Kate Bornstein, 60, a leading transgender activist, said identity is about living to your heart’s content while also respecting how others choose to identify themselves. (Photo by Casey Morgan)
This schedule includes some highlights of the annual Southern Comfort Conference. A marketplace and additional seminars and workshops also take place in many time slots.
Sept. 29
7 p.m. to 11 p.m. — Informal reception
Oct. 1
8 a.m. to noon — Registration
Oct. 2
9 a.m. – 6 p.m. — Robert Eads Health Project
9 a.m. to 10:25 a.m. — Seminar: Being Transgender on Campus
9 a.m. to 10:25 a.m. — Seminar: Transgender and Workplace, Learned Attributes
10:35 a.m. to noon — Gender Identity and Changing Discrimination Laws
5 p.m. to 6 p.m. — Newcomer’s reception
7 p.m. to 1 a.m. — Transmen’s welcome party
Oct. 3
9:30 a.m. to noon and 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. — Career expo
10:35 a.m. to noon — Intersexed People
10:35 a.m. to noon — Female to Male Gender Reconstruction Surgery
2 p.m. to 3:25 p.m. — Trans People of Color
3:35 p.m. to 5 p.m. — Punk and Queer: Negotiations of Queer Identities as Members of Subcultures
3:35 p.m. to 5 p.m. — The Total Feminization Plan
3 p.m. to 6 p.m. — People of color reception
10:30 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. — “SOCO-A-GOGO” with live entertainment
Oct. 4
10:35 a.m. to noon — Kids of Trans panel
Noon -1:45 p.m. — lunch featuring speakers Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality; and Donna Rose, transgender activist
3 p.m. to 5 p.m. — NCTE Reception
5 p.m. – 6 p.m. — Screening of “Still Black,” a documentary of black transmen
8:30 p.m. – 9:30 p.m. — performance by Jade Esteban Estrada
Cole Thaler is a gay man. But, he explained, he was “assigned female at birth.”
Confused?
Many people who fall into the traditional gender binary of male or female, including gay men and lesbians, acknowledge they sometimes can’t quite grasp the wide variety of gender identifications included in the so-called “LGBT” community.
Thaler, 31, lives in Atlanta and serves as the transgender rights attorney for Lambda Legal. He said he understands there can be confusion, but the best way to understand how people identify is to accept people as who they say they are.
Thaler stressed he didn’t have the “classic” transgender experience people hear about, where a person knew as soon as they could think that they were born in the wrong body. For him, and others, identifying as transgender was a gradual process.
“I was assigned female at birth, but as an adult I felt ‘not female,’” he said. “But I was unclear how to be my true self.
“When I came out as transgender in law school [at Northeastern University School of Law in Boston, Mass.], I was lucky to come out with a wide range of identities around me — I knew there were large numbers and space between or beyond the binary,” he said. “This allowed me the space and time to find the identity that was right for me.”
Thaler said when he first came out as transgender, he identified as “genderqueer” and declined to take on a male or female identity. But after he graduated and entered the work force, people began identifying him as male and he started thinking and functioning as a man.
“This started solidifying my identity as a male,” he said.
‘ENOUGH BOXES’
Transgender — an umbrella term for people who don’t fit into the established gender roles set up by mainstream society — is often the word used to describe cross dressers, post-operative transsexuals, people transitioning from male to female and those transitioning from female to male.
And then there are so many others, including effeminate gay men and masculine lesbians who may not actually identify as transgender.
“Anyone who is gender variant can fit under the transgender umbrella,” said Cat Turner, business manager for the Southern Comfort Conference, the largest transgender conference in the nation, held annually in Atlanta. This year’s conference, with the theme “Celebrate Life,” is set for Sept. 30-Oct. 5.
“I firmly believe we have enough boxes to start with,” said Turner, who said if asked to pick a label, then genderqueer is the “box” to check.
“A lot of people ask my friends, ‘What is Cat?’ And they say, ‘Cat’s just Cat.’ We tend in this society to put people on a specific space on a spectrum, but sometimes I wake up feeling more feminine and others I wake up feeling more masculine. We all slide along this scale.”
More and more young people are casting aside the gender binary, Turner added, and simply identifying as queer or genderqueer. By taking on the label genderqueer, they don’t specifically identify as male or female.
“The youth … are not concerned with trans, gay, straight, bisexual — they have so much more freedom of expression than when I was their age,” Turner said. “Their inner being is so strong, they demand to be able to be who they are.”
This year’s Southern Comfort Conference includes the second annual Career Expo, numerous workshops, and a new people of color reception, something Turner said the organization has been working on for awhile as more black transmen come out.
Turner expects close to 1,000 to attend over the long weekend of events; the conference consistently shows that nearly 40 percent of attendees are newcomers.
GENDERQUEER REVOLUTION?
For Atlantan Jae Cripe, 21, genderqueer is a label mostly taken on by privileged people in academic settings.
“A lot of my peers identify as genderqueer, but what I’ve observed is that many who do [identify as genderqueer] come from colleges and live a very privileged life. This term comes out from people immersed in academics where they have access to that language and theory,” he said, but noted not all genderqueer people come from such a background.
After experimenting with how to label his identity, such as genderqueer, Cripe realized he is simply a young man.
“I have a binary identity, my gender is a man. But my sexuality is queer,” he said.
Cripe grew up a “very unusual girl” and came out as transgender at 16 after meeting another trans person and realizing this is where his identity best fit.
“I used to go by ‘tranny boi,’ but those words make it like my gender ...
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