DU Lavender Graduation Keynote

June 14, 2018 Tagged: #LGBTQ+, #talks

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In May 2018, I was asked to give the keynote talk at the first Lavender Graduation held at the University of Denver. It was an honor and a privilege to give this talk to the graduating students. Below is a slightly condensed version of that talk; I hope that it serves as inspiration to you as well.

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Thank you, everyone. I feel so honored that Jasmine asked me to be the speaker for the first DU lavender graduation.

Lavender graduations began in 1995 at the University of Michigan when founded by Dr. Ronni Sanlo. In a 2000 article on lavender graduations¹, she describes the importance of ceremonies and celebrations at the culmination of one’s degree by emphasizing mattering and belonging in college. She quotes scholars Chickering and Reisser who said that graduation ceremonies are a time to “refocus on the individual student, who is more precious than any publication, more complex than any curriculum, and more worthy of our attention than any committee work.” And so today I would like to focus on the individual, by celebrating the accomplishments of each and every one of you, and by sharing a couple stories from my own experiences in and after college.

Iyanla Vanzant said, “It’s important that we share our experiences with other people. Your story will heal you, and your story will heal somebody else. When you tell your story you free yourself, and you give other people permission to acknowledge their story as well.”

What I like so much about lavender graduations is that this is a time for us to focus on the achievement of succeeding in a system that was not built for LGBTQ people, and especially not built for LGBTQ people with multiple marginalized identities including LGBTQ people of color and LGBTQ people with disabilities. That you are here today, that you have achieved the completion of your degree, is a monumental success story of resilience and survival in a system that was not built for you. Own that. Feel the enormity of it and take pride in that accomplishment.

When I started college, the first or second other trans man I ever met told me that he didn’t know any trans people who graduated without taking time off from school. My second semester when I withdrew from a class to make more room to deal with coming out to family, I started to worry that that would become my narrative, and I would have to take time off. Being trans and transitioning in college was a struggle. It was a struggle from peers, from teachers, and from my family.

In my junior year when I started hormones my family struggles worsened. I didn’t know what I was going to do when the year ended and I’d have to find a place to live and a way to stay in school. The LGBTQ center director at my college suggested that I apply to a national LGBTQ scholarship called the Point Foundation, so I did. And I was selected for it, which led to my graduating without taking any time off. My family was there for my graduation and have since become allies to LGBTQ people.

I want to focus in on that scholarship for a moment. The Point Foundation is a competitive scholarship, more and more so each year. I don’t share this to brag, but because it’s something I often reflect on when I need to put things into perspective. The application process concludes with a final interview where they fly you out to California. When I interviewed they brought finalists to the Castro district in San Francisco, to experience the historical gay neighborhood. Among the people I interviewed with a number have since then nearly become queer household names. Though this was 8 years ago now and before that class’s many achievements, I still felt like such a misfit among the 30 other finalists. Why would they choose me? What had I done that was that important, or what did they think I was going to be able to do that would make me a good choice? I don’t know the specific answers to those questions, but I do believe that I was chosen for a reason.

I guarantee that each of you have felt similar at some point in your lives, and will feel similar again, wondering that question, “Why me?” And so, I want each of you to remember that you are here today for a reason. Remind yourself, “I am here for a reason. I made it into DU, and to graduation, and into my internship, or honors classes, or onto that nonprofit board, or club sports team… for a reason.” And for anyone in the room who at some point in the past may have been struggling a lot and made a decision to stay here one more day, maybe still making a continual decision to be here today… You’re here for a reason. Every day that you continue to be here is for a reason.

At this point I want to speak a little bit about resilience, because succeeding in a system not designed for you takes resilience. I particularly enjoy the scholarship on resilience being conducted by Dr. Anneliese Singh at the University of Georgia. Singh focuses on queer and trans resilience, and in her book published earlier this year, The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook, she defines resilience as “the intrapersonal and interpersonal sources of strength you can draw on to get through those tough times and adapt to change.”

She says, “There is also the resilience you can develop from being part of a collective group who share identities, values, or some other commonality (community resilience).” So there are these three types of resilience: intrapersonal (or self-care), interpersonal (or reaching out to supportive people), and community.

A few years after college I ended up living in Fort Collins. I had managed to achieve awesome work-life balance, was doing yoga, eating good foods—really all of the self-care things. I was living with an awesome roommate and just a few blocks from my best friend. I was even able to be involved in the campus LGBTQ community as a staff person. So I had all three of those resiliencies going for me: intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community. The one thing that wasn’t going so well for me was my job, and I decided at the time that the best way for me to work toward aligning that to the rest of my life was to move out of doing communications work and into working directly with students.

So I applied to grad school at CSU, where I worked. Didn’t get in. So, I applied again the next year… and didn’t get in. But I had gotten into two programs out of state, and rather than wait yet another year in my same job, I decided the right move was to move. And I moved to Salt Lake City, Utah. There’re a lot of ways I could tell the story of living in Utah, especially since I often have to counteract people’s biases about living with “the Mormons.” I met a lot of amazing, progressive people in Utah, many of whom are Mormon. But this story isn’t about that.

Shortly after I arrived to Utah I realized that I felt very isolated. It was hard for me to build community there, even with so much opportunity to do so. A good portion of what made it hard was the fact that I had evening classes, and time conflicts with meetups and community groups. Other parts had to do with leadership turnover at community centers, cliquish dynamics in my cohort, and the vast diversity of experiences that come together and yet clash together in any conservative and deeply religious state’s one liberal stronghold. So out of these three resiliencies, intrapersonal, interpersonal, and community, I was rapidly losing two of them because my friends and community were all still here, in Colorado, and even though I tried and tried and tried I couldn’t find community in Salt Lake.

I don’t know what helped me pull through that tough time, or how I kept my intrapersonal resilience up. Something kept me reaching out for that interpersonal support from others, especially my professors, who were phenomenal. During my final semester I moved from Salt Lake to Cheyenne, Wyoming, finishing my degree remotely. I started rebuilding my interpersonal resilience, and I can’t emphasize enough the importance of having close friends nearby who love me unconditionally. It was their support that really helped me to heal.

I wish I could have stayed up in Wyoming for longer than I did. But shortly after I arrived there, House Bill 2 passed in North Carolina, and so-called “bathroom bills” fear-mongering made it tough for me to stay. I was starting to rebuild my connections and involvement in the LGBTQ community—my community resilience—but I had a lot of healing to do before I could be on the front lines of a fight like that again.

It’s been over two years since I left Utah and began my rebuilding, and in that time community resilience has been the toughest one for me to rebuild. Part of that is probably by virtue of being older—it’s a lot easier to build community when you’re in high school or college—but I think part of it is also due to some of the unfortunate dynamics that many of us run into in our LGBTQ spaces, especially activist and social justice spaces. Our communities are vast and diverse, and I saw that most clearly when I lived in Utah and Wyoming and met people who identified not just all across the alphabetic acronyms but also with all sorts of nuances to their identities influenced by their personal intersections and experiences with race, rurality, religion, and so much more.

In the viral blog post titled “Excommunicate Me from the Church of Social Justice,” writer Frances Lee paraphrased #BlackLivesMatter cofounder Alicia Garza, saying: “If we are interested in building mass movements to destroy mass oppression, our movements must include people not like us, people with whom we will never fully agree, and people with whom we have conflict. […] building a movement is about restoring humanity to all of us, even to those of us who have been inhumane. Movements are where people are called to be transformed in service of liberation of themselves and others.” Powerful. A lot to unpack there, but for right now, I want to focus on that personal transformation, that healing which is a necessary part of the work toward liberation.

Though I am still learning about resilience, I believe in this. Transforming oneself, healing oneself, growing oneself, these are all parts of that three-pronged resilience. When you heal yourself, you can heal and transform a community; likewise when a community transforms and heals, you too can heal. So that multipronged resilience is important, that resilience that takes building up yourself with inner resources (intrapersonal), and building up yourself and others with external resources, both your friends and family (interpersonal) and your broader community. We cannot have self-healing without community healing, and we cannot have community healing without self-healing.

I want to wrap up by sharing a quote from trans pioneer Leslie Feinberg: “Like racism and all forms of prejudice, bigotry against transgendered people is a deadly carcinogen. We are pitted against each other in order to keep us from seeing each other as allies. Genuine bonds of solidarity can be forged between people who respect each other’s differences and are willing to fight their enemy together. We are the class that does the work of the world, and can revolutionize it. We can win true liberation.”

This is why it is so important to build up our communities. If we want to heal ourselves we have to heal our community, and we have to come together and accept the imperfection and the diversity, the differences, even within our own community.

So I return to what I said earlier that each of you are here for a reason. Here at DU, here at graduation, and here at this juncture of your lives where you are about to step into a new chapter with its own reasons for you being in that specific place and time. Each of you survived and thrived for a reason. I believe that those reasons include resilience, and love, and unity, and community. This system wasn’t built for us, but we have succeeded and thrived nonetheless, and by sitting with, loving, and supporting each other in our imperfections, in our vulnerabilities, in our discomforts, even in our disagreements—by loving and being resilient “we can win true liberation.”

Thank you.