"Not only are they criminalizing parents of trans kids, they're turning teachers and the friends of trans kids into government informants. I view it as the erasure of a people, which is what it is," she says. Even 'community' sounded ridiculous."Īlthough trans representation is greater today than when she was younger, Goetsch says the community is threatened by recent anti-trans legislation in states like Texas and Idaho. Even the word 'trans culture,' that would have been ridiculous to even say that. "We could only see so much or express so much depending on what pocket of trans culture we were in. "There was a whole menu of terms that we used and none of them felt accurate," she says. Now, in her new memoir, This Body I Wore, she writes about coming of age and into adulthood in an earlier era, when she didn't have the language or knowledge to understand what it meant to be trans.
Goetsch went on to chronicle her transition in a blog for the American Scholar. "That's crazy, but it's this sense that I wanted more life."
"I felt that the universe owed me 50 years as a female living this way," she explains. Goetsch, who was 50 at the time, also decided that she'd strive to live to be 100. got to be that to continue life as a man was even scarier than to transition," she remembers.
Poet Diana Goetsch says she had been cross-dressing on the weekends for years when she had a flash of clarity on a solo retreat in 2014: She was a trans woman and she needed to live her life accordingly. Diana Goetsch writes about her later-in-life transition in the memoir, This Body I Wore.