Transcript of John Otto

From the Long View: LGBT Elders and Experts Speak, Episode Five

You’re listening to the fifth in a five-part series of interviews conducted by Amber Hollibaugh at the National Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Aging Roundtable in February 2007. Amber Hollibaugh is the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s senior strategist and LGBT aging expert.

For transcripts, photos and more, check out www.theTaskForce.org.

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JOHN OTTO
Uh, John Otto and I’m here in Washington, D.C. for the LGBT Aging Roundtable put on by the, the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and hosted by Amber Hollibaugh.

AMBER HOLLIBAUGH
Here’s my first question. Where do you see yourself in 15 years?

JOHN
Well, 15 years . . . I’ll be 66. And I just recently went back to school because all the type of work that I used to do I can’t do anymore. My body’s worn out, all — all the work I used to do, whether it was skilled or unskilled, required a fair degree of physical labor. And I realized I couldn’t do that work anymore and I was getting less and less calls, and the scope of work I could do within that field had greatly shrunk.

So I went back to school thinking first of all that I was just gonna get a two-year — another two-year degree in database administration, but a worker retraining person — I, I have to thank her. She, she wouldn’t let me just do a two-year degree, even though that’s the programs that she administered. She said, “You have to finish your bachelor’s degree.” And soon as I was enrolled back in school, in a four-year school, a month later she started saying, “Well, where are you going to graduate school?”

And for graduate school, even though really where my passion is is transgender studies and education and activism, it just seemed too iffy to go to graduate school for that area, so I picked library and information sciences thinking that it was a field that I’d be less likely to be forced out as I got old.

A government job with benefits, ’cause I haven’t had any health care benefits in . . . basically 17 years. And most of my life I haven’t had health care benefits, period. I have no retirement that’s anything worth — worth mentioning. And so I’m looking at, what can I do for work for the rest of my life? ’Cause that’s what it’s gonna — that’s what it’s gonna be.

AMBER
In an ideal world, what would you want things to look like in 15 years?

JOHN
Well, for myself personally, I would love to be employed in a capacity where I’m combining library and information science and transgender studies activism, education . . .

As far as what I’d like to see happen in the world, I’d like to see the world be a place where I feel comfortable about being out about being trans. I, I’m not now, and I try to find some sort of — I call it an “uncomfortable balance” between being out in situations where there’s a need-to-know basis, which — that includes the education and activism activities that I do — and also trying to maintain a sense of privacy with something that’s really such a — kind of a delicate, vulnerable, private area of my life that’s not just out there for public consumption.

But there’s always a quandary that in order to do the work that I feel called to do, it’s so much more powerful if I can share some of my personal story. So I try to find a way to do that and yet still maintain enough for myself.

AMBER
Every, I think every group of us in the LGBT configuration bring [sic] unique needs and, and perspectives to our own aging lives. What is it that, as a trans man, you would say is particular and important for people to understand around aging in your community?

JOHN
I think a lot of trans men, more so than trans women, don’t really get started in life earlier because of all the other things that they’re coping with. Often they’re atypical as women prior to transition, and dealing with the sexism in the world of — one, just being a woman and being an atypical woman and just trying to find a place to fit in, trying to find a place where you can work where you can wear clothes that don’t make you feel like a total fool, if you’re working in an office environment and, and . . . dresses and skirts aren’t quite the focus [sic] now as they were when I was in my twenties for working in an office, but there was no way that I could work in an office, ’cause — for a lot of different reasons, but a big part of it that just stopped any consideration of any other compromises I might have to make is the attire. There’s no way that I could fit in in that sort of circumstance.

I knew that if I was forced to live that way, I would ultimately end up killing myself. And so it was very important for me to pay attention to my needs along those lines.

The sort of work that I was drawn to do, as many trans men are, is the sort of work that men tend to want to do. And so being a woman doing more male-dominated work, there’s always those discrimination obstacles to try and overcome. And so I think a lot of us end up feeling we’re outsiders in some way. And we end up dropping out of society in, in certain ways.

I also, I started studying music in grade school and into college and always have hung out with artists. One, because I’m drawn toward those sort of things and, you know, an artist’s sensibility of living. But also because it was a safe place to be where outsiders and where kind of the freaks could be and it was smart people and it was a way where I could be appreciated. One of the few places where I could be appreciated — or just taken as I am. Just, you know, without having anything really held against me for being who I am.

And so ultimately, like many of us artist sorts and like many trans people, it ends up being later in life where we start to realize, “Oh my God, I’m getting old now, or I’m soon to be getting old, and I haven’t had — I haven’t done any of those things that prepare for a secure old age.”

I’m still trying to figure out how to pay the rent, and I’m very much — every single day for, I don’t know, for at least a handful of years, I’ve been thinking about old age and what am I gonna do. Which is partly why I ended up choosing library and information science, ’cause physically I thought I’d be able to hold up.

And I don’t know if this is true or not, but I thought that perhaps librarians would be a little more kind about the doddering old guy (Amber laughs) uh, shuffling around the building. Maybe that’s not true. I mean, there are a lot of pressures in the library world, too. But, I don’t know, I just thought it’d be a better chance.

AMBER
What are you most concerned about as an LGBT person in terms of your own aging issues?

JOHN
I’m very concerned about health care. I’m concerned about the unknowns of — we really don’t know what the long-term implications are of cross-gender treatment hormone use. And we’re not gonna know until — at least for trans men, there’s this whole big crop of, there’s a bubble of people in their 20s and 30s that are starting to transition, and they’re much more out than what [sic] people from 30 years ago when they were transitioning and the numbers are much larger, so it’s gonna be more possible to track what the long-term use is of 30, 40 years, 50 years, 60 years, even, of testosterone use with the natally female body.

I don’t know what might be facing for me. I didn’t start transitioning ’til I was 45, and so my body was in a little bit different place. I was perimenopausal. But I’m still greatly concerned about what might happen, will I have access to testosterone as I get older. Uh, I pay out of pocket for it. The way insurance is set up now, it’s very likely that even if I do get insurance I may still continue to be paying out of pocket.

Will I have enough money to be able to pay, you know, the 20, 25 dollars a month that it currently costs for testosterone use? Will I be able to administer it to myself? Will I have somebody who will administer it for me? Will I s — have people around me that will refuse to administer it because of trans bias? What happens if I’m in, am in a nursing home or, or something similar? Uh, how will I be treated? How will I be respected? Who’s going to take care of me? I have no children. Uh, I’m not particularly close with the rest of my family. I’m not ostracized, but we just don’t have a whole lot in common.

I’ve got a few nephews who I see once a year. Can I count on them to come see me? My friends will be the same age as me. We’ll all be needing care. I know lots of people and I know a lot of people from before I transitioned, and they — a lot of them don’t really quite understand my transition. Will they still be in my life? Has this taken me off in a direction where we’ll just be very much drifting apart and I’ll just be around all these other old trans guys and we’re all trying to figure out how we’re going — where we’re going to live, how we’re going to live, who’s gonna take care of us.

Many of us don’t have children, and just the general discrimination — how am I gonna be treated in an assisted care place? What sort of identity document problems might I have? What’s going to be going on with the government with how they’re treating trans people? The Real ID Act has huge implications in general for all American citizens, but in particular for trans people. Where all the data is all linked up and if it doesn’t match then it gets checked out.

Most of all [sic] my government documents I’ve done a pretty thorough job of hooking things up. But there’s still things that pop up. I found out last fall that in the voter registration records in Washington state, I was listed as female. There’s no way to control that information. It’s already distributed out in the world and there’s no way to retract it.

I knew as I went through all my identity documents that there will always be something that crops up. There’s always some record somewhere that I can’t access.

AMBER
Well, many trans activists have actually talked to me, who are older, about their Social Security cards actually being one of the few places where they had been able to do the changes and now it looked as though through Homeland Security that Social Security card number was not gonna be nearly as flexible a place to begin to change your documents as it had been. And that people were really panicked as older people because the meaning of a Social Security card, if you need Social Security benefits, is very different than just an ID.

JOHN
I was just talking a couple nights ago with Lisa Mottet of the Task Force, who works — lawyer working on the Transgender Civil Rights Project. And we were talking about the Real ID Act. And she was saying that when trans people were very much more flying underneath the radar, they were able to go into government offices, whether driver’s license offices or Social Security offices, and say, “Oh, there’s a mistake on my records. Can you fix it?” Those days are pretty much gone now. And she was saying that it’s very likely that everybody who did change their identity documents through that manner will likely face problems in the future, with Homeland Security and the Real ID Act. And that basically with identity documents, with the states, what the Real ID Act is forcing states to do is to go back and — everybody, not just trans people, but everybody to start from scratch with their records in, in the database.

So even when you’ve done things properly, like I have, you never know when things are gonna change and it’s gonna come back and you’re gonna have to try and — try and cope in a hostile environment. My birth certificate, I haven’t changed it, partly because I was kinda, I dunno, maybe it’s kind of a romantic notion of, it was accurate at the time of my birth and that’s what a birth certificate is for. I don’t have any particular reasons of why I’ve needed to change it.

I — I’ve lost already so much of my past, so much of my history through transitioning. Like, just in casual conversations with people, I can’t talk about how . . . when I used to play softball in the girls’ softball league, unless I’m willing to also out myself at the same time. Which usually, even if it ’s a person I feel comfortable doing that [with], it’s such a detraction in the conversation. It takes so much time away from what we’re really talking about, and it can also potentially just be a bombshell. And so it’s just not something that can casually be mentioned. So it’s just easiest to not mention it. Which ends up leaving me feeling that somehow I’m being dishonest, but I try to live my life in the world as honestly as I can, and so I don’t like that sort of disconnect . . .

Well, with the birth certificate, if I do ever change it it’ll be because, in the unlikely event I decide that I wanna marry somebody, then that will be necessary for me to legally be married. But even then, the legality of marriages where one of the people is trans, those marriages, even if they’re considered legal at the time, do not necessarily stand. There’s been court cases where the legality, the validity of the marriage has been overturned.

AMBER
What would you consider, for the LGBT community, for the T community, to be the single most important policy change that needs to happen in the next 10 years?

JOHN
Identity documents certainly are high up on the list. Very high up on the list. Housing, in combination with a respectful place to — mostly I’m thinking assisted living or nursing homes sort of situation, housing in that respect, though for me it’s just gonna be housing, period. Am I gonna have enough money where I can afford to live? Am I gonna have enough money where I can afford to live in the general location where I want to live?

For me to even consider living in one of the suburbs outside of Seattle, it’s just a place where I don’t get to be around people who understand my experience. And for me, I’ve had enough mental and emotional struggles, I don’t think I can handle that extra burden. And it’s been hard, when I talk with my mentors, to get them to think of that.

20 years is like the bare minimum amount of time you could even get a tiniest, really, amount of, of retirement. I’ll be 71 then. That likely will not be enough. At 71, how will my health be? How will my health be because of trans reasons, because of what’s — the changes in my body? Will that accelerate things? Even outside of that, how am I gonna support myself then? Even now I wonder how am I gonna support myself.

One of the things I’ve learned with transitioning is — well, there are ways that men are treated better, but I’ve also learned that women are treated nicer. And so which, ultimately, is better? Me, being the quite atypical-looking woman prior, I didn’t feel like I experienced much privilege in the world. And certainly not much privilege as a woman. I’ve since learned that I actually had quite a bit of advantages that I didn’t appreciate at the time. It wasn’t until those were gone —

And it’s subtle things. It’s very subtle, nuanced things. But it’s also pretty deeply profound things. And one of the things, in a more practical way, that’s different, is that a man in his fifties, if he doesn’t have a history of accomplishment behind him, it is a much different perspective than a woman in her fifties who doesn’t have a history of accomplishment behind her. And it’s held much more against men than it is against women.

“Oh, okay, you’re a 51-year-old man . . . what have you done?” I was like, “Well, I . . . just finally graduated from college.” And it’s like, “Yeah, but what have you done?” I’m dealing with ageism in a different kinda way than what I was before.

AMBER
That’s really powerful.

I want you to tell me a story that illustrates to you something important around LGBT aging.

JOHN
A friend of mine who’s roughly the same age as me, he had to come home . . . he’s been living in New York for the last 20 years, New York City, and he had to come home to Seattle to help take care of his mother, who was in her eighties, and he thought he was gonna spend three weeks there in Seattle and then go back to New York, and . . . well, he’s been in Seattle for three years now.

His mother has dementia. My friend is a transitioned man. He has the same name that he had prior to transition; he was one of those people with a gender-neutral name. And his mother recognizes him on the phone, but when he shows up to take her places — to take her on an outing, to take her to the doctor, to take her to the grocery store — when he’s face-to-face with her, she doesn’t know that this is her child.

Maybe 30, 40 percent of the time, she thinks that he’s his son. The rest of the time, he’s just kinda — he doesn’t really know quite who his mother thinks he is. That’s he’s just kinda some nice man who does things for her. And he gets to listen to his mother ask him, why doesn’t this daughter come visit her? She thinks that this daughter only will talk to [her] on the phone and doesn’t ever come see her.

You know . . . just kind of the general taking care of your aging parent who has trouble remembering what’s what is hard enough, but I think there’s a personal stab in the heart that makes it especially difficult under those sort of circumstances.

When they are able to look to the future and think of aging issues, very very commonly is expressed a concern of, “Am I gonna remember who I am? Or is that gonna drift in and out? How is that gonna interact with, if [sic] being dependent on somebody to take care of you, and it’s somebody who’s hired rather than somebody who is family?

And even family, for a lot of guys. A lot of guys, their families are not very supportive. I expect that I’ll outlive my parents, and I’m wondering if I’m gonna end up in my friend’s position: Will my parents remember who I am.

But I really wonder, am I gonna remember who I am? I have a hard enough time remembering anybody’s name as it is now! Am I gonna remember what my name is when I’m older? Am I gonna remember what my old name is, and what sort of problems is that . . . Am I gonna remember that I’m a man now? I’ll — I’ve always felt male interally, but still that’s different than how I move in the world.

And even as masculine as I was before and as much as I was one of the guys, with transitioning it’s really pointed out to me the ways that I wasn’t moving in the world as a man. And it makes me wonder now, how am I moving in the world as a man now as much as the average man is?

AMBER
But you’re also talking, I think, about history and about the complicated lives that queer people and certainly trans people have around how we get to have all our history, but the reality of the history we are as an old person not be denied at the same time. And how we will struggle with that for ourselves and how it will be read by people outside us.

JOHN
A lot of trans people, and myself included, if we have to go to the doctor, especially if it’s something where we’ve been injured so we’re going to an emergency room and we’re not seeing our regular healthcare provider, we’re always grappling with, “Do I reveal? Do I tell that I’m a trans man? Is this relevant?”

I tore my Achilles tendon a couple years ago, and I had to go to the hospital and I had to have surgery. I made a point of telling each health care provider along the way, especially with the first one — and I requested that they write it in the chart — that I was a female-to-male transsexual. So then, as I encountered all the other care providers that picked up my chart after that, then I could say, “Did you read my chart?” So I’m not having to say out loud . . . because always in a hospital like that, there’s many, many people around. And so I figured out quickly on my toes that that would be a way where I could be discreet.

Well, as I’m older, am I gonna have the sense to have that sort of discretion and how to create that sort of discretion? Am I gonna be as well equipped to take care of myself under those circumstances? Even though I didn’t expect them to get anywhere near my genitals, if there was an emergency while I was being worked on it might . . . as they have to uncover me to work on me, I didn’t want there to be a moment’s hesitation when they’re trying to figure out what was going on with my body, even if it’s benign trying to figure out what’s going on with my body, you know, and slow down getting the emergency care that I need to save my life in that instant.

Or, what prejudice might come up, and a refusal and disrespect that might be going on . . . as you get older, you’re much more likely to be in those sort of circumstances. The frequency of being in those sort of circumstances increase[s]. The potential for not being able to advocate for yourself increases. I mean, who knows who’s gonna take care of me when I’m no longer able to take care of myself, and what geographic area I might end up [sic] as a result?

AMBER
Is there anything that you want to add?

JOHN
Well, in Seattle the LGBT community center, their big plan is to create a much larger community center than what they currently have. And included in that much larger facility is senior housing. So LGBT senior housing is part of the vision of what they’re working towards.

My experience has been that generally speaking, the lesbian and gay community — which you would think, just on the surface of things are understanding and sympathetic towards the plight of trans people, especially since so many trans people do come from the gay and lesbian community — many don’t, also — but my experience has been that that is one of the hardest communities to deal with. It tends to be people who think they know what trans people are about and what being transgendered is about, but they don’t. And they have a whole lot of opinions about it, too.

And it’s also hard for me personally in that that gay community was always my safe refuge from the rest of the world. But now this place that was my — the place I could go hang out and be around a group of people where I didn’t have to constantly be explaining myself, that has now become the hardest community for me to hang out in. I really have no safe refuge anymore. The closest I come to a safe refuge is within the trans community, but it’s soooo [much] smaller. And it’s not just because somebody’s trans that I have a whole heck of a lot in common with them. I mean, I do have a lot in common with them in many ways, but what about the whole rest of my life?

I often have to sacrifice the whole rest of my life and the things I’m interested in just so I can be around people that are like me in this other way. And consequently, my friends in the trans community are scattered all over the country and I don’t get to see them face-to-face very often, and . . . I don’t really fit in with the straight world, though I am fitting in there in a way that I didn’t before, and it’s really increased my sense of diversity and made it, I think, much more all-encompassing. I think that’s been one of the gifts of transitioning.

But it’s also made me feel much more isolated than what I ever felt before. It’s kinda an odd dichotomy there, where the world has opened up in many ways and yet shrunk very much in other ways. And I expect with aging — well, that’s just something I’ve noticed with getting older period, that that that sort of thing tends to happen as well, and so I expect that this will continue to increase as I get older.

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John Otto being interviewed by Amber Hollibaugh. Produced by Rebecca Fureigh for the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

Check out www.theTaskForce.org for photos, transcripts and resources from the National LGBT Aging Roundtable.