a transition journal

risa stephanie bear

I'm working the Library reference desk and a patron comes up, no one I know.

She's a young mother, self-assured and practical in her movements, with a short, almost flattop haircut. She's wearing a floral-print blue baby backpack, she's young and happy and the baby is younger and even happier. And I'm helping her and the baby starts playing peekaboo with me around her shoulder. So she swings around to let us get a better look at each other, and the baby opens her arms wide and grins. "Da-da."

"Oh, no — I'm sorry," says the mom, reddening a bit. "She does that all the time. Everybody; men, women, it's da-da, da-da, right now, all the time."

"Well, in this case maybe she's not too far off. I mean, for decades I was a da-da."

That cracks up all three of us.

The young mom is glowing. She leans forward and touches the sleeve of my blouse. "And now you've come home to yourself — I can see it in your eyes."

Yes.

I HAD taken, in recent years, to walking about in the dark, on our acre of land, after everyone else had gone to bed.

I would sit up late, working at my computer, typing, proofreading, uploading, checking my work in a variety of browsers, or adding a chapter to a garden journal that I was writing, until past midnight.

I would then check round the house to see if anyone was still up, and then, if it seemed safe, I would go back to my room and choose among my few feminine treasures: a worn bra, a cast-off corduroy skirt, stained white blouse, pearls, a pair of down-at-the heels black mules, clip-on earrings, purloined lipstick (too red).

Then I would slip out the back door and walk around in the moonlight, or even in the soft, inky rain, and lean on the fence, watching the lights of late-night cars reach round the country curves in the distance.

I would cup my hands round my foam-pad breasts and wish they were real.

This is the part that is supposed to be sexual. But I simply wanted to know, leaning, over the sink as I rinsed a plate, that the weight of my body felt right to me. It is in that sense I wished they were real.

As a small child, I had run bubble baths, and then would lie underneath the foam, sculpting a woman's form on my yet-unmasculinized body, hating that the bubbles must eventually be washed away and my body returned to the world outside.

If there were company, I would try to help in the kitchen, or sit on the counter to listen to the women talk, only to be chased away to the living room and its tales of the hunt, or sports, or maybe truck maintenance. What little self-discipline I had went into looking interested in these tales. If I were not careful, I might begin looking toward the lovely laughter in the kitchen, and then my father might give that dreaded look of worry.

I was his only son. I must grow up to be a man among men...

I wished for a different body, a different mind and soul, even, than had developed over the last fifty years.

I wished it badly enough that I was now wearing a bra to work under my shirt, and taking it off, with a sigh, when I got home.

Something was going to have to be done.

I went to a counselor.

He inquired into my childhood. He listened to my vocabulary, enunciation and phrasing. He watched my body language. I had a feeling I was not femme enough for him.

After eight sessions, he was still cagey with me about where this was going; I pressed him; he opined that I was a crossdresser, nothing more.

I went away crushed.

But determined. And just as frightened as ever.

Would this cost me my family, my friends, my job?

Wondering if I might not divine my proper course with a bit of self-study, I brought home a digital camera and set it up facing my bureau mirror.

It was the evening of August 7, 2003.

I had shaved a beard that had occupied my face for most of the preceding thirty years. It was easier to see myself without the beard. I'd begun growing my hair, too.

It was time to see where all this was going.

I tie a bandanna round my head to hide the oncoming male pattern baldness. I snap on clip-on earrings, drape pearls untidily around my neck. A bit of lipstick. Sit in front of the mirror, fire the camera.

I download the image, look at it on my computer, and look again.

"Whom do you see here?" I ask myself. "What do you really want to do with your life?"

Something ticks over from A to B.


I logged on and placed an order at a website I'd heard of.

The pills came from New Zealand, by way of Vanuatu.

The wrapper was that plain one, brown, in the best porn-shipping tradition, except it was made of some more modern stuff, difficult to open without scissors.

I hid myself away to see the contents alone: buried in white plastic popcorn, the small white box; within the box, a clear polyethylene wheel, bearing twenty-eight blue pellets, each carefully matched to its ordinary day: Mo, Tu, We, Th, Fr, Sa, Su.

This was Sa, Saturday. For once no ordinary Saturday, to me.

I read, for the first time and also the last, the three hundred dreadful side effects, not without interest, not without concern.

I was no longer young, after all, and my cardiovascular system comes from a long line of stutterers.

After swallowing the first blue pill, I set down the water-glass and gazed out the window for awhile. I changed into clogs and a wide-brimmed straw hat. I stepped into the sunshine: gardener’s light. With suddenly trembling hands, I reached for string and scissors, watching a woman’s shadow, on straw, bending to her tasks.

Today, she will train peas.

Tomorrow, beans.

"What do you remember first?"

I remember that my mother sought a place at the statewide Christian Camp for me.

I had been slow to mimic the ways of boys and men. In the boys’ cabins and in the men’s lodge, inflicting pain was, it seemed to me, equivalent to virtue. And they had, of course, found me, as they always did, an easy mark.

The voices of men frightened me.

They woofed at one another: hnghh-hnghh-hrunnhh-hrgnh.

They devised elaborate ruses to detect, to punish weakness, if found among them; this was called joking, joshing.

And so she sought a place of safety within the camp; If her six-year-old child could not learn the skills for avoiding or deflecting bullying, then he could at least sleep safely among the women, on a trundle-bed they had found.

I lay in lantern-light, bundled, intently watching the beautiful hands fold towels. The owners of the beautiful hands spoke softly among themselves: "ullulu-ulullulu-ulu, ullulu-ulullulu-ulu."

Yes, this was my language; this, the speech that I must learn. Already I knew, in sadness, that my project must be carried out in secret.

One of my co-workers believes she has found a man in the women's restroom. She comes to me, distraught and angry, at the Library service desk.

"Who? Where?" I ask her.

"He’s over there!"

I see what to my eyes is a woman only, about my age, the kind called pleasingly plump, busying herself at a public computer terminal. Her handbag rests on the counter by the monitor. She’s gray, her expression a little careworn. Maybe even a little dull. She’s been to a thrift store, to judge by the pleated-trim skirt, but she’s shopped her color well, and hasn’t mixed silver with gold. Perhaps her hands are large, and maybe, just maybe, there’s a hint of Adam’s apple.

To me, she "passes."

This is the monster, bent on who knows what devious plan, that went to the "wrong" restroom?

And, if so, how in the world was she going to go to the "right" one?

On the spot, I must begin my co-worker’s training, for the lady’s sake, and, oh, for sure, my own.

There are lots of men, I tell her, that have this condition; it is well known to the medical community, there is a course of treatment that they recommend. "This is now a woman," I tell her. "We must be kind."

"See, here is a website; this is a doctor; this one's a dancer; this is an airline pilot; this, a member of her country's Parliament. This, a famous writer of travelogues .... "

My friend begins to marvel. "Look, they are all so beautiful! Oh, my!"

Oh, my.

I become aware that I am sad. For the lady we have seen, and for so many others, and also for me.

Like her, I will not have this beauty. We will be old ladies at best. We won't be the beauties the website features. It's a good strategy, showing good-looking passers, but ...

I have begun too late. But I hope, when I earn my face, some beauty from my heart will show.

Enough to go (oh god) to the restrooms in this place.

Counselors. I'm still looking for one that will even talk to me about where I want, need, to go. The ones I've encountered so far all seem to want to weave their own story of my future: adjustment, paterfamilias, wearing the beard and the tie into old age, an honored dignified death and a man's grave.

So much power! These people can nail you to whatever cross they like. They mean to help, but …

You have to find the right one. Someone to hold open the gate for you, and not hold the gate shut.

A gatekeeper can place high hurdles one behind another, and then, if you're desperate, and don't know any other phone numbers, you learn to nimble it, leaping, gathering strength to leap again. The trick is to slither through between the gate and the gatepost before your patience and stamina give out and suicide begins to look like an option.

So you learn to lie.

If you cannot lie, you’ll find yourself going it alone. And even if you do lie, you may find yourself going it alone. And, alone, it's very, very hard to get the body you feel you should have had.

You must turn aside the six invidious suggestions along the way.

1. Yes, it’s dangerous to be a woman; half the population knows that.

2. Yes, it’s a one-way trip; so’s life.

3. Yes, I can end up lonely, been there, survived that.

4. Yes, I have issues with my childhood and my mother. You don’t?

5. No, I don’t think becoming a more sensitive man will help; there aren’t insensitive women, then?

6. And, no, it’s not about the clothes.

It was never really about the clothes.

When I was punished for my interest in the clothes, I knew, though I did not know how to say it then, that it was not going to be about the clothes.

No, I understand that you don’t have to believe me.

Yes, I understand you will not be recommending a prescription.

Here’s your fucking hundred-dollar check.

Goodbye.

I am not yet telling anyone about the estrogen and the androgen blocker. I have ordered them and they have come from a faraway place.

It's clear that what I'm doing is psychotropic drugs. Estrogen and testosterone, except when manufactured with or without your permission by your own body, are federally controlled substances.

Results vary. But here are some things one might expect from estradiol.

The first thing you’ll notice is a letting go.

How else to put it?

Doesn’t sound like an emotion, but it is, like sighing, arms folded, leaning out a window, watching the last summer month take on a bit of color from the fall.

It’s not a sadness, don’t get me wrong. It’s more a harvest, like gold, like wheat.

Like rest.

You’re going to love it, if this way is you. You’ll cry while smiling, and beautiful things will be too beautiful; you’ll laugh through tears.

People will wonder what your problem is, but not much.

You’ll be blown away how busy they are with trifles; you’ll pity them, and maybe try to explain how they should see; that will be the sad bit, getting that there’s so much blindness to be got round.

Then, you’ll want to be helping always; it surges through you like a tide, to do the little things that men, and so many women too, must leave for themselves undone and unconsidered.

You’ll find yourself picking up after them! At first, you will enjoy that.

At first.

Next you’ll begin to notice how your arms are smaller than they were. Perhaps your thumb and middle finger meet, wrapped around your wrist.

One day it suddenly hits you that your hips are bigger than you remember, and your walk swings more, and all your ancient movements are estranged.

You must retrain.

Your elbows come in closer to your sides; you point your toes ahead and walk erect, no longer falling forward at every step.

Oh — your sweat won’t smell the same.

And there’s this: some sort of tingling soreness in your chest.

This may at first perplex you, as you miss, for now, for quite some time, the sweetness in any touching there; but the work’s begun.

In my window I had set forth a feeder for birds, a clinkered house, its floor seed-strewn.

A wren came, a junco, a chickadee. Red-wing blackbirds. Finches.

As I stood, my hands in the sink, the feeder hosted a blackbird, an odd one, fluttering one wing to stand upright.

I saw, on closer view, that it had one leg only. It was not like the other birds. It would never be quite all of what we think when we think, "bird."

My soaped hands left the water, briefly, cupping my own two most obvious differences, still new, but now my own for good or ill.

I hefted them, left and right, for the bird to see.

I contact an electrologist. She lives in the countryside, in the hills. There are sheep. She's wearing overalls.

She explains the process.

"One out of five follicles is asleep at any one time, see. So when I clear an area, a fifth of the hairs will regrow. Then a fifth of those will regrow. And so on. It can take two years, maybe more. You have to think about can you afford it, and can you stand it, and can you keep it up regular."

"Can we start right now?"

"Sure, suit y'self, hop on the table."

It becomes a routine. A friendship, even.

I can afford one hour a week.

I think.

It's a commitment, an expensive one. Added to the pills and the ongoing search for a counselor, I'm already among the privileged. I'm able to do this without working a second job, or waiting for someone to die and leave me money, or work the streets. Good thing, for me, about the streets. who'd want me? I'm a grandmother, for goodness' sakes.

I walk through the orchard to the front door; raise the knocker twice. The young retriever brings me his soggy tennis ball to throw as far down the slope, toward the pasture fence and the loitering sheep, as I can.

The door opens, and I move to the table, chatting a little self-consciously, as Terry Kay washes up.

"Further up," she orders, and I hunch my hips and shoulders to get the angle right. "You been doing good?" There's a rising inflection on her last word there, like a country singer at the mike, working the crowd. She is a country singer, actually.

She covers my eyes with small plastic blinders.

"All right, I guess," I whisper, from within the darkness.

"You want to do that upper lip some more?"

Oh, god. "I guess so."

"Well it’s your call, I dunno; that last time you got so shook you had us both crying."

She says: "We'll work up to it. Let's try ten hairs, on slow exhales."

She has explained: more power, quickly applied, hurts more, but kills more hair roots, as less heat will escape up the needle.

It works well, I can tell, but I think it ages me a bit.

Yes, well. We can only try.

She bends, in jeweler’s lenses, over my blinkered face, and as I count out breaths, I inhale the burning of the heretic women.

My Beloved said, "Do what you have to do."

But the next day, it was, softly, "Do you have to?"

Later in the week, she added, "I never thought it was going to be like this."

Thought a bit, then: "I feel like you’re going to a place I can’t go."

Said, "I’m losing you, bit by bit."

I asked, "So, um ... am I weird now?"

Beloved said: "Yes, you are weird."

She thought a bit, then added, "But you were always weird."

Said, "this is a little weirder."

Then, more brightly: "But, honey, lots of things are weird."

After a rather complicated evening, Beloved asked, "Will we still be able to make love?"

And the next day: "Is this going to make me a lesbian now? Umm, 'cuz I don't think I am a lesbian ..."

A few weeks after that, she made a horrifying discovery. "you shaved your legs?"

And then —"... your — your arms too?"

She looked out the window. "This is getting a little hard to think about."

We know where we have to go, and the terror of leaving behind our most loved ones prevents timely disclosure. And so there are confrontations, followed by silence, perhaps, or argument, followed by a half-trustful truce, a night's sleep, and from there things either deteriorate or move to a new level.

One prays that it will be the new level. But one cannot make it happen. One waits on the mind and heart of the loved one.

Beloved said: "You know, if you got some awful disease, like Parkinson’s or something, I’d be — I’d take care of you. You ... you know?"

Ah, well.

She perceives me as having an awful disease.

Well — perhaps.

We had said it was a condition. We accepted that there is a course of treatment generally prescribed. We have heard that not to pursue the treatment is sometimes fatal. Beloved understands all that, but it's still going be hard, very, very hard to accept. This treatment will kill her husband, and the consolation prize will be that she's sent this other person, sometimes familiar — still cracking the same stupid jokes — but alien, permanently so, from all that she had signed on for.

What it’s like: he got leprosy, or elephantiasis.

What it’s like: he has cancer.

Cerebral palsy.

It’s the burn unit.

I think of all the wives and husbands, sitting beside beds in hospitals, whose lives have just been changed forever, and yet are not thinking about divorce.

I reached out to give Beloved a hug. She said: "not today, OK?"

I walked unsteadily into the bathroom, going through the motions of getting the hot water, the towels, the shampoo. Cleanliness being existential.

I fell apart, and stuffed a washrag into my mouth to stifle the wails. I sat in the bath, leaning against the cold porcelain, weeping. I looked down, through a blur, at my breasts.

They’re not going anywhere. Another thing that's existential is you can't rewind life.

Beloved heard my crying and invaded the bathroom, sat on the edge of the tub. "God, don’t treat everything as a tragedy."

"How is it not a tragedy? You don't ever want to be touched, I always want to be touched."

"Well, it's kind of been like that all along."

"Yeah, well ..."

"And we've lasted over twenty-five years."

"Think about it," she added. "Who would I drink coffee with in the mornings?"




"So, you want cream in that?"

I give a ride to new faces. We are members of a hiking group, on our way to a bike trip.

Gorgeous, late spring. You can smell the river from miles away.

A young man in the back seat, whom I haven't met before, says: "So, I know why I’m here, but why are you here? I mean, you people are coming from a different place? You're married, you have kids, the whole soccer-mom thing. How come you show up at all our stuff these days?"

I check the rear-view mirror. Open, honest-looking face. I think he really wants to know.

"The flyers do say LGBTQ, right?"

"Well, yeah, but you know how that happens."

"OK, gotcha, I'm the token trannie. But think about it. All those people out there, they think we're both pretty weird, much the same sort of thing, right?"

"They do."

"Now, if I stay with my beloved, their idea is going to be, we're lesbians."

"Uh, yeah."

"But if she leaves me and I take advantage of that to go marry a guy, that, to them, is really a gay couple."

"Uh ... ummm ..."

"So I can contemplate either; I must be bisexual?"

"But ... but ..."

"I'm all the letters, guy; you're just one."

The rest of the passengers crack up. He's a good enough fellow that he laughs too.

I tell him: "I grew up in the Sixties. Peace marches, rights marches. They'd crack heads at any kind of a march. So solidarity made sense. Still does to me. If they’re going to put us in this box together, shouldn’t we be helping each other out?"

What else, I’m thinking, should I tell him ...

I could say: we almost had no role models, no vocabulary, nowhere to go for help. Christine Jorgensen was all there was, and we saw how the media treated her. A carnival sideshow. We learned from that to hide.

I could say: some did the other thing. Entered the traditional gay culture, learned to be queens. DRessed As a Girl! Style it, child! And when the policemen came, one day, a queen, later known to be a transwoman, flipped out. She threw a beer bottle, made a scene, and for once, everybody else present followed suit.

I could say: Your Stonewall, brought to you by us. But there are those who want to kill you. They come looking, find us, thinking we’re you. And we are dying.

I could say: there was this popular hairdresser in Washington, D.C., she was a passenger in a car, they got broadsided. And the EMTs came and they were checking for internal injuries, and then they found out she had a penis and so they stopped helping her and stood around joking about fags and she bled to death.

I could say; honey, we will always be in this one together.

Days later, I find him in the audience at Gay Movie Night. He looks up, recognizes me. "Wasn’t that a beautiful bike trip?"

A friend said: "You used to try to be kinda macho, but we all knew it was faked."

He thought a bit, added: "It’s better this way, I can see you. You had a kinda blurry outline, never in focus."





I come out to complete strangers. Mostly they’re just puzzled. You gonna surprise people, pick a venue. Target the audiences.

I was asked, as that guy I used to be, to do a reading for Banned Books Week.

I chose Feinberg. Stone Butch Blues. Supposed to be a lesbian novel; it's a bit more. Either way, automatically banned. Some readers would be, what? Traumatized that there are women that love women? By reading a book about women being fired from jobs, thrown out of apartments, refused service, beaten, raped, murdered, driven to insanity or suicide? None of which, presumably would have gotten the book banned, only the part about that they love each other?

And they call us sick? But I digress.

First, I dressed up some and let down my hair.

Then I showed up. The librarians were kind. Hardly missed a beat. They introduced Local Author, working from a printout of my online resume. As they became more aware of my self-presentation and its implications, they switched pronouns in mid-introduction. He does this, he wrote that, she’s reading to us today from author Leslie Feinberg.

Wow.

It was sweet, then, to come out to the room.

We did the doctor’s visit, his distance, vagueness. We did the two horrible nurses, the two equally forbidden bathrooms, the surgery, the staggering out of the hospital alone. We did the sickbed telephone call: "We’re sorry" goes the robot. Calling elsewhere, learning of the friend’s suicide. Calling the foreman, ending at the "you’re fired."

Afterwards, handshakes, polite and gracious inquiries.

One grand old lady confides: "You’re going to be pretty."

I don't believe her.

I went with my friend to the wilderness. It was a date we had made a year before. Now, I had become a girl, and though I wasn't fully out to the wide world yet, he understood the situation. I would be traveling as a woman. We talked all the way from the city to a tiny town on the Columbia River, where we slept in a motel (separate beds, if you must know), and talked all the way to the next day's small town. I'm not sure I had him convinced. I would characterize the conversation as interested, polite, with a bit held in reserve.

He's a very, very strong personality. I had laid out a hike I thought was within our (my) strength, and, he'd said, in effect, "bosh," and chosen a much more strenuous route. I had misgivings, especially when the weather, which had held off all summer, threatened.

Beloved had said, "on this trip you will have to go as the wife." That proved to be key. In the past I would have struggled with him over what to do. Now, I simply followed his lead.

The “little woman."

We hiked about ten miles, found a wet meadow in which to pitch our little tents, and in the morning began the long climb up to the Five Lakes Basin, a second choice, as the loop route ahead of us had been clearly blocked overnight by fresh snow. We wouldn't be climbing Eagle Cap on this trip.

At the Basin we settled at one of the lakes, an otherwise overused destination, which with the turn in the weather, we had all to ourselves.

It was a magnificent setting, even with the low-running clouds, but I found myself concentrating on survival. Based on prior experience, my gear should have been adequate to the conditions, but something about me had changed.

Might the hormones be doing something to my resistance to cold?

It was a dreadful night. Snow fell constantly to a line along the cliffs above us at 7,000 feet, turning into slush and rain where we were, at 6500. I had ditched adequately around my little high spot, and the rivulets ran past me all night, but cold seeped into the sleeping bag and I slept little, if at all. My body was wound tighter than a drumhead.

At first light, I took my sheath knife and began a relentless exploration for dry wood. There were a number of dead lodgepole pines in the area, and these I stripped of bark on the east side, away from the weather. Making a small fire of cones and pine needles that I had found underneath a log, I piled on bark in the firepit until it was practically a bonfire, then dragged over two small logs and crossed them atop the flames.

My friend awoke around nine a.m., having had a better night than I, but he, too, was glad of the roaring fire. "How did you do that after it stormed all night?"

"There's always dry wood if you look, my dear." Skills I had learned in the Georgia woods, the kind of skills that had been expected of me then.

He made oatmeal by the fire and offered me some, but I stuck to tea. "I'm not going to make it through another night; something's wrong with my resistance and I'll need to get down from here."

He nodded. "We're pretty evenly matched," he said. "I hold up to the cold better but you hike better. You're very strong and you cover ground. I putz along and find you eventually, but I can sit and admire things while you get all shivery."

It was odd to hear these comparisons; it sounded to me like the male penchant for competition, a thing I had hoped to leave behind me.

The hike-out was fourteen miles.

In a ladies' room at the trailhead, I shed the layers of shapeless foul-weather hiking clothes I had worn for days and changed into size fourteen jeans, a bra-cami, bandanna, earrings, and a touch of makeup. By the time I returned to the car, some spring had returned to my step.

“ That's what the trouble was up there,” my friend remarked. “You can't be pretty on the trail, and that's important to you now. I'm going to get you to a town where you can go shopping, or something.”

I thought I might have some rejoinder to that, but I realized he was right.

The woods might have to wait awhile.

The further we drove, the more sunshine and warmth we encountered.

In town, my companion took me out to dinner. As we ate, he realized I hadn't wanted to leave the motel and that I had let him badger me. He became a bit morose, and this seems to be what he remembers of the trip; that it was melancholy.

As though an era was passing. Which it was.

I was not the friend he had known, but someone new. He realized he hadn't been emotionally prepared for this, and it had put him under a bit of a strain.

My own memories of the trip are somewhat brighter. I went to the museums and restaurants that we discovered on our way home, very much in girl mode, and very successfully. I realized that if I could pass in cowboy country then I had already come a long way.

Yippee ti-yi-yo.

I have been thinking about names. Many transfolk use their birth initials for their renamings when they regender, and in my work scene it is difficult to change username in the computer system.

My initials were RSB. For my middle name, I already had a choice I liked: "Stephanie." Stephanie was the first chair first clarinet player in our high school marching band, in a county with such a small population that I was the first chair second clarinetist as a fourth grader. She was tall, ramrod straight, intellectual, with no figure, not interested in boys, which was apparently mutual, and kindly toward me.

But what to do with the "R"? I haven't felt drawn to "Roberta" or "Richelle" or "Rhonda" or "René," or ...

I actually was driven to websites listing girl names. There, one name caught my eye, as having been that of a wonderful University employee who had died young, of breast cancer, and was much mourned by those who had known her. I would be pleased to honor her by carrying on her name.

"Risa" is, in Spanish, and in Romance languages generally, "laughter." It could be taken as "the laughing girl" or "the happy girl." I've written it down with "Stephanie" and "Bear" and sounded out the full name.

Yes. This will do nicely, I think. I will have to see about making it my legal name.

It will soon be time to come out at work.

I meet with one of my employees, to give her her annual review. Tops in all categories. Everyone should be lucky enough to work with such people.

"You haven't really been ... yourself lately."

"It's true; in a way. I mean, I'm becoming myself, which might make some trouble for me."

"How so?"

Well ... I was always really a girl. I mean, inside. Where nobody could see me. I'm ... I'm trying to fix that."

"...Oh!"

"Uh, hunh."

"...Oh!"

I wait while she digests that. I can see it in her mind's eye; the barrettes, the bracelets. Can it be that much of a surprise?

"Ummm... does the boss know?"

"Well, I talked with him about — issues with femininity."

"Ok, so he doesn't know." She makes a worry-face.

"Well, some."

"No, this is more. I can tell. Maybe you oughta talk with him again, y'think?."

"Well, I will, I will ... now about the coming year, we need more room in the UN docs ..."

:::

:::

:::

:::

Daughter, I came out to you when you were thirteen.

You demanded, at the very beginning, a sign. I modeled for you. I knew the straps, the fasteners, everything. I unhooked my bra and drew it out though one sleeve of my blouse.

"Oh my god," you said. "You’re not kidding, are you?"

You said, "I gotta think about this."

You thought.

You asked me to hold off transition till after you got through puberty. I said I would try.

You gave me a doll that first Christmas: a princess in pink. When we raise her arm in benediction, there is music in the air.

You gave me shampoo and conditioner, in separate bottles.

You gave advice on eye shadow.

You gave silver bangles. I have worn them ever since.

You grew up, gave me my permission, turned eighteen, emptied the nest.

:::

I have had children in the house, off and on, for 36 years. I don’t understand this new silence.

I am working on your room, for guests. Under the carpet there are broken tiles; there is re-sealing to do, spackling, paint. I feel freer now; no strange youths walk through the house at late hours. I wear my new painter’s kit: bandanna, stretch jeans, camisole — speckled, spotted, something out of Pollock.

I am less free out of doors, but learning to relax. The mail carrier has seen a new name come to our box, as friends and organizations seek me out.

I go to the garden in capris and wide-brimmed hat, collecting chives and bok choi for stir fry. I’m wearing lipstick. I’m careful with my nails. I watch out for the sun. I pull a dozen weeds.

There are tomatoes, enough of them ripe, to bring in some.

I hear geese. They pass, heading for the river, in line, talking ripe corn.

I wonder when you will call. I wonder if trout are rising.

I wonder if the Red Sox will take the Series.

I think about putting in beets next spring.

I think about C.P.E. Bach and Joseph Haydn. I think of your offer to go camping.

You were there when I got my ears pierced. Earrings, that you gave me, jingle as I bend to pull more weeds.

The mail carrier passes by. She waves.

I'm home now, in my room. It's been a long day. Beloved is asleep at the other end of the house, in the big bed. She needs to be in good shape early in the mornings, as her responsibilities are spread over half the county. I have this room because I like to sit up late to unwind, writing, transcribing, reading, listening to Bach, Mozart, or blues or reggae, sometimes jazz.

I also do my morning stuff here, except for coffee, which Beloved likes to bring to me by the fire, in the dining room, where we can watch birds at the feeder before she leaves for work, usually before I do.

We give it about ten to fifteen minutes, and it's an important ritual. She says it's her symbolic nurturing thing to do for me, in recognition of my decades as the breadwinner.

She earns more than I do, and I enjoy fixing dinner for her before she gets in: trout, homemade bread, salad. Things from the garden in season. Definitely not "in season" just now. So the coffee is only fair!

Everyone should have one small vice, and be pampered with it. Coffee, tea, chocolate, a glass of wine, or a small bit of Gouda. But then take your health seriously the remainder of the day. And walk a lot.


On the wall of my room are portraits of a few of my heroines: Georgia O'Keefe, Anaïs Nin, Colette. Lives lived to the full, without apology, able to move on from hurts or to use them to build new strengths.

A small picture of Jan Morris is affixed to the top of the large mirror on my dresser.

She reminds me that it takes courage to be a woman, and that not all womanhood is in makeup, perfumery, and obedience. She's easy in slacks, with her own hands and her own face, a writer, first, last, and always. Goes her own way. I've written this about Morris (It's based on passages in her transition memoir, Conundrum [1974]):

He, who saw and wrote of wars and collapsing empires,
who wrote well, and was a celebrated man, goes,
carefully, quietly, to Africa. He has also

been she for years, disclosing to few or none
the changing shape, her body, as it grew into
her self. Waiting her turn for the doctor,

she walks the roads and beaches, and comes to love
the people. Women stop her once, demanding
to know, "Are you a man or a woman?" She opens

her blouse to them; they are satisfied.
Children follow her, chanting. An old man
waves them off, making a holy place for her:

"This one," he tells them, "walks alone."

There are on the dresser a seashell, a rock from a stream bed in the High Cascades, and a greenish slip-fired clay pitcher that my grandmother got for her wedding day, in 1884. There's a snapshot of me with my friends from PFLAG, taken at the AIDS walk. There's a small portrait of my daughter in a square glass frame, captioned: "Where you are/There is the sun."

Hanging from the mirror's corners are necklaces and strings of beads. There are hair ties, bracelets, a Venetian mask, a princess doll with a bright tiara. Scattered across the dresser are driftwood, shells, faux pearls, a small vase with dried lavender. These are steadying things, chosen from all that I have, to see upon retiring for the day and to see when awakening. They are, mostly, found, or gifts from my spouse and daughter and best women friends.


I'm hiding in this room, nursing a wound.

It's my first rebuff.

I'd complimented someone on her cookies. She managed to thank me, but couldn't look at me, and I felt as if I should go away, preferably go away and die, or maybe go away and die horribly: multiple choice. This was someone I had always counted a friend.

I went to a meeting, later, where activists were planning to pull together a beleaguered community — gays, old lesbians who had been together for forty years, ministers, transmen, transwomen, queer-questioning youth.

A new friend asked how I was doing. I burst into tears (blame the hormones if you like), told her what had happened, and she wrapped me in her deep and healing embrace and said the kind words I needed to hear.

I'm up late; it's 1 A.M. and I do go to work in the morning.

Dear sisters, lend me a bit of your courage to face the day, and sometime when I'm feeling braver, I'll lend you mine.

:::

Beloved has commandeered the dining room, especially the table, and I've been mostly in the kitchen.

There will be a potluck this evening at my church and another one tomorrow night at the local PFLAG. While I'm confident of my cooking enough to please myself and a few others, I'm still a shrinking violet when it comes to my peers, so I tend to retreat into what I know, which is bread.

I once lived in a Hutterite-Quaker commune in Georgia, where one of the income ventures was a bakery, and I learned the trade. The product was whole wheat bread, sold at the door and to hippie food cooperatives and health food stores, in one-and-a-half pound loaves.

I milled at 4 A.M. on Monday, and baked fifty loaves to the batch through Tuesday morning, a twenty-four hour shift once a week, producing eight hundred loaves. It was really good stuff, made with organic hard winter wheat and raw red-clover honey from North Dakota.

So, later in life, when I became interested in creating bread at home, I realized I knew only a recipe for a seventy-five pound batch and had to relearn the whole process.

I'm not baking much for myself these days, because of the belly I'm still trying to eliminate. But for others, as a rule, I can do pretty well. When inspired.

Today I'm doing apple-raisin wheat loaves, with a hint of cinnamon; these have been a hit lately, but, looking at them, I'm beginning to worry. One is spreading out a little flatter than I like, and the other is showing signs of not wanting to rise in time to bake before I leave.

I sometimes bobble baking when there's performance pressure, so that it's almost as bad as my other options. There have been times where I have just grabbed two cans of three bean salad, poured off the excess sugar-water, and dumped them in a bowl. Uh, voilà ....

Last week we had our holiday potluck at work, and I have had three bread disasters in a row at those.

So I poked about in the kitchen and came up with two sweet potatoes. I looked these up in Rombauer and Becker and could see that I didn't have all the ingredients they'd like, but I thought I might get by. I peeled them, cut them up in two-inch squares, and simmered them until soft, then drained them off and put them in the mixer with some brown sugar, a bit of salt, cinnamon, nutmeg, and 1/4 pound of butter. I scooped all this into a baking dish, and then found in the refrigerator some homemade applesauce a friend gave us, already cinnamon-y and nicely textured, and spread this on top of the sweet potatoes. Baked about 15 minutes at a low heat to kind of fuse the flavors a bit, let it cool, covered it with plastic wrap, and took it to work.

A few minutes in the zapper, and the "deep-dish sweet potato pie" was ready to serve.

There were seventy other dishes, but it was a hit nonetheless.

Luck.

I'm so far behind in these skills, I'll take any credit I can get.

:::

Beloved takes a break, so I join her, and we talk a bit about gender roles.

She's never really liked "girly-girl" stuff, hates terms like "chick-flick," likes overalls and barn boots, could do without slaving in a kitchen for anyone, has enjoyed having a career, doesn't particularly like having doors held open for her.

I go in way more for that stuff, though I try to have a sense of proportion about it; I keenly dislike grotesquery and try to avoid exaggeration.

I'm learning to use a bit of mascara and a bit of blush and a bit of lip-liner. She didn't use to use any of these, but finds herself competing with me for feminine space.

I'm a mild threat, though I'm not sure why. Is this a whiff of the thing some militants complain of? MTF transitioner as femme imperialist?

:::

If you were sort of cheerful before, you'll likely be sort of cheerful after, because glass-is-half-full people have to be put through a lot before they'll see the glass half-empty.

For example, libido. It's true; I make eyes at Beloved. But I've been with her twenty-eight years. And now I'm wearing a patch and taking an androgen blocker, meaning that my behavior is much, much, much more about affection than, you know, "that other stuff." This happens to most late transitioners, I think, and though some of us will feel a return of desire post-SRS, many will not. It's a risk that has to be faced. If you're reading this, and you're considering doing what I'm doing, I recommend your partner read it too, so that any subsequent discussion of your plans amounts to full disclosure as to the risks.

Look at it this way. Suppose your spouse or significant other said: "I have to go find myself. I'll be here the whole time, but we have to not do anything especially intimate together for the next year. If ever."

Because, if you're transitioning, at least male-to-female, you may be asking something like that from the person you're with.

But if that Special Someone touches your hand, and your entire being fills up with sparkles — not really desire, just sparkles — and your eyes brim over with tears, and that's sufficient for you — under the circumstances — and for your partner, then you're good candidates for going through this together.

:::

My granddaughter comes to visit. She's five, full of spunk and curiosity. She's watching me move around the house in a long blue skirt, so Beloved explains to her that Papa Bear is now a "she."

Later, I read to her in bed. She likes this "chicka-chicka boom boom" book and I'm just getting into the rhythm of it.

:::

After I go to the doctor's office, we're going straight to a birthday party for the president of our local PFLAG chapter — who's turning sixty — so I'm wondering what to wear. I looked good the last time, in a black velvet dress and a little black hat, with hoops in my ears. And before that, I was on the kitchen committee and went in a simple blue shift with an apron and a hair kerchief.

But this time, absolutely nothing will do.

I'm realizing I'm not as out to the front counter people at the Dr.'s office as I'd like to be, just yet, not to mention terrified of the other patients — her office is in a logging town — but also with Beloved coming along, it makes it different ... she's in a classroom environment today, which means she'll come home in overalls and tired, maybe cranky. If I get her into the car at all, it won't be with me doing the Betty Boop act!

So I fall back on my old standby, a maroon turtleneck and jeans, with a bandanna — and, sure enough, I feel womanly again, not like that big-headed wide-shouldered thing I saw in those sleeveless dresses when I looked in the mirror.




What complicates things for us when we try to explain about clothes to counselors, is they have taken classes about telling us apart from the crossdressers, and it's not easy to do that for two reasons.

Cross-dressing males dress as women.

Women dress as whatever the occasion demands (think house painting), but usually as women.

So if you have a male body but feel you are supposed to be a woman, you'll do things that may look, to others, pretty indistinguishable from transvestism.

Which is why the shame associated with shopping, etc. — we feel the always-potentially-devastating label of sexual deviant hovering nearby.

And so when the counselors ask us, "how did you feel when you dressed up as a girl?" — what they're looking for is that moment of hesitation while we decide whether to lie about dressing for pleasure.

And we do fall for it.

Which slows down the whole process, because they don't always get that at one time, each of us had to go through the phase of dressing for pleasure because we didn't know what transsexualism was.

We were choosing the colors, so to speak, that were the only ones available on the palette.

:::

So, I went to the new therapist.

And we went over the 1950s —

— and the 60s and the 70s and the 80s and the 90s, and just like the therapist I gave up on last year, she's all over the stuff I'm supposed to be "compensating" for by being a "crossdresser" — despite the fact that I've made the decision, 844 times in 422 days, to put a little blue pill under my tongue, and have come out to all but 5 people on the planet, and am living in role full time.

De-pressing!

So I went to a friend's house after that, to train her on baking bread, and we talked, girl to girl, for four hours, and it was ten times as therapeutic for me, and I only paid her with two loaves of whole wheat bread and a hug.

And then this evening, since I'm going out of town and my mom just got out of the hospital and my dad's going in, I thought I'd check on them; they're three thousand miles away and still refusing assisted living even though they are both on oxygen and have had strokes and cancers and such and are legally blind and oh, God, I don't know what all.

Did I mention three thousand miles away? I did? ... Well.

And so she talks doctors and hospitals for awhile and then she pauses.

"So tell me how it is that they were able to take off your blood pressure medication..."

"Self-acceptance, mom."

"Come again?"

"Well, did you see that talk show where there was this lady English professor and she used to be a guy?"

"You're a transsexual."

Shock!

I didn't even know she knew the word.

"Yes'm. Known it since I was six."

"You'll notice I haven't fainted?"

"Uh, yes'm."

"Sweetie, I always knew."

"But ... but ... "

"My goal was to keep you alive. And you were your daddy's only achievement ... as a boy. I know we hurt you, but we thought it was for the best."

"Oh."

"I don't think I'm going to tell him now, and I don't want you to; I don't think he's going to last out the year. And with all that you've achieved lately, he's so proud. I really think this would just finish him, in a not-good way. You know he can't adjust to things, and how he is about gay people, and he just can't tell the difference. That leap isn't in him."

"You know I've already given up fifty years of me for him."

"Can you give him six more months?"

"Mom, I'm already full time."

"Well, if you come see us, he'll get after you about your hair, but I'm willing to bet that's about all he'd notice."

Oh, sure.

"I'll think about that."

"Please do ... I know you've had it hard, I've always known, but you did well with what you had. And I just want him to rest easy the rest of the way."

"I'll think about it."

"Okay, honey. Love you."

"Love you. Bye."

Wha ...

She gets to always have known this, and I get to wake up from a coma after fifty years and find my body inhabited by a fat, bald, hairy, lying, childish, and angry man with a bad back, whom I barely know, who's married, has responsibilities, has kids, grandkids, and issues.

And now I get to learn how to talk, how to walk, how to ...

... how to keep lying to an old blind man on an oxygen bottle.

Holy fricking avatar on a cross, what a day it's been.

Still raw from that scary counseling session.

Work helps. Having people call me by my name and visit with me about girl stuff helps. My identity re-stabilizes. I advise a student worker on nail polish, and a couple of the others, who acknowledge it as good advice, laugh with her and they actually call me "mom."

Afterwards, at the mayor's swearing-in, more of the same. New friends, old friends, people are happy to see me and I'm happy to see them — and they are all women. Some kind of barrier has dropped; I don't feel judged — I feel trusted and included.

I told Beloved about all this, and she noted that inhabiting myself as a woman's psyche is not a great leap for me, if any. I'm just there, and people see Risa.

She.

Her.

My big terror had been that I would not look the part, or not act the part, convincingly; it shouldn't matter, as there plenty of un-feminine women.

But it does.

One must have, if one can get it, as one moves about in any society, some protective coloration. And the more of what coloration you have feels natural to you, the safer you will be.

I told her of meeting a friend, a true elderess among the lesbian community, to whom I confided that I was finding it difficult to face the new counselor, because of the high need that counselors have to establish beyond their own doubt that you are not mistaken.

"And I've faced the estrogen decision how many times now, and every time the answer has been yes!" — and of course I tuned up to cry. This tiny, tiny woman, who towers over me in years, experience, authoritative personality, and wisdom, took hold of both my elbows and looked me fiercely in the eye.

"Girl," she'd said, "never mind what anybody says or asks you. You know who you are. So you're gonna be fine!"

"Mmm-hmm." Sniff.

And she'd given me her handkerchief.

:::

An old friend, who was been a big fan of my poetry in my guy days, happens to spot me at the service desk as he's was preparing to exit the Library. He's been pretty quiet since I came out to him, which I had kind of expected, he being a man of impeccably conservative stripe.

But not mean, as in the re-emergent fascism, just — conservative — what conservatives used to be. A thinking man. So I'm — hoping.

He comes over, and he's across the cherry-wood counter from me. About four seconds of silence, then he shifts his weight, and we go through about four more.

Hmm. Another four might be fatal.

I must look very different from most of his memories of me. I once walked with a heavy shuffle, showed considerable male pattern baldness, and had a penchant for wearing ties, even when no one else in the Library did, blue-and-gold ties with medieval or Renaissance themes on them.

Today I'm wearing two-pocket jeans, size thirteen, a grey ribbed turtleneck, garnet ear-studs, matching nails and lipstick, with my daughter's gift of Mexican silver bangles. It's still early enough in the day for me to be at my best, my hair shoulder-length, with all the waves still in it.

I figure he'll swallow his tongue soon, so I had better break the ice.

I lean across the counter, cup my chin in my hand, and come as close to batting my eyelashes at him as I dare.

"Any and all questions are o.k."

I smile.

He clears his throat, and, bless his heart, he's asking kind things, especially about how it 's going for Beloved, whom he hasn't met, but, after all, he's read all the love poems I wrote to her ... as the conversation proceeds, he seems to realize this is a friend he hasn't lost, and begins to move on from my situation to topics of mutual interest. In the most gracious manner imaginable.

My shift relief arrives, so I offer to walk him back to his building, and we get caught up a bit on literature and the status of his parents' lovely place on the coast.

As we come to the massive doors, he takes that little half-step that men do, and reaches for the door handle.

I recognize it immediately and wait.

"Thank you! It's getting easier for me to accept that."

"Good thing, too."

:::

I like working with the public. No, actually, I love it. It's not my responsibility as I'm not a librarian, merely a supervisor, but I do train all the work-study students who staff the desk, and the department seems happy for me to fill in all around the edges.

I'm extremely hearing-impaired, which turns out to be a plus. I know how to train patrons to adjust to my difference.

New patrons almost invariably whisper.

I smile. "I'm sorry, I'm quite hearing impaired. This is a research library and, actually, you may converse in normal tones here."

With some, especially those with accents, I may actually resort to my assistive listening device to understand them. I put on my headphones, point the mike at them, explain the equipment a bit, and we go on from there.

Every transperson should have such a cool disability, especially if they work with the public. It seems to disarm those who might otherwise choose to be disdainful, and gives us time to discover each other's humanity. Then I help them with their inquiry, or find them someone who can. Always try to leave 'em grateful!

As a result I get to try out my voice, posture, and mannerisms in the most supportive and nonthreatening environment imaginable.

And I'm the grateful one when I think about that.

:::

Went to the new counselor again and she was pressing me some about my not wanting to show my feelings concerning last time — and I finally fell apart and cried, which seemed to help us both somehow — I mean, I hear her saying she gets that I really mean it and ...

... suddenly we're talking about options and schedules and it starts to sink in ...

... that she sounds like I'm going to get to be me.

I'm a girl.

I'm a girl!!!

I mean, I knew that. But now it sounds like she knows that.

I think.

And if she knows that then it means my driver's license is going to know that. And that a surgeon could know that. So, it's not a question mark hanging over my head any more.

So I'm not some sort of indecent thing.

Umm ....

I get to live.

I don't suppose she saw the little jig that I did down at the end of the driveway.

Later in the day, I went to the tiny hospital up-valley, where they had re-calibrated the bone density machine for me, and everyone was so nice.

So I drove out to the rails-to-trails bike path along the river, and walked for a mile. No one was around. Only the cottonwoods, ash, black oaks, and a few crows got to see me break down in — this time grateful — tears.

So, today, after work, I went shopping.

I called Beloved to see if she could go with me, and she couldn't, which meant that I'd, umm, have to go alone, and, uh, hmm, I'm dressed up an awful lot for shopping in a said-to-be-very-homophobic logging town, but, well, this was going to happen sooner or later, and since I've got two months' Real Life Experience, better get on with it.

So I planned my approach.


There was only so much cash on hand (a twenty) so I headed for a store not known for its posh clientèle. Years ago, we went there when it opened, and for several years thereafter, when pretty much all their stock seemed to be in one-gallon or number-ten cans. Since which time, it kind of got to be the neighborhood grocery and five-and-dime. For some reason they now have decent vegetables, at half what I'd pay at the nose-in-the-air store over by the university, so I parked there, gathered my courage, went in, and the place was wall-to-wall shoppers, looking markedly grouchy, with screaming-meemie babies hanging half out of all the carts.

I almost ran away.

I mean ... I was wearing a red bandanna, hoops, makeup, a ribbed turtleneck, carrying a purse ... and needing to go to the ladies room ... if anyone said, "jump," I would have broken my neck on the ceiling.
But nobody said it. Nobody even looked at me. Not from the left. Not from the right. Not from down the aisle, coming my way. Behind me, I don't seem to care about.

I was invisible. This hadn't really happened before, you see. I wove in and out, picked out two red bell peppers, two orange ones, two green ones, two yellow ones, some baby carrots, broccoli, cauliflower, and a small brick of pepper jack.

But they didn't have good dip, which I didn't expect them to anyway.

So I checked out ... nice chat with the cashier ... and headed for the next place, a kind of miniature big-box membership store that's employee owned, and wheeled my cart around awhile ...

... with the spironolactone-induced need pressing on my bladder ...

... and went to have a look at the door to the ladies' room.

Almost ran away.

Again.

But took a deep breath.

And stepped in.

And everything was (flush, wash hands, check mirror) fine.

As in anticlimactic.

As in what had I been worried about all that time?

So I picked up two boxes of cookies and two boxes of wheat crackers, an eyeliner, and a coffeemaker, and paid with my new credit card: cardholder Risa S. Bear. And chatted with the cashier.

Now for the tofu dip. I drove across the highway, entered the neighborhood's upscale grocery, wandered around lost, asked for directions, got the dip, got in line, paid, stepped out ...

... by now it was getting dark. There was ice on the railings of the cart-return rack. Best get home.

But all my missions were accomplished. I had shopped, solo, as a housewife, for two solid hours.

For some folks, that might not be a big deal, right?

But it has been a banner day.

:::

Only a week ago, I was celebrating a milestone.

It turned out I misunderstood! I'm out in the cold again, and I have no idea why.

Everyone else I know has had the experience of having a counselor in their corner and the world against them. With me, it seems like it's always the world in my corner and the counselors against me.

Why?

It would seem like it would be a professional kindness, by this time, to at least help me with my driver's license.

Because I'm, like, already in danger from my next traffic stop.

And "go back three spaces" is no longer a viable option. I have been living as a woman full time for two months. And I will never live as a man again.

Yet, she doesn't see me. She's still diagnosing crossdresser.

When she screened me out, as in out the door and onto the street, I cried, some, just a little, and then pulled it together and thanked her and went down to my car, but in the car ...

... I fell apart.

I mean, really fell apart.

I would sob, lean my head on the wheel, then lean back in my seat, muscles tightening all over my body, and scream. This went on for, oh, about half an hour.

And then the counselor walked by, carrying a rake, presumably on her way to a community garden somewhere. She saw me, in my car parked behind hers, red-faced, blowing my nose, and shaking.

She came over, knocked on the window. "Are you all right?"

WHAT? Do I look all right to you? I mouthed.

She opened the door. "I have to make sure you're going to be okay."

I held up my hand. "I'm a strong girl; I'll get through this. You should go on with whatever it is you're doing, because you said you have washed your hands of me."

She seemed to see the sense of this, because, after all, that was what she had done. So she loaded her rake into the Volvo and hopped in.

After she drove away, I spent another half hour alternately crying and screaming.

When I saw that one of her neighbors, in my rear-view mirror, had begun watching the car, I figured it was time to move on, and somehow got the engine running and drove over the mountain and down onto the freeway, periodically shrieking.

I went to my electrologist and changed our order from one to two hours of clearing, and lay weeping from beneath the plastic blinders. She patted my hand.

When I made it home, Beloved, who was busy refurbishing Daughter's old bedroom, took one look at me and dropped everything to help me to a chair.

I was shaking, colorless, and red-eyed. I told her what had happened and then started shrieking again.

"You're a wounded animal; let's get you to bed." She helped me off with my things, and brought hot apple juice.

I had cried, off and on, for six hours.

:::

Called in sick yesterday and stayed in bed.

Took antidepressants and stresstabs.

Slept thirteen hours last night.

Talked with Beloved all morning.

She left for a walk, and I got ready to go to work. Still a little shaky. Opened a letter from the lab. So, I might have osteoporosis? That's nice. Least of my worries!

So, it's cami, turtleneck, garnet ear studs, corduroy slacks and top-stitched Mary Janes. A hint of foundation, lip-liner and eyeliner. Wave to the neighbors, buzz past the sheep, the cows and horses, admire the scenery.

Pull over and cry.

Re-do face.

Drive on.

Not gonna let this be more than a bump in the road, unh-unh.

:::

Beloved and I make trip to the mountains, to visit an old friend who has recently lost her husband. They'd been a superb artist couple, she working in mixed media; he in oils and photography. She misses him terribly, and people have taken to having potlucks at her house to give her some energy boosts.

We meet for unprogrammed Quaker worship in her living room, with the kettle singing softly to itself on the wood stove, and the sun coming in at angles through the tall windows. The house was once a one-room schoolhouse and the interior walls are whitewashed tongue-and-groove siding reaching to a height of fourteen feet, covered with paintings by husband and wife and their many artist friends.

After silence, there is singing. Beloved, an alto, sits with me, but I discover my singing is making her tense. She doesn't sight read, and is dependent on the next person — which is at the moment me — but I'm singing with the sopranos. I have to move.





After lunch, I head for the kitchen, which must have been a broom closet at one time, it is so tiny. A friend comes in to help dry as I wash, and we take everyone's dishes from them and they're pleased to have us do so. I rake off the few leftovers, wash dishes in the diminutive sink, and slip the beautiful, unique plates, bowls and cups gently into a steel basin of water one by one; she dries and puts away.

We talk about my transition and her kids, and, while I feel her curiosity, it's of a kind I haven't encountered much — just like a neighbor asking how it's going with the braces on Junior's teeth.

An extraordinarily pleasant feeling, to have one's issues taken as ordinary.

When some of the people leave in the afternoon, including the dish dryer and her husband and kids, I get good-bye hugs.

The husband is really the only "young" man among the twenty or so of us that were there. When he hugs me, I pick up a bit of his scent — the day has warmed up, but he had kept his sweater.

Whoa? What's this?

Pheromones!

I have never, ever picked this up on a guy before.

I suddenly feel I knew a lot about him — good lover, good genes, good man all the way through, someone for a woman who deserves.

I get all this in less than a second.

It makes me dizzy. I'm glad she has him, 'cuz she is a greatly deserving lady — It deepens my appreciation of them both. Heady stuff, nevertheless!

I get back to the house somehow, a little weak-kneed, pop in through the doorway, close the heavy oak door behind me, and lean back on it. Beloved and the artists look up, quizzically.

"Wow," I say, grinning stupidly. "Uhh, that, uhhh... well, the guy has nice sweat."

They laugh.

"Remember," says Beloved with a glint in her eye, "you're taken!"

I attended a meeting the other night where one of the wonderful people present (and they were all wonderful) turned out to be a counselor I'd heard praised and was anxious to meet. In spite of my better judgment, I asked her advice on my situation, and she was patient with me and did offer some good observations. We found that I had written to her partner (as she turned out to be) and that I would likely be receiving one or more contacts to pursue. I'm afraid I got rather shaky. Fortunately it was time to clear the oom, and we were chased out before I could fall apart.

The man that had convened the meeting was still in the parking lot when I left the building. He asked how things were going for me.

I said, "you know, all the counselors I've met are good and dedicated people, and Harry Benjamin, as I've read, was a deeply caring human being; it's just so sad (here I began weeping) that these guidelines were named after him and that they seem to make ogres out of the people who are supposed to help us!"

He said a few kind things, gave me a good, long hug and I pulled it together and drove away.

But as I crossed the top of the hill, I began remembering what had happened a few weeks ago, and really lost it. I started screaming, really screaming, in that way that can damage your voice, and had to pull over before I became a danger to other drivers. I recognized the sounds I was making. Animals that have been shot or run over make them. This can't go on. And I've done it twice now, over losing one counselor.

But you can see how it is: my family, friends, work place, national and international colleagues, faith community, doctor, dentist, radiologist and, really, entire city in which I live already accept me as me.

Except for my ID and an operation, I'm as transitioned right now as I will ever be ...

But when you fail to convince a counselor, your clock, for purposes of getting these last two things, gets set back to zero. That's a lot to deal with when you're fifty-five.

I understood from an early age that if my parents found me in my mother's dress, wearing her bracelets, necklace, brooch, earrings and lipstick, wobbling about the living room on her high heels, there would be trouble.

Big trouble.

So I learned, painfully and always awkwardly, but with massive will and attention, to play baseball, to hunt, to fish, to sharpen knives, clean rifles, strip outboard motors, clean game, punch boys, tease girls, play football, tie a Windsor knot, wear cufflinks, carry my books on one side instead of in the middle, and part my hair on the left.

It was a relief, later, that my Adam's apple came in, my voice deepened, and my shoulders broadened.

I thought to myself, Now no one will ever know. I'm safe at last.

Over the decades, secure in my testosterone-mandated masculinity, I would drive bulldozers, boss forest fires, cruise timber, and skid logs with the best of 'em. I was able to forget, for the time being, the solemn promise I had made to myself when I was eight: when I grow up, I will be a girl.

Our family went to church. We practically lived there.

Our church was one of those where Communion appears in every Sunday service, small unleavened crackers on a silver plate, along with a silver dish with some forty holes in its lid, each bearing its own tiny shot glass of reconstituted grape juice. The sermons were often about Hell, the place permanently maintained for all unrepentant sinners, and about the appropriate demeanor of wives, and the importance of supporting the church. Financially, of course.

We were given many opportunities to become familiar with Scripture. There were two Sunday school sessions before the eleven o'clock service, another at 6:30, before the 7:30 service, another on Tuesday at 7:30 and one on Wednesday at 6:30, before that 7:30 service. And there were constant Bible bees:

"Shortest verse?"

"'Jesus wept', John 11:35!"

"Very good!" (Head pat.)

I attended them all. Each of the 66 books of the King James Version was gone over at least five times by the time I left high school. We read and discussed everything from the Levitical proscription against eating anything that goes on its belly, or all fours, or has many feet ("for they are an abomination," Lev.11:42) to the prophecies of Revelation. We spent much time on the instructions to the church of Laodicea, (Rev. 2-3), though I was never sure why.

One of our activities was a role-reversal where the congregation's young people ran the bible classes and the services for a week.

Once, I was assigned the Wednesday service.

I gave the choir their numbers, chose the hymns, and gave the order of service to the Church secretary. I wrote the prayer of invocation, the prayer for forgiveness of sins, the collection prayer, the communion prayer and the invitation, and labored for days over my sermon, neglecting dangerously my school paper on the distinctions between the Triassic, Jurassic and Cretaceous periods of geological time. I didn't see any contradiction there between my two worlds; one simply doesn't when raised not to question such matters.

The day came. I directed the music, got through the prayers, and began my sermon.

It was on that resounding passage, from Paul, the 13th chapter of I Corinthians, ending: "...and now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three, but the greatest of these is charity."

Our sermons ran about half an hour. I constructed mine as a meditation on each of the thirteen verses, drawing connection to love-in-action passages elsewhere: The Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5-7), the sheep and the goats (Matt. 25:31-46), the question of the greatest commandment and Jesus' response (Luke 10:25-37). The small mid-week congregation seemed to like it well enough. I was ecstatic.

I can do this, I thought. Perhaps I should go to Bible college.

The following Sunday the preacher asked me into his office for a few minutes. "We appreciate the effort you made last Wednesday night, son;" he began. "I'm concerned, though, as are some of the elders, that the approach you're taking could lead someone not grounded in the Faith to take some things out of context...." I was not asked to lead any more services.

I was crushed. It's not all about love, then? So ... why am I here?

It was decades before I found my way to a church that seemed to share my understanding of the Bible passages I had found so compelling.

Fast-forward, now, to the twenty-first century.

Daughter, who is nineteen, has moved back in with us. I take advantage of this by asking her to accompany me to a rally at the state capital for moral support. She's a natural-born rabble-rouser, and, unlike me, absolutely fearless.

We find the freeway heavily fogged-in on the valley floor, which was once a seabed and is now a flat expanse of farmland mostly given over to industrial-strength grass seed farming. It's always beautiful, even so, with mountain ranges on either hand.

Huge flocks of sheep flash by, alternating with heron-haunted wetlands. From one of these a ragged gaggle of white snow geese lifts off, flashing past our windshield in the first blaze of sunlight.

At the capital, we park on a back street in a quiet neighborhood, one of the few in the vicinity with no parking time limits posted, check our faces in the mirror, gather up our purses and walk toward the State buildings.

LGBTQ people and allies have descended upon the State Capitol Building to lobby for a bipartisan human rights bill, introduced by a Republican, written to end discrimination against citizens on the basis of sexual preference or gender identity and expression and legalize civil unions.

A thousand of us march round to the front of the Capitol, where a few well dressed senators and other politicians will address the crowd. Across the sidewalk, about eight dour-looking men, holding placards with slogans on them, shout something to the effect that God hates fags and we will all burn in Hell.

Brave men, carrying their convictions in their hands amid a sea of angry opponents. Somewhere in my heart, I admire them and wish them well.

I feel moved to shake hands with a very tall, quite handsome, well-dressed, bearded counter-demonstrator. "How do you do, sir?"

He almost reaches for my hand, then peers at me suspiciously.

I have been on hormone replacement therapy for two years and electrolysis for one, am wearing my best cranberry ribbed turtleneck, black elastic-waistband slacks, silver hoop earrings and have worn my curlers for ten hours the night before, in an effort to look my best. I'm sure I've got the voice right, too. But something tips him off. Is it the big shoulders? Hand size? Some aspect of posture? Or maybe it's the slight Adam's apple?

"You, you ... y-y-you're a sodomite!" And he withdraws his hand.

An abomination. Mustn't touch.