Femme

MY STORY
There is an African proverb that states, “Until the lion tells the story, the hunter will always be the hero.” I have always been dedicated to telling the lion’s story, the other side of the story when it comes to queer folks and people of color. But I became even more passionate about it when I began to socially and medically transition.

I have always been a person who had a million stories running through my head. I needed to get them all out so I started writing when I was young. I loved to tell stories about the underdog coming out on top. They go through a series of trials and tribulations and they come out better than what they were before. I also loved sci-fi and Afrofuturism. So that meant that many of my stories were set in the future or on some distant planet or had some supernatural element to them. Up until recently, my stories were told through the lens of an Afro-Latinx, bisexual woman who felt out of place most of the time because I wasn’t actually a bisexual woman.

So in 2019, I began the process of medically transitioning. Starting this journey made me want to do more research. Like with everything I start, I go on a Google rampage to learn everything I can about it. I wanted to learn as much as possible about the trans experience and especially the history. So I did and I found out about the Hijras of India, the Mahu of Hawaii, the Chibados of Angola, the two-spirited of Indigenous America, and the list goes on. I even learned the mentality surrounding gender non-conformity in Africa.

I’m reading through all this material and realizing that there were so many cultures, pre-colonialism, who had 3 or more genders and those non-confirming genders were highly revered in these societies, holding high positions of importance. I was so excited to learn all of this new information that had never been told to me before and began to think .... how did trans & gender non-confirming people go from being highly revered and damn near worshiped to suffering injustices daily? Well, we all know that storytelling has always been a very important part of culture, especially for people of the African diaspora. It has been the way we passed down information from generation to generation. It’s the way we understood our lineage and it’s how we honored our ancestors. The stories of a people give insight into who they are as a people. As the stories of our transcestors would have given us insight into the role they played in the human story? But why haven’t we heard of their stories?

Well, somewhere along the way the people who began to control the narrative didn’t see a need for it. It went against the type of society they wanted to create. So the stories and the history of trans people, much like black people, get tucked away in the chambers of time. Now they can be found if you go looking for them like I dig. If you did deep enough. But if you're not looking for us you will barely hear anything about trans people in the history of human beings. So I got a brilliant idea. I'm a storyteller…Instead of asking where our stories are, I could tell them.

So I created TransAct Entertainment so I could tell the other side of the story.