"Photographer Soraya Zaman has spent the past three years traveling across 21 states in America, to photograph and interview transgender individuals." The oldest is 34 and a lawyer pushing for sweeping social changes (which I bolded). Many are teenagers or very young adults from conservative backgrounds. I wonder if there will be a follow-up book in a decade or two.
Chase, Age 34, New York, New York
“I’m a staff attorney at the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union] national office and work on the LGBT and HIV project, and have for almost five years, doing litigation and policy advocacy. I litigated the Chelsea Manning case against the Department of Defense concerning her healthcare. ... I also do a lot of public education and writing because it feels like the real path to creating lasting substantive change. Our success in the courts is not going to happen unless we shift public conversation and deepen people’s understanding of what it means to be trans and how to center trans bodies. I think there is such a fear of the trans person who doesn’t have genital dysphoria. Those who actually embrace the idea of the woman with a penis or the man with a pussy or the person who identifies as neither but is comfortable with their body parts not lining up. There needs to be a centering of this part of who we are and an acceptance that this is also attractive and desirable.”
But also heart-breaking stories:
“My parents came home and caught me kissing my girlfriend in my room. My dad kicked me out of the house and I never saw her again. I was allowed back home, but from that day forward my parents treated me differently. So I decided to put on the role being a straight woman and I thought to myself, maybe if I go on my mission, God will take away all these feelings and I’ll be ‘normal’. I went on my mission and it was awful, I loved my mission, but being in a skirt every day and having to be called ‘sister’ – it wasn’t good. When I was preparing to go home, I was so depressed, because that meant I was supposed to get married in the temple to a man and start a family."
I live in hope that the work being done by the many marvellous women here on FWR will lead to a more open conversation, so that some young people in desperately unhappy situations will find ways out that don't involve a lifetime of medication.
www.theguardian.com/society/2019/mar/20/finally-feeling-happy-in-my-skin-american-boys-captures-the-trans-experience