So, a Week In Prideful Eldering (SWIPE) Week 2

My thought this week is on building trans community over time, making it into a real, thriving, living culture. We are well-established in some ways, as a culture: we have many references within our world that we can draw on with a word (e.g., "egg", "anticistamines", "taco"), we have artists who perform under our flag, we have writers and poets and academics and truck drivers and mayors and unhoused people and a few of every one of those groups and all the others.

But another thing that a culture needs: intergenerational knowledge transfer. Someone like myself - with a 34-year history of surviving and then thriving as trans here in Canada, the last 22 of them pretty publicly so. I have, in a word, gotten old as a trans woman. We don't get many of those in our community. Not public ones.

We have old people who've transitioned, sure, but that's not quite where I'm looking for elders. I'm looking among those of us who transitioned a long time ago, the ones with long experience of living as trans. The ones who've seen it all, and three times before Thursday breakfast.

I want us to start building a tradition of recognising and gaining knowledge of our history, our stories, and other arcane stuff we don't generally talk about.

Because y'know what? Our existence in history has pretty much exclusively been written about, in memory, by white cisgender heterosexual people. Even when allies, they aren't us. They don't know what it's like to always be the outsider, once you become known. Remembering that intersectionality makes all of these bad effects worse (a Black cis woman and a white trans woman both stand in a place of privilege that a Black trans woman cannot access - not the same one, but not necessarily just "part of what the Black trans woman gets", either).

Sometime, I'll give you some of the history, and why the cavalry - grey-haired trans folk riding over a hill on Segways or something, swooping in to scatter our foes in a last-minute rescue - never comes over that hill. But not today. There are reasons, but I want a positive focus today, so that's what I'm talking about. Doesn't mean I don't know the bad stuff. I was there. 14 in 1980. So yeah.

But what I went is to set up what a relationship with a trans elder might look like, for someone wanting to build community. That's today's topic.

So a trans elder. How are they different from a younger trans person, physically, emotionally, culturally? Physically: usually less vigourous, less energy, various small issues piling up to make movement more slow and stiff, and often, some slow mental decline, even without a source of dementia.

Practically, what effect can that have? Several. Loneliness is a big one. A lot of us were kept from being a part of any growing trans community as part of the gatekeeping. So as we grow old, as stealth some of us still, we tend to have a limited friend circle, to help manage the number of chances that we'll drop the mask with some slip (cf. memory loss).

So things like daily chores, or keeping up our houses, become difficult to accomplish, or keep up with. Mowing the lawn, or doing the dishes, hoovering, shovelling snow off the sidewalks and driveway, whatever the circumstance is.

And even if we have friends, they're decomposing as quickly as we are. So we can't cover it off for one another very easily.

So what if, sometime soon, you drop a note in at the seniors' department of your municipality. In your note, explain that as a local trans person, you were hoping to have your contact info given to anyone who is elderly and trans, so we can welcome them into the community we're building?

Contact info can be a throwaway email address. You just want to find a way to establish contact somehow. They're likely to be very careful about how they interact with the world.

And then you just be sociable. Talk about who you are, how you got here, ask about their story. Let them give you whatever they can afford to let loose. Build a bit of trust and a relationship. Ideally, even, do this as a pair of people.

And over time, you build that friendship into a relationship on a broader basis, and you offer some help with something. Not "I'll do that for you," but "anything I can help you get done while I'm here?" Leave agency in their hands.

That's a tradition I'd like to see develop in our culture. Not for my sake. Lonely is the last of my problems, and hasn't been one for decades.

But because I know there are others out there. And I want people to find and help them, in as careful and gentle a way as you can, and say that you've got a community going, and you'd love to have some elders around the events to class up the joint. Or whatever.

I dunno...just some musing on a Wednesday afternoon.

Questions for thought or comment:

1) What do you think of the idea of formalising the process of building our community somewhat? Not making rigid rules, but establishing the bones of our culture and community, and managing intergenerational knowledge transfer, getting writers to record the history of those elders.

2) Would you be willing to be part of one of these...I dunno, we can name them later, but these contact teams?

3) Do you have any ideas to contribute to the project of building a more recognisable and organised trans community/culture? Not regimenting things - we're still queer, still agents of chaos on an inherent level - but outlining some paths that can be taken if wanted, based on our elders' experiences of what safe paths look like.

Would love to hear back from anyone with ideas or replies, challenges you see arising, whatever. Just be nice to one another while you talk about stuff. We get enough shit from people in our lives, we don't have to shovel it onto one another as well. Disagree with ideas, not their bearers.

Love youse all!