A teacher of transgender studies for 11 years, Amy Cislo has noticed that when “trying to talk about the history of transgender activism or transgender experience, one could almost pick up what is published and it seems as if transgender people only live in San Francisco, L.A., and New York.” It’s why the Washington University senior lecturer in Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies feels the Midwest location of the conference she’s helped orchestrate for the last six years—alternating between Wash. U. and the University of Missouri–St. Louis—is so important.
“Part of it is to say that trans and gender-expansive people are here,” she says. “The significance of having it here is to insert transgender people into the American narrative—that transgender people live in the middle of the country.”
Held on November 8 and 9, the 2019 Transgender Spectrum Conference will see attendees from across the country as well as Canada and is a hybrid of both academic and interdisciplinary sessions. “We have this mission of providing something for everyone,” Cislo says, “And there is a concern that in primarily academic settings that people are talking about trans people and not with trans people.” A committee of members comprised of local community organizations including Metro Trans Umbrella Group, Pride St. Louis, ACLU Missouri, and St. Louis Gender Foundation, and local universities such as Wash. U., UMSL, Webster, Saint Louis University, Lindenwood, and Harris-Stowe help set the conference’s agenda. In addition to sessions throughout the two-day conference, attendees will hear from the keynote speaker Pidgeon Pagonis, an activist on behalf of intersex people, as well as plenary speaker Vanessa Fabbre, an assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University specializing in LGBTQ issues and aging.
As the conference’s plenary speaker, Fabbre will discuss how trans elders can achieve well-being later in life, which she says goes beyond general health and includes “a subjective sense of well-being, too.” She’ll also discuss To Survive on This Shore, the photography project she and her spouse photographer Jess T. Dugan recently finished. The couple spent five years interviewing and photographing trans people over the age of 50 from around the country and later published the work into a book. The series has been adapted into a museum exhibition that is currently traveling the country.
The project’s inspiration came from Fabbre’s time as a social worker in Chicago. Working directly with older adults, Fabbre “observed that there was a really robust aging network to serve older adults, things like senior centers, assisted living, nursing homes, and that aging network was very homophobic and transphobic,” she says. “At the same time that I observed that, I also observed in the LGBT network a fair amount of ageism. I saw that LGBT older adults were kind of being left out of these two major social service networks.” When she came to work at the Brown School at Wash. U., she was drawn to the school’s strong focus on aging and commitment to advancing and acknowledging LGBTQ conversations and issues.
“One thing I’m going to talk about is making sure we both balance our attention to the challenges of being trans in society and also the ways that people are resilient and developed strength and empowerment in later life,” Fabbre says. But if there’s one thing she hopes an audience takes away from her session it’s that “hearing the stories of trans older adults will remind everyone that trans is not a new thing. This is not something that young people have made up. I think there’s sometimes that perception in society that this is a fad somehow. Trans experiences have always been with us throughout human history.”
Tapping the educational aspect, the conference’s mix of conversation topics emphasizes one thing—the diversity of who they hope will attend. “People can come regardless of what level of involvement they have,” Cislo says. “Some people who participate in this are seasoned trans activists, some people have a long-lived experience as a transgender person, some people come because they are in the process of transitioning and are looking for support. We have a lot of people coming because they’re trying to make their businesses or institutions more trans-friendly.”
The conference is also encouraging attendees to record their own oral histories, noting that “trans stories, particularly from outside large cities, like New York or Los Angeles, are often missing from archived records.”
“There are some really great things happening here,” Fabbre says of St. Louis. “I think there’s a good foundation here among that core group of people who are involved and engaging in issues.”
But there’s still work to be done. “I think we’ve made a lot of progress around trans issues. I think especially visibility has increased in the last few years—from Laverne Cox on the cover of Time to Caitlyn Jenner,” Fabbre says. “That pop culture visibility is good, but it really doesn’t address the pervasive historical oppression of trans people. So I think we still need conferences like this to keep us moving forward, and to not just stop and think the work is done because trans people are on the cover of a magazine.”
If interested in attending the 2019 Transgender Spectrum Conference, visit Washington University Danforth Campus’s Hillman Hall and register in the Clark-Fox Forum. Registration opens at 8 a.m. on Friday and Saturday. Programming begins at 9 a.m. on both days.
