To Survive on This Shore Selections from the South

Abstract

Representations of older transgender people are nearly absent from American culture and those that do exist are often one-dimensional. For more than five years, Dugan and Fabbre traveled throughout the United States creating To Survive on This Shore: Photographs and Interviews with Transgender and Gender Nonconforming Older Adults, which culminated in a fine art exhibition and book about the lives of older transgender Americans. Here, portraits and interview excerpts with participants from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., are shared in order to highlight the ways in which transgender people are aging in the South. Participants’ experiences reflect the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and geographic place and point toward a diversity of lived experience and perspectives on aging.