JACK MACCARTHY: All right, here we go.
LISA SCHEPS: Yes.
JACK MACCARTHY: Lisa, will you start out by saying and spelling your first and last name?
LISA SCHEPS: Sure. My name is Lisa Scheps. l-i-s-a s-c-h-e-p-s. Pronouns, she and her.
JACK MACCARTHY: Excellent. And will you say when and where you were born?
LISA SCHEPS: Oh, I was born -- Specifically when? I have no problem.
LISA SCHEPS: in Houston, Texas.
00:00:30JACK MACCARTHY: Excellent.
LISA SCHEPS: It's the first time I've been asked that.
JACK MACCARTHY:
JACK MACCARTHY: into theater as a kid.
00:01:00LISA SCHEPS: Okay. I grew up in an upper middle class Jewish family in Houston, Texas in the sixties and seventies. I found my way to theater from -- My parents, when I was really young, tried to find that thing that interests me. We were a big swimming family, so competitive swimming was first, then judo, then other things, and nothing really stuck.
LISA SCHEPS: Nothing stuck. So they sent me, I've always said, just 00:01:30to get me out of the house, to a theater school at the Alley Theater in Houston, Texas. I was nine years old, and that stuck, and I just loved it. I do like to tell a story which is sort of -- It's a compliment to myself, which I don't do that often.
LISA SCHEPS: But this was a school, it was called the Alley 00:02:00Merry-Go-Round. It was a three year program, which I went through all three years. It was not a program that was catering towards professional, like kids that were gonna go on professionally. It was really just an afterschool kind of thing. But when that was all over, when I had my degree and my little certificate, I got out the telephone book and looked up theaters in Houston. I called
LISA SCHEPS: all the theaters in Houston, at 11 years old, asking 00:02:30them if they had any work. This one theater, Studio Seven, which was at the Houston Music Theater, said, yeah, we're doing a production of Tom Sawyer and we need crew. I came down, I started working with Studio Seven, which was an amazing school, as it turns out, run by this woman named Chris Wilson. Had people like Patrick Swayze, his wife, Lisa Haapaniemi, and a lot of people that did really, really well.
LISA SCHEPS: But I'm sort of really impressed with myself that I took 00:03:00the initiative to find another step in my theater career, education, whatever you want to call it, because it wasn't the focus of my parents.
JACK MACCARTHY: What was the focus of your parents?
LISA SCHEPS: No, I don't know.
LISA SCHEPS: If I knew what the term latchkey kid was, I would've 00:03:30been that. They weren't terribly involved in the decisions that I made regarding my life and what I wanted to do. I think initially they wanted to find something that garnered my interest. That happened, they were done.
JACK MACCARTHY: Right. What did theater mean to you?
LISA SCHEPS: It's hard to say at the time what theater meant to me, 00:04:00but I will say that it was an outlet. It was that outlet to let me live in another person's skin for a while, which was, clearly, as my life turned out to be, very important. It was a way to work as a team. It was a way to be mentored as a family.
LISA SCHEPS: There was just so much that theater meant to me and has 00:04:30meant to me over the years, and that's probably the biggest reason why it stuck.
JACK MACCARTHY: Mm-Hmm.
JACK MACCARTHY: and that was fine. Then there was a point where --
00:05:00LISA SCHEPS: It wasn't time. Yeah. No, I don't -- Time is a little skewed, but there was a time in my life, and I wanna say from ages 1-5, where everybody knew I wanted to be a girl. It was totally okay. As a matter of fact, I tend to remember being a ballerina for Halloween one year. Then again, growing up in an upper middle class Jewish family, a Texan family,
LISA SCHEPS: at some point around 5-7, it became very clear to me 00:05:30that this little notion of wanting to be a girl had to go away. It was not explicitly said per se, but I got the message and for all intent and purposes to the rest of the world, it did. Although, for me, it never did. I did play the game for years of my life. I was a
LISA SCHEPS: dutifully a rugged little boy and did quite well at it.
00:06:00JACK MACCARTHY: This is my first in-person OUTWORDS interview, and I'm used to having the zoom mute button, so I'm having the responses that I normally have, and I don't have a mute button to keep myself quiet.
LISA SCHEPS:
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Is there anything else from that childhood 00:06:30period that feels important to cover?
LISA SCHEPS: Not necessarily anything that we haven't hit on already? I'll say that the idea, since our focus here is my trans identity, I never really felt like a
LISA SCHEPS: girl trapped in a boy's body. That wasn't my path. That 00:07:00notion becomes important later on in my life. But at the time, it's like I wanted to be a girl. It was like what I wanted more than anything else. I used to play fairyland with my across-the-street neighbor, Ellen, and her big sister would take us to fairyland and sprinkle fairy dust on us. When we got to fairyland, I was always the girl, and she was
LISA SCHEPS: the boy. It was just something that always was, it was a 00:07:30thing, and it was okay for a period of time, and then that tacit approval went away.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah. I appreciate you articulating the difference between like trapping the wrong body versus, I wanted to be this because I think
JACK MACCARTHY: there's a lot of different ways that trans people 00:08:00experience our sense of self. And where that's located in relationship to what people are seeing when they look at us.
LISA SCHEPS: For the longest time as I started my journey, started really exploring gender, when I was older, I felt like I did not have the right to transition, because I didn't feel like a woman trapped in a man's body, which was
LISA SCHEPS: the "thing" that everybody was even looking for. Even 00:08:30professionals told me oh, you don't feel that way, you don't count. So it was a very interesting place to be.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah. Well, tell me more about arriving at that place where this started to be something that you explored.
LISA SCHEPS: Well, that's flashing forward quite a distance. But the desire to be a girl or be female
LISA SCHEPS: was consistent in my life. To me, it manifests itself in 00:09:00cross-dressing which I felt like I couldn't control. I'll just tell this one story just because of the timeline. I was a teenager, probably 14 to 16. My sister was out of the house, and I used to, late at night, sneak into her closet and put on her clothes. One day my father came up and caught me
LISA SCHEPS: and he said, "Okay, get it. Take 'em off." "Take 'em 00:09:30off." He was like, very serious about that. But we did not get corporally punished in our house, so there was no physical anything, but he was clearly disappointed. But since he didn't hit me or anything, he didn't get, like, really angry. I kind of took that as tacit approval, so I kept 'em on. He came back up,
LISA SCHEPS: then he got a little angry again, nothing physical, but 00:10:00it was like, take it off. But one of the things that I used to really get angry at myself, because there was a lot of self-loathing around this thing I couldn't control because everything else in my life was in control. But I had wished my father had beaten the shit out of me in that time period, because I thought that would've taken this terrible feeling I had away. That didn't happen.
LISA SCHEPS: That's to say that this has always been part of my life. 00:10:30I told very few people about it. Only one that I can think of offhand in my teenage to early adult years. But it was always there. Flash forward, I'm in my 30s or close to 30, I am dating a woman,
LISA SCHEPS: I am kind of a computer nerd. This is when computers are 00:11:00just being started. I was on CompuServe, if you're familiar with that. I happened onto a cross-dressing group.
JACK MACCARTHY: For people who don't know what CompuServe is, a quick overview.
LISA SCHEPS: Okay, of course. This would be in the early eighties. It was one of the first online, this is
LISA SCHEPS: before the web existed as a web. It existed to real 00:11:30computer nerds. But this was the precursor, really, to America online, if people know what America Online is. CompuServe, where I attached to other people. Again, it wasn't called the web. It was only through their service, and it had lists, what we now know as listservs and things like that. I forgot what they called them. I was browsing
LISA SCHEPS: through these things, and I happened to cross a 00:12:00cross-dressing listserv. I think maybe they even called it a transvestite listserv, at the time. I stayed up all night reading it because I thought I was all by myself with regards to trans people in media, I had Christine Jorgenson, I had Renée Richards
LISA SCHEPS: and that was basically it, to my knowledge, I didn't 00:12:30know of any others. Both of those were people that saw themselves as women trapped in a man's body, and that I did not identify with. I had no role models. I thought I was literally the only person in this category. So, wow. What a thing to discover,
LISA SCHEPS: I wasn't alone. Sat up all night reading. Two things 00:13:00became clear after that was, [a] I'm not alone, which we just ascertained. And two, this does not go away. So anybody from my demographic, which is a 60 something, white, male to female, at that time, crossdresser, I went through, like
LISA SCHEPS: many people, a period of binging and purging of all my 00:13:30stuff. I would buy female clothes and then throw it away in disgust. This told me, don't do that anymore, you're wasting money. But that made me go to my girlfriend at the time, who I still consider my soulmate. She's just a lovely person. We were three years into a six year relationship, and I told her about it, and she was wonderful.
LISA SCHEPS: She came back with an article from, I think, New York 00:14:00Magazine about a group called Tri-Ess. If you've never heard of Tri-Ess, it literally stands for the sorority of the Second Self. It's a group made up of heterosexual crossdressers that meet, and it's been around for a long, long time. This was a group out in New Jersey, and I
LISA SCHEPS: went in just a hideous dress that I bought somewhere and 00:14:30a hideous wig, and try to do some makeup.
JACK MACCARTHY: Where were you living at the time?
LISA SCHEPS: New York, in Manhattan. At Sarah's encouragement, she encouraged me to go to this place. I forgot what led to this, the original question. Oh, it was the exploration of my gender. I did not want to explore it prior to this,
LISA SCHEPS: which sort of told me that I needed to explore it. But 00:15:00even at this point, I was afraid to explore it because I was afraid that I would discover that I was a gay man. To me, nothing could be worse. I was pretty homophobic. I was transphobic. I was all those things. As I said, I did a really good job of being a guy. I was a pretty macho dude back in the day.
JACK MACCARTHY: What were you doing for a living at the time?
LISA SCHEPS: I worked in theater.
LISA SCHEPS: At this point I had already worked on Broadway as a 00:15:30stage manager. I got out of performing and started stage managing and directing. I worked on Broadway, and then I started doing what is known as industrial theater. It's basically Broadway style shows for industry. There's a wonderful documentary on Netflix called Bathtubs Over Broadway that sort of describes my industry. But I got into that and
LISA SCHEPS: loved it, and did that. As a matter of fact, that's 00:16:00where I met Sarah. She was a performer on a show that I did for McDonald's. Was it McDonald's? It might have been. It doesn't matter. But at that point, I was stage managing and producing what we call business theater industrial shows. A lot of stuff happened to get there, but that's where I was.
JACK MACCARTHY: Then you went to Tri-Ess in
JACK MACCARTHY: New Jersey, and what happened?
00:16:30LISA SCHEPS: Well, a couple of things. I felt great. I was the center of attention and I can tell you a little bit more about that later, but, so Tri-Ess -- It was very interesting. As I talk about it, we sit at a table and you'd talk about -- People were talking about cars and hunting and fishing and nail color. It was really kind of surreal.
LISA SCHEPS: What I discovered later through a lot of therapy was I 00:17:00was really the only female in the room at that time. Most other people sort of adhered to that idea of a heterosexual crossdresser. When I came in, suddenly there was a girl in the room, there's a woman in the room, and I didn't get it at the time, and that's kind of why I got that attention. That was one of the a-ha moments through like several years of therapy that I went, oh, this is not
LISA SCHEPS: just cross-dressing, it's something much more than the 00:17:30clothes. Then I had to explore that. But the Tri-Ess thing was pretty cool as I look back at it. But it was surreal all at the same time. I do have to admit, being a person of a certain age, my mind has been pretty cemented in the binary, I'm still kind of there. In this case I will
LISA SCHEPS: say this was men in dresses and me. It was really 00:18:00fascinating. The surrealness of the level of conversation of those things that were typically masculine with the odd feminine point of view brought in was just amazing. Now I celebrate it. I think, oh my God, these people are great that they're able to do that. But at the time it was surreal.
JACK MACCARTHY: The idea that it was like all these men in dresses 00:18:30and you were the one girl, do you think that everyone in the room was feeling that on an instinctual level?
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah, I don't think that the feelings that the other women in the room were explicit. It was just kind of what happened. I believe, or I'd like to believe, let's just be honest,
LISA SCHEPS: that I was emitting more female energy versus feminine 00:19:00energy than others, and that's why I think that they kind of treated me that way. That's all pop psychology. I wasn't aware of that at the time. It was much later.
JACK MACCARTHY:
LISA SCHEPS: I know. Yeah, I know. I'm sorry. Yeah. I'm sorry.
JACK MACCARTHY:
JACK MACCARTHY: a few times. Okay. So you keep covering my questions 00:19:30before I ask them. Since you're a professional.
LISA SCHEPS: Sorry.
JACK MACCARTHY: You go to New Jersey, you have this experience. What comes from it?
LISA SCHEPS: This is all on a continuum of exploring my gender, which I was, as I said, afraid to do. At that point, let's see -- I'm in New York.
LISA SCHEPS: At that point, I probably tried therapy. I don't really 00:20:00remember too much. I am an extremely stubborn person, so I would walk into therapists' office and I would go, all right, fix me. And I would give nothing. I didn't quite understand that I had a
LISA SCHEPS: contract in this and I didn't get what it was. I didn't 00:20:30actually do the real work I needed to do until I moved to Chicago which is another part of the story. Do we want to go there?
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah, let's go there. Why did you move to Chicago?
LISA SCHEPS: I moved to Chicago in 1994. Kind of, it was time to go. I had left Manhattan. I had moved north of the city. I stopped
LISA SCHEPS: seeing New York for what made it great. I started only 00:21:00seeing the negative stuff about it. Right before I moved to Chicago, I had moved to near Newburgh, New York, which was a two and a half hour commute each way. I'm a workaholic. I would get to work at seven. I would leave at seven. If you do the math, I didn't get much sleep and I wasn't at home. Funny little story, I continued to go to Tri-Ess. I bought my first home,
LISA SCHEPS: which was up near Newburgh. It was a condo. I was so 00:21:30paranoid that people would see me, so when I would get dressed, I would close all my shades and everything, and I would get dressed and I'd get in my car, which is a black Nissan Sentra SE-R, Bob's car, if people remember that commercial. I would get in my car, I'd turn off all the lights, I'd open the garage door, I'd zoom out and close the garage door behind me,
LISA SCHEPS: and then turn my headlights on and drive away to the
00:22:00Tri-Ess meetings or wherever else I was going. There was a seedy little bar in
New York, I forgot what it was called, where a lot of trans sex workers went. I
used to hang -- Hangout isn't the right word, but I used to go there. Found out
later I talked to somebody that lived in that complex, and they called me Batman
LISA SCHEPS: at that time, I identified as a crossdresser and that 00:22:30was what it was. It was still this thing I couldn't control. It was still something that I loathed about myself. Sarah and I had broken up. I was the one that did the breaking up, which I almost immediately regretted. But it was just time to leave New York.
LISA SCHEPS: I had a friend that I had worked with who said he was 00:23:00opening up a new office in Chicago, where he lived, and did I want to come up and share office space. I had sort of wanted to go out on my own. I was a freelancer when I was in New York, so I said sure. I moved up to Chicago in February, not very smart, and opened up an office with my friend, Mark, and my friend -- I should say ex-friend, both of these men -- Jeff,
LISA SCHEPS: in Chicago. When I moved to Chicago, I said to myself, 00:23:30purge, getting rid of all of it, not doing it again. It's done. I'm done with it. I'm gonna do my company. I'm gonna do that, and that's it. Did the company. Flashing forward a little bit, they had moved outta the offices. I took my company. I opened up an office
LISA SCHEPS: really close to my apartment at the time.
00:24:00JACK MACCARTHY: Will you just specify what your company was?
LISA SCHEPS: I opened up my company, Aileron Creative, and there's another fun story about that, but I'm not gonna go into it because it has nothing to do with what we're talking about. But I did, I produced these in what we call industrial shows, business theater. I had a very very large pharmaceutical client. Within a year I was grossing over a million dollars. I was wildly successful.
LISA SCHEPS: I had moved out of that little office, which was in a 00:24:30studio apartment building in downtown Chicago. I found an office close to my house and what is called the South Loop portion of Chicago. Funny thing was, one of the people in that office wanted to stop working out of his home. He said, "Could he move in?" So he moved in. He had his company. I had my company. We decided to combine these two companies because we were both making
LISA SCHEPS: about the same amount of money. I had one client, he had 00:25:00like six. We formed a company called Concentrix to do these things. In the meantime, my one client, my big pharmaceutical client, kept us alive because all his clients disappeared. We built this business. Some of this will become important later, but we built a wildly successful business. My third person, the
LISA SCHEPS: person who initially asked me to come down, wanted to 00:25:30join our company, so we allowed him to join the company. So there were three of us in this company called Concentrix at the time. I don't know how it started, but something hit me and I had that urge to get dressed again, so I did. I found a Tri-Ess meeting in the suburbs of Chicago. I would occasionally go to these meetings.
LISA SCHEPS: Our little company, the three of us were, or I thought 00:26:00we were, really good friends and we were pretty tight. That coupled with the fact that I cannot lie, I'm really bad at it, I don't do it. One day somebody said, "What are you doing this weekend?" And I said, "I can't say." They said,
LISA SCHEPS: "What?" I said, "I can't tell you what I'm doing. I'm 00:26:30doing something, but can't tell you what it is." They all thought it was kind of weird. I was going to a Tri-Ess meeting. Turns out they thought I was going to do, they thought I was gonna commit suicide. That's what they thought I was gonna do. They were very worried about me. They knew this thing was going on. I was obviously really torn up about it because I couldn't control it. I still
LISA SCHEPS: thought I was a crossdresser, didn't see anything else 00:27:00about it. But it was this thing that just ate at me. Tell me if I'm getting too verbose.
JACK MACCARTHY: No, not at all.
LISA SCHEPS: This thing just kept eating at me and I was clearly upset. My one
business partner, we'll call him Mark, because that was his name,
LISA SCHEPS: "I know something's going on. You gotta tell me what it 00:27:30is." I said, "I can't." We started talking in an analogy, and my analogy was red. I said, "I have this thing. It's red. Nobody can know about it. It's a terrible thing. It's like a really, really bad thing, but I do it. I can't stop it." Blah, blah, blah. We went on and on. This went -- Hour and a half, two hours, maybe. Clearly, the conversation was coming to end, and Mark said to me, "Look,
LISA SCHEPS: you can tell me or not tell me. Doesn't matter. Just 00:28:00know I'm there for you." Spoil alert, he wasn't. Then I told him, I just blurted it out at that point. His reaction, his visceral reaction was, "Wow, it's like a light turned on on the side of your head and suddenly
LISA SCHEPS: you're three dimensional. You were so much more 00:28:30interesting to me than you were five minutes ago." Sorry about this. He did not judge me. That hit me like a brick. As a consequence, I stopped judging myself so harshly. It was actually the beginning
LISA SCHEPS: of me really doing the work towards my gender. He then 00:29:00told me about one of his, I guess it's a -- I forgot what it was, but it was a kink. He gave himself a color. Oh shit. What was his color? I forgot. We had a color. Now there's this big office around, oh. And I told my other partner, who I'm gonna call Jeff, because that was his name, still is. We told him. Then he said he had a color,
LISA SCHEPS: which was teal, but we never ever knew what his color
00:29:30meant. But it became sort of a joke around the office. Yeah. Became a joke, but
I wasn't being laughed at, I was actually being laughed with. This was all
really good at the time. They knew I was cross-dressing. I found a therapist
that I liked. And again,
LISA SCHEPS: do any of the work you asked me to do, and you just need 00:30:00to fix me. She was going, nah, it doesn't work that way. Her name was Pat. I just, I look at Pat very fondly in hindsight, but I was a terrible client for her. As a matter of fact, I quit. I found a different therapist that took a different approach, which didn't work. I ended up coming back, or I called her, I said,
LISA SCHEPS: "I want to come back." I found out later, or not much 00:30:30later, like, on my first session back, that she didn't want to take me back. That I gave her like I was her worst client. She would go home in tears after talking to me. What I didn't see then was that the relationship between a therapist and their client is indeed that, a relationship. I saw it as a business.
LISA SCHEPS: I kept saying to her, I'm paying you, that's why you 00:31:00care about me. But that wasn't the case. I didn't get it then. When I came back, I then started doing the work. She was a Jungian, so we did a lot of dream stuff. But I started actually journaling and I was a very prolific journaler. I've got, all through my transition, hundreds and hundreds of pages of journal. But that's when I started doing the real work.
LISA SCHEPS: It was through my work with Pat that we discovered that 00:31:30it wasn't about the clothes, that it was much deeper than that. It was more about gender than the outside trappings of gender. At the moment, I discovered or accepted that I was transsexual,
LISA SCHEPS: it was clear that I had to do something, but I was still 00:32:00stuck with this thing around not being a woman trapped in a man's body. I'd said, "No, that's not me." There was a proliferation, as there are now, but there were a handful of memoirs coming out at the time. There was a memoir by Dr. Deirdre McCloskey. What was it called?
LISA SCHEPS: I read a memoir by Deirdre McCloskey, who was an 00:32:30economist at the University of Chicago or something. I think she was nationally known at the time. I think her being in Chicago was coincidental more than anything else. But one of the things that stood out to me and why this memoir, of all the memoirs that were out there at the time, hit me the hardest was she said, very explicitly, "I am not a woman trapped in a man's body."
LISA SCHEPS: It was like, bam, I have permission. Somebody else feels 00:33:00the way I do. Does that sound familiar? So that was that, that thing. Now the thing that's really important, and this would've been mid 90s, 95, 96, the internet still hadn't really taken off yet. There was not all that much information out there. As a matter of fact, as I first started
LISA SCHEPS: exploring gender, I think there were two books. One 00:33:30written by a doctor named Dr. Doctor . Then there was a picture book by -- Oh shoot, what's her name? She became a friend of mine. Anyway, there's a picture book of female to male cross-dressers and transsexuals. Those are the two things out there. I remember searching for them in the Barnes and Nobles and things like that, and too afraid to ask
LISA SCHEPS: anybody about them. I'm gonna have to write that book. 00:34:00There wasn't a lot of information out there. I couldn't search the web at the time. I don't think the web, as we know it, was out yet, but I'm not sure. But clearly I didn't feel like there was anything. So this book that you had to actually buy at a bookstore and read was -- books, in general, were -- very pivotal
LISA SCHEPS: to mine and, I will just go out there and say, all of 00:34:30our journeys at that time, because it was the only information we could get. Very little information. That was a little light bulb, that Deirdre book really spoke to me. Then my path was clear. One of the things about me, and going back all the way from theater to almost anything else that I've done in my life, I've always -- What I say is I jump off the cliff and I sprout wings on my way down. That's how I've always done things.
LISA SCHEPS: I do first, I plan later. The theater we're sitting in 00:35:00right now is a testament to that. I did not plan this. If I had, I never would've done it. Do first, plan later. Okay, I'm transsexual. That means medical surgical transition. That means changing my presentation -- remember, I'm binary girl -- from male to female. That was my path, and
LISA SCHEPS: that's the path I took. So as soon as I could, the WPATH 00:35:30standards, which were then called the Benjamin Standards of Care, were what everybody subscribed to. It was a year of therapy before hormones. It was all a very relatively slow process, but based on the standards of care, I did it very quickly. I'm gonna stop there.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay.
LISA SCHEPS: And let's -- Because you ask a question, I just talked, I'm sorry.
JACK MACCARTHY: No, the reason I'm not interrupting you is because you're on the right path, answering the questions I would've asked.
LISA SCHEPS: Good.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. So, according to the WPATH standards, you're doing it kind of as quickly as you can.
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah. Because there's no question, it's gonna happen.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. This is what, like, '96?
00:36:30LISA SCHEPS: This would be '97, '96, '97, somewhere around there.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. What happens? What steps do you take? Who do you tell?
LISA SCHEPS: Okay. So path is clear. I know there's gotta be a coming out process. I need to start telling people what I'm doing. I need to start taking the steps to do it.
LISA SCHEPS: At the same time, I started exploring what was out there 00:37:00in gender. I knew about Tri-Ess. Tri-Ess wasn't right anymore because I am no longer a heterosexual crossdresser. I am a transsexual. At that time, the gender binary was still the gender binary, gender queer wasn't a word. None of the other gender identities
LISA SCHEPS: were in my mind anyway. I became very involved in the 00:37:30political aspects of gender identity, because what I discovered is that I knew nothing about what made this country tick. I could not have told you how a bill became a law because for 35 years of my life, I was in the most protected class in the society.
LISA SCHEPS: I did not need to know how it worked because I had 00:38:00plenty of people advocating for me. Suddenly, very suddenly, I found myself in what, at that time, I called the most disenfranchised community. Of course, we know that's not true, but I found myself in a marginalized group. What I also discovered about my peers in my demographic was most
LISA SCHEPS: male to female transsexuals in their lives became very 00:38:30introverted. They chose solitary careers, they chose hyper-masculine careers, truck drivers, in the military, things like that. But things were -- Communication wasn't really done. Or computer programming was a big one. I chose theater. What I discovered much later is
LISA SCHEPS: my theater was my way of isolating. One of the things 00:39:00that I discovered that I could do was by being gregarious myself, by putting on different skins. Nobody asked about me. The more I talked, the less people would ask me. That was the way I protected myself. But it gave me the ability to talk. I found it at this point, my responsibility to speak for people that couldn't do it or wouldn't do it themselves.
LISA SCHEPS: I got involved with -- I forgot what it was called at 00:39:30the time, but it became the Illinois Gender Advocates. It was a statewide gender advocacy group run by two women, Miranda and Beth. We would lobby the state for gender identity inclusion and legislation, et cetera. I became very involved that way.
LISA SCHEPS: At the same time, I'm exploring my own gender stuff and 00:40:00I became very out in Chicago. I also had to come out to my family and my closest friends. My family obviously had to be first. My father had since passed away. It was my mother, my brother, and my sister.
LISA SCHEPS: Nobody had a clue about this because I was a pretty 00:40:30tough dude. I played the game really well. I decided to write a letter that I would read out loud, which sort of, in one page, I think laid out the background, the facts, and then open it up for questions. My plan was to try to really control this message that I would fly into Houston.
LISA SCHEPS: I had dinner with my mom on, let's just say Monday 00:41:00night, lunch with my brother Tuesday and dinner with my sister on Wednesday, because I wanted it to be as quick as possible. I had to start with my mom. Our family growing up was, I thought it was a leave it to be for family, we were fine. Everything's fine.
LISA SCHEPS: Now that I think about it further, we were a very 00:41:30typical southern Jewish, upper middle class, white family where everything was just on the surface. We never got very far below the surface. There was no intimacy in my family. We were like five strangers living in the same house. But everything was fine. Everybody loved everybody. We'd get in fights, but nothing was deep. That's the way it was. Took my mother to a really fancy
LISA SCHEPS: restaurant in Houston. I read her the letter and I 00:42:00looked at her at the end of the letter and she said, "Okay." And I went, what? She said, "You're a boy now you're gonna gimme a girl. Okay." I went, "All right, well, when this hits you, know that you can talk to me."
LISA SCHEPS: It never really hit her. I mean, I wouldn't say she was 00:42:30good with my transition, especially as it had to do with other people. If you know the term Shanda for the neighbors, she never called me her daughter. She always called me her child. When I chose my name, Lisa, I chose Ricky as my middle name. My family called me Ricky growing up, so my family did not have to change my name.
LISA SCHEPS: I did that specifically for them and others that called 00:43:00me Ricky. I made them spell it differently, which sometimes they did, sometimes they didn't. But when I had genital surgery, she was there. Always very loving, always very supportive in the way that she could be. My sister, pretty good. Her big thing, cute, was she said I was always the only girl
LISA SCHEPS: and now I'm not, and that makes me mad. My brother, he 00:43:30and I never really got along, so he was the hard nut, still is the hard nut. Everybody in my family has passed away now. My brother's the only one that's left, oddly enough. He's a little more tender now, but just a little. I had to orchestrate that whole thing. Then my biggest fear was my best friend Victor,
LISA SCHEPS: who in my opinion, looked at gender as a stereotype. He 00:44:00was a ken doll. He married a Barbie doll. He would always be very stereotypically male, his wife, very feminine. When I say stereotypical, well, stereotypical male is right. I do want to acknowledge the difference between male and female and masculine and feminine.
LISA SCHEPS: I do understand those differences, but he was 00:44:30stereotypically male. Prior to transition, I would always throw out these trial balloons. Like I would go, I remember saying to Victor once we were at the beach and I saw a man with shaved legs. I said, "Look at that guy. He's got shaved legs." And Victor just went off, what a fucking sicko that guy is. It's awful, blah, blah, blah. And I go, oh, I can't tell Victor. But I had to tell Victor, he was,
LISA SCHEPS: and still is, a very dear friend of mine. I was 00:45:00terrified. He lived in LA. I'd scheduled a trip out to LA. We met at a restaurant in Santa Monica on the beach. I forgot what it was. I was the most scared to tell him. He was the best. To this day, he's been the best. He was lovely.
LISA SCHEPS: He was hurt, terribly hurt, but I felt I couldn't tell 00:45:30him. I've known him since I was 12. This has been part of my life since I was 12. He was lovely, which is fucking lovely. I told him about the trial balloon. He said, God, I feel terrible about that. I just feel really bad.
LISA SCHEPS: I will say through my coming out process, nobody acted 00:46:00the way I thought they would. On the other side of the coin, I did lose some people. A couple of people in particular. Somebody I worked with, was pretty close to, politically, we were very far apart. He, like, screamed at me, when I voted for Clinton.
LISA SCHEPS: But when I came out to him, we were on a job site. I 00:46:30came out to him and he said "Eric," which was my name, he said, "Jesus told us to not judge our brothers or our sisters. I will never judge you. You'll be my friend forever. And that was pretty much the last time I spoke to him." He disappeared. We didn't have the term then, but I was ghosted.
LISA SCHEPS: There was a period, my girlfriend, Sarah, there were 00:47:00four couples that we were like a family. It's the only time I've really known family, like, family, and he was part of that group and his kids. I was part of his kids' lives and his wife and everybody. So that loss was
LISA SCHEPS: pretty hard. Flashing forward, then I lost my business 00:47:30and my business partners Which is another topic which I'm sure we'll get to. I think that was it for the planning. I'm going through those stages of the WPATH standards, which is X amount of therapy
LISA SCHEPS: before hormones, going on hormone therapy, getting ready 00:48:00to live full-time. But I was still in my business at the time, so I couldn't do that. Then doing everything that I needed to do with therapy and stuff to get ready for genital surgery, which was at that time a year of living full-time in the gender that you were transitioning to.
LISA SCHEPS: Bam.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. I think the hard thing is the thing that's kind 00:48:30of next.
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah. The business.
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah.
LISA SCHEPS: Okay. Well, I told you that I had built this business Concentrix. It was my heart and soul. Again, digging deep into me, really, everything was the business.
LISA SCHEPS: Any of my friends were connected to the business. 00:49:00Everything was the business, and I loved it. I will tell a story of early on in the business. I built this business Concentrix. It was my heart and soul. It was everything to me. There was nothing about the business that wasn't part of my life, including all my friendships, all stemmed from the business. And I loved it. I loved what I was doing.
LISA SCHEPS: I was financially successful. I will say this, there was 00:49:30one day, early in the business, this is before I took on partners, when I was just by myself. I just remember one night I couldn't sleep. It was like three or four in the morning, my mind was racing. I was really unhappy. I was crying. My office was literally a block from my apartment at the time, so I went to the office and I felt so much better. I remember thinking to myself,
LISA SCHEPS: I shouldn't be taking this much comfort from my 00:50:00business. But in hindsight, I'm all for it. I loved business. I told you already that I took on Jeff as a partner and then brought in Mark as a partner. We're doing really well. We have a handful of employees we wanted to grow to the next level.
LISA SCHEPS: A very large company in our industry went out -- They 00:50:30closed their Chicago office. We grabbed the VP of sales from that office, hired him on an ownership track. If he brought in X amount of business, we would give him ownership of the company. We're just gonna call him Steve, because that was his name. Turns out, spoiler alert, he was the evil person in the story.
LISA SCHEPS: I will say this, that I fought against him. I did not 00:51:00want him in our company. I really, really fought against it. Mark and Jeff really, really wanted. I was outvoted. He came in then I actually -- On a trip to London, I tearfully apologized to him for misjudging him. That was about three weeks before he kicked me out of my company.
LISA SCHEPS: At the time this happened, this company that I built, 00:51:30that my client -- Remember, when Jeff and I first started business together, my big pharmaceutical client stayed. All of his clients pretty much disappeared. My contribution to this business kept us going, through my entire time there, through this one client.
LISA SCHEPS: Where we are sitting right now is there are four people 00:52:00at leadership. I own 30%. Jeff owns 30%. Mark owns 30%. Steve owns 10%. Early on, after I had figured out that I'm gonna transition, I had made the mistake of telling my business partners that at such time I decide to fully transition, I will leave the company.
LISA SCHEPS: Well, I decided against that. So one day, Mark is out of 00:52:30town, he's out of the country. I said to Jeff, "I need to talk to you." I said, "I'm gonna transition and I'm gonna stay in the company." Three days later I was out of the company. We had a back room, and Jeff and Steve and I went
LISA SCHEPS: immediately to that back room where every kind of 00:53:00transphobic thing you could think of was said to me. At one point, Steve actually looked at me and said, "Eric, how do you think you're gonna be able to run this company when the only thing you're gonna be thinking about is nail color?" I looked at him
LISA SCHEPS: and I said, "Steve, did you actually say that? Did that 00:53:30actually come out of your mouth?" Bear in mind, in their defense, we're dealing with Fortune 50 companies, the highest level of corporation. At the highest level, at the CEO level of those companies, I am constantly at the CEO of these very large corporations advising them. They felt that a transgender person, which wasn't a word at the time, as a transsexual - could never do that.
LISA SCHEPS: At the end of that first meeting, Steve looks at me and 00:54:00said, "Look, we just wanna find a solution." Great. I went home. I got on the phone to some of my people, and I need to shout out to Mara Kesling, who has a very dear friend of mine, who I got on the phone with immediately, who didn't know me from Adam at the time. We became very good friends. I called Mara because I know that she had just transitioned in
LISA SCHEPS: a like company and kept all her clients. I said, I need 00:54:30some help. I need to figure out what arguments I can go back to give my partners to keep me in this company. I cannot lose this company. We talked for a long time and I wrote up a plan. I had a really solid plan, which made me not client facing. I would deal with the operations of the company and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I came back with a plan that
LISA SCHEPS: would make me not client facing, that I was gonna do 00:55:00operations. I was gonna keep in contact with my clients, through other people, as it turns out, which is fine, because at that point in my career, I had people doing all the face-to-face work. I was just there for comfort of the client at the time. I had this, and I felt really good about it. I said, "You said you wanted a solution. I have a solution that gives you everything you want." And then
LISA SCHEPS: I came back with that. And then Jeff just was so cruel,
00:55:30
LISA SCHEPS: I mean, it would've been better if they said, and they 00:56:00did for all intent and purposes, "Look, there's no argument. You can't talk us into it. You're a freak. We don't want you in this company." That would've been easier to take than this other stuff. We left that meeting and I don't know what I came back with
LISA SCHEPS: the third day. I don't remember what it was. Mind you, 00:56:30Mark was out on -- We had a client, a cruise ship client, we'll just call it Royal Caribbean because it was, and he was the main contact with Royal Caribbean. He was on a ship. They had ship to shore calling. He could have talked to me.
LISA SCHEPS: I do need to stress that, but prior to this moment, we
00:57:00had made an agreement a long time ago that the friendship comes first. There was
some things that happened, that we didn't talk about here, that tested that, and
they failed. This is turning into a long story
LISA SCHEPS: Anyway, [crosstalk]. Mark was on a ship, never called, 00:57:30never contacted. So this whole friendship thing really showed its true colors at this point. Bottom line is at the end of that 3 days, it was clear that with their 70% of the company and my 30% of the company, they wanted me gone,
LISA SCHEPS: and I left that day never to come back. It was huge on a 00:58:00lot of levels. It was huge on the company level because as I said, everything was that company for me. These people that I thought were my friends, first and foremost, prove themselves to not be.
LISA SCHEPS: And I meant it when I said it. I meant it. I always do. 00:58:30I said I can't lie, their friendship would've superseded a business decision for me. Clearly, it did not go both ways, and that's sad, in hindsight. I left the office that day. I'm gonna say it was approximately November 21st, 2000.
LISA SCHEPS: Stop there, in the mid-morning and I went home and I 00:59:00went from a period of living female, working male to living, female being female all the time. 100%. That was my day of going full-time. It was also the day of losing my business. As it turns out, it was the loss of
LISA SCHEPS: most of my friends and my money and stuff, because I 00:59:30like stuff, I like material things. I'm embarrassed about it, but I do like it. I miss having them. I was very generous with my money. I'm pretty convinced I had a long list of friends because I was generous with my money. That was the story of losing my business. I did just read,
LISA SCHEPS: a few months ago, that they won an LGBTQ award from some 01:00:00agency in Chicago. I wanted to write a letter to the editor saying, by the way, the company that you just gave this award to did this. If I had transitioned in today's environment, it would've gone differently. I'm convinced of that. But it didn't. I will say that as soon
LISA SCHEPS: as I was gone, Mark and Steve turned their eyes on Jeff 01:00:30and kicked him out of the company. I will also say that when I left the company, I didn't want any more negativity, so I decided not to fight for what I deserved financially. My lawyers were begging me to be more aggressive in my negotiations,
LISA SCHEPS: and I said, no, let's just give -- It's decent amount of 01:01:00money. Let's do it. Fast forward a year and a half after that, it was a payout over time, they came to me and said, "We need you to forgive all money from us. We can't pay you." They cheated me out of half of the money that I already thought was less. But I'm not bitter.
LISA SCHEPS: They went after Jeff and they were really mean. I mean,
01:01:30I thought they were mean to me. They didn't want me, not because of the work I
did, but because of who I was. They didn't want Jeff because of the work he did
LISA SCHEPS: Then Jeff is a whole nother story that I will not go 01:02:00into. But I will say that we started another company together in 2008, which didn't work out because it was 2008. Then he took a job with the corporation in our industry. He hired me, and then he showed his true colors.
LISA SCHEPS: I will say this, not through mean-spiritedness, he just 01:02:30does not have the courage to stand up for his convictions. When it's a choice between him or anybody else, he's gonna take him. He would not take my side in anything. As I look back on our history together, that happened in 2008, it happened in 2000, and back in the days
LISA SCHEPS: in New York, he used to hire me as a stage manager, I 01:03:00found out -- Again, part of what I do is I never charged overtime, even though I worked overtime. I found out later that he was charging his client overtime and keeping that money. Needless to say, I don't talk to Jeff anymore. I did try to reach out to Mark once, like not all that long ago, to say I never
LISA SCHEPS: really heard your side. I know my side, I know how I
01:03:30feel, but I never gave you the opportunity to say, "Hey, you're living your life
was scary to me for these reasons." I reached out to him and he said, "I forgive
you.
LISA SCHEPS: pill to take. After my NDA was over, part of my NDA was 01:04:00I couldn't tell my clients at my very large company the true reason why I was leaving. I did reach out to the CEO of this company after my NDA was over and he went, oh my God, congratulations. It's great for you, blah, blah, blah. Surprise. That's the story of the company. I did learn,
LISA SCHEPS: as I have -- In my path as someone that believes 01:04:30strongly in social justice and equity and diversity, I was one of those people that said, anybody can get anywhere in this company, lift yourself up by your bootstraps. Because I did it. I started that company with nothing, and I grew it to a multimillion dollar company with 25 employees and 40
LISA SCHEPS: permalancers, all by myself. I had no help. I didn't 01:05:00realize how much help I had as a white male. That theory I had about everything, jumping off the cliff and sprouting wings on my way down, always worked for me. I did not know failure until I transitioned, and suddenly I would have the same thing. I would go in, but I wasn't as easy. I didn't have that privilege that I had before.
LISA SCHEPS: I need to say, with all honesty, I still have a lot of 01:05:30privilege, but I don't have as much as I used to. It just says that maybe all that white maleness got me a lot further than even I thought I did. Because it has not been an easy path since then. Not only as a trans person, but as a woman. Now as a person of a certain age, I've just hit
LISA SCHEPS: roadblocks after roadblocks after roadblocks. That's 01:06:00kind of the business thing. And, no, I'm not gonna say that.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Yeah. As before, still
JACK MACCARTHY: royally sucks. Still royally shitty and awful. 01:06:30Especially if it's like -- I think there's a different pain between, like, I didn't think you would be supportive, and then you weren't supportive, and it seemed like you were going to be supportive and then you weren't. Or you gave me reason to think you would be, or you were in this way,
LISA SCHEPS: and then you betrayed me. That's a different kind of -- 01:07:00Yeah. There's a huge irony in the person, Mark, who released me from a lot of my pain and a lot of my self-loathing, was the person that caused a great deal of pain. And I will say, I don't believe I know a lot of truly evil
LISA SCHEPS: people in the world. I don't think Mark is evil. I think 01:07:30he is a good man that does bad things. Steve, on the other hand, fucking evil. I mean, he went at me with laser precision. He knew exactly what he was doing from day one. I mean, Mark makes me sad. Jeff makes me really sad.
LISA SCHEPS: I don't get angry very often, but Steve makes me angry. 01:08:00It's interesting, with regards to my transition, the people that have hurt me the most, other than Steve, I don't fault them in a lot of ways. Randy, who's the person that turned away from me after he said he wouldn't, very conventional conservative
LISA SCHEPS: religious beliefs. He's since passed away, but he was 01:08:30fighting his own demons. Yeah, it hurts. Yeah, I'm mad at him, but I think a lot of that was just, he couldn't get out of his own head to accept me for who I was. Not because he didn't love me, but because society told him he couldn't.
LISA SCHEPS: I find that sad. We have Kleenex now.
01:09:00JACK MACCARTHY:
LISA SCHEPS: I will tell -- This is probably not for this, but a very interesting story. Did you see the Hamilton Disney+ version? I've seen it a whole bunch of times. But somebody said, if you want to hear the actual outro that the orchestra plays, as people are walking out of the theater, go past the credits
LISA SCHEPS: or watch all the credits. I did. One of the things that 01:09:30I did that I really loved is like every person in that company, including the chorus, got a single frame mention. One of them, it came up, was Hope Easterbrook. Hope was -- I'm gonna describe her. She's a white girl, wasn't the one with the long black ponytail, but the other white girl.
JACK MACCARTHY: With the blonde?
LISA SCHEPS: Yes.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. Yeah.
LISA SCHEPS: That's Randy's daughter. I held her as an infant. She 01:10:00was born after they miscarried their first daughter. She was named Hope out of -- It's the Hope of a new life. Anyway, so I said, it can't be another Hope Easterbrook. I looked her up and it was her.
LISA SCHEPS: And I thought, God, I should reach out to them on 01:10:30Facebook, both Randy and Heidi, both parents are gone. I have another friend Lynno, shout out to Leno, if you're watching it. He called me one day and I mentioned the thing about Hope, and then he texted me like two weeks later. He said, you're gonna get a call from Hope. I never got that call, but it just made --
LISA SCHEPS: I don't know what Randy said about me, and I didn't want 01:11:00to intrude in their life, in their loss of both of their parents. I didn't reach out to her because I was gonna Facebook message -- Anyway, but I thought that was really interesting, and she's just a lovely talent, seems like.
JACK MACCARTHY: Wow. It seems like at this point you had already been 01:11:30involved in activism. How did your activism kind of continue formulating?
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah, that's great. I credit Mara Kesling, who is the founder of the National Center for Transgender Equality. She wasn't at this time. I credit her with a lot of this. I met her at Southern Comfort which was a
LISA SCHEPS: convention that happened every year in Atlanta, Georgia. 01:12:00One of the founders is Sabrina Taraboletti, a very dear friend of mine to this day, and one of the bravest trans people I know. Shout out to Sabrina. But I met Mara and we just became fast friends really quickly. She was very active politically, and so I credit her with furthering Miranda and Beth started it
LISA SCHEPS: on a statewide basis. But I was at Southern Comfort and 01:12:30there was a national group called GenderPAC, run by a person named Riki Wilchins.
JACK MACCARTHY: OUTWORDS interviewing [inaudible].
LISA SCHEPS: Okay. Well, good. Riki was a pariah at this time because she had decided to take GenderPAC from focusing on gender diverse people to gender in general, which really
LISA SCHEPS: ended up being more towards cis women, really more than 01:13:00anything else. But she became from the activist, sort of a non-welcome person. I was invited by Mara to this meeting of all the statewide trans activists and everybody that was doing trans advocacy to talk about GenderPAC and Riki. It was just a very charged room. It had every
LISA SCHEPS: nationally known trans activist in the country in that 01:13:30room, and me. And they all didn't know who the hell I was and wanted, they thought I was a -- Oh, because I had a GenderPAC button on because I'd met Riki earlier and she had put the button on, and I was like, they all like, it was really pretty funny. But I listened to all this and I
LISA SCHEPS: understood the criticism of Riki and why it was 01:14:00important for someone to be advocating for gender identity and expression at the time. There wasn't anything out there. HRC had already thrown the trans community under the bus once at that point. They would have done it two more times.
JACK MACCARTHY: You mean this was before they went on to then do it again?
LISA SCHEPS: And do it a third time. Before I got there, they did it. 01:14:30I don't remember the specifics around that first time. But HRC was clearly afraid. They were afraid of Barney Frank, who, at the time, was running the gay -- The word I'm trying to think of --
JACK MACCARTHY: Caucus.
LISA SCHEPS: Caucus, thank you.
LISA SCHEPS: Barney was known to be pretty transphobic. We were 01:15:00trying to get end of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, and it had been introduced year after year after year, and HRC would say, "We're gonna support gender identity inclusion." And then Barney would say, "You gotta take it out," and HRC would go, okay. They did this several times, but
LISA SCHEPS: I was learning all these subtleties and how important it 01:15:30was for us to have a voice. Through Mara, I met a whole bunch of other people. Then there was another group called the International Foundation of Gender Education. I joined the board of that. They had a convention every year. It was kind of like Southern Comfort except
LISA SCHEPS: it was more political. Southern Comfort was pretty 01:16:00political. IFGE was more political. I started going to all those. Then I learned about -- That at the time is called the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. Now I believe it's just called the Task Force. They would have a convention of statewide leaders every year. I got involved with them and met with some of them and just started getting
LISA SCHEPS: really involved in this idea of getting gender identity 01:16:30as part of the movement towards gay rights, sexual orientation and gender identity.
JACK MACCARTHY: What time frame?
LISA SCHEPS: This would've been 2001, 2002, right around then. Mara and I were thick as thieves, and
LISA SCHEPS: I was there. She said, "I think we needed a national 01:17:00group to take off where GenderPAC left off." That's when she decided that she was gonna start NCTE of which I'm a founding board member of. I just became more and more active. In 2002, I decided to leave Chicago and moved to Austin.
JACK MACCARTHY: Why?
LISA SCHEPS: I felt like I needed to leave Chicago.
LISA SCHEPS: There's so much pain there. In hindsight, I don't know, 01:17:30I should have stayed. But my transition sort of forced a little bit of intimacy in my family. I moved away from home in 1977 and had been away from home. And so I was 3000 miles away from my family at all times. Coming to Austin was kind of like coming home. I thought that my family would get a little
LISA SCHEPS: closer if I came in. That didn't really happen. But it 01:18:00was nice. I saw my mom a lot. I saw my sister a lot. I had a place to go for Passover and Thanksgiving. Those were important. My mother met a man who fortunately had a lot of money, so she, in the last years of her life, did a lot of traveling and just enjoyed herself. It was really wonderful to see.
LISA SCHEPS: Austin would be the only city in Texas that I would be 01:18:30willing to live in. As it turns out, it is the smallest city I've ever lived in, to this day. But I moved to Austin. My idea in moving to Austin was to just get off the radar. I was gonna be stealth. I was just gonna live my life as a Texan person and
LISA SCHEPS: be done with it. Almost two or three weeks after I got 01:19:00here, I got an email from someone saying, "Hey, they're trying to add gender identity to the human rights ordinance in the city of Austin. Can you come down and just meet with this group?" Okay. I don't even know how they got my name. I went and sat in this meeting in the offices of what is now Equality Texas, at the time was called LGRL [Lesbian Gay Rights Lobby of Texas].
LISA SCHEPS: The convener was -- I mean, we were in those offices, 01:19:30but allgo, at the time run by a person named Marco Duffer? I don't think that's right, but close. But allgo, which is statewide queers of color organization. At the time, it was Latino but now it's more inclusive. And allgo at the time was an acronym, now it's not.
LISA SCHEPS: Martha Duffer. Is that what I said?
01:20:00JACK MACCARTHY: You said Marco.
LISA SCHEPS: It's Martha Duffer. Shout out to you Martha. But we sat in that room and there had been some work going on in City Council or in the Human Rights Commission to add that. But it had gotten stalled, so we were talking about -- I ended up going to Human Rights Commission meetings every month trying to
LISA SCHEPS: get this thing through and getting the wording. There 01:20:30was already wording in place, and it had gender identity. I tried very hard to get them to add gender expression. That did not happen because it had already gone so far. But we finally, with the Human Rights Commission, got to a point where we were okay, submitted it to council. At that time we called this little group we formed,
LISA SCHEPS: we called it ATGOI [Austin Transgender Ordinance 01:21:00Initiative], and we got that passed. It's in the ordinance to this day. I'm really proud of that. I think I became the most active, I don't know if this is fair to say, one of the most active people in that group. When it was over. We all thought
LISA SCHEPS: this group needs to stay somehow. We changed our name to 01:21:30TACT [Transgender Advocates of Central Texas]. I was pretty much running it at that point, but there was a group of like five of us that sat down and came up with the mission, vision values and what we were gonna do. We met a lot. And that was really that core group of people.
LISA SCHEPS: I will say, this was me, we had a statewide group at 01:22:00that time. I forgot what it was called, but it hadn't been active in years. It was really just a Yahoo Messenger group that had nothing. There was one person who ran it, a wonderful advocate and activist named Vanessa. I forgot her last name,
LISA SCHEPS: but she wasn't doing anything with it. So I said, "We 01:22:30need something that's out there doing and advocating in the capital." We're in Austin, the capital is here. We changed it to Transgender Education Network of Texas, which still exists and is doing a lot of really good work. One of the problems at the time is everybody kind of looked like me, and that was clear to everything. I really wanted that to not be the case. I didn't want it to -- That group in Chicago,
LISA SCHEPS: those two women that ran it wouldn't give any 01:23:00information out. When they stopped doing it, it just fizzled out and died. I did not want that to happen to TENT, so I kept trying to get other people to run it. Finally, we got Emmett Schilling, who's there now. He is the very first paid executive director, now has a staff of a bunch. I mean, because the sights of the right are on trans people right now, there's a lot of
LISA SCHEPS: fundraising going on. I think TENT is pretty financially 01:23:30in good shape right now. All those organizations like Equality Texas and HRC that were kind of not allowing TENT to do the work because they wanted to take the credit for it in a lot of ways -- we thought it was important for trans people to speak for trans people --
LISA SCHEPS: suddenly they're now fundraising on trans issues and 01:24:00making a lot of money on it. But so is TENT. I have since stepped back from trans activism. I'm very active in the general space of anti-bias. I work with the Anti-Defamation League. Actually, I was thinking about this the other day because now I've changed my focus from trans to
LISA SCHEPS: a wider net. Very much like Riki Wilchins did with 01:24:30GenderPAC as it turns out. But I was the wrong face for TENT. It really needed to be someone who didn't look like me. That the people that need the most advocating for, the gender diverse people that need advocating for, don't look like me. They're non-binary. They're people of color. They're trans women of color. These are the people that
LISA SCHEPS: need advocating. They don't need to see my face because 01:25:00I just went from one protected class to another protected class, within a microcosm. It was important for me to not be the face. I am so not the face anymore. I am so proud of the work that these warriors are doing. When you look at TENT and when you look at the activisms of gender diverse activists in the state of Texas, there's not that many. There are some that look like me, but there's not
LISA SCHEPS: that many relative to what it used to be. I'm really 01:25:30proud of my activism. I'm proud of the path it took. I've always said I wish I could talk to myself, sit down with my old self because I wasn't a bad guy, I just didn't know. I didn't get it. Therefore, all that money I had that I could have been giving to social justice causes stayed in my pocket for the most part. I gave it to some
LISA SCHEPS: arts causes. But I would love to sit down and talk to 01:26:00myself and say, Hey, just think of these things as you go through life. And it might change. It might have changed stuff. That's my activism. I'm trying to think if there's anything else I missed around activism. But that's basically it. I did serve for several years on the Human Rights Commission, here in Austin, and was the chair of it for at least one year. I still work with
LISA SCHEPS: the Anti-Defamation League, and I'm on the city of 01:26:30Austin, Travis County Hate Crimes task force. Still pretty active, but now I'm focusing mostly on the arts.
JACK MACCARTHY: There's one story that we haven't touched on the subject of the HRC which was when you set up a table in the lobby.
LISA SCHEPS: Oh yeah.
LISA SCHEPS: I don't remember the date. Joe Solmonese was the 01:27:00executive director at the time, and actually I just saw a picture of it, but it was the second time, I think, HRC pulled their support for gender identity. Or may have been the third. Anyway, it was big. It was nationally known. It was a huge issue. We had a local HRC
LISA SCHEPS: steering committee, of which I was very friendly with. 01:27:30They were very supportive. They didn't like that HRC did this. First, I tried to convince them to break ranks to publicly say they disagree with national. They frankly basically said they can't do that. They could have, but they didn't. HRC has an annual fundraiser
LISA SCHEPS: every year. It's the HRC gala. It's a big deal. At the 01:28:00time, and I don't know where they are now, but HRC catered mostly to passing white gay men. That was their demographic. That's where the money came from, and all the galas happened, basically, rapid fire one after or the other. The first one that year was in Austin. I said, I want a table somewhere in the lobby when people come in.
LISA SCHEPS: The steering committee said, "Yeah." I said, "Well, do 01:28:30you need to talk to somebody? You need to call Joe and see if it's okay?" "Nope, you're gonna do it." I said, "I don't want to be told what I can say or who I can speak to, anybody." She said, "And furthermore, we're gonna put your table right where the escalators or people come, you're gonna be right there." Awesome. Joe did hear about it and said he wanted to have breakfast with me the day
LISA SCHEPS: of the -- And I forgot what I said to him, but I do 01:29:00remember just being really -- Not irrationally angry, but clearly not happy with the direction he was taking HRC. I don't think he was ready for this little unknown trans person to be so vocal. But my feeling was, I don't know if the rank
LISA SCHEPS: and file all those white passing gay men, did they know 01:29:30what .. Because HRC is a lobbying organization. That's their job. But the people that go to the gala, they just want drinks and a rubber chicken and to have a good time, do some dancing, watch some shows. Everybody we talked to, and we made these stickers that said -- Oh my God, what did they say?
LISA SCHEPS: Gender identity something -- Gender diverse people need 01:30:00rights ... Something that was specific to and fight at that time. We stuck 'em on people. Joe Manley wore one. I think I'm butchering his name, so I apologize if I am.
JACK MACCARTHY: No, I think that's correct.
LISA SCHEPS: Good. Yeah. Yay for me.
JACK MACCARTHY: Hold on. I just --
01:30:30LISA SCHEPS: Yeah, it's hot and I don't wanna turn the air conditioner on because it's really noisy.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. No, I think I just got some dust behind my mask.
LISA SCHEPS: There's no dust in here. Yeah, there's a lot of dust in here.
JACK MACCARTHY: There's no dust in any theater anywhere. Yeah,
LISA SCHEPS: But Joe even wore one of those stickers, which I think 01:31:00is kind of hypocritical. But it was the third time because that was the time that HRC said, okay, they won't ever do it again. And so far they haven't, but they haven't been tested either. But I would assume they'd pass the test at this point because trans people are so visible. But yeah, that was I'm really proud of us. We had
LISA SCHEPS: a whole bunch of trans people there. Again, 01:31:30unfortunately, most of them looked like me. But I think we touched a lot of people at that time. I'm really proud of the local group for standing up as much as they felt like they could. But it was really painful at the time because between the second and third time, after the second time, they said they would never do it again.
LISA SCHEPS: I basically believed everything Mara said. So, both Mara 01:32:00and I believed them. We kept telling people like Vanessa and other people that said -- Vanessa Foster Evans, I think -- that said, "No, you can never trust HRC." And we said, "No, they're good this time." Then they fucking proved us wrong. It just hurt so much to think that
LISA SCHEPS: this national group with so much power that said they 01:32:30had your back just simply didn't. It was losing in the football for the third time. I still believe that we haven't had a chance to kick the football again. But I have a feeling they'll stick to it because we are the cause right now.
JACK MACCARTHY: They couldn't get away with it now, I don't think. I dunno,
LISA SCHEPS: Who knows?
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. We are in Ground Floor theater right now.
01:33:00LISA SCHEPS: We are.
JACK MACCARTHY: How did this happen?
LISA SCHEPS: Well, this is actually my second theater to open. It's interesting that you ask that about the theater. I had always had a dream of opening up a theater and I had this plan, actually me and my friend Mark Baltazar, another friend I lost,
LISA SCHEPS: that we would open a theater and kind of pander to our 01:33:30audience, do Neil Simon and really easy stuff. Then just every now and then slip in some tougher theater till eventually we could do all tough theater. That was my idea when I opened my first theater. It was really just that. I came in with the wrong attitude. I was ex-Broadway person. I was from New York and Chicago. What do these hicks and Texas know? And blah blah blah. Needless to say that theater did not
LISA SCHEPS: last very long. It was called Play Theater Group. I also 01:34:00do a radio show here in town called Off Stage and On The Air on Co-op Radio, 91.7 FM. I had two theater people here coming to talk about an annual festival called Frontera Fest. It was Ken Webster and Christie Moore. We were just talking in the lobby before our show, they were just talking about the fact that there are no theater spaces here anymore. We were losing theater spaces.
LISA SCHEPS: We've had theater spaces, really well-known theater 01:34:30spaces like the Off-center, run by The Rude Mechs and Salvage Vanguard, run by Salvage Vanguard, and the Blue Theater, which is right across the street from here. That we're closing because rents were just becoming really, really untenable. I said, "Hey, I have a retirement fund, why don't I empty it out and open up a theater?" Because I wanted
LISA SCHEPS: to do a theater company again anyway. That was in 01:35:00January of 2014. In March of 2014, I signed the lease on this place. That's how fast it was, which was pretty amazing. But what I did right this time was, immediately, as I decided to open up the theater, I decided to reach out to other theater people
LISA SCHEPS: and say what my ideas were and listen to them and all 01:35:30these things. Also, for the theater company, the production arm of the theater, I didn't want just any theater company. I wanted this one to be a theater company with a message. That's when we decided to focus on historically underrepresented communities in everything we do. But to that end, what happened was this originally wasn't gonna be a black box theater.
LISA SCHEPS: I originally wanted to make a little Jewel box 01:36:00Proscenium. But I was sitting here in this room when it was just a big open space and no walls or anything with a woman named Natalie George, who now runs a company here called Natalie George Productions. And she said, yeah, I hear you with the Proscenium thing. She said, but if you really wanna serve the community, you'll make a black box. I went, done. Another person said -- I was gonna keep Play Theater Group because
LISA SCHEPS: I already had the logo, I had all the marketing, I had 01:36:30the 501c3 -- "Your mission about supporting underrepresented communities doesn't fit with Play Theater Group. That's the wrong name." And the back of my head had been telling me that all along, but it never -- and I went, you're right. Then I didn't know what to call it. I went through all these things and I had dinner with a guy named Rudy Ramirez. He's the one that came up with Ground Floor Theater. There's so much about this space, even though it's really because of me.
LISA SCHEPS: I'm the founder, it would not exist without me. I will 01:37:00say right now, it won't run without me. But there are so many other people in the bones on this thing. I went and had my ground plan that I wrote on a napkin. I showed it to everybody and people would give their input. This theater itself came about as a community effort. I drained
LISA SCHEPS: my savings account, but that wasn't enough. It takes a 01:37:30lot of money to equip and put this together. We had a GoFundMe that went really well. We've raised $60,000 on GoFundMe. The community has really stepped up. We have been hit, and are currently being hit again, with a lot of setbacks. The community has really stepped up and helped us when that's been the case. I think that's a testament to the community,
LISA SCHEPS: but also a testament to the attitude that I came in when 01:38:00I put this place. Now the DNA of Ground Floor Theater is community. The DNA of this place is equity. We like to say we're trying to build equity through art. I hear over and over again from people that come in and rent or come in that they say, the vibe in here is incredible. It's just so
LISA SCHEPS: welcoming. I'm really proud of the approach that we're 01:38:30taking to theater. All of our shows have to be mission driven in some way. To that end, we've done some amazing, I will say historic and groundbreaking types of theater that fulfill our mission in a really
LISA SCHEPS: quality way within our price point. We are starving. I 01:39:00mean, we don't have the budgets of other people, but these shows are really good. The pandemic hits and George Floyd gets murdered. We see white theater document came out. We were shut down. We were doing some online things, all mission driven or most mission driven.
LISA SCHEPS: Some were just to get some stuff out there. But we tried 01:39:30to stay within our mission. But at that point there were three of us running the company. We'd meet on Zoom every week for our staff meeting. Every week we would read a section of the We See You white theater demands, and we're white run theater. Patti's white and I'm white. Simone is a person of color. But we consider ourselves a white run theater. We took those
LISA SCHEPS: demands as talking to us. We read each demand. And the 01:40:00ones that we could do, because a lot of them were focused more towards Broadway and more commercial theater. But we adopted those. Furthermore, we are adopting and the world is sort of going this way. The show must not go on -- Or no longer the show must go on. We say the show must not go on. We have canceled full weekends of performance because someone just didn't feel up to it,
LISA SCHEPS: in their heart, and that's important to us. We've built 01:40:30a community, when we do our shows -- and we're just about to have one in a week, because we're about to start a new production -- we do EDI training at the start of every single show. The first read through starts with this is how Ground Floor Theater acts, this is how we communicate, this is how we respect each other. These are the things that we do. You can step out of a
LISA SCHEPS: rehearsal at any time without any explanation. Your 01:41:00health and wellbeing are more important than the stage, always. Then we do an EDI workshop and then we bring in an intimacy coordinator -- even if there's no intimacy in it -- to talk about boundaries and tapping in and tapping out. Then we do the reading. That has changed the way we are, because we feel like we're
LISA SCHEPS: walking the walk. A lot of people when all this stuff 01:41:30first came out, jumped on the bandwagon and are just kind of sliding back to the way it was, but we are not. Were already in that direction, but this just helped us step on the gas pedal a little bit more. I'm very proud of the work we do. I will say that the three of us that are in the leadership here at the theater, I'm a baby boomer. Patti is a Gen Xer
LISA SCHEPS: and Simone is a millennial. Simone and I always are 01:42:00going like this because I'm stuck in my old ways. I mean, I'm the kind of person I want to work 20 hours a day and I will go on stage if I'm next to death because I do all that stuff, which is what we are trying not to do anymore. It's been a very fascinating trip for me, and it continues to be because I have to fight. I have to fight those. But you ask about Ground Floor Theater, I can go on and on and on. But
LISA SCHEPS: I'm really proud of the work we've done. We've been 01:42:30getting critical acclaim and our version of the Tony's, the B. Iden Payne Awards . Our production of Anna in the Tropics just swept the category of drama in every instance. We just need to keep going. It is hard. I wouldn't be doing service to my theater if I didn't say with all the programmatic
LISA SCHEPS: success we're having, we're having trouble in the 01:43:00fundraising category because during the pandemic, there were the Save Our Stages Act. I will say this, you will not hear this from me very often, or ever, thank you John Cornyn for working with Amy Klobuchar to get that bill passed. It saved Ground Floor Theater and it saved a lot of other theaters here in Austin. But we were good through the pandemic because the government
LISA SCHEPS: stepped in and helped us. But now going back to a 01:43:30fundraising model where we need to still keep the lights on in an environment where our expenses have gone up more than 40% in the past year. Our income has gone down because we are committed to keeping our rents low for people that come in here, every one of our shows is pay what you can. We don't want money to be a barrier for anybody to get in. Therefore, we're not making a lot
LISA SCHEPS: of earned revenue. We're at a point right now where it's
01:44:00difficult and we're in danger of losing this space. But I love Ground Floor. The
Ground Floor Theater, right now, for me, is just like Concentrix was without all
the money. I wish it had all the money
LISA SCHEPS: or really just pay my mortgage at this point. But I feel 01:44:30the same way about this place. I will do everything in my power to keep these lights on without sacrificing any of the things that make Ground Floor Theater special.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah, yeah. Hearing you say that gives me a lot of hope.
LISA SCHEPS: Oh, that's very nice of you.
JACK MACCARTHY: I've only been
JACK MACCARTHY: out of the theater game for three years, but the 01:45:00things you're describing, I didn't know of anyone doing them three years ago. I was pretty plugged into like activist-y, social justice-y theater.
LISA SCHEPS: I think some were. I think the murder of George Floyd just ramped that up to a point. And thank God that We See You White document came out
LISA SCHEPS: because it was an eye-opener for me. Yeah. We're not 01:45:30unique, I know. With a theater communications group, I'm on a weekly call with other people that run theaters and the same budget and other people are kind of doing the same thing in other ways.
JACK MACCARTHY: Yeah. Will you just give a brief summary of what the
JACK MACCARTHY: We See You White Americans document was?
01:46:00LISA SCHEPS: Brief?
LISA SCHEPS: black theater makers are not gonna stand for these 01:46:30things anymore. They had a list of demands for white theater makers, or white theater runners, which was the majority of the people that run theaters, about this is what you need to do for your black artists, designers, and technicians. It was very specific and it was very cohesive
LISA SCHEPS: and it covered a lot of things. It came out fast. I'm 01:47:00amazed at how fast it came out. That was basically after the George Floyd murder. All of us white people were putting BLM black boxes on our Facebook pages and things like that. They really
LISA SCHEPS: capitalized on that momentum, which I think is good, 01:47:30because for me, as a white theater, and I think I said it earlier, a lot of it was, didn't even realize. Didn't, because I don't see it as a white person. I don't see it. And thank you for doing that. I will say, and this happened at the task force annual convention one year. This was very interesting.
JACK MACCARTHY: The Hate Crime
JACK MACCARTHY: Task Force?
01:48:00LISA SCHEPS: No, the National Gain Lesbian Task Force. They did a convention every year called Creating Change, still do. One Creating Change, they said, okay, and this would've been in the mid 2000s, 2005, 2006, somewhere around there. Everybody has their own track that they go on at the convention. It's got 2000 ... Have you ever been?
JACK MACCARTHY: I haven't, but I might go to the next one from San Francisco.
01:48:30LISA SCHEPS: It's got about 2000, 3000 people, or at the time it did. All the major leadership is there. They had a theme of building a non-racist movement. No matter what track you did, you started in a two hour racism or anti-racism. That wasn't a word at the time, but it was an anti-racism workshop. In my room,
LISA SCHEPS: whenever we do these workshops, there's a list of 01:49:00agreements and one of the agreements was, we are all racist, blah, blah, blah, blah. And a hand goes up and a trans-masculine black man, I forgot his name, says, "Hey, I got a problem with the, 'We are all racists.' I'm black, therefore I cannot be racist." Well,
LISA SCHEPS: this set off a little firestorm in our room. It was so 01:49:30hard for people like me to understand. I ended up storming out of the room in tears only to come back in and then to storm out a second time in tears. But what happened in all the rooms in this 2000 person, and this is my observation, other people that were there said, "Well, that's not the way I saw it, but this is what I saw." It seemed to split the entire
LISA SCHEPS: convention along racial lines, people of color and white 01:50:00people, most people sunk into their camps. Another good thing I did, I said, I don't get it. I wanna understand, so I seeked out that person and I said, "Can we go to coffee? I want to talk to you." We had a huge conversation around this idea that black people can't be racist. The idea is talking about racism as a systemic issue,
LISA SCHEPS: which was not widely well known ... That wasn't a word 01:50:30that we used at the time. But it's a systemic issue that started with black people and enslavement. Therefore, it's very specific to the black experience. Nobody else can have that experience. I said, "Well, okay, I'm Jewish. My people were all slaves. Can I have that experience?" "No, you can't." And I'm just
LISA SCHEPS: trying to -- By the end of the conversation, I pretty 01:51:00much agreed I got it. I got what he was saying. What he also said, we hear this a lot now because it's in the front of our art, is that he said to me, "I'm tired of educating you. I want you to do your own fucking work. I'm talking to you now. Fine. I don't wanna talk to you again. Go do your work and then come."
LISA SCHEPS: And that was a huge, ah-ah, moment for me. And that 01:51:30changed. And that's when I discovered that me, as a white person, practice racism every single day. I'm okay with saying that because it doesn't say anything bad about me as a person. It's just when I walk into a store, nobody follows me. I learned that lesson. My perception, I don't know if it's true,
LISA SCHEPS: is that the majority of people in that left wing
01:52:00tree-hugging group of people that I was in the minority of getting that as a
white person. And that has come in through George Floyd's Murder and Black Lives
Matter. Then We See You White theater. I know you said be real quick with the
answer
JACK MACCARTHY:
LISA SCHEPS: I'm sorry. Whoever's editing it, I apologize.
LISA SCHEPS:
JACK MACCARTHY: The full interview is what we're gonna wrap up soon.
LISA SCHEPS: Yeah. We've been doing 3 hours, [crosstalk].
JACK MACCARTHY: 2 hours. Yeah, yeah.
LISA SCHEPS: Oh, yeah. We did.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay. yeah, so they yeah, two hours. We will sometimes edit together like a three to five minute video from this, but the full thing minus anything you want to
JACK MACCARTHY: take out because we give you the transcript to edit 01:53:00or correct.
LISA SCHEPS: I won't take anything out.
JACK MACCARTHY:
LISA SCHEPS: No, I think we are pretty comprehensive. Yeah, I'm good.
JACK MACCARTHY: Okay.
LISA SCHEPS: Oh, I'm single.
LISA SCHEPS: Didn't cover that.
01:53:30JACK MACCARTHY: Funny story, totally independently of OUTWORDS, but after their OUTWORDS interviews there were two OUTWORDS interviewees who, by chance, met each other and are now married.
LISA SCHEPS: Oh, Mazel tov. That's great.
JACK MACCARTHY: So you never know. Okay. Do you believe in the notion of a trans or queer superpower? And if so, what is it?
LISA SCHEPS: I've never thought of this question before, so you're 01:54:00getting unedited anything. But yeah, I will say there's a superpower. I mean, it's actually pretty simple. Courage. I don't know a trans person, whether they're out and transitioned or closeted and not transitioned, because when you say a choice, that's our choice is to put it out there
LISA SCHEPS: and live our truth or bravely decide not to for whatever 01:54:30reason. Courage. I don't know a trans person that isn't super-duper brave. That's their superpower.
JACK MACCARTHY: If you could tell your 15 year old self one thing, what would it be?
LISA SCHEPS: Run away.
LISA SCHEPS: one thing I don't know. I'm 64 years old. There are so 01:55:00many things that I would want to tell them. It's all selfish. Because we take this road to life and we make turns, there's some turns I would've rather not taken. Would I tell myself, when you get to be 29 years old and this happens, do this other thing.
LISA SCHEPS: Or do I take the higher road and say, things will get
01:55:30better? Which, by the way, I don't believe
JACK MACCARTHY: No.
LISA SCHEPS: If I could tell my 12 year old self, I would tell that person, you're not alone.
LISA SCHEPS: If you wanna be your true self, now's the time to do it.
01:56:00After that point, after 15. Yeah. I'd love to be able to sing. I would like to
be a soprano
LISA SCHEPS: as a bass. I think that takes so much courage, because 01:56:30you had the -- In the church, you saw the Sopranos, which are all female identified, and the altos are all female identified in the tenors that are all male identified. Then the bases, which are all men, except for Sabrina who's out there singing bass. I don't have that kind of courage.
JACK MACCARTHY: Why is it important to you to tell your story?
LISA SCHEPS: It's important for me to tell my story to make people, 01:57:00or to allow people to be free to be their true selves. It's also important to tell my story. One of the reasons, and we did not cover this earlier, I truly believe the reason why people that are trying to hurt us or trying to get rid of us or are offended
LISA SCHEPS: by us living our true selves are simply because they 01:57:30haven't had the opportunity to meet us. It's important to tell my story to people, especially people that don't know other trans people, so that when they're out at their church function or at their barbecue and somebody says something derogatory around gender for someone they can say, "Hey, no, I met this person named Lisa. She was pretty good. She was pretty
LISA SCHEPS: funny actually. I liked her. She's trans." That's 01:58:00important. That's why it's important to tell a story. And it's important to tell the story and be visible for people like the 12 year old me that thought she was all by herself. Nobody out there to say, "You're not. your story can be different from mine." That's why it's important for me to tell my story, for you to tell your story, for everybody to
LISA SCHEPS: tell their story. But I will say it's also okay if you 01:58:30don't feel comfortable doing it.
JACK MACCARTHY: You already started touching on this a little bit, but what's the importance of a project like OUTWORDS that is dedicated to telling these stories?
LISA SCHEPS: I applaud OUTWORDS for the work that they're doing. I have to admit, I was not as familiar with the organization as I should have been.
LISA SCHEPS: But I think capturing stories of LGBTQ people is 01:59:00super-duper important, so that we all know that we speak, not with one voice, but with a unified voice. That we all have our stories, our stories are all unique, but we are the same in so many ways that it becomes important and nobody else is doing that work. There isn't some organization
LISA SCHEPS: out there that is straight-run and straight-identified 01:59:30that is saying, let's spend a year talking to trans people. I mean, maybe StoryCorps is doing -- I love StoryCorps -- the same kind of thing. But the documentation of stories is so important and now that we have the technology to do it so easily, why the fuck not? Because before, I mean, when I was a kid, I was like chipping on stones my stories. Literally, stones.
LISA SCHEPS: But no, I think it's real important. I'm so glad y'all 02:00:00are doing it. I hope you keep it up. I'm glad that you are concentrating currently on gender diverse stories. I think we've been overlooked over the years and I'm glad we're not. Thank you.
JACK MACCARTHY: Thank you.
