I did another outreach last night, this time to students and faculty at the Institute of Transpersonal Psychology. There was a good turn (I believe close to 100 people), which was the largest-to-date of the monthly series of talks and lectures that ITP has sponsored.

The format was pretty typical of the outreach events I do, with five speakers representing a range trans/intersex people. Besides myself there was the ever-fabulous James Green, an intersex activist, a trans woman and the parent of a trans man. (Incidently, it was great to see a parent represented. Too often SO and family are overlooked.) It seemingly went well. The audience seemed quite engaged, the moderator had to cut-off questions overwise we would’ve been there all night, and I had some nice informal conversations with people afterwards.

The challenge, as always, is how do you condense a life into 10-15 minutes? Particularly when I was doing double-duty as both the representive crossdresser and representative drag queen. Likewise, how do you educate people about the group(s) that you belong to in 10-15 minutes? (Aside from talking too fast.) While I’m leery of speaking for someone else—and prefer to stick to talking about my own experiences and what I’ve personally observed—given that crossdressers are the “dark matter” of the trans universe, I do feel a need to try to speak on others behalf. Because just (as James says) there’s no one way to be trans, there’s no one way to be a crossdresser or drag queen. Consequently, I want to make sure people know that while I can talk about my story in detail, it’s only one of many stories. Likewise, I also think it’s important to provide some context to my story with the occasional statistic, observation about differences/similarities among my peers, etc.

It’s a challenge…