This is who I am — a surfer. Photo: Jim Ready
My epiphany came in the glare of the setting sun through my windshield as I drove the winding back roads home after an amazing autumn session in overhead, offshore conditions. Ask any New Englander what their favorite season is and they will invariably answer: fall. The burnt oranges, reds, and amber leaves of deciduous trees, the crisp air and cerulean hued skies, the scents of pine and salt air, pumpkins and apples at harvest, render both the sea and landscape a fantasyland of color, a smorgasbord for all the senses. Steering my car, subliminally registering the abstract blur of transitional colors, flushed with the après surf glow of a good session where I’d caught so many incredible waves, in fact probably my best wave of the entire year, it dawned on me as I crested that little hill in the road and the full luminance of that orange globe flared through my windshield, alighting not only the interior of my car but the dark corners of my cloistered inner consciousness.
The swell came product of a low pressure system that had swirled up the coast before spiraling off into the upper North Atlantic. These “Nor’easters” are the predominant swell generators for New England surfers and the best conditions come after the storm when the wind backs around with incoming high pressure and offshore winds groom what the previous day had been a gray and unruly chaos of whitewater and closeouts. On the best days, the waves can be world class and such was the case on this particular late afternoon session in October. I’ll never forget that wave, that day. The biggest set, maybe three feet overhead, of that session rolled in and I was in perfect position and caught a screaming wall with a hollow section that I came out of and the ride went on for almost 300 yards. Like a grom who’d just caught the best wave of their early surfing life, I emitted a long wailing hoot for almost the entire ride and when I paddled back to the lineup, I couldn’t seal my resulting Cheshire fissured face, nor did I care to, despite the fact that it’s never cool to actually self-acknowledge, or “claim” a good ride. But I just couldn’t help it. Flushed with exhilaration, I sat up on my board when I regained my position off the point and gazed off to the horizon with a post-coitus like rapture. The demons I’d battled on my drive to the beach that day, the voices in my head, the hurt in my heart, and despair in my soul, were for the moment, vanquished. Nothing else mattered but the endorphin rush, still coursing through my being. And as I sat waiting for the next set, my internal dialogue soothingly assured: “See… that’s all you need. That wave. That feeling, right there… you don’t need anything more than that. You don’t need to be a girl!”
That internal dialogue had grown ever more insistent, a resonant crescendo drumming within, more and more when I was alone with my thoughts; in the car, the shower, and especially long insomniac nights when I couldn’t muffle or muzzle it to silence. Or distract it by hurling into activities of hyper-focused intensity, like my soccer, or surfing. Denial is a powerful force in humankind, especially closeted humans. Oh, I tried to connive myself it wasn’t real, the feelings, the compulsions. I liked sports. I liked girls. How could I want to be one? Silly me; some girls like sports, and some girls like girls. And what I hadn’t yet discovered, was that it wasn’t that I wanted to be female… I was female. Forget the clichéd conception of a woman “trapped” in a man’s body, but a biologically female brain and psyche, imprisoned by a biologically male façade. Yet I tried to refute it. Like most people, I saw what was in front of me, a boy, then later a man, peering back from the mirror. I saw what my intellect and what society insisted was there. But mirrors don’t always reflect the truth; mirrors don’t reveal what lies inside us. And though the force of denial was strong with me, this force was, and is, stronger. This force cannot be denied. Invariably, whether early, or later in our lives, it comes down to two simple questions: Transition? Or die? For too many of us, the choice, the only “choice” part of our equation, is to choose the latter.
Photo: Jim Ready
Transsexualism is one of the last taboos in the diverse amalgam that makes up the human condition. Lumped into the LGBTQ alphabet soup under “T” for transgendered, an all encompassing term that sometimes includes drag queens and cross dressers, it is still largely misunderstood, even by those well intentioned souls who seek to include rather than exclude us from society. Many people still believe it is a mental health condition (even though it has been recently declassified as such and hence removed from the latest editions of the DSM) rather than simply a medical condition. Even those who purport their “acceptance,” often do so from a place of belief that it remains a “lifestyle,” rather than an “accident” of birth. I’ve had good meaning friends even employ the word “Tranny” when speaking to me of other transgendered people they’ve known, seemingly unaware that this is a derogatory term on par with the “N” word. At least they don’t know any better; there are still far too many who openly mock the legitimacy of our claim to being mis-gendered at birth. It’s still okay for talking heads on TV and radio, actors in movies, and comedians on stage to go for the easy joke by holding us up as objects of hilarity. As recent as my generational history, some of us were sent off to quack shrinks who sought to “cure us” of these deviant thoughts and behaviors, some even being incarcerated in asylums.
Fear is the number one inhibitor preventing all of us from employing the key that we all hold in our own hands, to unlock the door to our personal closets. So I held onto my fears, and I stayed behind the door, in the darkness, slowly suffocating. My fears were powerful and numerous. They say to those of us contemplating transition, especially older transitioners like myself: Be prepared to lose…everything. And you do. I lost a home. I lost my hometown where my kids grew up, and my place in that community. I lost my three sons who have not spoken to me since that fateful day I came out to them six years ago. I lost my family of six siblings, excluded from their weddings, birth announcements, and all get-togethers, my only contact being the occasional “like” from the two brothers who have me on their Facebook pages. One brother at the time, emailed me about my “abhorrent” and “aberrant” behavior, and referred to my surgery as “Frankensteinian.” The general consensus from the rest is that I am selfish and self-centered for not caring what my transition does to the “family.” My mother doesn’t speak to me at all, though she “follows” me on Facebook. She forbade me from coming out to my father who was dying of lung cancer at the time I came out to her. Consequentially, my dad died believing me to be a fuckup and a “loser” (his actual words) for the entirety of my directionless and listless life that he knew me. All my money and my retirement funds were sucked up in finance of my transition and I work now in a menial profession, tending to the elderly in a nursing facility, for obscenely little pay. I’ve known poverty and hunger and the cold of an unheated house in the middle of winter in Maine. I’ve also lived without running water or electricity, camping out in my little bungalow, purchased after my divorce, while I struggle to stave off the bank from taking possession through foreclosure.
Yes, I’ve lost much of what I had before my transition, but what I’ve gained in return is…everything. What I’ve gained is myself. And nothing on earth is worth more than the freedom of fear to be one’s self. Before I could embark on the path to realizing myself though, I had to first face that person in the mirror, and look behind the glass at the true person inside the two-dimensional reflection. For anyone emerging from any closet, the first step is admitting to yourself who you are. So my epiphany came in that glaring sun through my windshield when it occurred to me, that the little voice of rationalization I’d listened to out in the water after that amazing ride on an amazing wave during an amazing day…well, that voice was full of shit. Because I realized that for my mind to have even conjured the rationalization that all I needed was a tasty wave to quell those inner desires, only proved I’d been fooling myself all along. That in such a moment of enrapture, I still could not help thinking about being a girl, proved to me at last, I already was one.
