Interview with Cody Smith
SL Ziegler interviews Cody Smith. Cody is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns.
We talk about being the first trans person to be licensed as a professional counselor by the state of Louisiana, and being the Medical Policy Advisor for the Louisiana Trans Advocates
Interviewee: Cody Smith
Interviewer: S.L. Ziegler
Transcriber: Dre Tarleton
Location of Interviewee: New Orleans
August 21, 2020
[Transcription has been slightly edited for space and clarity]
S.L. ZIEGLER: So, I'll just jump into my script. So, this is S.L. Ziegler, sitting down remotely with Cody Smith. Cody is a trans woman and uses she/her pronouns. Today is August 21, 2020, and we're meeting remotely using Zoom because the COVID-19 pandemic is still very scary. Cody, as we discussed before, this interview is part of the Louisiana Trans Oral History Project. The goal is to gather real world examples of what it means to be trans in Louisiana, here in the early 21st century, and to donate these interviews to the T. Harry Williams Oral History Center at LSU, and to put them, in part or in whole, on the project's website. So, please know that you can stop these interviews at any time, and if you have any questions about this or anything else, you can reach out to me at any time. Please also know that these interviews are a joint project between you and me, and you'll have a chance to review the transcripts, and any portions of them can be de-identified or restricted as you deem necessary. Does all that sound good?
CODY SMITH: Yeah.
ZIEGLER: Fantastic. Thank you for that. So, with that out of the way, I would love to just, I guess, start with the early years. What we'll try to do is just get a sense of your life to date, and how everything has formed as it has. So, you were born in Hattiesburg, MS.
SMITH: I was. Yeah.
ZIEGLER: And I'm just laughing about that tone. And you grew up in coastal South Mississippi, including Bay Saint Louis. So, am I correct that you moved around a decent amount?
SMITH: I did. Yeah, I moved around a lot as a kid. Fairly unstable young life.
ZIEGLER: Oh, I see. And what were your parents doing? Were you with them?
SMITH: My dad worked offshore for a majority of the time, and my mom spent most of her time abusing various substances, hence the moving around a lot. She's also been married and divorced five separate times, so I've collected a lot of step-parents along the way.
ZIEGLER: Do you mind if I ask, are you still in contact with your parents?
SMITH: Not really. No.
ZIEGLER: Because of your geographic location, you were able to spend time in New Orleans growing up, because you weren't that far away.
SMITH: Yes. Yeah. Yeah, Bay Saint Louis is like a 45 minute drive away from New Orleans. It was just on the other side of the state line.
ZIEGLER: So, that could definitely be one benefit to being there. So, I'm curious about, growing up, what New Orleans meant to you. It was a place that you would go and visit. Did you think of it as an escape? Did you think of it as-
SMITH: Oh, definitely. It was definitely an escape. A place that a burgeoning young queer could go and express herself a little bit before having to pack that all away and come back home.
ZIEGLER: Yeah. Would that have been during high school?
SMITH: A little bit during high school, whenever I could. I mean, transportation was an issue. But whenever possible, yeah.
ZIEGLER: And to identify yourself as a burdgeoning young queer at the time, were you out as queer in high school?
SMITH: Sort of, like to a tiny handful of people, but I didn't fully understand, obviously, the complexities of my identity that would sort of develop later on.
ZIEGLER: Which high school was that? Was that in Bay Saint Louis?
SMITH: It was, yeah. It's just called Bay High, Bay Saint Louis High School, Bay High School, et cetera.
ZIEGLER: [00:03:56] Was there a significant queer presence?
SMITH: No. No, no, no, no, no. There was one out and visibly queer person who got just tortured relentlessly by the student body.
ZIEGLER: Shit. Wow. So, had an, I guess, example at hand to why you wouldn't want to do that.
SMITH: Oh, yes. Yes. I had many examples.
ZIEGLER: Do you mind if I ask if you were out to your parents?
SMITH: In high school? No. No, no, no, no, no. No way in hell. That would not have been safe for me, either.
ZIEGLER: Okay. Yeah. And so you moved to New Orleans about 10 years ago.
SMITH: I did. Yeah.
ZIEGLER: And presumably things would have been much different for you at that point. I wonder if you'd be willing to expand what your post-move life would have been like in relation to your time in Mississippi. I guess I'm just trying to get a sense of the contrast of your life in Mississippi and when you got to New Orleans, because we're trying to think about being trans here in Louisiana, and then obviously, New Orleans looms large.
SMITH: It does. It does. It's a pretty sharp contrast, honestly. Living in a place like this, as opposed to a place like Mississippi, just opened up a lot of doors for me and introduced me to a lot of people and ways of moving through the world that I otherwise would not have encountered. So, yeah, without that, I really don't know where I'd be.
ZIEGLER: And do you feel like you have a strong community in New Orleans, of other trans folks?
SMITH: I do.
ZIEGLER: And a lot of that, I know you're active with the Louisiana Trans Advocates now.
SMITH: I am. Yeah.
ZIEGLER: A lot of interviewees that we've talked to, to date, are active with LTA in some way or another, and do a lot of community building through that. Were you active with them before you got... I don't know if they would have been an organization by then, but I guess you became active with them after you moved here.
SMITH: Yeah, LTA has been around for 9 or 10 years now, but I've only been involved for the last three.
ZIEGLER: Oh, okay.
SMITH: So, I'm sort of late to the game, as far as that stuff goes. But I like to think that I've had a hand in building up the community around here.
ZIEGLER: Oh, fantastic. I guess I'm just sort of curious. Was there a reason that it's only been within the last three years or so that you were with LTA? Did you feel like you were doing community work before that?
SMITH: It's complicated. So, my transition didn't start in earnest until just over three years ago, medically speaking. So, it all sort of coincided with that. There was a local support group chapter that met at the home of a semi-retired therapist named Lynn Friedman, who's wonderful. We love her. We as LTA owe Lynn Friedman a huge debt of gratitude for all of the generous donations of her space and time over the years. But when I took over, I moved the support group to my office, so that it would be more accessible to people because it's on two bus lines and the streetcar line. It's much easier for people to get to, because Lynn Friedman's house in Metairie. So, yeah.
For context here, I'm a licensed professional counselor. I'm a psychotherapist, so I kind of approach things in that way, as it's important to have a sense of community. It's important to have people that you can depend on when times get hard because times are often hard for trans people in the Deep South. Even if New Orleans is a bright blue dot in a sea of red, we still have our issues, obviously.
ZIEGLER: Yeah. And I was going to ask about your professional life. So, you are a licensed professional counselor. How long have you been practicing?
SMITH: Hm, good question. I've been working in the fields for 15, 16 years now. Started in the field working in inpatient hospitals pretty much immediately after undergrad, and then worked my way through grad school doing hospital work. And then after grad school, pursuing licensure obviously, which took a little while because it does. You have to acquire 3000 hours of supervised practice in order to even qualify to be licensed. Well, you have a provisional licensure that you practice under up until that point, but I won't bore you with the specifics.
ZIEGLER: I think it's enough to know that, as a non-therapist, I'm glad that there's a lot of training.
SMITH: There is a whole lot of training.
ZIEGLER: Could you tell us about your undergrad years? Where did you attend?
SMITH: Undergrad, I went to the University of Southern Mississippi in Hattiesburg, which was actually a pretty good time. I don't know that it would have been safe to be out at that time. I mean, it might be different. I hope that things are different now, but it wasn't super safe back then. That would have been '02 to '05/6-ish.
ZIEGLER: And you say it might not have been safe to be out. Do you mean out as trans, or just out as queer more generally?
SMITH: Either. Either, yeah. There wasn't a, what are those things, a GSA, Gay Straight Alliance. There was nothing like that, to speak of. And I don't recall any overt queer presence at all. I mean, there was a sort of weird little arts music community in downtown Hattiesburg at the time, which I'm sure would have been reasonably accepting of such things, but I just don't remember seeing any, honestly.
ZIEGLER: What did you study there? What majors?
SMITH: Psychology.
ZIEGLER: And then you said you went to graduate school.
SMITH: I did. There was a couple of years in between there, where I was working in hospitals. I tried to do a little bit of agency work, to varying degrees of success, but mostly in hospitals. There was a period there, where I attempted to do the cis-heteronormative thing real hard. I actually got married to a straight woman as a man-type person. And obviously that didn't work out very well. I was divorced by the time I was 26, so there's that.
ZIEGLER: Yeah. Do you mind a follow up question about that?
SMITH: Sure.
ZIEGLER: Okay, did your wife know that you were exploring, I don't know how you would have phrased it at the time, but your gender identity?
SMITH: Yes.
ZIEGLER: Was that a big factor?
SMITH: And she was not accepting of such things. Really sort of a deal breaker for her, actually.
ZIEGLER: Do y'all stay in touch? Do you talk-
SMITH: No. She wasn't a very nice person. They say you go after what you think you deserve as a partner. This is what I thought I deserved at the time, which is to say a person that was kind of mean and controlling. And obviously someone not accepting of these aspects of my own identity that I was struggling with.
ZIEGLER: [00:13:15] And so all of this would have been in Mississippi.
SMITH: Yes, all of that was in Mississippi.
ZIEGLER: And so, when you started graduate school, was that also Southern Miss?
SMITH: No, that was at William Carey University, the home campus of which is in Hattiesburg. There's a satellite campus in Gulfport, which is where I was taking classes.
ZIEGLER: I see. And that was for?
SMITH: Counseling and psychology. Yeah.
ZIEGLER: Counseling. So, that was probably largely the same, in the terms of queer presence on campus.
SMITH: Oh, there was none. It's a Baptist institution, and so, therefore, no queer representation of any kind on any of their campuses. But it was the program that was accessible to me at the time, so I took what options were available to me and a whole lot of student loan debt that came along with it.
ZIEGLER: So, the Baptist University. I'll just take this opportunity because this is something I ask pretty regularly, just because we're in the South. Do you consider yourself a religious person?
SMITH: No. I'm sort of anti-religious, if that makes any sense. I mean, I have plenty of respect for people's spiritual beliefs, but the aspect of Christianity, specifically, that I grew up being familiar with is very mean spirited and exclusive and outright punitive to those people that don't fit very neatly into what they consider to be normal. So, I got told I was going to Hell a lot as a small child and throughout my adolescence by my family, who hold these kinds of religious beliefs. They still say those things. I'm an abomination in the eyes of the Lord.
ZIEGLER: I was quite taken, and I just wanted to talk about this, as you know these pre-interviews, this is my lead up to this for all of our future listeners, the pre interview form that you were good enough to fill out just to help get the whole process started has this big, floppy question in it. This ‘what does being trans in Louisiana mean to you.’ And I'm always so grateful that people take a swing at this, but we make that so big and open ended, I guess, is how I should phrase it, so that sometimes we actually pull from that for discussion topics, etc. With your permission, I'll just go ahead and read what you wrote because I feel like there are some things in there to pull out, and I'd love to hear more about them. Are you comfortable with that?
SMITH: Yeah, sure. I've honestly forgotten what it is that I wrote, so I'm curious, too.
ZIEGLER: I thought it was absolutely wonderful. So, you do reiterate that it is a big question. But then you write, "Being trans in Louisiana is basically my career at this point. Living in New Orleans has allowed me to safely pursue my own transition and subsequently build a successful private therapy practice working with mostly trans and gender nonconforming folks. It has also allowed me to be involved in trans rights activism with LTA in other groups with similar goals. Living here has also allowed me to build community with other trans folks all around the state. It has also allowed me to meet my partner, who is also trans and a therapist. So, being trans in Louisiana is a huge portion of my life and my life's work."
Which I thought was just absolutely amazing. And just the idea that being trans in Louisiana is basically your career at this point. I've heard that to varying degrees, maybe not so overtly, but a lot of us, and I might put myself in that category, a lot of us have it wrapped up with our professional life. So, you're a trans therapist and you specialize, presumably, in that field, and most of your clients are trans and gender nonconforming. I'm curious about the field of therapy, maybe, in New Orleans. Do you feel like you're the only one? Let me just say, for context, we don't have that in Baton Rouge. It's a real bother.
SMITH: I know. I know. As it turns out, I am the first trans person to be licensed as a professional counselor by the state of Louisiana, followed very, very shortly by my partner who's in the next room working. He transitioned, I don't know, 12 years ago, but I got licensed before he did, so I win.
ZIEGLER: This might be a really, really stupid question but how do you have that statistic?
SMITH: It's just word of mouth at this point. Through LTA, which has satellite groups in just about every decently sized city in Louisiana, if there were other practicing trans counselors, I would have heard about them by now.
ZIEGLER: Yeah, I get that.
SMITH: There's a handful of young folks coming out of programs right now. I have an intern who is just absolutely wonderful, and also a trans person, through the Tulane School of Social Work, which is cool. So, I'm excited for this next crop of trans-identified therapists. But as of right now, it's just me and Jesse.
ZIEGLER: It's a real benefit. I'll just leave it at that. I'm sure you know that. And in this answer, you also mentioned building a community with people across the state. Is that mostly through LTA work? Sort of curious how that happens.
SMITH: Definitely. Yeah. I don't know that I would have had the opportunity to meet the trans folks in Shreveport or Monroe or more far flung places like that, had it not been for LTA. Its mission is to bring all of the trans folks together, where possible, and sometimes that's not always possible, of course. But we try. We try real hard.
ZIEGLER: What's your current role with LTA?
SMITH: I am on the board. I am the head of the New Orleans chapter, currently. We're going to have elections again in October, so I might not be the chapter head by the time this gets listened to by anyone that isn't you. But currently, I am the sitting chapter head of New Orleans, and I am the Medical Policy Advisor for LTA, currently.
ZIEGLER: What does that role entail?
SMITH: Primarily, that means interacting with the medical and social services community. I interact a lot with health care providers that work with trans people, or people that want to work with trans people, people that want to be better about serving their already existing trans client populations. I do a lot of trainings. Just sort of interfacing with healthcare, social services type agencies, and trying to help them get better at working with the trans population.
ZIEGLER: That sounds, just another great thing LTA does. So, this is another thing that we ask most people, and this is sort of in closing. So, again, this project is sort of a time capsule, in a lot of ways, just to capture, to some flattened extent, what it is to be us, here and now. Thinking about somebody who might be listening to this in 30 or 40 years, a few decades out, is there anything that you'd like to say about being trans in Louisiana that we haven't touched on? Anything that you think would be important, by way of closing thoughts?
SMITH: Well, I would be remiss if I didn't at least mention the plight of Black trans people in Louisiana, specifically Black trans women in Louisiana. They're going through a tough time right now, and definitely need all the help they can get. I mean, it's no secret that there have been three murders of trans women, or Black trans women specifically, in Louisiana, already this year, and it's only August. So, that is going to be, and needs to be, everybody's main focus right now.
The COVID situation has resulted in a lot of housing insecurity, food insecurity, all kinds of other insecurities, and trans people of color are hit the hardest by this situation. So, we're doing our very best to work with organizations around the New Orleans area and around the state to try and help these folks out as much as possible.
Things like House of Tulip, which I'm sure you've heard of, at least by now, those things definitely have been needed to be the focus for a long time, but finally, I think, are getting the attention that they deserve. I mean if we're not helping out those in our community that are most affected by transphobic violence and discrimination, what are we really doing?
ZIEGLER: There's a level of optimism, I guess, in general, that there will be people around in 30 years to hear this. So, I might as well keep the optimism going by just sort of hoping that, in 30 or so years, looking back, people will just be aghast at how that community, specifically, but so many communities are treated here in 2020. So we'll go ahead and end it there. Cody, I really appreciate it. What I'm going to do is stop the recording, and then you and I can talk a little bit about logistics and next steps. But again, let me, on tape, just say, again, I really appreciate you being part of this. Thank you.
SMITH: [00:25:15] Yeah, absolutely. My pleasure.