JACK MACCARTHY:

Alright, are you ready to go?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I'm ready to go. Rock and roll.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. So, just to start out with, can you just say and spell your first and last name please?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Riki Wilchins. R I K I, W I L C H I N S.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And can you tell me

JACK MACCARTHY:

what date and what city you were born in?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1952.

JACK MACCARTHY:

These interviews, we generally start from the beginning, but starting from the beginning, is going to mean something a little different here, since we're looking at the trans activism movement in a broader way.

JACK MACCARTHY:

This version of starting from the beginning, I'm curious what groundwork you felt like had already been laid that made the emergence of this trans activism movement in the nineties, able to pop up and happen? Like, what foundation had already been laid that created the conditions for that to happen?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Well, just to clarify, when we talk about the national transgender rights movement, as we know it today, in the beginning, and obviously even still today, it's still largely white. I mean, there's a whole other chapter to be written on activists and movements among trans people of color. I think that that's a really important distinction to get upfront.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Most of the people who engaged in activism at that time were privileged enough to do so. Mostly white, mostly middle class, mostly educated. We had the spare time and the resources to fly around and do stuff. I think the ground had been laid in a couple of ways. Obviously, the black civil rights movement basically set the template for gay rights and women's rights. Gay rights had already taken off, by 1990s there were LGB organizations,

RIKI WILCHINS:

I think in almost every state in the country. We had certainly seen, Queer Nation and Act Up. The AIDS epidemic was in full swing, so street activism was an understood way to pressure power structures and get your message out. The Compton riots and of course the Stonewall riot showed that queers could push back. But in spite of that, the trans community at that time, at least as I understood,

RIKI WILCHINS:

it was mostly confined to and circled around the transgender conferences that happened pretty much almost every month of the year. And there was this kind of enormous group of people that got together. I always think of it as like Brigadoon, that mythical Scottish village that appears every hundred years for a day and then it goes away. So, for three days, every month, you could go someplace in the country and see hundreds of transgender people

RIKI WILCHINS:

who then disappear back to their private lives, and you wouldn't hear from them again until the next conference or the next year. The people were there and techniques were there, but what was missing was the consciousness, the trans movement at that point. I mean, it wasn't even a movement. The trans community at that point really kind of understood itself to be mostly about acceptance and tolerance and about getting your family

RIKI WILCHINS:

to understand, dealing with psychiatry and psychology and so forth, and that pathologizing of trans, and really a whole thing around self-acceptance. Those are typically the kinds of workshops you would see at trans conferences, nothing around activism. It was, kind of, like the template was there but the awareness and the consciousness that this is a civil rights issue is missing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did people even find out about these conferences? How are people finding each other at that point?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Well, we didn't have the internet and we didn't really have email until later on in the nineties. I know it's hard to imagine. So, mostly it was through newsletters, like Tapestry and Transvestites, a whole bunch of them that came out and you would read about them through that and kind of get hooked up and get on mailing lists, and word travels.

RIKI WILCHINS:

The interesting thing to me about those conferences were that they were primarily for, and actually started by cross-dressers, who I like to think of as one of the last remaining closets since cross-dressers still can't be out in America, even though there's probably like 20 cross-dressers for every transsexual. The conferences were a place where you could take your clothing, and sometimes even your wife,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and dress in peace and reasonable security for a weekend and express your feminine side. I say that because they were almost always male crossdressers, that was the original purpose of the conferences. Over the years, that followed Christine Jorgensen's groundbreaking sex change, there was a pause and then Johns Hopkins and a number of other hospitals got into it. Then there was kind of the second wave,

RIKI WILCHINS:

that was in the late sixties and seventies, of trans people having surgery and transitioning -- I was part of that wave, I should say. As part of that wave, I started showing up at the conferences just to meet other trans people. I mean, when I transitioned in Cleveland, Ohio in 1976, I think it was, or '78, I was really hooked into the gay community. I was a very active in the gay community.

RIKI WILCHINS:

There were only two other transsexuals anybody new in the entire city of Cleveland, which the metropolitan area was probably a million and a half people. So, we were about as common as unicorns. But over the years we started meeting each other at conferences. Someone said, unlike cross-dressers, who often go back to their private lives, if you transition, that is your private life, you have no place to go back to. I think eventually not only were there more transsexuals,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but there were more people who were radicalized by their own personal experience of discrimination, and in many cases, violence, loss of family, loss of job, and so forth, being beat up. The transsexuals in general tended to be much more politically minded about it than the cross dressers. But I still think there was no kind of organized pushback, and that was kind of the things that was missing.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I should say, I remember one year, there had been a march on Washington, I think it was after the first Pride march on Washington, I maybe be wrong on that, but it was in the early 90s. I showed up at the IFGE, the International Foundation for Gender Education, which at the time was the main transgender national group, I showed up at IFGE's conference and put up a big whiteboard with markers and said, "We're going to do a march on Washington who wants to sign up?"

RIKI WILCHINS:

Not only was it tough to get people to sign up, I had a table and everything, but people just thought it was a riot. They thought it was funny. I mean, there just wasn't the awareness that one could actually do that. Now, of course, there have been national gender lobby days going on 20 some years, but back then there just wasn't an awareness that one could do this as a political movement. I also remember, and I wish I had her name, I really should remember, it was a baggage handler at American airlines

RIKI WILCHINS:

who transitioned and pushed American airlines to confront the issue of adding gender identity to their EEO and their non-discrimination policies. American airlines showed up the next year at the IFGE conference to get an award, it was these two 60-something balding white guys, who were just transfixed by this room full of transsexuals and crossdressers, probably the talk of corporate headquarters in the next year. But God love them,

RIKI WILCHINS:

they did it. I think they were the first fortune 500 outside of Silicon valley to add gender identity to their non-discrimination policies. We had like Xerox and Apple, they'll sign anything in Silicon valley. They were the first, kind of, more conservative mainstream fortune 500 to change their policies. It was a huge breakthrough. I remember talking to her at that conference and saying, we could take this national, we could go to other fortune 500s, and she was looking at me like I kind of grown two heads

RIKI WILCHINS:

and was speaking in tongues, people didn't think about this the way they would've thought about gay rights at that time. It was a big shift in consciousness that needed to happen, I think.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I wanted to touch on what you said earlier about privilege. Did you have contact with,

JACK MACCARTHY:

or observe trans people of color movements happening at the same time as this movement in the 90s or where they kind of, as far as you could see, too busy surviving to be participating in that way, or being active and activists in that way?

RIKI WILCHINS:

The out queer community in Cleveland that I grew up in

RIKI WILCHINS:

and then the out queer community in New York city where I moved to were both still, almost completely dominated by white people. We moved in different worlds. And it's funny when you talk about privilege because it's so awkward to think of yourself at that time as privileged. Obviously, we were enormously privileged in one sense, in terms of the education and white skin and stuff. At the same time,

RIKI WILCHINS:

I lost my job, I lost my family, I lost my partner, I was constantly harassed on the street. So, I don't think we realized we were privileged until later, at least I certainly didn't. I thought of myself mostly as a member of oppressed minority. But I also had some glimmers of better consciousness. I used to go shoot baskets at a small park off Gansevoort in Greenwich Village, at six o'clock in the morning.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I would sometimes see the street queens who had come off of Christopher Street sleeping on the benches. We would look at each other. On one level we knew there was something about us that was completely the same and another level we also knew that we were in completely different worlds, and I never knew exactly what I should say to them. I'm not sure they knew what they should say to me. There was certainly a shock of recognition.

JACK MACCARTHY:

From Trans/gressive, it kind of sounds like the first breaking point was the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival, would you say that was kind of when the possibility of this movement first kind of poke its head up?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I think for me the first point was

RIKI WILCHINS:

when Phyllis Frye and one other woman said that they would lie down on the street to protest the gay pride parade leaving out transgender. That was the first time I was kind of pulled, kicking and screaming, into doing activism. Some people in New York had reached out to me and said, "Would you be part of this?" To this day, I'm not sure exactly why they reached out to me,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but they did. Partly because I think I started a 12 step group for trans people at the gay community center, so I was kind of a known quantity. I think that was one piece of it. The next piece for me was we also protested the gay games. There was a gay games board member who just had a whole thing about men competing as women, and kept writing in this requirement that transgender women had to compete as males

RIKI WILCHINS:

and transgender men as women. That was secondary, and we protested them. That was kind of a family matter because they were all people we knew in New York. I knew half that board. Then Nancy Jean Burkholder got kicked out of Michigan Womyn's Music Festival one night, when she was confronted by security guards for the crime of being transgender, and escorted forcibly off the premises and basically left on an empty road in the middle of Michigan

RIKI WILCHINS:

on a dirt road at about one or two o'clock in the morning, without even time to tell her friends where she was or what had happened to her. That to me was just an outrage. I mean, that just crystallized -- There was a transgender woman, whose name I forget, I wrote a piece about the life she hadn't lived, about all of the parties she hadn't gone to and all the dances that she hadn't attended and all the trips that she didn't go on because she didn't think

RIKI WILCHINS:

she'd be welcomed in women's or lesbian circles. I had always told myself the same lie, oh, I don't really want to go. Oh, it's too expensive. But I knew the bottom line was I didn't want to get some place and say, "Hey, you're not welcome here," and get turned away and have that humiliation. Having Nancy Jean Burkholder kicked out like that was such a bright line that it really outraged people. That came right around the time that Brandon Teena had been killed, and we had already done a vigil.

RIKI WILCHINS:

First of all, we protested at the Village Voice because they ran a remarkably transphobic piece about Brandon's death, for which the writer has now completely apologized. But we protested, and that was the first time anybody that I knew ever thought about doing street protests. Anne Ogborn had already started a group called Transgender Nation in San Francisco, which was modeled after Queer Nation, but it never caught on.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I thought Transsexual Menace, named after the Lesbian Menace that invaded the NOW conference to protest the exclusion of lesbians, I thought Transexual Menace in those blood dripping, rocky horror red letters would be really funny. We decided to call it that, so we have a name. 20 people on a city street in New York looks like nothing, but 20 people in matching black T-Shirts looks like a demonstration. You get visuals, you get media, you get the whole thing. I said,

RIKI WILCHINS:

"Well, we gotta print up T-Shirts." Everybody showed up in these matching black T-shirts I brought with me and pulled them on. We all looked like we were together. Sure enough, about 10 minutes into it, two police cars come screaming up. Cops come boiling out of the cars, surrounded by eight cops. "What are you doing here?" I said, "Well, we are fulfilling our first amendment right to express our opinions. We are not blocking egress to or from the building. We are not blocking the sidewalk." They looked at us,

RIKI WILCHINS:

they said, "What are you protesting?" I said, "There was an article about transsexuals that we're very unhappy with." They looked around, they realized they were surrounded by about 20 transsexuals. They all started like trying not to crack up. They watched this for about five minutes, got back in their cars and left. That was the first time we realized the power of activism because it showed up in all the gay newspapers the next morning. That was pretty cool. Then we had the Brandon Teena vigil outside the trial where his murderers Lotter and Nissen

RIKI WILCHINS:

were being sentenced. Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein came to that, as well as Kimberly Peirce, who was there to do the backstory for Boys Don't Cry, which eventually won two Oscars. There was this awareness that one could do street activism, I think, that came out of that. Then Michigan happened around the same time. Janis Walworth, who had been to Michigan with Nancy,

RIKI WILCHINS:

was there when she was kicked out, found out later her friend had been kicked down the road, decided to organize this group to go educate people inside the festival. Her conviction was that there were more people that wanted to us in than out, that mainly it was the owners and a small cadre that were really hardcore TERFs that were holding line. Most people didn't care or actually were fine with having us in. I mean,

RIKI WILCHINS:

four or five trans women in a sea of 6,000, mostly lesbians, doesn't exactly raise a blip. She said, "We're going to do this educational event across the road, would you come?" The last thing in the world that I want to do is sit on a dirt road in the middle of Michigan, in a tent, in the middle of summer swatting mosquitoes, trying to stay out of the hot sun and talking to people who may or may not be transphobic. But for some reason I decided to do it, I guess

RIKI WILCHINS:

I was so ticked off. And by God, they came marching out of the festival by the hundreds. It was amazing. I mean, it's about a mile and a half to walk in the center of the Michigan Music Festival, all the way out where we were camped outside main gate, but they came by hundreds every day. I just said to Janis, "This will scale. There's something here and we need to make this an event." I held a speak out at the gay community center later that year

RIKI WILCHINS:

to popularize and try to raise a little money. Whole bunch of people spoke at it, the Lesbian Avengers, Leslie was there, I believe. Who else spoke in it? It was a really great group. Oh, I'm trying to think of Janis' book. I don't think she or Nancy actually made that, but it was really powerful. We had a lot of really good speakers. Oh, Amber Hollibaugh spoke at that, she was just phenomenal and it really got people charged up.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I remember thinking we have to have a name, so I announced that it would be called Camp Trans, which Janis apparently always hated, but just caught on immediately. It suddenly became known as Camp Trans. To this day, I don't think she liked it. I don't know what else she could have called it. Everybody was talking about Camp Trans. The next year there were 30 of us camped out, which is a unique experience. I've never been out camping with 30 transsexuals, along with Marriette Pathy Allen,

RIKI WILCHINS:

who showed up at every main juncture in my life, because she's a photographer. She has been documenting the trans movement and just trans people generally from Cuba to United States to all over the globe for like 25 or 30 years. She was out camping in the woods. There were 30 of us out there. Janis had set up a full roster of workshops. I mean, full workshops, every day, from morning to night. We must've drawn over a thousand people. Leslie Feinberg flew in with Minnie Bruce Pratt, her partner,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and spoke, Leslie probably drew 200 people in the rain. Thank God Janis had brought along a tent that we could construct. But yeah, that was just a real breakthrough moment, I think. That and the Brandon Teena murder vigil really galvanized people with an awareness that you could do something. From that time, we decided that we would do Camp Trans every year, which we did for several years. And also, I think what really kind of started

RIKI WILCHINS:

transgender day of remembrance, we decided we would start a document of all the trans people we knew of who had been murdered because at that time, no one tracked that, and they were barely even mentioned in the gay press. In fact, I remember when Bay Windows in Boston wouldn't even cover the murder of Brandon Teena, because he wasn't gay or lesbian. We had to track them ourselves, basically from what we heard through the grapevine. I remember keeping a word document with everybody I knew who had been murdered. We said from now on whenever anybody falls,

RIKI WILCHINS:

some of us will show up. And so, for the next couple of years, every time a transgender person that we knew of was murdered, Nancy Nangeroni from Boston and Tony Bareto-Neto, a friend of mine who was a cop from Florida, we would get on a plane and fly in someplace. And frankly it was debilitating in some ways because you're having your lunch or your breakfast, or you're about to head to work and then you get an email saying

RIKI WILCHINS:

so-and-so is dead in, and oh my God, I gotta be on a plane in the next six or seven days to some city I've never visited. In fact, while we were congratulating ourselves and relaxing after the Brandon Teena memorial vigil, because we were so proud, Debbie Forte was murdered back in Boston. I remember Nancy was especially upset because that was her backyard. I thought, God, we protest over here and they murder someone right back there.

RIKI WILCHINS:

It was interesting work. If you didn't show up, there would be no vigil. But if they knew someone was coming into town, trans people would come out to show up. And I always found that interesting. If we didn't show up, they wouldn't do it. But if we said, "Hey, we're flying in," suddenly it became an event and they would show up. And when they showed up, as long as they were wearing menace t-shirts and there was a vigil, the newspapers would show up and suddenly trans people who were murdered were getting news coverage. I think that was a breakthrough too, we can use this just pure visibility

RIKI WILCHINS:

and showing up to generate public awareness about something which so far is out of awareness. I have to say, just parenthetically, I'm getting ahead of this interview, but I saw the news coverage of the 15,000 people in Philadelphia to protest and realize the black trans women who had been murdered. I still look at that and I tear up. I still have trouble believing it. It's just --

RIKI WILCHINS:

Yeah, I'm speechless. It's so amazing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Really a long answer, wasn't it Jack?

JACK MACCARTHY:

It makes my job easy. I don't have to come up with as many questions [crosstalk]. How many years were you

JACK MACCARTHY:

flying around having these vigils?

RIKI WILCHINS:

It was about two years and I just started to realize, as I wrote in the book transgressive, I realized that you can't stop -

JACK MACCARTHY:

Rick, can you rephrase the question in your answer so that later we can edit me out and not lose any comprehension?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Yes we can. I'm sorry, I didn't know. You want me to do that? I'm proud to do that.

RIKI WILCHINS:

That was my safe word, Jack. For about two years, we flew around to help catalyze murder trial vigils, then, as I wrote in my book, Trans/gressive, realize that you can't stop a war from a mash tent. You have to go up on the front lines and do something different.

RIKI WILCHINS:

That was when I started thinking about forming GenderPAC which is not ever a pack, but it just was a cool name that Denise Norris came up with and like Camp Trans and Transsexual Menace, it just kind of stuck. But that's when we realized we needed an organization that could do organizational kind of stuff. Gender is a systemic oppression, it requires a systemic response. As much as I love

RIKI WILCHINS:

theorists like Judith Butler saying the way we defeat this is through small individual acts of gender insubordinacy, and there's certainly a place for that, I think there also has to be a more systemic pushback or certain things don't get done. So, as much as I'm committed to queer theory, in practice, I think you need organizations, and that was the idea for GenderPAC.

JACK MACCARTHY:

When and how did GenderPAC get formed?

RIKI WILCHINS:

GenderPAC got formed when I was asked to give a speech at the International Foundation for Gender Education annual conference, which was the second biggest trans conference of the year after Atlanta's Southern Comfort. You can imagine at that time, and in that milieu,

RIKI WILCHINS:

most people were dressed to the nines. lots of high heels, lots of makeup, lots of gowns. I was dressed in a Menace t-shirt and jeans and sneakers and pretty much the same hairstyle I have now. I clearly, kind of, didn't fit. They put me up on the stage and I felt like a fish out of water up there, talking about

RIKI WILCHINS:

transgender as a civil rights movement and saying, this is not just about being able to dress, and not being murdered, obviously that's important. It's not just about our private problems. I mean, when it happens to you, when discrimination happens to you, it feels like it's somehow about you. I said, these are shared problems and getting people together, even though these conferences are determinately nonpolitical,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but getting a lot of oppressed people together in a single room by itself is a political act. You realize it's not just you, it's happening to everybody. You realize it's not personal. It's not because you don't pass or you're too tall or your voice is too deep. It's because people out there hate people like you, and that is the birth of political consciousness. I said something like that and jumped down from the stage and people just started applauding and kept applauding.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I thought, this is really interesting. I was back in a hotel room with my friend Lynn Walker from New York. And people came in and started giving us checks for the organization we were starting. I hadn't announced any organization. I wasn't really even thinking concretely about an organization at that point. But we ended up with about, I don't know, five or $600 in checks and cash.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I said, "Okay, I'll match that." Now we've got a thousand bucks, and I thought, how can we jumpstart the organization? People love nothing more than bossing people around, let's endow a fund with this $1000 and ask the major trans organizations to manage how it can be spent. Well, of course that got all of them involved right away because they would have power over something. Everybody loves it. Who says no to that? I wouldn't. All of a sudden, we had like

RIKI WILCHINS:

a half dozen organizations or so that said they would be the board of this new organization. We had the Intersex Society of North America founded by Cheryl Chace, we had the International Foundation for Gender Education or IFGE. Basically the whole kind of milieu of trans organizations became part of the board. That was the genesis for GenderPAC. At that point, we thought of ourselves mainly as a lobbying and advocacy group. Eventually, one of our key focuses

RIKI WILCHINS:

became hate crimes. And we also focusing on queer youth as well, but originally it was conceived, basically, it's just we needed a Washington kind of lobbying and education arm, and that's why the next year I declared we were going to do a national gender lobby day in Washington. We had had about, I would guess, 50 people that came to

RIKI WILCHINS:

a meeting that was held in King of Prussia, Pennsylvania to launch GenderPAC formally. It was very quiet affair. Everybody debated what the article should look like, the format and the board and the officers and so forth, but no one had ever seen transgender people on Capitol Hill. I know today it doesn't seem like that big a deal and people hate it when you go in my day. But frankly,

RIKI WILCHINS:

in my day, trannies didn't do that. By the way, I do use the term trannies. I love it. I've used it all my life. It's a term of endearment for me, like queer. Trannies didn't go traipsing up on Capitol hill and much less to talk to Congress members. So, I was pretty sure whoever showed up was going to get arrested, particularly the cross-dressers. I mean, I, at least, had ID that said F but I was sure any cross dresses that would show up are going to get busted by Capitol hill police because they go to the men's room, which you have to do eventually. They go to the men's room

RIKI WILCHINS:

at Rayburn cafeteria, they're going to be arrested for public indecency. They go into the women's room, they're going to get arrested for harassing women. So, I was kind of expecting a small group. We had 105 people that showed up at some no-name motel out on the Greenbelt to train for the first national gender lobby day, which Dana Priesing, God love her, who was a Georgetown trained lawyer who was constructively terminated

RIKI WILCHINS:

from a wonderful law firm in DC, when she transitioned, Dana set the whole thing up. Printed up briefing materials, documents to hand out, everything. I remember standing on a chair. They finally quieted down, we're in this basement, really, hotel. I sit on the chair and I said, "It was a joke. Can't you people take a joke?" And they all busted up laughing. I mean, it was partly to break the tension, no one knew what would happen

RIKI WILCHINS:

and no one had ever tried this. You just didn't go out like this. Trans people at that point, almost all of us were on some level obsessed with passing. I remember my doctors, God love him at the Cleveland clinic, told me very clearly that I was a successful transsexual to the degree that no one could tell that I was transsexual. Which is a really interesting message. I mean, I was raised Jewish. You would never tell a Jewish person that you're successful to the degree that no one can actually tell that you are Jewish, right?

RIKI WILCHINS:

But that was the whole thing, you were supposed to pass as real. The idea of going and outing yourself and being political about it, that you actually had a political voice and political needs was simply unheard of. The only person who had been doing it and who I actually credit with the inspiration for lobby day was Phyllis Frye and her friend Jane Fee who had been up there for a couple of years. In fact, that's how it really got started. The year before I think it was near before GenderPAC started or the year we started.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I had heard of Phyllis going up there. I've been thinking for years, we need to go up on Capitol hill just because it's there and it's visible, as a symbol. We need to show up and show that we can do this, and this is a civil rights issue, not just an issue of personal acceptance. Someone said, "Oh, Phyllis has been doing that for a couple of years." I rang up Phyllis and I said, "Would you let me meet you?" So, the four of us, along with Phyllis' wife met in the Rayburn building cafeteria, along with lots of stares.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Phyllis showed me how to make the rounds. I was terrified, but after the first or second one, I realized, oh, I can talk to Congress members and congressional staffers too. Just tell them your story and tell them the facts and tell them what you want. They're paid to listen to you, congressional staffers are paid to listen to you. That's the great thing. You don't have to be special. I remember thinking, just like with Camp Trans, this could scale. I said, "We need to invite everybody next year. Would you guys back me?" They said, "Oh sure."

RIKI WILCHINS:

We got 105 people and the next day we all met upstairs. I think Phyllis had brought like 20 herself from Texas, you could tell because they were in the Longhorns, just kidding. We got on the subway and rode it to Capitol hill. All started walking up, I remember thinking, we're all going to get arrested. I had no idea. I turned to my partner, I said, "I have no idea how this day is going to turn out, but it's certainly going to be educational."

RIKI WILCHINS:

And nothing happened. Apparently, Capitol Hill police had been warned we were coming, as had most Congressional offices. I mean, let's face it, they're usually hearing from left-handed sausage makers' union from Milwaukee. We were the most interesting thing that happened on Capitol hill all year long. Of course, they'd heard about it in advance. They were lying in wait. It was really quite interesting.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I underestimated the appeal of 105 unicorns marching up the drive to Capitol hill. I sat in the Rayburn building cafeteria with Dana Priesing all day long, logging them into a computer as people made office visits to make sure we didn't double up, handing out materials, telling them who hadn't been visited. We visited almost all of the democratic offices and more than a few of the Republicans. That's how lobby day, and I think GenderPAC, really found its footing.

RIKI WILCHINS:

More than half of the people that showed up were crossdressers, and I am just so awed and amazed and honored by their courage. It was the first time it really struck me. I remember, like I said, a transexual friend of mine saying, "I can't do this on weekends. I have to do this 24/7." I think what she meant by that is the trans people are, in some ways, more oppressed. But the fact is I'm street legal, I have ID. I have, at least,

RIKI WILCHINS:

some tiny measure of social legitimacy, if not as a woman, as a woman-type person, but crossdressers have none of that. Crossdressers are mostly still just considered fetishists in weird clothing. God love them, they all showed up and they did some of the fiercest lobbying on Capitol Hill. It's still quite amazing. They are still an unseen, an untold and uncelebrated force in a transgender movement, which we call a transgender movement, but let's face, it is increasingly basically a transsexual movement

RIKI WILCHINS:

in all but name, in terms of its political goals and aims. I'm very proud of what that community did, and I've never forgotten the fact that the conferences and the whole infrastructure that allowed transgender activism to arise was really built on the earlier work of the cross dressing community. So, here's to you guys and gals

JACK MACCARTHY:

From that first lobby day, I know that there was a specific barrier that y'all kept coming up against as far as the organization that was considered like the gay organization

JACK MACCARTHY:

having been at odds with what you were asking members of Congress to do, and that led to another wave of activism and another area of focus. Can you talk about that?

RIKI WILCHINS:

We had been fighting. I mean, part of the genesis for GenderPAC was that we had been fighting HRC for years, the Human Rights Campaign, which back then was the Human Rights Campaign Fund,

RIKI WILCHINS:

to include trans. When I started doing trans activism, there were no LGBT organizations at the state or national level, they were all proudly LGB. Then I remember Kelly Lobell at the task force got them to T, but HRC was still one of the big holdouts. As usual, Phyllis was in the forefront. She had initiated a series

RIKI WILCHINS:

of meetings with them. I was invited to one of them and I remember confronting them really strongly. Their executive director had said, "Why are you bothering us?" I said, "Why do we have to? The moral thing here would be to include us." "We've always been part of this community. Many of you are us and many of us are you." That began a several year effort at the campaign to finally wrestle with adding transgender.

RIKI WILCHINS:

The particular sticking point was adding gender identity to the Employment Non-Discrimination bill (ENDA), which was to prevent discrimination in the workplace based on one sexual orientation. So, there were two battles. One was to get them to add transgender, and the other was to get them to expand ENDA. The end of the battle, we kind of won towards the end, after about 10 years of struggle,

RIKI WILCHINS:

adding the T battle. We basically won in all the states, pretty much. Of course, you had the task force and other organizations doing it. I remember back then, LAMBDA legal was not taking transgender cases. I would always talk to their political director and their legal director, and they'd say, "No, we don't do trans." I'd say, "But this is about gender. It's the same as if a butch lesbian gets fired." They were not taking it. They were not listening. That was a very long fight. One of the other pieces of activism that the Menace did was

RIKI WILCHINS:

I called up HRC and pretended to be one of their federal campaign members and donors. I said, "I travel a lot, can you tell me where all the dinners are?" Because dinners all around the country are a huge fundraising engine for HRC, and they were kind enough to give me a list of all the cities and the dates. So, I sort of calling people around the country, saying, "HRC is holding a dinner

RIKI WILCHINS:

on Friday night in downtown, will you show up? I have all the materials you'll need to flyer." "I'm going to overnight you a Menace t-shirt, so you'll be visible. I will talk to the local media, so you get some press." And they go, "Oh, we're going to get arrested." I'm like, no, you just have to say first amendment rights. You have to make sure you don't use a wooden stick behind any of your placards, only use fiberfill, so they can't say it's a weapon. Do not block anybody, be very careful and just peacefully hand out stuff and make sure everybody who walks in and out of that dinner gets a flyer.

RIKI WILCHINS:

We must've picketed them with activists in, I don't know, 13 or 14 cities. So, they finally kind of tossed in the towel. We were prepared to continue that indefinitely. We started talking to their donors as well, saying you can't keep supporting them, they're trans exclusive. So, that was a long struggle, just to get the gay organizations to engage with the T. It's very interesting to me that what they feared most I think has actually come to pass,

RIKI WILCHINS:

which is that transgender people are, particularly trans women, are the least, how do I say this gently, publicly palatable section of the LGBT spectrum. They have become the tip of the spear of right-wing attacks on the gay rights movement.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Nobody even talks about gay people anymore, that I've seen. Even Family Research Council and other wingnut organizations have moved on that, but trans people are front and center constantly. I have to say, it's a little bit outside this interview, but one of the things that tickled me was, I believe it was the Texas national organization, which is echoed by the way, by the national Republican organization, said that their two main priorities this year

RIKI WILCHINS:

were to elect more Republicans to take over the house and to push back on transgender people in bathrooms and women's sports. And I just thought, how are those two things equivalent? I mean, this is a national agenda? Keeping me out of the women's room? I mean, if negative press is still good for us,

RIKI WILCHINS:

it's just astonishing to me just how quickly this has finally come to the fore. I'm sure for some gay activists, it's their worst nightmare, but it's astonishing to me that this has become a huge prominent political thing. Kind of like critical race theory, which has been around since Delgado and Kimberlé Crenshaw kind of coined it like 20 or 30 years ago, and it's completely unexceptional and uncontroversial, and all of a sudden it's everywhere.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I thought, well, this is what it looks like in the last stage is when something actually reaches acceptance. You remember, not that long ago, they were doing anti-gay marriage bills in 20 state legislatures because marriage was under assault where marriage is being threatened, and that was kind of the last gasp of the attack on gay rights. I like to think that maybe this current transgender panic, which really, in many ways, had its genesis back in the early 90s, when the movement first

RIKI WILCHINS:

became political around transgender. I like to think that maybe this is the last gasp of the panic around trans and in 5 or 10 years, we'll come back and people will mostly be like, so what? They'd have moved on to someone else. I don't know, intersexes or BDSM, they'll find some other community to panic about and stigmatize. The trajectory is really quite amazing to me.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What are your thoughts,

JACK MACCARTHY:

I know you have many thoughts about the gatekeeping and infighting that comes with having a label or labeling oneself? Transgender used to be this inclusive term, and now it's become its own stick with which to hit people. Is there a way

JACK MACCARTHY:

to get one's rights without labels? What are your thoughts on identity politics and labels, and the reality of having to be able to talk about these two cisgender people in a way that will break through?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Well, identity politics has

RIKI WILCHINS:

always been problematic. I think for a gender rights movement. And notice I said "gender rights" and not transgender rights. The gay rights movement oriented itself around a single issue, sexual orientation. With gender, it just doesn't get that simple. I remember a partner of mine used to say, why are trans women so extremely femme?

RIKI WILCHINS:

Present company excluded, I guess. I said, "First of all, the barriers to transitioning are so high that only those people who really can't stand living in a masculine identity, do it. And second, anyone who was not like that is just going to be completely scared away." But I said, "Once those barriers start coming down, you're going to start seeing all kinds of

RIKI WILCHINS:

different identities come out of the gender box." And that's exactly what's happened. I mean, now we're seeing gender fluid, gender queer, non-binary, even micro identities. I think that gender is just much more complicated, in some ways, than just saying, well, it's my sexual orientation. I think, in a way, that's what got me in trouble.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I am a believer in queer theory and Judith Butler. I do see gender as a part of structural inequality, and a system. Because of that, once I started GenderPAC, the more I looked around, I just realized this affects lots of different kinds of people who are not going to announce themselves as transgender,

RIKI WILCHINS:

the breaking point for GenderPAC and between me and much of the trans community came when a young woman named Don Dawson was being harassed at work at Bumble and Bumble, a haircutting shop in Manhattan, of all places, for being too butch. She's being called by masculine pronouns and masculine names. She was basically told she didn't look right to come in. To me, this was a clear cut case of her gender identity, no question,

RIKI WILCHINS:

or gender expression, if you want to do it that way, no question whatsoever. I said, "We can't turn her away." I got a lot of instant pushback that she wasn't transgender. She was a lesbian and we should not waste our scarce resources on her. First of all, it consumes zero resources, so it was more of a philosophical disagreement, but that became the breaking point for GenderPAC that eventually, about six years later, led to our breakup.

RIKI WILCHINS:

It was around identity politics. One of the other pieces of that was the term transgender itself. I kept making the point that not all people who are gender non-conforming are in fact transgender. This also made me extremely unpopular. I remember being on a call to markup an inclusive version of ENDA, which they were laughingly calling,

RIKI WILCHINS:

I think GENDA in some parts of the human rights campaign. And it was all the national organizations, they were marking it up. Every time they would say transgender, I would say, "and gender nonconforming people". This did not win me any friends on the phone call. I have to say they were extremely tolerant of my insubordination, but I was not making any friends. I did that in every single meeting. I was trying to make the point, this is not an identity, it's about an issue.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Unfortunately, I was doing that at exactly the time the transgender community was finding its voice as transgender people, and it didn't go down well. I do take some satisfaction that now I see all over the place that when people write down transgender, they add "and gender nonconforming people". I take some credit for that. I like to think that was because I was such a pain in the butt back then, and I kept making the point.

RIKI WILCHINS:

There are all kinds of people who don't conform to gender norms. Gender norms are rigid and narrow and not all of people who transgress or transcend them are going to be, or are going to need be, announcing themselves as transgender. Organizing needs to be about the issue, not the identity. But this did not go down well in the community, and eventually led to the breakup of GenderPAC, or at least, my moving on. Certainly, NCTE, the National Center for Transgender Equity, inaudible] I think partly came out of that. I have to say, I tried for years

RIKI WILCHINS:

to also convince the gay rights movement that gender was their issue. It was never the slightest bit successful. Even to this day, if you mentioned anything about gender, they go, yes, all of those poor transgender people. They never want to talk about gender as a gay issue. I would go to groups of young men, mostly young men, and they were going to talk about gender and I'd say, well, let's start with your gender issues, and they'd be like, you know what?

RIKI WILCHINS:

We don't have any gender issues. You're the transgender person. And I used this little experiment that always worked, I'd say, "Great. How many men in this room are gay?" Everybody's hand would go up. I say, "How many men in this room are bottoms?" Everybody's hand would go down so quickly that sometimes all the oxygen was sucked out of the room and none of us could breathe for a minute. And then they'd all stare at the one self-identified sissy in the room who still had his hand up and they'd all crack out.

RIKI WILCHINS:

But that still the reality today, we still act as if, gay men are all naturally butch and gay women are all nationally fembots. This is not the truth. Anywhere from a quarter to a third of gay people are what I call visibly queer, and we don't acknowledge that. National gay organizations never talk about butch lesbians or "feminine" gay men, ever. Ever. I always check websites from time to time. There was no mention of gender, unless it's about transgender.

RIKI WILCHINS:

It's a ridiculous fiction. I think it has to do with a lot of internalized gender shame and gender phobia in the gay community, they don't want to talk about this. Privately, they do. When you're around lesbians and gay men, there's a lot of joking around getting married, all that kind of stuff, and how butch women are. But publicly, it is not part of public discourse at all. Gender must be only and solely a transgender issue. This fiction, I have to say, has worked remarkably well for them in terms of public acceptance.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Unfortunately, it's also siloed, and dare I say, ghettoized gender as a trans thing, it's a trans problem. I think this was a tactical mistake by the transgender movement and maybe a tactical success for the gay rights movement. We need to widen this dialogue. We need to invite people in. As long as the transgender movement doesn't invite other people into the gender conversation, they're going to have this problem that it will be really focused on them

RIKI WILCHINS:

in a way that doesn't really challenge the wider gender system. I don't just want people to have the right to transition, important as that is. I want everybody to have the right to not get harassed or stigmatized because they don't need rigid norms for masculinity and femininity. That is a wider and bigger battle. I was simply unsuccessful in engaging most of the leading trans activists in seeing that vision. I don't know if that's my failing or theirs, but it's simply the fact.

RIKI WILCHINS:

And it may just be that it was ahead of its time and people still needed an identity-centric movement, to feel empowered by that, before they were ready to widen the base, I really don't know, but I do think that's where this has to go. These narrow identity-based movements are not working, and I'll say that for two reasons. First of all, they're not working in an age where we're being encouraged to think intersectionally. Gay, and certainly transgender, in many places, started as largely white terms. I remember even in the 90s,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and in fact, my friend David Valentine wrote a whole book about this, we were calling ourselves transgender people, but many black people walking the balls in New York were still saying, "I'm gay". Transgender was considered a white term. So, there's all kinds of intersections around race, class, and ethnicity that go into these terms. We need to think intersectionally, and not just what it means to be this kind of gender queer. The second thing is

RIKI WILCHINS:

youths are taking this in just unexpected directions. I said earlier that once you open the gender Pandora box, all kinds of things will come out and I take some small satisfaction

RIKI WILCHINS:

that's in fact what's happening.As I said, we're seeing kids announced all kinds of identities that we've never heard of and hadn't anticipated and that don't fall neatly into transgender or transsexual, crossdresser. Many kids are just tired of boxes. They don't want to call themselves anything. I was talking with a woman who said, "My son has come out as non -binary." so it's so cool. What's going on? "Oh no, he's straight, he has a girlfriend, he just said he was tired of being in boxes."

RIKI WILCHINS:

I remember thinking, oh my God, we've gone too far. When young straight white boys are coming at as non-binary, we've gone too far. But this idea about identities can be really powerful, and I don't want to tell anybody who claims another identity if they shouldn't use it, because for some people, it is very empowering. But in other ways, it can also be limiting, particularly with something as complicated as gender. I think we're still

RIKI WILCHINS:

just at the very beginning of understanding gender. I also think that we're going to see the breakdown of sex as well. Right now, the classical transgender model is that gender identity is internal, sex is external and sex is kind of fixed. I think thanks to the insights of the intersex community, we're realizing increasingly that sex itself is also

RIKI WILCHINS:

a spectrum and is not really binary. And that tracking sex is entirely arbitrary and unnecessary. One does not have to organize human society around everybody's genitals. I'm impressed by the fact that the American Medical Association just came out for removing birth sex off of the legal part of birth certificates, much as was done with race several decades ago. We now have a number of countries, including Germany and Pakistan, of all places,

RIKI WILCHINS:

that are offering third gender options on all official forms. So, sex is going to go too. I think this train has not only left the station, but it hasn't really stopped rolling yet. We're going to see the breakdown of a lot of clinic categorical identities around sex and gender that we haven't seen before. I frankly hope I live long enough to see it. I'm delighted by every new development.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I wanted to ask about Transsexual Menace. I know kind of the genesis of it. How long did Transsexual Menace continued to be a thing and what kind of things were the Menace continuing to do after the initial formation?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I already said that the Menace was supposed to be a disorganization rather than an organization. I would get calls from people in different cities saying, "How can I form a chapter of the Menace?" And my answer was by calling me, you have just formed one. You are the newest chapter. I would arrange to get them t-shirts and we would customize it by city, so they would get their city name across the bottom.

RIKI WILCHINS:

We had a wonderful queer printer in New York who would ship them out by the dozens. I lost count at 41 different cities. So, it was an interesting moment. I often think that leadership, if it exists, consists of just taking people where they

RIKI WILCHINS:

already want to go. I was supposed to go down to Southern Comfort in Atlanta one year, with a whole Menace cohort from New York, we were still one of the only ones, and some activist I won't mention had warned everybody that we were going to destroy the whole conference, these out Menace activists from New York city were going to destroy everything.

RIKI WILCHINS:

And everybody that's supposed to go with me bailed out one by one. I just thought, I can't not go after this buildup. So, I actually drove myself 14 hours nonstop with a car load of menace t-shirts and I got there and just threw myself into the lobby, exhausted, with this big box of t-shirts, wearing one myself. They were gone within hours.

RIKI WILCHINS:

People would ask how much are they? And I'd say they're free if you'll wear it during the conference. I vividly remember this one very tall, very big cross-dresser who was just dressed to the nines, with her adorable, very small wife and walked up just all completely done up for dinner, the first night of the conference.

RIKI WILCHINS:

A formal dress, high heels, whole thing, wig, and made up. Put on an extra -large, pulled it over her gown, and wore it with her wife for the rest of the conference. In fact, the last t-shirt that I had, the somewhat smelly one that I had worn down in the car for 14 hours, was taken from me by one of the therapists who was working the conference.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I wish I could remember her name. She's like, "I don't care. I just want it."She put it on and she walked off to dinner that night. That's when I realized that they were ready, that people were ready to move beyond the constant focus on self -acceptance and where to find women's shoes

RIKI WILCHINS:

and how to explain your transgender to your shrink. Not saying those things aren't important. But people were ready to be political, and that to me was somewhat surprising. I mean, New York City is a very unique environment, but these are people from all over the country. Very red states, many cases, very rural communities, and they were pissed off. They were pissed off. The t-shirt was a way to say that and to say they were proud. They weren't just self-accepting and they weren't just looking for tolerance, they were angry and they were proud.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I don't think I really expected that. My own journey to anger and pride took a long time. I was really, really shocked by how much the community was into it and how quickly that went. That's when the chapters kind of started up. Yeah,

RIKI WILCHINS:

those conferences really were the backbone of so much that happened next, just because you get people together. Really quite amazing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I also wanted to ask you, Riki, about how creating some of the

JACK MACCARTHY:

first trans support groups came about.

RIKI WILCHINS:

The first trans support groups came from my own attendance -- I'm going to out myself here -- at 12 step groups, in an attempt to deal with some of my own family trauma. I attended a group at the gay community center, which was hosting a bunch of them at that point in New York City around survivors

RIKI WILCHINS:

of family and/or sexual abuse. Of course, I promptly became the subject of the meeting and they spent the whole thing voting on me and discussing whether I should be allowed to stay in the meeting or not, which was horrifying by itself. Someone said, "I need to say that there's a man in the room and I don't feel safe." The whole room of 40 women just broke up, about half of them started looking

RIKI WILCHINS:

around for this man. But she and I both knew who we were talking about. But I started attending. That was a very powerful meeting for me. I started attending other 12 step groups. I went to most of the available ones, I think, and learned something from all of them. I kept thinking there needs to be one for transgender people, so I asked the community center if they would host such a meeting.

RIKI WILCHINS:

They were not yet an LGBT organization, and they said they would. For reasons that escape me, I called it 'Survivors of Transsexuality Anonymous', because our meeting had been survivors of abuse anonymous, I think. I'm not sure it was a great name. The first STA meeting was held in a little basement room off the main lobby. It was about as dark and dank

RIKI WILCHINS:

filled with concrete, as you could get. Was a storage room with old chairs. There were three of us, and we held a regular 12 step meeting by the steps. No one knew what was going to happen, but word spread. Within about 18 months, we had 50 people and it became, at least for a certain part of

RIKI WILCHINS:

New York City, the place to be on Wednesday nights. Those meetings were extremely powerful, at least for me, I assume for many others. To have 50 of us get together and talk about what we were struggling with and what we were going through, what was happening to us. Which is really, really powerful and validating. I remember afterwards, we used to walk down to the coffee shop

RIKI WILCHINS:

at the corner near the gay community center, and we would literally take over the back room and that was tremendously empowering. I mean, people would walk in and there's just double-take, they're like, "Oh my God, the entire room is trannies. What am I doing?" It was cool. It was a huge sense of community and coming together.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I don't mean to be downbeat about it, but at a certain point I decided that I couldn't share it indefinitely, and I opened it up for anyone else to share it. There was, and I assume still is, a tremendous amount of dysfunction in marginalized communities. Two very dysfunctional people took it over and

RIKI WILCHINS:

in about six months, it was gone. But for several years it was really a springboard for many transgender people to find themselves. There was this kind of curious, reverse psychology going on. The people I found who did the best dealing with being at least transsexual were those who were least passable because they had to deal with it.

RIKI WILCHINS:

The people that I've found that were most confounded by it and ashamed were the ones who were "passable" as cis-gender. They would sit there through a couple of meetings and then terrified that someone at work will find out, we would never see them again. They would talk about the shame, and I realized that not passing in a sense is a blessing because it forces you out of the closet. That by itself makes you deal with

RIKI WILCHINS:

gender phobia as an oppression, and not the fact that you can pay us as some kind of personal failing. One person who came through as a model and she lived in constant fear that she would be outed and lose her job. She wasn't the only such person who came through. So, the closeted people were the most tormented, by far. Privilege, I guess,

RIKI WILCHINS:

is a door, in some way, that swings both ways. I remember discussing the group and its limitations with the head of social services for the gay community center. Just saying, "Look, we need to start a gender identity program here." We had a long talk about it. I said, "Well, hospitals are pulling back.

RIKI WILCHINS:

There is no central place. Then you have an enormous amount of need. A lot of these people were just transitioning and looking for anyone who could help them, doing really basic things, like just trying to change their government issued ID, and find a therapist, find electrolysis, find someone doing hormones." But I said, "There's just nothing." God love her, she went to the board and fought it through for about two years. Eventually,

RIKI WILCHINS:

they founded the first community based gender identity program in the country, I believe. To this day, it has served hundreds of transgender people every year. There's one very prominent transgender activist, whose name I won't mention, but I remember talking to her about how fabulous it was that she was in the covers of magazines and stuff. She said,

RIKI WILCHINS:

well, she came through the gender identity program here first. I was like, yes. So, really cool stuff came out of that. There were a lot of really good people that ... I didn't really stick around to write any of it, was just kind of an idea. But it took off. It's really interesting. The 90s were kind of this magical time,

RIKI WILCHINS:

if you fancy yourself an activist or some sort of change maker, when there was just this critical mass there to use the German word zeitgeist on every front, and everywhere you looked, the trans community something. You just had to figure out what was next. There were all these different things to be built, and the community was ready,

RIKI WILCHINS:

it was just lacking, kind of, a catalyst. This sounds like I'm tooting my own horn, and so be it, but that's kind of, I think when I look back, what I was. I don't think if you look at these things, almost nothing I ever did was my own idea, someone was always there first, but I was the one who came in and said, "oh, wait, this could scale. You could take this big. There's a market for this. People would love this." And then took it to that next level and then did something else.

RIKI WILCHINS:

It was a tremendously exciting time. It was also tremendously scary. I talk, in Trans/gressive, about one of the great lessons of my own life is that there are very often places that I found myself where you feel like you're all alone, nobody else is doing something. No one's even talking about doing something. Maybe you see one other person do it before,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and it still seems scary. Just something that people don't do. But if you stick with that scary feeling, if you raise a flag on an empty plane, people will see it and come running, and you won't realize that there was an army. Just, someone has to raise the flag. That's what a lot of this was. There were many other people who did things first. Anne Ogborn did activism first,

RIKI WILCHINS:

Phyllis Frye did lobbying and many other things first, combining HRC. Other people have done the whole Fortune 500 project we did to get

RIKI WILCHINS:

to 250 Fortune 500s that have changed their EO policies, HRC had already done that. But all of these were things that the community was ready to do, it just didn't know how. You just had to come in and say, "Hey, we can do this. This is a political issue. It's not your own personal failings as a civil rights issue. Let's organize." Things happen,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but it also takes going into that empty space where you feel really exposed and sometimes afraid and lonely, and you're not sure anyone's going to follow. Camp Trans was the same way. We didn't realize that would take off and be a 20 year thing, and be taken over by young people who actually ended up mounting their own soundstage and their own acts across from the festival. We had no idea that would happen. The sad thing is

RIKI WILCHINS:

at the moment that you're doing things, they just feel scary and difficult, and on the edge of your abilities. Then you look back 20 years later

RIKI WILCHINS:

and you realize they were history, you just didn't know it at the time. I find the older I get, the less I know. There was a time in my twenties where I felt like I actually understood something. The older I get, the more I realize I have no idea what life is about, and I barely have an idea of how to play it,

RIKI WILCHINS:

which seems a shame. Maybe awareness of ignorance is its own wisdom.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Why aren't you think that [inaudible]

RIKI WILCHINS:

I was saying something, maybe a saying somewhere, but the awareness of ignorance is its own wisdom.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. Why do you think that that critical mass, that readiness happened at that particular point in time?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I don't know why that critical mass happened at that point in time. I can say that the conferences created it, and I can say that they gave us kind of the soil, if you go to plant the seeds. The gay rights movement kind of showed us that could be done, but that doesn't mean anything. One of the things I asked myself is why do things happen at

RIKI WILCHINS:

a certain point in history and not another point? edit out sorry astra, one of the things i asked myself is why do things happen at a certain point in history and not at another point. Why not later? Why that earlier? It was only a few years ago that a young person came out to president Obama as non-binary.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I believe she was from India originally, or her family was Indian. Obama, who's probably, I would say, one of the best brief presidents of my time, had no idea what they were talking about and immediately fell back on his LGBT talking points, which were masterful, but had nothing to do with being non binary because even he didn't know what they were talking about. Now all of a sudden, it's everywhere and that's only two presidents back.

RIKI WILCHINS:

How is that possible? Did nonbinary people suddenly just occur in history? No. We know that we had two spirit people going back centuries. I mean, why? We have Hijra over in India? Why do people start coming out as nonbinary in the US, in the early 2000s? We don't know why exactly. Nobody understands this. I find this whole thing fascinating. My daughter wanted to go to gay pride last year, which is a big deal here in south beach, as you might imagine. I said,

RIKI WILCHINS:

"Really?" And she said, "Yeah, I define as pan, Alex defines as gender queer, and Max defines as gender fluid." I'm like, "Do any of your friends, just identify as dumb old gay or transgender? Because I've just devoted the last 25 years of my life to resuscitating those terms politically, and if they've fallen by the wayside, I'd really like to know." It's just things emerge in consciousness

RIKI WILCHINS:

in different points and different times. I don't think anybody really understands it, but our consciousness about gender is growing by leaps and bounds. Speaking of all publicity, even bad publicity, as being good publicity, I find the worldwide backlash against so-called gender ideology also fascinating. I mean, you have dictators in Hungary

RIKI WILCHINS:

denouncing gender ideology, by which they mean some amalgam of gay rights, trans rights and Judith Butler's theory. I mean, that's really interesting. These ideas are traveling around the world in just really cool ways. So, I really don't know why these things happen at a certain point. I would love to sometimes travel back to the 90s,

RIKI WILCHINS:

knowing what I know now, I've tried to work some similar efforts with the issue of gender norms. I would say it has met with very middling success. There is no gender norms movement in this country right now. So, maybe you do need identities for some things, but I don't know why things come to the fore when they do. I just know

RIKI WILCHINS:

the community was certainly ready and everything that we tried worked. I remember Tony was starting an organization, we decided to call TOPS for Transgender Officers Protect and Serve, for cops and peace officers. Within a year, they had like 30 people. There was just this awareness that we needed to organize, that we'll hang together or we'll all hang separately. I think people had gotten that message, but why

RIKI WILCHINS:

that set of years, I just do not know. I really don't.

JACK MACCARTHY:

As this movement is shifting in this direction, what can this younger generation of activists do to avoid burning themselves out?

RIKI WILCHINS:

avoid sirens

RIKI WILCHINS:

I think that the younger generation, first, I don't want to tell them how to do what they're doing because I am tremendously. I'm just in awe of how younger people are dealing with gender. The sophistication around gender is just far beyond anything that I could have understood. My daughters --

RIKI WILCHINS:

I guess I have to say partner, now, used to be, girlfriend -- has just come out as non -binary. I find I still sometimes make mistakes with gender neutral pronouns, my daughter never does, never. She's had at least one or two friends who were gender fluid, who literally adjusted their gender expression and preferred pronouns on a weekly and sometimes daily basis. She doesn't

RIKI WILCHINS:

find this difficult. I'm like, "Don't they have some sense of wanting to be masculine or feminine." She's like, "Mom, that's what gender fluid means. They're fluid. "Yeah. Right. She doesn't find that strange at all. I have no awareness. I mean, I've wrestled with gender roles my whole life, and with my own personal feelings around gender,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but they're pretty much stable. I have no idea what it's like to go back and forth on a daily or weekly basis, or monthly basis, and be masculine one moment, feminine, I have no clue, or some combination of the two. I don't know how, but they do it. They navigate this perfectly. So, I'm not going to tell them how to do this, but I do hope they do two things. One, I hope they keep whatever emerges here open so that more people can join. It doesn't get mired into, "What are you? This is a movement only

RIKI WILCHINS:

for non-binary or gender queer or gender fluid." And I hope they learn to think intersectionally, because we were always much too white without even realizing that we were white in the early days, my part of the movement anyway. That really needs to change because the most at-risk parts of our community were then, and continue to be now,

RIKI WILCHINS:

black transgender women, who are still dying in horrifying numbers regularly. That all has to change. I hope that continues to be in the spotlight. I mentioned earlier that the gender identity program at the gay community center, I neglected to mention that it was Dr. Barbara Warren who founded it and ran it for years and headed it. Barbara has also been

RIKI WILCHINS:

extremely outspoken on the issue of violence against black trans women. Many of whom came through her program and she saw get assaulted or be violently attacked. So, it has to be a focus. Too much of what we talked about was around ENDA and employment discrimination. Employment discrimination is only important if you have employment. If you're on the streets and you're doing survival sex, so you're gonna have a warm bed or more meal, not so important.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I also think we need to think more deeply about HIV and gender nonconforming. I read some horrifying statistics, for any sex worker who has been forced onto the streets within two years, you're going to be HIV positive. In most major cities, a majority of transgender sex workers, and I'm not talking about people who are listed online and meeting in a hotel, I mean, people who are working the streets --

RIKI WILCHINS:

are now HIV positive. It's just unconscionable in the richest country on earth, we can't do better than that. As much as I'm delighted to see the movements around identities, I hope they also focus on issues, and on those who may be more oppressed.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I hope that too.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Something that I'm struck by with a lot of people that OUTWORDS interviews, but it was striking to me particularly reading your story and all the resistance and all the denial of your humanity,

JACK MACCARTHY:

what kept you going in the face of all that?

RIKI WILCHINS:

It's hard to say what keeps you going when people are denying your very existence. It's still happening now around the so-called bathroom bills, and now the whole argument over transgender people in sports, which is really an argument, transgender women in sports. There is this constant kind of this disconfirmation

RIKI WILCHINS:

directed toward transgender people that is very difficult to overcome and to live with. I don't know how one deals with it. I certainly had internalized a great deal of shame and one of the ways I dealt with it, perhaps bizarrely, was, I just decided I was going to have to do implosion therapy. Rather than make any attempt to passing, I dealt with the harassment, which is

RIKI WILCHINS:

significant on New York City streets, even on a good day. I decided I would wear Menace wear, year-round. I even had heavy hooded sweatshirts printed up, black sweatshirts that said "Transsexual Menace". I wore Menace t-shirts every place I went for three solid years. What was surprising to me was that the harassment stopped immediately. I realized that a lot of

RIKI WILCHINS:

the harassment that comes from cis-gender people, which I mean cis-gender men, is that they think you think that you're putting something over on them, and they want to let you know that you're not, but the moment you out yourself, there's really nothing left to say. The other thing that seemed to happen is the whole point about harassing trans people is to make them feel ashamed. But if you're wearing it across your chest, you're probably not that ashamed,

RIKI WILCHINS:

so what's the point of harassing you? One guy who actually tried to do it on a subway and he goes, "Hey, that's a guy." I go, "What idiot. Don't read me, read my chest. Just like it says." And people were just staring at him like, what's wrong with you? She's wearing a t-shirt for God's sake. What's the point? It's a secret to anybody on this train who wants to know it. But it was really interesting dynamic. When I

RIKI WILCHINS:

lost my job when I transitioned, I ended up tutoring at a community college in Cleveland. The staff there was largely of color, so as a white person I was already hyper-visible, which of course is a complete reversal of the usual racial dynamic. In any case, I think I was the first trans person many of them had seen, at least as an out person, and they would not talk to me. They would not even meet my eyes.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Students would harass me as I was walking down the halls. It was a regular, daily thing. I needed the job to eat and to pay rent, but the only people that were kind to me were my own staff, because a lot of the tutors were gay. I got to a point where I was so anxious and depressed. I had to take Valium just to go into work every day. I'd be standing in the cafeteria line and the checkout woman would not even meet my eyes. I just thought,

RIKI WILCHINS:

as Bette Midler says, 'joke 'em if they can't take a fuck.' I went to a button printer and I had these big buttons printed up. I remember the smallest order you would give him was 40. I needed one, these big buttons that said, "Take a Transsexual to Lunch!" I made sure the button was big enough that you could see it from six feet away, because I'd observed that that was the threshold where the harassment happened. People that were 10 or 12 feet away didn't really see me.

RIKI WILCHINS:

And 1 or 2 feet aware was too personal, it would a personal insult. But it was when that interpersonal distance, around 6 to 8 feet, they would look at me, they were focused, they would realize I was doing something kind of feminine, that didn't fit, and that's when students were harassing me as they went past. Not exactly at me, but the word "Faggot" was always somewhere in the air. And the staff would look the other way. So, I wore that button every day to work, and the harassment totally stopped. People even started smiling at me. I don't think many of them approved of it. I think a lot of them didn't like it, but they got the message that I was proud of myself. I'm not sure that

RIKI WILCHINS:

I was entirely, but that was the message, and that I wasn't going to take any shit about it. And everything turned around. It's very powerful to stand up for oneself and one's own story. It should be the easiest thing in the world, but it really isn't. People make it extraordinarily difficult, especially with gender versus a system that not only oppresses you from the outside, but tends to get into your head

RIKI WILCHINS:

and take over how you think about yourself and your body. That's probably a discussion for another day, but I think we've learned to think of ourselves within the sex and gender categories, which are entirely socially constructed. It makes it hard to be proud of yourself when the terms and the concepts that you manipulate in order to articulate your sense of identity are themselves

RIKI WILCHINS:

constructed by and manufactured for cisgender people, and are trans exclusive from the get-go. Even in trying to articulate yourself, you were saying things that you don't want to and don't mean. Like, I've never bought into the term 'transsexual.' I find it completely ridiculous term, it's as dumb and made up term as there possibly could be --not to offend anybody watching this who feels empowered by the name,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but I just found it silly. Yet that was the term I had to use to come out because that's what people understood it to mean. Very strange.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I feel like a shirt that says 'Giraffe Menace' wouldn't have the same effect.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Probably not, but that reminds me of something. We were talking about Transsexual Menace, but the other thing that I try to do in all my activism

RIKI WILCHINS:

was to have a sense of humor. I think humor is empowering for oppressed people. Not that these aren't serious issues, but using humor like the irony of Transexual Menace also highlights how silly people's panic over trans people is. I think highlighting how other people are silly is in itself empowering, and focusing on how silly the hate is.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I've never missed a hate toward trans people ever. I mean, let's face it, there are only about 20 of us in the entire world. But more every day, but we're a drop in the proverbial bucket, there just aren't enough of us to cause major social problems. Yet, people are so transfixed by this issue. I really, genuinely, do not care what's between anybody else's legs. I really don't, unless I'm taking them home for the night, which hasn't happened in a lot of years.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I really don't, and it just baffles me that people really care that much about what's between my legs or what I might've done with them. I have no understanding of that at all. I sometimes feel like even though we can put people on the moon, and maybe, who knows, even Mars, one of these days, when it comes to gender and sex, we're still

RIKI WILCHINS:

just a bunch of hairless primates sitting around the campfire in a cave, just gesticulating in each other's genital areas and grunting. We're still just kind of primitive. "Oh, you've got those kinds of genitals." "You need to be doing this." "Oh, you've got those genitals." It's like, really? We should be able to advance beyond that, but alas, we have not.

RIKI WILCHINS:

What bathroom I use is still a matter of national importance.

JACK MACCARTHY:

It's very silly.

RIKI WILCHINS:

It is. Although, I have to say, as bad as things are for some trans people. I found it remarkable when, not just the NBA and not just the macho NFL,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but basically NASCAR, I mean, NASCAR, that's about as red country bros as you can get, NASCAR basically came out for transgender bathroom use. They didn't quite frame it that way but basically let North Carolina know they were not happy about trans-inclusive bathroom bills and similar anti LGBT legislation. I mean, NASCAR? Does that mean your average Bubba, and I say this as a term of endearment, who's lived in the south and lives there now, but your average bubba wants trans people using ...

RIKI WILCHINS:

I don't know what that means, but NASCAR? When you've lost NASCAR, you've lost the country. So, I still believe somewhere in my little heart that we are going to win this. It hasn't happened yet and there's going to be lots of pain, especially for those who are most vulnerable, along the way, but I really believe that there's a light at the end of this tunnel. There definitely is. We can see it in a way that we couldn't. I think if we came back to this interview

RIKI WILCHINS:

in 10 years, you would see a whole different country. It'll take a long time to catch in other parts of their world, I understand that, but in developed countries, I think this battle is mostly done. I say this, knowing that our friends in the United Kingdom are fighting a horrendous backlash from TERFS and their right wing allies who are attacking transgender medical care. But I really think in the long run, this will not succeed.

RIKI WILCHINS:

We're here and we're here to stay, we're only going to grow. It's just not going to be only transgender from here on.

JACK MACCARTHY:

These last four questions we ask of everyone that we interview. We are almost at the end.

RIKI WILCHINS:

You're going to ask if I've always looked this bad in sunlight, right?

JACK MACCARTHY:

What?

RIKI WILCHINS:

I said, you're going to ask if I've always looked this bad in sunlight.

JACK MACCARTHY:

No, you actually look quite like glowing [crosstalk]

RIKI WILCHINS:

That's Astra's work.

JACK MACCARTHY:

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

RIKI WILCHINS:

Take the leap.

RIKI WILCHINS:

If I could tell my 15 year old self one thing, it would be, take the leap.

JACK MACCARTHY:

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

RIKI WILCHINS:

I have always believed that there is a transgender superpower, and I think that being transgender is like having a PhD in gender.

RIKI WILCHINS:

That's why I've always believed that transgender people, this is a little teleologic, but if transgender people have a purpose, it is to illuminate the world about the gender system and hopefully overturn it, or as I titled one of my books, burn the binary. Unfortunately, the transgender movement did not agree with that sentiment, but I still believe that that is our hidden superpower. We get gender in a way that nobody else does and nobody else ever will.

RIKI WILCHINS:

If there was going to be any group that leads us out of the rigorous and discriminations of the gender system, it will be trans people and other gender queer folks who do it. But I do actually believe that's what's going on

JACK MACCARTHY:

Why is it important to you to share your story?

RIKI WILCHINS:

It's important to me to share my story because

RIKI WILCHINS:

I hope that people who look back will have a better understanding of what we did; what we did right and what we did wrong. I am painfully aware that the first three authors to write transgender popular paperback books

RIKI WILCHINS:

were Leslie Feinber, Stone Butch Blues; Kate Bornstein's book; and then my own. Hers was Gender Outlaw, mine was Read My Lips. We've already lost Leslie, which seems impossible for me to believe. Kate has been extremely ill, although she's bounced back lately,

RIKI WILCHINS:

thank goodness. But we're in danger of losing some really important history, and that's why I'm glad that OUTWORDS is doing this. It's not just even in the trans community, I mean Joan Nestle who almost one handedly resuscitated the idea of Butch/Femme gender roles is also older,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and has had other health problems. So, I think it's really important that we save a historical record so that people can look back and see what happened and have a better understanding.

JACK MACCARTHY:

You kind of already answered this, but the last question is what is the value of a project like OUTWORDS, that reports the stories of LGBTQ elders all over the country,

JACK MACCARTHY:

and using the word OUTWORDS in your answer, if there's anything you'd like to add there.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I think OUTWORDS is a really important project. I'm glad that they're doing it. I think that there are a lot of stories that go to making up how the movement that we know today, and the community we know today, happened. If you don't understand your past, you can't really understand your present or your future.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I'm really grateful and honored that OUTWORDS would ask me to be part of this and glad that you all have taken the time to include me. Thank you.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Thank you. Those are all my questions and we're at exactly the hour.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Wow! Good timing.

RIKI WILCHINS:

We did it. And to us

JACK MACCARTHY:

Are there any final things that you want to say?

RIKI WILCHINS:

They will all occur to me as I'm lying in bed tonight and I'll go, oh my God, I left out blank. That's what happens. It's that moment before you go to sleep. Oh my God. I left that blank and it's too late to get it in. Let me just relax for a second

RIKI WILCHINS:

and see if anything bubbles up. Do you mind if we run a couple of minutes over? I don't know.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I don't mind at all. Yeah. That's absolutely fine. Astra, you good?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. Astra says, yep.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I'm sure there's something there, but I can't imagine what it is to me. We touched on almost everything.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Hopefully I gave everybody their props. I can't think of anything offhand. Can you? We could've talked about BDSM work, but that's probably a different interview.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I had wanted to ask about how you used what you had been learning and the momentum you'd been building as a partner to the intersex and BDSM and communities, but we ran out of time.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Well, we could do a little thing on it, and there's also a little we could do on queer theory. I don't know if you want to do that. My activism such as it is actually flowed from

RIKI WILCHINS:

my understanding of queer theory and postmodernism. I had no idea what I was doing. I am credited with coining the term gender queer online, although historian Susan Stryker says it was in earlier use, but anyway I started using gender queer. I use it as the title of all my books, because I knew we had to start coining terms for different things. I really wish I'd come up with cisgender, that's a marvelous term that we struggled with for years,

RIKI WILCHINS:

or a concept we didn't have a word for, but I was just kind of inventing language for things. Some caught, some didn't, but someone was talking to me, actually at Cam Trans, and she said, "This post-modern thing you're doing is really interesting." And I thought, oh my God, someone knows what I'm talking about, because I didn't. I knew I was trying to take things apart and I knew I was trying to get at structures and language, but I had no idea. I had none of the training to understand what that was.

RIKI WILCHINS:

She said, "Well, you should read Judith Butler." I had no idea who it was, so I bought her book, Gender Trouble, her first book, and literally threw it across the room at the wall because I couldn't understand what she was saying. Not once, but twice. Bought it a second time, threw it again. I finally wrote the woman, we had email by then, and said, "I don't know where she's talking about." She gave me her Anthro 201 CliffsNotes, and then suddenly it's like a light bulb went on.

RIKI WILCHINS:

For three years, all I did was read queer theory because it explained to me everything about my life. It explained why I felt shame, why I always felt hyper-visible, how people directed their visibility and their consciousness toward themselves instead of outward. It explained to me the gender system and why there was this idea of binary bodies was so oppressive and how we basically got it instilled in our consciousness and why

RIKI WILCHINS:

it seems so difficult to get outside of. I mean, deconstruction is a very powerful set of tools for taking apart things that seemed omnipresent and inevitable, but are actually culturally constructed. I remember going to lunch with some friends of mine at a little bistro in the village and they couldn't get a word in. All I did was talk queer theory to them for like a full hour and they just smiled tolerantly.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I'm sure they thought I was out of my mind, I probably was. But that's kind of where my understanding of gender rights came from. That's why I always said "gender rights" instead of "transgender rights", which got me in enormous trouble, but I still believe in the concept and the term of gender rights and it really wasn't formed by theory. I think we've got a ways to go. I still think the trans movement and for that matter, the trans studies community, which is wonderful, it has grown up, is still

RIKI WILCHINS:

limited by what are largely cis-gender terms and concepts that we use. Even the whole idea of gender identity is an invention of cis-gender doctors to explain a phenomenon that they couldn't handle. Certainly, the term transsexual didn't originate with us either. What is it Audre Lorde said that you can't dismantle the master's house by using the master's tools. We are still using the master's tools. We need to get outside of these structures and see what kinds of movements

RIKI WILCHINS:

and communities emerge when we're not using what I call 'cis logo centric' terms and concepts. We're not there yet, but I do think that's what's coming next, along with really pulling down binary sex. The trans community has done, along with their intersex communities, a really good job of starting the breakdown of binary genders. We need to realize that binary sex is also socially constructed

RIKI WILCHINS:

in ways that we don't yet quite understand. I know it seems real, just like race seemed real in different ways 50 years ago, and we now understand it as the critical race scholar said, race is also a social construction in its own way and has its own structural hierarchies. We understand sex the same way. We're not there yet. The intersex community is getting us part way there, but sex is a binary institution that is tracked and regulated

RIKI WILCHINS:

needs to die. I know that sounds really harsh, but it's absolutely true. It needs to go. We have some really exciting things in front of us that I think, queer theory has helped point the way. They are radical ideas that are both becoming passe, at the same time, I don't think we've really grappled with their true depth. But once you get in it, you are forced to look for other ways to understand bodies

RIKI WILCHINS:

beyond sex and gender, because if sex and gender are not fixed points of identity, and if they're not fixed points of identifying people,

RIKI WILCHINS:

then you are forced to look at people through a different vision. That, I think, is yet to emerge, and we out - I love the snapping in the background, thank you. That makes it, "Oh, I'm okay here, Jack,

RIKI WILCHINS:

yeah I must be okay." That part, you know, thank you for that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah, the doing the interview on zoom and being able to mute myself so that my audio isn't recorded but I can still give that kind of--

RIKI WILCHINS:

I love it, thank you.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Non-verbal affirmation is a nice thing.

RIKI WILCHINS:

it's wonderful

JACK MACCARTHY:

Speaking of the master's tools in the master's house,

JACK MACCARTHY:

I just wanted to touch on Tony, the transgender cop a little bit because it seems like, we're recording this interview in 2021,

JACK MACCARTHY:

we're really questioning the role of police in society at large, and also having this trans cop in your corner made a lot of things possible. I wanted to ask you your thoughts on that

RIKI WILCHINS:

Which was part of that? The whole movement around Black Lives Matter or how we used Tony and his services or both?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. How having a member of the police force made things in that movement possible,

JACK MACCARTHY:

as the police also [inaudible] was a protest against the police.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Yeah. Having Tony as a transgender police officer, as a deputy sheriff, was in many ways a game changer because nearly every place we wanted to demonstrate there were cops. I remember being again, not the first person,

RIKI WILCHINS:

but one of the first pieces, I think it was Kelley Winters who was a lone voice calling for depathologizing Gender Identity Disorder or GID, which was still considered the diagnosis you were given if you wanted gender affirming medical care of any sort. I just said, we've got to overturn this, just like gay people overturned homosexuality as a mental disorder. There was enormous pushback that people needed to have surgery,

RIKI WILCHINS:

and for many people the only way to get surgery was if they could have a diagnosable illness. My counter was, you cannot mount a civil rights movement from inside the confines of a psychiatric diagnosis. I now think that there was probably some right on both sides of that. They found ways to actually split that argument in ways that I wasn't aware of. But we held the first protest around that

RIKI WILCHINS:

at the American Psychiatric Association national conference, I believe it was in New York, the Javits center. The moment we pulled up, they had cordoned everything off so you couldn't get anywhere close. We basically slipped under and got right up front where people were driving up and dropping off, the big circular drive. Immediately the cops came over and said, "You can't stand here." Well, Tony's there. Tony shows the badge and they're like, well, you're not supposed to be here, but we're not going to push you off,

RIKI WILCHINS:

you're one of us, and they let us stay. I remember the guy looking at him saying, "We can't tell you what to do, you're one of us." He would often and did the cop talk with them. The same thing happened at the Brandon Teena Memorial Vigil in Falls City, Nebraska. People don't realize this from the movie Boys Don't Cry, but Brandon died because the sheriff --

RIKI WILCHINS:

who was reelected by the way -- basically outed him to his assailants. They had said, "We're going to kill you if you go to the cops." They had raped him and beaten him, and Brandon being the boy scout that he was, in many ways, went right to the sheriff, who instead of protecting him, interrogated him about his gender, and then told Lotter and Nissen that Brandon had dimed them out. Of course, they killed him

RIKI WILCHINS:

on Christmas day, a few days later. So, we went in to do the vigil. The first thing we did was go to let the Sheriff's office know that we were in town. Laux was no longer sheriff at that point, ended up a bus driver, of all things. But anyway, Tony went and talked to the new sheriff who said,

RIKI WILCHINS:

"We're trying to do diversity training around gay and trans." That was really interesting. Got almost everything wrong, but they were at least trying. But I remember thinking that that was in many ways, the heart of activism, that if you kill a transgender man for being transgender, two years later into your office walks a transgender cop, who's just like you, to say, this was wrong

RIKI WILCHINS:

and we're here to stand up. There were many ways in having a police officer, who was himself trans, was really, really powerful, especially having a trans man alone. It's not just all trans women. There were trans men who were part of the movement. Like Jamison Green out in California has always been a leading activist on this. I think that it takes a village to launch a movement too,

RIKI WILCHINS:

it definitely takes a village.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. I think I do actually have to stop here because Astra needs to be able to wrap up.

RIKI WILCHINS:

You don't owe me an explanation. I'm totally fine. Thank you, Jack. This was wonderful. You made it, so thank you. [Crosstalk] you made it so painless.

RIKI WILCHINS:

I remember thinking how could we do two hours? And it's like, oh, the time just flew by.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. Like nothing. There were things we didn't even cover, but it's been such a pleasure.

RIKI WILCHINS:

You too. Thank you for reading the book. I'm sure it's a schlep to have to go buy people's books and have to read them, but thank you for doing that. I think it made for a much

RIKI WILCHINS:

richer interview in many ways.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I do too. It was a pleasure to read.

RIKI WILCHINS:

Thank you.