“I don’t support same sex marriage in Massachusetts,” announces trans activist, radio host and Massachusetts resident, Ethan St. Pierre who peppers his speech with self-revealing bombshells, that make the self-described radical guy sound surprisingly conservative. Founder of the Internet broadcasting network, , St. Pierre also sits on the board of a number of organizations including the International Foundation for Gender Education (ifge.org), Families United Against Hate (fuah.org) and the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition (ntac.org).

St. Pierre, identifies as a trans man but maintains, “I don’t think that I was born in the wrong body.  I just think that there are women with penises and men with vaginas.”

As coordinator of The International Transgender Day of Remembrance, St. Pierre developed a new Web site (transgenerdor.org), and updates the statistics of those who are murdered as a result of anti-transgender violence or hatred - work once done by Remember Our Dead founder Gwen Smith, who’s been on hiatus. “I can’t tell you enough about the work that [Gwen]’s done on our behalf; and what a difficult job it is. I work on that website for half a day and I’m bawling my eyes out.  These young people with all the promise in the world and their lives were just snuffed out for no other reason than they were trans or different.”

St. Pierre collaborated with hosts Nancy Nangeroni and  on GenderTalk, the online, weekly radio program devoted to transgender issues; then developed his own show, Radical Trannies, before launching TransFM (transfm.org).  Currently on summer vacation, the live show returns in September and reaches listeners in twenty countries.  In the meantime, pod casts of the show are available online, as are postings from other pod casters.

For nearly a decade, St. Pierre has also been lobbying for the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, which he describes as “a bunch of rabble rousers
telling it like it is, saying the things other organizations are afraid to say and won’t say about what’s actually happening in our community.”
In particular, NTAC has taken a strong stance on the Human Rights Campaign’s failure to support United ENDA.  Personally, St. Pierre says, “I don’t believe they’re helping anybody.  Never mind trans people, what they’ve done to us.  It pains me to see them grab people out of our community that don’t know the history. It’s the people that know better, that I [really]
.don’t tolerate.  This is our community, why would you do that to your own people?”

  “We got kicked to the curb in the ‘80s when the assimilationist movement started,” St. Pierre argues.  “And rich, white, gay men decided this was their movement. [Now] we’re moving out of a place [of] shame. We deserve these rights and we deserve them now. We shouldn’t have to wait for the crumbs that have been swept off the table. ” 

Still, St. Pierre doesn’t support same sex marriage, except in states that have “already taken care of
the [trans] community as far as employment, and hate crimes are concerned.”

Encouraged by a younger generation, that hasn’t known “our community without the T,” St. Pierre proclaims, “It’s a wild time to be an activist.  There’s so much going on right now. We’re going to move forward and leave people behind that are stuck in that old assimilationist thing.” 

“I’m really not that much of a radical guy,” St. Pierre insists.  “I just want rights like everybody else.  I want us all to have rights.”

Tune in to Portland, Oregon’s KBOO radio, August 26th 6-6:30 pm PST as trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall  joins Trannywreck Radio’s Rebecca Nay to co-host the pilot episode of their new radio show, Gender Blender, streaming live at KBOO.fm.