HeteroQueer Activist Speaks
at Southern Comfort

Woodward also helped found the Arizona Transgender Workplace (ATWORK) Project and establish the Alexander John Goodrum Transgender Mental Health Advocacy Project, in memory of TGNet Arizona founder. After taking over TGNet’s programs, SAGA folded into Wingspan, Southern Arizona’s LGBT community center and today is one of the largest regional trans advocacy programs in the country while Woodward has gone on to become Wingspan’s Health and Wellness Programs Manager.

He’s also continued to speak about transgender issues to a wide range of audiences, from PFLAG and Sunday school classes to the Arizona Attorney General’s Civil Rights Division staff. This Thursday, October 2nd, Woodward is giving a keynote speech at Atlanta’s 18th Annual Southern Comfort Conference, the five-day symposium for the trans spectrum.

Although he says he’s committed to staying in the LGBT non-profit field, Woodward acknowledges, “I also don’t want to be a pauper for all of my remaining days on Earth. I see myself working at the national level, or doing queer work on a college campus. Or writing the best-selling trans book.”

Despite his accomplishment’s Woodward isn’t resting on his laurels. He contends: “We still need universal access to health care, better legal protection, less violence and discrimination, better surgical techniques for men, and an inclusive ENDA. Clearly there are a few things I haven’t gotten to—yet.”

Growing up in Indiana, Woodward had his first lesbian relationship at 17. After graduating college, he discovered the National Women’s Music Festival (not to be confused, he jokes, with the “big naked anti-trans camping thing,” i.e. Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival).

“NWMF was a transforming experience for me,” Woodward says. “Seeing all those women-loving-women together in one place at one time was very moving.”

For the next 14 years, Woodward filled volunteer positions at the festival doing everything from security and transportation to performer management—where he met the era’s celebrity lesbians like Cris Williamson, Meg Christian, Kate Clinton, Suzanne Westenhoefer and Tracy Chapman. He served several years as president of the NWMF board of directors before retiring.

That experience started him “on the path to a full-time career in the LGBT community. I said more than once that I wanted to be a professional lesbian and earn a living because of who I was, not in spite of who I was.”

After transitioning, though, Woodward wasn’t sure where he fit. “I was pretty hung up on people not assuming I was a gay man just because I was in gay space. I’d lived openly as a butch dyke for 20-some years[but] I realized I was dealing with a bit of…internalized fagophobia. Ten years down the road…both my orientation and my identity [has become] a bit more blurred over time, and my lesbian-separatist aversion to men and especially their penises eventually melted away.”

His spirit of activism has led Woodward to staff True Spirit and Gender Odyssey conferences; present at Southern Comfort, FORGE-Forward and Creating Change; and—earlier this year—bring the International Foundation for Gender Education conference to Tucson. In 2009, as part of his new position, Woodward will co-chair the National LGBT Tobacco Control Network conference.

When Woodward discovered the existence of trans men at 35, he says he knew almost immediately that he wanted to transition, but was terrified he’d lose his singing voice.

“What if I couldn’t sing any more? My voice was the one redeeming quality I felt I had. Today, my voice is completely different…and not. But it did take a fair amount of work to retrain my ears and vocal muscles to not think like a female voice. I still have some trouble accessing my natural male falsetto voice because I’m still instinctively trying to just sing the high notes outright. It was a good two years before I really had command of the new vessel. The karaoke machine…was my lifeline. I could actually monitor how much my voice was changing. It also helped me exercise my voice.”

Woodward, whose parents met doing summer stock, grew up in front of an audience. “My first performance was a kids’ piano contest at age 5. I played “Green Tamborine” and came in second place! I spent many a night finishing my homework backstage.” He enrolled as a voice major at a prestigious music college but was “quickly disillusioned when I realized there wasn’t going to be a lot of work for butch sopranos. After one semester, I quit.”

Before the singing and activism, Woodword had a successful career in tech publishing editing and writing over a dozen books on Microsoft products; then founding Echelon Editorial and Publishing Services, which offered book packaging services and ushered authors through the book development process.

“Echelon was the former me’s swan song in the publishing industry,” Woodward says, although he continues to write articles and freelance with Echelon business magazine, he jokes, “[I’m] still really trying to figure out what I want to do when I grow up.”

© 2008 Jacob Anderson-Minshall

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