At Reunions, you gave me a gift that is beyond precious. Our 35th was my first class event since graduation. I had taken my diploma with you as William Thomas White. I returned this year as Tina Madison White.
I was terrified!
I need not have been. Your gracious reception and gentle inquisitions brought welcome relief. And I thank you. But you gave me so much more.
Discussions of transgender people tend to focus on the visible drama: our change in appearance; the discomfort others feel; the violence and discrimination we face. But our greatest drama isn’t one you can see.
For most of my life, I wanted nothing so desperately as to be a man — to be a sturdy comrade, a loving husband, a gentle father. The knowledge that I wasn’t one haunted my every day.
I tried everything to fix myself — sports, therapy, medicine, prayer ... marriage. I even joined the Ivy Club, hoping that its gentle fraternity might cure me.
I did all this in secret. Not even my family must know. The one “manly” thing I could do was to protect those I loved from my shame. So it was that I wandered the halls of Princeton.
When you travel the world as someone not you, you live a life of solitary confinement. Nobody knows who you are; their expressions of affection cannot touch you. I never felt, for example, the embrace of my mother’s “I love you’s.” She was loving someone not me.
I couldn’t even have a relationship with God. It wasn’t that God wasn’t there; it was that I wasn’t.
Such solitary confinement is profoundly dehumanizing. It will destroy anyone. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court asserted that to express and share our identity is a human right. I am here to say that it is a human necessity.
When I finally graduated from Princeton, I wanted nothing more than to put my past behind me. I had experienced alienation, shame, and isolation. Who would want to return to that?
Such was my state of mind as Reunions approached. It wasn’t you I didn’t want to return to. It was myself.
But, over the weekend, something wonderful and unexpected happened. With each of our conversations, I felt decades of sorrow and alienation melting away. For the first time in my life, you were talking to me! For the first time in my life I was at Princeton!
And that was your gift. While the rest of you were celebrating your 35th reunion, I was finally attending my commencement. You supplanted decades of sorrowful memories with ones of warmth and happiness. In three days, you returned years of my life to me.
At Reunions, you gave me a gift that is beyond precious. Our 35th was my first class event since graduation. I had taken my diploma with you as William Thomas White. I returned this year as Tina Madison White.
I was terrified!
I need not have been. Your gracious reception and gentle inquisitions brought welcome relief. And I thank you. But you gave me so much more.
Discussions of transgender people tend to focus on the visible drama: our change in appearance; the discomfort others feel; the violence and discrimination we face. But our greatest drama isn’t one you can see.
For most of my life, I wanted nothing so desperately as to be a man — to be a sturdy comrade, a loving husband, a gentle father. The knowledge that I wasn’t one haunted my every day.
I tried everything to fix myself — sports, therapy, medicine, prayer ... marriage. I even joined the Ivy Club, hoping that its gentle fraternity might cure me.
I did all this in secret. Not even my family must know. The one “manly” thing I could do was to protect those I loved from my shame. So it was that I wandered the halls of Princeton.
When you travel the world as someone not you, you live a life of solitary confinement. Nobody knows who you are; their expressions of affection cannot touch you. I never felt, for example, the embrace of my mother’s “I love you’s.” She was loving someone not me.
I couldn’t even have a relationship with God. It wasn’t that God wasn’t there; it was that I wasn’t.
Such solitary confinement is profoundly dehumanizing. It will destroy anyone. In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court asserted that to express and share our identity is a human right. I am here to say that it is a human necessity.
When I finally graduated from Princeton, I wanted nothing more than to put my past behind me. I had experienced alienation, shame, and isolation. Who would want to return to that?
Such was my state of mind as Reunions approached. It wasn’t you I didn’t want to return to. It was myself.
But, over the weekend, something wonderful and unexpected happened. With each of our conversations, I felt decades of sorrow and alienation melting away. For the first time in my life, you were talking to me! For the first time in my life I was at Princeton!
And that was your gift. While the rest of you were celebrating your 35th reunion, I was finally attending my commencement. You supplanted decades of sorrowful memories with ones of warmth and happiness. In three days, you returned years of my life to me.
And I thank you.