Jessica Soukup

Trans Lives Trans Voices from March 21, 2021 Jessica talks about her first experience shopping in public in a new gender role.

That Time of the Month - interview by Meghan Ross August 2019 Host Meghan Ross interviews Strong Female Lead(er) Jessica Soukup during the Pride Episode of That Time of the Month.

Plutopia News Network interview from June 23, 2020 PNN's Facebook Live interview with Jessica Soukup. Joined by The Not Ready For Cable News Players: Suzy Shelor, Jon Lebkowsky, Maggie Duval and Scoop Sweeney, Jessica talks about LGBTQIA issues, the recent Supreme Court ruling, Allies...and much more.

  Trans Woman Comes Out To Colleagues, Who Welcome Her With Open Arms.     Text of the interview Hi, my name is Jessica Soukup. I’m from Austin, Texas.  I currently work at Texas State University. I’ve been here now for 11 years. About five years ago, I came to a revelation. I realized that I was transgender. But tied to that was a recognition of the potential consequences of that revelation. I could lose my family. I could lose my wife of 35 years. I could lose my job. I could lose everything. I nevertheless felt I had to move forward with my transition. I spent about 18 months finding myself, how I wanted to present to the world, learning who I was. But eventually I had to come out at work. I thought about my boss, the person I was working for at the time and I wanted to give him a chance to think about his response. I didn’t want him to have to respond in the moment to some information that he wasn’t expecting. So I wrote a letter.  I told him what I wanted and w

Overcoming the Dystopia of a Transgender Childhood - TEDx Texas State University   Text of the talk ------------------------------- Frame of mind ------------------------------   Imagine back before your earliest memories, back to when you were given a name; a name that carried cultural meaning that would indicate what you would like and even who you would love.  Imagine at that moment when a doctor spoke your gender, they actually said the wrong thing. It was written on your birth certificate and on the pink or blue balloons used to celebrate your birth.   From that moment on, the moment of your birth, you entered a dystopian world. A world right out of the twilight zone where everyone else’s understanding of who you are and what you liked and how you behaved was different than you perceived it. From that action, your parents gave you a name.  They picked out clothes. Friends and family gave you toys and you were bathed in everything our society has assigned to be another gender  

Changing the world  The activism of Lisa Scheps By Jessica Soukup of QIRadio.com for KOOP Lisa Scheps Few would argue that the climate has improved for transgender people.  We all understand that there's still a tremendous amount of work that needs to be done, especially for trans people of color and trans youth.  Nevertheless, just a few years ago if you wanted to transition, you planned and organized, moved away abandoning your old life, and started over in a new place.  As I transitioned, I still had to worry about the safety of my job and about the likely loss of relationships I have had for many years but, all trans people stand on the shoulders of activists who publicly transitioned and fought for trans rights at a time when open discussions of trans rights were not a thing. I first met Lisa Scheps over dinner at a Texas Roadhouse in South Austin.  She was working to find a new executive director for the Transgender Education Network of Texas. When I met her, I

I, like the rest of my cohort, came to social media in my middle years.  I wasn't raised on it and, while I will abstain from stories of a tech free childhood, I never the less lived them. When I started my account, I did so because everyone else was doing it.  I was half interested and developed an extensive list of maybe 70 friends.    Then, there was a major shift in my life.  I discovered my gender identity was not as I was assigned at birth.  I was transgender. It's no surprise that the magnatude of that discovery was obvious to my 48 year old self.  I could lose everything; my family, friends, job, really everything. Regardless, once I knew who I was, there was no stopping the changes.  The need to transition is overpowering and increased for me with every milestone I overcame. Loneliness was pervasive in my early transition.  I didn't know anyone who was trans and I had nobody to reach out to for help navigating the enormous complexity of transitioning to the opp