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“Samm: Hank didn’t know she was a girl until she was around eleven or twelve. She was always the boy in the family. If it was Thanksgiving, Mom and the girls cooked dinner while she and Dad went hunting… They knew that Hank was different from her sisters and Hank’s dad was excited, I guess, about having this 'boy,' and Hank’s mom didn’t object.” Hank: “I always say, 'I’m just Hank. I’m not he, I’m not she, I’m just Hank. I’m who I’ve always been.' “Samm: Hank and I have been together forty-four years. We met after her time in the military, through some Chicago lesbians I had met. They threw a party every Friday night and one of those nights someone said, 'There are some really fine dykes up in Western Michigan.' And then somebody said, 'Road trip!' And thirty hours later, there we were in Kalamazoo. And so I found this one in Western Michigan. She was different from anybody I have ever met in my whole life and I knew that she would be in my life for the rest of my life. There was this immediate connection that would always be there. The way we are today, we started out that way.” - Hank, 76, and Samm, 67, North Little Rock, AR, 2015 Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from our culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For over five years (2013–2018), photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre traveled throughout the United States creating “To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults.” Each portrait in “To Survive on this Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults” by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre includes a powerful interview with each of the featured individuals. See “To Survive on this Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults” on display in the Ruth Kadish Gallery located in the post-security connector between Terminal 2 and Terminal 3, and online at: https://bit.ly/3yd08Gf This image was posted on May 07, 2024.