A place to call home

by Jessica Carreras

FERNDALE – The small office located on the second floor of Ferndale's Community Pride Building may not look like much, but to Transgender Michigan founders and board members, it's a 13-year-long dream finally come true.
The statewide but southeastern-focused trans support and equal rights group held an open house Oct. 13 commemorating the opening of their first-ever official office. Attended by both TGM members and community supporters, the open house highlighted some of the group's current needs, as well as encouraged visitors to become donors. It also provided a chance for founder and Executive Director Rachel Crandall to talk about some of the organization's upcoming goals.
"We're going to be adding resources and we're going to have any resource anyone would want for being trans," she revealed. "Besides Transgender Michigan, this will also be called the Michigan Transgender Resource Center. We'll have books and information about training shelters regarding trans issues – all kinds of stuff."
Of course, the group still needs donations, too, including office supplies and furniture, trans-focused books and funds to pay insurance, phone and other bills.
The group will be opening a hotline, and hopes to establish a speakers' bureau in the near future. A longer-term goal is to create a statewide coalition of transgender leaders that will include representation from all corners of the state's trans community. "We want to have all the trans leaders from all over Michigan," Crandall said. "We want to have leaders from up in the U.P., we want to have group leaders, we want to have everyone."
And, she added, the plans aren't just daydreams, either: Transgender Michigan is currently talking with a "major donor who wants to give us some money."
"I can't tell you who," she teased, "but hopefully you'll be hearing about it eventually. We met with them and they are very excited about us."
TGM Board Member Vanessa Emma Goldman is just excited to see an organization she cares about deeply expand and progress.
"I thought it was wonderful," she said of the decision to open up the office. "As a board member, I think it's a good thing that we have a space here to work out of and to plan our events and things that we're going to do and things for the community – people who need some courage and some help to come out and be themselves."
It's a service that Goldman can help with now that she is out, too. Originally from Wyandotte, the trans activist lives in Flint and works as a librarian at the city's University of Michigan satellite campus.
Goldman came out as transgender five years ago, and became involved with TGM shortly after. "It was not an easy thing to come out," she recalled. "When I was growing up in the downriver suburbs of Detroit, you just didn't talk about being gay or lesbian or transgender or anything like that, so it was only recently that I felt comfortable admitting even to myself who I am."
Goldman says she'd like to see Transgender Michigan continue to grow and expand its services throughout the state.
"I'd like us to get more members and get more of a presence around the state," she shared. "Recently I've seen e-mails from people who are way up north that are wanting to find help, and it's really hard because there's not as many (LGBT) people up there, there's no place like Affirmations or like this or like the college LGBT centers.
"I'd like to get more help for people, get more of a presence, not just in the obvious places like Ann Arbor or Ferndale, but everywhere."
Crandall adds that she hopes the organization will eventually have more than just an office to work out of. "We've been working on this ever since we started Transgender Michigan 13 years ago," she says of opening the office. "We're going to be expanding in the future and who knows? Maybe one day in the far future, we'll have our own building."