KC Bly

Specht: How did you educate yourself about being transgender?

Bly: About being trans, or transgenderism?

Specht: About transgenderism.

Bly: I did not really have to educate myself about being trans. As for transgenderism/ transexuality, I read a lot of books to start with. I started with Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg. A friend of mine gave it to me when I was a sophomore in college, in 1995 to 1996 at the University of Oregon, which was pre-transition, because she thought I would like it. It became a really powerful book. So I started reading more stuff by Leslie Feinberg. I started researching trans-identified authors, as opposed to people who write about trans-ness and who aren’t. This was in 1998 at UCSC. I was working with CLUH¹ on campus. I used my studies and my work as an outlet for researching trans stuff. I was kind of afraid to identify myself personally with that yet. I did research online. I saw some speakers, but not until later. Just to figure out what transgendered, transexual trans, transvestite—what all those words meant. Also, to figure out where all the pieces: “T, G, B, L”—fit together in terms of politics and community.

Specht: Aside from Leslie Feinberg, were there any other authors that had an impact?

Bly: Loren Cameron’s book Body Alchemy. You’ve seen Transexual Portraits?

Specht: That is the one where he is injecting?

Bly: The cover is a picture of him injecting testosterone into himself. I saw him in the spring of 1998 when the UCGLBTA conference was hosted at UC Santa Cruz. He was a guest speaker; he had his artwork up. I went to see him with my girlfriend at the time. I was petrified and wouldn’t talk to him, and she went to talk to him for me. His artwork was incredible. It was really moving to me, and I got a lot out of his book.

I was raised Catholic, so after I came out as a lesbian in 1994, I joked that Stone Butch Blues was my bible. I think that in my transition from lesbian female to straight male, probably Body Alchemy became my bible, the book I relied on for information and for support, as much support as you can get from not knowing somebody, from an inanimate object.

Specht: You mentioned that you used research academically because you were not able to come out to yourself. When was it that you were able to come out, not just to yourself, but to other people? When was it that you felt comfortable?

Bly: I moved to Santa Cruz in January of 1998, and I was there for about three-and-a-half years total. I spent the first two years living a double life, living as a lesbian within the Santa Cruz lesbian community, and as a male among the rest of the world. It is hard to pinpoint a transition time because, for me, transition is really open-ended. It takes a long time, a bit more for some people than for me. Coming out got stretched out over a period of time. I found myself at the Tom Waddel Health Clinic in San Francisco. They have got transgender Tuesday nights where they just see trans patients. It’s a free public health clinic and I ended up there in June of 2000. I say it like that because it wasn’t really conscious at the time.

There was no deciding factor that made me wake up one morning and say, I have to go now. It was really gradual. It really happened over months, years even. I just sort of ended up there, and ended up talking to a doctor, and ended up getting a prescription for testosterone, and ended up shooting it into my leg, and I have just sort of been doing that ever since. There was not a whole lot of consciousness behind it. I didn’t come out to other people until well after that, until I had been on testosterone for awhile. Because I had been read as male in most of the world for a lot of my life, the physical changes weren’t so drastic as people sometimes believe. It took me a long time to build up the nerve. I told the brother I am closer to, or have known longer, first, and then a few select people in my life, and then my parents. I told my parents like six months afterwards.

Specht: What was your family’s response?

Bly: I had come out to them as a lesbian in 1995, so I had some background in what to say, and how to do it, and what their responses might be. I had always known that no matter what I did my family would love me. They very much instilled that in me. But in the first round of coming out, I was a lot more afraid. The second time around, I had a lot more confidence, because I had already been through the first round and it was okay. And probably because this “coming out” made more sense to me, was a more accurate manifestation of my sense of self. The second time around, everything happened the opposite of the first time. When I first came out to them as a lesbian, I told my dad first and then my mom. [Back] then, when I told my dad, I cried. At the time, I felt a lot closer to my dad than my mom. The second time around, I told my mom first. She asked me, which was really different. I have heard of that happening to people but I never thought my mom… My mom and I are close, but I had never expected that from her. She had recently remarried, and I wanted to take her out to dinner, just the two of us with no husband. I thought okay, I am going to tell her at dinner. We had not seen each other in a while so we spent the whole night talking, [but] it never came up. As I was driving her home, she brought it up. She knew what my job was [Transgender Programs Coordinator at UCSC’s GLBTRC], and that I was invested in trans stuff, and I had trans friends. So she brought up that I had been coming to the city a lot, and one of us brought up testosterone. She said, “Is that something that you would do, or are thinking about doing?” I was like, “Uh yeah, I guess I have been doing that for a while now,” and she was like, “Okay, I thought so. I noticed the mustache.” [laughter] That was pretty much how my mom is. She is very inquisitive and very supportive. She wanted to know where she could get support, and I directed her to PFLAG [Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays].

I went to a PFLAG meeting with her and we both agreed that she was, not at all to be insulting, but she was ahead of anybody else there. She could have taught the class, because she did not need the kind of support they were offering. She was okay. She reads whatever I give her. She wants stuff to read, and I think any support she needs doesn’t come from others. It doesn’t come from outside; it comes from helping other people out. So I have hooked her up with a few moms of other trans people. She is great, and she gets a kick out of calling me her son. There is a picture on my dresser of me and her and her new husband on the day they got married. When she gave me the picture she said, “Look, it’s my two boys,” which made me very happy. She got married right after I came out to her.

With my dad, it was the opposite of what happened the first time. This time he cried, which was a little unnerving, because my dad is a very stoic figure in my life, and someone I have always relied on and looked up to. But once we got to talking, we figured out his biggest problem with my whole transition was that he doesn’t think people should lie. It took me a while over dinner to convince him that my living as male is not a lie but rather a truth. Once he got that, the rest just fell into place. Since then, he has been cool. He actually had a twin brother who died the month after I started taking testosterone, and so for him and for his mother (my grandmother) my transitioning to being male in their lives is taking the space that his brother’s death… The void that that left. So they work it out for themselves that way. They’re identical twin brothers and yet everybody says that I look like my uncle, which I think is true. There is something about our attitudes that is similar. Once my dad and I developed a kind of relationship around it where we could joke or make fun, both my dad and my grandmother have had an easier time with it. Like being able to say things like… My grandmother’s friend’s grand-daughter just had a kid, and it is a little girl, and they really wanted a boy, and my dad can say things like, “Well, you know these things change.” [laughter] That makes it easier for them. It’s great.

Specht: Do you identify as a feminist?

Bly: That one’s tricky. I hate to hesitate at it. I do, all right. Everything that feminism means to me I identify strongly with. [But] the word itself has become problematic.

Specht: Why so?

Bly: Because that word, that identity doesn’t get you very far unless you are on a college campus. It backfires a lot. It means a lot of negativity to most people who aren’t on college campuses. Everything that feminism stands for, I still believe in and always have. I am not as prone to throwing that word around as I used to be.
Specht: What do you believe feminism stands for?

Bly: I haven’t had to articulate that in a long time. I think feminism is about creating a world in which women have the agency to do what they want, in a nutshell, in which women aren’t oppressed by virtue of being women. It’s all so tricky now that the use of the word women is subjective. Especially because feminism is about more than gender— it can’t be separated from issues of race and class and sexuality, and that’s something the word feminism has failed to make explicit, historically speaking.

Specht: What was it like being trans in UCSC, and also in Santa Cruz?

Bly: There were parts of it that were really easy, and I think there are opportunities I had there that I would not have had anywhere else. I was in an environment where people were more willing to accept the choices that I was making overall, compared to the rest of this country and the rest of the world. I was in a space where I had access to information and the knowledge that I needed, sort of. I mean, I found out about the clinic I go to from a friend who lived here in San Francisco. I could compare notes with my transidentified friends in Santa Cruz, which I probably would not have been able to do in too many places.

At the same time, there were things that made it hard. There is such a large lesbian population in Santa Cruz; that makes passing in general for a lot of trans men very difficult. Passing for a lot of trans men is incredibly important. The entire experience of being trans rests on that, on which gender people are going to see you as. So when you are female-to-male, and maybe just look like a masculine woman to people… People who are accustomed to seeing masculine women are more likely to see a trans man as a masculine woman, which can be incredibly invalidating. That didn’t happen to me a lot because I was read as male for so long anyway. But it made my transition a little harder. It made the use of public bathrooms incredibly frustrating, sometimes frightening. I am not friends now with any of the butch lesbians that I was friends with. There was a big divide there, and we took separate paths, and that was difficult. I lost my support network. I lost my community. They might tell you that I left them behind, that I didn’t lose them, but that I went off on my own. And honestly, we had our differences. Part of our great bond rested on our similarities as queer, masculine, female-bodied people. So when I was no longer (identifying as) female-bodied, our bond was weakened.

What I got to study, and the job I got to do really facilitated my transition. When I finished school in June of 1999, I had moved back into the city [San Francisco] for a couple of months. I had heard that a student on campus wanted to start a trans group, so Deb [Abbott] hooked him up with me because I worked in student groups. I worked with that student for awhile, and I got to thinking, gee it would be really nice if there were someone on campus to talk to about this stuff. I called Deb and said, “I think there should be somebody on campus who does this stuff. I think that should be a job out of the resource center. There should be someone you pay to do this, and I think I should be the person.” She said okay. I would not have been able to create that job very many other places. I was certainly the only transgender programs coordinator in California, and we thought at the time probably in the country.

Specht: How did living in Santa Cruz shape your GLBT identity and politics?

Bly: There was a lot more opportunity for openness there. I think there was something about it being a small town and being relatively politically liberal. San Francisco is known for being pretty political and liberal, but I think it would have been too big for me to do the things I ended up doing in Santa Cruz. Being part of the Santa Cruz community politics—on and off campus—also taught me about the links between race and sexuality and race and gender in ways I’d never considered. Working with and knowing folks from Queers of Color, especially, opened my eyes to the world beyond white queerness.

Specht: Was there any GLBT content in any of the classes you took at UC Santa Cruz?

Bly: I was a women’s studies major. [laughter] There was a lot of lesbian content. All my classes were women’s studies. I took a politics class for a general education requirement and we read Catherine MacKinnon, I think some of her [book on the] politics of sexuality. I don’t know if there was any other explicitly GLBT content.

Specht: Were trans issues brought up in any of your classes?

Bly: Depends on how you define trans issues. Gender was brought up. I don’t remember there being a lot of explicitly trans stuff in the curriculum. I know I brought a lot of trans stuff to my classes, like, “This is what I want to write my paper on, so I am going to. [laughter] Is that okay?”
OH! Scott Morgensen. Scott Morgensen is the best professor ever!

Specht: Which class did you have Scott Morgensen for?

Bly: I think it was Gender in U.S. Societies that I took with Scott Morgensen. It was great. He infuses his classes with trans stuff, intersex stuff, and lesbian, gay, and bi stuff. And they’re not all white people, the authors that he assigns, bell hooks, some other real big name lesbians of color. The curriculum was created for people who hadn’t necessarily thought much about gender before. We got to Kate Bornstein’s Gender Outlaw in the last two weeks of class, and a lot of us wrote on the evaluation in the end of the course that we would love to see a course that was these last two weeks blown up for ten. I TA’d for Scott in spring of 2001. That class was Lesbian and Gay Social Worlds. It was a community studies class. He hated that title; that was a department title. He brought a lot of intersex and trans stuff, as well as lesbian and gay and bi stuff in.

Specht: Were there any other classes that may have brought up trans issues?

Bly: Except for Scott, I don’t think there was much.

Specht: Was it easy to always bring it up, or did you have to stretch to bring it up?

Bly: Whether or not it was easy would depend on my confidence level, and it would depend on the environment the professor was creating in the room. Some professors made it a safe space (I hate that term!), and may have made it a more comfortable atmosphere for me to do that in, but I may have not felt confident that day. There was one professor, Samantha Frost, who I don’t think is there anymore, with whom I could bring it up. I think I was doing most of the bringing up. That may not be totally true.

Specht: In terms of the reactions of the students in the class, as well as the professor, was it comfortable to bring it up?

Bly: I always got the impression when I was there that, especially in the women’s studies community at Santa Cruz, everyone is so excited about being… There is a lot of investment in being politically correct, especially in the classroom, in a women’s studies classroom. So I always got the impression that people would feign excitement. Whether or not they actually took to heart what they were talking about outside the classroom, it only seemed really interesting to them in terms of academia. So I would have a hard time saying it was really genuine all the time. But I never felt like I was getting a negative response. I got the genuinely invested responses from the people I worked with in CLUH.

Specht: As a student, what kind of activities or activism were you involved in?

Bly: I started with CLUH in the fall of 1998. It was a student group that hadn’t really been functioning.

Specht: Why wasn’t it functioning at the time?

Bly: There are a lot of reasons. I was never really sure. I think it boiled down to nobody was interested in taking up the torch, actually pursuing it.

Specht: And what did you do in CLUH?

Bly: In the fall of 1998, Lee Maranto (that is my youngest brother), he and I, and Deb Abbott, and a few other people sort of re-founded CLUH. We founded what is now CLUH. I went to Deb wanting to know if there was some sort of speakers bureau like Triangle Speakers, or something about queerness or GLBT stuff that I could get involved in, because I had done that in Oregon when I went to school there. She said, “Well, there is this thing called CLUH, but nobody has done anything with it since I have been here.” She thought, well, we’ll just get a group of people together to just sort of revive it. So four or five people met that fall, thinking, we’ll just revive this. We looked at the manual and all of us were like: there are fundamental problems with this model, with this workshop, with the way this is done. None of us liked it. So we thought, well, we will just redo it. We thought, this is easy, by next quarter we’ll be ready to go. We ended up spending… There was a group of us that ranged… Well, on some days it was just Lee and me, but it was mostly between four and twelve people who worked on this for a year and a half. We totally recreated the workshop. The only thing we kept was the acronym. It had stood for something else. So I was a co-founder to begin with and a co-chair, because, when it was just Lee and I, we were the two co-chairs, and I was the secretary and he was the treasurer. My second year, I was just secretary, and I worked with other members who wanted to take on those duties, so as to replace myself.

Then the third year I just did the workshops, and I was still on what we called the executive committee, which just meant I was so obsessed I still went to meetings every week. That was the main bulk of my student activism. Everything else I did sort of stemmed from that.

Specht: As a student were there any other activities you were involved in?

Bly: Like extracurricular activities?

Specht: Just stuff for fun, for yourself.

Bly: Oh wait! For fun for myself? [laughter] Oh no, there weren’t any of those [spoken in sarcastic tone] for fun for myself. I went to the bar on Wednesday nights.

Specht: Why did you go on Wednesday nights?

Bly: It was lesbian night/women’s night.

Specht: Which bar was this?
48The new CLUH, now Challenging, Learning About and Undermining Heterosexism, was formerly known as the Coalition for Learning about and Undermining Homophobia. The original CLUH workshops were inspired by a workshop performed at UCSC in 1987 by lesbian activist Nikki Feist from Wesleyan University. UCSC students Julie B. and Scottland J. adapted and elaborated on that workshop and developed the role-playing model used by CLUH until the spring of 1998. Their strategy was to put presumably heterosexual participants in the shoes of gay or lesbian people in order to bring awareness about the struggles and prejudices faced by gays and lesbians, emphasizing that “we are everywhere,” from every racial, ethnic, and religious background. The current C.L.U.H. model is the culmination of numerous ideas developed from November of 1998 through the present. Throughout this time the focus of the organization has shifted from concentrating on homophobia, to addressing heterosexism.— from the CLUH statement on history. http://cluh2.tripod.com/history.html

Bly: The Dakota, and I would go sometimes on Monday nights when they used to have salsa night.

Specht: Do you dance at all?

Bly: Yes. I just like salsa but I can ballroom dance. And I can line dance, to country. There weren’t too many extracurricular activities just for me. [laughter] It was activism. CLUH was my passion, my fun, my extracurricular activity.

Specht: I know that while you were a student you worked at the Women’s Studies Library. What made you interested in doing that?

Bly: That collection of books seemed like such an important resource for so many people, for the women’s studies students to write their papers, but it would have been nice if everybody on campus could have checked out their books. I used to go to the library around the corner from my house when I was little, and every time I would look something up of interest to me, it was not there but at the main library downtown. Whenever I wanted to do research on a project in grammar school, they did not have the books I was interested in. It seemed like such a good idea to have that collection available to people. They had to have people in the room in order for the door to be open, so [I said] “Sure, I’ll do it.”

Specht: Did anything for the library get accomplished that year?

Bly: It’s a little tiny room. It’s in the same room right?

Specht: Yes.

Bly: There were bookshelves lining the walls, totally packed with books, and boxes on the floor full of books that had not been catalogued at all. I think that was the plan, to have them catalogued. They weren’t in any particular order. They were kind of categorized by theme. I always had a hard time finding stuff in there. [laughter] They were supposed to decorate it, make it more welcoming; they were talking about putting posters in the walls.

Specht: How long did you work for the library?

Bly: One school year.

Specht: Once you graduated from UCSC, what was your involvement with the University?

Bly: I finished in June 1999. I still had one more class to take for my degree, but I moved up to the city and was commuting. It was a seminar so I only had to go one day a week. I stayed involved with CLUH, and that was when I got to talking to Deb about creating this position, and she agreed to do that. Meanwhile I also got involved with the Diversity Center which is the Santa Cruz County LGBT community center. I had gotten involved with them, and I had gotten involved with Triangle Speakers, which is the county’s educational group. It does workshops for high schools. Then I got the transgender programs coordinator job. So I was working with all three of those.

At the Diversity Center, I was a board member. I also started acting as a moderator and organizer for SCOUT, which is the Santa Cruz Organization Uniting TransMen. It was like our own little version of FTMI [Female to Male International], So after I finished school I was working with all of those groups simultaneously, and doing a lot of being a bridge between the campus and the community, trying to connect trans people on campus with trans people in town, because for the most part the trans people in town were older and had been transitioned longer, and trans people on campus were younger and just starting to transition, and wanted mentors and information. So I would get them to meet each other. I brought some friends that I had from town to a couple of meetings on campus to this group, Genderation X. A big bulk of my job on campus was organizing and maintaining that group, which was hard to do. I created a lot of workshops, because after my history with CLUH, it just seemed like second nature to design educational workshops for anybody who wanted them, but more specifically about being trans, because CLUH was more about combating heterosexism. I also brought speakers to campus. That was all part of the job, doing education on campus for the non-trans people about what it means to be trans, and what the relevance was to them, and then doing education for the trans community on campus about whatever they needed to know, if they wanted to transition, how to, what their identities would mean to them, getting them in touch with each other.

Specht: I want to talk more specifically about some of the different organizations you were involved in. Please tell me about what you did with Triangle Speakers?

Bly: I worked with Triangle Speakers for a long time. It is a Santa Cruz County-based organization that does workshops mostly in high schools, although I think they will work with younger grades if they get approval. There are different rules for that. Their workshop model is, I think they have an hour, or in most high schools fifty minutes, and they have four panelists and a moderator. They’ll go into classrooms, usually like a health class or something, and their four panelists will be one gay man, one lesbian woman, one bisexual person, and a parent of a gay man, lesbian woman, or bisexual person. It has been around for at least ten years, maybe fifteen. They have a history of having a real problem with trans-identified members of the community. GLBT gets lumped together a lot. And they were working for the GLB cause and not addressing anything too related. They had all sorts of reasons for it, and different trans-identified people in the community had different responses. Some were really offended and felt they should be a part of it. Some were like, “We don’t want to be part of it anyway. Transexuality is not the same as homosexuality.”

In the end, about a year-and-a-half ago Rahne Alexander and I did a workshop for the Triangle Speakers board members. It was a variation on the CLUH workshop, but it was trans-specific, because they were thinking about, how do we get trans people involved with the workshop? They had logistical problems and they had problems with who thinks what about whom. When we did that educational thing for the board, I think that opened up a lot of opportunity to them, and gave them some insight into, okay, if we are really going to consider adding a fifth slot to this panel there are a lot of things that we have to think about. So they created a Pro-Diversity Committee, that is what they called it, to deal with the issue of what they called transgender inclusion, and to deal with the issue of what they called cultural diversity, because the majority of Triangle Speakers were white, and they knew that there was a huge Latino population in Santa Cruz County. They wanted to be able to go to high schools with the higher Latino populations and have panelists that, in terms of cultural background, could relate more. Eventually, I think they want to be able to do all-Spanish panels as well. So they created this one Pro-Diversity Committee to address all these issues, which is a little problematic, but it is not like they are totally separate. I was on the committee, so I worked with them for a long time on how to do all of those things as best as they could. They ended up changing their mission statement to incorporate transgenderism, and they are working now on educating all their speakers on what the relationship is so they can better incorporate the transgender panelist.

Specht: So you still do work with Triangle Speakers?

Bly: I just got an email from one of the board members asking if I knew anyone who could help with, or if I would help with the education of all of their volunteers. Rahne and I are thinking about doing one, along with a guy named Gene Bush, who is a teacher in the Santa Cruz city schools. He’s a real good educator.

Specht: When would that take place?

Bly: I think this summer. The Pro-Diversity Committee suggested to the board that they commit to having everyone in the organization have gone through some workshop that has not yet been created [laughter] by January 1, 2003 or 2004. There are something like 250 people.

Specht: When you were talking about Genderation X you mentioned that it was difficult to organize. Why was that?

Bly: It’s hard to pull any group of students together around any common issue. Students are busy, and students with personal issues that pertain to an identity or politics are more busy most of the time. Students who are already politically active, who are dealing with maybe coming out, or whether or not to transition, or all these really heavy emotional issues, are even more busy. So try to find one day a week, or two days a month, where they can all get together and talk about all this stuff they have in common that’s keeping them so busy. It’s hard to do. I don’t know if this happens in general. I think the dynamic I was working with was a handful of students who were really busy, really burnt out, and really emotionally overwhelmed. Who, as much as they wanted and needed the support of each other, just couldn’t commit more time. One of the most active people in the group was someone who sometimes identified as FTM and had some identification with being lesbian, and had identification with being of color, and had identification, relationship sort of to being a woman. So this person was really busy and wanted to be active on all these fronts, and wanted to study and graduate. That was probably the person who would have been the point person if I hadn’t been there. It was supposed to be a student organization, so it was supposed to be a student in charge, but that person was really busy at the time. That is what made it the hardest.

Specht: When Genderation X was running, was it set up as a support group?

Bly: It was all kinds of things. Because of everything I just said, it couldn’t be too organized. So whatever people wanted, there weren’t any givens there. There were some meetings that were more like support meetings. It was a social group. There were meetings where people just came to hang out. There were only two or three people there. There was a little bit of activism involved more from just a couple of people, not from the group in itself. But the group ranged from two people, to, I think, the biggest attendance we had was thirteen people, including non-trans allies, which the group was open to.

Specht: Who decided the group would be open to allies?

Bly: The students who were there more often. We talked for a long time about what sort of role the Genderation X group should take. We had a couple of meetings about mission statements, and it was the consensus, at least, that it should be dedicated to talking about gender and transgenderism, and if you weren’t trans-identified it didn’t matter. You could come, but the space was for talking about those issues. I think it was understood, although never put into writing, that priority in terms of space to speak should be given to the trans-identified people, people who were thinking about issues more personally.

Specht: Was there also a space for partners of people who were trans?

Bly: I don’t remember anybody ever coming to a meeting and talking about that. It was talked about in theory. I think there was space for it. I am not the partner of a trans person, and I wasn’t at the time, so it is hard for me to say I would have been comfortable there, but I think and hope that we made that space available, so if someone wanted to come they could have. I know we didn’t discuss it as explicitly as we should have, or as explicitly as I would have liked, in retrospect.

Specht: Since you don’t have your position at the GLBT Center on campus anymore is that why Genderation X is not around?

Bly: Probably. I have stayed in touch with the one person I mentioned who would have been the person to carry it forward and that person cannot do it right now. So I would imagine so. I was dedicated. I was given an opportunity to dedicate a lot of time to that. I was paid to think about it, and to physically be in that space, and say, “Come here,” so obviously I had more of a chance to do that.

Specht: That just shows how important your job was.

Bly: Certainly.

Specht: I know now you do not live in Santa Cruz, but do you ever work with anybody at CLUH anymore?

Bly: I have not done workshops in a while, although even after I left Santa Cruz I was involved in the trainings. We did two trainings a year and I was involved in those. I wasn’t involved in the last training for the first time, which was kind of sad for me. I didn’t even know it was happening. I had been on the CLUH email list, and then when I moved back here to San Francisco in August 2001, for personal reasons I needed to clean house and distance myself from a lot of what I had done in Santa Cruz. So I removed myself from the email list along with six or seven other email lists. It’s all new. All the people who are doing CLUH now are people I have never worked with. Maybe there are two or three people who I did CLUH with. So I am not as up-to-date on what they are doing. Lee still goes to some of the meetings, and when I talk to him I ask him what’s going on. I know the workshop model is changing again, so I would do a workshop but I think I may not even know how. I would like to know. I sort of keep tabs from a distance because it is something I am proud of.

Specht: What is your best memory of CLUH?

Bly: I had a lot of fun at the beginning. When it came time to write the first manual, it had pretty much boiled down to myself, Lee Maranto, Ilona Turner and Aron Ford. And the four of us did most of the work for a long time. We had endless meetings; we had three or four hour meetings. We spent literally days writing that manual sitting in Aron’s little studio. I remember that really well because you know how you can get sleep-deprived, especially when you are a student and you are really accustomed to being sleep-deprived and getting a little delirious. We all had our quirks. I hadn’t met any of them before we had started; Aron and Ilona I think knew each other. But we had to get used to each other’s personalities. It was such a learning experience overall.

Some of my favorite memories… The interim period when I lived in San Francisco in the second half of 1999, it was still the four of us having meetings. They drove up to the city one night to have a meeting here so I did not have to go to Santa Cruz. We were here having a meeting till like midnight, and then we went out. I walked them out to their car and Ilona’s car had been towed and we had to go downtown to get it back. [laughter] We dedicated such chunks of our lives. I learned so much about myself through that process. I think that’s what really stands out for me. In a lot of ways I think I transitioned, or was able to transition, because of the connections I made through that work, because of the network I had around me, because of Lee, Aron, and Ilona.

I remember somebody came to a meeting one time in the very beginning… I now realize in retrospect that she had some really wise things to say, but at the time she made a comment that we were just a bunch of white lesbians sitting in the room, trying to do purportedly anti-racist work, and that fundamentally wasn’t going to work. At the time that was incredibly difficult to hear. We had dedicated a lot of time and energy and we wanted to do the right thing, so we did not want to hear that. I remember figuring out later how important it was that she did say that, and then also realizing that we weren’t a bunch of white lesbians in that room at all. How much personally we all developed through that process. We changed.

Specht: Do you think if that same person saw CLUH how you actually left it when you moved out here, do you think they would make the same comment?

Bly: She and I stayed in touch. There was a lot of tension between us for a long time, but I think she ended up being more or less pleased with what happened. But a lot of what happened was because she was really hard on us. It’s thanks to her that a lot of where we were going and a lot of what we were thinking changed.

Specht: Do you think CLUH has become a lot more diverse as far as the people within it now?

Bly: Oh, definitely! Lee, Erin, Ilona and I are all white. That is not true anymore, at least it wasn’t when I left. That is to say, not all the members are white. It was still mostly female-bodied women, and I think it is safe to say the majority were lesbian-identified. So those numbers hadn’t really changed. But I don’t necessarily think that’s a huge problem. I know that there are problems inherent in that, but I also think about the dynamic of Santa Cruz and the dynamic of the campus. And I’m more or less okay with that.

Specht: Imagine in the year 2075 someone reading this oral history. What would you like them to know about your life as a trans person at UC Santa Cruz?

Bly: My life as a trans person. It was just a life. For me it was a regular life.

Specht: What I am asking is, just imagine how society is going to be different, and how accepted or not accepted trans issues will be. What would you want them to know about how life was at UC Santa Cruz when you attended school there?

Bly: I think I would have to stick with the same answer, that my life, that being trans, that transitioning at UC Santa Cruz, in Santa Cruz, didn’t feel like anything spectacular. It is kind of how I feel about life in general. It wasn’t incredibly painful and depressing. (I know some people go through that.) And it wasn’t really amazing, like a big celebration, and some people do it that way. It was just my life. I was watching Riki Lake [on television] the other day and she had on this “Dude or Something” pageant. It was horrible! It was twelve people, and the audience had to guess if they were really male or female. It was incredibly offensive to me, and it is just all this glamorizing about this gender-bending and transgenderism, although they never ever actually used that word, which amazed me. I feel like transexuality and transgenderism is so blown out of proportion negatively in the media. I guess that is what I keep coming back to. My life is just my normal life, like it would not be normal to anybody else. Normal is incredibly subjective, but it is just my life. And that’s it.

1. The new CLUH, now Challenging, Learning About and Undermining Heterosexism, was formerly known as the Coalition for Learning about and Undermining Homophobia. The original CLUH workshops were inspired by a workshop performed at UCSC in 1987 by lesbian activist Nikki Feist from Wesleyan University. UCSC students Julie B. and Scottland J. adapted and elaborated on that workshop and developed the role-playing model used by CLUH until the spring of 1998. Their strategy was to put presumably heterosexual participants in the shoes of gay or lesbian people in order to bring awareness about the struggles and prejudices faced by gays and lesbians, emphasizing that "we are everywhere," from every racial, ethnic, and religious background. The current C.L.U.H. model is the culmination of numerous ideas developed from November of 1998 through the present. Throughout this time the focus of the organization has shifted from concentrating on homophobia, to addressing heterosexism. --from the CLUH statement on history. http://cluh2.tripod.com/history.html