Jack MacCarthy

So to start off, will you just say and spell your first and last name?

Aidan Key

Yes. Aidan Key. A-I-D-A-N K-E-Y.

Jack MacCarthy

I always forget to say this at first, but just so that we want this to be something where people can just watch you and not need me for context. So just make sure to incorporate the question

Jack MacCarthy

into your answer so that if I say, "What did you have for oatmeal?" You say, "I had oatmeal for breakfast."

Aidan Key

I got you.

Jack MacCarthy

What did you have for oatmeal? So Aidan, when and where were you born?

Aidan Key

Well, I started out on the planet in Kalamazoo, Michigan in 1964. Well, I shouldn't say on the heels, I should say right in advance of my twin sister who was on my heels,

Aidan Key

my identical twin sister. I started out about seven minutes before her, which is not terribly important unless you're twins and then you kind of track that kind of stuff.

Jack MacCarthy

And what was it like growing up as twins?

Aidan Key

Growing up as twins is something that most people don't really have a sense of,

Aidan Key

but for identical twins, it's a huge part of our identity. If I am talking about identity politics, I'm going to bring that one into the mix because being a twin brings one extra attention and usually positive attention. That was an interesting variable to see smiles and delight and joy

Aidan Key

on people's faces as they met these two little twins, whatever that means for them, is interesting. But also the people often infuse more into what it means to be a twin than at least my personal experience. Because my sister and I both knew that we are really, yes, we might be identical twins, but we're very different from each other. We have a lot of similarities and interests,

Aidan Key

but we're two distinct humans. Questions would come about like, oh, do you two speak a secret twin language, and things like that. And I thought, well, yeah, I don't know that we do that. But if I'm walking down the street and it's springtime and I smell some flowers blooming, and I think, oh gosh, I remember when I lived in Los Angeles and all the orange trees and the blossoms and that smell,

Aidan Key

and that sparks another memory and another memory I might turn to my sister and say, Hey, remember when? And she'll go, oh yeah, because she knows what she's getting some similar memories inspired. What else about it? Being twins didn't mean -- Yeah, let me think about this.

Aidan Key

In some respects, I'm who I am. My sister is who she is. She has her interests. I have mine. But why do I notice at even the youngest of ages that her interests, like her clothing choices or ways of engaging or whatever, society seems okay with? And mine? Not so much.

Aidan Key

It might be getting dressed in your favorite outfit because it happens to be school photo day, and she puts on whatever she wants to wear. And then my mother says, "Well, no, you can't wear that. Why are you wearing that?" Because I'm putting on my favorite shirt. There were things that I observed back then that said what she didn't, how she did, it was reasonable and not so much for me. One of the things

Aidan Key

that I loved about my twin sister is that there was never any judgment about who I was. She recognized me for who I was. Whether we had language to describe our differences or not, we didn't. But still, the acceptance was always there, and that was pretty valuable.

Jack MacCarthy

What were some things, and I'm guessing you

Jack MacCarthy

didn't have complete language for them at the time, but things that you noticed about gender and how you wanted to express it and knowing how you were different from your sister?

Aidan Key

Well, I don't feel like I really noticed anything beyond the things that I just mentioned. Her presentation, her way of being

Aidan Key

is just more acceptable, and puzzling on why I would get a raised eyebrow. But as time moved on -- Well, before I say that, let me just say that we did spend a few years in Michigan. We moved around a lot as children. We found our way from Michigan to Southern California, Hawaii, Washington, then on up to Juneau, Alaska, where I spent a lot of my growing up years. In Juneau, Alaska,

Aidan Key

the kids are, we're outside. It's cold's, snows, muddy, we're out in the woods. The gender differences, I didn't feel so much pushback because it's not practical to wear a skirt when you're hiking through the woods. So there was no pressure to put one on, for example. And also then what kind of activities am I plugging into? I feel like

Aidan Key

my world just completely opened up to a lot of joy when had the ability to access playing basketball. And that wasn't until I was 12 that I even had an opportunity to join a team, partly because of the time girls' sports were nowhere near as available as those for boys. So just landing in that

Aidan Key

environment and finding other kids interested in seeing what their bodies could do and doing it as a team and meeting some like-minded people was pretty amazing. I guess where I really started to feel the distress with respect to my differences has to do with moving out of that elementary school age, hitting puberty, stepping into

Aidan Key

junior high school and high school where it just became much, much more pronounced and kind of a, I don't know what to do about this. And again, not having language to describe one's experience with respect to gender or sexuality, not having visible representation in my community, in my school, having the impact of the

Aidan Key

very conservative fundamentalist Christian Church that I belong to and their overt messages, but also the very implicit expectations and messages that came about instilled in me quite early a sense that something was wrong with me, but no way to talk about it. No way to understand that. Even my mother,

Aidan Key

who was the parent who primarily raised me and my sister, I didn't feel like I could even talk about those things with them because I recognized too that my sister, she wasn't feeling the same things as me. She wasn't experiencing pubertal changes in the same way as me. It didn't seem to bother her. She might've even been a little excited about that compared to my horror at the way my body was changing.

Aidan Key

So yeah, what do you do with that? You just kind of -- I don't know. I dunno what other people do, but I did my best to just kind of ball it up and shove it down as far as I could, as long as I could. I did that as well as I could, which I would say wasn't so well, but at some point really turned to some harmful behavior, like a lot of drinking

Aidan Key

and drug use and things like that.

Jack MacCarthy

And just to ground us in the timeline a little bit, how old were you when you moved to Juneau, Alaska?

Aidan Key

Let's see, I was approximately, what, seven years old, 1972, moving into Juneau, Alaska, and graduated in 1982. Didn't spend the entire time in Juneau because as I mentioned,

Aidan Key

my family moved around a lot, but we always seemed to kind of return to Alaska, which was real a gift to me. I stepped into a number of different environments where the gender expectations were much more pronounced, and the punishment also much more pronounced, if you didn't conform. That sucked a lot. But I'm grateful, at least for the time that I did have

Aidan Key

in Alaska, and the expectations were there, but not as severe as many people that I talked to and many people that I encounter, even it seems so innocuous, my mother doesn't remember this at all, but going to church, there's times where it was expected that I would need to wear very feminine clothing and present myself in that way. I hated it. It's really difficult to describe.

Aidan Key

There's a lot of people who get it, who just go, yep, I understand what you're saying, but a lot of people that don't understand what the big deal is about having to wear a certain article of clothing for a certain period of time. Well, if that's your perspective of it, well, good for you. But it wasn't my experience. That was very, very distressing. And my mother let me bring my change of clothes in the car. Right after church is over, I'd race out to the car,

Aidan Key

change in the backseat, and then step out and be able to play with my friends afterwards while everyone socialized and whatever. She recognized that it was that important and that distressing for me. I just think, again, she may not understand the magnitude of what she was communicating then, but to me it was she saw me, she understood, and she gave me an out, even though she couldn't give me a full out in terms of

Aidan Key

not wearing the dress at all. So just different things like that that were lifesavers to hold onto.

Jack MacCarthy

I just want to hear a little bit more about your mom. I know that with the fundamentalist Christian influences, there was also this kind of feminist

Jack MacCarthy

empowering perspective that she brought as well.

Aidan Key

Yeah, my mom's a really interesting human. Divorce is a much more prevalent thing today, not unheard of at all. But for her, that definitely caused some people to judge her pretty significantly, even in the church community, as a single parent,

Aidan Key

she's very feminist minded. She's always told me, don't let anyone tell you you can't do something because of your gender. I don't think she anticipated where I would take those words of wisdom, but I've always been very grateful for that. She really relied on a Christian community to help support her and raising two children. It wasn't easy for her then. And so there was

Aidan Key

this interesting balance of all of those perspectives, which caused me to be able to question things in a way that didn't conflict. One example would be: I come home from school in seventh grade and I said, mom, I'm learning a lot about biology. They're talking about evolution. And I said, the stuff I'm learning, it really makes sense

Aidan Key

and that doesn't match up with what I'm being taught about the creation of the earth and the Bible and all of that within a particular timeframe of six days. She just said, look, if God is, there was no beginning, there's no end and present for all of eternity, and God created the world in six days. How do we even have any idea what a day

Aidan Key

might be to God? And boom, right there, she removed the conflict that I had. Because I wanted to do a good job in school. I was a good student. I was very enamored of learning and still am. Just those kinds of things. Even sometimes I would say, "Well, mom, they tell me that I'm going to grow up

Aidan Key

someday get married, and I'm supposed to obey my husband." I said, "But what if he's doing something wrong? What if he tells me to do something wrong? What's that about?" And she just said, "Yeah, I don't believe in that either." I mean, she wouldn't do that if we were under the roof of the church, but the fact that she could do it with me really made a difference. My mom, I think, was someone who

Aidan Key

was really held back just from being in the timeline of history that she lives, the opportunities available to her, much less than what was available to me. She really wanted to give us, both of us, the encouragement to pursue our dreams and aspirations in whatever way that we could. I'm really grateful for that.

Aidan Key

I always thought that my sister was the one to challenge her most, because they, in some ways, are very similar, and they would get in more arguments and things like that. I always felt like I was pretty laid back and easygoing. But my mom told me, she says, "No, you were the challenging one." Because I'm the one that the gender piece was showing up, the gender difference.

Aidan Key

She could tell that my heart would go pitter-patter for girls, didn't know what to do about it, opted not to say anything about it. Also, my first boyfriend was a young black man. Despite the fact that she herself, in Michigan, dated a black man, had a boyfriend, it was very

Aidan Key

dangerous back then to do that. And so here I come along and say, well, yeah, no problem. And she had to examine some things. So I don't know. I think she's been a free spirit and still is in terms of finding her way. And I really valued that.

Jack MacCarthy

A piece that I just discovered while researching you was you challenging your school district to provide equal funding to girls sports team. Can you just tell us about that?

Aidan Key

Yeah, absolutely. Gosh, I think it was 1980. It was my first year in high school, and I'm on the basketball team,

Aidan Key

and our coach sits us down one day and he says, "Hey, there's this thing called Title IX. And what it is is guaranteeing a constitutional right in schools and in athletics in that if a school funds a team, a boys team buys them new uniforms, equipment, money for travel and things like that. They need to do

Aidan Key

the same for girls, and they're not doing that." He asked if any of us on the team were interested in filing a lawsuit to make things fair. And boom, my hand is in the air. Like, no problem, right? And I absolutely expect every hand in the room to be up and oh, no, it wasn't. There were only two other people, two other teammates,

Aidan Key

that put their hand in the air. I remember being pretty dang shocked about that because I don't know, even looking back, I think, what were you doing? We were children. We had a sense of right and wrong. We had a sense of fairness. We hadn't gotten so jaded and whatnot as we might get older. I still don't have the answers to why there were only three hands in the air. But the three of us did move forward, and we did file a lawsuit against our school.

Aidan Key

It made statewide news. I didn't expect that. I got to hear my name on the radio every day on the bus ride to school and on the way home. Eventually, we didn't go to any type of trial or anything. The school district said, yeah, okay, we understand, and they did do that. I'm pretty proud of that. I was proud of it then, but

Aidan Key

also a little bit mystified at the reactions of others, not just my teammates, but in school, people were strangely quiet about it. I had a teacher who was -- I don't remember what he taught anyway. He was also the boys' basketball coach. And so when class was over one day, he said, "Hey, can you stick around for a minute?" Sure. And he said, "I just want to say

Aidan Key

I really admire your courage." And I said, "Oh, well, gosh, I'm so glad you agree." And he said, "I didn't say I agreed." And I said, "Oh, well, okay. Well, thanks for the plug anyway." That was interesting. And I found that I was not intimidated by that exchange in any way.

Aidan Key

You don't agree, well, too bad for you, because I have a sense of what's right, what's fair, and it makes no sense to deny opportunity. So yeah, I don't know.

Jack MacCarthy

I always find it fun to see the seeds of activism in early life,

Jack MacCarthy

and especially when we can see how those blossom later.

Aidan Key

Well, one thing about that is that we move through our lives, our childhoods, and we have experiences, and there are experiences, and sometimes we note them as being exceptional, and sometimes it's just another day. Filing a lawsuit against my school district is not just another day, but I also didn't

Aidan Key

understand the magnitude of what I was doing and understanding the historical timeline of that. And that wasn't until I was older and in the ways that other people can reflect the magnitude, it was really wonderful to hear from some really amazing human beings that are out there involved in collegiate and professional sports, being very excited about

Aidan Key

what I did as a kid to help pave the way. That helped me broaden my perspective and understanding what that meant. So, pretty cool. It informs my journey to this day. You just keep going. You do one thing at a time, and you don't know whether something lands significantly or if it just is another day. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah. Mason, the founder of OUTWORDS was interviewed on CBS this week. We make a point of trying to interview a really wide range of folks, and the interviewer asked him, what's the common thread? And he was like, people don't know what they're doing when they're doing it. I'm paraphrasing him.

Jack MacCarthy

You don't know what the significance of something's going to be, what the impact of something's going to be, but they just knew they had to do something in the moment, which I think that sounds like it's very much the case with this example as well.

Aidan Key

Yeah. Well, that's really nice to hear. I do things my way, and I don't necessarily know if that's how other people do things, how they go about it. So thanks for sharing that.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah. Moving ahead to

Jack MacCarthy

late teens, going to, oh, gosh, I only wrote the acronym. Is it Seattle Pacific University?

Aidan Key

Yes.

Jack MacCarthy

Yes. Okay. Tell me about, first of all, the application and how that was coinciding with things you were realizing about yourself and then going there.

Aidan Key

Yeah, hindsight, as they say, is 2020,

Aidan Key

but as I'm applying to go to college, my mother's telling me, you need to go to a Christian college for at least your first two years. You need to get a foundation. I had been to Seattle, and I knew about the Seattle Pacific University campus. I thought it was a really beautiful school and kind of a smaller size that I felt like I could really find my way and not get lost in that.

Aidan Key

I applied to go to school there, filled out my application. What do they ask? They ask your name, they ask your address, they ask different things. They want your transcripts. And oh, by the way, have you ever in the past or currently engaged in homosexual activity, yes or no? Well, at the time, the answer's no. But wow, what a shocking question. No other questions about

Aidan Key

one's social life, family composition, communities in which I'm part of, nothing like that. Just boom, that's the one. Are you a big homosexual or no? I answer, no, and I attend Seattle Pacific, and guess what? I start meeting some people who I have an affinity with, and guess what?

Aidan Key

Some of them start coming out to me as lesbians, and I just had that light bulb moment, or as a friend calls it, the two-by-four moment, somebody needs to hit you over the head with a two-by-four. I just thought, that's me. That's me. All of a sudden that made sense. Because it wasn't that I didn't know about lesbians, just I had no way to connect with them. In Juneau,

Aidan Key

there were some people who were visible, but they were older, and they were a really tight-knit community, and I just felt like I didn't have anything in common with them, and it didn't quite compute. I still had a lot of thoughts about attractions to the girls that I went to school with, and I knew to keep my mouth shut about it, but I really didn't know what to do it, and for whatever reason, I didn't associate it with the word lesbian at all,

Aidan Key

until someone my own age, someone with common interests and all that, then said, "Hey, I got to tell you something." And was very scared to tell me, but came out to me, and I said, "Oh, wow, I think I am too." It was in that very moment, Seattle Pacific isn't the place to come out. I came out to myself, to some friends,

Aidan Key

and it was very torturous. The climate at Seattle Pacific was not conducive remotely to that. That's reason for expulsion. It created a really hostile environment that just felt like we were always looking over our shoulders, wondering how much we could trust each other. What if word gets out?

Aidan Key

So partly coming out can be a really amazing experience. It's like, yay, a-ha, the universe aligns, things make sense. I have a way to describe my heart and who makes that heart go pitter-patter and how wonderful it would be to then be able to step in and maybe think about having a relationship with somebody. Maybe think about

Aidan Key

having that first kiss and the joy that could have been part of that just wasn't there. Also, the people that I knew were struggling like myself, drinking too much and some destructive behaviors and things like that, my grades were horrible, which wasn't my usual, and I didn't last very long. I didn't last very long.

Aidan Key

As a matter of fact, I can't even remember the sequence of events, but I decided to go ahead and leave after the end of the quarter. The director of residence life pulled me into his office and he starts grilling me about sexuality. At that point, I just said, "Look, I'm leaving. Yes, I'm a lesbian, but I'm leaving. I can't do this."

Aidan Key

And he wanted to know who else I was rowing on the crew team. He wanted to know who else on the crew team. He was asking questions about my coach, and he called the crew team a hotbed of homosexuality. I'll never forget it. I just boom in the moment. I was like, oh, I don't think anybody besides me. Oh, well, what about so-and-so I said, not that I am aware of at all. It's just me and I need to leave

Aidan Key

because this isn't the right place for me. It took me actually quite a number of years. I might even throw in the word decades, to actually be able to drive by the campus and not have a trauma response as a result. Such a tiny window of time there, but at such a pivotal moment. So yay for SPU,

Aidan Key

as in not. It was very painful place for a lot of people. One of the things that I'd love to chat about, either now or in a bit, is some recent engagement with Seattle Pacific.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah, let's talk about it now. Because that's something I wanted to ask you about.

Aidan Key

Yeah. Well, I got an email from an instructor

Aidan Key

at SPU who said, I would really love if you would come talk to my class, talk to my students about the work that you do with families of gender diverse kids, and that educational work that you're doing in K through 12 schools. My students are future educators, and I'd like them to learn more about this. I don't know if he felt the way I did. I think

Aidan Key

he knew he was definitely stepping out of what might be expected of the professors at that school. But for me, there's not a thing that could have occurred that would make me say no to him. If he said, you have to pay me $1,000 to talk to these students, I'd be paying him a thousand dollars, whatever it took to be part of that. I did get to chat with

Aidan Key

these students for a really short 50 minutes, and he invited me back the next year. Then he extended my name to a conference that they put together for their education department and any number of speakers. That's when I started to learn that there's a real grassroots movement in Seattle Pacific University to bring greater intersectionality

Aidan Key

into the curriculum, even as far as the student body and the speakers that they would invite and the topics they would discuss. I was able to come and be part of that conference faculty and talk about gender diverse students and how to be inclusive of them. Even another time recently where I'm stepping in with another professor there who's actually

Aidan Key

one of the -- I'm not going to remember her title right now, but one of the deans in the Department of Education, to speak to students going into that field. I recognize not only with these invitations that the students and the faculty are in pretty much open rebellion against the board of trustees at the school, and that the board of trustees is really interested

Aidan Key

in hanging on to those old practices, the school environment that I was part of. Meanwhile, students and instructors are saying, no, that's not who we are. And I walked around that campus for the first time since attending there way back in the early 80s, and seeing again, finally being able to see, this is a beautiful campus,

Aidan Key

and all I can see are dorm rooms, classroom windows with pride flags throughout. Even a young student walking by me with an SPU backpack with a pride flag stuck in a pocket. I had to stop him and say, "I don't need your face or anything. Can I take a picture? Can I just take a picture of this,

Aidan Key

of how just impossible that was?" And he said, yeah. And he says, "Yeah, I'm not gay, but I feel like it's really important to make a statement." And I said, it is. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah. That's beautiful. It is something that I really love

Jack MacCarthy

is the opportunity to reclaim or make new memories with something that was once harmful. I think that's a really special form of healing.

Aidan Key

Yeah, it's very healing. And one of my dreams is I want to stand in front of the student body there and deliver a keynote. A commencement keynote or something someday.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah, let's manifest that. Yeah. As you were talking about your friend coming out to you and that being the light bulb moment for you and the fact that it was a peer, I was noticing a parallel with that, and the first time you saw a trans man on a talk show in your late twenties,

Jack MacCarthy

and so I wanted to hear you talk about that.

Aidan Key

Yeah. Well, the joys of coming out right there can be many comings out over one's lifetime. And those pivotal ones are the ones that, well, essentially require coming out. We have a lot of life transitions, and many of them, for many people, are just part of the pathway. You graduate from

Aidan Key

high school and you step into grownup world, but coming out as a lesbian was pretty significant. As scary as it was, it was ridiculously exciting coming out, recognizing that that word transgender was very, very close to me, and boom, oh, I might be transgender, was not the same experience.

Aidan Key

There was no joy in it whatsoever. The word that comes to mind is despair. I don't want to be one of those people. Please, please, please, that can't be me. How can I make this go away? And yet I could recognize the sinking up of my gender and my challenges with my gender and my physicality

Aidan Key

with that single word, while at the same time recognizing that transgender people are mentally ill. There's something wrong with them. The transgender people that I was just barely aware of might be somebody that I saw in Seattle,

Aidan Key

that would be somebody that people would make fun of or ignore or worse. Those visible people to me, just a small handful of them were trans women. And I didn't really understand that there was such a thing as a trans man until I saw a fellow on a talk show talking about being transgender.

Aidan Key

He's on the show with his wife, they're talking about their relationship, they're talking about their child, he's talking about his career. Of course, the interviewer can only focus on genitals and whatever, just as they were all doing back then universally. But I didn't hear any of that. All I just saw was something that as a young kid I understood was impossible, that I had a

Aidan Key

recognition of my gender. I wondered, I'm like, why was I not born a boy? Why? Why? Why? Wondering how does this fit with God's plan? It makes no sense to me whatsoever, recognizing I couldn't even talk about it to anyone because nobody would understand. There I was saying, okay, this is impossible at nine years old. Then there I am at, I don't know, almost 29 years old, and there's possible,

Aidan Key

he's sitting right in front of me on the tv. Really pivotal moment, and what the heck do I do about it? I really didn't want to do a darn thing about it. But nevertheless, life happens and it unfolds, we discover, we learn, we incorporate. And I just started sorting things out. I met a couple of transgender people, found a support group,

Aidan Key

a small support group, watched that group come together tentatively and then blow up for somebody's not saying things the way I might say 'em, describing themselves in a way that's different than how I would describe myself. And that just obliterate a group. Then it would sort of reform in a different iteration and then in another one. I'm busy finding my way, and at this point, I'm in my early thirties.

Aidan Key

I'm a grownup. I'm a parent. I am pretty solid on my feet. I'd spent many of my years since leaving that college environment, stepping into lesbian community. My community specifically was the butch femme community, finding a real landing place there,

Aidan Key

a community that said, Hey, we get to be the humans we want to be, and we can be as masculine or as feminine as we want. That community really helped me accept myself and explore and embrace my masculinity. Where am I going with all of this? These things all

Aidan Key

converged together in a way that I thought, well transition, considering a gender transition seems like a logical next step. As I spoke with my members of my community, they did not feel the same way. My lesbian pals were -- Actually none of them used the word lesbian. We were all dykes. That was

Aidan Key

the term we embraced, one we felt very much empowered us, and many of them, the vast majority of them were older than me, 15, 20 years older. They're saying, we get to reclaim masculinity. We get to reclaim femininity. This is us. But they did it in the context of a rigid and binary view of gender. So, woman?

Aidan Key

Fantastic. Take it wherever you want to go with it, but don't step away from woman. Well, I didn't really feel like I was stepping away from woman. I felt like I was taking an additional step and one that I thought many of them would understand. Interestingly, many of them did understand at the same time that they're vehemently resisting it. I could talk all day

Aidan Key

about those conversations and those dynamics and what it meant to be, I guess in my early thirties and discovering this and exploring this for myself with an older generation. I didn't want to lose them. I love them. I do to this day. Many of them might be described as TERFS by others, but these are just like my Christian community

Aidan Key

when I was a child. My lesbian community nurtured me, mentored me, helped celebrate who I was. And it's hard, it's challenging. There's progression of understanding. What am I going to lose if I step into embrace my gender

Aidan Key

and consider some gender related steps? How much am I going to lose? Will I lose my family? Will I lose my community? Will I lose my job? Will I lose my housing? It was all about how do you minimize loss? No one expected --. No, everyone understood that relationships did not survive. Your romantic relationship would not survive. And I just questioned like, well,

Aidan Key

is that true? Does that have to be true today? And holy moly, buckle up because that was the beginning of my work. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

And am I understanding correctly that you were already a parent at the time that this was shifting for you?

Aidan Key

Yeah. I had been in a relationship with a woman for seven, eight years. The relationship

Aidan Key

needed to end, but nevertheless, in our journey together, we decided to have a child. My partner said, "I want to have a baby." And I said, "That sounds great." And she says, "I want to be the one to do it." And I said, "That sounds great." And we did. We found a donor. At the time of the end of my relationship, I think my daughter was around five years old, six years old,

Aidan Key

so I'd been co-parenting my daughter up until the point of gender transition. The unfortunate part is my ex was very angry about the end of the relationship. And many parents who are angry kids can be powerful pawns to

Aidan Key

inflict pain on another human, and she was absolutely willing to do that. I did my best to maintain connection in as respectful way as possible. But when I did sit down and talk with her about that, I was considering a gender transition, she did this while grabbing the phone practically to call a lawyer to try to

Aidan Key

remove my kid from my life. I'll tell you what, people sometimes say, well, your gender transition, if you could go back in time and do it all over again, would you? And I can't say the answer is yes, because I didn't know how high the price tag was going to be. I was truly fortunate, as the

Aidan Key

non-biological parent, to have legal parental rights because I was in Washington state and they had just begun allowing same-sex couple adoptions. I was one of the first handful of families to be able to take advantage of that. I think that's the only reason that kid's in my life to this day, and fortunately she is. But I had a long, long, hard journey of, number one,

Aidan Key

not seeing my kid for over a year, not laying eyes on her at all. While the courts sorted things out. They don't know, transgender person? I don't know if that's a good parent, doesn't sound like a good parent, but they, in their ridiculously lengthy amount of time, were at least thoughtful about it and examined me as a human. I was the one

Aidan Key

under the microscope. They basically came out and said, there's no reason Aidan can't be in this child's life. Now, we need to think about how do we reintroduce him into this child's life? Because so much time had gone by. Easily the most painful experience in my life to have gone through that. And you know what?

Aidan Key

I learned a lot of things in that time. One is that it doesn't matter what's going on for me. I've got to be perfect. I absolutely have to be perfect no matter what way they're looking at me. If I have emotions, too bad, I don't get to express 'em. I have to be completely and utterly respectful of a person who's behaving very, very poorly, my ex,

Aidan Key

because I am the one under the microscope. I had to keep it together far longer than any human should have to. And I understood a couple of things from that process. I started hearing from some trans people that I met, and primarily trans women who never talked about it, but when I brought it up, they would talk about the children that they never got to see ever again.

Aidan Key

That was really painful to hear. It was such a common occurrence, and yet one that was not discussed. There was another thing that was probably easily the most important thing I'll say in this whole interview, but it's gone. I lost my train of thought on it. Let's see if I can find it. Oh, I know what it was. I had a father, but I

Aidan Key

didn't know him. He was around. He was in Michigan, but we moved, and I just never got to see him. As far as I know, he never reached out. I thought, what is this about? The dude just does not want me or my sister in his life. He doesn't care about us. Whatever story I might say about it. But as I was going through this experience with my own daughter and seeing how much

Aidan Key

she was being ripped from my life, whether I wanted it or not, which of course I didn't, no matter how hard I was trying to stay in her life, there was still no guarantees of outcomes. I thought, you know what? I understand a little bit better why men in general don't stay in their kids' life. Because I had these thoughts of, I wonder if I'm harming my child. I wonder if it's better if I just step away.

Aidan Key

And I just thought, you know what? I can't do that if I ever see her again, which there was no guarantee. If I ever see her again, I need to be able to tell her right to her face that I fought as hard and in every way that I could to be a part of her life. I would need her to know that. And while I might mention this as one of the most painful experiences of my life, I also have to

Aidan Key

consider myself fortunate because at the time, being transgender alone is a good enough excuse to boot one parent. And that didn't happen. The people involved said he's okay. He can be a parent. My kid and I had to work at getting reconnected, and I'm happy to say she's a beautiful and wonderful part of my life

Aidan Key

to this day. 33 going on 34. What the heck? Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

Wow. Yeah. My story as a parent is very different, but I'm amazed at how much I resonate with what you just shared. Yeah.

Aidan Key

I had a person I knew that was part of

Aidan Key

one of those support groups, and he had a kid with his partner, similar situation. She was the birth parent, 5-year-old, and he adored his child. And I said, you know what? It would be such a good idea if you all might just put a parenting plan in place. I mean, just in case. Just in case. Oh, no, he says, you know what? She would never do that to me. And she would never do that to our child.

Aidan Key

She knows how important we are to each other. There's no way she would ever do it. And I said, okay. It took about two months, and he never saw that kid again. So heartbreaking that the price tag for us just, number one, trying to stay alive on the planet, number two,

Aidan Key

trying to be as truthful and authentic in our own selves as we can, has price tags that. That pain has fueled so much of my work, and I'm not unique in that way. Many people experience a lot of hardships, and they then throw themselves

Aidan Key

into advocacy or other important work, or even creating art or writing or things like that. They throw that energy into that in the hopes that for one other person, it might be different. I've been able to track that in my life and my work and my journey. It informs it every day. And like I was saying before,

Aidan Key

with that engagement with Seattle Pacific University and being able to come back that cycle, being able to come back around and say, wow, look at this. There's a lot of beauty that has come out of this, a lot of joy. That initial despair can remain despair if we allow it to be despairing, but we can look at it and actually think about something different.

Jack MacCarthy

Where we left off channeling pain into work, you also mentioned these deep, complicated conversations you were having in your community. How did that lead to the long and illustrious career that we will

Jack MacCarthy

definitely not be able to get to every aspect of, because you're just too impressive.

Aidan Key

Whatever. Oh, yeah, yeah. Well, one foot in front of the other. While the long journey of waiting to see if I can bring my child back into my life is happening, I felt

Aidan Key

very much at a standstill. I felt like the things I needed to do to understand what types of steps to make, if all of that were significant conversations I had with my butch femme community were so volatile, and my people did not know what to do. One of 'em even said,

Aidan Key

"Why do you want to be a man?" And I said, "I don't." And she said, "Well, then you better figure out what the hell you're doing." I answered that question so immediately that it just startled me. It wasn't about becoming a man. So what is it about? The personal journey happens as the same time as the reflection, and what are the implications in my community if I start to look different, can I stay?

Aidan Key

My transition wasn't about leaving my community, and I thought, naively, I thought, okay, I'll stay. Everybody's talking about butch flight. Well, I'm not going anywhere. I love the word butch. I felt like it really landed on me, around me, infused throughout me. I felt a real connection to it. Okay, so fantastic. I can do that, right? Yeah, not so much. I'm not sure.

Aidan Key

It was really difficult, and I felt like it was a lit match being tossed into a pool of gasoline, in terms of what that represented. There were no visible trans people within my community. It was either, oh, they're leaving or they get pushed out. I fought to stay, and what that meant was

Aidan Key

many, many conversations with people. It meant being visible in my community as I began to change with some testosterone related changes, it meant that I needed them to see me. Then if they decided that the person that they knew and loved was gone, well, that was on 'em. I was very thoughtful about it, and I started pulling people together.

Aidan Key

All of the things that I heard, oh, some of the questions that occurred today, like, oh, aren't people just doing this because it's trendy? Or being brought up 25 years ago? I'm sorry. This is not a joyful trend of which we're jumping in. It's a very complex and oftentimes very painful process to find one's way. I put some of those words on the -- I made a little flyer

Aidan Key

and I made an event, and I said, meet here this day, this time, and we're going to talk about these things. They were very provocative, provocative questions about what we could talk about. I was quite surprised to show up that day and have the room absolutely packed with people and a bunch of people I didn't know. I thought, certainly some people I know would come, but there was a whole

Aidan Key

community of younger folks too that I'd never encountered that were crowding into the room. I followed it up with another session. Those two different events, I just thought, there's so much being brought to the table in this discussion. The intersectionality of our identities and how that makes each person's perspective different and unique, the journey, the decisions they might make, we bring it all

Aidan Key

to the table. Let's take a look at these things. I created a six part series every other week event, and the first time there was about 50 people. The second time there was about 70. By the later sessions, the room was packed, 150, 200 people. It was the first time that the Seattle community was coming together for these types of discussions.

Aidan Key

We looked at these things and I found that, well, it's not just me asking these questions. I also, at the suggestion of a friend in California, he said, I think there ought to be a conference in Seattle, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And I thought, yeah, okay. I'd worked on a conference committee, a couple of conference committees in the past, so I knew a little bit, and I thought, okay, boy, did I not know what I was getting into.

Aidan Key

What I ended up doing in 2001 was producing the first Gender Odyssey conference that ended up running for over 20 years, 20 plus years now. I remember thinking, well, there are a couple of conferences across the US, from what I understand, they're primarily attended by those on the Transfeminine spectrum. I thought, well, let's lean the other way

Aidan Key

and get some of those conversations into the mix. People came, people came from all over the country. They came outside of the US, South America, Central America, Europe, maybe Australia, I can't remember, but definitely some representation. And of course, our friends to the north, the Canadians, definitely were a presence as well.

Aidan Key

I got done with that conference, and I thought it'd be easier to put together a conference for people who want to come and talk about the fact that they have a head on their shoulders than it was to find commonality in the vast array of who was showing up and what we all needed, what were conversations each of us were hungry for, and figuring out how to do that. The learning curve was

Aidan Key

very, very steep. From day one, I was critiqued about what wasn't there that I had no idea. And also just a lot of gratitude for the fact that we could come together and share space and hear each other's stories. It took me a while to realize that whether I liked it or not, whether I wanted it or not, that that was coming with the word leader.

Aidan Key

I thought, I'm just putting together an event date, place, time. Everybody show up and then make it what you want. Well, sounds good in theory, but there's more to it than that. I had a very complex growth curve with respect to leadership. It was really hard to accept it for many reasons.

Aidan Key

One, I just thought, I'm one person. I'm trying to make my way here. I don't know what other people need. I don't know how to do that. I'm so new in my journey. How can I even get close to that word leader? And yet it's being thrust upon me and left ridiculous praise, ridiculous criticism, and then a wide range of input in between.

Aidan Key

Figuring out how to manage that was really hard. And yeah, it's hard when we don't have a place to land. If we actually make space for a conversation that we haven't had space for prior, then what comes is what is most pressing? And that could

Aidan Key

be anger and rage. It could be a lot of pain and a lot of grief. It could be, I don't see myself in this space at all. I really hoped and wanted to see my experience reflected in others. As I went forward with that conference, I realized a lot of things. I realized that when people first walk in, they see those who are different. They think, oh, this isn't for me. It's for young people. And I'm older. Oh, this isn't for me because

Aidan Key

I'm a person of color and most of the people are white. Oh, this is not for me because it's mostly trans masculine people, not feminine people. Oh, oh, it's for post-transition people, not gender queer people.

And that as time went over those 2, 3, 4, 5 days, depending on how long the conference was, that people could find their way, that they could

Aidan Key

make connections with each other. And that part of it, of course, is their responsibility to find those people. But what can I do to help them find each other? And so I'd have a hotel staff calling me and saying, "I have someone here who's afraid to go to the conference center. They just want to head home. What do I do?" And I said, "You tell them to get here and come find me and we'll sit down and talk."

Aidan Key

I had somebody stop me on the escalator and say, "Aidan, I wonder if you can tell me why I should stay." I said, "Well, I guess first you'd have to tell me why you want to leave." Those conversations really mattered, really being able to figure out how to enter and find some way to belong. And in the way that our lives inform us,

Aidan Key

my sister and I, because we moved around a lot, we had to start at different schools all the time. It's hard. It's hard to step in brand new and not know how that's going to go. Figuring out what would be helpful and making sure that I put things in place, that we had not only conference staff, but volunteers and whoever that were instructed, like,

Aidan Key

notice people, see if somebody's sitting by themselves looking very studiously at their program book. Maybe they want to look through it very studiously, but maybe they don't know what else to do. So go sit by them and say, "Hey, can I help you with any of the answer, any questions about our programming or the events that are coming up?" And it was really amazing to do that. I watched

Aidan Key

that depth and maturity continue over time very soon, I said, I don't want this to be all people on the assigned female at birth spectrum here. Let's open this up. And like, okay, you can change the language, but it doesn't mean that people are going to show up. It's got a reputation just with a year or two in, so what are you going to do about that? Then working very hard to make it all genders.

Aidan Key

It just was a constant attention to various things that kept the conference different every year. Then guess what happened? 2004, three families showed up with trans teenagers, and they said, "Well, so

Aidan Key

what programming works for us? What programming can I send my kid to?" And I said, "None." First of all, I felt like you people don't exist. First of all, what 15 year old is going to open their mouth and talk about their gender? Because I couldn't imagine that. I figured everybody waits until they grow up. It's not logical. But that's where my thinking was. And then also, you as a parent, you don't exist either

Aidan Key

a person who would show up and listen to their kid and want to support them, want to find out more information, and you're finding this conference, that means there's nothing out there for you. And I had to bite my tongue in terms of wanting just to say, I have no idea. Good luck. Go away. I had a father who I looked at -- He's white, he's tall,

Aidan Key

heterosexual. He looks like he's upper middle class. And he says, "Aidan," I've hardly met the guy, "What do I do with my kid?" Dude, I don't know. To me, he has everything at his fingertips in terms of privilege. And guess what he's asking me? Like, oh, dude's in trouble, so find something to tell him, Aidan.

Aidan Key

I just thought, well, if I had the ability to open my mouth at 15 and have language to describe my experience, what would I want to have happen? And I just told them those things. Your kid is going to share things with you and that you may not understand. You just need to believe them that they are very serious about this. You need to just be on the journey with them. Say, look, we're going to figure this out together. Those two things. Then the third thing I told them had to do with my

Aidan Key

personal experience in terms of wanting to find some type of support and resources and things like that. I said, don't trust that your experts know anything. They may have treated one person before and not a child. They may be going off studies that are 40 years old. You've got to do some research. You've got to dig in and put yourself in charge

Aidan Key

and figure out what might be best for you and your family and gain that knowledge wherever you can find it. Keep seeking. And you know what? That was in 2004, I still give that advice out to families today, even though I feel like the landscape has changed quite a bit. Do it together and be on this journey with your kid. Find out all the information you can and then some. That's a little bit

Aidan Key

of the journey with respect to the Gender Odyssey Conference. In its most robust, we had programming for adults, which was a pretty broad spectrum of programming. It was really amazing in that much of the programming did not come from external submissions. It came from the things that I would hear about,

Aidan Key

the things that others would hear about and share with me. Oh gosh, I went to this workshop and in the last five minutes somebody brought up this question or made this comment, and the room was electrified, but the session was over. I grabbed that, I dug into that, and then created a session for that discussion to happen the next year. I'm really, really proud of that programming and that approach to it, because it made it very organic

Aidan Key

and actually more present day. Workshop submissions that would come in, okay, I'm proud of you for your dissertation, but I don't think you need to read it in front of this group. We need to engage in discussion. So we created town meetings that centered on a particular topic, race and gender, that's pretty big topic.

Aidan Key

Whoever comes into the room and forms that conversation, they were profound. Gender and disability, class and gender, sexuality and bodies. I worked hard to find facilitators who could really help hold the room and bring all of the different things in, really unpredictable.

Aidan Key

Those sessions could happen each year and be completely different than the year before. I love that about it. And just a couple of other things with respect to that Gender Odyssey conference, was that incorporating the families into those conversations, figuring out, okay, I'm a scared, terrified,

Aidan Key

probably heterosexual, probably cisgender parent. I've got a little seven year old. I am stepping into a convention center with a bunch of freaks all around me. Should I even be here? It feels dangerous for them to be there. What do they need to be able to ease in? I provide a little way to give them a buffer at the beginning and then put them right in the thick of it by the end of the conference,

Aidan Key

in ways that was absolutely life-changing and powerful to witness. Same with the adults, the adult trans people, how do I show them these children? How do I let them see these parents and grandparents and other caregivers? How do we do this in a way that allows any of us to potentially heal the pain

Aidan Key

and the grief that we might have because of our families, the grief for a childhood that we don't get, but these kids having the support so early, and how do we celebrate all of that, even as we're navigating all of these other feelings at the same time. Then, oh yeah, how about those professionals? How about those medical mental health professionals and those educators? I found ways to give them some of the

Aidan Key

information they needed while also witnessing a gender inclusive world. Even if it was just for three or four days, this is what things could look like, at least the start of what it could look like. It really facilitated a pretty significant growth of change and resources. The conference most of the time was held in Seattle, and so you could see the impact of that

Aidan Key

in the entire city. Then how does that then go out for those people that travel and come, what do they take home? Yeah, yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

I love hearing about the first time seeing parents with trans kids coming to the conference in 2004, because now almost 20 years later,

Jack MacCarthy

you have really stepped into being an advocate for trans kids. I'm hearing the beginnings of that. And you've founded multiple projects to continue to support trans kids. Can you continue drawing that line that you've started to draw?

Aidan Key

Absolutely. The first few trans children that I met beyond those teenagers at Gender Odyssey was probably a year or two later, and it was a little potluck in the Bay Area, and there's all these kids getting together with their families. I was standing there, not quite literally, but

Aidan Key

certainly figuratively, with my jaw on the ground because I'm seeing the support of children far younger than I would've imagined. How could a child even find their voice at that age? They're all hanging out, they're playing, they're laughing. We put a little tiny twin mattress on the top of the stairs and sliding down. I scored points being the only adult willing to do that.

Aidan Key

I remember just thinking, I don't even know which kids are the trans kids. I don't know which ones are their siblings, and do I need to know? Well, I do need to know. Why do I need to know? And just feeling this massive grief that I didn't know existed, at the same time as this joy that something so radically different can occur in my lifetime, in this moment,

Aidan Key

these kids get support. It was a real game changer for me. I thought, you know what? I have put quite a number of years, at that point, into the adult community. I'm turning my attention, I'm turning my attention to the families and these kids more and more. The conference journey followed me in that way because at that point,

Aidan Key

especially Aidan Key and the Gender Odyssey Conference are kind of very deeply intertwined. I just thought, I have to do this. There was no question of it. It just needed to happen. I stepped in more and more to do work with these families, and I launched a support group, for parents, and

Aidan Key

we sat and we talked about things. I felt Ill-equipped to help them, but essentially they seem to, from whatever I wanted to share, because at least I could give them a little bit of perspective on a different gender identity and help them understand that piece. As soon as I pull those families together and we're having very frank conversations,

Aidan Key

they're also saying, well, I'm ready to support my kid, but how do I send them to school? And boom, right there. I don't know. The school needs to understand that they have a responsibility. What is that responsibility? How do they make room for a trans kid for a non-binary kid? How does that work? I think it was maybe 2006.

Aidan Key

I stepped into my first all staff training at a school. I have yet to meet somebody that did that work prior to that moment. I don't know if that's the first time, but I remember that moment and thinking, okay, again, you just have to know a little bit more than them and do sit down with them and find out what are their questions, what are their concerns, and let's sort

Aidan Key

through those. Essentially, that began my very, very significant learning journey about how do we create an environment in schools that has not been created before With respect to gender? Well, on one hand, we have a lot of the tools because we've worked at efforts at inclusivity in other areas. When I was a kid, there were efforts meant to more

Aidan Key

racially integrate schools. Some of those efforts worked very well, some did not work so well. What can we learn from that? And how many of the tools that we have would be applicable in this way? And then begging the question over and over and over, why do we separate by gender? And not as a rhetorical question, but as an exploratory question.

Aidan Key

We divide by gender for very good reasons. Okay, what are those reasons? Let's name them. What are our objectives and do we accomplish those when we divide by gender? Well, we accomplish them to a degree. Okay, are there other ways we can accomplish those same objectives? Well, yeah, we could do this or Yeah, we could do that. Okay, you don't need me anymore, do you? Go about it. Have at it. But if the solution

Aidan Key

isn't obvious, then gender is a handy divider that does provide some benefit, but also excludes some people. Also, there are boys who might thrive better in an environment that is optimized for girls. There are girls who would love to step into some of those boy environments and the objectives that are set forth and be able to

Aidan Key

find their place in that. Even as simple as putting language to teachers, something like, well, if you need kids in two lines, do you have to separate them by their genital configuration? It's a strange way to put it, but it inspires kind of a light bulb moment for them. Yeah, I'm not doing, yes, I am doing that.

Aidan Key

Why am I doing that? Well, because you want kids in two lines. Two lines is more manageable than one. It might be just the sheer space that you have. Getting those conversations going has been now a 15 plus maybe actually more journey, and I'm still learning and still learning, and still learning. As those educators came into my world, as those parents

Aidan Key

came into my world, and as the healthcare providers who are seeking to treat and support those folks, those children, come into my world, guess what? They all ask the same questions: how do we know if this is a phase or not? What if they change their mind? Well, they're too young to make this kind of decision. How do they know, they're just seven? They're just five. Well,

Aidan Key

our brains aren't fully formed until we're 25, so we expect them to wait until that age before they make any steps. Oh, teens are just being influenced by their peers. How do we know this isn't just something trendy or whatever? Well, okay, because everyone asks those questions, then let's just step into those questions. Let's not ignore them.

Aidan Key

Let's not make them statements, as in -- A question would be, this child is so young, is it possible for them to know their gender identity? Is quite different than saying, oh, they're too young to know who they are, therefore, no action, no movement, no whatever. Quite a bit different. I encourage those conversations

Aidan Key

and those conversations are amazing and rich. I quite often say I would be a complete and utter fool if I said teenagers were not influenced by their peers because there's just nothing more influential in a teen's life than their peer group oftentimes. How does that influence come about? I'll tell you, if you want to talk about whether or not

Aidan Key

a child is too young, they are too young to manage the societal distress and pushback and resistance that is showing up, 100%. They are too young. It doesn't make their gender identification go away. We know that supporting them in their gender exploration is the number one factor in terms of optimizing their growth and their resiliency, their sense of self.

Aidan Key

But how do you do that in different climates, in different supportive climates and deeply resistant climates? How do we navigate all of this? There's lots to be said about all of that work. Again, it's been very life-changing for me. And yeah, I guess I love those kids so much,

Aidan Key

and I'm not stepping into conversations with them anywhere near as often as I'm stepping into conversations with their parents and caregivers as I'm stepping into conversations with their teachers and principals and school counselors. There's something really magical about that for me, even though that's where all of the complex layers show up, where all the resistance, the divisions based on

Aidan Key

politics and faith differences and cultural differences, and what state you live in and so forth. I dunno. I guess I just love that complexity and I love stepping in to those discussions with people. Especially as a parent, I almost lost my kid. I know what it's like to

Aidan Key

grieve a child that's still alive. I know what it's like to look at a kid and just say, my heart is breaking because of what we lost, or at least what I feel like we've lost. When those parents come to me and say, "I'm so sad. I don't know how to get through this grief. I feel guilty for even

Aidan Key

feeling this way. I want this to go away." I will give them nothing but support and sympathy and understanding because I couldn't get through bringing my child back into my life without moving through that grief myself. I feel like I really understand that, and I want to make room for that.

Aidan Key

And that is at the core of the Trans Families program that I founded offering support to all of those families out there. And trust me, there's a lot of grief in those rooms. There's a lot of frustration and anger. There's a lot of guilt. Some parents are even embarrassed about their own children.

Aidan Key

If I can make room for them to say that out loud, then they're on their way to healing and being able to see their kids again and see like, oh, my beautiful child is still there. Yeah, they might look a little different. Yeah, I would never make my hair that many colors or whatever.

Aidan Key

I would never use that pronoun for them, but they can get through that to a better place. And I love witnessing that. Sometimes I feel like I could chart it. Here they are in one group. Most important thing about that very first group is getting them back to a second group. If they come back to a third group, I think, okay, on your way.

Aidan Key

What they share is how powerful it is to connect with others with shared experience. They want to talk to other families. It is not rocket science, but it is very difficult for them to find each other. I love creating ways that they can find each other. And guess what? When I look in

Aidan Key

another direction at the schools, the place where kids spend the most amount of time with other adults, they're asking those same questions. What's kind of interesting to me is that these teachers and administrators and so forth, these kids aren't their children. It's their students in their classrooms. What do you care whether it's a phase?

Aidan Key

What do you care whether a kid changes their mind? What do you care about their possible medical intervention steps? Why are you so intensely interested in that? Why is that in the way of you doing your job, which is creating a safe, inclusive environment in the classroom, optimizing the learning? Why is all of that showing up? Well, those are big questions. Why is that the case?

Aidan Key

Then working to help facilitate that and show them. We ask these questions, they are front and center, and until we get the opportunity to delve into them, we can't see the next step and the next step. I love that work. I love it a lot, so much that I wrote a book about it. Oh my gosh.

Jack MacCarthy

Tell us about the book, Aidan.

Aidan Key

Yeah. What's the point of learning all of that stuff if I can't share it? I've found ways to keep ears open, to keep hearts open, to keep conversations going, and it really is by honoring the distress that does show up in the room and saying, I'm not going to judge you. Please don't judge yourselves for your resistance. But let's just

Aidan Key

step into that a bit. And what we've all learned together and collaboratively as we explore those questions on how to create an inclusive school environment, I found that the things I thought people might need, they don't need it as much. I thought they need to understand the experience of trans children. They need to understand what non-binary means.

Aidan Key

They need to understand that gender can be a journey of multiple steps, and that it's okay to have what appear to be inconsistencies show up, that what we all really need to do is kind of take a deep breath and let kids be kids. I thought that statistics would help. I thought that terminology and definitions would help. That's not what they need at first.

Aidan Key

What they're showing up first and foremost with the most is their own distress, their own questions and confusion. Just as I -- When I mentioned I had, on one hand, I felt pretty joyous, if not a bit apprehensive about coming out as a lesbian. It's because there was context, there was community, there was resources. There was a place for me to land. Coming out as trans was just big, dark nothingness,

Aidan Key

and I didn't know how to find my way. In some respects, I feel like the journey of these families and journeys of these schools are similar. Like, okay, I can feel the immensity of it and I don't even know where to start, nor can I find that book to help me out, nor can I find other schools that may have taken these steps already. We are seeing those changes. That's really good,

Aidan Key

and I wanted to be part of facilitating that change and sharing the things that I have found to be very helpful, even though they're not necessarily asking for it at the outset. One question that might come out is, well, our teachers need to know how to talk to children about gender differences. They need to know how to talk to these kids about their transgender classmate. You know what? I could spend 15 minutes with a group of teachers and give 'em

Aidan Key

everything they need to get going, and then all they need to do is follow the conversations that their kids are having, that part's easy. But here's the way it plays out, as one teacher so confidently said, as she raised her hand in the air, she said, "Aidan, I can do this, and it's fine, I can really have these conversations with kids if I can keep them in my classroom 24/7, but I have to send them home. I have to send them home to their families. And then what comes back

Aidan Key

is what I don't know how to handle." Okay, now we're talking. Essentially, the children are very straightforward and matter of fact about gender differences, they understand the concept of gender identity, that a person can have a sense and internal sense of gender that might be different than what we see on the outside. They get it. They get it. I listened to a kid say, oh, well, Joey, yeah,

Aidan Key

he's always been mostly a girl anyway, makes sense that he wants to be a girl. Like, okay, you got it, you see it, whatever. But we, as adults, have acquired a lot. We've acquired a lot of stigmatizing representations of gender diverse people. We've incorporated bodies, sexuality, dating relationships, gender norms, gender expectations,

Aidan Key

and those vary significantly in our communities by whether we're part of a faith community, part of a cultural community, if we live in a red state or a blue state, a political community and so forth, and all of that comes crowding in. When that comes crowding in, then there's any individual is thinking, what's going to come at me? What kind of anger, what kind of resistance? Is my job

Aidan Key

on the line? And a teacher, absolutely, justifiably, can feel that, because I don't know, is there anyone else that's going to back up that teacher for having conversations about gender differences? Is the parent community going to organize and picket the school with their fears about what's being discussed? If you don't have an educator or a principal or a superintendent of a district or whomever to be able to confidently

Aidan Key

answer those questions, you're in a world of hurt. That's where we are today with respect to that. We're seeing that with some very harsh, harsh resistance and legislative efforts that are being passed to deny these conversations in schools, to deny these young people the care they need, to remove children from the families that are supporting them, to bar them from

Aidan Key

sports participation and other activities. It's just painful out there. So gosh darn it. Yeah, I had to put it on the page, and it took a lot longer than I thought. Took many years, actually, and I felt like I'm missing the window. The book came out and I thought, guess what? I did not miss the window at all. The real effort that I tried to instill in the book is to very gently

Aidan Key

help make some of these things evident for the adults in the lives of these children, because these kids need them. We need those adults looking after us when we're children. We need our schools making room for us. We need the love and acceptance of our peers. At the very least, we need to not get beat up every day in our schools because of who we are. So yeah,

Aidan Key

trans children in today's schools, it's really funny, sitting down with the publisher, Oxford University Press, and they said, well, do you have a working title? And I said, well, yeah, Trans Children in Today's Schools, I guess for now. Yep. That just stuck. I want to mention something about that process because it's an important part of my story. I dropped out of college,

Aidan Key

I finished my bachelor's finally, finally in my forties somewhere. I still don't quite know how I did it, but the path I expected to take in my life between the gender and the sexuality, you get knocked off the main track. And that means sometimes a lot of different life experiences. I learned a lot in doing 10 years' worth of pizza.

Aidan Key

I learned a lot about humans. And I thought, okay, how do I do this book? I wanted to go with the university press because I knew it would be so easy for people to dismiss my words based on my life story. And Oxford told me, Hey, no offense Aidan, but you don't have a PhD

Aidan Key

or an MD after your name, and we are a university press, so, you know, would you consider getting a co-author? And I thought I'd be doing all the writing, I'd be sharing all of this learning, all of these experiences of these families, these schools, these children, and I put somebody else's name on there because they have a PhD? I just couldn't do it. And I said, let me write my book proposal

Aidan Key

and I'll take my chances with what the review board says. And then I had to think about, well, who's that group of people? There could be just like any other person, a school janitor, a school superintendent, a parent who's an engineer, a parent who's a nurse, whatever. They're all coming kind of in at the same level of understanding and

Aidan Key

the same void of information. So you've got to write a sample chapter for a book. I'm like, okay, what does everybody ask about? Bathrooms. When I was putting that submission in, it was all about bathrooms, bathrooms, bathrooms. What about the bathroom? What about the bathroom? And I thought, oh, God, when I do my work in those environments, people ask those questions right away and I say, I will

Aidan Key

get to that. Let me walk us through some things so we have a foundation established, and then we'll talk about bathrooms. Absolutely have to do that. But how do I convince -- Essentially my book proposal and my sample chapter just turned into a mini book, which I then completely abandoned and had to rewrite once they said yes. They did say yes.

Aidan Key

The reason I mentioned all of that is because what we need extends so far beyond facts. We need somebody to walk us through, to actually help hold our hand while we move through our fear and distress and confusion, our anger. Why should we make

Aidan Key

all this change for just a small percentage of people? I don't understand that. That doesn't make sense. Well, actually it does, and can. You make changes to be more inclusive. It benefits everyone. Let's find out those benefits. Let's talk about those. Let's take a look at what's actually being asked versus what you feel like is being asked. And let's acknowledge that it's ridiculously uncomfortable

Aidan Key

and that I don't want to do it. If we can do that, then we're on our way. All of that said is, yeah, had to write a book about it.

Jack MacCarthy

I want to touch on one more thing. We're getting to the end of our time, but I'm thinking about the piece about, oh, what if it's a fad?

Jack MacCarthy

What if it's a phase? What if it's just "trendy"? And that being related to aren't they too young to know? And thinking about a story you shared with Bliss about deciding whether to start testosterone and reading about this, only do it if you're certain, and asking around and finding out

Jack MacCarthy

that certainty wasn't as much of a given as maybe you thought. Those seem connected to me. I just wondered if you could speak to that.

Aidan Key

Yeah. Well, thinking back to the early days of my gender exploration and what do I do? Do I take transition related steps? If so, what? Testosterone was a hard one for me. And everything I'd read said, you got to be absolutely certain this is the

Aidan Key

right thing to do because the price tag is so high in our lives in so many ways. These interviews that I read, they were all compiled in a particular book by Aaron Devor, actually called FTM, I'll never forget it. All these people interviewed said, be sure, be sure, be sure. I thought, okay, I waited and I waited.

Aidan Key

I talked to people. I've read whatever I could find. I'm looking for certainty. Meanwhile, I'm falling into a deeper and deeper sense of darkness and despair, because how am I going to find that certainty? I don't know. I don't know if it's the right thing to do. And offhand, one day I asked a friend who had begun his transition, good year before me, I said, "So when did you know this was the right thing to do?"

Aidan Key

And my dear friend started laughing hysterically. He says, "Are you kidding?" He said, "I still don't know if it was the right thing to do. I just needed to have some movement." And being, again, the light bulb or the two-by-four, whichever analogy you like best, I thought, yeah, who's going to pin me down and make me take testosterone for the rest of my life? And that's when I could step in and say, I'm going to test the waters.

Aidan Key

I empowered myself to approach my doctor in that way who had no experience. I said, I'm going to do this. We're going to start gradually, and I reserve the right to make whatever decisions I want to make. Okay, she says. No skin off her nose. So as I sit with parents of these kids and these questions come about, first of all, those top questions, what if it's a phase? What if they change their mind? Aren't they too young to know? Are they being influenced

Aidan Key

by their peers or by social media? I answer every question of yes, it could be a phase. Yes, they might change their mind. Yes, they're so young to shoulder this all by themselves. Yes, teens can be influenced by their peers. Okay, so how do you know? You don't. You have to take a step forward and you have to take another step forward. And what's going to help your children the most is to hear them and receive that, validate that,

Aidan Key

and take another step forward. Thinking about the medical intervention steps for young people, there's steps that afford that child and their family a greater amount of time for discovery. It provides information that they would never get any other way. Just like, I don't know what testosterone feels like. I don't know what kind of changes

Aidan Key

it's going to create, don't how I'm going to feel about those changes. I can just sit here and wait the rest of my life for some certainty that will never come because certainty is actually a crystal ball and I don't have one. Those are a lot of the things that I share with these families and with those educators asking about those children as well, we don't need to know.

Aidan Key

Of course, kids go through phases. If your kid's going through a phase or the student in your classroom is going through a phase, what's the worst that can happen? Well, you switch a pronoun now, you just might switch it back. Okay, I bet you the second time's a lot easier than the first. Those kinds of things and helping them recognize that stepping in and

Aidan Key

acknowledging one's gender identity and working to find language to describe it and what that means to any of us personally isn't signing up for genital surgery tomorrow. Yet you'll have a parent of a five-year-old who can't sleep at night because they're busy worrying about genital surgery. Trust me, by the time you actually need to consider that, you're going to be at a so much different place. I don't know

Aidan Key

what that place is going to be, but I know it'll be very different. And I know that you will have a lot more capacity to examine that question at that time. I'm not the only one that needs those light bulb moments. Those parents and caregivers and teachers and others need them as well. I think, yeah, it's often with hindsight that the logic seems to show up like, oh, why didn't I think about that before?

Aidan Key

Why didn't I realize why I could start testosterone and not be forced to continue to take it? I dunno. Yeah. Hey, I want to say one other thing about that too, because from very early on in my gender transition and after starting testosterone, there's roughly a good about two years before I started fully presenting and people perceiving me as male.

Aidan Key

As soon as they did, even within my own community, people decided what my gender identity was, and it did not match my own sense of my gender. No one even bothered to ask, even within my own community, they decided, they framed it in whatever way they wanted to. But that thing that I said to my old dyke pal back in the day when she said, "Why do you want to be a man?"

Aidan Key

And I said, vehemently, "I don't," is still true to this day over 25 years later. It wasn't about becoming a man. I could care less about that piece. There's a lot more to say about that than we have time for. But what I do want to say is that in my journey along the way, I landed at a time,

Aidan Key

roughly a year into testosterone, where I looked in the mirror and I said, there you are. That's the person that I expected to see looking back at me my entire life. And that also the place where the society around me was losing their marbles. People couldn't tell what gender I was, and they needed to know. Whether I was stopped

Aidan Key

in my car at an intersection, having somebody ask me to unroll my window so they could find out, are you a man or a woman? Having a police officer get mad, he pulled me over for having a blinker out. He gets mad because he looks at my ID, my gender on my ID doesn't match what he sees. People making comments, people experiencing distress, confusion, anger, the blank look, I'm really trying hard

Aidan Key

not to move my face right now because I don't know what to do. Some people even being very drawn in and wanting some type of sexual experience with somebody like me, that's what was happening around me. And I thought, I can't manage that kind of moment by moment distress for the rest of my life. Now what? Do I move forward? Do I continue

Aidan Key

and actually consider increasing my testosterone dosage to step more into a male presentation? Or do I go back and stay with what I know and what has been familiar? And I have to tell you, I was really, really disappointed to be in that place and know that it's not just me, it's not just deciding what's best for me.

Aidan Key

In essence, I have to decide what's best for me by considering everyone else, by considering society all around me, and I get up every day to do this work so that other people don't have to make that decision. So I pose the challenge

Aidan Key

to the world at large, but especially to even those within my own community. Don't assume about my gender just by looking at this. There's a lot more to me than that. Yep.

Jack MacCarthy

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

I feel like sometimes in an effort to be gender affirming, even people close to me kind of want to take the non-binary out of me and assign me masculinity I didn't ask them to. And it's like, just because my voice has dropped doesn't mean

Jack MacCarthy

I'm not still a sparkly fancy lady boy.

Aidan Key

That's right. That's right. That's right. And I'm of a particular generation, and I teamed up with some older folks too that celebrated butch femme. And like I said, I just love the term butch. It allowed me to be so close to my full self for the first time in my life. I've had people say, "What?

Aidan Key

You still consider yourself a butch?" I'm like, yeah, pry it for my dead fucking hand, okay. Excuse my language. Do I have to let go of all of who I am? And it's an interesting journey too, because I loved many things about being a girl and a woman in the world. I'm an identical twin sister. Huge and amazing part of my identity.

Aidan Key

Do I have to let all that go? There are people that want me to, there's a storyline out there that says, you should modify that, you should reject that, or viewing it as only a source of pain and therefore letting it go. I struggle, for example, with the term dead name because it hurts my heart to think about that.

Aidan Key

Am I going to reject that little kid? Am I going to reject the name my mother gave me so thoughtfully? Am I going to reject the twin sister sibling that I am and erase all of that? Am I going to take that from my sister? No, I don't want to do that. It's one of the things that I hope I see

Aidan Key

some shift from our collective gender communities that maybe even we incorporate more into the conversation about how we bring all of our stories forward for our own benefit, our own wellbeing, and our own circle of healing. Yeah. There's pictures I don't like to look at. You know what? I don't look at 'em. I'm not going to take 'em

Aidan Key

from my mom, though, they're part of her story. And it's one of the things that I, again, so deeply connect with those families as they're trying to sort out these questions too. How do I support this person? We don't know, right? The support we need on one day might be different than what we need two years later than what we need 12 years later.

Aidan Key

I know one school, I did a two part exercise or two part training with the educators there, and one was kind of the usual foundation laying discussion and all of that. And the second part, we came back and had a really rich conversation, much more interactive. And one teacher said, so Aidan, are you advocating for a genderless world? And I watched the

Aidan Key

entire room of people just sort of collectively hold their breath. It was really interesting to observe. And nobody had ever asked me that question in a session before. And I said, well, no, actually, I really want a more gender-full world. I want one that includes me, allows us all to have a lot of movement. And I'm telling you, all these people in the room just started breathing and smiling

Aidan Key

and the joy because they could connect to that just as much. No, absolutely not. I think gender is amazing and beautiful, and I love how it moves around in me. I love seeing it move around as I interact with another person. It's not consistent, person to person. The way my gender shows up talking to one person over another, over another is really pretty interesting to watch. Pretty interesting to experience,

Aidan Key

and I love that. I want that for everyone. Yeah.

Jack MacCarthy

Is there anything we haven't touched on that you'd like to touch on before we wrap up?

Aidan Key

Yeah, if you don't mind.

Aidan Key

I guess as I think about all of the things that I've done over time, much of it has been in an effort to change things for the better. I have deeply sacrificed giving attention to myself. And I'm in a place now 25+ years later where I'm starting to do that.

Aidan Key

I'm really grateful to be able to do it. I feel like it will afford me some continued work and additional chapters to my work. But I just say that to -- I don't know why I'm saying that. I just feel like it's really important. I don't feel like I did anything wrong in terms of giving so much attention

Aidan Key

to making change. But I have really wanted to be thoughtful about how the story of my work, me in that work, the impact of that work -- I've cared a lot about how that is captured because it's been profound and there's been a lot of ripple effects. And it's not because I'm some magical person,

Aidan Key

it's because I'm doing this stuff. I'm putting my head down and doing some work at a really profound time. That said, it's been really interesting to show up to -- Who am I? Who am I right now? Who am I moving forward? And not the Aidan

Aidan Key

that is part of all of this work, but now how do I bring my full self into that work in a way that benefits me, not puts me on the sideline? And I find it kind of important to talk about, because many people who have done powerful work, if they were chatting to my younger self, they were saying, you've got to make room for yourself. You've got to look after yourself,

Aidan Key

self-care, make sure you take the bubble bath or whatever. I went, yeah, whatever, the whole time. Again, I don't feel that those choices to compromise myself are wrong. I just feel like now is the time to give that attention because I'm not done. I've used up a lot of that reservoir, and now

Aidan Key

I'm focusing on rebuilding that reservoir of energy. The only way I can think of to do it is by giving that attention to me now. I'm curious to see how that plays out in whatever time I have left to do work on the planet to see, Hey, do I get to bring my full self into the picture now rather than the strategic approach that I have taken?

Aidan Key

What that has looked like in the past is knowing that the decision to further my step into a masculine presentation has provided a more palatable me for others, that my whiteness has added a level of validity to my words. It should never have happened,

Aidan Key

have to happen, but it does. I'm aware of those things. I'm aware that my age is playing a role, too. I've done that thoughtfully and strategically with humility and acknowledgement of that. But I just wonder, I just kind of wonder what happens if my full self shows up and I start speaking those truths more and more. I'm curious about that.

Aidan Key

I guess that's what I wanted to add. How about that?

Jack MacCarthy

I love that. That's another thing that I wanted to ask you about. I saw we were getting long on time, but you said something to Bliss about feeling like you haven't been able to exist personally and wanting to change that now. I'm glad to hear you talk more about that.

Aidan Key

Yeah. Work in progress.

Jack MacCarthy

Yes. Yes. Tavi had to leave to pick up their kid from daycare, and they said, thank you, Aidan, for sharing your stories. I learned a lot and resonated with a number of experiences. Wonderful work, everyone. We have a set of -- They can be lightning round four questions

Jack MacCarthy

we ask every interviewee. One of 'em you already addressed very explicitly, but I'll ask again in case there's something else you want to say on it. If you could tell your teenage self something, what would you say?

Aidan Key

Yeah, I would just say keep at it. Whatever you're doing

Aidan Key

is the best way to go about it. We make decisions all the time, and we do it as thoughtfully or as impulsively or with as much or as little information as we have. Just give attention to the thoughtfulness and slow it down for half a second if you can, and go ahead and make those decisions with courage in the midst of the fear. How about that?

Jack MacCarthy

Do you believe in the notion of a queer or trans superpower? And if so, what is it?

Aidan Key

I think that when our gender and or our sexuality and whatever other things that we bring into our full selves doesn't fit, we might only see

Aidan Key

the drawbacks of that at first, but there's a real power in that. And I love stepping into that because yes, okay, it's knocked me off the path of mainstream life, and it's kind of a shitty path for so many people, the expectations, the restrictions that it imposes on, boldly, let's just say,

Aidan Key

everyone, and being able to have that perspective. Your perspective changes when you're looking at things from a different angle. I love that. I love that about my own personal identity and the fluidity of that.

Jack MacCarthy

Why is it important to you to tell your story?

Aidan Key

I want to tell my story.

Aidan Key

I want to be seen and heard and received for who I am. I'd also like to find out if that's a reasonable person. I don't know if reasonable is the right word, but is that a person that can be received and loved and celebrated? I want to find out. So yeah, that it means telling my story.

Jack MacCarthy

And what do you see as the value of a project like OUTWORDS that is collecting and telling these stories?

Aidan Key

Well, we know that if our stories are not captured in some way, that they can completely disappear and others will write our histories, if they even bother, that

Aidan Key

our experiences can be completely obliterated. I know that just thinking about some of the young people that I've encountered, the young trans and non-binary people, they understand what pioneers they are oftentimes, and they're often very unaware of the work that has come before them. One of the greatest gifts in my life was what I always

Aidan Key

refer to as my second upbringing, was stepping in with that older butch femme crowd. Because they raised me in that family. They mentored me, they looked after me, they knocked me in my place when I needed it, and I had to learn to have a voice amongst those as well. I was doing, again, kind of a second upbringing, and they shared their stories with me.

Aidan Key

What each and every one of them did meant that I could do what I do. I loved seeing that. I think that's why having any of us share our stories with others can be so meaningful. It helps us connect the dots.

Jack MacCarthy

I love that so much. Something I want to bring back is I found out that the origins of

Jack MacCarthy

using the term coming out, it was originally coming out into queer society, when you would make some other queer friends and they would take you to the gay bar, or they would take you to the drag ball that was coming out. I just learned that recently, and it was so beautiful to me. It sounds like that's kind of what you're describing in the second upbringing

Jack MacCarthy

is this, like, a community took you under their wing.

Aidan Key

Right. And there are times where there's some really ugly stuff that has occurred along the way. I certainly expected ugliness from people who don't understand. It's much, much harder when it comes from within your own community. There's lots of reasons for that.

Aidan Key

It happens. It's not new. There were people there who saved my bacon, because I just felt desperate to understand what I was experiencing. I didn't understand the negativity that came my way, the volatility. I knew it didn't have anything to do with me personally, but I represented something that was difficult, I

Aidan Key

represented some change that was occurring that was difficult to pinpoint. I had people like Kate Bornstein. I talked to her, I said, "I don't know what's going on. I can't understand this. I can't believe how brutal this is." And she said, "Oh, so now you have the big hurt, huh?" And I said, "Oh, it has a name, does it?"

Aidan Key

And we had a laugh, but then I knew it's part of change, it's part of upheaval, and it helped me be able to pick myself back up and put myself back on my feet. Minnie Bruce Pratt did the same thing for me, and I shared with her some of the hardships that I was experiencing. She paused for a moment,

Aidan Key

and she goes, "In 1969 in Selma, Alabama," and then proceeded to share story that she had of her work in the Civil rights movement and how some internal upheaval had been really painful for her personally and for others involved. So they're hard to find sometimes, these people. But I have had

Aidan Key

these people in my life. I've got my pal, Cory Silverberg. I've never met Cory Silverberg in person, but we love and adore each other. Corey shows me how to look into the future and see a more gender inclusive world in ways that my brain still struggles to see, but their brain doesn't so much, and they're putting their thoughts into children's books.

Aidan Key

Fantastic. I guess one other person that I'll just mention is Caitlin Ryan. Caitlin Ryan, the lead researcher, the Family Acceptance Project. My brain hurts on just about every conversation with Caitlin because of her depth of knowledge. She's been in the game way, way longer. And she can very clearly show the entire world

Aidan Key

with evidence-based research, that one person supporting a gender diverse child can mean the difference between life and death. I've been blessed with some really amazing, brilliant humans along the way, too, that have made such a huge difference.

Jack MacCarthy

I think that's a beautiful note to end on.

Aidan Key

Alright then.

Jack MacCarthy

Thank you so much, Aidan. Yeah.