Jennifer Finney Boylan

Opinion
Is Being Trans Like Being an Immigrant?

Both involve a journey. And both are under assault by this administration.
Jennifer Finney Boylan

By Jennifer Finney Boylan

Contributing Opinion Writer

April 3, 2019

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The narrative of migration can provide a helpful metaphor for the lives of some trans people.CreditCreditMauricio Lima for The New York Times

Last week, a 9-year-old American citizen, Julia Isabel Amparo Medina, was detained at the Mexican border for 30 hours. Although she had made the trip every school day from her home in Tijuana, Mexico, to school in California, authorities claimed they could not identify her.

Back in January, two British women angrily accosted the human rights activist Sarah McBride after a conference that had brought together members of Congress and the parents of transgender youth. The women, members of a group that denies the humanity of transgender people, referred to Ms. McBride with male pronouns and accused her of championing rape and the erasure of lesbians.

On the surface, it might seem as if the detention of Julia and the cruelty of transphobes is unrelated. But both hatreds, in fact, rise from the same dark spring.

“People who have transitioned,” those anti-trans activists seemed to suggest, “aren’t sending their best. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”

Actually, unless I missed something, they didn’t say a word about people like Sarah McBride and me being good people. Mostly they implied, as the president once said of undocumented immigrants, that we’re not people. That we’re animals.

Comparing the trans experience to those of other marginalized groups is awkward, and not least because gender and race and poverty have different, if entwined histories. We conflate them at our peril.

Still, the narrative of migration can provide a helpful metaphor for the lives of some trans folks. This isn’t true for all of us, to be sure. But for someone who transitioned midlife, like me, it works pretty well.

I’m 60 years old now. I was 40 when I set out on the dangerous crossing that led from the place where I was born to these green fields of womanhood.

From my earliest memory, the old country — so to speak — felt like a foreign place; for me it was, at least at times, a place of hunger. I knew that if I stayed in the country where I was born — dear old BoyLand — I would never survive. And so I set out for this new land, the place I’d been dreaming of, one way or another, since I was 6 years old. In 2000, when I came out, I finally got my green card.

On the whole, my life has been lucky and blessed. But womanhood has also come with new threats. One night, outside a bar in Waterville, Me., a would-be suitor grabbed me roughly by the wrist and said, “I tell you what, Jenny, we can do this the easy way, or we can do this the hard way.” (I escaped from him, but I think about that night sometimes, and what might have happened if I had not.)

I can assure you that no one transitions from male to female to get a better deal. And yet, even at its harshest, the world I live in now feels like the one for which God made me.

Has my experience of womanhood been identical to that of other women my age? Of course not. I speak, sometimes, with a hint of a foreign accent, a vestigial trace of the country where I was born.

As Zadie Smith writes in her novel “White Teeth,” “This is the other thing about immigrants (’fugees, émigrés, travelers): They cannot escape their history any more than you yourself can lose your shadow.”

I’m all too aware of the way my past informs my present, and there are plenty of times when I long to have lived a life unburdened by the past.

And yet, just because I began my life somewhere else, I am no less a citizen of the country I have made my own. My womanhood is not a matter for debate. What it is, above all, is a fact. It is, however, a fact that cannot possibly be understood without imagination.

When members of the present administration claim that people like me should be “erased,” are they not saying, in so many words, “Build that wall?” Are they not echoing the cries of every xenophobic bigot throughout history in furiously demanding that I Go Back Where I Came From?

I’m not going back. I’m staying here, in the land I struggled so hard to reach. It is here, as a woman, that I’ve built a home. Is where I began my days really so much more important than where I wound up?

There are all kinds of women in this world: Amelia Earhart and Aretha Franklin; Sonia Sotomayor and Kathy Griffin; Bonnie Raitt and Toni Morrison.

If there is room in this world for all these women, surely there might be some room for me.

What the world needs now is not more walls — to keep out the strange, the different, the new. What the world needs now is not hatred — of men, of women, of anyone in between.

What the world needs now is bridges: across rivers, across genders, across every last border that divides us, one soul from another.

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Jennifer Finney Boylan, a contributing opinion writer, is a professor of English at Barnard College and the author of the novel “Long Black Veil.” @JennyBoylan