Allow me to introduce myself; my first speech for the Toastmasters club at FIU

"What's in a name? That by which we call a rose any other name would smell as sweet."

Hello, everyone. Tonight, I'll be introducing myself as Adonis Alvarez. However, that was not always my name. Before I was even born, my identity was conceived in words: daughter, grand-daughter, niece, girl. As I grew older, I realized none of these words described me and yet, I was told they were more real than the feelings of uncertainty I had to struggle with on a daily basis. But words are funny like that.

They can heal or hurt, liberate or incarcerate, build up or tear down an individual. I guess as a Gemini, I’ve always been biased in my belief that language is by far our most important creation. Like the saying goes: Until the lions have their own historian, the history of the hunt will always glorify the hunter. And for far too long, people like me have been beaten,maltreated, harassed, and persecuted simply for being ourselves.

I’d like to say that I never chose to be a political topic. But my body, and what I chose to do with it, will always be a hot-button issue. Because for as long as we’ve had gender, we’ve had transgenders. We are the resistance to the stereotypes that kept our mothers pregnant and barefoot in kitchens when they should have been out on the streets organizing, to the forces who took our brothers’ lives via suicide because asking for help was not the ‘manly’ thing to do.
You cannot write us out of existence, no matter how hard you try. We are everywhere; in your classrooms, in your bathrooms, in your children, in every nonconformist thought that has ever crossed your mind when someone told you you couldn’t, or shouldn’t, do something because of your genitals.

And I, for one, will not be silenced. Too many of my trancestors would have killed for this opportunity, and they were killed regardless. Too many of my trans sisters are still too preoccupied with basic survival to worry about developing a voice. I know I can’t speak for them. But I can use my visibility to shine a light on the issues affecting our entire community. I’ve had the privilege of being able to afford counseling, housing, medication and most importantly, an education which helped me dismantle the walls of oppression surrounding my current existence, along with exposing me to the vocabulary I needed to reconstruct those walls into a beautiful bridge. But like any good resident of Florida will tell you, it cost to get on this causeway. And the price you pay to enter my space is an open mind. Because we owe it to ourselves to speak out, but we also owe it to each other to question everything. Thank you.