Introductory Remarks from President Cristle Collins Judd
It is my pleasure now to welcome Jennifer Finney Boylan to Sarah Lawrence, both to honor her as part of our Commencement exercises and to have her share a few words with you.
The inaugural Anna Quindlen Writer in Residence at Barnard College of Columbia University, Jenny is also a prolific novelist, memoirist, and short story writer. Among her 18 books, her 2003 memoir, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, was the first bestselling work by a transgender American.
Jenny adeptly uses the power of the written and spoken word to broaden society’s understanding of the lives and fundamental rights of individuals who are Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer or Questioning. Though not a Sarah Lawrence graduate herself – perhaps her only flaw – she truly embodies the character, vitality, interests, and concerns of our community, gracefully promoting in all she does the ethos of our motto, “wisdom with understanding.”
Jenny, I now ask you to join me at the podium.
Jennifer Finney Boylan, in recognition of your work and the spirit in which you do it, be it resolved that the Board of Trustees of Sarah Lawrence College commends you on the occasion of the 94th Commencement of the College and does hereby confer upon you, by authority of the Board of Regents of the State of New York, the degree Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa, with all of the rights and privileges thereunto appertaining.
Remarks from Jennifer Finney Boylan
President Judd, members of the Board of Trustees, faculty and staff, family, friends, parents, and above all, this glorious Sarah Lawrence class of 2022—and 21!—and 20!
I have received many gifts over the course of my long life but there are few as precious to me as this honorary degree from Sarah Lawrence College.
All these years I have been coasting along on nothing more than fumes and my MFA. The doctorate honoris causa means a lot to me, and I thank you. (Doctor Boylan, at last!)
By your leave, I wanted to talk to you, briefly, about change, a concept which is surely on the minds of these graduating scholars this morning, as the day has finally arrived when their time on this campus ends and a new life now begins. But to talk about change also means considering the question—of belonging. This was one of the central themes in a series of events at Sarah Lawrence this academic year, in fact. That series asked, among other things, what it means to belong, as well as what it means to feel excluded? What has to change, in order to take us from where we are now, to the better and more just place described by Langston Hughes, a place where “opportunity is real, and life is free?” And in what ways will it be necessary for each of us to change in order to make someone else feel included, welcome, beloved?
As a transgender American I can tell you how lousy it feels to be maligned, belittled, excluded, but I can also tell you about the joy I have felt on those occasions when I finally felt seen, when I finally felt as if there was room in this world for me. In some ways the biggest change in my own life was not going from male to female but going from a person who had a secret to a person without one, a person burdened by a private sense of shame to a person who was able to live her life out loud with pride.
Gender isn’t the only thing that’s changed in my life; an even more profound change for me happened half a dozen years ago when I lost my hearing, and I went from a person who had never given serious thought to what it might be like to move through the world as a disabled person to someone who, well, I can tell you, someone who thinks about it all the time.
I still remember the morning I called my wife after getting my final diagnosis, the one in which my doctor told me my hearing was mostly gone after a single night standing a little too close to a fire alarm when it went off. This is my wife Deedie, to whom I have now been married thirty four years—twelve as husband and wife, twenty two as wife and wife.
I told her my news, and then I started sobbing into my phone, right there on the streets of New York. I said, “I’m so sorry you have to be married to somebody like me.”
She said, “Jenny, I stayed with you through the gender thing. You really think I’d divorce you because you have hearing aids?”
It was a beautiful morning in New York City. All around me were the sounds of chirping birds, shouting children, honking taxis.
I said, “What?”
I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to our ASL signer, whose work this morning helps those of us who are hearing impaired feel that we too belong. Thank you.
I also remember the night almost twenty years before I lost my hearing, when I told my mom that I was transgender.
I was pretty sure that my mother—eighty five years old, Republican, conservative, and an evangelical Christian, wasn’t going to view my coming out as an occasion for celebration.
It was pretty scary, actually. But on that Sunday evening, I poured her a very hearty gin and tonic, and then we sat down, and said, Mom, there’s something I need to tell you.
And that’s when I told her I was trans, that I had known I was supposed to be female since I was a child, but that I was afraid of telling her the truth, all these years, because I was afraid of disappointing her, that I was afraid she wouldn’t love me anymore.
Right about there is the moment I started crying, and I found it impossible to go on.
And that is when my tiny mother got up out of her chair and sat down next to me, and put her arms around me, and said, I would never turn my back on my child. I have always loved you. I always will love you, no matter who you are.
And I said to her, But mom, what will happen when everyone finds out I’m your daughter now? Won’t that be an embarrassment? A scandal?
She said, well, frankly, yes. But I will adjust. And then she quoted First Corinthians: These three abide: Faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love.
She held me in her arms and wiped away the tears. She said, Love will prevail.
And in my own life, that has mostly been true, although there have been times when other things have prevailed, too. Ignorance. Violence. Loss.
There are a lot of reasons why the forces of darkness seem to be in ascendance these days—economic and racial injustice; the assault on truth; not to mention many of the upheavals and inequities hard-wired into capitalism itself. But really at the heart of a lot of trouble is a simple inability to accept change, a refusal to accept that most things don’t last forever, and in many cases, shouldn’t last forever. It is hard to let go of the way things have been, but when we face injustice, we have to prevail. And make no mistake, to greet the world with love doesn’t mean that you sit around with a dopey smile on your face while the world burns around you. For love to prevail it is necessary to greet the world with fierceness, to push back against injustice with both relentlessness and joy, wisdom and ferocity. Those who would turn back the clock to a time when women were denied the right to control their own bodies, to a time when LGBTQ people had to live in the shadows, to a time when people of color could be denied the right to vote—these people need to understand that they will have a fight on their hands—but that those of us engaged in this work are motivated not by fear but hope, not by intolerance but justice, not by hate, but love.
Members of the classes of 22, and 21, and 20, I said earlier that today is a day of change for you, but it is also a day of change for your parents, and for those who have served as parents for you. If you see them, later today, shedding tears, well, forgive them. And consider that they may not only be shedding tears for you. Today is a day when they might find themselves, like Kurt Vonnegut’s Billy Pilgrim, come unstuck in time. They will be watching you cross this stage, but they will also, perhaps, be remembering when they were the ones graduating from college, or—who knows?—perhaps a time even more distant than that. My daughter graduated from Vassar a few years ago and on that day, even as she took her degree in hand it was impossible for me not to remember standing in an O.R. 22 years earlier as a baby’s cry filled the room, and my wife Deedie, light radiating from her face, looked up and said, That’s amazing.
Well, it is amazing, the passage of time, an occasion for joy and celebration, and, sure: a few tears as well at how swiftly our days pass by. But as Gandalf said, I will not say do not weep, for not all tears are an evil.
President Judd, Trustees, faculty and staff, I thank you for the great honor you have bestowed upon me. Members of the classes of 22, and 21, and 20. We cannot wait to see what, and who, you change into next. We wish you joy and godspeed in all the adventures that now begin. May love in your lives always prevail.
Thank you.
Remarks as prepared for delivery