New Oral History Captures Decades of Trans Life in the Words of Elders of Color

We are living in a time of intense anti-trans backlash. Almost every day now, we get news of another attempt to criminalize trans and gender-nonconforming people — our government denying gender affirming care to trans youth, banning schools from teaching about gender identity, barring trans athletes from competing in sports, prohibiting Medicaid reimbursement for gender-affirming care, rejecting changes to legal name and gender marker on government identification, and challenging the very existence of trans and nonbinary people while simultaneously promoting sensationalized and pathologized portrayals of trans existence to justify exclusion.

Trans people of color, especially trans women of color, have long borne the brunt of systemic violence. As genderqueer novelist Caro De Robertis told me recently when we discussed their first nonfiction book, So Many Stars: An Oral History of Trans, Nonbinary, Genderqueer, and Two-Spirit People of Color, “The criminalization of queerness and transness is not new. And, in the history of this country, authoritarianism isn’t new either — just look at Jim Crow, enslavement, Japanese internment camps and the genocide of Native people — but, fortunately for us, neither is the beautiful power source of gender euphoria.”

So Many Stars is an in-depth look at this power source, through interviews with trans and gender-nonconforming elders of color who share mesmerizing stories of survival, resistance and community-building from Havana to Texas to New York to Oklahoma to Buenos Aires to San Francisco, from the 1940s to the present. Filled with intimate conversations that reveal fascinating historical details left out of the public record, this book is refreshing in its range, candor and resonance. In this interview, De Robertis discusses what they learned in the process of writing the book, and how everyday acts of courage throughout history can inspire us in these frightening times.

Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore: One thing I love about this book is that it does not feel burdened by our current moment of anti-trans backlash — it feels like an internal conversation, by and for trans, nonbinary, genderqueer and two-spirit people of color — and I think this enriches the experience for anyone who reads it, since the narrative is on the speakers’ terms. I wonder if you could talk about this intention.

Caro De Robertis: I’m so glad the book lands this way to you. I think one of the reasons this mood is possible is embedded in the nature of oral history. As a genre, oral history is by definition intimate, unrushed and capacious. There’s room for nuance and complexity, for the surprising anecdote that sheds extraordinary light on seemingly ordinary moments of life.

Part of what I learned in the excellent oral historian training I received as a Baldwin-Emerson Fellow was the understanding that, unlike with other modes of interview, there’s room to take your time, to go deep. There’s something deeply human about this practice, and when it comes to a community as kaleidoscopic as that of trans and gender-nonconforming people, it allows for a deeper dive, beyond the headlines, into the dazzling range of who we are and can be. Or at least, that was my hope with this project.

The form of the book is really fascinating, because you draw from 20 separate interviews, but then you place excerpts from the interviews alongside one another as if the interviewees are in conversation. It feels so intimate, and I know it must’ve taken a lot of work to make the book legible in this form.

Once I committed to this narrative structure, it was a really exhilarating and gorgeous process for me. As a novelist, I found such joy in shaping a narrative arc that could hold these disparate yet overlapping stories and voices, drawing connections without conflating people’s experiences.

Bearing witness to these remarkable people’s personal stories was a conduit to expanding my deeper understanding of who we are, of our inheritance.

Of course, it was also painstaking! First, I went through all the transcripts, gathering pieces that sang or stood out and placing them in a file of thematic “buckets” — childhood experiences, migration, transition, activism, and more. Then, within those buckets, I took to sculpting those pieces and arranging them. Sort of the way a visual artist might craft a collage out of lots of tiny and larger magazine cut-outs, seeking something greater than the sum of its parts.

In the chapter on the AIDS crisis, Sharyn Grayson talks about how Black trans women were actively prevented by a Black gay service organization from accessing resources for HIV in the early years of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Honestly, it shocked me to learn of this blatant exclusion at the hands of Black gay men, not just white service providers. And I think this is the potential of anecdotal history, that you learn something you didn’t know before, and this opens doors to making other connections.

I’m so glad you brought that up, because the experience of Black trans women in the AIDS crisis — from the transphobia they faced in queer spaces to their role in spearheading change — was one of the elements I learned about, too, during the course of this project. I didn’t know before that Black and Latinx trans women had been pressured to detransition in order to access services. And that leaders like Sharyn Grayson and Adela Vázquez responded by blazing trails for trans women to find not only services, but dignity, and to build movements of their own.

How could I have been a queer activist for 25 years, and not known that history? That’s just one example of how bearing witness to these remarkable people’s personal stories was a conduit to expanding my deeper understanding of who we are, of our inheritance.

Another part that really struck me was the stories of survival under dictatorship, such as Andrés Ozzuna talking about being taken into prison with everyone in a gay bar in Argentina, or Nelson D’Alerta Pérez, who was tortured by the Cuban government for throwing drag shows. These stories of crisis are told alongside everyday survival — it’s everything at once. Was this your intent: to show the multiplicity of trans lives in this way?

Definitely. It felt essential to me, in writing this book, to portray the vast range of ways that we as trans and gender-nonconforming people have always existed — in every culture, region and period of history. Given the world we live in, that is going to include life under authoritarian regimes — that’s part of the broad spectrum of human experience, and therefore of trans experience too. Of course, with the brutal authoritarian reality we’re currently living through in the United States, stories like these become essential parts of our legacies to know and remember.

There’s a kind of tapestry of thousands of acts of blazing courage that make marginalized lives more possible.

One of the things I cherish about Pérez’s story is that, even as she describes being arrested and tortured for her drag shows, she also speaks of the art she created with incredible joy. I, for one, can feel myself there with her in those Havana mansions, watching these glorious queens descend a grand staircase toward an adoring crowd, all in defiance of the regime. That, too, is our history, and might have medicine for us in our current times.

All of that said, putting these stories alongside others was also a way of affirming the worth and depth of all trans and genderqueer life stories. It took courage for Ozzuna to survive his terrifying arrest in Argentina, and for Pérez to stage her shows in hostile Cuba. But the everyday steps other narrators in this book took to live their authentic selves, and to affirm and uplift their communities? These are acts of blazing courage, too. There’s a kind of tapestry of thousands of acts of blazing courage that make marginalized lives more possible. I very much hope this book can help illuminate that tapestry.

I also love how sometimes interviewees appear to contradict one another, such as when Donna Personna says she knows she would have died if she stayed in Texas, and Sharyn Grayson says she was always accepted there. These are two trans women born in Texas in the 1940s, describing radically different experiences, and this is right at the beginning of the book. Talk about the way you weave these differing opinions throughout and what this accomplishes.

No identity is a monolith, and when we write from marginalized identities, we often feel the burden of representation — the pressure for the story we’re telling to somehow speak for our whole identity. That’s an enormous amount of pressure and can lead to a flattening of our collective truths. There’s power in affirming the range of experiences in a community and creating a symphonic rather than reductive portrait.

Another example of where this comes up in the book is in the chapter on transition. There are narrators who enthusiastically celebrate and discuss what certain gender-affirming care has meant for them, while others reflect on their decision not to engage with this or that physical approach to transition. There is no right or wrong way — as Ms. Billie Cooper says, “In my life, I have the right to transition any way I want.” I hope that, in hearing the true and nuanced stories of these different people’s journeys, readers can find both mirrors of their own experience and windows into the experiences of others.

Most of these interviewees lived in the San Francisco Bay Area at the time of your conversations, even though many grew up elsewhere, so I think this book also offers a fascinating portrait of the Bay Area. What did you learn about the Bay Area that you didn’t know before?

Of course, I’d always known that the San Francisco Bay Area is a queer mecca. I myself came here for that reason, at the age of 21, seeking signs of queer life and more room to live and breathe. As a person separated from my family of origin by familial homophobia, and later transphobia, and as an immigrant, that search for belonging felt essential to making a life, and the Bay Area caught me, helped me feel more possible.

And yet, delving into these stories from generations that preceded me, I learned new layers of the great epic story of the queer and trans Bay Area, which is also a great epic story of queer and trans migration. The people in this book who claimed the Bay as home hail from all over the country, and the world. I also learned a great deal more about the racial richness of those stories: the Black, Latinx, Native and Asian layers of the queering and transing of this region, which are less visible in the white queer mainstream.

In the intro, you identify as “a Latinx immigrant who’s had their long journey to claiming the many gender terms that personally resonate: genderqueer, gender fluid, nonbinary, transmasculine, butch, and woman.” How has working on this book influenced your own journey?

As a person with an expansive gender identity, it took me a long time to feel permission to claim space for my whole authentic gender. It felt radical, and still feels radical, to fully embrace and name all of what I am and who I am, embracing the man in me along with the genderqueer butch woman in me, without apology. Of course, I want to do that while wholeheartedly affirming the gender of those who identify as binary trans women or trans men. All our genders are amazing! I want room for all of us, in all of our radiantly varied selves, to be whole and safe and free.

Working on this book, then, was one of the most affirming and powerful experiences of my life. These narrators are all incredible people — bold and loving, witty and thoughtful, visionary and salty and generous and full of stories and ideas that expanded me, that amazed me, that blew open my mind and heart. In these people’s presence, I felt grace. I felt that I myself, in all my unique genderqueerness, had more room to exist and flourish thanks to their voices.

Nothing could give me greater joy than for readers to experience the same.