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A new book by photographer Jess T. Dugan and social worker Vanessa Fabbre documents the underrepresented community of aging transgender people through portraits and stories. BY CONOR RISCH
in the new book of portraits and stories by Jess T. Dugan and Vanessa Fabbre, titled To Survive on This Shore, a 69-year-old transgender man named John recalls, "I grew up in the South. You didn't even hear of it [being transgender]." He says he fell into depression as a college student before a psychologist helped him understand what he was feeling. He eventually began identifying as transgender at 63. Another of the book's subjects, a 59-year-old named Diego who identifies as an openly transsexual man, tells a story in which he describes the first conversation he had with his mother about feeling he was "born wrong." He was five years old at the time. In response, Diego's mother showed him a picture on the cover of a magazine. It was of Christine Jorgensen, who is considered the first American to publicly announce she had undergone sex reassignment surgery. Diego's mom reassured him, "I think that if it's OK for her now, by the time you grow up it'll be OK," he recalls.
The two stories emphasize how important it can be to the formation of someone's identity to see photographs of people you identify with. And it points to one of the underlying themes of To Survive on This Shore (Kehrer), a series of 65 portraits and stories of older transgender and gender nonconforming people: that trans people have been underrepresented in our culture. The effect of this "lack of representation of who [queer and trans people] are, or visions or a kind of roadmap of a life is hard to quantify," Dugan says, "but I think it can be very damaging to live in a world where you never...