NYC Trans Oral History Project

The NYC Trans Oral History Project provides a publicly accessible collection of original interviews with trans and gender non-conforming people who have lived in New York City.

The project has featured many interviewees who fall under the non-binary umbrella, including scholar and archivist Che Gossett, former ACT-UP member Jamie Bauer, writer Andrea Lawlor, and writer/playwright Kate Bornstein.

Quotes

Yes, and so I also really—my gender feels very galactic. I’m wearing a shirt that has the galaxy on it, and, um, the galaxy and like, space, and like, the expansiveness of space plays a lot into, um, how I envision myself and my gender, and other people’s gender, and gender in general.

And I still had this, like—I still—I think I struggled with this idea like, “Well, I’m— I don’t feel like I’m a trans man,” and so like, that still—I still fought it for a long time. I was like, “You have, you know, funny gender feelings, but like, everybody does,” and I think I realized like, not everybody does. And I think I—my like, path in life is to like, figure out how to like, actually listen to the things I feel inside, as opposed to just being like, “It’s okay. Just let it go. Let it go. It’s fine.

- Lenni

So my understanding of my gender has gone through a few reiterations as I’ve been figuring it out and I’m sure that it will go through several more but I went from thinking that I was probably internally a guy to realizing that it changes, and that I’m probably more frequently somewhere in the middle in the great gender expanse. But sometimes I’m delightfully feminine and I like it, and that's okay.

- Dezi

I consider myself to be gender non-conforming, but since I transitioned and started hormones earlier than that was a terminology that was used, I’ve sort of always thought of myself as genderqueer, but with a very consistent gender that’s slightly masculine of center. So I tend towards not dictating how people use pronouns about me or with me when we’re in conversation, but I in print prefer to not use pronouns or to now use neutral pronouns because that’s now become sort of more standardized.

- Lauren Simkin Birke

But I was– actually there was a little demonstration this morning Uptown at the Indonesian Mission about the 140 in Jakarta who had been arrested in a spa. And so I was talking with one of the guys there who is my age, a gay man, and he was like, “Oh, I know you use they but it just, it’s hard for it to roll off my tongue and I said, “Jay,” that’s his name, and I said, “Jay, do you want to be part of the problem or part of the solution?”

- Jamie Bauer

Further reading

Interviews tagged "non-binary".