“It is so important and necessary to document, period. If we don’t know where we’ve come from, we won’t have the full knowledge to take us where we need to go.”
– Qween Jean, in conversation with Raquel Willis (Revolution is Love: A Year of Black Trans Liberation).
Trans stories are powerful. Seeing ourselves in the past, present, and future, is powerful.
I love to read about trans people at various points in history, although most didn’t use the word “trans” during their lifetimes. Often, documentation about trans history is scarce, and we only see what others have written about us. Surviving documentation often comes in the form of court records after a trans or gender non-conforming person is convicted of a crime (usually related to their gender non-conformity). Very little of what gets written down about trans history comes directly from trans voices.
When I think about these maybe-probably-trans historical figures, I imagine what it would be like to read about their lives in their own words. I wonder what our world might look like now if their worlds had been safe enough for them to share their stories more publicly.
Now, many trans people are documenting their lives publicly, ranging from celebrity autobiographies to the YouTube videos I watched early in my transition as others tracked the changes they experienced on testosterone, or the process of having top surgery.
There is power in writing shit down. We each experience the world, and our transness, in different ways. We never know who those experiences might connect with across space and time.
Lately, I’ve been reading We Both Laughed in Pleasure, The Selected Diaries of Lou Sullivan. If you’re not familiar, Lou Sullivan was one of the first transgender men to openly and publicly identify as gay. He died of AIDS-related complications in 1991.
His writing is personal, down to the gritty details of various sexual encounters and moments of self-discovery. Reading the diaries feels like toeing the line between an invasion of privacy and a late-night conversation with a close friend. And though it sometimes felt like I shouldn’t be reading such personal writing, Lou intended for his diaries to be read publicly, and worked on compiling them until his death.
Lou Sullivan grew up in the same place I did. I see myself in his experiences, and also recognize how vastly different our experiences have been. So much, and also nothing, has changed.
Our own stories may not feel remarkable to us, especially in an age when trans storytellers, artists, game developers, poets, and public figures are more visible than ever. At the same time, we’re facing an onslaught of anti-trans legislation and cultural hate, and don’t know what the future holds for us and our communities. We can pretty safely guess, though, that trans people’s lives twenty years from now will probably look different from our own, and will probably share some of the same threads that connect us to the past.
This is why it’s important for us to write our shit down. This doesn’t necessarily mean keeping a diary across your lifetime that will be published after your death–that’s a level of vulnerability and intimacy I think few people would be comfortable with! But it does mean believing in the power of our own words, and knowing that our stories will be meaningful to someone, even if we don’t know who that person is yet.