To Survive on This Shore: Selections From the South

Here, we share portraits and interview excerpts with participants from Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Missouri, South Carolina, Virginia, and Washington D.C., to highlight the ways in which transgender people are aging in the South. Our participants’ experiences reflect the complex intersections of gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, sexuality, socioeconomic status, and geographic place. Their narratives of growing older illuminate a diversity of lived experience, varied approaches to aging, and, in many cases, they also point to contradictions in southern culture. We hope these portraits and narratives provide a nuanced and complex view into the struggles and joys of growing older as a transgender person in the South, and inspire reflection on what it means to live authentically in later life.