Interview with Liam Lair

SL Ziegler interviews Liam Lair. Liam is transmasculine and uses he/him pronouns.

We talk about living in Japan, almost becoming a minister, resisting common trans narratives, and the power of sharing stories.

Segment: “Trans Narratives”

Liam talks about trans narratives, and the desire to be perceived as trans. Not as feminine, not as masculine, but as trains.

Full Interview Transcript

Interviewee: Liam Lair                                                                    
Interviewer: S.L. Ziegler                                                                           
Transcriber: Dre Tarleton                                                                          
July 11, 2020
Location of Interviewee: Baton Rouge

[Transcript edited slightly for length and clarity}

SOPHIA ZIEGLER:     This is Sophia Ziegler sitting down remotely with Liam Lair. Liam is transmasculine and uses he/him pronouns. Today is July 11, 2020, and we're meeting remotely using Zoom because the COVID-19 pandemic is still very scary. So, Liam, 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 the T Harry Williams Oral History Center at LSU, and to put them, in part or in whole, on the project website. So, please know that you can stop this interview at anytime, and if you have any questions about this or any other aspect of this project, you can reach out to me at anytime.

Please also know that these interviews are a joint project between me and you, and you'll have a chance to review the transcripts and any portions of them can be deidentified restricted as you deem necessary. Does all that sound good?

LAIR: Absolutely. Yeah.

ZIEGLER:    Fantastic. Thank you so much. So, with that being said, Liam, I thought we'd just start at the beginning. Based on what we know about each other, you moved around a lot in your early years, all the way through your teenage years. So, can you tell us a little bit about the places you lived?

LAIR:        Yeah, so I was born in Roswell, NM, in 1980, and lived in Roswell until I was five. My parents divorced, I guess that school year, and then over the summer we moved, my mom and I, to Las Cruces, NM, which is about three hours away from Roswell, close to El Paso, TX. I lived there for three years, and then, when I was nine, yeah the summer before I turned nine, I guess, we moved to Okinawa, Japan.

My mom is a teacher. She worked for the Department of Defense Dependents Schools. She had worked for DoDDS many years previous to that, in the 70s, for one year in Germany. But my aunt was also a teacher with DoDDS, and she lived in Okinawa, so that's part of the reason we went to Okinawa, which sort of is important because when I talk about my parents, it's sort of my mom and my aunt.

So, we moved to Okinawa when I was nine, and I lived there until I finished high school when I was 17. So, we'd come back to the states every summer, so I could see my dad every other holiday, because the military paid for one trip a year, so we paid for a trip every other year. Then, I came back to the states for undergrad in Texas. I lived in Fort Worth, TX, and I finished in four and a half years. My last semester was abroad, so I studied in Alicante, Spain. And then, as soon as that semester was over, I finished in December of 2002, I moved up to Chicago, and then was there until I went to grad school in 2011. So, I was there for almost 10 years, and then was in Lawrence, KS, for grad school for three years.

[00:03:38]     Came down to Louisiana, lived in Baton Rouge for two years, and then in 2016, got my first academic job. It was a three year position at a small Catholic institution, or set of institutions, called College Saint Benedict, Saint Johns University, near St Cloud, MN. Was there for a year, got a tenure track job in Westchester, PA, about an hour outside of Philly. So, lived in Westchester for two years, and then this last year, I lived in Philly, but I've spent every summer and holiday in Baton Rouge with Cat, who works at LSU.

ZIEGLER:    That's fantastic. We're trying to do is get a sense of what it means to be trans here in Louisiana, which is a big, floppy, hard-to-wrap-your-head-around idea, and to some large extent, it was intended to be that, so that it gives us plenty of wiggle room. But we really like to talk to people who have these different perspectives. We've talked to plenty of people who have lived here their whole lives, and sort of moved around internally. I really like the conversations with people who have moved around nationally, and in your case, even internationally.

So, maybe we'll just pause for a little bit and you can tell us what it was like. So, you were in Japan all the way through high school, so from age nine all the way through high school. And I normally do dwell a little bit on high school experiences just because I mean they're so formative and sometimes awful. Can you tell us about that?

LAIR:     Sure, just whatever?

ZIEGLER:    Yeah, whatever. I mean, maybe we can start with this. Where did you live? While your mother was a teacher there, were you speaking Japanese? Were you integrated that way?

LAIR:     Not really. The US has an incredible military presence in the Far East, with the US being the center of the world in a lot of ways, or thinking it is. But there's a huge military presence. As civilians, we were allotted five years to live on base for free, and then we had to move off base for two years, and my mom still got a housing allowance, and then we could move back on base.

So, that was one of the reasons we went. My mom wanted me to live abroad and just have that experience, but also in terms of finances as a single parent, she was a elementary and middle school teacher, and so in New Mexico, we were fine but there wasn't a lot of class mobility to be had. There weren't vacations. I would say solidly middle class, in that I never had to worry about food, I never had to worry about shelter, like that sort of stuff. I never had to worry about that stuff.

But living in Japan, it was such a significant bump because the salary was a little bit higher, but my mom didn't have to pay for housing. So, that was so significant. So, she was able to really get ahead financially, in terms of just savings and paying off debt. We took advantage of living overseas and traveling a lot. But all this to say, when we first moved there, we lived on base.

There were at least nine, I feel like there was more like 12 military bases in Okinawa. Okinawa is this tiny island. It's 70 miles long, 20 miles wide, but nine military bases. So, there's two high schools. My high school was the smaller of the two, and I had a graduating class of 121. I think there was 800 in our high school, so that gives you a sense of the military presence. It's pretty significant. So, I went to elementary school at Kinser Elementary School,  and Kinser was, I want to say it was an Army base, I should know this, on the more South of the island a little bit. And then when I went to middle school, I went to Lester Middle School, and we actually moved to Lester, which was a naval base, because my mom was also teaching there.

And then once we moved off base, we stayed off base. There's a lot more freedom and the military was hypervigilant to a fault. So, when there are typhoons or just creeping up on your business. Like military police who had nothing better to do than give tickets to cars that weren't locked. Just annoying military stuff. And I had no politics at the time, and my mom's not particularly political, but do we just found certain things to sort of be annoying. And so we really appreciated Japanese culture. I went to a US school on the military base, but when I first moved there, my mom did help me take Japanese lessons. So, when I was young, I could speak a level of Japanese where I could converse with kids my age, and I knew the first alphabet.

And they sent me to day camps, but they never sent me to Japanese school, which I was sort of bummed about. I know they considered it. But then when I went to high school, rather than sticking with Japanese, I took Spanish, in part because they generally had Okinawan women teach Japanese in high school, but there was such a cultural difference in terms of disciplinary shit that the Japanese classes were a shit show. And I was a nerd enough to know that I wanted to learn something. I was like, "I'm not going to be self motivated enough to learn Japanese and do my own work," so I took Spanish.

ZIEGLER: I see. So, the kids you were going to school with were also, I guess, there for the military purposes.

LAIR:        Yeah, all military kids for the most part. And some other teachers' kids. So, a lot of my friends were teachers' kids, in part because the military kids, their parents were on a three year rotation, so kids were really there for three years and then they'd move, but the DoDDS kids, it was a year to year contract. So, we were all there, and we all sort of found each other. My last three years of high school, a lot of my friends were military kids, but up until then, it really was other teachers' kids because we were the only ones that stuck around.

ZIEGLER:    And you're saying DoDD. Could you repeat?

LAIR:        Yeah, so DoDDS is Department of Defense Dependents Schools. So, all the teachers that were employed by the military to teach high school, middle school, counselors, principals, administration, all the folks, all the staff that worked at the elementary, middle and high schools were employed by DoDDS. So, that's what my mom and my aunt were, and that's how I had a military ID, but we were technically civilians. Which is why the housing was a little bit different. It was a year to year contract. That kind of stuff was different.

ZIEGLER:     Okay, that's interesting, because I was thinking about a high school in Japan and how that might be different from a high school in the US. Or maybe it wasn't that particularly different.

LAIR:        We had a few kids who were locals. Their parents had to pay a lot of money for them to come. But it was all pretty much military kids. And I did have some friends who went to some of the international schools. There's American School in Japan, which was an international school off base, and then there was another school, but I didn't have any friends at the other school. I had some really good friends who went to ASIJ.

So, there were military kids who didn't go to the military school, or the school on base. But yeah, otherwise, high school, we had sports. Was exactly the same as going to school in the states, with the exception, and I didn't realize this until many years later, in terms of class stuff, Cat, my partner, she grew up in Greenwich, CT, which is a super wealthy town/city. And she would talk about being middle of the road, like a lot of her friends were incredibly wealthy, castles for houses. Not castles, but huge houses. But then there were always the kids that were on the food program.

And I didn't realize until many years later, that was the one difference is that, even if they were poor kids at my school, everybody's parents had jobs because they were there because they were parents from the military. So, there was significant pay disparities between enlisted and officers, but everyone had a home, everyone could eat because their parents were all employed. And I think that I still haven't really thought deeply about how that shaped my high school experience, but I wasn't aware of the extent of poverty and being faced with that in the same way I think a lot of high school kids are.

ZIEGLER:     Yeah. Yeah. I have another question about high school, but before we move on, just for the sake of future transcribers and researchers, when you say your partner Cat, we're talking about Cat Jacquet, who is a History Professor and Women and Gender Studies Professor at LSU.

LAIR:     Yes.

ZIEGLER:     Back to your high school. You say this is similar to what you would find in the states. Was there a very visible queer presence?

LAIR:     No, not at all. I mean, maybe. I don't know. I know lots of high schools where there is no queer presence. There were some queer kids. One of the women on my volleyball team, actually, she was out in high school. We didn't particularly like her, not because she was gay but she was just really annoying. But she had like a really good set of friend. She was friends with the drama crew, sort of stereotyped, you know. I knew some young men who, I knew they were gay at the time, but they weren't out until later.

Yeah, the one memory I do have is my uncle is gay, and he's my uncle because he was married to my aunt, so my mom's sister. Aunt Tari and Uncle Steve were married in the mid-70s, early 70s maybe, and he realized that he was gay. It was pre- the homosexuality being outside of the DSM. So, he went to therapy to de-gay. Obviously, that didn't work, so they ended up getting divorced so he could be with his partner, Michael, who he's still with, his husband.

But Uncle Steve, I grew up with him always being a part of my life because he and my aunt stayed really good friends for many, many years. And I still see my Uncle Steve. Like, Cat and I actually had a trip planned for this summer to go see Uncle Steve. He lives in Santa Barbara, CA. And I remember in middle school, my good group of friends and I, we were in English, and for some reason, we were having a debate about gays in the military. So,  this was 1992 or [199]3. And we were just so angry because the way the students were talking about gay people, and the teacher was not doing anything about it. I don't know that this is different than it would have happened in the states, but I think it had a different impact because we were on a military base, and everyone who was talking, their parents were in the military.

And so we sort of fought against it, and and this is, I mean, I'm blown away that we did this because, again, I wasn't particularly political, but then we went and we staged a protest in the cafeteria. Someone had lipstick and so we all kissed each other on the cheek, and we did Queers Anonymous. And I'm surprised we even used that word in a political way. And we sort of got in trouble for it, but we're like, "Why is this such a bad thing?" We didn't understand it. It was so frustrating. And so that's the only explicit public conversation I ever remember having about queerness or gay stuff on any of my school campuses, high school or otherwise. Besides a few people being out in highschool, there was not a lot of talk about it. It was also 1998. I don't know.

ZIEGLER:     So, were you out in high school?

LAIR:     Absolutely not. The first woman I ever fell in love with, like oof, I was in high school. There was one of my really good friends I had a really big crush on, and I just didn't get it. But I went to summer camp in the summer, and this woman Allison, who was part of the reason I went to Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, TX, for undergrad. She's the reason I went there.

So, we went to this all girls Christian camp in Texas. I went every summer. My mom went, my aunt when they were kids. My stepmom even went when she was a kid. And she and I just, I mean there's really no other way to articulate other than we had just fallen really hard for each other, but there was nothing ever explicit about it. She wasn't gay. I wasn't gay. And we never did anything physical. Sorta. But we would kiss, like we would sleep together It was just very sensual. It was odd.

And then after I spent part of the summer with her, she invited me to hang out with her in Fort Worth. She was already in undergrad. She was 22, I was 16. And so, I spent part of the summer with her. I came back to Okinawa. We would spend hours on the phone together, and she got a special phone plan, and we would write letters. But it kind of freaked her out after her mom said something to her, and by that time, it was too late to apply somewhere else that would give me as much money as TCU did. So, that's the closest I ever got to sort of recognizing something, but I didn't come out until my junior year of college as a gay woman.

ZIEGLER:     Your junior year of college, which means you would have been at Texas Christian University. Are you comfortable talking about that?

LAIR:        Oh, yeah, totally.  I mean, part of this is, in high school, when I was a sophomore, I fell in with the youth group. And on the military base, again, everything is non denominational because its the military, but they hired these youth leaders through, it's an organization called like Cadence International, I think. But Karla and Todd were the two youth leaders that they hired, and they were very evangelical, Baptist approach to theology, so very conservative, very no sex until marriage. And I fell in hard with that group, like that became my life. I went to Bible study, I went to church with them. My mom was not done with this, so I would spend weekends with them. I went on one of their family vacations with them. We became very close.

And so when I went to undergrad, I was really interested in continuing to be part of ministry and I wanted to be a youth minister. And so I didn't like the door to door evangelical stuff. I did one day with Campus Crusade for Christ. They made me knock on doors, and it was horrible, and I went back and apologized to everyone. But then I started working for Young Life. Are you familiar with Young Life?

ZIEGLER:     I'm not. Mm-mm (negative).

LAIR:     So, it's an international Christian youth organization, but most groups are in the US. But I appreciate their sort of form of evangelism, I guess. I was on this team and you go into high schools and you just make yourself available for students to hang out and you are not allowed to talk about God unless they bring it up when you're on their turf. It's weird being a college student and just walking into a high school lunchroom and being like, "Okay, I got to make friends now." Especially, I had a good group of friends, but I wasn't A-list cool kid in high school so it's intimidating. You want to get in with the A list cool kids because I don't know. Whatever. It was a thing. And so I did fine.

But I was working for Young Life, so you would go out and hang out with high school kids and be there for mentorship, but then you would have once a week youth group and they would come to you, and then you got to talk about God. And I liked that sort of approach. It wasn't aggressive. It wasn't in your face. And I had to raise support. So, I was a volunteer for a while, but then I actually started working more hours and I became, I forget what they called it, but I had to write letters to people and ask for people to pay Young Life to pay me. I had to raise my own support. I had to do all this stuff.

And that's what I wanted to do for my career. I was like, "I'm going to work for Young Life. I'm going to be a minister." And then I had actually started dating my friend, Bill, who he and I went to high school together in Okinawa, and he was at an institution in San Antonio, maybe University of Texas San Antonio. I don't remember where. And we had started dating the fall of my junior year, but I was also an RA that year, and I had gotten to be really close to this woman Jill, who was one of my fellow RAs.

And after the winter break, I came back and told her that Bill and I had started dating, and she was really upset about it, and I didn't get why. And then a few weeks later, we ended up making out and I was like, "Oh, I'm gay. All that made sense."

Well, I called Bill and I was like, "We can't date. I'm gay." He was like, "Okay." He was fine with it. I think he was sort of bummed about it. I don't even know if I told him I was gay. I think long distance isn't working or whatever. And then I remember I called my mom and the next day, and I was like, "I'm in love with a girl.” I just wasn't even bashful about it with her. I think, in part, because my uncle had been in my life. I knew even if she had a hard time with it, I never questioned if I would be not welcome in her house or whatever. And she was okay with it. I found out later it was a lot harder for her than she let on, which I appreciate, sort of in retrospect.

So, I told my mom, and then the worst part about that is that I told Young Life. Oh, no, I didn't tell Young Life yet because I knew it wouldn't be good. So, Jill and I started dating and a few weeks later, I was with two of my students, two my students I was closest with, and one of my students, we're all getting ice cream or something, and she was like, "I have a question for you, Brittany." My name was Brittany. And she was like, "My dad is incarcerated and I was visiting him, and he came out to me as gay. Do you think that's wrong?"

And I was like, "Absolutely not. I think it's awesome that he trusts you enough to tell you, and I don't think there's anything wrong with it. And your dad sounds like a great guy." And I knew in that moment that I could no longer work for an organization, because I wasn't representing their... Ethically, I'm not going to say one thing and then work for this organization, but also I'm not going to take money from an organization when I'm not saying the stuff they would want me to say anyway.

So, I told Young Life on a Friday night, and we were supposed to do something the next day, on a Saturday, a fundraiser or something, and the team lead was just real bummed, and he's like, "Just don't come. Let me figure some stuff out. I'll call you on Monday." And so they called me in on Monday to the main office and they laid hands and prayed over me, and then fired me. I knew I was being fired. But the shitty thing was that they changed all the passwords I had some of my own files that I had worked on, and I didn't have access to anything. And then they told me I wasn't allowed to say goodbye to my kids. And so that was kind of shitty. And so, then everyone from Young Life just ignored me on campus. 

But the amazing thing was, I was a religious studies major, and that was where I found my community after that. The Religion Department at TCU was radical and progressive and welcoming and wonderful.

ZIEGLER:     And so, at this point, you're presenting as a woman.

LAIR:        Yes, absolutely.

ZIEGLER:    You're in undergrad.

LAIR:        Mm-hmm (affirmative)

ZIEGLER:     At a Christian University, coming out as gay. What's the University setting? So, obviously you can't work for that one job anymore, right, because yeah, but then, as a University how accepting? I mean, from the outside, just from the name of the University…

LAIR:        Well, what's interesting about TCU, at the time, it's changed radically, but at the time it was a school of 7,500, really strong Greek life. Like, I was in a sorority for a hot second. I left because they were like super fucking racist and expensive. I was in a Christian sorority. I was in two sororities. And I had seen, in the Christian sorority, when anybody came out as gay, they got kicked out. So, I knew some of the fallout from this. Like, there were no queer, maybe there was a queer group, but I also wasn't ready for that. That was too much, because I had no analysis or no critical thinking around pulling gender and sexuality apart. I didn't want to be political. That was really hard.

But I think the other hard thing was, after I came out... I was an RA my junior year, and then my senior year, I wasn't an RA. What did I do for a job? I worked at Starbucks. But I was living with a friend of mine who was an RA in the on campus apartments, and Jill, my girlfriend, was still an RA in the freshman dorm, where I had been an RA. And I didn't find out... Well, actually, I found out halfway through the year that the hall director asked my roommate, who was an RA, to keep tabs on how often Jill stayed over. There was this network of folks surveilling us, to make sure that she was doing her job. Like, all of a sudden, people didn't trust us in the same way.

Jill and I lived with our friend Jeneille that summer, in between my junior and senior year, and we started watching Queer as Folk. Because there was no queer culture out at the time, especially nothing lesbian. And so then we got weird accusations like, "Are you just watching that to learn how to be gay?" We would go to Dallas just for the gayborhood because it was the only gayborhood.

So, that stuff was sort of frustrating. I remember just telling people that I was gay when I started to come out after I had told Young Life, and I just began to expect the look of like someone had died. It was always a disappointment. So, that got really old. But it was also interesting to see some folks sort of show up, like my friend Jeneille, who said some shitty  things. She went to scripture. She's like, "You know what? I don't believe that this is wrong." And it took a while to get there, but I was like, I still remember that and I appreciate that. So that, I don't know. And again, I just found really wonderful people through the Religion Department, so that was good [inaudible 00:27:05] people through Starbucks. That was really cool.

ZIEGLER: I do want to be sure that we talk about your full time two years in Louisiana, which was 2014 to 2016, if that's right. Okay. So, you were still doing the PhD in Kansas, University of Kansas. Is that right?

LAIR:        I was. So, yeah, after undergrad, I wanted to get out of Texas. Moved up to Chicago, worked for Starbucks, then worked for a bike shop. Came out as trans there in 2009-ish.

ZIEGLER:     This was in Chicago?

LAIR:     This was in Chicago. I was working on my Masters program. I had met, knowingly, for the first time, other trans people, and it just sort of opened up a world of possibilities. And the best thing about being in Chicago, which made coming to Louisiana so hard, was two things. One, in Chicago, and this is incredibly unique, I had this group of folks, all transmasculine for the most part, but not all. We all sort of transitioned together, and part of that was because a really good friend of mine, Owen, is a community organizer, and he organized us. We would have skill shares to talk about how to do a legal name change. We'd have skill shares on how to do a hormone shot. I mean, he has a law project still operating in Chicago that has a name change component, where they do name changes once a month.

So, we had him to sort of bring us together. so that sort of supportive community, where, I mean, there'd be ton of times would there be 10, 15 people in a room, and Cat would be the only cis person there. Like it was incredible, looking back, having that sort of space to talk about what it meant to go through all of this.

But the other thing is, when I decided to physically transition, because that wasn't always a sure thing. Like, I knew I wanted top surgery, but I definitely didn't know if I wanted to take testosterone at first. But Howard Brown Health Center is the queer Health Center in Chicago, and they had just, I caught the beginning and the sort of pilot program for what they call THInC [Transgender Hormone Informed Consent]. It's the informed consent model. So, getting on testosterone, when I decided to do it, was super easy. It was three appointments, done. Luckily I've just, again, I'm just so grateful that was the case, because then when I came to Louisiana…

So, I went to Kansas for three years, had a really shitty experience on campus at the Health Center with a super transphobic dude. Found an amazing doctor off campus through a friend of mine. She was one of the first and only medical professionals I've had, not at a queer center, who knew more about my health than I did. So, I went from Chicago to having this wonderful person, Karen, to coming to Louisiana. So, Cat and I moved down here in 2014, and I'm just going to do TMI stuff if that's cool.

ZIEGLER:    Yeah, yeah.

LAIR:        So, when I moved down here I guess just the humidity and the shock, I started getting yeast infections. They wouldn't go away. I would take some medicine and it would come back, and I would take medicine and it would come back, and we didn't know what to do because I didn't have anywhere to go. So, we started trying to call around and I couldn't find anyone. I had Affordable Care Act health insurance, or health insurance through the Affordable Care Act, thank God, and it was fine, but we couldn't find, easily, anyone who would see me, so we actually went to Planned Parenthood in New Orleans and just paid out of pocket. And they were fine. They were cool. I've always felt safe going to Planned Parenthood.

But it was sort of the first time where I explicitly did not have access to trans affirming care, or even to find out someone who would provide it outside of an LGBTQ context, and we'd gotten connected pretty quickly with Capital City Alliance, and Tucker Barry and Dylan Waguespack and Bruce. I'm forgetting the person's last name. But they were really involved in Capital City Alliance. Dylan and Tucker were really part of Louisiana Trans Advocates. Bruce was just badass. So, we'd got connected with them, but it was hard to find doctors.

But we found okay community. It was cool to know Tucker. We didn't hang out a lot but it was nice to know that other trans guys existed down here. But the hardest thing, again, with not having community and then not finding healthcare when I had been out my second year, I was like, "Okay, it's been three years. I need a pap. And I spent probably two or three hours on the phone calling different spaces just to see if they would see me. Most people just said, "No, we will not see you as a patient." And then when I found person, I was dealing with the person at the front desk, and she was like, "Hold on." She put me on hold for like 20 minutes. She came back and she was like, "I found a guy. One of our doctors, he will see you, but he wants to know if you have natural parts or surgical parts."

And I was like, "Okay." I was like, "I just need a pap smear, but okay." So, I hung up the phone. I had made the appointment. I hung up the phone and Cat was like, "Cancel the appointment. We're just going to Planned Parenthood again." So, we paid out of pocket, went to Planned Parenthood, and that was sort of how I sort of piecemealed my healthcare together down here. I don't think I had my blood checked. I used to get my blood checked for hormones every year, and I don't didn't do it the entire time I was down here, just because I didn't feel like I could go.

So, yeah, when I got the job in Minnesota, it was awesome. I also experienced some pretty significant transphobia where the college was, but I could drive to Minneapolis where there's a queer health center. Then I had healthcare again once I went up to Minneapolis.

ZIEGLER:    So, that's the medical side of things, and you did say that you were able to find some community here, to some degree. I wonder how Baton Rouge compares to Lawrence, KS, where University of Kansas is.

LAIR:        Yeah, Lawrence is a little blue dot in a red oasis. They're very self congratulatory about their blue dot.

ZIEGLER:    Of their dot?

LAIR:     Yes, of their dot. So, there's a lot of posturing in that, like, "Oh, we like the gays and we have a rainbow flag in our restaurant. We're good. Like, I remember I was on the board very briefly of their state alliance or whatever. I forget what it's called now. And once they got a domestic partner ordinance, they were like, "Now what? We're done." And I was like, "Hm, no, actually, that's not the case."

So, most of my work in grad school was at the domestic violence shelters. They were super supportive and they're like, "How do we make this better? How do we create spaces for trans and nonbinary folks in this space? What does that look like once folks are in the shelter? What does that look like in our office?" So, I worked with them to create some trainings and do some really cool stuff there. So, Lawrence is great. At the time, I was definitely not the only queer person, but was the only trans person most often anywhere. That's usually the case, right?

ZIEGLER: Yeah, yeah. I've noticed that.

LAIR:        We're used to being the only one in the room, the only tran. And I think the most notable part here was working at LSU, where for the first time I had students, because I always come out on my first day. Because I teach Intro to Women's Studies, and then I talk about being a sorority or I talk about being a woman, and the people don't know that I'm trans. They're really confused about what I'm talking about, because I use myself as an example so much.

And it was the first time I ever had a student say like, and she sort of apologized because she realized how it sounded, but she was like, "I don't care about hearing about you being trans." Like, she wasn't nasty about it, but she could tell she didn't agree with it. And it was the first time I had, and I would rather have students be transparent about that. I was like, "That's cool. You don't have to hear about it. Okay." And where I was actually more nervous here saying that I'm an atheist than I'm trans sometimes, because I didn't know evangelical Catholicism was a thing.

So, it was interesting being down here navigating some of that. But I did hang out. I found cooler straight folks down here than I had ever found anywhere, which was fun. I have a few straight friends, but mostly queer folks, except for here.

ZIEGLER: I was going to ask you about that. So, there's actually two things I want to circle back from what you were saying. One, I'll go ahead and do the professional part first. 'Cause I was going to ask whether or not you tend to come out to your students because you do teach Women and Gender Studies, currently, at Westchester University.

LAIR:     Yeah, and it's sort of changed. How I do it changes and has changed over time, but I name a lot of my identities. And I've sort of been began in this last year to start to articulate it in this way, that I always want to name my relationships to power, to be transparent with my students. Like I'm not going to pretend that it's an equitable space and that they're just as whatever, like they have as much power as I do, because that's just simply not the case. But if I named that I'm trans, but I also name that I'm white, and that even though I'm trans, quite often because I look the way I do, that's not a salient identity. Like the more salient identity is that I pass as a straight white guy, and my relationship to power in  regards to that is much more impactful on my day-to-day life than being trans, at least in terms of my interactions with people.

And I've seen it. I think I've worked really hard to be a good teacher, and it's, I think, a craft that I'm continuing and will always, hopefully, be working at, but I know that even though my students know I'm trans, they still see this white dude walk in with a masculine voice. And I don't wear a tie everyday but I wear a collared shirt or whatever. So, I always come out as trans, in part because I think I can leverage my privilege in particular ways to do that without a threat, or any threat that I'm going to face is minimal because of my other identities.

It's also something that is so central to who I am that I feel like if I know anyone in any capacity, and I know my students by the end of the semester, if they don't know I'm trans, they don't know a huge part of me, and a huge part of how I understand myself, and how my politics have been formed and my feminism and my political commitments, all that stuff.

ZIEGLER:    And so I'm looking for this quote. So, as part of our pre-interview, we ask this question, which is just curious as to what people would say. But we ask what does being trans in Louisiana mean to you. And if you don't mind, I'll go ahead and just read your answer.

LAIR:        Okay.

ZIEGLER:    I know in general it's terrible to read back what people write.

LAIR: No, it's cool. I don't remember what I wrote exactly.

ZIEGLER:    So, you write that it means being someone who is invisible in a ton of ways (in part because I pass as a white straight dude) but it also means that, in a place like Louisiana, I can use my relationship to power to do justice work." And I wanted to use that to bridge your comments about passing as a white dude.

LAIR:        Yeah.

ZIEGLER:    Which you were just talking about, to the work that you do, both in the classroom and outside of the classroom. So, as I online stalked you, you've been active as a volunteer in the Trans Lifeline, which is the transgender crisis hotline.

LAIR:     So, Trans Lifeline, I realized that it takes some of us sometimes a long time to figure out what we're good at and what we're not, in terms of where our strengths lie, and Trans Lifeline was not where my strength lied. I got so anxious taking phone calls, I think in part because my experience was so far from the folks, often, that were calling. Which doesn't mean I can't do that work, but that's not work that I want to do, I guess.

So, my stint with them was a little bit shorter than I would have liked, I think in part because, again, so many people calling. At least the majority of those I got were transfemme folks, except for one person, but folks who are really struggling with depression or suicidal ideations, and that has not been my experience at all. And so I can empathize. I don't know, it just felt like not a good fit.

But with some of the other organizations, when I think about my work and my relationships to power, even in Louisiana, I feel like some of the more impactful work, actually, I've done is as National Lawyers Guild Legal Observer, and that's when, so I'm invisible in that Cat and I, I mean people know us, but we don't have a huge queer community here, and there's ways that she's very visible as a queer person everywhere but Louisiana. She gets read as straight all the time. I always get read as straight. And I think there are ways that, if we were in other spaces, we wouldn't be read that way, so we're invisible.

But where I can do, I think, the most impactful work in the classroom and in my work off campus is around racial justice stuff, particularly as a white man, which I think links directly to trans justice and queer justice. But, so with the National Lawyers Guild Legal Observers, we were part of the protests for Alton Sterling in, what was that, 2016? And I realized that I was a really bad legal observer at protests because I was so nervous about being arrested because being trans.

So, what I ended up doing, and this is work that was like, "Yeah, this I can do all the time," is I did a lot of prison support. So, for all the protests where folks are getting arrested, we had 24-hour watch at the Baton Rouge Prison, the parish person up by the airport. And we would interview folks and document. I mean their bruises and their cuts from being arrested, and they ended up serving the Sheriff a lawsuit, and maybe it's still pending or maybe they won, or giving people rides or whatever they needed, and so that's work that I can do. So, Cat and I just re upped our training, so we'll see what happens in the next couple weeks with any more protests here.

But even in the classroom, I mean I teach about queer stuff when I teach about trans stuff but I start the semester with defining oppression, privilege, but we really jump right into racism and white privilege. And I think I can do that in lots of ways, and I get pushback but not in the same way as my colleagues do because of my embodiment.

ZIEGLER:     And then, we talked a little bit about your time here full time, and you're here in Louisiana part time now. So, you live in Pennsylvania, teach at Westchester, which is a little bit outside of Philly. You live in Philly now, you were saying at the beginning. This is not going to be a well formed question, so brace yourself. We talked a little bit about how you found Louisiana when you first got here, when you were more or less previously based in Lawrence, and before that Chicago, so you can compare that. Now I'm sort of curious, when you come back for the summers and you come back to the holidays, having spent more time in Pennsylvania, for instance, I'm just curious your thoughts about Louisiana. Like, when you show up here and all your memories come back, you know what I mean? Say whatever you want to say about that.

LAIR:     Yeah, I think in some ways it's really hard. And the first thing that comes to mind right now is just because we're living in a time of COVID, it's really frustrating being down here knowing that people just don't give a shit and don't take it seriously. And it's hard to tell people to care about other people. I don't know how to do that in a productive way, especially when we're living in different realities, when facts don't matter anymore. So, I always know when I come down here that's hard.

I'm always way more aware of being queer. Like I always wear my rainbow bracelets but one of the things that happen, and I am generally... Well, let me tell the story. I don't know how to... Anyway, okay, so we first got down here, we have our car down here and I don't know if we'd been to a Mardi Gras parade or some other parade where we've got this rainbow throw. And it was the gayest throw ever. It was huge beads, rainbow with little rainbows in between. It was the whole thing. And we had it hanging from our mirror, and we took our car to get new tires or alignment or something at this place over on Perkins and I forget what the cross street was.

And I just got this really weird vibe from them, and I usually don't feel weird vibey. Like I don't feel like I've ever been like hate crimed. I mean, I have been hate crimed, like people screaming at me when I was a gay woman in Chicago, but that was always very explicit. I don't feel like it's ever been something people have done, right? But there was just something that didn't feel right.

And I picked up the car, and Cat's cousin happened to be in town and they were driving, and like it got kind of weird, so she took the car back, and they didn't tighten the lug nuts on one of the wheels. And we just, maybe it was coincidence, I don't know, but it felt really creepy. And for the first time, we took a gay thing off our car. Like we took something down off our car that was gay.

And that felt sad. Like, I was bummed about it. And so, when I come back, I think of that. I think about how we want to really be as visible as we can, but I think about what if we put another rainbow sticker on our car? Is our car going to get vandalized? We have the Black Lives Matter sign out. Is that going to get stolen?

Every day I'm surprised that it's still there, right? That I was in Lowe's the other day, or Home Depot, and a dude not wearing a mask, this is pre wear a mask inside, had a handgun strapped to his belt. Like shit like that is not something I ever experience in Philly, and so I'm just always a little bit more on edge down here, I think, because of some of the stuff. I mean, right now, it's not a big deal because we're home most of the time, but when I go out, I am aware of stuff like that.

I don't know. So, I love our community here, but it's also hard because it's still my community, but I really also miss my friends up in Philly. It's been hard not being able to get as involved as I would like in activism, either here or in Philly. I've been actually more involved down here 'cause it's summer in winter, so I have more time to do stuff. So, even when I was doing the Trans Lifeline stuff, I did my training when I was in Baton Rouge. So, this is where I've really been able to engage in some activism, but I'd like to be more involved in Philly.

All that is to say I love being down here, and I love being in our house. I love our house and I love our dog, and seeing the people who we've built relationships now for six years, but I feel sort of ungrounded in lots of ways. 'Cause I never have all my stuff, another place. Not that stuff makes a home but yeah.

ZIEGLER:     Thank you for that. I know that was a really tough question. I do want, and this is, you're the very first interviewee that I'm going to put through this twice, but I'm going to read another thing that you wrote. And I guess that's what you get for being a scholar, right? You've got a lot of written stuff out and about. But this is from an article in the Oral History Review, published just about a year ago, so last July, 2019.

LAIR:        Shit, alright.

ZIEGLER:     Yeah, I know right? Look who did research. And so this is your review of both the Tretter and the New York Trans Oral History Project. So, you probably know this. That was sort of a set up. But I'm going to read a couple of sentences from that because I wanted... Anyway, I just wanted to talk about that. You write, "When I began to identify as trans over a decade ago, the only narrative readily available was one of being born in the wrong body. Through listening to narratives of other trans people available to me only through a few documentary films, I found bits and pieces of stories that helped me figure out my own narrative. These oral histories," and again, this is the New York Trans Oral History Project and the Tretter Transgender Oral History Project. So, "These histories will do much more than preserve untold histories. For many trans individuals who have yet to hear stories that reflect their own experiences, these oral histories create a space online that showcases the diversity of voices that make up the larger trans and nonbinary community."

Which I thought was just amazing and fantastic, but I also wanted to say or ask, rather, if you'd be more willing to say if the ‘born in the wrong body’ narrative wasn't really for you, do you feel like you've made progress on figuring out which narrative you either prefer that you've heard from other people, or how it is that you prefer to project when asked?

LAIR:     Yeah, and I will say, too, that I think that has largely come, not from being in any one place, but from, like I said, hearing other people's narratives. And so I think the first time I really realized that, I was watching Jules Rosskam's documentary called Against A Trans Narrative. And unfortunately, so these film makers at the time were also based in Chicago. All these folks came from Chicago, even Sam Feder, who did Disclosure. Sam was in Chicago. Sam and Jules were dating at the time, and so I knew a lot of the people in these documentaries, which is always really weird.  

So, it's this person who I don't like at all, but they, in Against A Trans Narrative, were saying, like, "If I could walk into a room and have people identify my gender as trans, not as masculine, not as feminine, but as trans, that would be my ideal." And I was like, "That's how I feel. That's my gender." I never wanted to be a man. I didn't feel right being a woman, but that was something that alright for me.

And so that was sort of the beginning of me being like, "Okay, people are having really different experiences what is mine?" And so the way I sort of tell my narrative now, and I couldn't even really pinpoint who else has said this, but I don't feel like I was born in the wrong body. I feel like I've made a series of choices to change my body and to change the way I present my gender, and just like some people undergo surgical intervention for breast augmentation or something else, that's how I think of it. Or people are super into going to the gym, and for some people, those things are very serious. Some things it's just like, "Oh, I'd like to do this."

But that's sort of how my physical transition has been. That it's sort of a series of choices, and that I like taking testosterone. Will I do it forever? I mean, probably. I really wanted facial hair. I hated having facial hair as a woman. And maybe we've talked about this, but I feel like women with facial hair will be more radical than I ever had the courage to be. But yeah, I liked my body. I worked really hard as a woman to be okay with my body as a woman, which in this culture, we're supposed to hate our fucking bodies. And I found a gender expression as an androgynous gay woman that I ended up really loving.

And so, it really wasn't until I met some other trans people and I was like, "Huh, maybe this is something I could explore." And so, for a long time, I just wore a binder, but still identified as a woman, as a queer woman. And I loved that for a really long time. And then the trans stuff came a little bit later, but I can't read that back into my history in the same way that I can read being gay.

Like, I remember being a kid, having crushes on girls, but I was also confused because I had crushes on guys, and it didn't make sense to me. But I can read that back into my history, but I can't read back into my history being trans. So, yeah, I don't know if that sort of answers it, but...

ZIEGLER:     That's actually lovely, and I appreciate that. I know these are sort of hard things to think about, but yeah, I think that's very right. We're all bombarded by the ‘born in the wrong body’, and ‘I need to be this or that’.

LAIR:     And I did see KC Tobias, there was a quote on Insta or something, and KC Tobias was saying I don't want to live in a world without gender. I want to live in a world where gender is celebrated and it's a playground. It's a playful and affirming thing, where we can express in all the ways we want, without consequence." And I feel like that's really fun.

Like there's ways that, after taking testosterone, after I had masculinity written on my body in a particular way, that I was able to access femininity. Like I didn't have my ears pierced before I transitioned. I never painted my nails. I judged a drag race sometimes at school at Westchester, and I do eyeliner and mascara, like I never would have done that stuff as a gay woman. Wearing V-neck T-shirts were too feminine for me. So, there's been away that I've been able to access femininity and play which gender, even though I present pretty normatively, like skater boy most of the time, that has been really fun.

ZIEGLER:     Yeah, I love that. So, we're coming up on the end. I do try to ask, as one of the closing questions, whether or not there's anything that we hadn't talked about that you wish we had. So, again, we're thinking about being trans in Louisiana. We talked about a ton of stuff, but is there anything in closing that you would like to bring up? Would like to discuss?

LAIR: I guess what I would say is that I haven't had to look for healthcare down here. I know it's changed a lot, that there are more resources, both in New Orleans and in Baton Rouge. So, I know that has changed, so I would be less anxious about coming back down if I ever, I won't ever get a job down here, but if I were. And I guess the other thing I would say is that I'm so grateful for the Louisiana Trans Advocates, but I do feel that, at least one or two meetings I went to, was a much younger demographic, which seems to be the case a lot for sort of support groups for trans people. Not always, but yeah. That's it, I guess.

ZIEGLER:     So, I'm just going to hit you with one more question and this is coming at you with no warning, but again, we're thinking of this as sort of a time capsule. So, we're sitting here halfway through the year 2020, we're locked down in COVID. Somebody's listening to this in 30 years. I'm curious about if there's any trans or nonbinary, genderqueer, etc., artists or performers, writers, poets, etc., that are really important to you, either now or have been in your past that you'd really wanna encourage somebody in the future to look into. Ar at least go ahead and record that you really like them.

LAIR:     Yeah. I mean, I think, as an artist, Alok Vaid-Menon is kind of amazing. Like, their poetry's pretty legit. One group that I really liked that was really powerful for me when I was starting transition, I think, too, because he's a trans dude, but it's the band Coyote Grace. They're really good. It's a dude, and I think his ex girlfriend. Maybe they're dating again, but I don't think they are. And what is cool is they're smaller band, but their music is really great. But then there's this recording of him singing, I think it's a Bob Dylan song, before he transitioned. And there's something about that, like hearing his voice pre-transition,  I'll never forget the first time I heard it. There's something about the voice change. I don't know. So, they're really cool. Otherwise, I don't know if I really follow. Pose.

ZIEGLER:    This is fantastic. Thank you very much.