’s stories and other women’s stories of their struggles with their sexuality, I was like oh my goodness, I’m not alone.
After the dust settled, I started to provide support for women online in a smaller version. Our secret group is large now. It’s like 1,600 members. When I joined three years ago, it was 185, so that’s tremendous growth if you think about it.

What I do now is I provide support groups for women coming out later in life. I start about one every three or four weeks and it is a way for women who are coming out to share their stories. We talk about internalized homophobia, which is a huge piece in the later life community.

SH: I understand that your ministry today is pretty LGBTQ-focused. What advice do you have for other faith communities that are doing that hard work of becoming more inclusive?

AMZ: I’m a minister in the United Church of Christ, which is referred to as the UCC. The UCC has something called the open and affirming designation. It’s called O and A. What does that mean? A lot of churches are open. You’re a gay person or a trans person or somewhere in the LGBTQ family and you go to church and they’re open and they’re welcoming to you, but affirming is a different story.

Affirming is determining what kind of god language they use; is it exclusively male? Because if it’s exclusively male, I don’t know how it’s affirming to women. Is God referred to other than father? Also, how do they treat you and your partner when you come in? Can you hold hands in a community? That’s affirming. Affirming, especially around gender, I think that’s where we get tripped up a lot of times.

I’ll tell you a sweet little story. I belong to an LGBTQ church. It’s in Nashville. We’re all learning. We were singing a song once, a hymn once and the music leader said, “Okay, all the women sing” and then “All the men sing.” I was sitting in the pew thinking we can’t divide that way because we are an LGBTQ affirming church and so we have to be very careful about dividing along lines of gender because we have all varieties of gender attending our church. It’s really, really small stuff.
We recently had a transgender woman who came to our church and she asked us if we had a gender-neutral bathroom and actually, we didn’t yet, so we put in a gender-neutral bathroom.

Those are the ways we can make churches not only affirming, but welcoming as well.

SH: Thank you so much for talking with me today and for sharing your story.

AMZ: Oh, you’re welcome.

Sarah Holtz Interviews Sierra Debrow, Outreach Coordinator for Transilient

SD: People are more than just one facet of their lives. Basically, we aim to normalize the transgender experience, to humanize transgender and gender non-conforming people and to help people realize that we are people too. Beyond that, we have so much to offer beyond just talking about our own pain, suffering, oppression and the physical changes that we go through.

SH: Yes, that is one thing that I really noticed when I was going through the website in the interviews is that there are so many moments in both the video and the photography, quiet, subtle moments of joy. I wonder if you could speak to the importance of that with the project.

SD: Yes, I work a lot in transcribing the interviews and looking at the photos and trying to find the best parts to share with the public. Transcribing these things, I often get to hear those silences in between conversations and the quietness between it all. It’s great that you were able to see that, and it was able to be shown.

To me, it shows that while trans identity and gender non-conforming, gender identity, are often seen as these loud, disruptive things to the system of gender binary and the patriarchy, but it’s also just about being a human being.

SH: The idea of looking beyond a binary framework of gender is unfamiliar to many and confusing to some. Sierra shared how they approach these often-challenging conversations.

SD: It’s something that I constantly think about and have to work on because in my office, I’m out to my coworkers, but I travel a lot for work and I’m not necessarily out in all of my communities just because for me, I’m going to a community for two to three days at a time, three times a year and I don’t want to push my identity or my politics onto another community.
I still want to be authentically myself, so with the communities I am out to, actually some of the educators and rabbi’s and community members help me do that work. They will sometimes correct people if they use incorrect pronouns or if we’re talking about gender differences in a Torah portion, they might ask; “What might this be like if this isn’t a difference between men and women, but between human experience,” and bring up gender there.

A lot of times I’ve had questions that people ask me and I personally don’t mind answering any questions about my experience, but I try to explain to them that while I don’t mind them asking me about what my daily life is like, someone’s identity is very personal, it belongs to them. It’s not necessarily that person’s obligation to tell you anything about themselves just like it’s not a sick person’s obligation to talk about their medical history or trauma or successes. No one is obligated to share information about themselves without their consent.

I really value prioritizing the human experience first and talking about, “How’s your day,” and having that relationship and then if the person is comfortable, maybe they’re bring it up; “Is it okay for me to ask you about something related to your gender identity?” and if the person says “no,” being very respectful of that.

SH: The male-female paradigm runs deep within society, but it’s something young people are starting to question and even unlearn. Still the idea that gender can be non-binary or fluid can be perceived as a threat to the status quo. I asked Sierra to share her take on why this is.

SD: I think it’s something that we’re taught when we’re very young, before we know how to conceptualize gender on our own. Even as infants, that gender is male or female. Even if you’re born intersex, sometimes there is a gender that is forced onto you. It’s something that is so ingrained in our society that anything that is different becomes not necessarily feared, but unknown and not knowing what to do with the systems we have in place is really scary.

Thinking from a medical perspective, how to treat patients who are non-binary when they have a certain sex, for example, what are women more likely to develop or be at risk for and what are men more at risk for and then how do you talking to somebody who identifies as neither, but still might have a higher risk for illnesses or diseases. Just changing that language is really tough because language is really the only thing we have to define ourselves by.

I think also it is threatening to certain types of feminism in a way. I’ve heard a lot of “the future is female,” and that’s wonderful and I hope that the future is more female and that there is more access for women and for girls. For me, I like to say that the future is non-binary, beyond gender.

An unknown leads us to thinking what is the worst case scenario. What if I’m doing everything wrong and what if everything I know about myself is wrong? What if everything I know about my friend or partner or child or about this world is different? Instead I think the focus needs to be more on it’s okay if one part of my life is different.

Let’s step back and take, as much as we can, our personal feelings and ourselves out of it and say, if it makes someone more comfortable to use “they,” “them” pronouns, is it more important to be typically grammatically correct or that I’m making someone feel welcomed, loved, included and valid as the person that they are.

SH: Transilient’s online stories have impacted trans and non-binary folks on both sides of the screens, interview subjects and followers alike. As the group’s outreach coordinator, Sierra often gets to hear firsthand what people take away from these narratives.

SD: A lot of people are surprised that we don’t focus on transition. I think a lot of media focuses on the nitty gritty process of how one gets surgery and what that looks like or did you have the surgery and have you transitioned and seeing that as a necessity for the trans experience. By taking that out of the equation entirely, it shifts the focus from that being a necessity and makes it more a part and an option, but not the focus of trans people’s lives.

A lot of times we get messages or comments saying, “Wow, this is so amazing! I didn’t know there were people who had stories like mine.” Or “I didn’t know that people wanted to hear stories like mine” creating a space on the internet where people can talk about their own identities or even just hear about their own identities and see someone who is like them. It’s really liberating.

At least for me, I haven’t met any other trans people in Jackson Mississippi since I’ve moved there and I’ve lived there for two years.

In terms of the people who are not part of the trans community who reach out to me, one thing that has really surprised me is that it has been so overwhelmingly positive. I think we’ve had one or two negative comments and I think one of those is more coming from a place of curiosity and question than a place of negativity and judgement, but it has been so overwhelmingly positive that it really is a bright spot. It’s a really bright spot at a time when the world is not always so bright for trans people.

SH: Thank you so much Sierra for taking the time to talk with me.

SD: Thank you! This was really awesome!