Kortney Ryan Ziegler introduces himself as a “heterosexual black man” who grew up as a “normal little girl” in Compton, Calif., and became the first person to earn a Ph.D. in African-American studies from Northwestern University. Ziegler, filmmaker of Still Black: a Portrait of Black Transmen, is also the first transgender person known to have earned a doctorate in that discipline.
Raised in a family of single black women, his mother struggled with the twin demons of mental illness and drug abuse, his father was absent, and his three alcoholic uncles inflicted emotional and physical abuse on the women in his family, he has said in a personal essay. It was during this painful foundational period that Mr. Ziegler learned to resent and fear black men.
As his girlish body changed during puberty, Mr. Ziegler presented himself as masculine, but that didn’t stop the unsolicited advances from “catcalling homophobes” who, he says, threatened to turn him straight. He was surrounded by ads and music that told him he was an ugly girl, good enough only to be a sexual object for black men. As a freshman at the University of California at Santa Cruz, he took introductory courses in race and women’s studies that gave him the critical tools to reject those messages.
But those academic exercises did little to help him shake off the shame he felt or escape the suffocating stereotypes associated with being black and female. Despite his negative feelings about black men and black masculinity, Mr. Ziegler still wanted to become a black man. He’ll tell you that the memories of pain and harassment he felt as a woman have shaped the man he is now. He doesn’t hog intellectual space, and he makes it a point to seek the opinions of female colleagues.
Mr. Ziegler’s gender transition was a gradual one. He checked “female” when he applied to Northwestern’s doctoral program in black studies in 2006. During his third year, he started identifying as “gender queer” and began taking hormones to change his body. When he returned to the campus in 2011 to defend his dissertation on queer black and Latino filmmakers, his body had bulked up, he had a deep voice, and he wore a beard.
The following is an edited excerpt of a conversation with Mr. Ziegler.
When some transgender people look back on their childhood, they say that they felt like they were growing in the wrong body. Did you feel this way?
I don’t want to say that I knew I was in the wrong body or that I knew the exact moment when I wanted to be a man. I was fine with being a little girl. I honor and love that experience. I was a nerd who studied a lot and was curious about the world. I thought I was going to be a scientist. I tried to build robots, and I was always in the kitchen mixing things that I shouldn’t have been mixing. I was a tomboy, but it wasn’t a definite indication of my future transition from female to male. By the time I was 17, I started dating women and was perceived as a lesbian because I presented as masculine.
How did your family react to your masculine presentation and preference for women?
I was raised by my grandmother and other extended family members. It was cool with them. I didn’t actually come out to my family and say, “Hey, I’m queer.” I came home with rainbow symbols. Everybody already knew. They said, “Look at you. Look at the way you dress. Of course you’re gay.” I was the first one in my family to go to college. They knew I was going to be successful, and my sexuality had nothing to do with it. But I had internalized a lot of what society taught me about gender and sexuality. Society taught me that if you are physically female, then you shouldn’t be involved with females.
At what point did you begin to question your gender?
Not until my mid-20s did I start to think, maybe I’m not gay. I was trying to figure out who I was in this body and wasn’t feeling so comfortable about maturing into a woman. It was during the first year of graduate school at San Francisco State, where I was pursuing a master’s in ethnic studies. I was living in the Bay area and being exposed to a lot of people and knowledge that shifted how I began to view myself. I started adopting terms like “gender queer” and not identifying as a lesbian.
After I finished my film, Still Black, I was 25 and started thinking, maybe I’m trans. I was dating somebody who said I was a girl. She said, “You’re meant to have breasts, give birth, and be beautiful.” I wasn’t in a supportive environment. I started doing research on black trans men. I saw videos on YouTube of people my age and younger, and those films, which are not in the mainstream and are invisible stories, were part of my gender journey. When I turned 27, I started to identify as trans-curious and decided to make the medical transition to match up with my social transition. California is a trans-friendly state, so I just went to a clinic and told them I am trans and they said, “Let’s help your outside match how you feel.” I didn’t have to go through therapy and other ways of outing myself.
Can you describe what it was like to undergo your gender transition while in graduate school at Northwestern?
During my first year, I started identifying as gender queer, and during my third year, I started taking hormones. Northwestern wasn’t the most supportive place for queer folks. It was difficult for me to be a queer person in a hostile place. People perceived me to be a lesbian before I started taking hormones and because I didn’t explicitly require people to use male pronouns.
I was part of the first cohort of students in Northwestern’s brand-new African-American-studies doctoral program, so there was a lot of publicity and fanfare around us. There was a conference in California that we were sent to, and they put us up in a hotel. Another student said that she didn’t want to share a room with me. Her comments were made in a room with higher-ups, and nobody addressed it. Maybe they were nervous or ignorant about what to say.
Things would be explicitly said in our seminars. I would bring up my research on queer individuals, and colleagues would dump on it in ways that weren’t about pushing me as a scholar. They were uncomfortable about engaging in an intellectual space with someone who was openly queer.
While in the African-American-studies program at Northwestern, I noticed that people bought into respectability politics in a harmful way, and there were gender and sexual microaggressions that I had to navigate as a student. I dress masculine, and people expected us to present ourselves in a certain way because we were the first cohort of doctoral students. One professor commented about how I looked unprofessional and said they wouldn’t want to work with me again. What does it mean to be professional? I didn’t come to school with food on my face.
Was your medical transition difficult to balance while trying to complete your doctoral studies?
My medical transition was easy. It alleviated a lot of stress. Much of that transition happened away from campus, while I was completing my dissertation. But now that I’m a black man, there have been situations where I realize that there’s a fine line between black-lesbian masculinity and trans masculinity that blend into one another.
Black women, regardless of sexuality, are always seen as masculine—strong, aggressive, angry, loud. All these masculine traits are mapped onto black women’s bodies. Black transmen are considered the same. When I’m in a space where people don’t know that I’m trans, I see how blackness is so mistreated. When I was a black woman, I was hated. Now, as a black man, I’m feared. People are afraid of me. As a black butch, people weren’t afraid of me in the same way. People literally cross the street and they don’t want me in their space. When I was a woman, I feared street harassment. Now, as a black man, people touch me more and grab me aggressively to tell me that I’m out of place. When I began my hormone therapy, I had to attend a conference in San Antonio, and a friend let me stay at her apartment. She left the key under a rock. I arrived at the hour, got the key, and the tenants downstairs came into the apartment and told me that I wasn’t supposed to be there. A few minutes later, there were police officers flashing a gun in my face and telling me to get … on the floor. That’s when I knew I was passing as a black man. As a woman, I wouldn’t have been perceived as an intruder.
When I came back to Northwestern to defend my dissertation, I had a beard and a deep voice. The people on my committee told me that I looked great and happy. They were very supportive. There was one person in my department who didn’t know who I was, and I got a lot of double takes from others. But that’s to be expected. I looked like a man.
Initially I didn’t want to go back for graduation. I was willing to miss out on the hooding ceremony because I felt a strong sense of anxiety and didn’t feel safe. But I ended up going back because it was closure. I deserved to be on that stage.
What’s it been like for you to go from being a black female to a black man on campus?
After grad school, I taught a course on trans women as an adjunct at San Francisco State. It was an interesting experience, because I now identified with the black male students in a different way. I totally got them in ways that I didn’t when I was in college. I feel that we don’t give young black men enough credit, because they are not perceived as serious intellectuals.
As a black male professor, I came out to my students on the first day. People treated me fine. If I had to compare my experience of being a woman and a man, I’d have to say that I have more authority as a man. I’m more confident in who I am, and my confidence shifted and affected how I taught students. I’ve definitely gotten more respect in the classroom as someone who presents as male versus female. There’s always that one white male in the class who wants to be the devil’s advocate. I was able to shut him down quicker when he questioned my authority and what I know. Black folks are always going to be questioned. They’re always going to be challenged in academic spaces by students who’ve never had a black teacher of any gender.