Shannon's Queerest Space

I’m a radical genderqueer who lives in Washington, DC. I was  born in 1972 and grew up in St. Louis, MO, where i suffered through twelve years of Catholic elementary and high school. I have two younger brothers, a younger sister, a mother, and a father, and we almost always had a dog around.  Aside from being a social outcast at school from fifth-twelfth grades, i had a safe, privileged, and very happy childhood.

On February 7, 2002, only six weeks after his diagnosis, my dad died unexpectedly of secondary liver cancer of unknown primary origin. It was a horrible experience and grieving has been a long process, although things are significantly easier now, five and a half years later. He was a wonderful man. Even if he was a Republican and didn't always "get" my politics or my identities, he always loved me unconditionally – something i’m not sure that i could do nearly as well myself if i’d raised a child who was as conservative as i am radical.

In 1991, i went to Vassar College in New York State to major in International Studies, with a minor in French. Ten years later, i got my Masters degree in Women's Studies at George Washington University. My principle academic interest is in lesbian/gay/bisexual/trans/intersex issues, with a particular focus on trans lives and experiences. I wrote my MA thesis on how trans and genderqueer youth in US high schools deal with their gender-congruent, heterosexual peers. I've since turned my thesis into a book manuscript and am trying to get it published, a process that isn't going very far very fast.

I moved to Washington, DC, after i graduated from Vassar in 1995, lived in the city until 2004, and then moved to suburban Maryland so i could buy my first place – a nice condo with wonderful windows and sunlight, which i couldn’t have bought without the help of the Neighborhood Assistance Corporation of America. The ‘burbs, however, aren’t for me. So with great joy, i moved back to DC in April when my girlfriend and i bought a house together in the Fort Dupont Park section of Southeast DC. We now live in a great neighborhood with Katie’s two kittens and my two adult cats.

I am so, so happy to be back in the city! I love being in a place where i can hear people across the street playing basketball, where neighbors talk on their front stoops, where i can watch kids riding their bikes, where there's a bus stop less than a block away, and where there are two Metro stations within a mile and i can walk to one every weekday morning. Granted, our area doesn't have any of those "urban amenities" that one usually associates with white people moving back into the city: bookstores, coffee shops, internet cafes, movie theatres, live-performance theatres, etc. But Katie and i couldn't afford any of that. So we're in a massively under-resourced, under-funded, high-poverty part of the city (although there are parts of DC that are significantly worse-off than ours). And while it does have its crime, i generally feel really safe and haven't looked back for an instant since we moved.

During the day, i play Program & Donor Relations Associate with the National AIDS Fund, an organization that does philanthropy around HIV/AIDS services throughout the US. I have a hand in lots of projects there, and i like that i’m not stuck with one task all the time. I’m also very pleased to be working for an organization that’s not only fighting HIV/AIDS but that is doing so while deeply rooted in a commitment to seeing AIDS as a social justice issue.

That commitment to broad-based social justice pervades much of my life and my politics. I'm an out, proud queer. But i also identify as radical, feminist, white, anti-racist, anti-assimilationist, opinionated, stubborn, (sometimes) outspoken, androgynous, upper-middle class, agnostic, and temporarily able-bodied.

However, i try to be involved with issues not because they overlap with my identities but because i agree with the political goals of certain movements.  I can’t support an organization that only works, for instance, on “gay issues” or “women’s issues”; people and movements need to be willing to look at the intersections between issues – how race issues affect LGBTQ people, how sexual orientation issues affect men, how gender issues affect people with disabilities, how issues of embodiment affect immigrants, and so on and so forth.

I also need to be involved in movements merely because it’s the right thing to do, regardless of whether or not the issues impacts me personally. I must, for instance, support the immigrant rights movement, even though i’m not an immigrant. I must support calls for racial reconciliation in Jena, LA, and every other place in our country, even though i am unlikely to ever live in the Deep South and even though i am white. I must support the rights of workers to unionize, even though i’ve never worked in a factory or had a service job. I must support disability access to all buildings and facilities, even though i have not (yet) ever needed a wheelchair or crutches. I must stand up against churches being burned and swastikas being spray-painted onto non-Christian places of worship, even though i am completely agnostic. I must oppose “English only” movements, even though English is the only language that i speak fluently.

I don’t do these things because they’re about my individual, daily life but because they’re all about human rights and about individuals and groups of people being treated with dignity and respect.

The end point of liberation movements cannot be assimilation into the larger culture. Liberation movements need to seek to change the larger culture, in large or small ways, in order to make that culture more just. For instance, as a queer person, i don’t want straight people to see me as “just like them” or to ignore my sexual orientation and gender identity differences. I want them to acknowledge my uniqueness, to celebrate it, and to be willing to change the ways that they see other people. While, yes, i want the right to marry, i also want us to examine why we only give certain rights to people based on their marital status and why we limit marriage to only two individuals. Shouldn’t everyone be entitled to health insurance, instead of having to get it through a partner’s employer? Why can’t three adults, entering into an equal and consensual relationship, be as valid a married unit as two adults?

I don’t want to be accepted by or disappear into a homophobic, transphobic (racist, sexist, xenophobic, ableist, etc., etc.) culture; i want to radically change that culture so that it’s no longer any of those horrible things.

And while “changing the world” is a bit challenging, i do what i can in my daily life to help make that change happen. I tell everyone i can about my queerness. I try to stand up for my beliefs in conversations with people, although i’m admittedly not always very good at this. I write the occasional letter to the editor. I regularly called or, more frequently, e-mailed my Representatives and Senators when I lived in Maryland. (Being a DC resident, i have no longer have voting representation in Congress.) I attend marches and rallies, although the older i get the more i doubt their efficacy. I’m trying to get my thesis published so that more people learn about the lives of gender non-conforming teens. For 13 years, i sang with a group that gets messages of feminism across through music and even occasionally humor.

Is that sufficient? No. But i only have so much time, energy, and money. It’s always a struggle between “doing something” and taking time for myself. There’s never enough of either one, much less of both.  

And i want desperately to help children have better lives. So for 11 years, i volunteered with a local domestic violence program, where i spent an hour each week with children who come from situations of homelessness, drug abuse, and/or domestic violence. The other related program, where i've been for since 2007, is a program that supports gender non-conforming children and their families. I go to their monthly gatherings and either play with the kids or sit in on their parents’ meetings.

I also long very much to mentor a child. There are so many young people out there who have no positive adult role models, who have no adults in their lives who truly listen to them or take them seriously, who have no adults who affirm them or their identities, whose only adult contacts are with people who constantly nag at and degrade them, who have little adult guidance and support. Watching how parents treat their children – the derision, the lack of respect, the refusal to take their kids seriously, the threats of and actual physical violence, the sexual abuse, the emotional neglect – it’s a wonder that so many people turn out as well as they do.

I’m hoping that the latter program i volunteer with will eventually yield up a child whom i can help mentor. While there are many, many kinds of young people whom i would love to mentor, i have skills to listen to and be a presence for a gender non-conforming child that many other people who want to be mentors (and those who don’t) do not have. So for now, that is my “mentee goal”.

Relatedly, i very strongly support youth rights – to identify as queer, to be taken seriously in their sexual orientation and gender identity, to have safe and consensual sex (although i don’t believe that teens having sex is a very good idea), to have complete information on safer sex, to have access to all kinds of contraception, to be free from violence at school and at home and on the streets, to be free from harassment of any sort, to read whatever books they want to without censorship, to be cared for and respected by adults, to be guided gently into making good decisions for themselves, to be treated with dignity but not to be expected to act like adults, to be seen as fully human as adults are, not to go to schools that are like prisons, not to be sent to prisons when what they really need is strong social services that have full governmental support….

The one thing i do not support for youth is anyone driving under the age of 18. There are way, way too many young people being killed and killing others on our roadways. Cars are a deadly weapon that we as a culture – and that many youth because of their age – do not take at all seriously. Let’s let people vote at 16 and have them wait until at least 18 to drive. We’ll have fewer people being killed, and we may have some more folks out getting involved in the political process. After all, no one’s going to die because some 17 year old votes drunk!

Other things that  make me passionate are singing (which i do with DC’s Bread & Roses Feminist Singers), reading, and languages. I’ll read just about anything, although i don’t enjoy heterosexual romances that have no other redeeming plot points, Westerns, or mysteries. I read to have fun, to learn my own history, and, most importantly, to get a glimpse into the lives and experiences of people who are different from me.

I also love languages. The fact that sound combinations and words that mean nothing to me form the basis for billions of other people’s understanding of the world totally fascinates me. And i'm amazed by the fact that, without words, things become unimaginable, unthinkable, unknowable. This is part of the reason that folks have such a hard time with transgender and genderqueer in this country. English just doesn't have the words for those ways of being. (See my gender pages for more long these lines.)

And much to my surprise, after several years of earning very poor grades in French in middle school, i’ve actually turned out to be pretty good with languages – for someone raised monolingually in the US, at least. I’m proficient in French, used to be proficient in Wolof, know a tiny amount of Spanish, and used to know a little Russian, ASL, and Haïtian Créole. My biggest “linguistic goal” for the rest of my life is to become at least a little proficient in Spanish, which is hardly a “foreign” language in the US anymore – and it never was “foreign” in many parts of this country. I need Spanish to be able to get around and talk to people, although that is less the case now that i’ve moved from a predominantly Latino/a suburb to a majority African American neighborhood in the city. But still. I meet Latino/a folks all the time, and not being able to speak to them, when i’m relatively good at learning languages, just seems self-centered and lazy on my part

What else is there to say? Perhaps not much right now, short of continuing to write out my entire political philosophy. If you’ve made it this far, congratulations! As is relatively apparent, another part of my bio should read, “I’m not very good at being concise!”

Want more exciting info? Have comments? Suggestions? Insights? Drop me a line at hugdyke @ gmail.com. Thanks!