Monika: Merissa was thinking about an international network surprisingly early. Where did that enormous ambition come from?
Dallas: Merissa had a vision for what she wanted the community to become, and people responded to that. Unfortunately, no one quite seemed to know what that vision was. She would get frustrated when someone would affirm her and not get it “right.” Several times she told me, “No, no” when I thought I understood. I think her vision and drive came about because she cared and because there was a pressing need to help people in distress. Even today, many of us are in anguish when we are coming to terms with our natures.
Monika: When you look at the Tiffany Club, Tapestry, IFGE and the conferences together, do you see them as separate accomplishments, or as parts of one larger vision Merissa had from the beginning?
Dallas: I see it as an evolution, as a move from one activity to the logical next. I am certain many Tiffany members felt abandoned when IFGE started. The organization was born in the mid-1980s at an inn on Winslow Street in Provincetown, on Cape Cod, during the then 10-day annual event Fantasia Fair. Fan Fair, now known as Transgender Week, started in 1975 and is now in its 52nd year. It has been called The Mother of Transgender Events because so many organizations and community leaders and conferences were born there.
I think Tiffany, despite having played a critical role, and Fantasia Fair, which she attended and in which she held a position of leadership, were stepping stones on the way to her vision, which was IFGE and the community that formed in and around it. The annual conference, which was called “Coming Together-Working Together,” was a tool to build that community. It was all in pursuit of the goal Merissa had that no one I know seemed able to quite figure out.
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| Virginia Prince receiving an award at IFGE March 7th, 1987.© Mariette Pathy Allen |
Monika: Tapestry became a lifeline for people who had never met anyone like themselves. What did the magazine mean to the community in those early years, before the internet existed?
Dallas: For many years I looked for printed material that made sense but found little that did. The medical literature was all about psychopathology. Bookstores had almost nothing. While I picked up tidbits of information here and there, it was not until I blundered across Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna’s Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach that I held something actually useful in my hands.
So when, in 1988, a woman named Jessica Britton showed up at a support group meeting with a copy of TV-TS Tapestry (as it was then called), I knew instantly it was just what I had been looking for because toward the back there was a comprehensive listing of support groups and service providers.
By the way, recently, I received the sad news that Jessica had passed away. I was deeply saddened by her death. Jessica had been, in many ways, the wind behind Holly Boswell's sails, quietly doing much of the essential work behind the scenes for the Phoenix Transgender Support Group and serving as a tireless worker bee for the Southern Comfort Conference. Her contribution to the transgender community deserves to be remembered and appreciated.
The group I had been attending was not my demographic, but a nonprofit in Atlanta certainly was. I called their number several times a day for more than a month before someone answered the phone. I traveled the 300 or so miles there for an interview, and was accepted. In a few months, I was asked to lead the group. With the information I was given, I was able to figure out how to successfully transition. So, that single copy of Tapestry changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way. I will always be grateful to Merissa and IFGE for that.
Monika: Your own story shows how much one copy of Tapestry could change a life. How far did the magazine reach beyond individual readers, and what was the community like before IFGE existed?
Dallas: And I was not the only one so affected, of course. The magazine had a fairly large print run, about 13,000 copies, and became available in bookstores, and the IFGE office in suburban Boston was open for people to just walk in. Many readers of Chrysalis Quarterly told me they passed their copies on so others could read them. I am sure the same happened with Tapestry. Had Jessica not handed me that copy, it might have been years before I found my tribe. Its actual readership may therefore have been considerably larger than its 13,000-copy print run.
Before IFGE’s formation, the trans community, if it could even be called that, was strictly segregated by type. The only three career paths, as anthropologist Anne Bolin has called them, were crossdresser, transsexual, and drag queen. Virginia Prince was queen supreme for the crossdressing community and aggressively excluded transsexuals and gay and bi crossdressers from membership in her groups and coverage in her magazine, Transvestia. The university gender clinics that prevailed from the mid-1960s until 1979 rejected most applicants and counseled the few who were accepted to cut all ties with other transsexuals, so there was little opportunity to form community. Both transsexuals and crossdressers found some acceptance at gay clubs and with some gay men and lesbians, but it was often grudging.
Monika: How did the IFGE conferences change that divided landscape?
Dallas: The IFGE conferences provided the first place where all gender-diverse people were welcome, and I have been saying since 1990 that it was the coming together of formerly isolated communities that sparked new terminology and helped new gendered identities form and consolidate. Until the 1990s, and even after that, many trans people, like me, found it difficult or impossible to find information and support. Many wound up with lives, relationships, and careers they would not have chosen had they found information and acceptance. So yes, Merissa and IFGE played a huge role here.
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| TV-TS Tapestry Issue 53 (1989) Digital Transgender Archive. |
Dallas: There were internecine wars in the community, with some insisting that crossdressers were crossdressers and transsexuals were transsexuals, and the twain would never meet, but others didn’t entirely identify with either category and began looking at alternative descriptors for the way they felt. Holly Boswell’s essay The Transgender Alternative, which appeared simultaneously in 1991 in IFGE’s TV-TS Tapestry and AEGIS’ Chrysalis Quarterly, and a 1992 pamphlet by Leslie Feinberg titled Transgender Liberation: A Movement Whose Time Has Come blew the doors off, introducing a term for those who did not comfortably fit in the available three gender career paths.
Monika: Merissa was not only helping other people navigate questions of gender and identity, but was also living through her own transition while becoming an increasingly visible activist. How did she cope with those two journeys happening at the same time?
Dallas: My best guess is that Merissa identified as a crossdresser in her earlier life. Certainly, crossdressers were the primary financial supporters of IFGE and made up the majority of its membership, and the organization was taken by surprise when Merissa, accompanied by a posse of supporters, traveled to Trinidad, Colorado to have gender affirming surgery. I think Merissa’s struggles were not so much about her gender identity, however. She was frustrated that the community did not seem to understand her message and was not behaving as she had envisioned it.
She was extraordinarily sensitive to criticism. She often acted, as did Virginia Prince and any number of other leaders, imperiously. And she had a mood disorder. I did not know this until Yvonne Cook-Riley gave a keynote at Fantasia Fair early in this century. She described how Merissa, emotionally wounded for one reason or another, would hole up in her office at IFGE for weeks at a time, neglecting time-sensitive tasks like the publication of the magazine and writing and mailing of fundraising letters. Having observed over more than a decade what I consider the low productivity of IFGE as compared to organizations like AEGIS and FTM (later IFTM International) with one-tenth of IFGE’s budget, I believe Yvonne spoke the truth.
Monika: Her earlier involvement with feminism and the Journal of Male Feminism is a less remembered part of her story. How did feminism shape Merissa’s understanding of gender and her activism?
Dallas: I was unaware of Merissa’s involvement in The Journal of Male Feminism. It launched in 1979 and ran through the 1980s, before I found the community. I acquired all or maybe most of the issues and read them, but didn’t notice Merissa’s name, probably because I wasn’t looking for it. My copies are now, along with the rest of AEGIS’ extensive holdings of trans materials, in the Joseph Labadie Collection at the University of Michigan, so I can’t run to my library to check them, but you betcha I’ll be looking through the issues online at the Digital Transgender Archive.
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| Merissa, Reneé, and Rena Swifthawk at the Trinidad Medical Center, where Merissa and Reneé had their surgeries, 1991. © Mariette Pathy Allen |
Monika: You mentioned that you have a couple of observations about the level of feminism within IFGE. What stood out to you at the conventions?
Dallas: First, IFGE’s annual conventions were in a different city every year. By the time it was held in Atlanta in 1994 or thereabouts, I felt the organization was quite heterocentric. What hit home for me at that convention was a poster meant to normalize trans people. It featured a photo, I believe by Mariette Pathy Allen, a fine photographer who has extensively covered trans communities. The subjects were Yvonne Cook-Riley and her spouse Dan. Yvonne was looking quite feminine and Dan was dressed in a suit and tie, as I remember, and I remember thinking “Where is the queer aesthetic here? Where is the queer sensibility?”
The other thing of note is that IFGE sold, along with many excellent books, Virginia Prince’s The Crossdresser and His Wife, in which she ranks female spouses on a scale of A through F, as if on a high school report card. One needn’t be much of a feminist to find this appalling. I wrote Merissa, asking that IFGE stop selling it. I was ignored, and it remained in their publications list. I’m sure, when Merissa began to live as a woman, she began, as do many people who transition, to become aware of issues of misogyny about which she had been previously oblivious. I can’t really say, as I have only my own observations, about her level of feminism. I hope it was quite high.
Monika: Merissa was not simply providing support to individuals. She was trying to create physical, organizational and financial infrastructure for an entire community. What made her such a natural institution builder?
Dallas: Her experiences at Fantasia Fair and the Tiffany Club certainly helped. I think it was mostly her drive, her vision, that drove her. It also frustrated her and led her to eventually become a hermit.
Monika: Merissa’s approach with the Southern Comfort Conference was particularly interesting. Rather than simply organizing the event herself, she helped local activists learn how to build it. What did that tell you about her philosophy of organizing?
Dallas: By 1990 there were several large trans gatherings around the US: Fantasia Fair and the IFGE conference, of course, and other events, for instance, the Tri-Ess conference and the Be-All in the Midwest, but there were no conferences in the southern United States. When she visited the IFGE offices in Boston, transgender activist Sabrina Marcus asked Merissa and Yvonne to start a conference in the South. They told her no, but said they would be happy to visit the South and teach locals how to do it themselves.
Sabrina rallied the troops, and soon representatives from trans support groups and nonprofits from the south and surrounding areas met with Marissa and Yvonne at the Piedmont Street La Quinta Inn in Atlanta to hammer out the many steps involved in starting a conference. When the two-day meeting was finished there was a name, a plan, and a proposed date. I was at that meeting. The lesson I took from IFGE’s response to Sabrina’s request was this: it is better and often easier, less costly, and more productive to empower someone to do something than to simply give it to them. Sabrina’s request created a powerful entity that lasted several decades and affected thousands of lives.
Monika: Southern Comfort eventually became one of the most important transgender gatherings in the United States. Could you take us back to those early conversations in Atlanta and explain what Merissa contributed?
Dallas: IFGE had a table at every SCC and Merissa was present at many of the conferences. Many of the speaking slots were taken by IFGE personnel, who in various ways passed on Merissa’s and IFGE’s messages. I don’t remember any presentations by Merissa, but she did take the mic on occasion at dinners and such.
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| Dorothy Ann Finch and Merissa Sherrill Lynn having a good laugh at a Tiffany Club meetup, 1981. © Mariette Pathy Allen |
Monika: Merissa also worked to establish international connections, including correspondence with organizations such as Britain’s Beaumont Society. How important was it to her that transgender people in different countries knew about one another?
Dallas: Merissa’s message, as best as I could figure it (she would probably tell me I am wrong if she were still around) was that by working and living and playing together despite our differences, we would build something enduring. You will notice the word International is in the name of her organization. Although it was primarily a US-based nonprofit, I think her intent was to be truly international.
I also think that US ethnocentrism handicapped the realization of her vision. Trans activist JoAnn Roberts once wrote an essay called “International Foundation for Gender Education: None of the Above,” in which she argued that the organization was not truly international, was not a foundation, and did little gender education. JoAnn was a wag, but she had a point. With a budget that was more than $250,000 by the mid-90s, IFGE could have done far more than it actually did.
Monika: She was a prolific lecturer and appeared on television and radio, at a time when public discussion of transgender lives was still extremely limited. What kind of public speaker was she?
Dallas: Merissa was not a great public speaker in that she could captivate an audience, but audiences believed in her message and appreciated her work and were always in her corner. I’m not saying she was a bad speaker; she wasn’t, but it was not her major talent.
END OF PART 2
Main photo: TV-TS Tapestry Issue 58 (1991), Digital Transgender Archive, © Mariette Pathy Allen
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