Tarald Stein, transwriter

"MY BODY IS MY LOGOTYPE"

Tarald Stein tried to be a woman for 28 years. The slow insight and the selfreview about him being a man, it´s continuing now with a successful carrier as a poet and writer. At Pride House he tells us about his transition and he is helping other people to right about the trassexualism.

-This is how I am born, with arms, legs, head and a dick! This is how the Norwegian writer Tarald Stein tells the story about himself.
On varied English and Norwegian he tells in front of a small focused public  about his coming out as a man. During his telling he is reading one of his poems that tell us about the feeling and thoughts around the story. It is not so strange, the literature is very important for Tarald, he wanted to write before about being a man. That has not changed.
-The writinig is more fundamental for me than my body, that i´ve always tried to forget and push away. A positive effect of that is that I came closer to my body, says Tarald thoughtful.

A knife in the back

The body is in focus for Taralds writing, and his other relation to it. From poems about penises to the feeling of meeting people not being able to understand and prejudices from the least expected direction.
-I got the diagnose of Gender Identity Diorder, problems with the gender identity. Than I got a letter and an email of other transsexual people that think I should shot up, says Tarald.
The tune is quiet but not serious in the local, from the most important people Tarald was understood.
-I was directly “one of the guys” for my father. My sister said that the only feminine thing about me were my clothes, he says grateful in front of the small enlightened scene on the Klara Café of the House of Culture.

The art of writing

Later in a small conferenceroom has the public transformed into participants and Tarald to a teacher. The noise in the House of Culture has changed into quiet concentration. We will write about transgender.
Ones sexuality and gender identity can be so charged that Tarald insists that the present must be able to separate themselves from the text.
-If you send a text to a publishing house and get it refused you should not see it as that you are bad as persons, says Tarald seriously.

The title of you life

The theory is quickly changed to practice: The first task is to write about a subject, in this case a part of the body, continuously for five minutes. Classical writingcourse-trick. The only thing that you can hear is the sound of the pens scratching against the paper. It is rigid from the beginning, but when the participants are reading the results of their other task, conceivable titles to their texts of trans, it´s snatching in their corners of the mouth and they are nodding likely. The black sheep: correct me if I´m wrong, Nothing new under the skirt.