Bestselling author Jennifer Finney Boylan, one of the nation’s most influential and recognizable advocates for trans rights, is currently serving as scholar in residence at The Humanities Institute during a fraught time for both trans rights and the humanities.
In an informal and far-ranging interview at THI's offices, she stressed the role of the humanities in fostering compassion and imagining other lives.
"It may be that we are living at a time without enough imagination, a time of distrusting the imagination," Boylan said.
Boylan is THI’s first Scholar-in-Residence since the onset of the COVID pandemic, and a fitting scholar to reintroduce this important program, said Professor of Linguistics and THI Faculty Director Pranav Anand.
"Her words have reached millions through her books and columns, and her work at GLAAD and PEN America has helped advocate for and advance human dignity and freedom," Anand said. "We feel truly privileged to be hosting her as our Scholar-in-Residence during THI’s 25th anniversary and the year in which THI is contending with the theme of Humanity.”
Known for her bestselling books and popular New York Times columns, Boylan is a professor at Barnard College in New York City. Though she is not teaching formal classes at UC Santa Cruz, she is participating in dialogues with undergraduates, having roundtable discussions with faculty, and giving readings and performances. Boylan will be on campus through St. Patrick’s Day.
In her latest book, Cleavage: Men, Women, and the Space Between Us (Celadon Books), Boylan frequently returns to the importance of compassion and imagination:
“In June of 2020, J.K. Rowling posted an essay in which she explained her reasons for speaking out on gender issues,” Boylan writes in Cleavage. “‘Woman is not a costume,’ she wrote. ‘Woman is not an idea in a man’s head. Woman is not a ‘pink brain, a liking for Jimmy Choos, or any other sexist ideas now touted as progressive.’ She concludes: ‘Biological sex is real.’”
"I agree with all that," Boylan writes. "I am not female because of an idea or a costume. I don’t own any Jimmy Choos… And my brain is gray, same as (Rowling’s). The thing that makes me female is the same thing that makes her female: a sense of self, deeply rooted in neurology and experience. Being female is not an idea for me; it is a fact. But it is a fact that cannot possibly be understood without imagination.”
During the interview at THI, Boylan expanded on this statement: “One of the points of the humanities is to revere the imagination. It encourages people to set their sights higher than what is simply in front of them. Everything from painting to poetry to a well-told story can literally change the way you experience the world. With imagination comes a more complex understanding of the world, but given that most Americans read at a sub-sixth-grade level—literally—maybe we can understand why the imagination is not valued more highly and why artists and storytellers are seen as expendable.”
Boylan was referring to an oft-reported and well-documented statistic: A Gallup analysis published in March 2020, which examined data from the U.S. Department of Education collected in 2012, 2014, and 2017. The analysis revealed that 130 million adults in the U.S. have low literacy skills, with over half (54%) of Americans aged 16 to 74 reading below a sixth-grade level.
Continuing her thought, Boylan said, “Before my transition, I had many feminine qualities, but that wasn’t why I transitioned. You don’t transition just because you want to play with dolls or because you want to look beautiful. One of the things I talk about in Cleavage is that life is long. Your life will outlast your sense of fabulousness.”
No one likes to have a target on their back
This spring, Boylan wrote a New York Times essay about Trump’s rollback of trans rights in the U.S.
“The point, it seems, is to make transgender people’s lives as difficult as possible,” she wrote in the essay, entitled “I’m A Transgender Woman: This Is Not The Metamorphosis I Was Expecting.” “The point is to isolate our small, vulnerable, maligned community and mock us for our differences. The point is to erase us from the public sphere. The point is to use our tiny, misunderstood population as useful scapegoats upon whom Mr. Trump can blame all of society’s ills.”
“No one likes to have a target on their back,” Boylan elaborated during the THI interview. “Being singled out, as trans people often are, feels cruel. It’s the result of people who haven’t done their homework. It’s frustrating, but I’m determined not to let these people live in my head. I’m not going to spend the next four years singing tales of woe.”
“There’s nothing these people hate more than seeing people like me being happy,” Boylan continued. “Being joyful and full of wonder is good for the heart and for activism. I’m not saying that people should walk around with fake smiles while the world burns around them. The work we do comes from both fierceness and love. Taking care of yourself is important, but when you get the chance, speak up because no one can take that away from you.”
“There’s nothing more powerful than someone who others are trying to erase walking around joyfully and visibly,” she said. “Walk into your PTA meeting, go to your child’s baseball game, show up at the office, go to the car wash—live your life with your head held high. It’s worth remembering because our lives are amazing and awesome. If you’re trans, you’ve been given the gift of living a life of two genders, of having space in between. How cool is that? Most people don’t get to experience that. Why wouldn’t you feel like a shaman or a trickster or just the luckiest goofball who ever fell to earth?”
Celebrating Amelia Earhart in story and song
At this year’s Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture, presented by the Humanities Division and The Humanities Institute, Boylan imagined Amelia Earhart’s life after her disappearance on July 2, 1937.
In Boylan’s version, Earhart survives her plane crash and ends up on a remote island in the Pacific, where she befriends another castaway, a young boy named Sparrow, abandoned by his father.
The story of their unlikely friendship and adventures on the island is funny, whimsical, heartbreaking, and reminiscent of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. In one scene, Earhart builds a sandcastle airplane. She and Sparrow soar above the clouds in their imagination.
Boylan recited and sang her Earhart story, accompanying herself on the autoharp and piano. Illustrations by New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake appeared on the screen above her.
During the interview, Boylan reflected on Earhart’s legacy: “One of my next projects is a mash-up of stories about the lives of martyred women or forgotten women,” Boylan said. “I’m thinking of calling it Imaginary Women. For instance, if Amelia Earhart lived and chose to disappear, why would she have done that? The mystery isn’t whether she’s alive; it’s why, if she is alive, she hasn’t let anybody know.”
“Maybe if you know anything about her marriage, she was trying to get away from her husband, George Putnam, or maybe she felt she had done everything she could in an airplane,” Boylan added. “One reason she might have taken on the kind of reckless project of doing a round-the-world trip, for which she wasn’t properly prepared, was that it was essentially a suicide mission. Howland Island (Earhart’s intended refueling stop in the Pacific) is a one-mile strip in the middle of a vast ocean. Wouldn’t it have been easier to just get divorced?”
A chance meeting at a local bookseller
That performance was the highlight of a residency that came together after a chance meeting during one of Boylan’s many visits to Santa Cruz with her wife, Deirdre Boylan.
“In November of 2023, we came (to the Central Coast) for a couple of weeks and spent almost a week in Santa Cruz,” Boylan said. “We did the standard trip around the Bay—Carmel, Monterey, Big Sur. I went to a Nathan Hill reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz for his book Wellness, which I think is one of the most spectacular books—disturbing and smart.”
While visiting the bookshop, Boylan ran into Irena Polić, THI’s managing director, who asked what she was doing in Santa Cruz. “When I told her, she asked if I’d ever want to have anything to do with The Humanities Institute, and I said, ‘Would I!’” Boylan said. “After some discussions, I was invited to be a scholar in residence, and here I am.”
Writing a bookend to She’s Not There
As Boylan mentions in her new book, Cleavage, her breakthrough memoir, She’s Not There: A Life In Two Genres(Broadway), caused “a real brouhaha” when it was published in 2003.
Though it was not the first trans memoir, it had an oversized impact and caused an avalanche of publicity; Boylan went on Oprah five times and had two sit-down interviews with Larry King.
Twenty-five years later, the cultural landscape has changed for trans people in America.
“Things are both easier and harder now—better and worse,” Boylan said. “When I came out, transitioning wasn’t particularly well-blazed in my rural state of Maine. You had to find someone who knew someone who could point you to the right therapist or someone who could prescribe hormones or do electrolysis. It was all very underground. When I came out, half the people I came out to had never met anyone who was trans, and they knew only about Christine Jorgensen or Renée Richards (celebrities who transitioned in the 1950s and 1970s, respectively).”
“There was a lot of confusion,” Boylan said. “One person even asked me if it meant I was ‘supergay,’ which annoyed me at the time, but years later, I thought, ‘Well, maybe that’s a good way of thinking about it.’”
“Now, things are easier because there are gender clinics, the internet, and places to get resources,” Boylan said. “It’s easier to get from point A to point B—though it still depends on where you live. But it’s also harder now because people have been given specific instructions on how to hate me.
“When I came out in 2000, my conservative mother wrapped her arms around me and said, ‘Love will prevail,’” Boylan continued. “People were generally nice to me because they didn’t know they weren’t supposed to be. Most people didn’t have much to go on—other than human decency.”
Humanities Division Dean Jasmine Alinder said Boylan’s extended visit to campus is well-timed.
“At this moment, the humanities are more important than ever as a way to understand the human experience and as a means of centering marginalized voices, systemic racism, and gender inequality,” Alinder said.
Around the same time period that President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders targeting trans people, he also signed an order dissolving the President’s Committee on the Arts and the Humanities (PCAH).
“The humanities are, all too often, being defunded and marginalized,” Alinder said. “And all this is happening at the same time that trans people are facing waves of legislative and cultural attacks in our country.”
Launched in 2017, the THI Scholars-in-Residence program aims to bring scholars to Santa Cruz for extended stays, allowing various groups both on and off campus to engage with them.
Previous scholars-in-residence have included Tony Michels, the George L. Mosse Associate Professor of American Jewish History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison; Robin Coste Lewis, poet, author, and Professor of English at the University of Southern California; Barry Lam, Associate Professor of Philosophy at Vassar College; and, most recently, Jacqueline Wernimont, Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities and Social Engagement at Dartmouth College.
The Peggy Downes Baskin Ethics Lecture Series is a lively forum for the discussion and exploration of ethics-related challenges in human endeavors. The Ethics Lecture is made possible by the Peggy Downes Baskin Humanities Endowment for Interdisciplinary Ethics, which enables the Humanities Division to promote a dialogue about ethics and ethics-related challenges in an interdisciplinary setting. The endowment was established in honor of Peggy Downes Baskin’s longtime interest in ethical issues across the academic spectrum.
