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…