The Early Writings of Rachel Crandall-Crocker, Founder of #TransDayofVisibility

For all the attention that March 31: International Transgender Day of Visibility now receives, I’m willing to bet that far fewer people know about Rachel Crandall-Crocker, the social worker, therapist, and advocate who created it. While Trans Day of Visibility has existed since 2009, I got to know Rachel over a decade earlier at Michigan State University and in the Greater Lansing community. It’s difficult to describe how it feels knowing that one of my oldest friends has been responsible for starting a worldwide phenomenon. Pride, of course, is a given. But I can’t say I was surprised to learn that an event now covered by major news networks and marked by the Biden White House originated with a person I knew incredibly well during my formative years. For anyone wanting to understand Rachel’s work and legacy as a Trans advocate, I hope this story will enlighten, inform, and inspire.

Love, Positivity, and Bold Authenticity

I can’t recall all the details of my first encounter with Rachel, but here’s what stands out. It was the spring of 1997 at the MSU Union, probably during Pride Week, which was held every April before students left for the summer. I don’t remember who was standing with me, but suddenly this person with astonishingly positive energy rushed over and threw her arms around us in a big, spontaneous group hug. I sensed an immediate rush of warmth and welcoming, a feeling of acceptance from someone I’d only just met. But as I would soon learn, this was Rachel, above all else: someone who would throw herself into every new encounter with love and positivity, putting people at ease with her unconditional acceptance.

Many years later, I learned that 1997 was, in fact, the year of her coming out “full time” as Rachel. In community spaces where many lesbians, gay men, and bisexuals still looked over their shoulders in trepidation, I saw her throw herself into conversations with an infectious enthusiasm. On later reflection, I realized that as a self-described “Jewish transgender lesbian with Tourette’s Syndrome,” this bold authenticity was probably Rachel’s only real option.

For me, that particular time was packed with intensely joyful and sometimes humbling experiences. I’d arrived at Michigan State having come out only somewhat earlier, and midway through my freshman year, I had the inspiration to create a publication that would serve as a central source of news, events, and perspectives for MSU’s LGBTQ+ community. That project would only have been in its early planning stages when I first met Rachel, but by the fall, I’d assembled a small team of fellow creative queers to found the Q-News, a magazine by and for Michigan State’s LGBTQ+ students and allies. With funding from a variety of student services and academic units, and with mentorship from the university’s lone staff person devoted to LGBTQ+ concerns, we’d taken an approach that, in hindsight, appears even more revolutionary now than it did at the time.

To the fullest extent possible, Q-News tried to capture the diversity of queer identities and experiences on our campus of 50,000 students, with an emphasis on featuring voices beyond a narrow segment of white, cisgender gayness. Moreover, we declared early on that people’s lived experiences were newsworthy, highlighting first-person essays, poetry, and artwork around a theme selected for each issue, which came out about six times per year. Transgender contributors were there from the very beginning, and about halfway through our first year, Rachel approached me. As a Michigan State alumna, clinical social worker, and psychotherapist who practiced in the area, she wondered if she could submit content for the magazine. The answer was an enthusiastic “Yes.”

Looking back on Rachel’s writing from that time, I can see some of the seeds from which her later activism would emerge. Appearing as it did in the early years of the Internet, the ­Q-News never had much of an online presence. Today, its back issues can only be found in a few places, such as the MSU Library Special Collections and the private collections of its creators. So, to provide some context for these pieces, I scanned them from my personal collection and showed them to Rachel over a recent video call, getting her present-day reaction to materials that she hadn’t seen since they were first published.

February 1998: “I Wonder About Fish Sometimes”

Of all the ways we formed a bond during those years, Rachel and I shared a love of writing poetry, especially stream-of-consciousness pieces that made space for exploring different facets of queer identity. It’s no surprise to me, then, that her first submission to the ­Q-News was a brief poem asking the question, “Can fish be gay?” When I showed her this piece during our call, she exclaimed, “Oh wow! I don’t remember what I was thinking. However, it’s really cute!”

“I was trying to say that maybe everyone and everything is actually gay,” she added, saying that at the time she viewed “Gay” as an umbrella term for LGBTQ+. “I might use Trans today. I don’t even remember identifying with the word ‘Gay’ back then. However, there it is, right in front of me! I love it!”  With its mention of fish magazines, festivals, and alternative holidays, of special fish radar and fishy drag shows, and asking whether fish had trouble telling their parents about their orientation, she seemed to be exploring just how pervasive the coming out experience might be. Where some may regard the poem as childishly simple, I see an exploration of the phenomenon of “otherness,” a meditation on how widely the experience of being an outsider might actually be felt, and the extent to which many of us go to conceal that otherness for fear of isolation, ostracism, and persecution.

August 1998: Transgender Michigan and Mashed Potato Breasts

Rachel’s next appearance in the Q-News came six months later in a brief piece announcing the creation of Transgender Michigan, a pioneering organization that is still alive and thriving today. The organization itself was something of a marvel for its time, for even though Transgender groups existed in the area, the focus was largely on support and confidentiality, rather than public advocacy. Today, Transgender Michigan has support groups and speakers across the state, it actively sponsors community events, and it’s an active member of Centerlink, an organization of all LGBTQ+ community centers in the U.S.

Rachel’s brief submission, however, is memorable to me because it provoked the only complaint that I ever received as editor of the Q-News. When Rachel gave me the story, she included a photo from a recent party, showing her playfully holding a pan of baked mashed potatoes, shaped like breasts with melted cheese for nipples. Not long after its publication, I received an email from a cisgender gay student, complaining that the photo was offensive in how it depicted Rachel. “Straight people judge us by our media, too,” the student wrote.

When this individual cornered me after a campus event, he started telling me that he was only concerned for Rachel’s well-being. She was the one who supplied us with the photo, I countered, to which he replied, “Yes, but she doesn’t understand what people might think.” I told him, “Sometimes other people need to just fuck off.” My unspoken message was, he could feel free to do the same. We never spoke again, and to this day, it remains one of my favorite photos of Rachel. For her part, she seemed to take the story in stride while I still find it irritating and offensive today.

December 1998: “But Jews Don’t Do Those Kinds of Things”

Rachel’s next piece came in an issue that, to my recollection, had been really difficult for our staff to assemble. The campus LGBTQ+ community had been shocked that fall by the murder of Matthew Shepard, a gay University of Wyoming student who could’ve passed for any typical member of the MSU campus. His death had come just days after The Rock, a landmark painted by student groups for generations, had been defaced with anti-gay slurs in the leadup to National Coming Out Day. In the aftermath, I recall multiple vigils being held, holding friends’ hands as they wept in both grief and fear, and witnessing a vicious round of arguments on the university’s LGBTQ+ listserv, an email-based predecessor to the social media platforms we use today. Out of what I can only speculate to be a surge in internalized homophobia, some community members seemed to be lashing out and blaming queer activists for provoking these acts of anti-LGBTQ+ violence.

In response, the Q-News published an issue devoted to coping with hard times. Interestingly, Rachel gave us a piece reflecting on the intersection of her Transgender identity with her Jewish heritage.

“There I was. I was a nice Jewish boy, but I was really a nice Jewish girl. And I wasn’t even a nice Jewish girl who liked boys; I liked girls. I was constantly so confused, I needed a scorecard to keep track of me. Sometimes I felt that maybe I wasn’t really Jewish. Maybe I was stolen from my real family by a band of roving Jews. I was always taught that Jewish kids studied, and there I was spending all my time in my mother’s closet, fantasizing about being a woman who was in love with another woman!!”

Reflecting on this piece in the present day, Rachel told me, “I’m really proud of writing it. It was hard. However, there are now congregations that would accept me! There wasn’t back then.” Over time, her Jewish identity has sort of faded into the background, and she now considers herself part-Christian, in part because of the congregation to which her wife, Susan, belongs. “I kind of have the philosophy, ‘I believe because I want to believe,’” she added.

Thinking back on it, I remain struck by the timing of this piece, knowing that during a moment of real pain and uncertainty for the local LGBTQ+ community, her impulse was to go deeper into herself and share an exploration of her identity’s intersection with faith and the meaning of existence. I suspect that these kinds of honest self-appraisals are still vital for many of us today, especially in response to the current onslaught of anti-trans violence and political repression occurring in certain corners of American politics.

April & October 1999: “It actually happened!”

Given that Rachel’s next two contributions covered the same topic, I somewhat naively assumed we would cover them quickly during our video call. However, I wasn’t expecting her response to these old submissions: “I remember that Visibility Day sprung out of that.”

On reflection, I shouldn’t have been surprised. As she related it both in print and in our call, Rachel’s motivation to advocate for Transgender visibility had taken a dramatic leap forward following an especially harrowing event. “I received a phone call one recent morning. It was a paramedic who had just admitted to a local hospital a [Transgender] woman who had tried to kill herself. The paramedic believed that this woman needed an advocate with her in the hospital, and nobody there knew of anyone but me. This person had no support and desperately needed someone right then, right there.”

“I remember the paramedic really well,” Rachel added when we recently spoke. “I rushed to the hospital, and I actually talked to the person and afterwards they told me that if it wasn’t for me, they probably would’ve killed themselves right in the hospital.” The woman survived, and they stayed in touch for years afterward. From that experience, Rachel came away with the impetus to start another organization, which she wanted to call “Transgender Advocates Worldwide.”

Although it never got off the ground as Transgender Michigan did, Rachel shared with me that the idea for worldwide advocacy never went away. The opportunities for reaching a wider audience, however, would expand substantially with the development of social media, leading her a decade later to begin promoting Transgender Day of Visibility as an annual event, held on March 31.  

“It was founded soon after a friend showed me how to use Facebook,” Rachel told me. “I posted it everywhere! The first year was small. However, then it really began to snowball. I think a lot of people were actually wanting it.” The present moment, with unprecedented numbers of people openly identifying as LGBTQIA+, seems to be catching a lot of people by surprise. For people who have been paying attention over the years, it’s not so surprising at all. Trans activists have worked as allies to LGB movements and organizations since Stonewall itself. Tragically, many of these efforts have been papered over in the interests of respectability politics, all while Trans persons have endured substantial hardships from violent abuse and murder to chronic unemployment or under-employment, disproportionate levels of HIV and addiction, homelessness, and suicide.

As Rachel wrote years ago in the ­Q-News, she knew as far back as early childhood that she was different in ways that couldn’t be openly shared. Much of the advocacy and policymaking done today in support of Trans persons, and especially Trans youth, is to give them a fighting chance to survive and thrive in a society where, despite the best efforts of Rachel and many others, openly identifying as Transgender or Nonbinary can still mean risking one’s life.

“Right Here, Right Now”

There were two more Q-News pieces I shared with Rachel during our call. The first came from my final issue as the editor, which we devoted to anger and outrage. The idea had been to give community members a space to vent about whatever was pissing them off, and Rachel at the time had plenty to say. Her first piece was a “Top Ten” list, sarcastically answering the question she most frequently got from strangers in public: “What do you have between your legs?”

Her second piece was inspired by a recent hate crimes vigil, after which it struck her for the first time that she could be an easy target for assault or even murder while walking back to her car. “I remember how vulnerable I felt, and I still feel that way a little,” she told me during our recent call. “Trans people are often a lot more accepted. However, I think even more of us are being killed these days. I was confused about if I wanted to speak out loud. I just felt so vulnerable.”

A few years after that piece, when a new generation of student activists resurrected the ­Q-News and lovingly made it their own, Rachel contributed a story describing her own coming out experience. “My coming out was very difficult for me,” she wrote in 2003. “I lost my job, my house, my marriage, family, friends, all my income, and my career for a long time. I will remember forever just rocking back and forth curled up in a fetal position for hours.” Reflecting on that piece in the present day, she told me, “I remember feeling proud, that I was actually doing something about it, and that I wasn’t hiding. I also felt like I came a long way, and I was a little more forceful. I had gotten over my fear and I kind of felt like I was fighting a battle. However, I was a proud soldier.”

In the years that followed, our paths diverged as I ended up moving to Minnesota while she relocated to Detroit. Going back to the first day I met Rachel, however, I have always gravitated toward her kindness and abundant generosity, not to mention her willingness to talk to anyone and show them unconditional positive regard. I remember when she took a standup class at a local comedy club and brought the videotape of her final exam, a five-minute routine performed in front of a live audience, to one of my parties. She absolutely killed it, earning loud, sustained applause both during the show and in the living room of my parents’ split-level home. I don’t know if I could muster such abiding courage in the face of the very real and dire threats that Rachel and other Transfolk continue to face, to approach the world with so much positivity when a segment remains so doggedly devoted to rendering invisible, if not outright eliminating, Trans people from our world. I do believe that in her own unique way, through her small private therapy practice, the continued efforts of Transgender Michigan, and the now-global reach of Trans Day of Visibility, Rachel Crandall-Crocker has likely saved more lives than we will ever know. For these reasons and many more, I hope that this story will pay tribute to the “proud soldier” I am honored to call my friend, and to all advocates who continue to do the difficult work toward achieving LGBTQ+ acceptance and empowerment around the world.

Acknowledgment: Thank you to Holly Cullerton for providing the ALT text for this article!