2006 POINT SCHOLARS

Ben Singer

Rutgers University

English

Ben Singer grew up in a small town in northern Illinois. As an undergraduate, he became the first in his family to obtain a college degree. In his second year of graduate school he fully realized his need to transition. This was before a gender movement had even begun and he had just learned there was a word to describe himself: transgender. Early in transition he experienced estrangement from his family, physical abuse in a medical setting, extreme isolation, and lost his academic advisor who claimed people would think he was a “freak.”

As a teaching assistant at a major university without a “gender identity” policy, he had no job protection either. Ben was terrified of losing his job and, thus, the health insurance that made it possible for him to transform. Because there was no closet in which to hide his visibly changing body—an uncontrollable public event—he came out on a campus of fifty thousand people and became the spokesperson of a successful campaign to add transgender protective language to the university anti-harassment policy. The accompanying stress was so great he could barely concentrate on his studies. Though it slowed his progress toward graduation, he could not abandon his conviction to create a world within which others like him could live openly and harassment free.

Ben has integrated his efforts by pursuing a dual career of activism and academic work. Highlights include becoming founding director of the Trans-health Information Project, a collaboration of Prevention Point Philadelphia and the Gay and Lesbian Latino AIDS Education Initiative that is funded by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. He also conducts frequent health education workshops for trans individuals and cultural competency training for providers. Ben is a PhD candidate at Rutgers University completing ethnography on the medicalization of trans people in public health settings. He recently taught “Transgender Queries in Medicine, Law, Politics and Culture,” at Barnard College.

In Ben's own words: “I started activism at a time when trans people had no real community. I was determined to help create a social space, beyond the personal, wherein my life had a larger meaning. A turning point came in a moment of activist’s despair, when a friend who is a Native Storyteller said: ‘You will build a house that you will never live in.’ This view significantly shifted my perspective; it’s not enough to establish a space in the immediate sense, it’s about working towards a world yet to be inhabited.”