Portraits and stories from the older trans community

Forgotten voices — For five years, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre travelled across the US to hear – and share – the rarely heard stories of the country’s older trans citizens.

From 2013 through 2018, photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre travelled across the United States to meet with older trans and gender non-conforming people who live on their own terms, surviving and thriving despite all of life’s unexpected turns.

Understanding the power of representation, Dugan and Fabbre assembled an incredible collection of portraits and stories of people who live within the complex intersections of gender identity, race, ethnicity, sexuality, class, geographic location, and age for the incredible new book To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer Verlag). The result is a phenomenal portrait of people from all walks of life who have lived to tell their tales – a feat unto itself given the fact that the average trans life expectancy is just 35 years old.

“From the beginning, we were mindful of trying to include as wide a range of experiences as possible,” Dugan explains. “Some people may think of LGBTQ as one community, but each person featured in the book approaches their identity in a different way.”

SueZie, 51, and Cheryl, 55, Valrico, FL, 2015 © Jess T. Dugan

“One of the things I was most proud of was the complexity of these experiences and the levels of nuance. The trans and gender non-conforming experience runs across all places and lifestyles, and it’s really quite a broad group. I wanted to make each person relatable as an individual and moving away from the stereotyping of the people of a group as being all the same.”

This awareness led Dugan and Fabbre to unexpected pockets of the nation, far off the beaten path, into small towns, inside churches, and among military veterans. Consider Dee Dee Ngozi, 55, from Atlanta, Georgia, who lives with HIV. She created the first trans ministry in her church, helping people deal with their struggles in life. Hers is just one story of self-acceptance and personal strength; the book is filled with figures of power who have so much wisdom to impart on a new generation coming of age.

“I think representation is really important and when you grow up in a society never seeing yourself represented that can be very damaging and difficult,” says Dugan. “Something as simple as seeing an image of someone who you identify with can be very powerful and transformative. That idea is at the core of all of my work.”

Gloria, 70, Chicago, IL, 2016 © Jess T. Dugan

The significance of depicting older adults adds new layers of depth to our understanding of the trans and gender non-conforming communities, giving both the youth a roadmap to consider as well as filling in the missing blanks of history. By sharing their names, faces, and experience, Dugan and Fabbre are expanding the conversation to be a truly inclusive one that is a complex mixture of triumph and tragedy, loss and happiness.

“A lot of the subjects in the book are wrestling with the idea of wanting to live authentically and be seen as their true selves,” adds Dugan. “I wanted to share the stories that are relatable on a human level and then the other elements they choose to share come to supplement the human connection.”

“We wanted to make a book because a lot of the people we featured began to understand their identities at a time when there was no Internet nor a conceptualization of the word ‘transgender’ and the trans community that we now know. We felt like that history was at risk of being lost and we wanted to preserve the stories of the people who paved the way for the world we live in now.”