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LUCY MUKERJEE:

For context, because I know I'm going to ask you a lot of questions, so I'll give you a little background of me, so it's not too weird. I'm a queer film curator and activist. I work primarily with Tribeca film festival and the Programmers of Color Collective. I joined OUTWORDS at the end of last year, and I really find that these conversations have been inspiring

LUCY MUKERJEE:

and enriching, because I get to hear so many different perspectives and so many great stories. It gets me thinking about community and purpose and all of this.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Well, nice to hear that you have a media background and that you work at Tribeca. It's a great festival and organization. I was living in New York last year, before the pandemic hit. It was just before the festival.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I was planning on going to a lot of it last year. I was in "Disclosure," which was programmed and just, yeah. So anyway, it's like, the Universe wanted us to meet. Here we are.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Exactly. I love the way you put that. Thank you. All right, well, let's get started. Kristie, feel free to hit record and do your thing.

KRISTIE TAIWO-MAKANJUOLA

Perfect. We're all good. If you guys need

[inaudible].

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. Thank you. I think I'm in a good spot for wifi, but if I cut out at all, please just wave and I'll move. Susan, I think we're going to start at the beginning, with your childhood and upbringing, and then we'll move forward, chronologically, to present day. So let's start with the easy stuff. Can you say your name and where you were born and raised?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yeah. My name is Susan Stryker and I was born in 1961. Where I was raised? That's actually not an easy question. My father was in the U.S. military and so I was conceived in Munich, Germany. I was born at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. I lived there until I was almost two,

SUSAN STRYKER:

at which time my father went to Korea, and my mother and I went back to their hometown in Arkansas. Jonesboro, Arkansas, where we lived until I was three. And then we moved to Fort Hood, Texas, and then we moved to Schofield barracks in Hawaii. And then my father got sent to Vietnam and my mother and I went back to Jonesborough, Arkansas, where I started kindergarten.

SUSAN STRYKER:

First grade in Fort Sill, Oklahoma, again. Then we lived in Germany for three years. Now I'm all of 10 years old and we've moved back to Oklahoma where I then lived-- Well, we lived in what I consider my hometown of Lawton, Oklahoma adjacent to the Fort Sill, military base, through high school. And then I went to the University of Oklahoma for my undergraduate degree

SUSAN STRYKER:

and then to Berkeley. I've never really left the Bay area ever since. Got here in '83.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. That's a lot of moving around at a very young age. So that makes you self-sufficient.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Well, I was telling that to someone who was far more into astrology than I am. They said, "Oh, what's your sign?" I said, "Cancer." And they said, "Oh, that makes a lot of sense for you

SUSAN STRYKER:

because you carry your home with you wherever you go." And I thought, well, that's just how I was raised. It's like, people say, "Where are you from?" And if I'm feeling very cheeky, I'll say, "I'm from a certain moment in the global deployment of the U.S. and the immediate post World War II contexts. I am from U.S. global empire during the cold war. That's where I'm from."

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I love that answer. That's great. Not too cheeky at all. Can you describe ... Well, this is a bit broader for you. But I was going to ask, can you describe the home where you grew up and maybe I'm asking about then, your mother and you obviously spent time in several different homes as you were coming of age. Do you feel like there's some commonalities among them?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yeah. My mother was sort of the really steady presence in my childhood. Because my father was in the army, he would often be gone for weeks at a time, when they were on military maneuvers and deployments. He was away twice in combat zones; once in Korea, once in Vietnam. It was my mom and me a lot for my first seven years.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And then I had a brother who was born in 1968, when I was seven. And then my father passed away quite suddenly and unexpectedly when I was 13. So my mom raised my brother and me as a single mom. I would say it wasn't a particularly remarkable childhood,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it seemed like the experiences of a lot of the other military families that we knew. It's like, picking up and moving every 12 to 18 to 36 months, someplace. There was not any particular sort of strife or dysfunction in the family. As they say, all families are unhappy in their own ways,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it's just like in the ways that there was, like, anything unhappy in my growing up years seemed pretty routine. Just that kind of really quotidian generational parent-child conflict. But yeah, I mean, there was no alcoholism, there was no abuse. I mean, there was nothing that was dramatic at all. We were just a pretty unremarkable lower middle class,

SUSAN STRYKER:

working class, white family, with a member of the household who was in the military. My dad was a Sergeant, he was an NCO, was not an officer. So yeah, I mean, a lot of my growing up years seem pretty unremarkable in terms of socioeconomics and family dynamics.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

And did it feel like a progressive or more conservative upbringing? Was it particularly religious?

SUSAN STRYKER:

I would say in terms of politics, it's like all of my family on both sides, I would say we're kind of classic New Deal Democrats. They were Southern white working class people who really appreciated FDR

SUSAN STRYKER:

and social programs and social security and Medicare. They were kind of big government liberals who thought, well, back in the depression, it's like we were going to starve to death and the government stepped in and then we went to war and we won the war. There's a lot of military service in my family. A lot of the men on both sides did military service in world war II, Korea and Vietnam.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But I would say, if anything, they were more apolitical or independent or libertarian. It was not a family where there was a lot of talk about politics, not a lot of strong political party orientation. We never really talked about politics. But the values were what I would say were like a big basic kind of centrist liberal Democrat sort of perspective.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And the people in my immediate family, I would say, were not explicitly racist, which I also find interesting. I mean, there was certainly, what I would think of as, sort of, the ambient racism of just being in the US in the mid 20th century, and Southern white people who had certain kinds of preconceptions about race.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But my people weren't haters. They were not rightwing racist zealots of any kind. I really feel thankful for that, that there wasn't that kind of explicit racial animosity. That was something that I had to overcome. I was raised to kind of think that the civil rights movement was a good idea.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I'll even tell an anecdote. My father had just started college in 1956 or 7, whenever that was -- I'm going to forget my dates. '57, maybe. He was in the national guard as a way of paying for his college education. To be in

SUSAN STRYKER:

the national guard in Arkansas in the late 1950s, he was one of the troops who was mobilized to prevent the integration of Little Rock High School. He had to drop out in the middle of his first semester in college because he got called up to serve. And I didn't know that growing up, my mom told me when I was an adult, long after my dad had died. I said, "Well, how did he feel about

SUSAN STRYKER:

being mobilized to prevent the integration of Little Rock High School?" And she said, well, all of the guys in the unit talked about that, and they thought, well, we would actually be charged with mutiny if we disobeyed the order of our commander in chief, who was the governor. So we're gonna do what he says for now, but if it comes to him asking us

SUSAN STRYKER:

to resist or fire upon the federal troops that Eisenhower sent in to basically put down the Arkansas national guard, mom said he said that all the guys in the unit decided that the South had already lost that war once before, and they weren't going to do it again. I think that's kind of indicative of my family's politics

SUSAN STRYKER:

that at the end of the day, they were solid people who were on the right side of things, but they were not gonna rock the boat or, kind of, get out and lead in any kind of progressive way. In terms of religion, my dad's family were, I would say, kind of, run of the mill Southern Baptist,

SUSAN STRYKER:

like sort of active in their church without being explicitly fervent. I remember my grandfather, my father's father saying the 10 commandments and the golden rule, that's all I need. I don't need to go to church. My grandmother was more of a church lady. On my mom's side of the family they were all members of,

SUSAN STRYKER:

I call it one of the minor LDS churches, not who we called the Utah Mormons, the Latter Day Saints. The early Mormon movement in the 1830s and 40s, when the founder Joseph Smith was assassinated, the early movement just sort of split apart into all of these different factions. Decades later, some of the minor sectarian factions

SUSAN STRYKER:

of the original Mormon church and Mormon social movement came back together. They called themselves The Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, which has something like 200,000 members worldwide. It doesn't even exist in that form anymore, but that was my mom's family. So I grew up with relatives belonging to that church. I mean, it was certainly a part of my growing up years.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I will also even say that I think having two sides of the family involved in two different religions, but then being in the military and moving around all the time and not necessarily being around family or around church, I think that definitely contributed to some of my sense of myself as a trans person,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and then as an academic interested in what I would call the social construction of reality, that it was just part of my quotidian existence as a child to go like, Oh, these people believed that there was a farm boy in upstate New York who found some gold plates written in reformed Egyptian hieroglyphic characters that he miraculously translated by the power of God.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And then there's like the rest of the world. They both seem like incommensurable realities that co-existed in this sort of unproblematic way. I felt like I learned how to move in and out of different social realities. And then, for me, there was the sense of my own transness being like, yeah, there is this thing

SUSAN STRYKER:

that feels real to me that isn't real to other people, it doesn't manifest somehow. I think that all, kind of, got sort of tangled up in my thinking of like, to think that in some ways being trans is about making the reality that you experience real to other people and the sense that that reality wasn't something that was carved in stone, that it was in fact something that is socially produced.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It's kind of an agreed upon consensual hallucination, that it's like, as long as you're all agreeing on what counts as real, it's like you're in the same reality. But then, there are other realities, there's indigenous worldviews, there's pre-modern worldviews. They were all equally real, they were just socially different. I do think a lot about how my peripatetic-ness,

SUSAN STRYKER:

army brat-ness, trans-ness, the multi-religious worldview that I was exposed to, that is what was a shaping experience for me as a child. The moving in and out of different realities.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I can see how that would give you a sense of independence and also the ability to sort of think for yourself and be pragmatic,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

at an early age. I'm curious, thinking about those formative years, who do you feel like were some of the strongest personalities around you, perhaps the strongest influences on you among your family, your close family, your extended family, and folks that were just sort of in and out of your homes?

SUSAN STRYKER:

I would say that my grandmother, Ruby, who is my mother's mother,

SUSAN STRYKER:

was a very powerful influence. I would say, in a way that I have a lot of compassion for now, but that I experienced as a child, as very controlling. One of the things that I have learned is that while I said in my own immediate family, there wasn't any major dysfunction, but that in my mother's family, the one that she had grown up in,

SUSAN STRYKER:

that there was actually sexual abuse and domestic violence that had happened in that family and that my grandmother, Ruby, I mean, I would to hear these stories about how she had fought her husband off with ... She slept with a knife under her pillow. Her husband had tried to kill her once, and he was involved in a lot of criminal activities

SUSAN STRYKER:

and was cheating on the family and was abusing family members. It was a pretty ugly scene. All I knew was that my grandmother Ruby was kind of a difficult person and seemed very controlling and seemed religious in a very sort of prudish, puritanical kind of way. Everyone was very reactive to her.

SUSAN STRYKER:

What I realized later on was that, I mean, she was a survivor of sexual and physical violence, and she managed to hold her family together as a poor woman with a fourth grade education, and gets rid of an abusive husband. She was very traumatized by the whole thing, so that she had clung to religion as a safeguard. It's a place where she felt she had community,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it's a place where she felt she was oriented towards an afterlife instead of this life, she thought it was instilling good values in her children. She was a traumatized survivor of sexual and physical violence and that kind of echoed through the generations, I would say. She was just a very powerful figure, not always in a way that landed easily with me,

SUSAN STRYKER:

you know? Then I would also say that my father was a very positive influence. My mother, who I did feel quite close to, and I feel I had a good relationship with that got better over the course of our lives. She, when I was a child, was more, say, emotionally reactive and unpredictable.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And I see that now as second and third order consequences of the family that she grew up in. But my dad was always the calm, grounded, centered person, and all my family members would sort of joke about it in more recent years and say--my dad's name was Richard, my mom's name was Barbara--and everybody's like, Oh yeah, Richard, he was the Barbara -whisperer.

SUSAN STRYKER:

My Mom would be freaking out about something, being emotive about something, dad was the one, he was just kind of like, "It's all good, you know, it's all good." I do feel like whatever sense of groundedness or tranquility I have, or an ability to be in a space for somebody who's having a lot of emotional reaction to you, I think I got my dad's chill vibe.

SUSAN STRYKER:

In some ways, that makes it sound like I'm too harsh on my mom. And it's true that as a younger child, into my teens and 20s, I felt I had a very combative relationship with my mother. Some of it was about feeling like

SUSAN STRYKER:

she was trying to live vicariously through me somehow, and that, it was like, "Mom! Me

[pointing to self], you

[pointing away]. Just back off." So there was a lot of that. But what I realize, as the years went on, is that my mom just had this absolutely, fierce mama bear kind of love for her kids. Just don't get between her and her kids.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Second, I feel like, well, the way I've tried to write about it in recent years, and particularly this past year--my mom passed July 20th, 2020. Not of COVID, but during the pandemic--the way of framing

SUSAN STRYKER:

my lifelong relationship with my mother that kind of came to me as I was emotionally processing her death is that I feel she really gave me two kinds of life. That she gave me my physical, biological life, she birthed me, but also, sort of by example, she taught me, how do we call it,

SUSAN STRYKER:

the power of self-transformation. Here she was, Arkansas farm girl with a high school education, married her high school sweetheart, and became an army wife and is trying to raise her two kids. Then she's in her mid-thirties when her husband dies, and she's got two kids. What do you do? I just watched my mom rise.

SUSAN STRYKER:

She went to college, she finished a BA in three years, she got a master's in social work. She totally had a career. That was an inspiring thing to see. So, when I think about my mom's example in my life as a trans person,

SUSAN STRYKER:

she showed me that it's possible to transform your life. I would say those are the most significant.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Wow. That was really remarkable. Thank you. It's interesting. I think you perfectly encapsulated the dynamic between my own parents when you described yours.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Like I said, I don't feel like there's anything particularly remarkable about my growing up years. It was a pretty standard, heterosexual, nuclear family dynamic.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

But that's an extraordinary role model in your mother that you have, as you said, as your example. I wonder if you could think about your first recollection of meeting someone who identified as queer.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Do you remember sort of immediately understanding, Oh, they're like me, and do you remember how old you were when that happened?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yeah. Well, see, for me, I think it's a little different being cis-gender gay and lesbian or bi, than it is being trans. I can just say that I did not knowingly meet, in my real life, another trans person until I was fully an adult.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That I was only seeing things in mass media representations, but and that, as it turns out, there was a lot of sort of queerness and transness in my family that never got talked about. One of my mom's cousins, I didn't learn this until,

SUSAN STRYKER:

I'd say I was in my thirties, or maybe in my forties, that she had a first cousin who had run off with her high school gym teacher who then dumps her. She came back home, married a man, had some kids, and then one day sent the kids outside to play, put a gun in her mouth and blew her head off. It's like, why did I not hear that story growing up? Or after I had transitioned and I was coming out to my mom about my own queerness, and she was like, why would you be interested in that?

SUSAN STRYKER:

And it's kind of like, I don't know? A different kinds of queer kinship? I learned that my aunt, my mom's sister, who married a man, had two kids, after she died of breast cancer, her daughters found her diary and she was like writing in her diary about how crushed out and in love she was with some of the women at church.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It was like it would feel sinful and, but, it's like, well, I don't know. My grandmother, my mother's mother, I think perhaps in relationship to the kinds of trauma that she had experienced, she would often say things like, "well, I just wish I had been born a man. If I was a man, blah, blah, blah, blah." So, I think there was some gender dysphoria in there.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But now, one of my nephews is trans, I've got a first cousin whose kid is trans. I feel like there's just a lot of queerness in the family that is now out and open, but it was not in my growing up years. I don't have a clear memory of a formative encounter with someone

SUSAN STRYKER:

who was trans or queer in my growing up years. It was mostly through media. I mean, there were some encounters with men when I was young that I recognize in hindsight, like they were pedophiles and they were trying to connect with me

SUSAN STRYKER:

and it didn't happen. But it's kinda like, "Oh, that boy scout leader was actually, you know." It's like, "Oh, my fifth grade teacher in grade school, it's like, yeah, he was a pedophile. No, not my fifth grade teacher, my sixth grade teacher."

SUSAN STRYKER:

How do I want to try to explain the difference? I think if you're gay or lesbian and you're cisgender, it's like you might feel attractions to people or they might feel attractions to you, and that's how you find a queer community or start thinking about your own queerness. But for me I always felt trans, like from early childhood.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Some people say, "Oh, that doesn't really happen, that's just the story people tell." No. I always felt trans. I first recognized my feelings about my own sense of self being a problem for other people when I was about five, it was kind of like, oh-oh. It's just like, I think about myself like this, but I've just learned about genital difference, and this whole boy/girl thing seems to be connected to bodies in a way that I wasn't previously aware of. It's like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

what does this mean for me? That was a very clear memory from age of five. But I have also always been, you know, in my sexual fantasy life, even as a pre-latency period child, is I've always been oriented towards women. It was always, I like girls who like girls, I wanted girls who like girls to like me as a girl.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That was just the thing from early on. There's something I've written about, sort of like about that early childhood period of trans identification that as a four and five-year-old, I was completely in love with the song, "The Girl from Ipanema," which came out on the radio right at that time, '64, '65, '66. It was absolutely my favorite song as a child.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I remember fantasizing myself in that. I was the girl from Ipanema. I was the tall and tan, and young and lovely one, whose -- I'm going to forget the lyrics -- hips sway so gentle like a samba, and whatever. There's a line that says, she walks straight ahead to the sea,

SUSAN STRYKER:

she looks straight ahead not at he. Writing it in English in a way that is not quite grammatical, but it's like, I remember that feeling of being the desirable woman who's doing her own thing, walking towards the ocean. Men are looking at her, but she's not engaged. And it's like, I'm not returning your gaze. In hindsight, I was going like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

oh, that is such a little trans lesbian childhood sex fantasy of wanting to be a certain person who's intelligible a woman, but who is just not into guys that way. That's always been me. I didn't, as a result of that, it's like, I was oriented towards girls, people thought I was a guy, it didn't flag as queer.

SUSAN STRYKER:

So it's just like, I wasn't meeting homosexual people. If it was homosexual, people would think it would be like, I was a gay man interested in men. That's not, I mean, I'm not phobic about it, but that's not my thing. But I am gay, but it's like, I'm gay for girls, as a girl who you don't recognize me as, because I haven't transitioned.

SUSAN STRYKER:

So that was my hairball to try to disentangle. Where do I want to go with that? So because of my pre-transitional transness, my trans homosexuality, it just played in the world as straight. Even though it deeply wasn't straight.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But it did not put me in contact with a homosexual or trans world. By the time I was 19, the summer of turning from 18 to 19, I went off by myself for the first time in my life. I just took all the money that I had. I bought a standby ticket to go to Europe for the summer. It was really the first time I was not around people who knew me,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it was just like, I was totally on my own among strangers. And I feel like I kind of got a sense of myself, like, who am I to myself? Not in relationship to the world that I have been part of. I had this moment of clarity about my sexuality and gender. It was sort of that, I don't know what I'm going to do about my body going forward. Maybe I'm going to transition.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I don't know. I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I know that I am dissatisfied in my love relationships because the people that I'm attracted to are attracted to me back in a way that I can't relate to. And so, I just need to come out as having questions about my gender, having trans feelings, not thinking of myself as a guy.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I thought, I need to date bisexual women. I need to date women who are not going to be put off by my body, but who know how to have an erotic or romantic relationship with women, and I will come out to a potential partner or girlfriend or whoever really early on. It's like, we're starting to get it going, I'll say, all right, something you need to know.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And so I made that decision when I was 19 and actually almost immediately met somebody who was sort of what I was looking for. We were together for 11 years and we wound up having a child together. It was interesting because what I thought as a late teens, early twenties person was like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

Oh my God, I met somebody who understands me. I don't have to deal with that whole, public gender transition thing. She sees me, she gets me. It was a real, loving, satisfying relationship. And then as I was getting a little bit older, it was like, yeah, but, I really do think I need to transition. I really do feel like it's not just, somebody sees me,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and this is our little world that we share. It's about, who am I to my child, to my son? Who am I to my friends? Who am I in the world? It meant the world to find somebody who got me, but I needed a bigger world. And that was where the tension in the relationship set in, because what I learned was that

SUSAN STRYKER:

my partner was from a really homophobic family and that she, I think kind of left her own devices, would've been a lesbian, she had been with women but she was very afraid of rejection from her family. Part of what she really valued in her relationship with me was she got to have a relationship

SUSAN STRYKER:

that felt like a queer relationship to her, with a woman emotionally, but it passed as straight in the world. I was her closet, and when I needed to think about not seeing a path forward for me without transitioning, that was outing her. That was a very tense, and I would say unhappy, phase of the relationship. Ultimately I decided I needed to transition,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and the relationship ended. The rest is history. For me, this all revolves around your question of, "When did you first meet somebody who was queer?" And it's kind of like, I don't know. I got involved with a queer person in a pre-transitional trans relationship. But I knew people in college, I knew people in high school who were gay,

SUSAN STRYKER:

but it didn't really seem to be, I would say, a significant thing. It's like, oh, so-and-so is gay, and that was that. It didn't feel like I was really wanting to connect with that person for some reason. I knew gay people in college, was friendly with gay people. But yeah, no trans anything, it was so not

SUSAN STRYKER:

easily accessible to have contact with trans people. I mean, historically what was going on at that time in the 70s and 80s is that people who were seeking some kind of medical transition, we were quite literally encouraged to invent a plausible history for your pre transitional life story.

SUSAN STRYKER:

You had to disappear yourself. That you were trans was supposed to be like the biggest secret. The measure of success is, can you successfully pass as a cisgender person? There's a trans studies and media theory person, Sandy Stone, who says, it's hard to launch an effective counter discourse when you were programmed to disappear.

SUSAN STRYKER:

What you saw about transness in mass culture, or even in cis-gender gay and lesbian culture, was "transsexualism is rare." These are very emotionally disturbed people, kind of gender reactionaries. They are all caught up on wanting to change their bodies so that they won't be homosexual. It's like, oh, we can do this. But then it's like, that your best chance for having a happy life is to assimilate into the straight world.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That was what it meant to be trans in the '70s and '80s. That was the world that I grew up in. There just weren't trans people who were easily findable. It's before the internet. By the time I moved out to the Bay area to start grad school in 1983, I was a young parent at that time,

SUSAN STRYKER:

so my life was pretty busy with grad school and parenting, By the mid '80s, I was definitely feeling like I needed to expand my world. The relationship I was in, starting to have a lot of tensions in it around transitioning. I just said, okay, well, I will be who you ... How would I say it? I continued to present as a man,

SUSAN STRYKER:

at school, with our neighbors, in anything involving our social life. But increasingly, I was sort of making a different life for myself in the queer community in San Francisco, across the Bay from Berkeley. That was an awkward period because I really did feel like I'm living a double life. Just like, I was living my personal and familial life,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and then I was off exploring the dungeons and drag bars of San Francisco. That was like the second half of the '80s. For me, I started to meet a lot of queer people by the second half of the '80s.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you for so beautifully articulating your journey.

[Inaudible]

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm curious, you talked about leaving home at 19 and finding yourself, in a way. Did you feel that there were expectations placed on you by your mom, professionally about career?

SUSAN STRYKER:

There was certainly, I mean, yeah, I was raised to be upwardly mobile. I came from working class people who like the whole story, it's like, well, we're doing better than our parents and you're going to do better than us.

SUSAN STRYKER:

You're going to go to college and you're going to be ... There was definitely that sense of expectation of some kind of class mobility, that was part and parcel of my growing up. I think I internalized that, that I'm going to be going somewhere. There was this sense of that, it was expected of me to do well, to do better than my parents.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But I wouldn't call it pressure. It was just, it was just the expectation that I said. that I internalized. But I would say back to the religion question, I had questions about religion as a child and certainly early adolescence, I always sort of tended towards a non-theistic view of religion.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I would say one of the early flashpoints in my relationship with my mom's side of the family is that people who were assigned male at birth were expected to enter the priesthood. The greater Mormon world has a lay priesthood structure that involves all of the male members.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It's like joining the Boy Scouts or something, you started at a lower rank and you work your way up to a higher rank. And I just said, I don't want to do that. That's like nothing to do with me. And it's a way that my transness also, like, complicated by the complexity of the already complex religious upbringing, which is like, if there is a God

SUSAN STRYKER:

and that God understands me, then it's like, it knows that I am not the man that people think I am. So if you're being some church leader saying to me, "God has told me that it's time for your ordination," whatever, like, actually, I don't think we believe in the same God, because that's not going to be anything that is going to happen.

SUSAN STRYKER:

When I just told my mom and I was like, I wasn't going to do that, she was hurt. When I said, I wasn't gonna raise my child in our religious traditions, that was a big deal. I'm not a theistic person. And I don't believe in the truth of that religion on top of that.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I read that you did your PhD in U.S. history at Berkeley in '92, and you did your thesis on Mormonism.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I did. Right. It's because I knew it, I knew that history. And like I said, I sort of joke about it sometimes and say, I approached trans and queer studies obliquely by writing a dissertation on the Mormons.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It was not as oblique as some people might think that it was. The way I framed it as a dissertation topic was to say: In 1825, there's no such thing as a Mormon. Just doesn't exist, the word hasn't been made up yet. It just isn't a thing. Like 20 years later, by 1845, there are people who were making "I" statements, saying,

SUSAN STRYKER:

"I am a Mormon." Like, they are a member of a Mormon community or a Mormon church. There's Mormon literature, Mormon forms of kinship. There's a transcontinental migration. It's just like, holy shit, how is it that so much can happen in such a short period of time, that is organized by the articulation of historically novel form of personal and collective identity?

SUSAN STRYKER:

The dissertation was called Making Mormonism: A Case Study in the Formation of a Marginal Cultural Identity. It's a question about how we create origin stories. It's a dissertation about how we come to identify with historically novel ways of being in the world.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It's this story about the relationship between identity and community. And so all of the stuff that I was working on, because I knew, from my family's history, some of the Mormon history because, like I was saying earlier, it's around questions of geographical mobility and religious pluralism in my family that gave me the sense of what I would call the social construction of reality,

SUSAN STRYKER:

which seemed very significant to me because of my unexpressed and publicly expressed trans feelings of like, how do you become real? How do you become real to people? It's like, well, we can make that happen. You become real at some level by manipulating the codes that count as realness in your community.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That there are some ways of becoming real for your significant others. And how do you do that? We live in a society that says, you're really this or that because of what your body is. You're really a man or you're really a woman because of what your body is like. Well, you can change your body. That act of changing your body

SUSAN STRYKER:

changes your social reality. It wasn't really possible, I would say, maybe for me personally, or within the field of history in the 1980s, to write a dissertation on cultural studies of the emergence of transsexuality as a concept of identity. So, I did it sideways. I did it through an adjacency of some kind,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and then I never published any of the Mormon work. I mean, who knows maybe before I die, I'll get to it. But what I did was like, everything that I learned, both, like, learned from living my life as well as learned from the kinds of study that I did, I just sort of took all of that critical intellectual apparatus about the historicity of identity

SUSAN STRYKER:

and I just slotted in a different key term. It's like, okay, instead of Mormon, we're going to put in like, transsexuals. There was a time where the word

[transsexual] didn't exist, it hadn't been made up yet. Of course, there was gender variance before transsexualism, but it wasn't called that, some new thing happened around that word.

SUSAN STRYKER:

There was a time before genital surgeries. There was a time before our hormones had been discovered. So, this question of how it is that you are this thing that you just deeply feel yourself to be, it's like, I had those trans feelings as a child before I knew anything about history or medicine or technology or whatever. I know that I had those feelings, but the technical possibility of certain kinds of bodily transformations

SUSAN STRYKER:

and legal, bureaucratic changes on identity? Like being able to change your name on a birth certificate, a driver's license? These are all things that happen at certain historical moments. To think in the way that I had trained myself to think historically, about the emergence of new forms of identity,

SUSAN STRYKER:

that is the project that I just started doing on transness. How is it that this becomes a particular historically contingent way of understanding the complexity of gender, and the fact that people's identifications don't necessarily line up with what their culture thinks they're supposed to be? It was a lot of, academics will say like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

you call it research, but really it's me-search. Definitely, this dissertation that I wrote was me-search, and the sense of like, it was using one part of my autobiographical experience to understand another part of my autobiographical experience that couldn't be addressed directly in that format. And then my career, like when I came out as trans

SUSAN STRYKER:

at the end of graduate school, it's like, okay, I'm doing the thing, but it's like in a lived embodied way and an intellectual way.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's really groundbreaking. I love hearing you talk about that. Wow. You're certainly ahead of your time.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I was of my time. It was my time, you know?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Everything--I don't want to say goes according to a plan--but it was just like, I mean, I just pursued my interest and my needs. All of the questions that I asked were at some level a question about how do I continue to exist as me? How was such a being as myself possible? The intellectual

SUSAN STRYKER:

and political curiosity was just deeply personally grounded. I was trying to figure stuff out. Figure it out, how to be and how to persist. So it wasn't ahead of the time for me, I was figuring it out as I needed to figure it out. In order to continue.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That makes sense. You referenced in your prep interview that after your academic life, you gave yourself permission to do all the things you were interested in. And it struck me that that's the best way that one could start one's adult life, because it ultimately guides us to our calling. I wondered if you could talk about that for a moment, that time and how it helped you understand the life you wanted to live and who you wanted to be.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yeah, sure. This is back to the class mobility kinds of questions, that I had always imagined myself as somebody who would be upwardly mobile. The idea of going to college was to get a good job. I was always very interested

SUSAN STRYKER:

in medicine and biology. And I look back on that now as, well, the way I said it then, and might even have said it in the pre-interview, is that I realized, by the time I got to college, that I thought I was interested in how bodies worked, but what I was actually interested in is what bodies mean, which is a humanities question rather than a medical question.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It was because, well, if I want to understand the mystery of my own existence, I must unlock the secret of the genetic code. You satisfy that curiosity through medicine rather than philosophy or cultural studies. But by the time I had switched from zoology pre-med to like a general liberal arts degree and was thinking about grad school,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it kind of dawned on me, it's kind of like, oh, I could be a professor studying, literature or history or something, and that would still be like, I could become a professor instead of a doctor. Still moving into the professions. When I was applying for grad school, partly, it's what I felt I should be doing

SUSAN STRYKER:

to be moving towards a profession. But I had a creative side. I had thought, well, if I'm not going to be a doctor, maybe it'd be a writer, be a novelist, and I've always been interested in film, but being a filmmaker seemed way out of reach. That's what fancy people do in Hollywood. But writing it's like, well, if you had a pencil and a piece of paper, later,

SUSAN STRYKER:

if you had a desktop computer and a printer, you could be a writer. You could have the means of producing your creative work pretty cheaply. Maybe nobody read it, maybe it wouldn't get in print, but you could make it without spending a lot of money, just a lot of time. I had thought, well, if I don't get into grad school, I think I'll maybe just get a job as a bartender and work on my novel. But I got into grad school,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and that was kind of, on the one hand, it fit the narrative of upward class mobility. It let me continue to explore and be curious about things I was deeply motivated to find answers to. But at another level, it was kind of safe, it was like, okay, I will spend X number of years in grad school, and then I will be a professor and then I will work to get tenure. It was like setting you on a track,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and it kind of put a lot of my creative work aside, it's like, okay, I'm going to focus on this. And when I wrote the dissertation, got the PhD, I was transitioning genders right at the end of that period. I had already started socially transitioning. I just didn't tell my department. I was already on hormones.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I was already out to people. I was starting to live in a gender I had not been assigned to at birth. But as far as the department was concerned, it was still this name and this gender marker. I didn't have to be around a lot during the dissertation writing years. I mean, I was through with classes. I filed my dissertation under the old name, and as soon as the degree was awarded, I filed to change the name on the title page,

SUSAN STRYKER:

because I was worried, I was actually worried that my dissertation director, who was not an easy person, might have some problems with me. First, I wanted to make sure I got the degree that I had worked so hard for. Then I dealt with the paperwork to clean up the name on the title page. And then I was a free agent, because being in early transition as out queer,

SUSAN STRYKER:

lesbian transsexual, the idea of getting a job teaching early 19th century, US cultural and religious history specializing in the Mormons? That job didn't exist. It's just like I was not the right kind of person to be hired, as a professor nor ...

SUSAN STRYKER:

I mean, as a professor in general, let alone in the specialty that sort of I had on paper. And so that sense of a door being closed to me. I applied for jobs. I finished my PhD in '92 and I was hired with tenure and a professor job in 2009.

SUSAN STRYKER:

So 17 years. I applied for academic jobs every year. It was like my absurdist Zen practice of like, I am just doing this for the discipline of applying for jobs. It's like an art form, writing the job application letter for the job that you will never get, and you know that you will never get. But it's like, you have to keep going.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I mean, if I just went back and got all of my job application letters, it's like, who do you want me to be for this job? Here's the letter. I can be that thing. It was just a non-starter. I tried. Kept throwing myself at academe and it's just not happening. The upshot of all of that,

SUSAN STRYKER:

by 1992, I knew that I was basically kind of an unemployed, unemployable, broke-ass tranny with a PhD. It's like, all right, how do we deal with this? I thought, well, I actually know how to do research and know how to write and read and find my way around in archives. I'm just going to be a community-based historian of trans.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Let's get busy, here we go. I'll try to figure out how to make some money in there. But I also felt like I wasn't on this normative academic path anymore. And so it was like, well, I want to learn how to be a documentary filmmaker, I'm going to learn how to be a documentary filmmaker. If I want to do stand up and spoken word performance or do performance art, whatever. I'm not worried. It's like, "Is that too risque?

SUSAN STRYKER:

What if my department chair sees that? Well, that would complicate my application for tenure if they know that I've been in a porn film." Yeah. It's like, who gives a fuck? I do think about the cliched line in the "Me and Bobby McGee song," by Janis Joplin written by Kris Kristofferson, that "freedom is just another word for nothing left to lose."

SUSAN STRYKER:

It was kind of like, I'm not going to get a job as an out trans person, one of the most abject creatures imaginable. What am I going to do? It's like, "Ooh, you're going to say bad things about me, whatever." It was very freeing. It was that sense of well, I've just been knocked to a pretty low rung on the totem pole by being out as trans.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I'm just going to make my life not worrying about how it slots into other people's hierarchies. I'm going to do academic work from outside the academy. I'm going to make art, I'm going to do politics. Art, activism, academe, the three As,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and figure out how to make a living. It was not easy, at first. I've told this story a number of times, between 1992 and 1998, I was making somewhere between 8 and $10,000 a year. Living collectively, we were eating cheaply,

SUSAN STRYKER:

I dressed out of the free box at the social services agency. I mean, I had no money. I walked everywhere. I took the bus. Just getting $50 to do something, it's like, great, now I can eat for the next two weeks. I called it my unpaid residency in transgender studies,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it was like having an internship for seven years, post PhD. I don't want to romanticize poverty and precarity, it was hard. I feel like I have PTSD from that experience of just being so breathtakingly poor.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yet, I feel like it's where I planted the seeds of the life that grew into the life that I have now, that I did the academic work that becomes part of carving out a field called transgender studies in the academy, of writing histories of trans people that other people now know, that have just become part of, for lack of a better word, common knowledge.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I feel like my creative life is really rewarding. I feel like I had success as a documentary filmmaker and it's helping me move into doing more, like higher public visibility kinds of media work. I do work that

SUSAN STRYKER:

I would consider political work in terms of organizing and informing policy and doing public education and giving backgrounders to people in decision-making positions. I feel like I do activism. It's like all of the different strands of my life,

SUSAN STRYKER:

they've braided into something that adds up to a lifestyle. I got a life. I've got a comfortable place to live, I'm in a good relationship, the kids are alright. It's what the Buddhists would call having right livelihood. I feel like I have right livelihood. Yeah. It's worked out okay.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That makes sense. Thank you. I think we can take a pause here, about 10 minutes, if that works for you. At the halfway mark. And then when we come back we can start with talking about your work with Francisco GLBT historical society.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Okay. I'll be here to see you in 10.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Okay. Sounds good.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Susan, you spoke a little bit about that the journey through the nineties, and I thought we would open up now to the period from '99 to 2003, when you were the executive director of the GLBT historical society. From the work I've done in community, I know that that's no small responsibility, that role. I wonder if you could share some takeaways from that experience of your time in that position.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Sure. I got involved with what was then called the Gay and Lesbian Historical Society in 1991/92. I basically just sort of showed up and said, Hey, I'm trans, I'm starting transition right now. I'll be changing my social gender within the year. I'm probably not going to have an academic career,

SUSAN STRYKER:

so I'm looking for a place to plug in and be active. I would say, for many years, what became the GLBT historical society was really my sort of social and intellectual home. I learned how to be an archivist. I eventually went out and got a certificate in archival science but I learned how to process archival collections as a volunteer.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And, it let me do a lot of work in the archive. I was just there, all the time. I didn't have a job to go to, so I was there scouring the collections for any tidbits related to trans history. Within about a year of volunteering, I was asked to join the board of directors. I did, I think in '92 or '93.

SUSAN STRYKER:

And then by 1998, actually, well, I became the executive director in 1999. Like I said, I was there all the time anyway. I had started, because I needed money, I said, okay, I'll volunteer, I'll be on the board, but you need somebody who's managing the office, let me be your sort of office manager.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Five hours a week. Answer the emails, return phone calls, get the physical mail sorted, which then became like a 10 hour job. Then the organization made the decision to hire an archivist first, which I think, in hindsight, was not good organizational development practice,

SUSAN STRYKER:

to hire a staff position for an organization where all the administration was done by an active hands-on board of directors who didn't know anything really about running a nonprofit organization. They were all grassroots history types, driven by their passion and by the mission, as is often the case. But didn't really know that much, honestly, about running a 501c3.

SUSAN STRYKER:

There was a bequest that had come into the organization from a rich gay man who passed away, and that was where quite a lot of the salary that paid the staff position came from, paid the archivist position. The organization didn't have any fundraising capacity. Well, what happens when the money runs out? I had been saying,

SUSAN STRYKER:

as a board member, for years, now that we've gotten this bequest, we've gone from being a $10,000 a year organization, basically we pass the hat to pay rent on the archival space we're renting, now we have staff, and it's a $100,000 a year organization, but we still have a $10,000 a year fundraising capacity. There will be X number of months until the money runs out.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I would go to the board meeting every month essentially saying, okay, we have 53 months until the money runs out. We have 52 months until the money runs out. And then when we were about 12 months away from the money running out, that's when the rest of the board was kind of going like, Oh my God, Oh my God, what are we going to do? The money's going to run out. By this time, it's 1998 and I had gotten a postdoctoral fellowship.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I had gotten this Ford Foundation/Social Science Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in Sexuality Studies. I was based at Stanford history department to have an academic affiliation. I was just doing all this work on San Francisco trans history, that was my postdoctoral project: it was doing all of the research that eventually went into the film, Screaming Queens.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But this organization that ran the archive that I needed for my research was about to collapse. The height of the dot-com boom in San Francisco, and people were like, what are we going to do? I said, okay, since I've been the person who's been bitching and moaning for five years, about how we need to have more fundraising capacity, and we need to have nonprofit management, not just nonprofit staff position.

SUSAN STRYKER:

You have to have somebody who's raising money and doing the public-facing work, not just doing the staff function of running the archive. It's like holding that bigger picture. Since I'm the person who's been bellyaching about this, and I now have another source of income--I went from making $10,000 a year to making $40,000 a year--it seemed like I was rich. I just said,

SUSAN STRYKER:

all right, what I will do is, I will volunteer for a year to be the executive director, create that staff position for me, I will be your executive director. And if I can raise the money in the year to pay my salary, pay the other staff salaries, keep the lights on, keep the rent paid-- then I want this to be my half-time job with healthcare benefits, for the indefinite future.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I think largely because the organization didn't see any other good options, it was like, great, okay, let's see what Susan can do. And it turned out I could do it. I spent about half my time, when I wasn't doing historical research, networking with the city politicians and trying to get government funding from the city or from the state, getting philanthropic

SUSAN STRYKER:

and foundation grants, cultivating major donors, and then building up the infrastructure within the organization. I did the organizational development work that took the GLBT historical society from scrappy grassroots organization with a volunteer board of directors and one staff person to one that had an executive director that had an expanded fundraising capacity.

SUSAN STRYKER:

In my five years there, I think we raised about $2 million total, over the course of that time. I feel like I shepherded the organization through a very rocky patch of its history and got it to the next level.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I probably could have continued doing that for a long time, but in 2003--I mean, I've been working, the whole time I was executive director, on the documentary film, Screaming Queens, about the riot at Compton's cafeteria. It was coming along, but it was time to make a push on that.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Also my academic career had gotten to a point after I'd had this postdoc, where I was starting to get a different kind of traction in the academy. I got invited to be a visiting artist/academic at a university in Sydney, Australia, through some colleagues that I had met on the conference circuit.

SUSAN STRYKER:

These were good colleagues, sounded really interesting to be in Australia for a little while. I asked the board of directors, I said, "Can I take a six-month leave of absence to go take this visiting academic appointment and then come back?" They said, no. And I said, "Oh, well, thank you for that clarity. I quit." They were like, what?

SUSAN STRYKER:

If it's a choice between doing this and doing that, I've been doing this and I feel like I've done okay. I'm ready for the next thing. I guess this is just the universe telling me that it's time to up my academic game and to come back from that visiting position and finish up my film. It was while I was in Sydney that my filmmaking partner

SUSAN STRYKER:

and I learned that we had gotten a production agreement with ITVS, which is a nonprofit organization that works with independent media producers to develop content for public television broadcast. We had applied to ITVS through a station partnership with our local PBS affiliate KQED. We'd been scraping together little bits of money, a few thousand here,

SUSAN STRYKER:

a few thousand there, but we'd gotten the film to the point where we'd made our sizzle reel and we'd gotten some startup money for it. Then yeah, ITVS came through with a production agreement to fund the full development of the film. It's like, okay! Then I spent the next year doing the post-production on that film, with my co-director, writer and producer, Victor Silverman,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and with our executive producer, Jack Walsh, and with our editor, Laurie Lezin-Schmidt. It was a nice year of becoming a filmmaker. Then went out on the film festival circuit, the year after that. The film was finished in 2005. I was out on the film festival circuit with it for a year.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That was the end of my time as director of the GLBT historical society. It was, like I said, a real home for me throughout the nineties. '99 to 2003, for five years, one month shy of five years, I was the executive director. And then, academe and filmmaking, I heard the siren call,

SUSAN STRYKER:

and decided I would go crash my ship on those rocks.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

I'm curious, since you're talking about working across all three sectors, art, activism, and academia, do you feel like there's an overarching mission or belief system that connects all of the work that you've done?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Yeah. I'll say, where I realized this, I was doing an event.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I was doing a corporate event with LGBT employees group. They were very interested in boiling everything down to some sound bites. They said, if you had a motto, what would it be? What's your motto? I said, "Change Gender." And I was like, that's it. That's actually what my mission is. I realize; one, it's not just like change my gender,

SUSAN STRYKER:

it's just like so much of my early work in the nineties was, I would say, deeply motivated by that outrage of how you get treated as a trans person, or how you got treated as a trans person then, and the way you just fall off the map of most people's reality. It's kinda like, "oh, that was really sad, what happened to them." There was the sense of like, I need to transition.

SUSAN STRYKER:

It totally sucks how trans people get treated, and for lack of anything better to do, I really want to do my part to make sure that it is not this shitty of an experience for people to come after me. And so not just change my gender, but change gender. Change the way gender as a social system works. Partly by doing the history that says trans is a real thing, that we exist, that gender is more complicated than most people think.

SUSAN STRYKER:

To do activism, to try to remove some of the barriers to having a full and satisfying life that trans people have to contend with. Being engaged in sort of the intersectional and alliance kinds of work, or other sorts of social injustices related to bodily difference, whether it's racism or disability, or female reproductive health and reproductive choice.

SUSAN STRYKER:

These are all, to my mind, interrelated questions about how our society uses bodily difference as a way of creating hierarchy that is imagined to be natural and inevitable, when in fact we know it's not. What transness can teach is that the beliefs that we have about the meaning of the body and how the body is used to rank and hierarchize

SUSAN STRYKER:

life as being more or less worthy of living, transness shows that you can change what the body means. You can engage with those cultural practices of meaning making and make them different. That was my mission. I realized in the first ... Not the first. Well, actually, the first academic article I wrote, sort of, ends with this sense of like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

wanting the way that I live my trans life to kind of leave a mark of its passing in the way that it deforms and refigures the social environment that I moved through. That was there early on in this article, called "My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix," which is one of the first academic article

SUSAN STRYKER:

that I published. And then by 1998, I had guest edited a special issue of a journal called GLQ, which was the first queer studies journal. I did a trans studies issue of that journal and in the introduction to the collection of articles that were there, I mentioned something about how I remember when I was transitioning, which at that point was like,

SUSAN STRYKER:

all of like six or eight years previously, that feeling of transsexuality is gonna mean something different when I get done with it. This is the thing that gets put on me that becomes the category that I have subsequently have to live through to be myself, and to make the changes in my life that will sustain me. But that, it felt

SUSAN STRYKER:

so oppressive to be labeled and categorized in this way, so pathologized, medicalized, psychiatrized, legally controlled. I mean, it's just like, this is a very narrow gate that we have to pass through and I just want to blow it up. I want gender to be different when I'm done with it. I realized later when I founded an academic journal called TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly,

SUSAN STRYKER:

that the slogan that my founding co-editor, Paisley Currah, and I came up with was, "We're changing gender." It's like, oh, I didn't even think about it, that that was kind of my mantra 15 years earlier, changing gender. And the book that I'm working on right now, which is a mass market book, general trade book,

SUSAN STRYKER:

with a commercial publisher, the title of that book is called Changing Gender: A Trans History of North America, from Colonization to the Present. All of which is to say that if I have a single theme that ties everything together: Change Gender! (in the imperative) By any means necessary, and by whatever is right in front of you to do.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I was trained as a historian, how do I change genders? By changing what we know historically about gender. It's by making art that moves people to shift their perceptions. By doing public storytelling in a way where other people remember something that didn't happen to them. We weren't at Stonewall, we remember that it happened.

SUSAN STRYKER:

There are ways to do public storytelling that changes public consciousness about what people imagine as being real and possible. You change bureaucracy. You change administrative practices. You change the things in society that enact a kind of administrative violence against trans lives. You change gender by developing academic programs of study,

SUSAN STRYKER:

by training your graduate students, by teaching your undergrads. It's just like all of it, for me. Doing an oral history with OUTWORDS. It's just like every little thing. It's like, does this become a way that we can change gender? Sure, I'll do that. That's my job today. Sometimes, it's working in media, and sometimes it's doing really wonky kinds of policy

SUSAN STRYKER:

or consulting work. Sometimes, it's making an art film. It all does, sort of, tie back to expressing things that I have learned from the challenge of being trans in the world, and how to live as trans, and, honestly, to live well.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Thank you. I hope that one day I'm able to look at my life with such clarity and see the connections between everything. It's amazing, just listening to speak about how everything ties back together. I wanted to ask you, I'm married to a trans man, and we often talk about how strange it feels sometimes to be straddling the line

LUCY MUKERJEE:

between queer culture and the

[inaudible] world. I feel like for him, there's a dual need to be, sort of, seen and accepted as who he is, but also not to leave behind the community that got him where he is. I wondered if that resonates with you and how you might have been able to find peace with those two things.

SUSAN STRYKER:

See, it feels a little different to me because my coming into the queer world was as trans, not being in the queer world as cis and then being differently queer as trans. It was just like showing up was a twofer, it's like trans and lesbian, here I am. What are you going to do? You want to kick me out of your music festival or go on a date? What's the story? Which one is it going to be? I dunno, but here I am.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I definitely feel tension between trans world and cisqueer world, but it's more of a not being recognized and acknowledged by some parts of it. Most feminists are not transphobic, most lesbians are not transphobic,

SUSAN STRYKER:

but there's a certain overlap of transphobic lesbian feminist, more sort of so-called, TERFY kinds of lesbianism and feminism. It's a real thing, it is there. People who would not accept me or recognize me as a member of their community. That's where I feel the tension. Or gay men

SUSAN STRYKER:

who might want to think of me as a gay man, rather than as a trans person, even though I'm not oriented towards men, or other people who would, because I'm involved with women, not really recognizing my transness, wanting to see it as a kind of heterosexuality, a kind of perverse heterosexuality. Those are where I bump up against divisions within the community.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Apart from that, as we were just talking about, I've been the executive director of an LGBT organization. I have run an LGBT research Institute at a university. I have so many people in my life who are not just trans people, but cis-gender GLB folks. My partner is a cisgender lesbian identified woman.

SUSAN STRYKER:

In most of my life, I don't run into exclusions or a lack of recognition, at least, anymore. My queer community is a very trans affirming queer community. But I don't feel a lot of tension most of the time anymore about people mis-recognizing or not recognizing or excluding me.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Back in the nineties, even early 2000s, I certainly felt like I encountered it more. I think there's been a lot of shift that has happened in the LGBTQ world on trans issues, in the teens. I certainly know a lot of trans guys

SUSAN STRYKER:

who came out of lesbian community, who want to both honor where they've come from and what their path has been, and want to be seen as a man.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

A number of questions that Mason, the header OUTWORDS, likes to ask all of our interviewees, so you can think of it as a quick fire round.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Number one, if you could tell your 15 year old self one thing, what would it be?

SUSAN STRYKER:

Just do it just. Yeah, just do it. Actually, I knew who I was, early on, it just didn't seem possible. It was like there was this beyond that you had to get to, that was just like, so completely unimaginable.

SUSAN STRYKER:

But just do it. Do the thing that you need to do. If we're doing slogans, corporate slogans.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

What do you think are the best qualities about LGBTQ people? Oh, sorry.

[Crosstalk]

SUSAN STRYKER:

Best qualities of LGBTQ people, I'm going to punt on that one, because I think, the best qualities of LGBTQ people are the best qualities of straight people. I've certainly met some really shitty LGBT people. For me, kindness is really important. Humility is really important.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Honesty is really important. Showing up in really pragmatic ways for people who need something is really important. Being able to, I would say, make common cause, break bread with people who are different from you in a way that can help heal the brokenness of the world.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Those are the important qualities for me. If, basically, you're a kind person who wants the world to be a better place because you walk in it and you do good things to make that happen, you're my people. I don't really care who you have sex with or how you think about your gender identity.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well said. Thank you. Why is it important to you to tell your story?

SUSAN STRYKER:

I don't know. Part of me wants to say, yeah, I don't really care, but then another part is like, no, you've always thought about writing a memoir, you obviously feel like you have something to say. But I guess part of it is feeling like, I feel like there are things that have happened to me in my life, they're just interesting. People would want to hear about that.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I'm interested in figuring this stuff out, surely somebody else would be interested. The other part of it is wanting to leave a record, this is, what it was like to be my kind of trans where and when I was trans. This is what the world was like then. It's just like leaving a record of that, you know, a message in a bottle that somebody might find at some point.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Then, probably a small part in there, of feeling like I've had some success in life, and wanting to put something out in the world that was like, "Hey, you young trans: it's possible. You can live. You can do things. You can follow your passion. I can't tell you how it's gonna work out

SUSAN STRYKER:

or even promise you that it'll work out, but it's a possibility that it could work out." I will say too, I feel ambivalent about it. I keep hearing that I, I, I, I. It's kind of like, ugh, here we are with that sense of identity of, why is it that the "I,"

SUSAN STRYKER:

and identity, is like such an important way of organizing our experience? I'm kind of bored of saying, I, I, I, all the time. I want to learn about other things. I want to think about things in ways that don't revolve around the "I", and I find myself increasingly sitting in interviews saying, I, I, I, I. Maybe it's an occupational hazard for

SUSAN STRYKER:

being a trans of a certain age, who has a certain level of public visibility, that I will spend my sixties and maybe my seventies and eighties, who knows, saying I, I, a lot.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

Well, moving into the, "we", I guess. What is the importance of an archive for LGBTQ stories?

SUSAN STRYKER:

You know, again, I would say not necessarily important for LGBTQ in a way that's not important for just historical memory in general. Although I will say that there are a lot of dimensions of life that are not routinely captured by what archivists will call the state archive, like the official records of things. Hence the importance of the counter-archive,

SUSAN STRYKER:

an archive that documents life experiences that are not valued or recognized by the official archive somehow. So community-based archiving is really important. But even that can have problems. Well, we don't have a lot of time left, so I won't sort of go into my internal critique of community-based archival practices.

SUSAN STRYKER:

That's a field that I've worked in. I like it. I value it. But I've also kind of seen how the sausage gets made. So archives for LGBTQ history, important. As they are for everyone, and especially for people of any kind of minority experience,

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's amazing thinking about the folks who are listening to this interview and might be looking for some guidance. I'm wondering if there's a message or any parting words that you'd like to leave them with.

SUSAN STRYKER:

Hello, from across time. I hope you're doing well.

SUSAN STRYKER:

I hope you find something of use in my words. Like I said, it's all about stuff that I felt like I needed to figure out how to do, or think about, or experience as a way of just continuing to stay alive in the world and to be myself, and thinking, well, if it's useful to me, it's probably useful to somebody else. We like to all think that we're unique individuals,

SUSAN STRYKER:

but we live in categories. There is a demography, you are a part of a population. There are other people who are kind of like you. And so that kind of works for me. I just trust that it will kind of work for somebody else. I hope that anything that I have to say or whatever breadcrumbs to trans history I have left in the public record, somehow, I hope there's something in it that serves you.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

That's perfect. Thank you so much. I appreciate all that you shared and respect your time. I'm looking at the clock time. I know it's time for Kristie to jump in and do her thing. But thank you so much for sharing with us.

SUSAN STRYKER:

You're so welcome. Yeah, it was nice to get to know you a little bit and thanks for your questions and your preparation.

LUCY MUKERJEE:

absolutely