"My OwnSetofKeys": Meditations on Transgender, Scholarship, Belonging Bobby Noble As I sit down to prepare the writing of this essay, I am struck by the profundity of a series of conversations staged in Jules Rosskam's experi mental documentary, Against a Trans Narrative (2008).1 Rosskam seeks to question the political use but also the existence of one single master narra tive that explains transgender both as a political narrative but also as a per sonal one. The documentary is troublesome, in the best sense of the term. It delves deeply into the many narratives and discourses circulating over the past ten years or so about transgender in feminist contexts, queer communities, across age differences, as it materializes through racial differences, as a medical and clinical practice, and as the subject of much agonizing debate for transgender people as well as for their partners before, during, and after transition. Rosskam does not shy away from the controversial conversations and in fact uses an intelligent mix of the elements of the documentary form (the authorial voice-over, confessional one-on-one conversation, group encounter sessions) and combines them with fictional scenes (the reading of a script by actors, the staging of differ ent scenes as rehearsal and then again, as the "real" scene, and so forth) to render the single transnarrative all but impossible. The film's strengths are the multiple group encounter sessions where each group is constituted around one particular demographic—young, mix raced gender queers, self-identified lesbian feminists, queer women of color Feminist Studies37, no. 2 (Summer 2011). © 2011 by Feminist Studies, Inc. 254 BobbyNoble 255 over the age of fifty-five, to name just a few—where the group is filmed trying to "come to terms" with transgender. On the one hand, several groups of self-identified lesbians discuss the emergence of transness relative to what was possible in the old heady days of lesbian feminism. It is true, they note with sharp analysis honed over many years of passionate debate, that twenty-plus years ago, there was no possibility of claiming a trans iden tity, because the language, technologies, and possibilities for such a thing did not yet exist. Does that make it fair now to have to make space for such a thing? But, a younger group of gender queer, queer, and trans youth answer that polemic: but the option does exist now. As such, why do geni tals have to function as membership cards? Moreover, members of a Books Discussed in This Article The Transgender Studies Reader. Edited by Susan Stryker and Stephen Whittle. New York: Routledge, 2006. Transgetider Rights. Edited by Paisley Currah, Richard M. Juang, and Shannon Price Minter. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Imagining Transgender: An Ethnographyof a Category. By David Valentine. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Special issue, "Trans-," Women's Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 3, 4 (2008). Edited by Paisley Currah, Lisa Jean Moore, and Susan Stryker. younger group of activists reply that feminism continues to expand and grow; being male, they say, in the best of ferocious intersectional critiques, isn't necessarily a privilege for all men. Why do we have to subdivide to belong? Rosskam, on the eve of surgery, frames it this way in a quiet autobi ographical moment in front of the camera: "What is it I have to do to face my reflection in the mirror? And what is it that 1 have to do to face my community? And what do I do when these produce different kinds of answers?" I am struck by the beautiful and impossible lived messiness of such heartfelt questions both in the documentary and also as the noisy context for grappling with transgender as the category, its communities, and their 256 BobbyNoble attendant scholarship grow into the twenty-first century. Some back ground explains both the beauty of this impossible messiness: I turned fifty this year. I have spent thirty of those fifty years living a committed lesbian life that has included a stint inside the minefields of white lesbian feminism, memories that stand in stark contradiction to the spaces of boy/boi/trans man I currently live in, again, which seem in tension with...