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“In fact, I never thought that I would actually transition while my parents were alive. I thought, “Well, it's gonna break their hearts.” That was what I was putting on myself. Even though they’ve always been the most open-minded people. But there was something about coming out as transgender to them, I was like, “Shoot, what's my mother gonna say to this?” And so I remember my partner and I, we went up and I had made an appointment with my mom and dad. I said, "I'm coming up on Saturday, please be around.” It was like two weeks prior to me coming. So for two weeks my mother was a wreck, like, "What, are you dying? What's going on? You never call and say, ‘Well, I’m coming,’ you know, you just appear.” So, we get up there, and I start crying before I can even say any words. My mother's like, “Oh my God, what's going on?” As soon as I finally got it out, then I started apologizing, you know. But my father gets up, and he comes down and kneels on the floor in front of me. He said, “That is the bravest thing that anybody could ever do.” And, of course, now I’m crying all over again, and that's when my mother said, "I knew that there was something, but I never could quite put my finger on it.” - Preston, 52, East Haven, CT, 2016 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/46z9t7N
This image was posted on October 11, 2023.
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