Growing Old and Being Trans: How Can Trans Studies Take Better Care of Our Elders?

Author: Mx. Jones

Introduction

When a friend told me that their parent had come out as non-binary, I was filled with joy and wide-eyed curiosity. Since then, they’ve started HRT. This brought a question to mind: What does transition look like for someone in their 50s? Much ink has been spilled about trans youth, how gender identity is formed in childhood and how HRT affects teenage bodies. But what about older trans adults? How does HRT affect older bodies? What specific social barriers could they face? Where is the seniors’ trans clinic? Trans discourse has a bad habit of forgetting that older trans adults exist. Trans people are underrepresented in research on aging, as they are often lumped in with lesbian and gay populations. Researchers in 2021 found that out of 75 articles written based on the data from “The Aging with Pride: National Health, Aging, and Sexuality/Gender Study,” — a study including 2400 LGBTQ adults above the age of 50 — only three focused on trans people.1 We are severely lacking in resources for trans people to know what to expect as they age.

The Transgender Child Grows Up

Trans Studies has concerned itself with criticizing the prevalent belief that children are too immature or intellectually underdeveloped to know their own gender and works to reframe the child as capable.2 But in doing so, what that reframing means for older trans adults has been neglected. Claudia Castañeda argues that the dominant view of the child as an “unfinished entity that undergoes a […] normatively progressive trajectory of bodily and social transformation whose endpoint is completion as an adult,”3 leaves the transgender child as a “threat to normative gender development.”4 But simultaneously, “because of its presumed malleability, the child-body also becomes one that can be put back on course when it deviates from the norm.”5 This presumed malleability harkens back to the “sexed plasticity” underpinning twentieth-century intersex and transexual medicine, as identified by Jules Gill-Peterson.6 Gill-Peterson notes that this plasticity — the ability for sexed characteristics of the body to take on multiple forms and then be medically “corrected” — was “racialized in the eugenic and evolutionist paradigms of the era.”7 They write: Sex became in places like Hopkins a phenotype that could be surgically manipulated through its plasticity, leveraged precisely in order to push it into a binary form. The surgical (and, later, hormonal) project of normalizing the intersex body carried a great deal of racial meaning informing the “modernity” of human sex as alterable but binary. While the medical transformation of intersex plasticity into binary form resulted in the racialization of sex as a pliable phenotype, making it signify through whiteness, this brought other hypervisible forms of race and antiblackness into play.

This understanding of plasticity or malleability as both white and young renders older trans adults, especially non-white older trans adults, invisible. Hidden within the assumption that children are too young to know their gender is the assumption that older adults are too old to change their gender; positing that children are developing towards authoritative self-knowledge relies on an imagined ‘true self’ that becomes knowable in young adulthood and remains stable throughout one’s life. If the trans child’s self-knowledge is as authoritative as adult knowledge, then we must treat later-life self-knowledge as equally authoritative. By bringing older trans adults into the conversation on trans children, we can combat the assumptions that there is a ‘too young to know’ and a ‘too old to change’ simultaneously.

Aging in the Archives

Archiving trans histories is a common strategy used in Trans Studies that can help bring attention to trans elders. However, the current state of trans archives leaves much to be desired. In “All Power to All People? Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto,” Syrus Marcus Ware calls attention to how existing trans archives often fail to include BIPOC trans histories.9 He notes that this erasure functions as a larger part of the “conceptualization of the black queer subject as a new entity.”10 Ware argues that starting from a BIPOC trans history will reveal a more inclusive trans history; this needs to be done through a reframing of what is archivable material. BIPOC trans history “persist[s] in an oral tradition of telling and retelling, embodied in our activism.”11 Archiving from this perspective centers a more inclusive trans history, combating the imagination of BIPOC trans people as new and broadening what transness can look like. Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha writes about Martha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rodrigoz’s activism and how they were/are remembered as “crazy” or “mad.”12 They interrogate how trauma and mental illness have informed trans activism, bringing a disability justice lens to Stonewall’s legacy. 13 Piepzna-Samarasinha calls on trans activists and allies to be radically inclusive and to allow “madness” to be part of activism.14 Remembering trans pasts is integral to imagining trans futures; knowing trans histories can allow us to reach through time to pick up the resistance and joy of those who came before us.

In these writings, both Ware and Piepzna-Samarasinha include quotes that viscerally remind us of the extreme precarity of BIPOC trans life, and why this is important to remember. Ware quotes from an interview with Monica Forrestor, a Black trans woman who entered activism in the 1980s: “No one really thought about archiving, because we really didn’t think we would live past 30.”15 Piepzna-Samarasinha quotes a friend of theirs, Emma DeBoncouer, who passed unexpectedly: “Celebrate trans femmes while we’re alive.”16 Archiving oral histories from trans elders helps us remember their resistance and calls on us to continue to improve the circumstances of trans lives. But remembering their pasts is not enough; many of these trans elders are still with us, and we owe it to them to care about their current life circumstances. Older trans adults are not just a living history: they are a living present.

Applied Trans Studies

The Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies is a journal attempting to bridge the gap “between the hard-won humanistic disciplinary homes where trans studies ostensibly takes place and the newer spaces being carved out across the social, biomedical, and even natural sciences.”17 It focuses on addressing the “material conditions of transgender existence and the issues transgender people face in the world”18 by meaningfully engaging with research and centring trans voices. Trans communities have, and still have, a fraught relationship with research. Historically, “trans people were treated as objects of study, with cisgender researchers regarding trans people as tools to test the limits of sociological theories.”19 The history of trans medicine is also full of harm. By centring trans-led research, we can begin to repair the relationship between trans subjects and researchers. Gathering expansive knowledge from trans people is necessary to improve the conditions of trans lives; if we don’t know the specifics of how systems (social, institutional, and medical) are failing trans people, we cannot begin to address them.

The conditions of older trans adults are underexplored, leaving them in precarious positions. The model of Applied Trans Studies can offer strategies for improving the lives of older trans adults that are sensitive to intersectional marginalization and historic traumas. Bringing older trans adults into Trans Studies through trans-led research and autoethnography can create actionable steps towards a better future. Another important consideration for Trans Studies is intergenerational solidarity. Archiving trans histories is a good starting place, but it doesn’t address the barriers (physical and social) to forming productive, justice-oriented, intergenerational relationships. We can address this by exploring the ways older trans adults are pushed out of activism, and using archiving and storytelling as tools to learn from different understandings of transness as they evolve through time. For the first time in modern Western history, trans people are an aging population. Now what?

Recommended Readings

Silverman, Marjorie, and Alexandre Baril. “‘We Have to Advocate so Hard for Ourselves and Our People’: Caring for a Trans or Non-Binary Older Adult with Dementia,” LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 3 (January 27, 2023): 187–210. https://doi.org/10.1080/27703371.2023.2169215.

This article is one of many reporting on a small, empirical study of trans and non-binary people living with dementia and their carers in Canada. The authors draw attention to the fact that the lived realities of trans and non-binary people living with dementia are severely understudied.20 The study adopted a trans-affirmative approach to gender identity and a crip-positive perspective on dementia to emphasize self-determination and agency to validate the ability of individuals with cognitive disabilities to make decisions about their own gender identity, expression, and care.21 They used an intersectional framework to “gain a more comprehensive perspective of the ways in which cisgenderism, cogniticism, and ageism, among other systems of oppression, interact.”22 This study illustrates applied trans studies in action; by centring respect for the participants’ agency, the researchers were able to learn valuable information on the ways transphobia interacts with biases against people with dementia and how that impacts their access to care.

The article focuses on first-hand accounts given by four participants who care for trans and non-binary people living with dementia. Informal elder care usually comes through family, but two of the accounts highlight non-normative paths into caregiving roles through community and chosen family relations.23 By focusing on the carers, this article elucidates the importance of intergenerational community and interpersonal advocacy in ameliorating the life circumstances of older trans adults. The article concludes with recommendations from the participants on how to improve support for trans and non-binary older adults living with dementia and their carers,24 further demonstrating how thoughtful research and communication can help materially improve trans lives. From this, we can ask: How do disability and ageism impact trans lives? What steps — interpersonally and institutionally — can we take as activists to improve care for trans people as they age?

Sumerau, J. E. “Rejecting Simplicity in Favour of Embracing the Complexity of Multifaceted Health and Aging,” Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging, 44–59. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020.

This chapter is from a book exploring how “sex, gender, and sexual marginalization may impact health, healthcare access and experience, and understandings of the self over the life course”25 through three autoethnographic accounts. In her chapter, J. E. Sumerau offers a profoundly personal account of the ways class, sexual, and gender marginalization have impacted her health. She calls into question narrow models of health by discussing how her lived experiences, both historically and at the time of writing, complicate what “being healthy” means.26 By drawing on both personal experience and existing knowledge, Sumerau portrays how intersections of sexuality, gender/trans identity, class, and race shape health and aging. She calls on the reader to reject simplistic conceptions of health and aging in favour of focusing on the complex ways our multifaceted lives impact health and aging, and focusing on the “multitude of pathways and possibilities for living healthy lives.”27

This reading displays how personal accounts of the lived pasts and presents of trans people can be a useful tool in understanding the social and healthcare realities of trans people as they age, while also centring trans voices in what needs to be done to improve their life circumstances. It asks us to consider: How can we begin to address the impact of intersectional marginalizations on trans health and aging? As an autoethographic account, this reading also asks: What counts as research? How can academics and activists use this strategy to gain insights into trans aging?

“The Indigenous Doctor Helping Trans Youth.” Context. January 8, 2020. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hj-a5AE-VM.

This short documentary features Dr. James Makokis, a two-spirit member of the Saddle Lake Cree Nation. Dr. Makokis is a family physician who focuses on transgender health in his practice. He works to help the two-spirit youth in his community access gender affirming care without pushing them into Western ideas of gender. Beyond the clinic, Dr. Makokis and his husband host two-spirit sweats and meetings at their home to build community with two-spirit youth and their families. Dr. Makokis fosters holistic wellness for two-spirit youth in his communities by integrating trans medicine, traditional Cree teachings, and ceremony. 28

Dr. Makokis is a fantastic example of the strength of intergenerational connections and storytelling. His work shows that considerate healthcare for members of a marginalized community requires practitioners from within that community; his two-spirit, Cree identity not only allows his patients to see someone like themselves, but it also allows him to offer culturally competent care. Dr. Makokis’ patient-centred, culturally informed, and community-based model for trans and two-spirit healthcare represents a promising future for trans health. From this, we can ask: How does Dr. Makokis’ approach address the intersectional oppressions faced by two-spirit people? How does Dr. Makokis build intergenerational solidarity? What would culturally competent gender affirming care look like for you/your community?

De Graeve, Katrien, Ladan Rahbari, and Nika Looman. “From Allochronism to Generationality: Ageism in Queer Communities in Belgium,” Sexualities 28, no. 1–2 (August 4, 2023): 251–67. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607231193312.

This paper explores the ways ageism creates intergenerational divides in queer feminist spaces through interviews with trans and lesbian women* above the age of 50 in Belgium. While it focuses its critiques on Queer and Feminist Studies, the concepts explored hold important insights for Trans Studies. The interviewees’ statements and the researcher’s fieldnotes paint a complex portrait of the shifting meanings of identity labels like “lesbian,” “trans,” and “woman.”29 The paper illustrates how these shifting meanings and changes in preferred language contribute to the ageist discrimination that the participants faced in queer advocacy spaces, despite them having a long history in these spaces.30 The researcher’s fieldnotes give us a personal insight into the uncomfortable feelings that can arise when disagreement and conflict arise in discussions of sex and gender politics.31 This paper calls on its readers to consider what is lost when the ideas and accomplishments of second-wave feminism are discarded, and the ways ageist assumptions push older people out of activist spaces.

This reading prompts questions for academics and activists: How am I perpetuating ageism? How can we learn to listen across generations when uncomfortable feelings arise? What can we learn from older people’s understandings and politics? What can Trans Studies gain from intergenerational solidarity?

*The personal accounts of gender in this paper complicate the category of “women” as solely a gender identity. I use the term women to refer to the broad social context in which these individuals exist, as a more in-depth exploration is beyond the scope of this short annotation.

Clinton, Thomi. The Outwords Archive. By Mason Funk. Theoutwordsarchive.org, October 15, 2024.

In this interview, Thomi Clinton talks about her experience growing up in rural Arkansas during the 70s and 80s as a gay boy, moving to LA and transitioning, and being a trans community leader. Coming from a background of community organizing, she launched the Transgender Health and Wellness Center in 2018 to create a space for herself and other trans people to work and to offer resources to her trans community. She faced enormous pushback from others in the LGBTQ+ community, mostly cis gay men.32 She remarks that when talking about supporting the LGBTQ+ community, people often only think of cisgender day men, leaving trans people behind.33 She calls on us to consider how we are supporting trans people in our LGBTQ+ activism.34 Clinton discusses how, even within trans communities, there are issues with a lack of acceptance and respect for non-binary and gender non-conforming trans people from binary trans folks.35 She herself is making a conscious effort to be more inclusive of non-binary people in the language she uses.36 She says that within LGBTQ+ advocacy, we need to “spread that equity evenly across all those letters. Then that’s going to be equality.”37

This interview offers many important lessons for trans activists and allows us to learn from someone with decades of experience. Clinton shares some potentially controversial opinions about police reform, drug use, and trans survival strategies. Hearing these opinions with the context of her life that informed them gives us an opportunity to explore discomforting, consider what shapes opinions we might disagree with, and consider them thoughtfully. This interview asks us: What strategies can we learn from Thomi Clinton as activists? How can we combat transphobia within LGBTQ+ communities? Did she say something that made me feel uncomfortable, and what can I learn from that discomfort?

Jaguar Mary X. ‘Fearlessness Is Required’: Jaguar Mary X Believes in the Power of Revolutionary Elders. By Sterling Cruz-Herr. Them, July 31, 2023. https://www.them.us/story/jaguar-mary-x-performance-artist-trans-elder-project.

This article is one from a series of interviews exploring the power of intergenerational connection. In this interview, Jaguar Mary X talks about the responsibility that comes with elderhood as a Black, non-binary artist. When asked what is called of trans elders, they say: “We are here holding this massive power of representation.”38 They frame this power dually as a duty and an opportunity to embody Black trans possibilities for younger generations. They call elderhood “a gateway that we are constantly walking through. I walk through a gateway that someone else showed me.”39 This framing reminds us that intergenerational solidarity is a two-way street; trans activists, young and old, need to be understanding of our different positionalities and the responsibilities and opportunities that come with them to work collaboratively towards liberation.

Later in the interview, Jaguar Mary X discusses a conversation they had with their mother after finding out that she was still referring to them as her daughter.

She was like, “I don’t even know what to [call you]. What should I say?” And I was like, “Mom, I don’t even know. I don’t know what to tell you.” And she said, “Well, okay, I’m gonna think about it.” A little while later, she came back with, “I know what I’m gonna call you: You’re my firstborn.” I was like, “Thank you. That is beautiful. That is beautiful and true and real.”

This is a touching personal example of how patience and understanding can help forge loving relationships, especially concerning the terminology trans people use to define themselves. This article asks us: What role do I play in fostering intergenerational connection?

Endnotes

1 Matthew Adan et al., “Worry and Wisdom: A Qualitative Study of Transgender Elders’ Perspectives on Aging,” Transgender Health 6, no. 6 (2021): 333. https://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2020.0098

2 Claudia Castañeda, “Childhood,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (May 1, 2014): 59. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399605

3 Claudia Castañeda, 59.

4 Claudia Castañeda, 60.

5 Claudia Castañeda, 60.

6 Julian, Gill-Peterson, “Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (November 1, 2018): 610. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7090073

7 Julian, Gill-Peterson, 610.

8 Julian, Gill-Peterson, 610.

9 Syrus Marcus Ware, “All Power to All People?: Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (May 1, 2017): 170-180. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814961

10 Syrus Marcus Ware, 172.

11 Syrus Marcus Ware, 174.

12 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha, “Disability Justice/Stonewall’s Legacy, or: Love Mad Trans Black Women When They Are Alive and Dead, Let Their Revolutions Teach Your Resistance All the Time,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 58. http://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.2.0054

13 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha, 60.

14 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha, 60.

15 Syrus Marcus Ware, 174-175.

16 Leah Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha, 61.

17 Thomas J . Billard et al., “Whither Trans Studies? On Fields, Post-Disciplines, and the Need for an Applied Transgender Studies,” Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies 1, no. 1-2 (June 13, 2022): 4. https://doi.org/10.57814/pe84-4348

18 Thomas J . Billard et al., 4.

19 Thomas J . Billard et al., 2.

20 Marjorie Silverman and Alexandre Baril, “‘We Have to Advocate so Hard for Ourselves and Our People’: Caring for a Trans or Non-Binary Older Adult with Dementia,” LGBTQ+ Family: An Interdisciplinary Journal 19, no. 3 (January 27, 2023): 188. https://doi.org/10.1080/27703371.2023.2169215.

21 Marjorie Silverman and Alexandre Baril, 190-191.

22 Marjorie Silverman and Alexandre Baril, 191.

23 Marjorie Silverman and Alexandre Baril, 195.

24 Marjorie Silverman and Alexandre Baril, 204.

25 Nowakowski, Alexandra C. H., J. E. Sumerau and Nik M. Lampe, “Introduction,” Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging, 7.

26 J. E. Sumerau,“Rejecting Simplicity in Favour of Embracing the Complexity of Multifaceted Health and Aging,” Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging, 47.

27 J. E. Sumerau, 59.

28 “The Indigenous Doctor Helping Trans Youth.” Context. January 8, 2020. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hj-a5AE-VM.

29 Katrien De Graeve, Ladan Rahbari, and Nika Looman, “From Allochronism to Generationality: Ageism in Queer Communities in Belgium,” Sexualities 28, no. 1–2 (August 4, 2023): 252. https://doi.org/10.1177/13634607231193312.

30 Katrien De Graeve, Ladan Rahbari, and Nika Looman, 258

31 Katrien De Graeve, Ladan Rahbari, and Nika Looman, 261

32 Thomi Clinton, The Outwords Archive, interview by Mason Funk, Theoutwordsarchive.org, (October 15, 2024): 51:30.

33 Thomi Clinton, 1:44:00.

34 Thomi Clinton, 1:44:00.

35 Thomi Clinton, 1:27:30-1:30:30.

36 Thomi Clinton, 1:29:30.

37 Thomi Clinton, 1:44:30.

38 Jaguar Mary X, ‘Fearlessness Is Required’: Jaguar Mary X Believes in the Power of Revolutionary Elders. By Sterling Cruz-Herr. Them, July 31, 2023.

39 Jaguar Mary X

Works Cited

Adan, Matthew, Melissa Scribani, Nancy Tallman, Christopher Wolf-Gould, Lisa Campo-Engelstein, and Anne Gadomski. “Worry and Wisdom: A Qualitative Study of Transgender Elders’ Perspectives on Aging,” Transgender Health 6, no. 6 (2021): 303-379. https://doi.org/10.1089/trgh.2020.0098

Billard, Thomas J., Avery R. Everhart and Erique Zhang. “Whither Trans Studies? On Fields, Post-Disciplines, and the Need for an Applied Transgender Studies,” Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies 1, no. 1-2 (June 13, 2022): 1-18. https://doi.org/10.57814/pe84-4348

Castañeda, Claudia. “Childhood,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 1, no. 1-2 (May 1, 2014): 59-61. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-2399605

Clinton, Thomi. The Outwords Archive. By Mason Funk. Theoutwordsarchive.org, October 15, 2024. https://theoutwordsarchive.org/interview/thomi-clinton/

Gill-Peterson, Julian. “Trans of Color Critique before Transsexuality,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 5, no. 4 (November 1, 2018): 606-620. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-7090073

Lakshmi Piepzna- Samarasinha, Leah. “Disability Justice/Stonewall’s Legacy, or: Love Mad Trans Black Women When They Are Alive and Dead, Let Their Revolutions Teach Your Resistance All the Time,” QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking 6, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 54-62. http://doi.org/10.14321/qed.6.2.0054

Nowakowski, Alexandra C. H., J. E. Sumerau and Nik M. Lampe. “Introduction,” Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging, 4-16. Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020.

Sumerau, J. E. “Rejecting Simplicity in Favour of Embracing the Complexity of Multifaceted Health and Aging,” Transformations in Queer, Trans, and Intersex Health and Aging, 44–59.

Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2020. “The Indigenous Doctor Helping Trans Youth.” Context. January 8, 2020. Video, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Hj-a5AE-VM.

Ware, Syrus Marcus. “All Power to All People?: Black LGBTTI2QQ Activism, Remembrance, and Archiving in Toronto,” Transgender Studies Quarterly 4, no. 2 (May 1, 2017): 170-180. https://doi.org/10.1215/23289252-3814961

Growing Old and Being Trans: How Can Trans Studies Take Better Care of Our Elders?

Comments

Leave a Reply Cancel reply