Stories - Brenda Way, co-founder of WiTCoN in Wichita

I have decided to begin sharing stories I find in the news and blogosphere relating to Trans* advocacy. I think a major part of advocacy is simply getting those stories out there and perhaps it can help people to remember that trans* people are humans with struggles and stories. The fight for restroom use is simply a small sub-set of trans* stories.

Brenda Way (left) and Elle Boatman (right) co-founders of WiTCoN

The first story comes from The Wichita Eagle and the full article can be found here.

Brenda Way was out of coffee creamer. She ran into a local grocery store but needed to use the restroom, and as she came out of the stall, a woman confronted her.

Way, who began her transition from male to female less than a year ago, is unemployed, fired from her job as a dishwasher, she said, when a male co-worker was offended that she called him “sweetie.” Her then-wife threw her out of the house when her transition started, and for about six weeks she lived under a bridge near Maple Street. She wears blue eyeshadow and short skirts with wedge heels, but she hasn’t yet begun the long and uncertain process of changing her gender on her driver’s license, which makes finding another job difficult.

The woman told Way she was in the wrong restroom and to get out.

“I basically shrugged her off and went and got my creamer,” Way said. “I was standing in the coffee aisle with one of those baskets trying to pick out what I wanted, and all the sudden, she comes running up the aisle with the security guard going, ‘That’s him! That’s him! That’s the man who was in the woman’s restroom!’”

Jenner’s recent coming-out party was a good sign for transgender people, say local members of the transgender community and the experts who serve them. But Jenner’s experience – and the experiences of other high-profile transgender people like Laverne Cox, Jazz Jennings and Chaz Bono – is not typical, they say. Most transgender people are poor. Many are struggling with issues ranging from homelessness to joblessness to suicide. Many avoid going out in public for fear of being ridiculed or worse. And very few of them will ever be able to afford the expensive surgeries that would make their transformations complete.

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article26505787.html#storylink=cpy

The article continues on with statistics relating to persecution and suicides in the transgender community and then comes back to Way's story:

She grew up in Minneapolis, and said she recently found out she was born intersex, with underdeveloped female genitalia that was eliminated through surgery when she was a baby.

When she hit puberty, she began to develop breasts, and her father insisted she begin taking testosterone. But she still never felt like she was a boy. She’d never heard the word transgender and guessed that the bullies at school were right – maybe her effeminate characteristics meant she was gay.

She joined the Army when she was 17 but was discharged four years later. Way has been married to three women. During her last marriage, the feelings she’d had her whole life became too hard to fight. Way had attempted suicide five times when she finally found a therapist who helped her recognize that she wasn’t confused about her sexuality. She was transgender.

“I was miserable, and there was this wonderful, confident woman that was screaming to come out of me,” she said. “I felt more comfortable, more confident when I was in women’s clothes. When I was in men’s clothes I was always uptight and anxious and really uncomfortable. I felt like I wanted to just crawl out of my own skin.”

In September of last year, Way threw out all of her men’s clothes, started hormone replacement therapy and began her life as a woman. Her wife asked her to leave the house.

She was homeless and slept on friends’ couches for a while before living under the bridge. Her entire family disowned her, she said, and she had to give up two of her beloved hobbies – riding motorcycles and playing disc golf. The first group no longer accepted her. The second one doesn’t allow transgender people to compete in sanctioned events, she said.

The past eight months have been marked with loneliness and despair and more suicide attempts, Way said.

“It’s been really tough. Now, even though I’m a happier person on the inside with myself and with who I am, now I’m realizing there are a lot of different struggles – with dysphoria, with how you feel about your looks, your progress on your feminization. You have to fight loneliness and you have to fight the struggles of not having a job, and it’s miserable because there’s nothing out there for us, and you basically feel like you’re on this journey completely by yourself.”

Read more here: http://www.kansas.com/news/local/article26505787.html#storylink=cpy

Logo art made by Brenda Way for WiTCoN, a Trans* Community Network and Support Group

Brenda Way has helped to start the Wichita Transgender Community Network or "WiTCoN" They can be found on their website www.witcon.org or their Facebook page here. Something that's nice is that they include meetings that connect with community resources that want to better serve the transgender community. Here in Salt Lake City, Utah there is now an annual mini-conference each November for community professionals to meet, share, coordinate, and learn how to better serve the trans* community both as trans* professionals and as those seeking to be allies. More of these kinds of community networks need to happen.