"It's Not a Culture War"

An interview with author Diana Goetsch

Diana Goetsch was in Pella, Iowa for a reading last week. She is an American poet and memoirist. Her book, “This Body I Wore: a Memoir,” was a 2023 American Library Association Notable Books List Selection and named a best book of 2022 by The Washington Post. She has numerous other publications, including representation in “Best American Poetry.”

Here are a few words about her memoir:

“A captivating memoir of one woman’s long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her.” The Washington Post.

“Achingly beautiful.” The New York Times Book Review

Diana is on a “Red States Tour,” sharing her perspective on transitioning, and what life is like as a trans woman in general, and in the hostile political climate some Republicans have created for trans people and other minorities.

I was able to spend some time with Diana. Here is the audio of the interview, and the lightly edited transcript is below.

Diana, tell us a little bit about yourself.

So, I am a 60-year-old trans woman from New York City. I worked as a public high school teacher for 21 years. I trained as a poet and I have several collections of poetry, and now I have a memoir called "This Body I Wore" out with FSG in paperback, so I've lived as a writer and as a teacher. I also danced professionally for a time. I was born in Brooklyn, New York, grew up in Long Island in a suburb called Northport. And came back to New York in my adult life to teach. And then at age 50, I transitioned. And I’ve lived now as a woman. Which is what the memoir is about.

Okay, so when did you know you needed to transition? Was that something you thought about for years?

My whole life...since I became aware that there were trans people, which was basically Renee Richards winning the right to compete as a woman in the US Open in Forest Hills. This was 1977. I was 14 years old. As soon as I became aware of trans people, it was just sort of plunked up in the sky as you know, if only that was me. And I previously always saw this as aspirational, not as what I was, and then I realized no, it's what I am. And that you know, I would call that coming out to yourself. And I took a long, long... I did everything I could to try to run away from my identity.

I remember Renee Richards and this happening. Yeah. I remember it was a pretty big deal. I don't remember...I remember people just trying to figure it out and I was young then too, but I don't remember the anger and the animosity at the time, that like we're getting now about trans people. Am I misremembering... 

Well, the anger wasn't organized. You know with Renee Richards, it was you know, for a lot of people she was an anomaly. And so she would get a knee-jerk rejection, you know, there were racists and bigots like Margaret Court, who's just horrible; great tennis player, but just horrible person and she's known for it, you know her homophobia, etc. And so she refused to play against Renee Richards. And so you'd have that, then you'd have other individuals, Billie Jean King was, you know, lionized at the time and a lot of women players just naturally respected her, and she asked a couple of questions and said, okay, yeah, she's fine with me.

You know that was good enough for a lot of players, but it wasn't organized. You didn't have a... you're right. You didn't have a campaign. What we're having now is...it's almost like their second try, the first try was the first bathroom bills in the late Obama administration beginning in North Carolina. And it didn't work because a lot of people saw through that, and they tried that. Corporations started pulling out of North Carolina. You had the NCAA not having their tournament there. I mean they were just...it was bad for the state and people saw that, but then they reorganized, and then they actually went to school on trans people. And they kind of figured out that the way to do this is to go after the kids. And to go after the fears of parents and the disinformation campaign about trans people nowadays is incredibly well organized. I mean, everybody's parroting the same talking points. Everybody's bringing the same court cases. That you could track as a blueprint to it. And you know the same talking points and it's very coordinated. You know, mostly the red states.

You are a widely acclaimed author. Is there a short passage you can read so that…So that people that are listening can understand the quality of your work and why it's so respected. I bet you can pull up a random paragraph…

I mean, I could quote some poetry. I could quote from here (picking up her book)… So this is 2019. Can I read two paragraphs? 

Sure.

I often think about a 55-year-old African American Military vet, who wore one of her wife's dresses to a support meeting I attended in 2014. She was crying because she waited too long to transition. No, she was bawling, doubled over, heaving and sobbing for a long time. I was 50 and I wanted to say something positive about transitioning late. I'm glad I didn't. Her abject grief for decades of a life not lived in her gender consecrated that space. The tide of that grief wouldn't roll over me for a few more years and now I don't know if it will ever recede. The experiences of late and early transitioners are like night and day. Early transitioners were unable to conceal from themselves or others the fact that they were trans. Late transitioners were unable to unearth it.

Trans women’s history has centered on early transitioners, which makes sense. They were the ones who were out, struggling to survive in the face of violence, poverty, AIDS. They were the ones marching and forming alternative families and communities. Meanwhile, late transitioners struggled to live as men, often though not always engaging in cross-dressing. Many of the cross-dressers I knew in the 1980s and 90s were trans and didn't know it. But, I have yet to meet a trans person of any age who isn't filled with regret for not transitioning sooner.

Wow. So this is a memoir. But it's also for those of us that read it…It's kind of an ethnography too, and it's an introduction to a different culture than we participate in. It's also, I'm sure, comforting and inspiring to trans people to understand your journey; helps them understand their own perhaps, like any good memoir, any good novel will do too, or poem. Is that how you see it?

I've been a writer for so long, I just see that as a great opportunity to ply my craft on a topic that I've never seen written about, particularly late transitioners and particularly a certain community, a subculture of cross-dressers in New York City in the 80s and 90s, again that I've never seen written about in narrative nonfiction. So I think it's value...I mean trans people generally don't need to hear about someone else's transition. They have their own. They kind of don't need it. But this is history. This is really a pre-transition memoir. A lot of the culture reduces trans people to this before and after photo. But you know what happens if the before photo was 50 years…during which you taught 10,000 school children. And you lived this life that was very public but also very private. What do you do with that? And so I just thought it was an interesting writing project, but it did all the things I think you're mentioning, if somebody, wanted to understand the texture of reality. You know, how can you be face to face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?

And allies are people who stay around for the answer. And transphobic people use that very question as a way to delegitimatize us like we're confused. And we don't know, you know, we don't know up from down, and you know...You know trans people aren't real. We're just a construct.

Meanwhile, I've watched my culture try to construct a man out of me for 50 years and it didn't work. So I'm not a cultural construct. But you know, what was it like to go through a life where you don't recognize this essential thing, and how can you write about it? When at the time you didn't have language? And if you don't have language you don't have perception. You don't know what to call it.

When I was the victim of hate crimes and bullying when I was a kid, but what was the hated group? They didn't know when I didn't know. They knew I was different. I mean the go-to thing was to call someone a faggot, you know in my town the worst thing you'd be called.

But where's the evidence? I mean, they couldn't find any boy I was dating, or you know, anything like that, here I was this varsity athlete. I was just.. they.. but still, I was repeatedly...I mean they vandalized my house repeatedly. So...it was just an absence of words, but yet I was a fully trans kid. You just saw it by the result, and you know, I wasn't going to tell anybody, you know how badly I wished I was a girl, and I wished I had, you know, a childhood in my gender. I didn't have those. I didn't have those words for it.

So that made me very interested in writing this, but I also thought it could be valuable because I'd never seen any of this quite written about to my satisfaction, you know, the actual lived reality. To go in there and just kind of excavate that…with all the tools I have learned as a poet and as a journalist. And so you're imagining and writing in part about a lost childhood. Yeah, a lost life, but especially the childhood. Which is what they're trying to do now is to take away people's right to a childhood in their gender. Which is the single biggest thing that makes trans lives precarious. Is the lack of a childhood in our gender, and most non-trans people I mean...It would be horrifying to even contemplate not having had the memory of a childhood in your gender, and then to go through some life crisis without that.

And then even more horrible is to think of going through puberty in the wrong gender. I mean, it's terrifying. That's what the red states, especially super majority red states. That's what they're trying to do. And they know there's a body count. That's the research they did, from the first foray at the bathroom bills to now with like something like 500 bills going after every single aspect of trans lives, but especially kids gender-affirming care. It's pretty grisly.

Tell me about your red state tour. How's it going? What have you learned?

I have learned that the librarians that are safest are really pissed off. Because they can afford to be and the librarians that are going through it and in danger are mostly too panicked to even invite me to come. Because of the danger. Some of them point to a local bookstore. I still consider that the library tour because the librarian opened that up for me, or a college where there could be security so that a lot of them say come. 

You know I can talk about, you know coming to Pella because I'll be long gone before someone sees this. But I never...I never post my itinerary and I never sleep in a town where I speak, just out of safety, but so far. I'm coming to the libraries that are safest and speaking, but it's still red state and they still...you know the librarian in Ames knew very well about Pella, and also Vinton, Iowa, where they chased off three Librarians in a row. I'm just stopping at the library and seeing what it's like for different librarians.

Well, and there's been plenty of controversy here in Pella and the fact that librarians are afraid for their safety, for their funding, for their staff, because a small minority of people want to silence... Not only silence some fine authors but erase a group of people off the face of the earth. That's what they want. They won't say that… they don't. But they want them erased from the library shelves. They want them erased from them... you...

Writers of color. Women talking about agency and rights. You know any woman writing about Reproductive Rights or protecting yourself from trafficking is deemed as somebody writing sexually explicit things?

So by you’re sort of standing in this space. Defending the First Amendment and human rights. Is that how you see it?

I think so. You know, it's kind of like I see this as fascism. Um, even if like it takes place in layers, the leaders know what they're doing. They know they don't care about books particularly. They know they don't care about you know, children's safety. They don't care one bit about the... we know for example that Moms for Liberty doesn't give a damn about childhood safety. Otherwise, they'd be talking about guns, school massacres. I mean they got their start as an anti-masking group. So sort of like the let's not die approach, that wasn't theirs for their kids. So we know that about these people, and we also know they don't really care about access to sexually explicit material for minors because they don't say one word about cell phones. And Google. Kids don't go to a library to rebel.

This is the most obvious thing in the world, but very few journalists ever ask these Moms for Liberty... the simplest questions. What about the internet? That's where a kid goes for porn or it's sexually explicit stuff or even information about being trans. I mean if you want to rebel, you don't go to the school library. That's it's absolutely ridiculous.

So, you know, they're funded by dark money. And they're in conversation with red state lawmakers, you know, they're based in Florida, others places are based, you know, there's a lot of groups, but it's the same model. And so they get the lawmakers, who just want to get elected, you know, DeSantis just thinks that this is going to get him the votes, any kind of you know, he's a white supremacist as well. So that kind of helps along with him staying consistent with his beliefs. I guess his values. So he says okay, what kind of language can I put in this for you to succeed? And then the Moms for Liberty get a lot of parents scared. You know, so they become useful idiots. They might even see what they're doing as fascism even as they try to burn books in Virginia. They really are scared. Because they're kind of owned and useful idiots by these fascists above them. And so they get really scared and crazed about their kids and they get fed disinformation and it kind of works. And the other way it works is it terrifies minorities. I mean people are terrified because of this stupidity, but the stupidity, you know, these stupid people have guns and political power and areas and it's like you know you got these idiots who can kill you.

One thing I don't understand is in raising our kids. We're just all pretty scientific. We explain things when they come with questions. We explain it. They use a bad word we teach its etymology and why people use it and why it's inappropriate and or in some contexts it is appropriate, but I mean, we're just sort of scientific about it and the kids are just like, oh, okay, and I read, when all the hubbub came about for Gender Queer I read it and it was very interesting. It was an ethnography of taking me into that world into that person's world and I found it very interesting, by the time I was through with it that I'd learned so much and I hadn't really noticed the parts that were so “offensive” because they fit into the storyline and you know the panel to whatever... it doesn't really matter but it's all stuff that if my kids or grandkids encountered any of it, but we would just explain it.  I just don't understand it. I want, and so I want my kids and grandkids' worlds to be bigger than mine. They want their kids' worlds to be just a little bit smaller than theirs is what I see and everything approved, where I want my kids and grandkids to rely on teachers and librarians to take them into those places they might not have been comfortable talking with me about it. Yeah, and so it's just a worldview I don't understand.

I mean, I think you're giving the other kind of parent too much credit, even for wanting their kids to have a world at all, you know, whether it's now or not. I think it's really actually very blunt and stupid. This is a white supremacist agenda. If you have a body that is a non-standard body, a gay body, a body of color. You know a trans body, you know a female body, and you care about your rights you are to be erased you are to be told you're a second-class citizen and that's it. I mean when you ban a book about Jackie Robinson, or Frida Kahlo, or Michelle Obama, or Aretha Franklin or Roberto Clemente; we're talking about people, you know, some of whom are on postage stamps. They're banning a book about Anne Frank. That says everything. That's just plain white supremacy. I wouldn't even go into any other motive about, you know conservative values. No way. It's white supremacy. It's fascism plain and simple.

Do the people that are our friends and neighbors... they don't recognize it as that, and so how do...

They're useful idiots. They're good Germans...it's too late to try to be polite about this. Um, you know, how do you talk to a useful idiot? How do you get along with or try to... I don't know. I don't know your neighbors, but I think you know, when I go around…What I what I speak to mostly is someone who might listen to, what are considered the neutral sources of journalism. Let's say NPR. So I'm driving and I'm listening to NPR and the smug commentator calls this a culture war. It's not a culture war. You know, it's not a culture war. The death camps weren't a culture war. Book burning is not a culture War. Jim Crow was not a culture war.

You know Hitler went to school on Jim Crow and Oklahoma. On what we did to Native Americans. Put them on reservations, restrict a group of people, you know who are physically different from a dominant group of people. And we're going to now, we're going to school on Hitler. We've got MAGA Republicans, just importing, you know swastikas and slogans, you know Moms for Liberty is quoting Hitler. And in case there's any doubt after the quote, they write Adolf Hitler right on the cover of their newsletter.

So this is why it's important for you to speak in different venues because here…I really think it's an authoritarian cult that is I mean, I agree with you. I think that we're going down a terrible, dangerous path and it's going to happen, whether it's Trump or it's DeSantis, probably anybody because all the people propping up Trump and trying to you know, weaponize the justice system...if they get DeSantis or Trump or anybody in control, they're going to take over the courts. They're going to take over any independent agency. They're going to fill all of the ranks with people that they've vetted because I see them at Republican events. They're signing people up. Okay. So here I am…

It's basically any alternative source of narrative. So that's the fourth estate. It's also the Department of Agriculture because they're going to talk about climate. It's all the things you're saying, but it's it's capturing alternative sources of… alternative narratives…

…but because I'm sitting here trying to figure things out and trying to find compromises, and I'm acting in some ways like it's 2015. And I think a lot of the media is doing that too before we've gone through this big shift. With the MAGA people and white supremacy and stuff, was always underlying things, but I'm not the target…

Right…

You're the target. So your voice offers a different perspective than my sort of an old white guy perspective trying to figure it out, and so your voice...what I understand and think is probably more readily available. But from your perspective…has much more power, and I'm not the victim yet. You're the victim.

Yeah, and I think it's it's actually always been this way. I mean, you know ask a Black person about America. In almost any decade, I mean they're going to be much more likely... the person you're talking to is much more likely aware of what happened in Tuskegee. You know, so they're going to believe and see, you know, fascist things authoritarian things, you know, incredibly corrupt things… violence... of our government a lot sooner. You know than a privileged person, because they see it. They're not surprised by anything. They were not surprised by, you know, Trump's victory in 2016, and again they're much more ready to just go right to what this is, which is fascism, because they've watched it happen and they've just seen a different reality, and the same for trans people. I mean, With This Body I Wore does, the memoir, it portrays the world that the MAGA folks want to take us back to ...we know what this looks like.

You know, talk to women who have strong and clear feelings about bodily autonomy…they're gonna be much more ready with their perception and what they see, you know, when Tennessee is now going after medical records. They started with trans people. Now, they're going after women who go to out-of-state abortion providers chasing down medical records.

And then Vanderbilt University. Like idiots, like cowards, they give up the medical records of trans people at their clinic. They just give it up. It's like you don't fight that? You don't recognize what that is? You got a lot of privileged doctors. They make a lot of money. I mean, it's fascism. And they don't even tell the patients and the patients know what this is. It's a takeover.

All right, so I said the word “victims.” Okay, but I can't stop with that because we're only victims… you're only a victim, minorities, women, whatever, are only victims if we yield and stop fighting. Then that's where you're stepping, you're standing in that space, and you're fighting back with your red state tour. They want to erase you and you refuse to be erased and librarians are helping you, allies are helping you, but if you and people like you don't. Don't do that.... I mean it's a very dangerous position for you to be in. But what you're doing is courageous...and...

It's not as dangerous as if I didn't do it. I mean there's a reason why Dr. King never canceled a march. So I get upset when they cancel Gay Pride marches. Like, don't do that. It makes it more dangerous. As scary as it is, you know you canceled that, what you're doing is you're telling them that political violence pays off. And so, I really feel like I'm lowering the danger. But you're right. I am stepping in, and I'm taking cautions, and I have to take cautions because it's more dangerous than if I stayed in New York. But I also know that I have better facts. And that's, that's the antidote, although you can't really tell a narrative because they're winning with slogans, blunt, dumb, slogans, just as Hitler recommended in Mein Kampf. Make your slogans blunt. Well, it doesn't get any dumber and blunter than Trump. You know colonizing the brain stems of these dispossessed people in a lot of red states with build the wall, and lock her up, and drain the swamp and they're meaningless, but these blunt slogans...So I have better facts, but I might even have some better slogans because I'm a poet. But yeah, I am stepping into this space and I do see myself, as in a way uniquely positioned, because the ALA gave me a notable book prize. Let's put this prize to good use. I'm no longer... I'm not just the angry tranny from New York. I'm not an outlier, you know person of letters. And I'm an author. And you know, and I'm going to state, you know, the bluntest most sobering, accurate version of the fact of what's going on as I see it, without any politeness, and without any... I've watched The New York Times spend 22 words to avoid the word fascist. I could show you the article. I couldn't believe it. I mean they will do anything not to say that word, and we're just going to sit there and let this happen without naming it? So yeah, that's, you're right. That's the space I'm in and I'm really unhappy with, just the tenor of the dialogue, especially from you know so-called neutral, or even liberal news sources, beginning with this idea that this is a culture war. It is not a culture war. You know civil rights isn't a culture war. It's, it's an erasure when you try to take away civil rights.

Have you written that article that it's not a culture war? 

It's in the Tampa Bay Times, it appeared in late May. And I was glad to have gotten into the best and biggest paper in the reddest state. And yes, the takeaway line that I landed in Florida was book banning isn't a culture war any more than cross-burning. You want to call cross-burning a culture war? You know, go ahead.

Now it's just pretty amazing to me. I have a lot of epiphanies, you know because I just wander around and I try to learn and so whenever something sort of shakes up how I see the world, I find some joy in it. Not everybody does. But you know just that statement. It's not a culture war sort of reimagines my relationship with the media and my writing and I think that... I hope it does a great many other people, too. But I guess that's the purpose of your writing…

Yeah. I mean, it's tricky because we're so used to the gray. I mean as a writer and also journalists in general, I mean, they should delight in the gray. They should delight in that this side of it and that that side of it, and being responsible and going to all people and exercising empathy, etc. I mean, so much of poetry resides in the beautiful complexity and backflips you do in the gray. It's quite wonderful it turns this way, it turns that way. But when an issue is not a two-sided issue, to present it as a two-sided issue is a terrible disservice. You know, I mean you're going to do an article about the flat earthers? I mean you want to present that as a two-sided debate? I mean, that's just bad writing. It's not news anymore. And there's this idea that everything has two sides, and here we got the culture war here. We got this horse race journalism.

The New York Times ran an article of junk science about trans kids where they thought it was smart to interview one detransitioner and one trans person happy with their transition, without paying any attention to the rate, and maybe they knew this, that you had something a 1% rate of people who stop a transition and then you got 99% of these people are saving their lives by doing this. That's a little like doing a two-sided article about the lottery. And half of the people who are interviewed are winners and half are losers. Well, the losers outnumber the winners a million to one. It's not a two-sided issue. Or who lost the marathon… everybody lost the marathon. Oh, let's have one winner and one loser. That's not reporting the marathon. That's just junk science. So this notion that everything has two sides… good luck compromising, you know with totalitarianism. You know, I'm not sure... you know right now DeSantis wants the other side of slavery being taught. Everybody knows it's a farce, but it's also a very dangerous farce. They're not two sides to how black people use learned skills. The thing about slavery we seldom study is, we mostly study the last generation before the Civil War. What about the ten generations before that? You know the blacksmiths who were whipped to death, or died as slaves and what you know, like, so, so I just think the fly in the ointment of the fourth estate is profit.

You know that phrase when Michael Jordan said Republicans buy sneakers, too. They asked him how come you don't talk about civil rights issues and issues concerning black people, he said because Republicans buy sneakers, too. Well, Republicans buy newspapers too. You know you have somebody getting 75 million votes. You know, are you going to print the truth and have canceled subscriptions?

I don't want to take too much of your time, but I know there's something I missed, that I didn't give you an opportunity to speak to. Is there something that comes to mind?

I think I would like allies to know if there are allies that feel like there's nothing they can do, because maybe they're at a loss or maybe they don't know all the facts, or what have you, or it's just daunting and they're in despair because a lot of despair is being produced by what's going on. I would like allies to know that their power is exponential to the power of Queer people. You know, I write an OP ed and it's of course self-interested. If an ally says those same things it's far more powerful. Or even this, the slightest thing about a misgendering. You know, if an ally steps in and says, let me help you out here. You know to the person misgendering; far more powerful than me having to defend my humanity. The idea of having to defend your humanity is already dehumanizing. But when an ally does it, it's right. So I just want to allies to know they have enormous power.

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