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WORDS in
MOTION  

Eli Clare delivered the powerful
opening plenary speech of the
University of Vermont’s
Translating Identity Conference on
March 5, 2005. He graciously
agreed to provide a shortened ver-
sion so we could print it here.

nslating. Identity.
I want to start today by
picking up those two words;

they make me curious: what do
they mean side—by-side? The iden-
tity part is simple enough, at least
on the surface. We talk about iden-
tity all the time these days, usually
referring to whom we know our-
selves to be, each of us as individ-
uals. Identities hinge upon many
things: where we make home, the
languages we speak, the food we
eat, the beliefs we hold dear, the
people we love, desire, want to
romance, our very bodies them-
selves, how we feel inside our
skin. There are so many ways of
naming, telling, our identities, and
often we try to squeeze them into
single words.

In the trans community,
we’re in the midst of creating a
myriad of words: transgender,
femmeboy, ftm, transwoman, trans-
sexual, genderqueer, trannyboy,
mg‘, crossdresser, transman, tran-
sie, two spirit, femme queen. I
could go on and on; the list is that
long. Some of these words we’ve
adopted from doctors and sexolo-
gists; others we’ve found in the
dictionary; and still others we have
created ourselves or stolen from
the bullies and bashers.

Instead of a single word,
I want to start like this: At eight,
nine, ten years old, I took my kite
down to the sheep pastures, flew it
for hours on end, spinning the line
out. I can still feel its tug on my
arm.

There is something so
futile in trying to name the whole
of our gendered desires and reali-
ties in single words, even as they

are powerful and necessary.
Activist, writer, and this after-
noon’s keynote presenter Leslie
Feinberg writes, “For me, branding
individual self-expression as sim-
ply masculine or feminine is like
asking poets: Do you write in
English or Spanish? The question
leaves out the possibilities that
poetry is woven in Cantonese or
Ladino, Swahili or Arabic.” (Trans
Liberation, pg. 9)

For now, let’s leave the
single words behind. Tell it as a
story: once I stood.in front of my
sister and asked, “Do I look like a
boy or a girl?” I couldn’t see
myself in the mirror. I was a
tomboy with a bold and unsteady
gait I never grew out of. And you,
how will you tell it? Whatever our
stories, let’s tell them, but not
make them simple. Identity doesn’t
grow in nice neat rows.

I am the guy who gets to
take off his shirt at public beaches
to warm his bare chest. But listen,
I have also been the dyke who had
a harsh critique of masculinity,
defending wome_n’s only space
with barbed and unfair words. I am
the genderqueer who lived for
many years without pronouns, who
believed in pride but always
cringed at the questions I could
never answer gracefully. But lis-
ten, I have also been the butch,
suspicious of trans people, even as
I liked being called “sir.” Tomboy,
dyke, butch, woman, genderqueer,
guy: I have inhabited all these
places, claimed each as home,
none of them a detour.

And you, where do your
breaks, ruptures, contradictions
live? I mean to ask this whether
you’re trans or not, whether you
think about your gender every sin-
gle day or not at all. Identity is a
shadblow tree whose branches
twist and turn, tangling toward the
sun, never symmetrical. Really it’s
too much to squeeze into any sin-
gle word.

 

And so let me continue

like this: I used to take my kite
down to the sheep pastures, fly it
for hours on end, red-tail hawks
keening on the updrafts, sun and
wind reaching through me. But I
wasn’t just a tomboy; I was also
disabled, queer, white, working-
class, English-speaking. Identity is
always multiple.
Gender folds into disabil-

ity; disability wraps around class;
class strains against race; race

“- tumbles into sexuality; sexuality

hangs onto gender; all of it finally
piling into our tender, resilient
human bodies. There’s no real way
to separate my genderqueer self
from my white self: me, a guy sit-
ting in meetings among women
and people of color, aware of my
passing privilege as a white man,
even as I may hear ma’am on the
next street corner. There’s no real
way to tell it without my disabili-
ty: the everyday gawking as folks
try to figure out what’s “wrong”
with my slurred speech and trem-
bling hands. Me, the white dis-
abled genderqueer guy: identity is
a tangle. _
We need to listen hard

right into the center of that tangle,
which brings me to the other word
in that phrase, translating identity.
To translate is to shift a story, idea,
understanding from one medium,
culture, or language to another,
words in motion, cracking open
ideas and experiences that other-
wise would be inaccessible.
Translation is about crossing
divides and is important because
by itself identity isn’t enough.
Certainly it’s important to tell it, to
say: I used to fly my kite for hours
on end. And still today I can feel
its tug on my arm, the beckon of
wild blue sky. My gender is that
tug, that beckon. But by itself, this
story is not enough. There are so
many ways to tell, talk, translate

I our genders. Tell it like a story

about trouble, a storyabout joy.
Talk it as a training for health care
providers. Translate it as policy,
rebellion, a poem sung in the
streets. Translation is unfolding.
Tell it, talk it. translate it
across divides of power and dis-
crimination. Here at UVM we're
working hard to make campus :1
friendly place for trans people. to