Digital Transgender Archive

Interview with Katie Burgess

An interview with Katie Burgess, a white trans woman, community organizer, social worker, trans activist, and theatre artist based in Minneapolis. At the time of this oral history interview, she was a Co-Founder and Co-Director of Open Flame Theatre, an all-trans theatre ensemble based in Minneapolis and western Wisconsin, and additionally worked as a social worker and theater educator with the homeless. Prior to that work, she served as the Executive Director of the Trans Youth Support Network (TYSN,) a Minneapolis-based community organization primarily serving trans youth of color, as the overnight desk staff at Avenues for Homeless Youth in downtown Minneapolis, and as a member of the collective running The Exchange, a community space serving queer and trans people at 34th Street and Chicago Avenue in South Minneapolis. She additionally was part of the early 2010s campaign to free CeCe McDonald after she survived an assault and was imprisoned. In this interview with Myra Billund-Phibbs, Burgess discusses her upbringing by hippie parents in southern Maine, her experiences in school, and coming into an understanding of herself as trans before moving to Western Massachusetts and ultimately travelling for years as a homeless punk, her settling in Minneapolis at a friend's suggestion and entry into the South Minneapolis queer/trans punk/anarchist/collectivist scene of the 2000s, and her entry into trans community organizing work. Specifically, she discusses going to the support groups at SafeZone and how that led her to District 202, her work at Avenues for Homeless Youth and the Minnesota Trans Health Coalition (MTHC,) and her eventual assuming of the Executive Director role at TYSN, which she discusses at length, in terms of the organization's role, work, youth base, issues, split from District 202, and shortcomings. She additionally discusses the structural weaknesses of similar nonprofit organizations and the divide between professionals and the youth they aim to serve, the impacts of TYSN on Minneapolis, her time with The Exchange and the beginnings of MTHC's Shot Clinic, and the beginnings of the Free CeCe campaign of the early 2010s.