Radical Radio Tranny - Gay news and Lesbian newspaper including, Local, National and International Level.

By Jacob Anderson-Minshall

“I don’t support same sex marriage in Massachusetts,” announces trans activist, radio host and Massachusetts resident, Ethan St. Pierre. Willing to voice his true feelings—be they on air, in his numerous blogs or in interviews—St. Pierre peppers his speech with verbal bombshells: “I like animals more than I like people,” “I’m not a real hate crimes advocate.” At first blush, they make St. Pierre sound far more conservative than you’d expect from a self-described, radical guy.

The founder and creator of the Internet broadcasting network, TransFM, St. Pierre also sits on the board of a number of organizations including the International Foundation for Gender Education (ifge.org), which organizes an annual conference and publishes Transgender Tapestry; Families United Against Hate (fuah.org), which supports survivors and families impacted by anti-LGBT violence; and the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (ntac.org), a lobbying and advocacy group that organizes the bi-annual Lobby Day.

“I don’t necessarily believe that just because somebody is born with a vagina, that means that’s a woman,” claims St. Pierre, who identifies as a trans man. “Or somebody who is born with a penis…[is] automatically…a man. I don’t think that I was born in the wrong body. I just think that there are women with penises and men with vaginas.”

As coordinator of The International Transgender Day of Remembrance, St. Pierre has developed a new website (transgenderdor.org), and investigates and updates the statistics of those who are murdered as a result of anti-transgender violence or hatred. He’s taken over the work once done by Remember Our Dead project founder Gwen Smith, who’s been on hiatus for a few years.

“I can’t tell you enough about the work that [Gwen]’s done on our behalf; and what a difficult job it is. I work on that website for half a day and I’m bawling my eyes out. Just looking at their faces, all these young people with all the promise in the world and their lives were just snuffed out for no other reason than they were trans or different. We’re being murdered at an enormous rate.”

Still, he says, he’s not a big supporter of hate crimes legislation. “I fight for hate crime legislation inclusion… because one exists and whenever we’re removed from it or kept from being put in it, it puts a target on our behind.”

Before launching his own podcast, St. Pierre collaborated with hosts Nancy Nangeroni and Gordene O. MacKenzie on GenderTalk, the online, weekly radio program devoted to transgender issues.
But he couldn’t shake the feeling that there needed to be more outlets for trans perspectives, so St. Pierre developed his own show and then launched TransFM (transfm.org). Currently on summer vacation, their live show returns in September and reaches listeners in twenty countries. In the meantime, pod casts of the show are still available, as are postings from other pod casters.

“My [ideal] target audience isn’t really just transgender people or LGBT people,” St. Pierre admits. “It’s people who don’t know anything about us. I’d love for people to tune in that don’t know anything about trans issues, so that they can get to hear it first hand. I’m really tired of people…speaking for us and not knowing what they’re talking about.”

“If more people hear us,” St. Pierre argues, they’ll support trans rights. “It’s like, well of course you should be covered in employment nondiscrimination. Or, of course you…should be protected from being abused physically and murdered.”

When it comes to his off-air activism, St. Pierre encourages families who’ve suffered losses due to LGBT violence, to contact him ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) or the other folks at Families United Against Hate. “We’ve all suffered loses or have experienced hate crimes directly in our families or personally. Any family that needs help…can contact anyone of us.”

For nearly a decade, St. Pierre has also been lobbying for the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, which he describes as “a bunch of rabble rousers…telling it like it is, saying the things other organizations are afraid to say and won’t say about what’s actually happening in our community.”

In particular, NTAC has taken a strong stance on the Human Rights Campaign’s failure to support United ENDA. Personally, St. Pierre says he “won’t even tolerate supporters of HRC…I don’t believe they’re helping anybody. Never mind trans people, what they’ve done to us. Their board made an educated decision…to not support us. It pains me to see them grab people out of our community that don’t know the history. It’s the people that know better, that I’m really talking about when I say I don’t tolerate that. This is our community, why would you do that to your own people?”

On his Radical Trannies show, St. Pierre addresses similar topics. “We got kicked to the curb in the ‘80s when the assimilationist movement started; and rich, white, gay men decided this was their movement. [Now] we’re moving out of a place [of] shame. Shame is no longer our guiding force. We deserve these rights and we deserve them now. We shouldn’t have to wait for the crumbs that have been swept off the table. ”

Still, St. Pierre doesn’t support same sex marriage in Massachusetts, although he does support it in California, “and every other state that has already taken care of…their community as far as employment, and hate crimes are concerned,” because he thinks its important for the entire community to gain physical and economic security ahead of marriage rights.

“I’m really not that much of a radical guy,” St. Pierre insists. “I just want rights like everybody else. I want us all to have rights.”

Encouraged by the younger generation, that “didn’t remember our community without the T…[and] couldn’t understand, or fathom the idea of one of those letters being lobbed off for the sake of expediency,” St. Pierre proclaims, “It’s a wild time to be an activist. There’s so much going on right now and I think that we’re going to move forward and leave people behind that are stuck in that old assimilationist thing. Though, unfortunately, they’ll [still] have more money than we do. ”

Tune in to Portland, Oregon’s KBOO radio, August 26th 6-6:30 pm PST as trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall ( This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ) joins Trannywreck Radio’s Rebecca Nay to co-host the pilot episode of their new radio show, Gender Blender, streaming live at KBOO.fm.

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