“It is crucial that our community reclaims our power to define our own lives and speak our truths. TRANSformative Stories gives us the opportunity to challenge harmful and deceitful narratives by sharing that which is at the center of our stories and our struggles: our humanity.” — David Breña, TRANSformative Stories Strategist & Monologist
AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL MONOLOGUE PROJECT
About the TRANSformative Stories Project
In Motus Theater’s TRANSformative Stories (2023), transgender and nonbinary leaders present artfully crafted personal stories about their hopes, dreams, and experiences of negotiating oppression and liberation. At a time when transgender and nonbinary communities face escalating attacks, TRANSformative Stories offers a powerful counter-narrative rooted in self-definition, artistry, and civic courage.
The monologues disrupt dehumanizing perceptions, lift up the humanity of monologists, and invite audiences to see transgender and nonbinary people not as headlines, political talking points, or statistics, but as whole human beings with faith, humor, tenderness, complexity, grief, survival, joy, and imagination. The project centers transgender and nonbinary leaders as the protagonists in the American drama, sharing stories that help audiences more deeply understand the real human perspectives around gender, family, belonging, and safety.
TRANSformative Stories monologues were created in collaboration with Motus Theater’s artistic director, Kirsten Wilson, as part of a transformative storytelling workshop focused on story development, public speaking, and support. All monologists in this project are transgender and nonbinary leaders, ages 23 to 64. 75% of monologists identify either as Black or Latinx.
TRANSformative Stories is the sibling project to Motus Theater’s What Love Requires, in which parents of transgender and nonbinary adults share stories about how they transformed their own perceptions of gender and parenting to support their gender-diverse children to not only survive but thrive.
David B. - “It is that Simple”
When you love someone, David shares, being trans can be simple. But it rarely is simple. David shares the denial and fear of being trans that he experienced on his way to recognizing himself as a beloved of God who, despite the threats he faces, will be a happy man.
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David B. (he/him) has a Master's Degree in Social Work (MSW) and is passionate about fostering and advocating for the mental and physical health of marginalized communities. He has experience and knowledge working with LGBTQIA+ youth and adults, as well as Latin American immigrants. He is also trained theatrically, with a double major in sociology and theater. He has a passion for using theater for community conversation and healing. He is bilingual in Spanish and bicultural.
“It is so odd to me, almost incomprehensible that people who aren't trans think of trans people as devoid of spirituality when for me my transition was primarily spiritual. The medical and social transitions were simply vehicles that aligned me with my true nature. I even chose the name David because it means “beloved - loved by God” and no one can take that away from me.”
Shauna Brooks - “The HRT with HRT”
A Black transgender teenager, without access to gender affirming care, goes to the streets to get the hormones and silicone shots that she needs both to ease her dysphoria and to help her pass as female for her own safety. But sixteen years later, the treatments she found on the street to save her life could kill her.
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Shauna Brooks (she/her/hers) an entertainment actress, model & influencer notable in the the beauty, fashion & entertainment industries. She is a visionary with an insatiable desire to create informative, impactful and progressive systemic changes in the coexistence of LGBTQIA+ people, in particular people of color. She focuses her efforts on overcoming societal barriers, economic disparities, online censorship discrimination and systemic livelihood obstacles.
“Do you know how dangerous it is to ride the HRT? And I am not talking Hormone Replacement Therapy, Honey - I’m talking about the Hampton Roads Transit system in Norfolk, Virginia.
Do you have any idea how dangerous it was for me, as a transgender teenager, to get on that bus everyday to school, work and back?
Do you know what it's like to negotiate the world when your body doesn’t visually align with your gender, and it’s unwelcome in the spaces and places amongst your peers?”
Nicole Garcia - “A Rose is a Rose”
The eldest son of a Roman Catholic Latino family realizes she has always been the eldest daughter, and that God created her to be a trans woman.
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Rev. Nicole M. Garcia, M.A. LPC (she/her) is a queer transgender Latina who served as the Faith Work Director at the National LGBTQ Task Force. Nicole earned an M.A. in Counseling from CU Denver and is a Licensed Professional Counselor in the state of Colorado. Nicole earned a Master of Divinity from Luther Seminary in St. Paul MN and is an ordained minister in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. Nicole works to lift the voices of multiple faith and spiritual perspectives with an emphasis on amplifying the voices of Black and Brown people while partnering with faith-based nonprofit organizations to carry out faith-based organizing to achieve impact. Nicole is dedicated to preaching queer liberation theology and is passionate about doing the work of moving social justice from a concept to reality.
“As a pastor and a therapist, I've had the honor of walking with so many beautiful trans and nonbinary people in their journeys of self-discovery and self-actualization. I have worked with people who wanted to die because they felt no hope and saw no path forward in the gender they were assigned.
I've sat with them, the tears streaming down their cheeks as they try to form words between sobs, - words I remember uttering to myself so many times in the past – ‘I don't want to disappoint anyone, but I can't be who they want me to be.’”
Ruby Lopez - “Surprise, It’s a Girl!”
Despite almost killing herself at 22, Ruby, with the support of her community, transforms a ‘death story’ into a ‘birth story’, and comes to love the beautiful “badass transexual dyke” that she is.
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Ruby Lopez (she/her/ella) is an intersectionality-minded community leader and advocate with almost a decade of experience serving systematically excluded communities. She is also an experienced dancer and martial artist and is most likely out dancing or kickboxing if she’s not working, resting, or tending to her many house plants.
“And the truth is, through all that hardship and confusion, I have really really grown to love the badass transexual dyke that I am. My story could easily have been a death story so many times, but it’s not and I am so grateful that it’s not.
Sometimes I think of some of the ridiculous statements I’ve read as an advocate for the trans community. A classic is this false claim that Hormone Replacement Therapy doesn't help with dysphoria, suicidality, depression, et cetera. But let me tell you, the truth is, I am the evidence; my life is the evidence that those claims cannot possibly be true. Don’t you see, against all odds I’m alive and I’m happy! “
Alison Reba - “Shapeshifting”
A cosmic exploration of nature's vast ever-transforming essence and yet the social expectations that gender must be fixed and checked off in simple boxes of “girl”, “boy”, or “nonbinary”.
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Alison Reba (they/them) is a Black Trans butterfly, sibling, community organizer and healing justice practitioner who centers relationship building as a means to transform ourselves and our communities. They believe in the radical imagination and power of young people to transform our world. Allison carries over 10 years of experiences co-learning from their brilliance. Alison is deeply committed to a practice that interweaves storytelling, creative practice, dreams, and soul + ancestral medicine as tools for collective liberation.
“Too often my friends, family, lovers and community are just frustrated with me because I will not stay fixed in my gender: No, I am not a girl. No, I am not a boy. No, I am not nonbinary. I am trans. Period. And I am speaking on the other side of a knowing that is hard for language, and hard on me, but it doesn’t mean it is not true or natural.”
Jahmil Roberts - “A Sacred Trying”
Jahmil’s experience of moving beyond reductive gender assignments of ‘man or woman’ to become themself in body, mind and spirit, between and beyond these two options.
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Jahmil Roberts (They/He) is a community organizer and professional who helps build practices of connection through practical care. Jahmil’s goal is to shift the ways that people relate to one another in working and sharing purpose. By encouraging analysis and excitement while building trust through consistency and curiosity, Jahmil creates spaces to name and address the impacts of systemic harm, and nurture individual and collective growth and healing. Jahmil worked at Trans Lifeline for 3 years. A journey that began as a Part-Time Hotline Operator, now holds Jahmil as the Hotline Operations & Care Manager.
“No one will give you the permission to become yourself. But you do have the option to explore yourself before becoming the person that you’ve been told that you are. You don't have to live inside of patriarchal and colonized gender assignments, inside of these pre-ordered mass-produced experiences. You can actually have something that's just yours.”
Dr. Morgan Henry Seamont - “Catch”
A trans man reflects on the overwhelming pain he experienced growing up in a small town without gender affirming care, and encourages us to support trans youth so they don’t suffer the way he suffered.
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Dr. Morgan Henry Seamont (he/him/his), Director of the Pride Office at CU Boulder, identifies as a trans man and long-time advocate for the LGBTQ+ community. His research has focused on the embodiment, sexuality and gender of transgender individuals, which has helped him focus on trans advocacy within higher education. His passion for LGBTQ+ advocacy began in 1992 with Measure 9 on the Oregon ballet that was an early version of "Don't say Gay" and equated LGBTQ+ identities with pedophilia, sadism and masochism. Since that time, he has been active within the community as a learner and leader fighting for equal rights while providing help and support to those within the community.
“People sometimes ask me if I was reborn, would I choose to be trans and go through the struggle again. The answer is, "Yes," there are so many gifts I have discovered by seeing the world from different perspectives – in touch with femininity, masculinity, and all things in between. But honestly, I don't think I could survive the pain of growing up the way I did, in that small town, with no language, no acceptance, no possibilities. ”
Raye Watson - “Gender Play & Possibility”
An experience of negotiating limiting and pathologizing narratives to access gender-affirming care. But on the other side of transition, their new freedom to expand into their true version of being nonbinary - an experience, not of neutrality, but multiplicity.
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Raye Watson (they/them) is a 26-year-old writer and designer living in the Denver metro area. Between grassroots nonprofits and student organizations, they’ve led hundreds of hours of workshops and fallen in love with storytelling for change. Drawn to social justice by their experiences as a queer student and artist, Raye lives happily in the intersection between art, academia, and advocacy. Their diverse body of work is connected by themes of design thinking, disability equity, and gender freedom. Their whole vibe is less "sex, drugs, rock and roll" and more "naps, meds, mellow jazz."
“For me, there was never a defining moment where I claimed the label of ‘non-binary’. This initial realization was less about discerning WHAT my gender was and more about becoming WHO I wanted to go through life as. I didn’t think of it as transitioning. I was just … expanding, growing branches that were the different parts of myself. I find it strange when people call my non-binary gender unnatural, because I feel this is the most natural thing there is. Nature is not either or. Nature is dry and wet, hot and cold, forgiving and brutal. Authenticity is multiplicity. Fluidity is sincerity.”