You don't need me to find a topless woman for you...

My roommates and I moved a fridge last night and felt very proud of ourselves. Our landlords were getting rid of their fridge and gave it to us (since it wasn’t really very old), but only had the moving guys bring it up to our sunroom. So one door-removed-from-the-hinges-to-fit-the-fringe-through-later, we have a shiny, huge new fridge. That isn’t really relevant to this post, other than I’m excited about it and the fridge-moving immediately preceded a conversation I had with my two roommates about being topless.

Our apartment has central heat and air, but we try not to overly rely on them in the interests of keeping our energy costs low. So there’s usually a few weeks of the summer where, with fans on and windows open, the apartment is livable, even though it gets pretty hot when you try to go to sleep. We had one of those evenings a few weeks ago (yes, in Chicago it can go from being almost 90 to barely 50 in the span of a week) and I ended up sleeping topless. Which made me come to the conclusion that I should be allowed to be topless in my own apartment.

I am not a stranger to discussing and thinking about toplessness, but this is the first time I have made a concrete decision about a specific space in my life where I think I should be allowed to be topless. I actually realized that being topless would make me feel good, both physically and emotionally. (Insert comments about exhibitionism here, if you must.) I’d talked with one of my roommates about this that very hot weekend, and she said that she wouldn’t be joining me, but didn’t care if I bared my boobs. Last night, I asked my other roommate if he was OK with me being topless in the apartment

He said ‘no.’

Insert a pussy joke here

I admit, he doesn’t make a habit of just wandering the apartment without a shirt on. But I really wasn’t planning on that – I wasn’t going to be, say, watching TV or making dinner topless. But it’s not unusual for him to go, say, across the hall from his bedroom to the bathroom without a shirt. Or to come home after a sports game and take off his jersey to put it on the drying rack, without first going to his room to change into another room. I don’t care about any of those things; I mention them simply to provide some context.

So I was a little surprised when this roommate, who has stood by me and stood up for me throughout my transition, who I’d place at the top of my list for straight cis friends who ‘get it,’ said that he thought my being topless was too much nudity for him in the apartment. In the moment, I backed down immediately. I said it wasn’t that big of a deal, and if he wasn’t comfortable with it then I wouldn’t do it.

Now I’m second-guessing that response. I don’t want to cause apartment drama, and it isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s absolutely a double standard. My jackass impulse is to say that OK, he can’t be topless in the apartment, either. But I don’t really care about his behavior, and don’t want to be a jerk.

Any thoughts? Am I overreacting? My real feeling is, though, that I’ve worked damn hard to feel comfortable displaying any amount of my body, and want to embrace that while it lasts.

The (basic) text of the piece is below, but I first want to talk about the experience of the performance. It was a nice space, maybe 60 or 70 people, so not too overwhelming. Likewise, I could see everyone, something I really like when performing. My current show, Trans Form (obligatory: only two weeks left – buy tickets today!) has a section where I change in and out of different tops, and am in a bra for a few minutes, but tonight was a whole different realm. It was scary, it was nerve-wracking, and it was incredibly empowering.

I’ve talked before about being topless while trans, and a follow-up conversation I had with my dad. I’m still seriously thinking about going topless sometime next summer as a political act. I consider tonight part of that, of saying, “I get to define who I am, and what about my body I reveal, not anyone else.” It also felt very much to be a way for me to state pride in and power over my body, to celebrate it and refuse to have it be hidden.

There wasn’t really a sexual component, though, which was interesting to discover. I wasn’t expecting there to be, but I discovered a big difference between empowerment and exhibitionism, at least for myself.

I’m still reflecting on all this, and coming down off the high of a performance that went well, so I’ll probably post more about all this later in the week. I’m having difficulty putting into words exactly why using my body in performance in this way felt so good, made me feel so good about myself. As those thoughts start to settle, I’ll definitely fill you in. In the meantime, here’s the basic text of the piece I did. For those of you who have been around for a while, you’ll recognize a lot of the text and stories comes from other events I’ve posted about.

As a transgender woman, something not many people know much about, I’ve chosen to become an advocate and educator on behalf of myself. As such, I’ve spoken to a lot of high school and college students. This past spring, I was speaking to a high school group in the area. I love high school students: they’re old enough to ask good questions, and young enough to not realize they ‘shouldn’t’ ask certain things.

This one group had been great, and was asking a lot of good questions. As an example of how funny people can get when you’re freely saying ‘penis’ and ‘vagina,’ though, I’ll give one hilarious example.

A student, near the end of the discussion, worked up the nerve to ask, “You, um…you said you hadn’t had…the surgery yet, right?”

I feel like, in an educational setting, it’s important to be straightfoward. “No, I haven’t.”

“But you, um…” (He was super awkward) “You…like girls, right?”

“I identify as a lesbian, yes.”

(Huge pause.) How would that…if you did have the surgery…how would that…work?”

Without saying a word, the girl in front him – with a look of utter disdain and disappointment - turned around and waved her fingers in his face, displaying one way that “that” could certainly work.

Another question the kids asked, and something I’ve been asked before, is whether or not I regret anything about transitioning. Usually my answer is either a simple “No,” or to say that I regret not transitioning even earlier. And, indeed, that’s the answer I gave these students.  But the question was bouncing around in my head the rest of the weekend. It was the first beautiful weekend of spring, a weekend that reminds you Chicago will eventually have warm weather and going to the beach doesn’t seem quite so far out of reach.

And I realized, I really missed being able to go to the beach topless.

It’s sort of a shame: back when I was presenting as male, was hairy, didn’t like my body, I could display it in the tiniest Speedo I should so desire. But now that I have undergone hair removal, grown breasts, like my body, I have to cover it up whether or not I want to.

Last may I was in the hospital to get my gallbladder removed. (This is the point where I removed my shirt.) You can see the scar – here’s where they removed it, and here and here and here are where they inserted the camera and tiny tools. I was in the hospital from a Monday to Friday – the longest I can remember ever being in a hospital – and it gave me lots of time to think about my body, what it means to be trans. My mom stayed by my bed the entire time. Afterwards I asked her why, said I was an adult and could take care of myself, and she said all the stories I’d told her about trans people mistreated by the medical community made her not want to let that happen to me.

And it’s true: It would have been easy for a doctor or nurse or administrator to refuse to respect my identity; to listen to what’s between my legs instead of what’s in my heart.

Being in the hospital also made me think about what it means to be strong in one’s body. I was weak, literally to the point of being unable to sit up or go to the bathroom on my own, and I had lots of time to reflect on what discomfort can do to a person.

When I got out of the hospital and healed up, I was finally able to go to the beach. But not topless. I did some research, and found that the City of Chicago doesn’t allow for women to show their nipples. Men can. I could when I was presenting as male, hairy chest and all. But now, presenting as a woman, I could be ticketed. If I’m really unlucky, I could be arrested. Taken to jail. The criminal justice system doesn’t have a history of treating trans people very well. It’s all too possible I could be beaten, raped, killed. Yesterday was the Transgender Day of Remembrance, memorializing the dozens of trans and gender non-conforming people killed this past year, and countless more who weren’t reported. I’d love to get arrested and argue with a judge about what it means to be a man or a woman, but am scared of the potentially dangerous ramifications.

All tor doing something as simple as removing my top. (As I say the line, I removed my bra.)

I really want to make a stink, to try and get a ticket. I thought long and hard about whether or not I should do that, this past summer. Because what does it mean to be a man, to be a woman? My drivers license says “F,” but only because I lied at the DMV. My insurance says “F,” but only because I left that section blank and they assumed “Rebecca” means “Female.” My birth certificate says “M,” but only because Illinois requires The Surgery before changing it. Which of those documents ‘wins?’ And why doesn’t my own stated identity factor into it?

All my life I’ve been told it means this to be a man, this to be a woman. You should feel this way about your body, not that way. This document doesn’t match that document doesn’t match what this person says doesn’t match what that person says doesn’t match what I see on TV doesn’t match what my family tells me doesn’t match what the government tells me.

But I get to decide what my body means. How its gendered. I get to decide what my flesh signifies to the world, not the other way around.

In other news, this link has been sitting in my ‘drafts’ folder for a while while. Jezebel had a post on “Boob jobs that don’t involve actual boob jobs,” including

That seems like a reasonable claim to make...

There’s also bras and bra inserts, hypnotism, and “boob slapping.” Good stuff.

Pretend you can see my dad!

My father marched at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. He went to Washington to see Dr. King speak. His work as a defense attorney has helped demonstrate the unjustness of the death penalty and his was one of the cases referenced by Gov. Ryan when he issued a moratorium against capital punishment. In my mind, I still sometimes imagine my dad like I did when I was ten: the Good Lawyer protecting the innocent from Evil Cops, fighting for Civil Rights and Other Important Issues Warranting Capitalization.

Life rarely that simple. Family certainly isn’t.

There was a slowly dawning sense of discomfort during my teenage years, as I started to notice the times my dad would talk about clients he knew were guilty but would receive reduced sentences based on police misconduct. Now, to be perfectly clear, I think police misconduct is almost always a greater societal problem than the guilty person getting a break. Better ten guilty men go free, and all that. I still believe my dad is one of the Good Guys, and that even the guiltiest among us deserves fair and competent counsel. But my dad is also a more nuanced and complicated individual than I as able to acknowledge as a child.

Still, I sometimes expect him to see all civil rights and justice issues the way I do. Which made speaking with him tonight something like banging my head against a wall. The discussion began, as so many do, with talk of breasts.

I’ve been thinking a lot about my post on being topless while trans. The more I consider the idea of intentionally getting a ticket to call attention to the stupidity and inconsistency of attempting to legislate gender, the more I like the idea. At the same time, I really don’t want to go to jail: trans women have a tendency to not be treated well by the criminal justice system. Even though I’m usually perceived as a woman, I don’t – to put it bluntly – want to risk being raped and killed for what is admittedly a minor civil rights issue.

So I called my dad, like I do whenever I have a legal question. I explained my train of thought, and how I didn’t want to get raped or killed. I asked him how likely I would be to get arrested. He thought the answer was “pretty likely,” but immediately got me on the defensive by talking about how cops don’t react well when they “see trans people.”

“Well, how would they know I was trans?” I was more than a little upset by his comment, particularly in light of my relative confidence recently of presenting myself as and being perceive as a woman.

This is not me, but I try to be this fierce and proud

He admitted that they wouldn’t, necessarily, but that cops are assholes and getting arrested – just because they felt like arresting me – was entirely too possible. That it’s nice to imagine we’re protected when we know the law, and that the cops will read it and interpret it exactly the way we do, but that so often is not the case. That he didn’t want to see me raped or killed. I could agree to all of that, and probably would have left it there had he not then said, “And it’s not like this is an important issue.”

In one sense, he’s right. In the barrel of civil rights issues, women being able to go topless is somewhere near the bottom. It’s nestled with all the boring civil rights issues, below Discriminating Based On Handed-ness and above Discriminating Based On Hair Color. You need to lean waaaaaaay over the barrel to see them down there on the bottom, and you’ll probably need to root past Racism and Homophobia to get there. But I do really believe it’s in the same ballpark as any other type of gender discrimination, even if it’s much less pressing than equal pay or property rights.

After a pause, I replied, “OK, but isn’t it sort of silly that three years ago it was legal for me to go topless, and somehow I’ve magically transformed over that time into it being illegal?”

“Right,” my dad countered. “You can’t have it both ways: You want to be treated like any other woman, and they can’t go topless, either.”

I though I had him. “I do want to be treated like any other woman, but I’m not treated that way. The State of Illinois says I’m a man unless I get surgery. I want to point out the hypocrisy of that, to call attention to how ridiculous it is to legislate gender.”

“But we live in a society where it’s been decided certain body parts need to be covered up.”

Be very wary of any sentence that begins with those words: But we live in a society where…

Still not me, but closer to how I was feeling after this conversation

Finally, he had hit the root of the issue, that there is this magic box around “certain body parts” that makes it acceptable for men and women to be treated differently because of them. My dad readily conceded that men and women shouldn’t be paid differently, that black and white patrons of a restaurant shouldn’t be served or seated differently, he even went so far as to wager that breast feeding was a civil rights issue. Maybe.

But regardless of my analogies to other civil rights issues, my highlighting of the different treatment men and women receive, my pushing of the inconsistencies and stupidity of legally saying “this is a man, this is a woman,” my dad wouldn’t budge.

“But dad,” I tried, “We live in a society that kept slaves, that didn’t allow women to vote, that is still OK with keeping gays out of the military. Simply because It Is So doesn’t make it right.” I assured him I was no longer arguing about whether or not I should try to get ticketed – now it was about the theoretical question of whether or not I should be allowed to go topless, not whether I ever would be allowed to do so.

No luck. Again, he started, “But we live in a society where…” And we went in circles.

Ultimately, we agreed to disagree, and said we’d try to find a time to get dinner together next week. I still think he’s a good person, and I resisted – barely – the urge to say, “You don’t understand because you’re a man. A MAAAAN!” Because I really think it’s a generational gap at least as much as a genderational gap. But it disappoints me when we have such a failure to see eye to eye, and a little bit more of “My Dad, The Hero” fades away. And I still think I have a right to go topless.

Or should.

So I sucked it up today and went to Victoria’s Secret where I learned a few things. Again, we’ll do bad news first.

The bad news is that the bras I got are, ultimately, uncomfortable and a bit too small, so will need to be returned. Specifically, the end of the underwire, between the cups, digs into my sternum rather painfully, and they’re all already stretched on the last set of hooks.

The good news is that I was sized at Victoria’s Secret and apparently my own guess of 38A wasn’t horrible, but I forgot that that also means 36B and 34C, which is how they ultimately sized me. So, armed with that knowledge, I am now more confident in my ability to find a bra (or, dare I say, bras) that fit me, get me out of the sports bras I’ve been wearing for a year, and are actually comfy.

The bonus good news is that, even with feeling a little bummed that the stuff I spent money on needs to be returned (and the friends I’ve talked to tonight ultimately said “Oh, I’m not a huge van of Victoria’s Secret’s bras…”), I was able to do it without having a panic attack and I went to Old Navy and got some tops and khakis I like and I got my hair cut today and like that, too.

As I said to some friends, I think spending all that money on clothing and hair and enjoying it means I’m suffering from estrogen poisoning, but I aint’ complaining…

-R

The bad news is my torso is apparently too large and my boobs too small to fit the straps and cups of the largest/smallest bra Target sells (36A).

The good news is that some creative scissoring meant the padded cups from the ill-fitting bras have allowed me to expand my bust considerably, wink-wink, nudge-nudge, say-no-more.

The bonus good news is I just went out boot shopping, was ma’amed, and no one blinked as I was trying on women’s shoes. The cashier did pause for a second when seeing the name on my credit card, but she didn’t give me any trouble (and it could have been my imagination to begin with).

EDIT: The bonus bad news is that putting padding in a bra without padding inserts causes the wearer to develop mondo uni-boob after a few hours. (Who knew?)

The double-bonus good is it still made me feel better about myself for a little while.

-R

At work, I told the admin assistant not to come in because she was sick. I then left to go to the workshop, and everything sort of fell apart, culminating in one of my bosses threatening to fire the admin assistant. (No one was fired, fortunately.) This morning we had a Meeting with both of my bosses, the admin assistant, and myself. While I’m still not happy how my boss handled things (threatening the admin assistant’s job was way out of proportion for what had happened) my bosses had really valid points about how I and the admin assistant had let the office slip over the past couple of months. They did manage to say a few things we’re doing well, and I do know that this isn’t the end of the world and it’s a learning experience and all that mumbo-jumbo that will make me feel better a month from now. But, for right now, I had my nose rubbed in a number of things that are ligitimately my fault, as well as a few that aren’t (but are difficult to extract from the lump of things that have gone wrong).

(Amazingly enough, getting that all out helped a little….need to just keep reminding myself that things will look better – or, at least, less bad – with every passing day.)

I’m also frustrated because I wanted to be able to focus on this workshop, and not on my job. But that’s kind of difficult, now. I’m still trying, but I know I’m bad at compartmentalizing and the stress about work is definitely spilling over into feelings of inadequacy as a performer and as an artist. (Not to mention as a woman…) I realized today that I’m uncomfortable as J and as R. For example, this morning, in the Meeting, I was feeling awkward in boymode because of my boobs and how I was sitting and wondering how obvious it was that I was wearing a bra. Then, during the workshop (in girlmode) I was feeling awkward becuase of my boobs and how I was sitting and wondering if I looked like a boy who was feeling awkward about his boobs. I knew this before, but never quite in such stark relief…

(Thinking happy thoughts. Thinking happy thoughts. Thinking happy thoughts.)

(Trying to, anyway…)

-R

So the first one is about clothing, the most mundane (and yet oh-so-important) of things. L was saying I needed to just go to Target, where no one would care what I was looking at or trying on, and get something. I was whining and backpedaling and letting fear of embarasment keep me from doing it. See, among other things, I really don’t like to feel like I don’t know what I’m doing. And buying women’s clothing? I don’t know what I’m doing.

But I finally got up my courage and went to Target. (There’s a sentence I never thought I’d write…) After putting off the women’s clothing section by looking at all the cool Lego Star Wars toys and the GPS systems and the make-your-own-ice-cream things, I finally meandered slowly past the clothing section. I felt like a bad spy in a satire, where if no one notices the spy before they try to ‘sneak,’ everyone damn sure will after.

Then I lost my nerve and went next door to Office Max, hating myself all the way.But wait! I went back, meandered some more, looked intently at my phone as if i just happened to stop to check the time near the women’s section and wasn’t struggling with 23 years of ingrained shame about not identifying as a man.

In the end I did come home with two women’s tshirts. I dawdled some more, pretended I was looking at my shoes, my phone, anything but the clothing in front of me. But I managed to try something on, and didn’t die of cripling embaresment (because L’s right, as usual, no one gives a shit). And they’re undeniably feminine, with scooped necklines and slight waists, feminine in a way that the vast majority of my clothing is not.

And I do feel really good about having bought them, and owning them. They show that I have boobs! Oh dear god, I have boobs! Ridiculous. (Wearing them in public, however, will be a different battle…)

Shifting gears slightly. The second thing L ‘wins’ at, which ends on a less happy note, was talking to my dad.

We went biking for Father’s Day yesterday, which was actually really good. We did about 20 miles round trip, and even talked about doing an overnight trip at some point, about 30 miles each way (which I’m somewhat interested in doing, since 20 miles was pretty OK). But then on the way back, I brought up transitioning.

L had said that, since I’m an adult now, it’s not only my dad’s responsibility to keep up the relationship. That is, if there’s something I think he and I should talk about, it’s half my responsibility to bring it up. I’d felt like we hadn’t really talked about transitioning stuff…well…ever, and was a little uncomfortable about it. So driving on the way back to my house, I finally did bring it up. But I felt like every time I gave him the opportunity to ask questions or explain why it was hard for him to deal with, he just repeated “This is hard for me.” Even worse, he said border-line homo/transphobic things like “Well, how would you feel if I said I was going to become a woman?”

That hurt first, becuase I think he’s handling it worse than every other person in my life is, so I have pretty high standards for how he should be handling it. Second, he’s had literally ten years to think about my being trans and still dances around the vocab of trans-ness and transitioning.

So I ended up coming home in tears, with him insisting he loves me and me feeling like he was saying “I love you, but….” But I slept on it, and G was (of course) really good at helping me calm down and get a little perspective. I’m still upset with him, and I think I have the right to be upset. But I also am trying to see things from his perspective and not be too hard on him. As G said, I need to go easier on him, but also on myself.

So I emailed him today, in response to a brief email he said where he apologized for upsetting me but didn’t even try to figure out why I was upset, and said that I still love him and would still be interested in going on the overnight biking trip, but need a few days to figure out my thoughts before responding to what we talked about concerning the transition.

I’ll let you know how it goes.

-R

While on the El yesterday two black girls got on the Red Line around Argyle, heading north. They were both in their late teens/early twenties, dressed to enjoy Chicago’s at-long-last nice weather. One of them was smoking when she got on, and turned to the closed door to take one last puff and throw the cigarette to the ground, stepping on it and extinguishing it.

The two girls continued to stand in the door, chatting, when someone across from them – an older white man – got up and moved to the other end of the car. The girl who was smoking took offense to this, and started speaking loudly at his back as he walked away: “Oh, so you don’t like the smell of smoke? Well, my pussy smells better than you, you ass! Yeah, that’s right, you better walk away!”

I was playing around on my phone (oh, the joy of a phone with Internet…) but looked up at her during her little tirade. We locked eyes. And I, conciously ignoring the decorm of the El (and public places in general) held that eye contact.Well, the smoker was not happy about that: “You got a problem?”

I replied something along the lines of “I’m not thrilled you were smoking on the train.”

She started on me, saying, “Oh, well I put that cigarete out so you better not have a problem with me fucking standing here.” I continued to hold eye contact, wondering what she’d say next. “You wanna come up here and start something, you little white ass, playin’ with your cellphone on the train?”

I did not, in fact, want to start something, and said, “No, I’m good where I am.” (I continued to hold eye contact.)

“Then what’s your problem, you little faggot? Shit, I bet you like that, you got bigger tits than I do!” I should mention that I do not, in fact, have bigger tits than she did, though I suppose I should be flattered she noticed I have any tits worth mentioning.

I was back to playing with my phone by this point, and a black man in shorts and a cutoff t-shirt sitting near the door chimed in, “He’s probably calling the police. Y’all should shut up.”

The smoking girl turned on him, proclaiming, “I don’t car if he’s callin’ Jesus!”

(I couldn’t help myself, asking, “Does Jesus smoke too?” She went off on a whole new rant at that point and apparently, yes, Jesus does smoke.)

At the next station we came to the doors didn’t close: “Beepbeepbeep! Your attention please. We are experiencing equipment delays. The train will begin moving shortly.”

A conductor walked in, as the old white guy who moved to the other end of the train had apparently pushed the call button during all this. I should mention she was black, but don’t know that her race actually had any effect. She asked what was going on, and the smoking girl’s entire demeanor changed: “Ma’am, we were just standing here talking when this guy,” looking at me, “started having some sort of problem.”

I didn’t say anything, and the guy who had pushed the call button stepped forward, saying, “They were smoking when they got on the train and have been using foul language since then.”

The conductor asked what he’d like her to do about it.

“I’d like them arrested!”

“Sir, I can’t arrest them for using foul language.”

A pause. “Well, then, I’d like an appology!”

“Sir, I can’t force them to appoligize. Would you like to move to another car?”

“No, I want them to appologize!”

Finally, the conductor convinced the girls to come with her to a different car, which satisfied the man who had pushed the call button. We got moving again, but that’s when the most interesting part of all this happened. A black man in a suit had come in during this and sat down opposite the black man in shorts who had offered his opinion a couple times, in favor of the girls being able to say whatever they felt like in a public place. After the girls got off with the conductor, the man in shorts turned to the man in the suit and said, “What you think about all that?”

The black man in the suit said that he thought they’d made their point, and probably should have kept their mouth shut, but the one in shorts kept saying that it was a free country, until he finally got off the train and told the man in the suit to have a ‘good one.’

So there we were, on a train full of white people, with two black men who look like they’re in as different class and economic places as two people can be. But the one in shorts imediately finds a racial connection with the one in the suit and feels comfortable breaking the otherwise assumed code of ‘keep to yourself.’

At the core, I feel racial divisions in the US are really class devisions. That is, perceived issues of race are (in my opinion) often actually issues of economic gaps. And yet, this ‘lower class’ guy assumed that the economic gap was less important than racial unity, and was willing to draw the guy in a suit into a conversation.

I have no real conclusions, unfortunately. Just been thinking the experience over…any thoughts?

-R

Why Solo Performance?
When I was thirteen I crept into my parent’s room and tried on my mom’s black one-piece bathing suit, inflating my flat chest with socks and tucking my penis between my legs. Had I been asked, had a surprised family member burst in and wondered what the hell I thought I was doing, I could not have provided a good answer. Ten years later, now one year into hormone replacement therapy and exploring the identities of ‘transgender,’ ‘transsexual,’ ‘lesbian,’ and ‘queer,’ I no longer need to stuff my bra with socks but I am still searching for an answer to that most powerful of questions: What the hell do I think I am doing?

In an effort find an answer, my artistic exploration has carried me far and wide. I have immersed myself in story theatre at the Workshop for over ten years, first as a student and now as a teacher. Much of my artistic sensibility comes from my training at the Workshop and the belief that text is not truly alive until it is given voice. Yet, while staging the writings of others has informed my own identity, it has not allowed me to find my own answer to the question always at the back of my thoughts.

More recently, I have studied circus arts at the Gym for the past five years, taking myself to new heights – literally and metaphorically – of physical exploration and engagement. I now know that every piece of theatre is inherently physical and all movement and positioning on stage, even that with the intent of neutrality, communicates something through the body of the performer. Again, viewing my own gender as a physical performance has aided in the creation of my identity as a woman, but the larger question following me requires deeper examination of what it means to be a woman.

Finally, I have reveled in the opportunities for interdisciplinary art at University while participating in the Animate Arts program and as a Computing and Information Systems minor, and have taken my theoretical examination of performance to a higher level in my major with the University’s Department of Performance Studies. Through the Animate Arts program and the Computer Science department I created my most multidisciplinary piece to date, a Choose Your Own Adventure piece where audience members voted on the path of the show using two-toned xylophones and had their votes tabulated and displayed by a computer program of my own design. Likewise, through the Department of Performance Studies, I discovered that all human interactions may be viewed and analyzed as performance, and furthered the skills in adaptation that I first learned while studying at the Workshop. So I have begun to examine my own life as a performance of gender, both masculine and feminine, but need more than introspection to come to any conclusions.

Indeed, at every opportunity, I have looked for ways to expand my reach as an artist and as an individual. My areas of interest are wide and varied, ranging from computer science to circus, and from the theories behind performance to the staging of the written text. However, my personal narrative as a trans woman continues to be a driving force behind my work, and behind my desire to create solo performance pieces. I have been writing about my experiences during my transition, blogging about my thoughts and interactions, but I know all too well that text which remains unspoken, remains unheard. My transforming body is a political statement, an extreme example of the inherent performative nature of human identity, and demands a voice.

Just what the hell do I think I am doing, anyway? I aim to find out.

Mentorship
While I have not had the privilege of seeing the mentor’s performance, it is clear that his work as a performance artist is not ‘simply’ political, ‘merely’ personal, or ‘just’ entertainment. Rather, it finds the intersection of all three. In [show], for example, he takes the political topic of gay marriage but injects it with his own very personal reality of being unable to marry his partner. Likewise, in [show], he co-opts Broadway musicals to explore his own experience as a gay man growing up in the United States. From my own perspective, as a trans woman hoping to participate in this program and to begin to find her voice as a performance artist, the possibility of working with the mentor is extremely exciting.

A mentor is a guide and teacher (as well as the one who allows you to find your own path), a provider of answers (as well as an asker of questions), and a source of encouragement (as well as a reality check). My hope for this program is to create a partnership with the program mentor, with the goal of placing him in all of these roles. I am aware of my lack of experience with solo performance, and wish to discover my voice as a solo performance artist. Likewise, I have yet to discover my voice as a queer artist – as transgender or gay or simply as a a trans woman – and hope to learn from the mentor’s experience and hear how his path has brought him to where he is now. Finally, from that partnership and mentorship, I hope to create a strong solo performance piece which begins to answer my own questions of how my gender experiences have created and effected my identity, and how my identity as a trans woman can feed my art as I move forward.

For the above reasons, I believe I am an excellent candidate for participation in the mentorship program through this organization. As an artist, I am poised and ready to expand my work into solo performance. As a trans woman, I am eager to find my voice as a queer artist. And as a lifelong resident of the area, I am thrilled at the possibility continued growth within the area’s artistic and theatrical community by working with this organization.