Arizona Equals Shae

On today’s episode of the Arizona Equals Conversation, we’re joined by Shae from Arizona Trans Together for a wide-ranging discussion about mutual aid and community building, hormone therapy and its gatekeepers, and the overlaps between neurodivergent and trans communities. Links * Arizona Equals Celia * Arizona Equals Jesse & Gabe * Brick Road Coffee * AZTYPO * one-n-ten * Erin’s Informed Consent HRT Map Full Transcript Jeanne From Equality Arizona, you're listening to the Arizona Equals Conversation. I'm Jeanne Woodbury. I'm the interim executive director at Equality Arizona, and each week on the show I talk with a queer person living in Arizona about their story and their communities. Today's guest, Shae, is a friend of mine and a friend of Equality Arizona. She's also one of the founders, along with Celia, who we spoke to on a previous episode of the podcast, of a group called Arizona Trans Together, which meets at Brick Road Coffee every Friday night. As someone who grew up in Tempe and didn't have the first idea of how to find trans community, I'm constantly amazed at what that community has grown to be in honestly a really short amount of time. Shae dedicates a lot of her time to community building and to mutual aid, and it was really nice to get to know her a little bit better through this conversation. I feel like something I should preface going into this is that at a lot of points it really is a trans conversation for trans people, and we even recognized that at the time, but it was special for me and it's really cool to have that recorded here for people to listen to because it's unique and it's important and poorly understood. Something else really special was getting to reflect on both of our first days on hormones, and something that makes that extra special is, even though we recorded this conversation almost a month ago, we're releasing it on June 1st, which is actually the fifth anniversary of the first day I started taking hormones. And so that's pretty exciting for me, and it's neat how the timing lined up for this. It's also the first day of Pride Month, and that means it's a great time to support organizations like Equality Arizona and organizations like AZTYPO and one-n-ten that Shae mentions later in the interview. And beyond supporting nonprofit organizations like us, it's a time to invest in community, to invest in mutual aid and direct support. We gotta be there for each other. All right, let's roll the tape. Shae Hey everyone, my name is Shae. My pronouns are she or they. I don't have an official job, but I do a lot of organizing stuff with EQAZ on occasion and with something that I helped start and I help organize called Arizona Trans Together. It's a nice little community building project we've been doing for going on eight months now. Started with like 10 people and it's blown up to nearly 200. Meet up at Brick Road Coffee every Friday, 6 to 10 p.m. It's been a lot of fun. Jeanne Yeah, I noticed that there's been some nights at Brick Road where it's just full to the door and then people are out into the street basically. It's definitely something that has grown a lot in a short amount of time. Shae Yeah, it's nuts. I think on Trans Day of Visibility we had 45 people there all at once. And that's like basically at capacity for Brick Road Coffee. It's a really small space. Jeanne Yeah, it's a nice sized coffee shop, but it doesn't handle, you know, 100 people. Shae It really doesn't. I love the space though, don't get me wrong. Jeanne Yeah, I know, I love Brick Road, and that's where the group kind of got started, right? Shae Mm-hmm. It started with Celia, who was actually on this podcast a while back, and myself, we started going to the Queerizona meetups on Wednesdays. And then we started meeting other trans people there, and we decided to make a group chat on Discord. And then as soon as we hit the max limit, 10 people, we were like, "Hey, what if we start doing our own thing? And why don't we just meet up on Fridays?" 'Cause trans people desperately need their own community space. It's not that queer people in general are transphobic or anything. However, sometimes as a trans person, you have to deal with cis nonsense. And that's a lot of emotional labor. Jeanne Yeah, it is. I think I wanna dive into that a little bit. Not necessarily just like how cis people can be tiring, but just that idea of like where the need comes from and whether it's being served by other groups or if there was just kind of not enough before you put this group together. Shae Oh, I mean, I was the person who like approached Celia to like start this whole thing. And the reason I came at it was kind of personal, actually. Like, when I came out, things got extremely difficult for me. And until I met Celia, I didn't really know any other trans people. Like, Celia was the first person I started hanging out with that was trans, and shared a lot of the same experiences as me. So like, I've noticed in the eight months that we've been doing AZTT, that story is very common. A lot of other trans people didn't know any other trans people. They're basically like alone. And like I have people coming up to me even now saying that like, I'm so glad that y'all started doing this. And I try to tell them, it's like all of us doing this, because it's a community, you know? Jeanne Yeah, and I think that's actually kind of key that it's not just about being the one person. It's about finally not having to be just one person. Shae Yeah. Jeanne I definitely had that same experience where coming out was like, okay, well I know things from the internet and now here I am and how do I find anyone? How do I find people? And clearly — I mean there's a lot of trans people, but there also aren't that many of us. Shae No I think we're like what, basically 1% of the population? That’s a high estimate and like low estimate is like 0.5% of the population. Jeanne Yeah so it's something where there's no real natural community formation, and we have to go out and do that in a proactive way. Shae Like I love the community out in Melrose and stuff, but like a lot of things are very cis gay centered and there's nothing out there that's like trans centered out, at least outside of ASU. There's a lovely group called Trans Fam at ASU. I've been talking with some of the people there They have a nice thriving community as well. And actually we're planning on potentially collaborating and stuff in the future because once you graduate from ASU, where do you go? Jeanne Yeah, well that's the thing too, is that if you find a support group or you find a group at a school or a university, you typically age out. I remember when I was up at NAU several years ago, like really early in my transition, I joined a trans support group and realized that one of the big problems with support groups is it's people who are one to two years into their transition max, and then by the time they're a little farther into their transition, they don't really feel like they want to be in the support group anymore. So it's a lot of people who are really early on, talking to people who are also really early on, and you don't get that intergenerational aspect of trans community. Shae Nah. I won't say that like AZTT doesn't offer support and like one of our like most important values is like building community. And a lot of that of course implies a lot of mutual aid, a lot of building support networks between each other. We've had people that have faced homelessness that have been able to find like places to stay temporarily, sometimes permanently with each other. It's an unfortunate reality for a lot of trans folks like how bad things could be. Like after I started hormones, actually, like, I was living with my best friend while I was going to college in Bakersfield, California and I was immediately kicked out. I was lucky enough that I had a friend who runs a YouTube channel, made a video about my situation and got me out of like the shelter circuit. Jeanne This was all in… This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit equalityarizona.substack.com