How a Sci-Fi Convention Exposed A Truth I’d Hidden From Myself For Over 40 Years
My journey from ‘crisis’ to ‘wonderfully normal’ as a trans woman
In a moment of confusion and despair, a storm that had been brewing in my head for more than four decades finally blew itself into a calamitous hurricane. A long-simmering question of identity blossomed into a full-on crisis.
Five years ago, surrounded by four-thousand of my closest friends, I started down the path of finally recognizing myself as transgender.
Every year, my family and I attend Arisia, a science-fiction/fantasy/fandom convention held in Boston over the weekend preceding Martin Luther King Day. Arisia strives for diversity, both in terms of the content of the convention and in terms of its audience. It’s four-thousand-ish geeky people, increasingly skewing younger, many highly invested in outside-the-mainstream-narrative stories, themes, discussions, and identities. Further, the con is held in the capitol of deep-blue, pinko commie liberal Massachusetts — all of which makes it a pretty queer con, or at least one with a sizable queer component to it.
Arisia has always felt like a safe space for people to be whoever or whatever it is they want to be, or to express parts of themselves they don’t often let out…
