"Through my reporting and series Tongass Voices and Lingít Word of the Week, I tell stories about people who have shaped -- and continue to shape -- the landscape of this place we live."
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March 31 is Transgender Day of Visibility. This year, it comes after an onslaught of anti-trans legislation around the country — including in Alaska, where a bill that would ban transgender girls from female sports is making its way through the Legislature.
But Jane Hale is not afraid to be in the spotlight.
“I’m a ham,” she said. “I like having an audience.”
Hale came out as trans in February, at the age of 69. And she did it in a rather bold way: through a column in the Juneau Empire.
“I mean, it sounds cliched, but I feel like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders,” she said. “I’ve been hiding this for so many years.”
The column starts with a Sufi story that was told to her by a professor. It’s about a river trying to reach the other side of a desert.
“It’s a parable about our individual insufficiency, a story about allowing others to help us. Whatever you have to do, you don’t have to do it alone. You can rely on others for aid and comfort,” she wrote. “For me, the story has become a transgender parable, a story about dying as one ‘self’ to become another: giving up the identity the culture has saddled you with and discovering a self that feels more authentic and true.”
She writes: “The courage to live authentically is meaningless without the courage to do it with and for others.”
Since her initial column, she’s taken on a public-facing role as a trans person in Juneau.
Transgender Day of Visibility is a day of awareness, to celebrate trans identity and the resilience of trans people. While representation of trans identity has increased, so has hateful rhetoric.
This means that for many, coming out isn’t just about themselves. It’s to build and strengthen the trans community as a whole.
“I wanted to be public about it,” Hale said. “I wanted to be an activist, take an activist position. I’m going to do this. Let me help other people who are doing this, too. Let me be a part of this thing out there. We have a nice trans community here in town, and some of us are open, some of us aren’t, and I just wanted to do that.”
For Hale, it’s been worth it to see the community’s reaction.
“A friend and acquaintance came up to me at the pool the other morning just, you know, thanked me for the columns, and it was so heartfelt and warm, and I was almost in tears,” Hale said. “Yeah, it was really wonderful. And that’s happening again and again. And that’s the reward. That’s the payoff. Right?”
Hale says trans visibility in Juneau is a work in progress, but, so far, she’s found support.
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A Facebook Group is trying to do something about all of the missing people in Juneau. The group is called Help Find Juneau Missing People, and there’s action in that name.
“Everybody is somebody’s someone,” the page says.
Since the group started in October, it’s been a space for people to share information about missing people in Juneau, but it’s also for sharing resources.
The group was started by Kiersten Farnsworth when her brother Doug went missing last fall.
Doug Farnsworth’s body was found on Nov. 8, but Farnsworth stayed on as a moderator to help others who are going through what she went through.
“I mean, the page kind of it’s kind of my way of bereavement and grief,” she said.
For Farnsworth, it wasn’t just her brother’s case that was personal.
“I’m kind of close to a good chunk of random missing people,” she said.
One decision she’s had to enforce as a moderator is keeping the page Juneau-specific. People have come to post missing people from Anchorage and other places in the hopes of drawing attention to these cases.
“I feel like if we start focusing on other areas like that,” Farnsworth said. “People will stop paying as much attention when it’s somebody from Juneau.”
Whenever this happens, she tries to make sure that person has access to other resources, like the Seeking Alaska’s Missing page and then she takes the posts down.
“Because I mean, everyone matters,” she said. “It doesn’t matter what city they’re in, they still definitely matter.”
Late last year, Davina Merchant’s cousin Clifford White went missing, too. Farnsworth made Merchant a moderator of the group. They’ve known each other since they were kids.
When White went missing, the police said they didn’t know where to look for him, so his family had to organize the search efforts themselves.
Merchant said she got a lot of leads from people saying they saw her cousin get beat up in a parking lot, or they’d tell her where they thought she should go look, but none of them were helpful.
“When somebody starts telling a story, I think it’s because they’ve heard somebody else say it. I don’t know,” Merchant said. “It was nothing but lies.”
After five months, White’s body was recovered in Juneau’s wetlands. It took a few days before the State Medical Examiner’s Office could confirm that it was him, but people were speculating on Facebook instantly.
“When my cousin’s body was found, everybody just assumed it was him. And they were already posting it, that he was found,” Merchant said. “Before I turned everything off, I was just, like, out of respect, you know, you got to wait until the autopsy is done, so we can find out. You can’t just assume that it’s him when there’s a whole lot of people in this town that are missing still. And so I just shut my phone off because it was just too much.”
Last week, the Juneau Police Department reopened its own page for active missing cases, but Farnsworth isn’t sure that people will know to check that page regularly. What she really wants is an alert system that would draw immediate attention to someone’s case when they go missing.
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