from the Series: Pride Month
Getting to the Bottom of Storytelling
by Maeve DuVally
These days, it’s quite common to hear people talk about the power of storytelling—so much so that the expression has become almost trite. With Pride Month upon us, I wanted to take a step back and look at exactly what the power of storytelling is and why it is especially important right now.
I have devoted most of my life to storytelling. A journalist in Tokyo, Washington D.C. and New York for fifteen years, I told stories through the print articles I filed on financial markets. Following that, as a corporate communications professional first at Merrill Lynch and then Goldman Sachs, I worked with executives to craft narratives about our companies and shared them externally, most often with reporters.
Last year, Sibylline Press published my memoir, Maeve Rising, where I detail my life as an alcoholic, and my transgender coming out experience in corporate America.
As an alcoholic in recovery, I think twelve-step programs best express what makes storytelling unique and so effective. As my former sponsor likes to say, the secret sauce of sobriety is one alcoholic talking to another and the identification that occurs between them, which in turn breaks the isolation that addicts and drunks so often experience.
Why is this important now?
The laws being passed in some state legislatures around the United States restricting gender-affirming healthcare for transgender youth and curbing other basic civil rights of transgender people have one goal (which the other side rarely acknowledges in public): It’s to erase transgender and non-binary people.
More than ever, we need trans people to tell their stories to humanize us so we cannot be written off as an amorphous mass of weirdos. I don’t think anybody who thoughtfully reads my memoir cataloguing my struggles and eventual triumph over them can honestly tell me that there is no commonality with the life experiences of cisgender and heterosexual people.
It’s utterly shameful in Pride Month of 2024 queer people still need to defend our lived dignity, but we do; how we do it is by sharing our experiences over and over. At some point the other side will get it.
Happy Pride and give ’em hell.
About Maeve DuVally
Maeve DuVally is the author of Maeve Rising: Coming Out Trans in Corporate America. A New York City resident, Maeve is an LGBTQ+ advocate; communications and diversity and inclusion consultant and a writer. She worked as a corporate spokesperson for Goldman Sachs and Merrill Lynch for twenty years and was a financial journalist previous to that. She is a frequent traveler to Japan where she lived for years. A frequent public speaker on workplace diversity, she serves on the board of multiple non-profits including GLAAD, Anchor Health Initiative, and Trans New York. She is a mentor to transgender people in corporations.
Maeve DuVally is the author of Maeve Rising: Coming Out Trans in Corporate America published in August 2023 by Sibylline Press. Click here to purchase her book.