Jay, 59, New York, NY, 2015, from the portfolio To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults
Interview Text
I’m a pretty classic transgender man, as I see it, because from my earliest recollections as a tiny child I experienced myself as a boy in a girl’s body. I felt that some dreadful mistake had been made and I didn’t get the body I was supposed to. I prayed every night to God to make me wake up a boy the way I was supposed to be. And that orientation never changed throughout the whole trajectory of my life. That said, I was also a political activist, an LGBT activist. For a long time, society identified me as a lesbian and seemed to ignore my transgender status. Back then, in the 1950s and ’60s, society wasn’t really all that nuanced in how it looked at LGBT people. We were all sort of lumped into the same boat.
My partner, Eleanor, was a big time activist. She was one of the most outspoken people in our community. But she had a huge stroke when she was fifty-six and from there on I was either taking care of her or she was in a nursing home where she was horribly abused. I mean, horribly abused. Eleanor had bedsores from lack of care and neglect at the nursing home and this woman would come in and take this rag and wipe between Eleanor’s legs while screaming at her, “This is for Joy, isn’t it? This is for Joy. You’re going to hell! You should repent or you are going to hell when you die. You’re going to burn in hell, you pervert.” Joy is my previous name and how the nursing home knew me. So that is what they inflicted on her, they basically rubbed the bacteria from her anus and genital area into her bedsores.
Then I got cancer and I was facing discrimination where doctors wouldn’t even give me my biopsy results. The man who was supposed to be my breast surgeon wanted to send me out to psychiatry. Wanted to send me to psychiatry before giving me any breast cancer care! And he didn’t even call me to give me my biopsy results. I didn’t even know that I was sick for a long time.
One good thing I can at least say is that when Eleanor received end-of-life care, the doctors provided the most dignified, compassionate care that we had ever received. But part of it is that I was finally passable by then and they were treating us like we were a heterosexual couple for the first time ever. It was like night and day, the respect, almost reverence, that staff would give. They treated us like we were gold. That experience really highlighted how incredibly different it is to just be treated like a normal human being, and, you know, we had gotten so used to being treated like we were garbage. It was really shocking just to receive standard care. And I have to wonder how different everything would have been with Eleanor’s care, in particular, had we always been perceived that way.
If you hear our story and it resonates, it is your job to keep holding the torch. No one else’s. Please care about the movement as much as I did, as Eleanor did, as we all did. We put our lives on the line for this and there are people who believe in justice and fairness and the morally right thing to do and we have got to stick together and we can’t give up. I will always be with you and watching down wherever I am. I just pray you can soak up strength and love from each other and be everything you were meant to be.
