My name is Liam. I am a transmasculine gender transcendent queer person and I most comfortablly use maculine pronouns (he/him/his). I am a white-bodied, male-blending person assigned female at birth. I am a person in active, long-term trauma, addiction, and mental well-being recovery. 

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I come from Scottish-Muscogee people with a long and complicated history with colonization in Scotland and in this country. My biological father was a first generation American-Hungarian born to immigrant parents fleeing fascist Communism. All these genetic threads run through my enculturation as an American born into colonization and white supremacy culture in 1963. I was raised, shaped, and formed in Christendom as well as Western European-based academic systems that serve this country as apologetics and supportive scaffolds for colonization, gender oppression, racism, economic exploitation of land and bodies, queer oppression and erasure, and religious persecution. I have spent a lifetime attempting to understand these colonizing ideologies, practices, and systems and to decolonize myself, my practices, and my ways of being. I continue to strive for understanding and growth in this way as it seems to me to be a life-long series of practices and intentional endeavors.

 

Along the way, I - and my spouse - converted to Judaism. After getting sober and initiating my ongoing recovery, I left working in theatrical design and production, I was educated and trained as an addiction/ mental health counselor. For over 20 years, I specialized in substance use/mental health crisis stabilization, trauma-informed practices, and person-centered counseling, as well as HIV/AIDS case management and counselor. I have been deeply involved in intersectional queer and trans justice work and change-seeking, with intentional attention to anti-racist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist, caste-dismantling decolonizing practices since the early 1980s. Commitment to these principles and practices ultimately led me to leave the mental/behavioral health industry.

 

For more than 10 years, I have narrowed my change-making focus to trans-queer advocacy and activism, with continued commitment to addressing intersectional power systems. I carry in my skin, the tensions, wisdom, mistakes and live-dreaming of my ancestors, immediate family, and my own continually evolving selfhood and lived experience, while living as we do, in a world burgeoning with potential, consternated and constricted by oppressive and dehumanizing systems, structures, and institutions. I first came to 18 Springs as a teacher and I have remained because I believe in the vision and mission of 18 Springs. 

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I am a gender theorist, theological activist, participant learner invested in co-creating relational, learning communities with others seeking movement toward measurable and meaningful justice. I work primarily with religious communities, civic and public groups to better understand gender, sex, and sexuality and develop more accepting, affirming, and accommodating practices. I am an author, podcaster, and content writer. My spouse and I live in Winston-Salem with our dog, Dodi, and enjoy our son’s company when he is home on breaks from college.