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And it is - one place in the book where I talk about how people who, you know, were on my side of the line, cross-dressers, we sometimes envy the transsexual girls for their beauty or the fact that they got to be full time and didn't have to keep to wardrobes. And at the time, there was a huge separating line between TS and TV, transsexual or transvestite or cross-dresser. GOETSCH: I wasn't a part of it, partly because I wasn't ready to see myself as transgender, which is another word we didn't have.
And they had a kind of family that you would see in ballroom culture and things like that, you know, alternative family. These were earlier people who had transitioned already, you know, people who were more woven into gay culture, you know, so-called street queens, you know, other people who are early transitioners who were kind of out. But there were other pockets of what we would now call trans culture that had a very different experience. And most of these people identified as straight men who, you know, didn't understand why they needed to do this.
You'd be relieved just to arrive and be relatively safe. And you'd get there in some, you know, some protected way. And you just sort of found some speakeasy, some corner of a bar that was used one night a week or, you know, all these different places that we would just pop up. So, you know, I started to go out cross-dressed in the mid-1980s in New York City. GOETSCH: There was no community, you know, in my pocket of trans culture.
Even the word trans culture, you know, that would have been ridiculous to even say that. So, you know, we can only see so much or express so much depending on what pocket of, you know, trans culture we were in. I mean, what was this, junior high? You know, there were whole, you know, menus of terms that we used, and none of them felt accurate. Maybe the most embarrassing one was GG for genetic girl. And then we said TV, like, you know, transvestite or CD or, you know, we tried to create lingo. So people said transsexual, but we said TS. I knew that they were, you know, rough approximations. I mean, as a poet, you know, talking to people I knew who were cross-dressers, who were out, you know, on a Friday or Saturday night, I cringed a little at the language we were using - maybe they didn't, but I did as a poet. Even back then, it felt shameful to refer to ourselves. GOETSCH: Most of the words we had from today's perspective were fairly laced in shame. As you try to make sense of your identity and your gender identity and sexual orientation, what was language like for you before we had the words today, like gender non-conforming or queer or transsexual? Like, what words did you have access to that could help you describe who you were? And what were the words that other people used to describe who they thought you were? Since you are a poet and you've taught writing just about your entire adult life, let's start with language. She's received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the New York Foundation for the Arts, and was the Grace Paley teaching fellow at The New School in New York. She taught English at Stuyvesant High School in New York for 14 years, then spent six years running a creative writing program for incarcerated youth in the Bronx. Goetsch also writes about her decision to transition relatively late in life. Now Goetsch has a new memoir called "This Body I Wore," about what it was like coming of age and into adulthood in an earlier era, when she didn't have the language or knowledge to understand what it meant to be trans. The blog was published on The American Scholar site. GROSS: That's my guest, Diana Goetsch, reading from her blog, Life In Transition, that she kept during her period transitioning to life as a woman. One other thing - I longed daily to be a woman. At the same time, I was depressed and had been for decades with no family, no partner, going through life alone. Previously, I'd been a concert jazz dancer, a restaurant cook, a varsity athlete. I seem to be a well-functioning man named Douglas Goetsch, a teacher who taught at Stuyvesant High School and various universities, a poet with award-winning collections, a dedicated meditation practitioner and instructor. In 2015, my guest wrote this.ĭIANA GOETSCH: (Reading) My life broke down two years ago at age 50, though it was broken all along.