TBB said to me “If you don’t want to produce the empire conference, what do you want to produce?”
Transpower
How do you take your power in the world?
In the boardroom? In the bedroom? In both?
Or is it somewhere else? In the pulpit, in the circle, in the salon, on the stage, in print, on the web, on the streets, wherever?
Transpower is where we come together to discuss how we take power in the world
and share ways to become more integrated, more authentic and more empowered.Be more. Be bigger. Be yourself.
Transpower.
Be here.
It was the first question I asked at the first session on my first day at my first trans-conference. I know how women take power in the world, I know how men take power in the world, but how do we as transpeople take power in the world? How do we shift between genders without becoming abject and powerless?
This is a hard one, I know. I used to ask Christine “So, do you want to be powerful or powerless?” She would answer “Isn’t there another choice?”
But finding ways to take our power seems crucial.
This weekend I had an old acquaintance tell me that even though I am a big transperson, I could be more invisible if I just tried harder to be like them. They were distressed when I didn’t embrace their advice.
“Someone big boned like you,” Kristine James told me this weekend, “shouldn’t even try to transition.” That was the same thing TBB was told when she walked away to go full time, that she was doomed to failure
Both of us, though, think the priority is simple.
We have to separate the idea that “you can’t pass as female” from the idea “you can’t succeed as a woman.”
If the only way to succeed is to be invisible, the only way to take power is to mimic older forms, do an imitation of someone else, then we lose. We need to worry not that have to conceal our past and our biology, but rather focus on how we reveal our own authentic self.
How do we succeed on our own terms? How do we take power in the world? How do we use our voice, our words, our art, our skills, our experiences, to get other people to trust us, to join with us, to agree with us, to work with us, to value us? In the end, that’s all power is, using the tools you have to get others on your side to work to achieve shared goals.
Transpower isn’t a conference for people who want to be invisible in the world. It’s a place where people who have found their own power can come and share, share how they succeeded, share ideas for how they can become more powerful. And it’s not just for people who identify as trans, but for anyone who wants to take power across new boundaries, who wants to become more profoundly authentic and potent in the world.
Empowerment is the next big goal for transgender, and that means that we have to be willing to pull the stick out of our ass and let our ourselves dance, leap, and even fly. We need to be able to fit into organizations, need to be able to stand out as unique, and need to be able to stay strong, centred, healthy and growing so we can be vibrant in the world.
To be trans is to know that there is something inside of you that is fabulous that you need to bring out, even if the world doesn’t yet know that they need it. It is to be willing to let the conventional die off so we can reveal the exceptional. It is to trust that calling from deep inside to be bold and brilliant, healed and healing in the world.
I bought the domain name TransPractice.com because I wanted to talk about how we as transpeople create our own practices in the world. I knew that I felt an obligation to start a practice, and I knew that I wasn’t doing it. I meant practice as in creating a structure to deliver our skills and services, like a law or medical or ministerial practice, but all the meanings of practice come into play, from the repetition required to achieve mastery to the habits and routines we use to build a strong life. Practice lets us create strong practices that allow us to build an effective practice, as it were.
Transpower is the conference I want to go to, the home of the people I want to learn from and connect with.
And that’s the conference I might even produce.
Callan 