JACK MACCARTHY:

Side note, I was listening to some of your music before coming on the zoom today. Oh dear. You can see me. Okay. Right.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah. I can see you fine.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. I was listening to the song Love My Body and I literally, at one point, was working on a solo show called You Should Love My Body.

JACK MACCARTHY:

It never actually happened, but part of it was going to be, I was going to walk up to every single audience member and look them in the eye and say, "I love your body."

JESSICA XAVIER:

That is cool. That is cool. Yeah. Now, I didn't write that song. It was written by my guitar playing buddy, David Machen. He wrote it because, I think it was kind of a reaction to like at the time everyone was into changing their bodies, and why do you

JESSICA XAVIER:

need to change your body when the body you got is fine? Just change your gender, right? So that was kind of like the notion of that, but also the national organization for women had a "love your body" week. We never approached them about using the song though. I'm very under-marketed, so I'm very impressed. You found this recording of me.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. You do have a Spotify presence. There's just four songs

JACK MACCARTHY:

on it but I was able to listen to those.

JESSICA XAVIER:

What were the other ones? I'm curious what they have.

JACK MACCARTHY:

The other ones were, let me go look, Golden Children, which is with a bunch of other artists, , and Hidden Secrets featuring Claude Sinclair.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Those other three songs

JESSICA XAVIER:

you just mentioned are by another Jessica Xavier.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Different Jessica Xavier.

JESSICA XAVIER:

She's a very beautiful I think Afro Latina and Guyana and she is a very fine recording artist and beautiful and lovely voice and such. We've never communicated, but I know of her work and I'm sure she knows of mine.

JACK MACCARTHY:

That's funny. So I've heard one of your songs.

JESSICA XAVIER:

the only one that's currently available. I should do something about that once I reach that great graceful state of what's it called retirement? Yeah. Retirement.

JACK MACCARTHY:

, I've heard that's a thing.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It is.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay, so just backtracking, there's like a lot to cover because you've done so many different things, so I'm going to start

JACK MACCARTHY:

by just asking, because I kind of want to really dive in like at the beginning of the nineties and kind of go from there. Well, before I do that, will you please, for the record, state and spell your first and last name for me?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Jessica Xavier, J E S S I C A, Xavier X A V I E R.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And Jessica,

JACK MACCARTHY:

will you also state when and where you were born?

JESSICA XAVIER:

1952 in Bethesda, Maryland.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Since there is so much about like from the nineties onwards to cover, in terms of activism and music, we're not going to spend a ton of time on like your childhood and family, but before I dive in

JACK MACCARTHY:

to the nineties, I wanted to just check in and see if there's anything about your childhood and upbringing that you feel is necessary context for what we're going to be talking about more today.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Oh, well, very briefly, I was born into a government family, both my parents worked for the federal government and raised Roman Catholic and survived the church of Rome somehow.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I mean, I don't know what else there is. The sun's coming out of the clouds now. I hope that doesn't disturb the light too much.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I think you look great. I'm going to pause to ask Juan is there anything we need to adjust with lighting as it's shifting?

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

I don't think so. Yeah, I think everything is looking good for now.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. Yeah. That's how it's looking on my end as well.

Juan Raymundo Ramos:

Sorry, it's just the zoom. That's a little tricky to see, but in the OBS software, everything should look. Okay.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay, great. Thank you, Juan. So, you were just saying you raised Roman Catholic, survived the church of Rome.

JACK MACCARTHY:

As also being raised Catholic, I am chuckling inside.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah. And, let's see, my parents split up when I was 10 and was largely raised by my mom and attended Catholic school until high school, and then I was in public school and I have graduated

JESSICA XAVIER:

from high school and also the university of Maryland. So I'm Maryland through and through.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Then physically where were you in 1991?

JESSICA XAVIER:

1991, I was living in Maryland and

JESSICA XAVIER:

beginning transition, after 25 years of being clinically depressed and a lot of drinking and drugging. I survived all of that too.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Were you sober at that point?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Getting there. I certainly used a lot less than I did previously.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Also, I couldn't afford it. Transition was very expensive so you had to kind of prioritize things like electrolysis and saving money for surgery and paying your psychologist and your hormone doc. We didn't have insurance coverage in those days, except for the mental healthcare, everything else was right out of pocket.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How were you accessing

JACK MACCARTHY:

resources and accessing support to start making those changes? Both in a medical interpretation of that question and also in terms of community support or meeting other folks that you had things in common with.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was a very difficult time because we did not have the internet and there was no social media. You had to do a lot of embarrassing asking around. I had some doors slammed in my face

JESSICA XAVIER:

for people who refused to treat me because they were transphobic. I was very lucky though, because I was working at the George Washington University Medical Center and I just told them I was going to transition and the head doc there said, "How can I help?" And I said, "Well, I need an endocrinologist." She immediately connected me to the endo that they sent all of their problem cases to, so I was very, very fortunate. I came out in a

JESSICA XAVIER:

what was a crossdressing support group, the TransGender Educational Association of Greater Washington. That was my peer group, my support group who I learned from and transitioned with their support.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What had you been doing at George Washington University?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I was working as a data coordinator in clinical research trials there.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Through my almost decade of employment there, I worked on hematology, oncology, women's health nutrition, and of course HIV, so I've actually been working in the HIV epidemic for 38 years.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Wow. What's that like, I mean, I know that

JACK MACCARTHY:

eventually, like with the survey, there became a focus for you, if I'm correct, on addressing the specific needs of the trans community in getting HIV care. But how did your trajectory, your career working in HIV and AIDS

JACK MACCARTHY:

evolve, especially at the beginning?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, I was the data coordinator for the very first HIV clinical research trial conducted in Washington, DC. I was in 1984 and it was a pretty desperate time. We had just, with the help of Dr. Gallo, developed the antibody test. We actually sent samples from the clinical research trial participants to him to prove that the ELISA test worked.

JESSICA XAVIER:

But it was the first trial, there were about 35 men in it, and because we had no treatment at the time, they all eventually died. It was very difficult to watch these young men being taken in their prime. Later we expanded to an outpatient clinic solely focused on HIV clinical research. There I met my first three trans women, they were all African American.

JESSICA XAVIER:

The rest of the clinic patients, they were all gay men, mostly white, but some men of color. We were running all sorts of clinical research trials, including participation in the first AZT trial which was the first drug used to treat HIV. But I noticed that these women were being classified as men who have sex with men, and I thought that to be erroneous because they were women, they were living as women,

JESSICA XAVIER:

they weren't gay. I started doing some research after I transitioned and I knew a fair number of women of color, trans women of color who were living with HIV and living in DC, and that kind of propelled me to this notion of what can we do to improve care. That's how I came about conducting that first needs assessment survey in

JESSICA XAVIER:

1998 to 2000.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'm gonna pause you right there, because Juan wants to adjust something real, real quick.

Juan Raymundo Ramos

Hi, Jessica, I'm finally able to connect to your computer. I'll just go ahead and minimize the tab just so you can see. Okay.

JESSICA XAVIER:

How's that? Is that good?

Juan Raymundo Ramos

Okay. That should be good.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Great.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay. Thank you, Juan. Assuming that I never had heard of this survey, didn't know what a needs assessment was, will you just spell out for me what that was and when that happened and how it came about?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Sure. There was a group of friends of mine up in Philadelphia who had conducted a needs assessment there,

JESSICA XAVIER:

and the reason this kind of tool is important is a way to organize an entire community. When you can put hard facts and figures on paper describing a, heretofore, hidden community and all of their particular needs, their experiences in accessing regular medical care, transgender care, mental health care, and HIV care, plus housing employment services -- put all of that on paper. And then that final report

JESSICA XAVIER:

becomes an advocacy document that you can take to the city hall and talk to the city council, talk to the department of health, department of housing, department of employment services and lobby for improvements in services. You can also use that to document that you need to do trainings of various kinds of service providers, healthcare providers, social service providers, the folks in the bureaucracy.

JESSICA XAVIER:

So it becomes a way to organize a community. Shortly after we published the WTNAS ("witness") final report in 2000, the District of Columbia government gave us our first funding in HIV prevention. Shortly after that, the first transgender specific program was launched in DC and gradually the community began to organize around that. Of course, there's always a couple of people who were always the usual suspects who do most of the heavy lifting,

JESSICA XAVIER:

my dear friend and colleague and sister, Earline Budd, did a lot of that work with me when we were doing the survey, and then she went ahead and started leading these services in delivering them to transgender women of color who are predominantly impacted by the HIV epidemic at the time. From there a community started, I remember Earline and me going to an organizing meeting

JESSICA XAVIER:

of transgender people in DC at the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force's headquarters on Massachusetts Avenue. I told Earline, "Well, Earline, I guess it's gonna be you, me and maybe about two or three others showing up for this meeting." There were 41 people there, and it just hit me then, I don't have to do this anymore, we've got people who really wanna do it. And they were all diverse, we had lots of trans-masculine people,

JESSICA XAVIER:

we had people who were partners of trans people, we had lots of trans people of color, African American and Latino and Asian, so it really represented the population of the city at the time. I just thought, this is great because we've got so many people who want to be involved in not only advancing trans health, but also trans rights. A lot of the, we convinced the local activist group, the Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance,

JESSICA XAVIER:

the oldest continuous gay activist group in the country -- Dr. Frank Kameny, God rest his soul, was one of the prominent members of that -- to advocate for us. They got us some of the first anti-discrimination legislation passed in the city. It was really kind of a community organizing tool, that's why I'm so enamored with this notion of doing these types of surveys. I did a second one

JESSICA XAVIER:

in Virginia from 2003 to 2006, and I'm doing another one in Virginia right now. This one is fully inclusive of not just trans-masculine, trans-feminine, but also non-binary folks right now about 40% of the 415 participants we have thus far are non-binary, and I'm thinking this is going to be some fascinating research because we know a little bit about the experiences of transgender people accessing care,

JESSICA XAVIER:

we don't know very much at all about non-binary people's experience, and so this is kind of a real keen focus of mine right now.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Wow. I definitely wanna ask you more about that. I just wanna clarify a couple things, when you say the first program for trans-specific HIV care, was that the first in DC or the first in the country?

JESSICA XAVIER:

No, it was the first

JESSICA XAVIER:

in the District of Columbia, but I'm sure it was one of the first on the east coast, at least. Of course, we've had very fine trans organizers out on the west coast forever, and of course, it happens in California, everybody thinks, well, it can happen anywhere. Yeah, well, it's a little more difficult than just that, but San Francisco of course, and Los Angeles, and I think San Diego as well, all had very fine young trans organizers who got there probably the first

JESSICA XAVIER:

prevention services delivered there, but on this coast, it was probably New York city and DC that led the way, possibly Boston and Philadelphia. We had about four cities that we're all starting at the same time.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And this meeting where you thought it was gonna be you, Earline, maybe a couple other people. And it was 41 people ah, what year was that?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Oh, gosh. Probably

JESSICA XAVIER:

something around 2004/5, something like that. Memory's not so good there. But yeah. So literally you can organize an entire community by appointing people who are survey administrators representing the segments of the population. Obviously, DC was a very African American city. So we had more than a few African American presenters.

JESSICA XAVIER:

We had our recruiters and administrators. We had some trans Latina people, and that's actually one of the things I'm very proud about with the WTNAS study. It was one of the first translated into Spanish in the country, so we could capture trans people who are immigrants coming to this country for the first time and not being able to fully speak English yet.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How many people participated in that first survey?

JESSICA XAVIER:

252. We were only in the field for four and a half months. But if we went longer, I'm sure we could have had a bigger sample size, but it was significant in that we established the first HIV prevalence rate amongst transgender women in DC.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was 32%, one out of three. And at the time, because there was no prevention funding, absent prevention, you are going to get high HIV prevalence. So that's the effect, the qualitative effect here, of being able to finally fund prevention services, testing services, to be able to make people aware of their HIV and then deal with it.

JACK MACCARTHY:

And am I correct that the respondents were mostly people of color?

JESSICA XAVIER:

95%.

JACK MACCARTHY:

That's fantastic. In talking to other activists who are active in trans activism in the nineties, there is kind of this,

JACK MACCARTHY:

I've sometimes seen some like shoulder shrugging, well, like while all the trans people of color were like so busy surviving, they didn't have time to like show up in activism, so it was just kind of a very white movement. Hearing about the ways in which you were actually able to hear the voices of,

JACK MACCARTHY:

and advocate on behalf of trans people of color is really heartening and seems not like a thing that was happening a whole lot at the time.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It wasn't. But I made a very sharp distinction between speaking about trans people of color and never for. Because of the survey, whenever we had a training session or speaking opportunity

JESSICA XAVIER:

I would always bring Earline Budd or, later, Ruby Corado along to help present the realness portion of the stuff. I was just there for framing and putting in numbers and such. At the time I was like one of the first trans feminists, I wrote about this, and we were kind of like --

JESSICA XAVIER:

It's intersectional kind of approach because we looked at race, class, gender, ages, trans-masculine, trans feminine, all those different types of intersecting identities and oppressions that worked at the time. The trans feminist approach basically looked at all of that and didn't -- It was kind of a partial rejection of identity politics because this big monster called gender based oppression

JESSICA XAVIER:

was out there and it was making all of the queer world miserable. The reason this is important is because if we just dumb down gender based oppression to where it intrudes into our narrowly drawn identity boxes, then it becomes just something that is like, we fight the dragon with toothpicks instead of a sword. The real disease here is gender based oppression affecting

JESSICA XAVIER:

all queer folks on the basis of their sexual orientation and gender identity, and not just transphobia, biphobia, homophobia, sexism, cis sexism, cis normativity, heteronormativity, all of those different types of ways you conceptualize gender based oppression. That informed my approach. But at the time I don't think I talked about a lot about trans feminism,

JESSICA XAVIER:

but it didn't really connect with the other white trans people who were also working in advocacy. And it kind of carried this implied impetus of bringing all of the different trans voices to the table and giving them a chance to speak, to guide the research, the needs assessment surveys for being done. Also, what are our priorities? What can we realistically get done? How do we go about lobbying the city council for these

JESSICA XAVIER:

types of services? In other words, we strove to be representative of what the trans community looked like at the time. And yeah, community is something we use all too loosely sometimes, but we really did establish a trans community in DC that was working. It was functioning, where people would talk to each other for the first time across all those identity walls and racial and ethnic differences. We finally began to

JESSICA XAVIER:

connect with one another and we saw the commonalities in who we were as human beings and worked together.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Rewinding, time wise, a little bit, because there's a lot of activism that you were involved with before the survey. I wanna

JACK MACCARTHY:

go back to the 1993 March On Washington. It seems like you got involved in that through the cross dressing support group you were part of, is that correct?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah. I was the outreach director for the Transgender Educational Association. We would approach organizations and do trainings and transgender talking head

JESSICA XAVIER:

kind of stuff, where you finally meet a transgender and you get to talk to them. Well, in that capacity, we got a letter from the host committee for the 1993 March On Washington for Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual rights. I decided, okay, this looks interesting, I'm gonna go to a meeting. And I did, I joined the host committee and worked right beside them. It was an energizing, empowering experience

JESSICA XAVIER:

because here I was working alongside gay men and lesbians who were out loud and proud about who they were. It completely turned my head around because at the time, the working theory was trans people are in the closets. We don't share our identities unless it's a very safe space negotiated beforehand, so I began joining other trans advocates to work to do advocacy work for our rights.

JESSICA XAVIER:

At the time the trans movement was just really emerging from the shadows. It was literally the first time ... I mean, most of the white people I work with identified as transsexual. Anyway, the 1993 March On Washington happens and I meet Phyllis Randolph Frye for the first time and also Leslie Feinberg, and both of these folks had an enormous impact on me. Leslie really influenced my trans feminist thinking a lot.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I adored Les. I told all my friends, I would've taken a bullet for them because they were just so, so inspirational. Phyllis was of course the mastermind of the trans movement. Without Phyllis there would've been no transgender movement.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Did you meet Phyllis and Leslie in the planning stage

JACK MACCARTHY:

or at the actual event? How did you end up meeting them?

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was on the day of -- Actually, I might have met Leslie the day before, because one of the things the host committee did was it funded the very first drag show on the national mall, and Leslie was the MC and that's how I met them. The day after that, I met Phyllis Frye on the south stage, the step off stage of the 1993 march on Washington.

JESSICA XAVIER:

This was a huge event. The crowd size estimates were 900,000 people. Marches are good for galvanizing people. They're not so good for trying to change the minds of Congress. I think Barney Frank had that wonderful observation that your marches, they're not gonna do anything, but if you go home and you organize, you build lobbies,

JESSICA XAVIER:

you raise money, you support candidates and you get legislation introduced, that's how you really create lasting change. And Frank, of course, was right. Even though at the time he was not exactly a very positive person towards transgender rights. He came around, I think towards the end, I think Diego Sanchez had something to do with that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

When you met Phyllis and Leslie, were you

JACK MACCARTHY:

already aware of their work or was meeting them also your introduction to their work?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I had learned about both of them, I think through community newsletters and such. I had not read Stone Butch Blues yet, but I knew about Phyllis's work from the International Conference for Transgender Law and Employment Policy and contacted her

JESSICA XAVIER:

via letter from representing the host committee, asking her to come speak. I knew that she had spoken before at the previous March On Washington in '87. They needed a trans talking head and I thought Phyllis was the logical person for that.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'm curious, something kind of

JACK MACCARTHY:

notorious now, like early meetings of the gay liberation trend, people talk about how like chaotic they were, and I'm curious, like what was the experience like of interacting with other folks you were meeting, these other activists. I'm curious, like, what was the energy like?

JACK MACCARTHY:

Was it positive? Was it chaotic? I'm just so curious about what the tone was in the room as you were volunteering with the host committee

JESSICA XAVIER:

The host committee itself, they were very supportive. We had two other trans people working the host committee. But I think I was there for nearly all of the meetings. The host committee was very well run.

JESSICA XAVIER:

At the time we were running on consensus methods and we had the national organizing committee which had somebody named Scout on it, was operating on gender parity, so each state could send two people to represent the state, but one had to be a man, one had to be a woman. It was like binary gender parity at the time. It would've been nice if they had transgender parity,

JESSICA XAVIER:

now that I'm thinking about it. But anyway, that's another story. But when we got into discussions about the trans movement, it was very, very difficult. There were very few resources, there were very few people who were even in positions of being able to advocate. You mentioned earlier about how so many trans people of color were basically eaking out survival in the urban centers in the United States, and that was largely true because they were under assault from violence, rampant discrimination,

JESSICA XAVIER:

HIV, homelessness, substance use, the range of all sorts of problems. So the movement, at the time, became a white middle class, largely trans woman, led movement at the time. In 1994, I went to the transgender law conference in Houston, and there I was one of three co-founders of the first national grassroots organizing trans political organization called Its Time America!,

JESSICA XAVIER:

along with Karen Karin of Vermont and Jane Fee of Minnesota. We organized extensively through the next three or four years. At the end, we had about 25 different chapters and affiliates. I started a chapter here in Maryland called It's Time, Maryland! And we were a little more successful than some of the other groups. Over a three year span,

JESSICA XAVIER:

we introduced four different bills into the Maryland state legislature, including the very first state-level anti-gender identity specific anti-discrimination bill ever introduced in the United States. We were very serious about the work. Then in 1999, we had a big fallout with the state gay and lesbian lobby, and I quit working with them. We were made a bargaining chip

JESSICA XAVIER:

for the state anti-discrimination bill to pass that out of committee with just sexual orientation in it, and I started getting sick from all the stress and in September of '99, I left the trans political movement and handed over the group to my friend's sister and colleague Tacy Ranta of Baltimore. Three months later, she was shot to death in Baltimore City, the victim of a

JESSICA XAVIER:

rather obvious hate crime. I think nobody really understood the risk that we all took in those days. I had somebody trying to hurt me by loosening all the lug nuts on the right rear tire of my Honda. I was driving down the Beltway and heard this horrible noise pulled over and saw that three of the four lug nuts were missing on that tire. I touched the other one, it fell into my hand. Obviously,

JESSICA XAVIER:

if that wheel had come off on the Beltway at 65 miles per hour, I may not have been sitting here at all right now. We took enormous risks and the stakes were very high, but we had to put trans political advocacy on the map.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. And correct me if I'm wrong, but the lug nuts incident happened right

JACK MACCARTHY:

after you were testifying.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah, I had just testified for a birth certificate bill. At the time, the practice was to take the original birth certificate and white out the original name and strike out the original assigned sex at birth, and then giving you basically a birth certificate that looked like a self-adulterated forgery. We were advocating

JESSICA XAVIER:

for clean new birth certificate bills in the Maryland Assembly. We didn't didn't pass. And so I come out of the hearing room and there's six different media outlets, including the all-news 50,000 watt news station here in DC, a Baltimore television station, and the Washington Times. The Times followed up with an interview that began with "Jessica Xavier

JESSICA XAVIER:

is a man living as a woman in Silver Spring, Maryland," then it kind of got into the details. I thought, okay, after I freaked out about the first sentence, I was okay. Two weeks later, this happened where somebody tried to make the wheel come off on my car and I reported it to police. They said, "Oh, somebody was just trying to steal your tire." And I said "Off a 14 year old Honda?" Yeah. And this happened on my street, I mean, right in front of my house where

JESSICA XAVIER:

the nuts were loosened. That did not intimidate me though, it just made me want to fight harder because I realized what was going on. They were trying to intimidate me and intimidate a lot of people, even in deep blue, progressive, Maryland, there were people who felt free to exercise their transphobia.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I know that there were murderers and deaths of negligence within the trans community at the time that were also really galvanizing for you.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Was this moment of finding the lug nuts all taken off around the same time?

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was actually about three years later. In 1995, we had the Tyra Hunter tragedy. Tyra was an African American trans woman, a hairdresser, who was critically injured in automobile accident. At the time, the DC Fire Department was so dysfunctional that half of their ambulances

JESSICA XAVIER:

brought a commission, so they sent out a fire truck with first responders to the accident scene. One of the firefighters cut open Tyra's legs to treat her, discovered she had male genitalia, stopped care and started mocking her. She was later transported to DC General Hospital where she died on a gurney because none of the doctors would touch her. Her mother sued the city and was awarded something like $7 million. The moral of the story is

JESSICA XAVIER:

that transphobia can be very expensive to the taxpayers. A year after that, oddly enough, in the very same intersection in Southeast DC we had the very first double murder of two young transgender women that Stephanie Thomas and Ukea Davis, they were 19 and 18 years old respectfully, and they were both shot to death in an automobile almost just really half

JESSICA XAVIER:

a block from where Tyra almost died. So, yeah DC was getting to be called Dodge City, the Times magazine called it a death trap for the transgender. So doing our work in DC came at a great risk. And trans women of color were bearing the brunt of the violence as they still do today.

JESSICA XAVIER:

So violence against trans people is the primary issue that governs our lives. It influences our thinking. We always have to be aware of where we are, who we're interacting with, what time is it, is that street corner safe for me to walk down to the local 7-Eleven or not, are the strolls safe where our women do sex work? There's a lot of violence on those.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It's a constant concern, has to be front and center all the time, and it kind of obscures the extent of HIV in trans women of color. There was a study done that said that just over 50% of African American trans women are living with HIV, something 51% that staggers the mind.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. Yeah. That's an astronomical number. And with Tyra Hunter, can you talk a little bit more about the community response to that? Because I know,

JACK MACCARTHY:

if I'm correct, the media coverage of it, that you were part of a movement pushing back against the media coverage of that event.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah, that's correct. The community response that organized was amazing. We had people who were straight and gay and trans, white and of color,

JESSICA XAVIER:

community people, residents of the neighborhood and people from all over DC who organized to protest the DC Fire Department's negligence in not treating Tyra. But I had formed a chapter of Transgender Nation in DC, and we were outraged at the media coverage of Tyra who was repeatedly described as a man in a dress, or a man living as a woman,

JESSICA XAVIER:

or gay. Just the whole chain of misidentifications. In September of 1995, about five weeks after her death, we organized a protest at the Washington Post, which was kind of one of the real worst offenders of this coverage. It was literally the first open transgender demonstration in the nation's capital.

JESSICA XAVIER:

We had about six Transgender Nationals, and then we borrowed activists from all the other different advocacy groups in DC, the Gay and Lesbian Activist Alliance, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation, Out, Queer Nation. They all kind of joined with us and we leafleted for like three hours at the headquarters of the Post, then on 15th Street Northwest, and got to some people.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I believe our leaflets were quite the topic of conversation at this nationally famous newspaper. Shortly, thereafter, we started meeting with editors and we started changing coverage and style guides and stuff. I mean, it took some time, but the Post is so much better now, unbelievably so.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Was this something that It's Time America! was doing? Was this a separate thing? I'm just kind of trying to keep track of all different threads.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was a separate thing. We were aware that we had to put on a formal face and a formal dress when we went in to talk to the legislators to lobby them for trans supportive legislation. But there was also a lot of direct action. Transgender Nation was the first direct action transgender group

JESSICA XAVIER:

that was working in the nineties. I mean, of course, the first, very first one was STAR (the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), founded by Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P. Johnson. But there was also another one, the Transgender Menace, which had many more chapters and across the nation and they did direct action too, and they also had the better ability to travel. For example, they went out to Nebraska to protest

JESSICA XAVIER:

in the town where, I'm having a senior moment, where Brandon Teena was murdered. Direct action was at another level. It was a lot more empowering and energizing when you take it to the streets and you show your body and get in the face of people and leaflet them or sit down, block traffic.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I had friends of mine who were in ACT UP, and I actually did an ACT UP demo once. It was pretty funny. It was in the steps of St Matthew's Cathedral in DC. At the time, Cardinal Hickey had spoken out against Surgeon General, Joycelyn Elders, who said that masturbation is safe and fun and there's no problem with it. And of course, he had an issue with that. I got photographed for the first time in a newspaper

JESSICA XAVIER:

in the Washington Blade, and I was holding up a sign that said "Bad, Cardinal, no altar boy." And they misspelled altar, it was ALTER. I was holding the sign. Gotta have a sense of humor about this sometimes. I was also in the Lesbian Avengers

JESSICA XAVIER:

for a number of years and I've ate fire and protested against the Christian Coalition whenever they came to town at the Washington Hilton. That was very energizing. The Avengers rock. I mean, they were just the most greatest bunch of out loud, proud queer women you ever want to be with. I wish they were still alive today. We could use their energy.

JACK MACCARTHY:

There are many directions I could go from here. I also wanna say we're about an hour, and I wanna check in to see if you wanna take a break or you wanna just kinda keep powering through, what do you think?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I'm fine. I can keep going.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Okay.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Okay. This is a great conversation.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What's that?

JESSICA XAVIER:

This is a great conversation.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Yeah. I'm having a great time. and the light was

JACK MACCARTHY:

making some very sharp shadows on you, but it looks like it's softened now. So yeah,

JESSICA XAVIER:

I think we're back

JACK MACCARTHY:

I think we're good there. Let me just take a look at my notes, because we've covered a lot of what I was going to ask you about. I just want to check in with what we haven't talked as much about.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I know you wanted to talk about bisexuality, and I feel like stories about trans people who are also bisexual is like an under underrepresented thing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

So do you mind if we pivot into that a bit?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Sure. I was bisexual before I transitioned and I'm bisexual afterwards and I met a group of bisexual activists, here in DC and also nationally, they were very adamant about their bisexual identities because they were being continuously erased and there was a lot of biphobia in the gay and lesbian communities at the time, so they were experiencing that. Which we felt

JESSICA XAVIER:

we also had experiences of gay and lesbian transphobia at the time, so we could bond together on that. The survey research that I've seen suggest that there are far more bisexual people and gay and lesbian. In fact, put gay lesbian combined, there's still more bisexual people. I was always kind of out about being Bi after I transitioned. I noticed that whenever I was asked

JESSICA XAVIER:

for a bio, one of the things that was happening was, because we were learning how to teach the alphabet, GLBT, LGBT, that you were being added to a list of sexual orientations, so your sexual orientation was being invisibilized.

JESSICA XAVIER:

So I always, in my bio, put "Jessica Xavier is a out bisexual, transgender activist."

JESSICA XAVIER:

I put bisexual first, so it couldn't be erased. Now, of course, I realize that Bi is being more interpreted as being pansexual. And I suppose I'm more pansexual really than bisexual, but at the time, was kind of a grounding identity for me. I'm still loyal, true to my school about that, and all the Bisexual activists I've worked with to raise Bi visibility in so many different ways and such. I was on the Community Advisory Board (CAB) of Lesbian Services at

JESSICA XAVIER:

Whitman-Walker before I started work there. Whitman-Walker is a gay identified AIDS Service Organization here in DC. One of our projects was increasing Bisexual visibility that the CAB undertook. It was a lot of good pulling together resources and stuff, and dispelling the myths about bisexuality and such. It was really good kind of organizing work, education work, grounding and such.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Can you ground me in time when this was?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Oh, I was on the Community Advisory Board before I started work with Whitman-Walker. So that was '98, '99 around then. Yeah. I was kind of cool because I was like the first trans woman on the Community Advisory Board of Lesbian Services. Then I got hired by

JESSICA XAVIER:

Whitman-Walker and I had just finished the WTNAS survey. I had this final report of all these facts and figures, and I was thinking we have to be able to start a transgender health program here in DC. For me, Whitman-Walker was the only option. At the time it was Gay and Lesbian -identified. I was not the first trans employee, but I was certainly the most visible because I was Director of Volunteer Resources.

JESSICA XAVIER:

So I was in management, theoretically. I lobbied them internally to start their trans health program. It was very, very difficult work. I mean, it's easy if you think about it to stand outside a building and throw stones much harder, if you have to go inside the building and then get hired as a peer and work with all the people in that building to change hearts and minds to provide services.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Before I left, they started their trans health program. It was very hard work, a lot of hard conversations with the management and board of directors. I mean, the providers all got it. I mean, they were already seeing many trans women living with HIV and we had trans men and trans women coming into our HIV testing services. The providers were all there already for it,

JESSICA XAVIER:

but the management of the board of directors, that took some convincing. By the time I left Whitman-Walker in 2004, they had started their trans health program. I went off to get a Master's in Public Health at the university of Maryland .

JACK MACCARTHY:

Rewinding a little bit when did you start to connect with like bisexual activists?

JESSICA XAVIER:

That was really around when I was the outreach director

JESSICA XAVIER:

for the TransGender Educational Association. I'd meet up with the BiNet DC folks and we go to dinner together and talk and meet people and have casual meetings and then plan, what are we gonna do to raise Bi visibility in DC? A lot of the controversies in DC at the time were around the pride events. Like, is this just gonna be yet another Washington gay and lesbian pride event? Are we gonna be able to say,

JESSICA XAVIER:

this is the Washington Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender pride event? So we found ourselves organizing around this very visible pride event. It was huge. We used to draw lots of people to that pride event, the parade on Saturdays and then the street festival on Sundays. And the Saturday, of course, before the pride festival started we'd have the dyke march. I'd get to march with the Avengers and have

JESSICA XAVIER:

some fun doing that. I remember on one of the dyke marches, we were walking through Georgetown, the real Tony section of DC. Our chant was "We're here, We're queer. We're not going shopping." We were passing like there was an outdoor restaurant with all sorts of tables and stuff. We started walking by, it was dead silence,

JESSICA XAVIER:

and it was just a look of shock on people's faces, all these very wealthy Georgetowners and so I just turned to them and I said, well, just don't stare at us, applaud. They got up and applauded . I loved being a Lesbian Avenger. I just loved it.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I wanna a t-shirt that says that.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah, I still got two or three t-shirts.

JESSICA XAVIER:

The first one was "We Recruit," of course, the famous one in the back motto. Well, group my Lesbian Avenger chapter, I wasn't there, went to a Promise Keepers protest in DC, and there were 750,000 Promise Keepers on the mall, and this was not a militia. This very Christian, very white nationalist, kind of, 'we're men and women should be in the kitchen,' kind of a

JESSICA XAVIER:

masculinity movement centered around their version of Christianity. The Avengers went into the middle of the mall where all these guys were gathered and they ate fire, they did the chant, "their fire will not consume us, we'll take it and make it our own," and then they left. As they were walking off, one of the promise keepers came up to one of the young lesbians and said, "Pardon me, but are you a lesbian?"

JESSICA XAVIER:

And the young woman said "Why? Yes I am." And he said, "Well, golly, you're too pretty to burn in hell". And that was our new motto, "Too pretty to burn in hell."

JACK MACCARTHY:

Oh, I love that, for so many reasons.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I'm curious. Like,

JACK MACCARTHY:

I came out as bi before I even realized I was trans. There are these parallel self awarenesses with being both trans and bi. I guess I'm curious, like, were you always aware of both? Did one pokes head up before the other did?

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did these or didn't these interact with each other for you?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, by the time I was seven, I knew I was not a boy. I didn't have a word for who I was. As I was growing up, I discovered the word transvestite, and I thought, okay, well, that must be who I am. Then I discovered the word transsexual when I was like in my late teens, and I said to myself,

JESSICA XAVIER:

oh my gosh, thank God. I'm not one of them. I spent the next 20 years in hell with different psychotherapists, trying to prove that I wasn't. The bisexuality was always there. I was always attracted to boys and girls, to men and women, but I never really acted on -- Well, I did, I had sex with men before I transitioned, and sex with women. After I came out, I had sex with

JESSICA XAVIER:

cisgender men, cisgender women, transgender men, and transgender women. No non-binaries though. If you're out there, look me up on, what? Grindr. What's the really good trans dating app now? I can't remember. Anyway, I'm not on those dating apps, kids. I'm just kidding.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I feel like maybe -- Like

JACK MACCARTHY:

something that has happened, sometimes, this is just a sidebar, is that like, I imagine at least, at least one of those folks, like, now has a little more language and it's like, oh, I am outside these gender boxes. So maybe, in retrospect, you did and you just didn't know it at the time, they didn't know it at the time, but that's neither here nor there.

JESSICA XAVIER:

yes, yes. It could have been possible. Absolutely.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I also wanted to come back to trans feminism a bit, because I know that

JACK MACCARTHY:

you were trying to lead from those principles with It's Time, America! and It's Time, Maryland! And that there was like outreach that you were trying to do so that it was a less homogenous, less middle class group. I would love to hear more about how you went about that.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, I would find, in various corners of the community,

JESSICA XAVIER:

they either had newsletters or there were people that told me, oh, you need to go talk to him, or you need to go talk to them, or they're usually down at this bar on Friday nights, so I'd go in and interact with people and talk to 'em about our work and stuff. What our prospects were and try to get them to come to Its Time, Maryland! meetings. We were pretty successful in getting trans-masculine people involved. There was

JESSICA XAVIER:

a very new trans-masculine group called the American Boys that was formed by my friend and brother, Gary Bowen. They would join us for our lobbying events in Annapolis, so we were kind of successful on that end, but in terms of the national stuff, I think it really fell on deaf ears because at the time, we were mostly white middle class trans women,

JESSICA XAVIER:

there's this kind of feeling of 'our rights have been violated, I wanna see the manager, I wanna see my elected representative.' This kind of male privilege cis kind of attitude, and I felt sad about that because there was this -- No, there was no perspective that these folks had to categorize the oppression that they were experiencing, I found it in feminism. I was a feminist for 15 years before I even came out. I had

JESSICA XAVIER:

all sorts of girlfriends, platonic relationships with women, women who had gone through abortions, women who were survivors of intimate partner violence. I became really staunchly feminist way before I transitioned and understood what it really meant to having a woman's body. So yeah, I had that experience. I could contextualize all the hardships, all the difficulties, all the discrimination in a

JESSICA XAVIER:

larger context of feminism and the stuff that women have to go through, cis women have to go through, to not only secure their own survival, but that of their children as well.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did you initially come to feminism? Was it just kind of like around you?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, like I said, it was unusual.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I was a musician and so I ran in a musician's crowd and we had lots of different friends of ours come to the shows, men and women. My women friends and I were really tight and I think they probably suspected I was gay. So therefore that made me safe. I could be a guy they could talk to, and it got me into the discourse of learning what other women of my age and their experiences were having. I knew women who had abortions.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I knew women who were survivors of interpersonal violence. I mean, so it really kind of socialized me. It re-grounded me. Okay, if this is what a woman's experience is gonna be like, I need to know about it because this is my peer group, my natural peer group.

JACK MACCARTHY:

That's actually a great segue into asking me more about music.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What's kind of the timeline there with your relationship with music and being a musician? How did you come to it?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, I had been a semi-pro keyboard player and bass player for about 25 years before I transitioned. I had, at least, some facility in being able to play instruments and I would write

JESSICA XAVIER:

chord progressions, but I never had any lyrics. Once I transitioned, all of a sudden, I discovered lyrics and I started writing songs primarily as therapy because I would process very strong emotions in the lyrics. At the time, it was a lot cheaper than paying a shrink. Eventually, I started writing songs to go with the lyrics. I was in

JESSICA XAVIER:

a trans quartet with two transsexuals and two crossdressers, the Cherries. The Cherries broke up. I worked with another guitar player and we were writing songs together and we were working with a MIDI sequencer, so we could program our own drums and keyboards and stand up and let the music play in our background. We would sing and play guitars and bass, and that was a band called Me Neither,

JESSICA XAVIER:

which came about when somebody asked me if I was a boy or a girl, and I said, "Me neither." That's how the band got named.

JACK MACCARTHY:

When was that?

JESSICA XAVIER:

That was in the late nineties. Then I showed my songs and made a couple of rough demos for some friends of mine. They all said, "Jessy , you've gotta record a CD."

JESSICA XAVIER:

I had a lot of support from these folks and one trans woman helped me organize a little limited liability company to secure the copyright rights. I went into the studio with a guitar player and a flutist and recorded Changeling in 1999, which was pretty early for trans music. My producer was also a trans woman, and I guess the music is kind of like

JESSICA XAVIER:

late eighties, nineties, kind of new wave-ish alt-ish kind of stuff. Very melodic. People ask me, what type of music do you play? I called it alternative music for a future without fear. And "A future without fear" always became my little tagline because being queer and being open, I mean, I've been out

JESSICA XAVIER:

for 31 years. Anybody who got to know me on any type of a level would know I was trans, I never hid it because I had nothing to be ashamed of. I just always thought of that way, when I came out, the protocol at the time for trans people was to transition, get surgery and hormones,

JESSICA XAVIER:

and then go right back into the closet and pretend you were you're nothing but a cis woman, which I thought was a lie because I was a feminist and I hadn't lived in that body all my life, and hadn't been subjected to a lifetime of sexual harassment and sexual objectification and potential sexual assault. I was not gonna claim a cis woman's experience as my own, so I decided to be out. In other words,

JESSICA XAVIER:

that kind of experience of being completely out, I called the authentic transsexual experience, informed my lyrics. One of the songs I wrote on Changeling was called Stonewall, and I co-wrote that with my guitar player David Machin. We were at Rehoboth Beach in Delaware, which was a famous queer Mecca. We had just finished dinner and we were out on the boardwalk. It was evening and it was very windy.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I started scribbling down lyrics on a yellow legal pad. After the song was recorded. I took it up to Transy house in Park Slope in Brooklyn and played it for Sylvia Rivera who -- It was really funny, she went through this progression of, okay, I'll put up with this. And she was listening to the lyrics and she just got really fierce. And she just said, "Yes, this is it!" I had written this song for her and I'm very proud of that.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I had met Sylvia Rivera earlier at a meeting of the Metropolitan Gender Network, which used to meet at Leslie Feinberg's old Workers World Party headquarters in lower Manhattan. I was there giving my spiel about Its Time, America!, trying to get the Metropolitan Gender Network to affiliate with us, which they did. And so I was explaining, there are two arms to the transgender movement, there's the educational arm

JESSICA XAVIER:

and there's the political advocacy arm. After I finished, all of a sudden this figure stood up from across the room in darkness, not darkness, but in shadow, and pointed a gnarly finger at me and said, "Just one moment, please, Miss Xavier, just one moment, please. There was a third arm to the transgender movement, and as that is the entertainment mode, because miss Ru Paul gets 300,000 listeners on her drive show every morning here in New York City." That's how I met Sylvia.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I got read out by her. But we obviously talked and things clicked and I knew her for the last seven years of her life. Of course, she was a huge influence on me. How can anybody not meet Sylvia Rivera and not be profoundly impacted? .

JACK MACCARTHY:

It's not about impression, I'm impressed.

JESSICA XAVIER:

like I said, she had a strong, strong effect

JESSICA XAVIER:

on me. After Changeling came out, it went to the top of the trans charts. It sold 57 copies, because it wasn't nationally distributed or anything. I formed a band after it came out and the band was called Femme Messiah and I wanted to call the band Girl Jesus, but the others in the band thought that was a little too provocative,

JESSICA XAVIER:

so we called ourselves Femme Messiah and we would perform at Pride Days mostly in DC and Baltimore. Although I performed in Atlanta and also in New York City, I actually performed at Webster Hall the night before The Night of a Thousand Gowns. I had my drag experience, there were about 14 shows I think I was in, but then it got

JESSICA XAVIER:

cut tragically short, if you know what I mean? I couldn't really get up there. I remember being backstage at a drag show in Atlanta before I got up and sang Stonewall and this beautiful drag queen asked me, so are you a change? And I said, I guess I am

JACK MACCARTHY:

Well, Octavia Butler says God has changed, and I believe that trans people

JACK MACCARTHY:

are divine. So there you go.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah, I think we are too. Raven Kaldera wrote that wonderful book called Hermaphrodeities, which is all about the sex changes of the gods and the different gendered deities that are present in Egyptian and Roman and Greek traditions. I'm a Wiccan high priestess. I know about these kinds of things. That's another part of my dimensionality. I became Wiccan because I wanted to heal more completely after getting

JESSICA XAVIER:

a rough experience in the trans political movement and I needed a spirituality to sustain me. I liked the idea in Wiccan that we have this metaphor of balance between the divine masculine and the divine feminine. Seeking that balance in nature and in ourselves and in our deities allows us to live a more even centered focused existence in harmony, of course, with the seasons, the solar cycle

JESSICA XAVIER:

and the lunar cycle.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did you know that that was what I was going to ask you about next?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Let's say that Wiccans have -- Some of us have that kind of gift of premonition where we can see what's coming. My instructor in Wicca and in Reiki -- I'm also a Reiki Master -- was also another trans woman, Millie Knox,

JESSICA XAVIER:

and she certainly had a very strong influence on me. I learned a whole new way of relating to the universe, and it certainly has allowed me to become more centered, more focused, more calm. The trans political movement in the 1990s was, as you mentioned earlier, chaotic and hectic. There was a lot of infighting and I really needed to heal. Losing friends like I did with Tacy Ranta

JESSICA XAVIER:

and others. I had met an African American trans woman in DC, very beautiful young girl, and learned that she had been shot to death. Then I discovered this picture that she gave me of hers many years after the fact. I knew her and remembered her from this picture and it was like provoking. I wrote a song called Whipping Boy,

JESSICA XAVIER:

which is about the hunger of human hatred and how quickly people just jump to hate as this kind of immediate reaction towards people who are different than them. I've got lyrics for a hundred songs and only unfortunately about 20 of them have been recorded, but we'll see what the future brings.

JACK MACCARTHY:

How did you find your way to Wicca?

JESSICA XAVIER:

After two months after Tacy's death, a friend of a friend was having a circle. I went to an Imbolc circle, also known as Groundhog Day, and met these folks and joined what was at the time, a gaggle. Wasn't even quite a circle and certainly not a Coven. We wrote our own rituals and it was very experimental, and I started writing Wiccan songs to go with

JESSICA XAVIER:

those rituals and then discovered another coven that had instruction, a three year survey course in magical traditions and became an adept in their tradition and a Reiki Master. After that, I became a high priestess by teaching a couple over a three year period and also became an apprentice to a high magician. I practiced a lot of magic, that's

JESSICA XAVIER:

my primary spirituality.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Something that I love about this is that you were working so much with data and being able to have the numbers to get change made on a very

JACK MACCARTHY:

concrete level. And there is also this, that you have this strong relationship with spirituality. I feel like that data and science and also magic, like that feels very, very queer and very trans to me. I'm thinking of,

JACK MACCARTHY:

I think it was a standup comic or a podcast where someone was like, oh, you're into astrology. Hello, science is a thing. She was like, that's like saying, oh, you like questions, you must hate answers. I love that there is this both/and in your story and in your life.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah. I have my own involved kind of interior that I retreat to, which is lyrics and magic and such, but I had to establish that safe space for me. I mean, I did another very difficult internal advocacy piece that we haven't discussed yet. But I had finished my second needs assessment survey, the first one in Virginia in 2007, and I was very close to being unemployed.

JESSICA XAVIER:

So what did I do? I joined the federal government and I was, of course, very well aware that there were lots of transgender women of color living with HIV. And many of them were having very difficult treatment experiences in getting HIV primary care. So I worked for the Health Resources and Services Administration for 10 years and in the Ryan White HIV/AIDS program, which provides treatment services, HIV treatment and care services to

JESSICA XAVIER:

all sorts of people in the United States, about 73% of their service population is of color. I did the very extremely difficult work of internal advocacy in your United States Federal Government, and these people are very difficult. This is the white power structure writ large, and

JESSICA XAVIER:

they're bureaucrats and they're very risk averse. Here's this very junior person to the government advocating for a demonstration project to improve the care of transgender women of color living with HIV. I put it up, the proposal up, three years in a row and finally got it greenlit on the third time. In 2012, we began this demonstration project with nine demonstration sites in four urban centers, New York,

JESSICA XAVIER:

Chicago, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay Area and finished it six years later. Now we have nine interventions to improve the care of transgender women living with HIV, and their intervention manuals are freely available on the TARGET HIV website. After those intervention manuals were just about ready to get published, I left government

JESSICA XAVIER:

because the previous fall, the attorney general under then president Donald J. Trump, removed anti-discrimination protections for transgender federal employees. I was at risk for getting fired, so I had to leave, and it was a good thing because I really did not want to serve any longer in a Trump administration. You could say

JESSICA XAVIER:

we had slightly different politics.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Bringing it back to the question of balance. How did you use your spirituality as a resource while doing that incredibly

JACK MACCARTHY:

difficult work?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well one of the uses of magic is self-empowerment. And so I would do various rituals that would give me the energy to get through very difficult times. My particular practice of high magic I discovered really worked out very well for me when I was getting my Master's in Public Health, taking 12 credit hours,

JESSICA XAVIER:

working two different jobs, and my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. Then I had to finish my master's while taking her through a lumpectomy in five courses of chemotherapy as her primary caregiver, so the stress was unrelenting. I found a lot of strength in empowerment through this particular practice of magic.

JESSICA XAVIER:

And that's how it got me through that particular time. And then I learned other rituals and have helped me further in my life and stuff. It's a discipline. As Wiccans like to say, we are our own clergy. We don't need a priest, minister or rabbi, or Imam to do this, we do it ourselves. So it's all on you. It kind of begins with this point of departure of your own empowerment.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It's not gonna happen unless you do it, and I like that kind of that empowerment vibe translates larger into our trends and non-binary populations because we are so often the victims of the oppression and gender based oppression of the world, in violence, discrimination, harassment, barriers to employment, housing, healthcare. Encountering all that crap in our lives, it's so easy to become a victim. The problem with becoming a victim though, is that you give away

JESSICA XAVIER:

all your power. I like to focus on the other end of the equation as a survivor, because if you can survive all that, you begin to build resilience, coping mechanisms, ways of navigating the world that help you lead somewhat of a normal life beyond just surviving and maybe even getting into thriving. It's been my long time goal ever since I came out,

JESSICA XAVIER:

certainly with healthcare, to lay the groundwork so that trans people can thrive in that future without fear, without having to worry about getting our healthcare or dealing with providers who misgender us and disrespect us and refuse to call us by our names, and don't have a firsthand clue about how to provide hormonal therapy to us. There's a lot of work

JESSICA XAVIER:

in that area, it's a good niche for me. There are other people who are doing the ongoing trans political work, the National Center for Transgender Equality and their advocacy for the Equality Act, which is absolutely essential for a discrimination- free future. But to heal, I had to get away from political work. I just couldn't do it anymore. The folks in Maryland wanted to bring me back to do more political work in Maryland and I just refused

JESSICA XAVIER:

because I was just too beat up and too traumatized by it. I mean, losing Tacy Ranta to a gunshot, it sobers you.

JACK MACCARTHY:

We have about 20 minutes left and there's a couple things that we

JACK MACCARTHY:

haven't touched on. One is your work with GLOV or is it GLOVS?

JESSICA XAVIER:

It's GLOV, it's Gay Men and Lesbians Opposing Violence. There was a kind of a sweeping movement in the, maybe it started in the late eighties and then into the nineties,

JESSICA XAVIER:

forming LGBT anti-violence projects, because there was so much homophobia, biphobia, transphobia that was resulting in violence in all of our urban, mostly urban, centers. There were some very, very amazing advocates like Jeff Montgomery of the Triangle Center in Detroit who were very, very dedicated veterans of these anti-violence projects. We would work with the

JESSICA XAVIER:

local police and try to educate them when they let us. GLOV was this very, very great group of gay and lesbian, mostly gay, lesbian folks working here in DC for the longest time. They even would write grants and such. They were heavily involved in the protests after the Tyra Hunter tragedy and many of the other

JESSICA XAVIER:

murders of transgender women here in the district. They were allies and I worked right beside them. I would have their speakers come out and speak to our trans support groups on the basics of self defense and what to do if you are a victim or a survivor of violence. I got to know them really well and eventually went to work for them as a volunteer coordinator.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Eventually, the money started running out and our executive director left and I ended up being the last paid employee of GLOV. One of the things we used to do in GLOV was we used to go down and train the DC police recruits and firefighter recruits at the Blue Plains academies down at the very bottom of the District of Columbia. I would go in there and start talking about LGBT diversity

JESSICA XAVIER:

and what sexual orientation is and all this stuff to these really blue collar guys, mostly guys and stuff. In the course of the middle of all that training, I would out myself as a trans woman and I got so many 'if looks good kill, I'd be a dead trans woman' kind of stares from these guys. It was like literally on the front lines of trying to make a difference

JESSICA XAVIER:

in somebody's perception and hopefully, by doing so in an official capacity, they wouldn't react to violence and their feelings of, I mean, really it's a real intense hatred vibes I was getting from some of these recruits and stuff. It was quite intense. I got to know the DC Fire Department quite well in the wake of the Tyra tragedy because the fire chief left,

JESSICA XAVIER:

and eventually they hired a new one, and he was very certain that his department was not going to discriminate against future survivors of accidents. He instituted training program and GLOV monitored that training program and helped craft it and stuff. We were writing training curriculum materials for the DC Fire Department. Eventually we were superseded because a very courageous gay cop, Brett Parsons,

JESSICA XAVIER:

came out and, with the help of a very supportive chief, formed the DC MPDs Gay and Lesbian Liaison Unit. With out gay and lesbian cops, we didn't even need to have GLOV at that point. Eventually, they even got an out trans woman in that group. I thought that was very, very cool.

JESSICA XAVIER:

GLOV folded because the grant money ran out and the board eventually dissolved. Lately it's come back, they have reformed, they're an all volunteer group and I haven't been too involved with their activities. I know of their work, but I haven't been involved in a lot of community activities. I got taken out of the community as a matter of fact, because when my mom got sick,

JESSICA XAVIER:

I was her primary caregiver for the last six years of her life, and then I joined the government. When you're working with the federal government, they don't want you to be doing any queer advocacy. Oh, no, because that's going to theoretically undermine your objectivity or whatever. So I had to leave pretty much the community altogether, and now I've a host of different kinds of health problems that prevent me from working downtown, and of course the pandemic and such.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I'm kind of once removed now, and I guess in semi-retirement, but that's not where my heart is. I mean, my heart is still in grassroots organizing and going to the meetings and going to the bars and marching in the streets and doing that kind of work that I did in the nineties, because that, for me, was the realness of being queer, of being out loud and proud of just staring down the stares and being who you are, standing on your own two feet.

JESSICA XAVIER:

And not defending yourself, just stating who the hell you are and why these people have no right to be able to put you down or try to shame you or stuff, or act out their hatred.

JACK MACCARTHY:

In this moment of like, semi-retirement, and COVID

JACK MACCARTHY:

what does that grassroots organizing look like for you these days?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, I'm actually working on my third survey, the second one of the state of Virginia. It's an administered survey. So I've been talking to as many as six trans and non-binary people each week, reading them the survey questions and recording their responses and

JESSICA XAVIER:

getting to know them on a really rather personal basis. At the end of the survey I run down the list of resources that we have available for them in Virginia, and some of 'em, they had no idea of. Some of these conversations can be quite painful because some of these folks have been really beaten up by the healthcare, by the system, by all sorts of other stuff that really needs to be done. I went to a conference, the first one, a long time in Maryland, the Maryland Trans Resilience Conference.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It was only like three weeks ago and reconnected with some folks here in Maryland and DC doing the work. There was this one African American woman, trans woman, who was doing -- I mean, working with the homeless trans people that she knew, connecting them to services, giving them food, clothing, I mean, toothbrushes, I mean, this kind of roots kind of survival stuff. I told her, "You know, one of the things

JESSICA XAVIER:

we just don't do enough of in this community is to thank one another for our work, because the work that you're doing is very difficult. And so I just want to thank you for the work that you're doing, because you are making a very real difference in the lives of our population." We just hugged after that because it's true.

JESSICA XAVIER:

We're just not -- My cat is determined to get into this video. And by the way, I always say population, because I'm in public health, it sounds like an awkward term, but public health is population health. I was one of the first people to advocate that trans people are a population, and as a population, we have numbers and our numbers mean that you need to pay attention to us and give us

JESSICA XAVIER:

services that are specific and affirm our dignity as human beings. So after I met this woman and we talked, I just thanked her for her work and I hugged her. It was like reconnecting, as you talked about reconnecting, with the grassroots. That was my post pandemic attemptat reconnecting.

JACK MACCARTHY:

That's beautiful. By the way, my cat has been present for this whole interview, but she is fortunately sleeping. But there was a moment where I thought I was also gonna have a cat moment.

JESSICA XAVIER:

There's a she for you, so much better well-behaved. My cat is a male cat and he constantly misbehaves. That's why I did not take this laptop out until like an hour before

JESSICA XAVIER:

the tech time and set up because I know he'd be into it.

JACK MACCARTHY:

yeah, I mean, yeah, Sophie is my pet.

JACK MACCARTHY:

She definitely has times when she's like, it's time to do some damage, but this is not that, but is there anything that we have not covered that you want to make sure to address?

JESSICA XAVIER:

Well, there probably are, but you know when you do these kinds of oral histories you get some really good stuff and there's about four or five different pieces in these threads that I think if you edit them together and I remove those 'so's' that I end my little paragraphs with. I think you'll probably get some very good content out of this.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Absolutely. Juan is one of the magicians who edits together shorter videos from our full length interviews, and does the magic of editing around filler words?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I know one last thing I do want to add about trans feminism, and we touched on this earlier, another interesting thing about trans feminism is that it's grounded in this need for trans people

JESSICA XAVIER:

to access the transformative medical technologies of transgender care, hormones, surgeries, et cetera, and that access is very important. It parallels the need for cisgender women to have access to reproductive healthcare services. We're conducting this interview some 10 days after Roe v. Wade was overturned. I was quite outraged at that

JESSICA XAVIER:

as a feminist and as a trans feminist. I would note that one of the little known facts, and it's a secret and don't tell anybody, but Planned Parenthood has quietly become one of the largest providers, nationally, of transgender care services. The moral of the story is go out there and support Planned Parenthood, because if you believe in bodily autonomy

JESSICA XAVIER:

and agency, then support cis women and trans and non-binary people in getting the care that we need.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Amen. Amen. There are four kinds of rapid fire last round of questions that we ask all our interviewees. I will ask just one more question before we get to those,

JACK MACCARTHY:

which is, and you've touched on this a little bit but just to give it its own space, what does that future without fear look like

JACK MACCARTHY:

when you see it in your mind?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I can see that the social stigmas that are the primary drivers of oppression in in all of the systematic oppression that queer people endure, the people of color

JESSICA XAVIER:

endure, the systemic racism. Those stigmas begin to fade away as more and more of us step out into the light, become organized, demand justice. I like that formulation because that was one of the truisms I discovered when I came out, was that the only justice we receive, we must create for ourselves. It's on us and it's like the old

JESSICA XAVIER:

Hopi elder once said, "We are the ones we've been waiting for." If we don't do it, it will never happen for us. It will never happen for this term of affection, the children. It's not it being ageist, it's just recognizing that there's a brand new generation of trans and non-binary people who are coming out, and so it's up to us, the elders now, to continue to secure

JESSICA XAVIER:

the trail that we have blazed, to make sure that we put down permanent markers, that can't be easily erased, that we solidify our gains, that the we dust off the interventions that we know work, that help get us into healthcare and survive all the different kinds of hardships diseases, illnesses, oppressions that we have to endure. I'm very hopeful that

JESSICA XAVIER:

my future without fear will happen at some point.

JACK MACCARTHY:

That's beautiful. I'm so glad I asked that because that was exactly the pep talk I needed to hear.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Yeah. I mean, despair is a luxury and we cannot, as we said, in the seventies, "Don't agonize,

JESSICA XAVIER:

organize." Get together, support people, support one another. Support candidates that are going to vote into the laws that are gonna make the changes that's going to eliminate all of this hatred.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Amen. Yeah. Okay. Final four. Do you believe in the notion of a queer and/or trans superpower? And if so,

JACK MACCARTHY:

what is that superpower?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I would say it's our ability to look at things differently. There is so much this kind of blanket of heteronormativity that cis straight people live in and that kind of that cleavage to the norms, reduction to the mean kind of existence is boring. They're

JESSICA XAVIER:

very boring. There's no creativity. There's no understanding of what it means to bear up under intense hardships. There's no survivorship, there's no resiliency. We have all of that in our populations. We have to be able to own our own power, and that's the difference between being a survivor and being a victim. I'm a survivor. I even wrote a song about it.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Why is it important to you to tell your story?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I think that one of the key takeaways I would like to share with people is that I have been working in public health as an open transgender woman ever since I came out, and

JESSICA XAVIER:

yeah, I've experienced some employment discrimination, but at the same time, by being out, you have that power over other people that you can out them as friends or foes. One of the things that I wanted to suggest to people is there are career pathways to working in public health, in becoming

JESSICA XAVIER:

a therapist, a psychologist, an electrologist, a nurse, a social worker, even a physician and serving our population in any way shape or form that you can. It's a good field and it's very progressive and it needs more trans people in it. I've worked in the HIV epidemic for 34 years

JESSICA XAVIER:

and in trans health for 24, you can do it. It can be done. Si se puede.

JACK MACCARTHY:

If you could tell your teenage self one thing, what would you say?

JESSICA XAVIER:

I would say try not to worry and trans on. There was a tremendous amount

JESSICA XAVIER:

of fear when I was a teenager, because I was very conscious of my difference and I tried to keep it to myself and didn't even really talk to a psychotherapist about being trans until I was 19. And remember, we didn't have social media, we didn't have the internet, there was no place for me to explore my identity in a safe space and compare myself with other folks who were gender different like me. I am so

JESSICA XAVIER:

pleased now that we have social media that so many young gender different people can find themselves in that beautiful tapestry that gender spectrum or spectra, or outside it, inside it, all around it, swarming about from pole to pole in any way shape or form that they themselves feel is comfortable, empowering and self-actualizing for them to be. I think that non-binary people are

JESSICA XAVIER:

the future and I am thrilled that there are people like you in the universe who are now coming out and finding their way in this world and living and creating and thriving. That would've been impossible when I was a teenager and now look - it's happening. It's amazing.

JACK MACCARTHY:

It is amazing. Okay. Last question.

JACK MACCARTHY:

What is the value of a project like OUTWORDS that interviews queer and trans elders all over the country and please use the word OUTWORDS in your answer.

JESSICA XAVIER:

Sure. OUTWORDS is a very important organization and its mission of activism through archivism. Our history is very tenuous and like many other marginalized populations in history, if it's an oral tradition,

JESSICA XAVIER:

we must pass it down through generations. My Wiccan tradition is very much like that, if we don't teach it to other people, it dies. There's enough hatred in the world to want to completely erase the beautiful history that queer people have established through millennia. As we go back in history and rediscover all of the fabulous queer people that are part of human history, and yes, our American history as well,

JESSICA XAVIER:

OUTWORDS is doing this beautiful project of love, capturing what it can from the survivors of all those times of history and hatred and now shining, showing that spotlight on us and allowing us to demonstrate our beauty, our resilience, our fierceness, our willingness to continue to be in the struggle with all of the younger people who are coming up after us, so thank you, OUTWORDS, for doing this work.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It is indeed a labor of love and you all are fabulous people.

JACK MACCARTHY:

As are you -- Fabulous recognize fabulous.

JESSICA XAVIER:

I was fabulous at one time before the pandemic. There were so many people who caught the COVID dozen and the quarantine 15, and I caught the

JESSICA XAVIER:

pandemic pregnancy. That and some medicine that I take, which just makes me very heavy. It's hard to be Fabu when you're as big as I am right now. But when I was a younger, mere slip of a trans girl, I tried to be Fabu, certainly on stage.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I think that the fabulosity is still -- Namaste the fabulosity in me recognizes the fabulosity in you. It's still there,

JACK MACCARTHY:

there being more of you means the fabulosity just increases as well, that's my belief. I'm so happy to have been able to talk to you today.

JESSICA XAVIER:

It has been so great to talk to you too, Jack. You are inspiring in your work and your ability to be an out, proud, non-binary person. Thank you for that. The future is yours, my friend.

JACK MACCARTHY:

Oh, thank you. Wow.

JACK MACCARTHY:

I don't think we can top that. I think that's it. Okay.