. . . in the Genes

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April 10, 2007

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

By NICHOLAS WADE

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raisingthe greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

In the womb, the body of a developing fetus is female by default and becomes male if the male-determining gene known as SRY is present. This dominant gene, the Y chromosome’s proudest and almost only possession, sidetracks the reproductive tissue from its ovarian fate and switches it into becoming testes. Hormones from the testes, chiefly testosterone, mold the body into male form.

In puberty, the reproductive systems are primed for action by the brain. Amazing electrical machine that it may be, the brain can also behave like a humble gland. In the hypothalamus, at the central base of the brain, lie a cluster of about 2,000 neurons that ignite puberty when they start to secrete pulses of gonadotropin-releasing hormone, which sets off a cascade of other hormones.

The trigger that stirs these neurons is still unknown, but probably the brain monitors internal signals as to whether the body is ready to reproduce and external cues as to whether circumstances are propitious for yielding to desire.

Several advances in the last decade have underlined the bizarre fact that the brain is a full-fledged sexual organ, in that the two sexes have profoundly different versions of it. This is the handiwork of testosterone, which masculinizes the brain as thoroughly as it does the rest of the body.

It is a misconception that the differences between men’s and women’s brains are small or erratic or found only in a few extreme cases, Dr. Larry Cahill of the University of California, Irvine, wrote last year in Nature Reviews Neuroscience. Widespread regions of the cortex, the brain’s outer layer that performs much of its higher-level processing, are thicker in women. The hippocampus, where initial memories are formed, occupies a larger fraction of the female brain.

Techniques for imaging the brain have begun to show that men and women use their brains in different ways even when doing the same thing. In the case of the amygdala, a pair of organs that helps prioritize memories according to their emotional strength, women use the left amygdala for this purpose but men tend to use the right.

It is no surprise that the male and female versions of the human brain operate in distinct patterns, despite the heavy influence of culture. The male brain is sexually oriented toward women as an object of desire. The most direct evidence comes from a handful of cases, some of them circumcision accidents, in which boy babies have lost their penises and been reared as female. Despite every social inducement to the opposite, they grow up desiring women as partners, not men.

“If you can’t make a male attracted to other males by cutting off his penis, how strong could any psychosocial effect be?” said J. Michael Bailey, an expert on sexual orientation at Northwestern University.

Presumably the masculinization of the brain shapes some neural circuit that makes women desirable. If so, this circuitry is wired differently in gay men. In experiments in which subjects are shown photographs of desirable men or women, straight men are aroused by women, gay men by men.

Such experiments do not show the same clear divide with women. Whether women describe themselves as straight or lesbian, “Their sexual arousal seems to be relatively indiscriminate — they get aroused by both male and female images,” Dr. Bailey said. “I’m not even sure females have a sexual orientation. But they have sexual preferences. Women are very picky, and most choose to have sex with men.”

Dr. Bailey believes that the systems for sexual orientation and arousal make men go out and find people to have sex with, whereas women are more focused on accepting or rejecting those who seek sex with them.

Similar differences between the sexes are seen by Marc Breedlove, a neuroscientist at Michigan State University. “Most males are quite stubborn in their ideas about which sex they want to pursue, while women seem more flexible,” he said.

Sexual orientation, at least for men, seems to be settled before birth. “I think most of the scientists working on these questions are convinced that the antecedents of sexual orientation in males are happening early in life, probably before birth,” Dr. Breedlove said, “whereas for females, some are probably born to become gay, but clearly some get there quite late in life.”

Sexual behavior includes a lot more than sex. Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, argues that three primary brain systems have evolved to direct reproductive behavior. One is the sex drive that motivates people to seek partners. A second is a program for romantic attraction that makes people fixate on specific partners. Third is a mechanism for long-term attachment that induces people to stay together long enough to complete their parental duties.

Romantic love, which in its intense early stage “can last 12-18 months,” is a universal human phenomenon, Dr. Fisher wrote last year in The Proceedings of the Royal Society, and is likely to be a built-in feature of the brain. Brain imaging studies show that a particular area of the brain, one associated with the reward system, is activated when subjects contemplate a photo of their lover.

The best evidence for a long-term attachment process in mammals comes from studies of voles, a small mouselike rodent. A hormone called vasopressin, which is active in the brain, leads some voles to stay pair-bonded for life. People possess the same hormone, suggesting a similar mechanism could be at work in humans, though this has yet to be proved.

Researchers have devoted considerable effort to understanding homosexuality in men and women, both for its intrinsic interest and for the light it could shed on the more usual channels of desire. Studies of twins show that homosexuality, especially among men, is quite heritable, meaning there is a genetic component to it. But since gay men have about one-fifth as many children as straight men, any gene favoring homosexuality should quickly disappear from the population.

Such genes could be retained if gay men were unusually effective protectors of their nephews and nieces, helping genes just like theirs get into future generations. But gay men make no better uncles than straight men, according to a study by Dr. Bailey. So that leaves the possibility that being gay is a byproduct of a gene that persists because it enhances fertility in other family members. Some studies have found that gay men have more relatives than straight men, particularly on their mother’s side.

But Dr. Bailey believes the effect, if real, would be more clear-cut. “Male homosexuality is evolutionarily maladaptive,” he said, noting that the phrase means only that genes favoring homosexuality cannot be favored by evolution if fewer such genes reach the next generation.

A somewhat more straightforward clue to the origin of homosexuality is the fraternal birth order effect. Two Canadian researchers, Ray Blanchard and Anthony F. Bogaert, have shown that having older brothers substantially increases the chances that a man will be gay. Older sisters don’t count, nor does it matter whether the brothers are in the house when the boy is reared.

The finding suggests that male homosexuality in these cases is caused by some event in the womb, such as “a maternal immune response to succeeding male pregnancies,” Dr. Bogaert wrote last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Antimale antibodies could perhaps interfere with the usual masculinization of the brain that occurs before birth, though no such antibodies have yet been detected.

The fraternal birth order effect is quite substantial. Some 15 percent of gay men can attribute their homosexuality to it, based on the assumption that 1 percent to 4 percent of men are gay, and each additional older brother increases the odds of same-sex attraction by 33 percent.

The effect supports the idea that the levels of circulating testosterone before birth are critical in determining sexual orientation. But testosterone in the fetus cannot be measured, and as adults, gay and straight men have the same levels of the hormone, giving no clue to prenatal exposure. So the hypothesis, though plausible, has not been proved.

A significant recent advance in understanding the basis of sexuality and desire has been the discovery that genes may have a direct effect on the sexual differentiation of the brain. Researchers had long assumed that steroid hormones like testosterone and estrogen did all the heavy lifting of shaping the male and female brains. But Arthur Arnold of the University of California, Los Angeles, has found that male and female neurons behave somewhat differently when kept in laboratory glassware. And last year Eric Vilain, also of U.C.L.A., made the surprising finding that the SRY gene is active in certain cells of the brain, at least in mice. Its brain role is quite different from its testosterone-related activities, and women’s neurons presumably perform that role by other means.

It so happens that an unusually large number of brain-related genes are situated on the X chromosome. The sudden emergence of the X and Y chromosomes in brain function has caught the attention of evolutionary biologists. Since men have only one X chromosome, natural selection can speedily promote any advantageous mutation that arises in one of the X’s genes. So if those picky women should be looking for smartness in prospective male partners, that might explain why so many brain-related genes ended up on the X.

“It’s popular among male academics to say that females preferred smarter guys,” Dr. Arnold said. “Such genes will be quickly selected in males because new beneficial mutations will be quickly apparent.”

Several profound consequences follow from the fact that men have only one copy of the many X-related brain genes and women two. One is that many neurological diseases are more common in men because women are unlikely to suffer mutations in both copies of a gene.

Another is that men, as a group, “will have more variable brain phenotypes,” Dr. Arnold writes, because women’s second copy of every gene dampens the effects of mutations that arise in the other.

Greater male variance means that although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes. Women’s care in selecting mates, combined with the fast selection made possible by men’s lack of backup copies of X-related genes, may have driven the divergence between male and female brains. The same factors could explain, some researchers believe, why the human brain has tripled in volume over just the last 2.5 million years.

Who can doubt it? It is indeed desire that makes the world go round.

When She Graduates as He

There's a battle brewing at the Seven Sisters over the growing population of transgender students. The question at its core: What kind of women's college awards diplomas to men?

By Adrian Brune | April 8, 2007

Though born a girl, raised a girl, and now attending a women’s college, Isaiah Bartlett didn’t feel quite right being female. Old pictures show a very feminine, rosy-cheeked Allison Bartlett with chin-length dark brown hair. Yet every time her mother coaxed her into a dress for one of those photographs, Allison’s skin would crawl and her mind would race with insecurities. Even coming out as a butch lesbian in her freshman year at Mt. Holyoke College – and getting rid of those dresses for good – didn’t seem to solve the problem.

Not long after Allison enrolled, in the fall of 2005, she shaved most of her hair into a mohawk and picked up a few pairs of boxer shorts. Soon she started binding her breasts with an Ace bandage every day before going out. After a year of struggling in school and a semester off to sort out her emotions, the popular 20-year-old psychology major returned to school and went to a talk by fellow student Kevin Murphy. Then things began to make sense. Allison realized that though she was a biological woman, she wanted nothing more than to be a man. She adopted the name Isaiah. “When I heard Kevin’s story, his talk about struggling with coming out as a lesbian, then realizing that he really wanted to be a man, I felt as if he was telling bits of my own story,” Bartlett says one October afternoon in his room in Mt. Holyoke’s Buckland Hall dormitory, just before a friend comes barreling up in a robe and a green face mask to offer a quick hug and some dish. “Soon after, I came out as a transman.”

This is the latest subculture to emerge at the elite women’s colleges in the Northeast known as the Seven Sisters – young women, some still teenagers, who, like Bartlett, are exploring the possibility of growing up to be men. And it’s creating a social upheaval at these historically all-female enclaves as they wrestle with what to do about all this gender bending.

The Seven Sisters colleges were founded in the 19th century, and famous graduates have ranged from anthropologist Margaret Mead (Barnard) to actresses Stockard Channing (Radcliffe) and Meryl Streep (Vassar) to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton (Wellesley). Vassar started accepting male students in 1969, and Radcliffe officially merged with Harvard College in 1999, leaving just five sisters – Mt. Holyoke, Bryn Mawr, Smith, Barnard, and Wellesley.

But the same empowerment and opportunity for self-discovery that an all-female school provides may also make survival as single-sex institutions that much harder for the remaining sisters. After all, the real challenge that transmen are forcing women’s colleges to face is an ideological one: Is it still a women’s college when some students who were female as freshmen are male by graduation day?

The term “transman” is a relatively new one. It originates from “transgender,” which generally describes people who feel that the gender they were born into is at odds with their true identity. Coined in the late 1970s, transgender is now often used in place of “transsexual,” which describes a person who has had sex reassignment surgery or who lives as a member of the opposite sex. Most transmen begin their transition with masculine dress, adopting the pronoun “he,” and taking on a male name. After counseling, some transmen start taking the hormone testosterone, known in the community as “T,” which deepens the voice, causes facial hair to grow, enlarges the clitoris, and reduces breast size. If he decides to go further, a transman may undergo a double mastectomy, hysterectomy, and ovary removal. The final frontier is penis construction surgery.

From a medical point of view, Isaiah Bartlett’s story reflects the classic traits of gender identity disorder as defined in the “Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,” the bible of the mental health professions. At the same time, while no one knows exactly how common it is, advocates and many professionals who work with the trans population believe transgender people should be reclassified, because gender variation is normal across the human spectrum.

It does seem that most transmen start to feel male at a young age. A study conducted two years ago by researchers at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Pennsylvania State University asked transmen, transwomen, “genderqueers” – who consider themselves beyond or between genders – and people with other gender-diverse identities about their experiences. Roughly 3,500 people responded to the survey, sent to transgender support groups throughout the country and to self-identified transgender individuals found online. Of the 807 respondents who were female at birth but who now identify as male, transgender, or “other,” 86 percent said they began to question their gender identities before age 12, and all but 2 percent before 19.

In addition, researchers believe that more young people than ever before are acting on those feelings. “It used to be that transitioning was a midlife process, but the Internet has changed a lot,” says Brett-Genny Janiczek Beemyn, one of the lead researchers in the UMass-Penn State study. “With the click of a mouse, more and more young people can find others going through what they’re going through and have a stronger sense of themselves at a younger age.” Beemyn, who also directs the UMass-Amherst Stonewall Center, an educational resource center for gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students at the school, believes that in the coming years the number of young people who are “out” as transgender will only grow. Advocates think that’s a good thing: A number of studies have found that the earlier an individual undergoes sex reassignment, beginning with hormones, the easier it is for that person to pass as someone of their transitioned gender, and that passing is key to a transitioned person’s long-term happiness.

Though a successful transition can certainly be a liberating experience, the growing transman population at all-women’s colleges has created some unique problems, too. While both Mt. Holyoke, in South Hadley, and its rival school, Smith College in Northampton, cultivate what transgender students say is an open and accepting environment that allows them to find their true selves – including their gender identities – there are new rivalries developing. “No parent is surprised anymore when their daughter goes to an all-women’s college and then comes out as a lesbian,” says Kevin Murphy, the 21-year-old junior whose talk inspired Isaiah Bartlett. “But once you get into this, within the community, there’s a lot of competition. Who goes on T first. Who is taking more T. Who gets top surgery first.”

Sitting in a dimly lit bar after playing a club hockey match against Smith – club teams aren’t covered by the NCAA regulations that ban college players from taking testosterone – Murphy is practically indistinguishable from a very small, fairly handsome young man. He has deep brown eyes and, having been on T for the past two years, an even deeper voice, as well as a beard that is filling in nicely. A year ago, he used his own money to pay for a double mastectomy. Today he strolls into the bar, flashes his ID, and sits down to a Corona without a hesitating glance from anyone, including the bartender, who might have noticed that Murphy’s driver’s license still lists him as female – something he can legally change in Massachusetts, thanks to his surgery. Yet for all his confidence, Murphy, who is majoring in psychology and religion, is still figuring things out. “When I go out with my friends, I’m the guy in the group, and when I go out with their boyfriends, I’m the most feminine guy,” he says. “I’m really trying to form friendships with biological men because I want to be accepted, and I was never allowed to when I was younger.”

Beginning in high school, when Murphy came out as gay, a fairly typical transgender progression followed: dressing in drag, adopting a male haircut, and breast-binding. Kevin was still Caitlin when he enrolled at Mt. Holyoke in 2003. After about two years, Murphy decided to make the leap. “I wanted to be a guy,” he says. So Caitlin started taking T, legally changed her name, and began looking for surgeons. Murphy insists he will never regret his decision to become male, though the process hasn’t been entirely easy. “I cried the day after I woke up and found my breasts gone,” he says. “With each stage, I feel like I’ve been losing my lesbian identity, and that’s hard to give up.”

Therapists, doctors, and college administrators are concerned about students who decide to transition based on what sometimes seems to be shaky logic: growing pains such as insecurity or peer pressure, childhood trauma, depression, or even just the need to rebel. They tend to be cautious about their clients’ transitions, but many counselors ultimately feel that even young adults should be able to make their own decisions. “Of course, any compassionate therapist might be concerned about a young person making such a permanent decision. ‘What if this person could make a mistake? What if I make the wrong decision in giving the OK for this person to transition?’ ” says Arlene Istar Lev, a family therapist and adjunct professor of social welfare at the State University of New York at Albany who specializes in transgender issues. “But here’s the catch: We know that a certain percentage of the population is transgender, and we know the research on transitioning and age. At this point, we have no evidence of any young people regretting these decisions. And the other thing: We all have to live with decisions. Young people drop out of high school, even when counselors say, ‘Don’t do that.’ People get pregnant and have babies or get abortions. All you can do is give the best assessment at the time.”

A Smith School of Social Work student, Shannon Sennott, has started a nonprofit called Translate, to provide training and seminars for women’s colleges. Sennott believes that the schools should offer hormone counseling and advocacy as transgender students make crucial decisions about their lives. “Any person that age needs direction, and my concern is that they’re not receiving it,” Sennott says. “Someone needs to say, ‘OK, you want to be a transman, let’s discuss these options.’ Or, ‘OK, you want to remain genderqueer and use female pronouns the rest of your life, that’s just great, too.’ ”

It’s not that there aren’t any resources for students. At Mt. Holyoke, there’s True Colors, a student organization that runs a community center; the group arranges movie nights, mixers, and panel discussions and seminars for lesbian, bisexual, and transgender students on subjects such as coming out as transgender at work. There is also a designated adviser for transgender students on campus, an associate director of residential life who is a gay man. At Smith, similar services and groups are available.

But at Bryn Mawr College in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, the transgender community remains so nascent, there are few resources. “There are 1,300 [undergrad] students here. It’s a tiny population – I know all of the trans students,” says Lindsay Gold, 21, who guesses that the campus’s transman population is between six and 12 students. The would-be senior majoring in computer science left school in December because she “wasn’t feeling in the academic spirit,” she says. Gold is now living in an apartment near campus and trying to sort out two big hurdles: finishing college and being transgender. “Everyone is accepting, but there are no resources. People come to me asking where they can go to get help.” In an e-mail, assistant dean Christopher MacDonald-Dennis writes: “This is an issue we are only now beginning to talk about. . . . We realize that our other sisters have been dealing with this, so we are looking to them to help us be as supportive as we can.”

the trans population at smith has seen the most public attention, and probably the most public debate, too. Former student Lucas Cheadle helped bring widespread attention to the issue by being profiled, along with three other transgender students, in a multipart documentary called TransGeneration that aired on the Sundance Channel in 2005. Before that, it was a major victory for trans activists on Smith’s campus when, in 2003, all references to “she” and “her” in the student constitution were changed to “the student.” Students say another fight over the pronouns used in the constitution looks to be rekindled in the coming year, and every so often, members of the trans-friendly and not-so-trans-friendly communities exchange heated words on the public website smith.dailyjolt.com. A recent anonymous posting about an annual event formerly known as Celebration of Sisterhood, renamed Celebration in 2003 – though there is debate as to why – reads: “Yeah, God forbid anyone include the word ‘sisterhood’ . . . because a handful of trans students somehow feel oppressed, despite the fact that they chose to attend a women’s college.” The reply: “Let the transphobia debate begin again.”

One first-year student who didn’t want her name, major, or hometown used for fear her views would provoke hostility from fellow students, says she has witnessed conflict offline, too. “I’ve heard some of the most liberal people – feminists and even gays and lesbians – say adverse things toward trans students at Smith,” she e-mails. “One of my friends, who is a lesbian also, expresses anger toward trans-identified students because she thinks they are giving up their womanhood. Although I do not agree with these opinions, I can see where they come from.”

Another camp worries that as the school makes room for transgender students, it will be forced to start accepting transmen who began their transition in high school and biological males making the transition to female. Or worse yet, it might, they say, become coed. “Taking T and planning to transition doesn’t go with the mission of Smith College,” writes Nicole, a junior who doesn’t want to share her last name or her major because she thinks her views will be thought politically incorrect.

A member of Smith’s Republican Club and editor-in-chief of its conservative newspaper, junior Samantha Lewis, 20, doesn’t mind speaking on the record. “I think it’s ironic that there are Smithies who do not want to be women, and, to be completely honest, it seems to me that it defeats the purpose of being at a women’s college.” While Nicole guesses that the trans population at Smith is 30 out of about 2,500 undergraduates, Lewis thinks that the number is at least twice as big. “The first person I met on campus was a man,” Lewis says. “He said, ‘Hi, I’m Ethan, and I use male pronouns.’ ”

The administration paints the conflicts as healthy, lively, debate. “Questions about what it means to be a woman or a feminist are not new to the college discourse, whether at Smith or many other leading institutions,” writes Maureen Mahoney, the college dean, in an e-mail. She adds that Smith recently opened a Center for Sexuality and Gender as a student resource and for years has allowed students to request the name they desire on their diplomas. “For the most part, these are issues of diversity, and diversity has clear educational benefits. As one of our student leaders noted in an address to her peers, what she learned at Smith is, great minds don’t think alike.”

No, clearly, they don’t. “The students here try very hard to be accepting of almost anything, and it’s really difficult for us to say, ‘Hey, you don’t really belong here,’ ” says Nicole. “It’s not a matter of discrimination or approval, it’s a question of that person’s goals and the overall goals of the university. I personally don’t think trying to pass as a man and having Smith College on your diploma gives you the chance to have a stable career. And there are those of us who are investing in Smith, and in 40 years, we want Smith to be greater as a women’s college than it is now.”

Meanwhile, back at Mt. Holyoke, Isaiah Bartlett remains in gender limbo. “Although my decision to have surgery isn’t dependent on my parents’ approval, more of a support system from them would help a lot,” he says. As far as starting testosterone, Bartlett thinks about it, but ultimately demurs. “I’m not ready to make that kind of a decision yet.” But at Bryn Mawr, Lindsay Gold can’t wait to begin to transition and started seeing a gender therapist last month. “I feel like other transmen accept or validate you based on where you stand in your transition,” Gold says. “I don’t want to be sneered at for still having a woman’s body.”

On Coming Out TG: Susan and Steve Stanton

His second self

Over and over, the family man tried to put Susan in a suitcase. Now, Susan and Steve are finally merging, and career and family are splintering.

By LANE DEGREGORY and LORRI HELFAND
Published March 11, 2007

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When it was finally over - after he had listened to people talk for four hours about how depraved he was, how sinful and untrustworthy - Steve Stanton handed over his office key and walked out of the City Hall he had run for 14 years.

He climbed into his Lexus and turned on the radio. Naomi Judd sang, "It's over ..." Steve tried not to be angry even though the Largo vote had been 5-2 against him. He tried not to feel sorry for himself.

It was after 10 p.m. on Tuesday, Feb. 27. He thought everybody would be in bed when he got home. His 13-year-old son, Travis, had school the next day. And Steve hadn't shared a room with his wife, Donna, for years.

When he turned into the driveway, he was surprised to see the kitchen lights still on. By the time he shut off the engine, Travis had flung open the door. He ran to his dad and hugged him. Donna came out and hugged Steve, too, for the first time in months.

"We watched the whole thing on TV," Travis said. "Why did they fire you? Why were those people saying such mean things about you?"

Steve shook his head. "Because they don't understand."

- - -

How was anyone supposed to understand?

How could Steve even begin to talk about the mirrors and the clogs, the birthday cards and clothes, the two sets of journals, the loneliness and lies?

How could this tough, 48-year-old city manager who had commanded 1,000 employees, who had rappelled with the firefighters and trained with the SWAT team, explain why he wanted to be a woman?

He had started with his wife. This is not about kinky sex or being gay or strutting like a drag queen, he told her. It's about who I am.

At first, Donna tried to understand. She even took him shoe shopping. It was like a game. Then it wasn't a game anymore.

"I believe you didn't choose to be this way," she told him. But someone who wants to be a woman isn't what she wants in a husband.

You need to know I tried, Steve said. I agonized over this, went to therapy, fought it for 40 years.

You need to understand: I tried to kill Susan.

- - -

Steve Stanton has known he is different as long as he has known his name.

He was born in September 1958 in New York's Catskill Mountains. His father - a distant man, Steve says - was the personnel manager at a knife factory; his mother stayed home with Steve, his older sister and younger brother. They did typical family things together. They camped, built backyard forts, gathered for dinner every night.

But mostly, Steve was a loner. He was always in his room studying, in the basement tending to 50 tanks of tropical fish, taking walks with his gray poodle, Misty.

She was his only confidante. Even when he was 6, Steve says, he would walk her through the woods, saying out loud what he was ashamed even to think.

"I want to be a girl," Steve told his dog. "I think I am a girl, inside."

He told the dog he hated mirrors because his reflection didn't match who he really was. He told her about the time he stole his sister's blue clogs and clip-clopped to Mr. Brown's candy store. He said he was scared of what was inside him.

He thought about how much easier everything would be if he had been born a girl. One day when he was 8 or 9, he asked his mom, "If I'd been a girl, what would you have named me?"

"Susan," she said.

"It was like an electrical charge went through me," Steve says now. "I remember wanting to yell, 'That's it! That's who I am! "'

- - -

He started keeping journals in fourth grade. Every night after his brother fell asleep, Steve would curl up in the corner of their room with a diary.

He wrote about how hard school was, how much it hurt when other kids called him Jew boy. Mostly, though, he wrote about Susan. The journal was the only place he could reveal that part of himself, try to figure out what it was. He didn't have a split personality, he says. Susan was simply the other side of him, the piece that made him whole.

He filled pages with his feelings and thoughts, but he never wrote the word Susan. He didn't want anyone to know her name.

In his writing, Steve called her "my second self."

- - -

Puberty was torture. The more his body changed, the more he felt he was losing who he was supposed to be. When peach fuzz began to sprout above his lip, he stole his sister's pink plastic razor and whisked it away.

But he had to do something to fix himself, to become the man his body was telling him he should be. One afternoon he stuffed all his diaries into a bag, dropped them in a can and burned them.

He thought Susan was gone.

In high school, other boys bragged about their sexual exploits, but Steve didn't want to hear. He wasn't attracted to anyone, really, girls or boys. He never asked anyone out. He didn't go to his prom.

"I never thought anything of it," says Steve's dad, Web Stanton, who lives outside Tallahassee. "I just thought he was too cheap."

Steve spent his time playing basketball, delivering papers, scrubbing bathrooms at his father's company.

He didn't write in his journal. But he still dreamed of being Susan. In his dreams, his body matched his brain.

- - -

Steve's parents split up in his senior year in high school, and his mom asked him to take some of her clothes to the Salvation Army. By then, Steve's sister had moved out, so he had his own room.

He was 17. He'd never worn a dress.

He spent hours that day poring through his mom's discard pile, picking out outfits. At the bottom of the heap, he found a white tennis dress.

He slipped it on. It hugged his thin hips. He loved how the fabric felt against his skin.

He slept in the dress that night. And the next.

When he left for the University of Florida in 1977, he took it with him.

- - -

Steve rented an apartment by himself. He majored in psychology, thinking it might help him figure out what was going on in his head.

He never went to football games or frat parties. He spent weekends shopping - and becoming Susan behind closed doors.

He would buy nightgowns and cheap dresses, always long-sleeved and floor-length to hide his hairy arms and legs. He would buy a birthday card so the clerk would think the clothes were a gift.

After his first semester in college, Steve bought a journal: a leather-bound volume with lined, dated pages. His first entry was on Jan. 1, 1978, in black ballpoint pen, in almost illegible script.

"Life is funny," he wrote. "And God works in mysterious ways. ... It is up to us all to seek the truth about ourselves. I will try to do just that."

- - -

Psychology turned out to be too hard, so Steve got his degree in political science, then stayed another year for a master's. When it was time to leave Gainesville, he knew he had to kill Susan. Again.

He stuffed a closetful of clothes into trash bags and dragged them to the trash bin. The last thing he wedged in was the white tennis dress.

The next few years took Steve to Washington, D.C., New York, Alaska, Champaign, Ill, then Kentucky. Susan died each time. Every move to a new place gave Steve faint hope that he could be someone the world could accept.

But every time he landed in a new city, he bought another wardrobe.

- - -

At work, Steve seemed to have it all together. In 1986 he got his first job as a city manager, in Berea, Ky.

In an aerobics class in nearby Lexington, Steve met a woman named Donna. She was tall and voluptuous, with blonde hair and a soft voice. She laughed a lot.

Steve thought she was gorgeous. But he wasn't really attracted to her. At 30, he says, he was still a virgin.

Donna, who was seven years older, had been married before. At first, she didn't like Steve. He was sarcastic, condescending, not considerate of other people's feelings, she says. He seemed uncomfortable. But the social worker in her saw he needed a friend.

Eventually, Steve invited Donna to his apartment. He had bought another wardrobe of women's clothes by then, so he hid everything in a blue trunk.

One afternoon, Donna saw Steve's diary and asked to read it. Okay, he said, but not this one. He gave her the one from his first year in college. It never spelled out his desire to be a woman.

When Donna thinks about those days now, she wonders how she missed the signs. In a four-hour phone conversation last week, she poured out her story, beginning with that afternoon she spent deciphering the cramped handwriting in his journal.

"I saw a different side of him in those pages. There was a vulnerability about him," Donna says. "If I'd never read his journals, we probably never would have dated."

She didn't know it, but she had fallen in love with Susan.

- - -

They had been dating nine months when Steve got an offer to move to Florida and be an assistant city manager in Largo.

The third-largest city in Pinellas County, Largo is home to 76,000 people. It's about 90 percent white and has more than 60 churches. It is known for its parks, mobile homes and downtown feed store. It calls itself the City of Progress.

Steve asked Donna to marry him and move with him to Florida.

She asked him if he was gay.

"I'd wondered, after reading some of his journals. He wrote somewhat in code, but it was obvious he felt ... differently ... about a lot of situations," she says.

Steve assured her he wasn't gay.

They had a short ceremony in Myrtle Beach, S.C. When they got to Largo, Steve tossed his women's clothes into a trash bin. He wrote in his journal: "I've gotten rid of my second self."

- - -

Now that he had Donna, he thought, he didn't need Susan. Cat Stevens lyrics kept playing in his head: "Find a girl, settle down." Marriage - that would be the cure.

For seven years, it worked. Donna found a job in a nursing home. Steve was promoted to city manager. They bought a house. Travis was born. Donna quit her job and became a soccer mom.

Steve didn't buy women's clothes. He didn't write about Susan in his journals. He was just Steve, workaholic city manager, husband and father. Regular guy.

Until 1998. When he had a dream.

In the dream he was Susan, and everyone could see it. Steve woke up in a panic: She was back.

He got on the Internet and typed in "transvestite." A new world opened up to him, one with cross-dressers and drag queens, gays and lesbians, bisexuals and asexuals, and something called a transgender. Steve says he had never heard that word. He was sure he wasn't one.

He got lost in cross-dressing Web sites. He started coming home late from work, then holing up in his study to look at them. When Donna walked in, he'd click off his computer. "City business," he'd say.

Finally, she told him she knew. He was having an affair.

No, Steve told her. It's not that.

She started crying.

In bed that night, Steve touched her shoulder. "There's something I have to tell you," he said. He kept talking in circles, telling her how much he loved her. Finally, he blurted, "I think I might be a cross-dresser."

He didn't tell her he had worn dresses before. And he didn't tell her about Susan. Just that he had been looking at Web sites and thought he'd like to dress up.

Donna laughed. "Steve," she said, "you are the most conservative, judgmental person I know. That's just too funny to be true."

He told his wife, "It's not a joke."

- - -

Cross-dressing? Was that all it was? Donna was relieved. She even said she would help him.

On a Saturday evening in January 1998, while their son was at a sleep-over, Donna took her husband to Payless ShoeSource. She pretended to be shopping for pumps, then let Steve try them on.

He has small feet - size 8 - so it was easy to find shoes that fit. At first, he teetered in the black pumps.

Then Donna took him to Ross Dress for Less, where she helped him buy a blue dress, size 12, and panty hose. He had never worn panty hose.

"I thought it was just a little fetish," Donna says, "something we could giggle about together. I didn't know he'd been struggling with this all his life. In my mind, he'd try it out and see a ridiculous-looking man in a dress. He'd figure out the foolishness of it and it'd be over with.

"If I had known what I was doing," she says, "I probably never would have done it."

The next night, in their bedroom, she showed him how to roll up panty hose. She zipped his dress. She gave him a blond wig she'd worn to a costume party and did his make-up: thick foundation to cover his whiskers, lipstick, shimmery eye shadow, mascara.

One wall of their living room was filled with full-length mirrors. Donna led Steve toward them.

"I was laughing. He was Halloween, a masquerade," Donna says.

Steve stared at himself for a long time. He says he didn't even see his shoes, the dress, the wig. He was looking into his own eyes. He couldn't believe that after all these years, he was seeing Susan.

"This person I'd been running from was right there, staring back at me in the mirror," he says. "I knew once she was out I couldn't put her back in again."

Watching her husband watch himself, Donna felt sick. "It wasn't funny to him," she says, her voice catching. "He was connecting with that image and it frightened me. I think he said something like, 'So there she is!' "

After midnight, still in makeup, Steve opened his journal. On Jan. 19, 1998, he wrote the first entry in Susan's voice.

"Well, finally I'm free to see the world as I am. To look in the mirror and see my own image. I have protected him for so many years, waiting for my chance to see the world as he does. ... I'm the softness in his heart and the caring in his mind. I have comforted him when he feels alone and protected him from rejection, from hurt. I've always been with him. And he's always been with me. For so many years, I've cried out in his sleep to be whole, to express my femininity while he expressed his maleness. I promise to act as one. I can make him a fuller person. But I am real. And I need light, no less than he does ..."

- - -

Come with me, he begged Donna. Help me navigate this new world.

Donna was trying to be supportive. She called a friend, asked her to keep Travis for the evening.

They drove to Orlando, to a big hotel, where 60 men in drag were meeting in a support group for heterosexual cross-dressers. Some brought their wives. As Steve and Donna crossed the parking lot together, Steve kept staring at his shadow. In those heels, that dress and wig, his outline looked like a woman's. This was Susan's public debut.

But inside the meeting, Steve got squirrelly. He wasn't like those other men in dresses.

Donna wanted to go home. She kept thinking, "This is my date night?"

Three weekends, they drove the 90 minutes, only to realize they didn't fit in with that group. Finally, Donna struck a deal. If Steve had to do this, that was one thing. But she didn't want any part of it.

Once a month, Steve could go out of town and do whatever he had to do. But he couldn't talk about it. He could never dress up at home.

And they couldn't tell anyone. Ever.

- - -

Steve called those weekends "boy's night out."

He'd tell Travis he was going away on business, or to run a marathon. He always packed four bags: A garment bag for his suit and ties; a gym bag for running clothes; a rolling suitcase for Susan's wardrobe; and another gym bag of makeup.

He'd drive to Jacksonville, Savannah or Atlanta, where he figured no one would know him. He'd check into a hotel and start the transformation.

It took at least two hours for Susan to emerge. First he would tug on a sports bra, then four pairs of stockings. He needed at least that many to keep the hair on his legs from poking out. Long skirt and long sleeves. The wig, low heels.

He developed his own process for applying makeup: Dot lipstick across your beard and moustache areas and blend. Add two or three layers of liquid foundation and you can barely see the razor burn. He got good at accenting his blue eyes, inking his pale lashes.

The first few weekends, he went to nightclubs, gay and straight. He didn't like either. He got nervous when guys looked at him. He thought he was passing. But he didn't want them trying to buy him a drink. Just like in high school, he wasn't interested in sex with anybody; it wasn't about that.

Maybe Susan would be more comfortable someplace a little more upscale, he thought. So one weekend, Steve put on a woman's suit and pulled into the parking lot of Orlando's Adam's Mark Hotel.

He walked toward the glass front doors and hesitated. He started and stopped three times before he finally dared go in. The doorman held the door for him and said, "Good evening, ma'am."

He had made it. She had made it.

Soon, he was wearing dresses everywhere on those secret weekends. He would sit on benches at malls and study how women walk, what they wear, how they move their hands. He learned to speak more softly, to raise the inflection of his voice and shift his speech patterns.

"At the drive-through, a man says, 'Give me some fries,' " Steve says. "With women, it's usually, 'Can I please have some fries?' Gender is about so much more than just the way we dress."

Some Saturdays, when he got back to the hotel, Steve would call Donna. Often, she'd be angry. Eventually he stopped calling.

In each strange city, before he went to bed, Steve would unpack a little black frame with an old photo of Travis. He'd put it on the nightstand and push the button.

"Hi Daddy. I miss you so much," the photo would say, in Travis' 4-year-old voice. "I can't wait until you get home."

- - -

While Steve was going out to dinner and concerts as Susan, Donna was home with Travis, watching rented movies. She never went out when he was away. What if someone asked, "Where's Steve?"

She hated lying. She hated his being gone. She got sick of thinking about him somewhere in a dress. What if someone saw him? What if someone jumped him? He wasn't used to thinking like a woman.

They found a marriage counselor who specialized in cross-dressing. They agreed they both loved their son, their home and friends, their standing in the community. So they agreed to stay together and keep the secret.

"That's how we lived for years," Donna said. "And I hated it. I felt like a fraud."

- - -

At work, Steve was the buttoned-up, short-fused boss, the face of Largo's aggressive annexation policy and its quest to become a real city with 10-story buildings downtown. He demanded perfection from his employees, was quick to fire them if they questioned him. Nobody would have guessed he was Susan on weekends.

He managed to keep a solid wall between the two personas - until 2003.

That year, commissioners were considering a human rights ordinance that would have protected transgender people - people who prefer to present in the opposite gender. Steve said he supported the ordinance, but he didn't push for it. He was afraid someone would make him defend his view. And he knew he wasn't impartial, so it would be hard to consider the city's best interests on the issue.

"We were drafting this stuff and some people were trying to figure it out, but others were just snickering," Steve says. "Someone would make a distasteful joke and I'd go red."

The law came up for a public hearing. Until then, Steve said, he hadn't really understood what it meant to be transgender. The men in dresses - that's what they looked like to him - scared him when they spoke to the commission. He didn't think he was one of them.

But their stories sounded familiar. His journals were filled with all the things they were saying. He felt small, sitting there in his big chair, in his tailored suit.

The commission voted against the ordinance. Later, one of the commissioners called Steve aside. She knew he believed in the law. Why hadn't he fought harder for it?

Steve hung his head.

- - -

After years of wondering, denying, pretending and hiding, he had to know: What was he? Where did he fit in? Was there a treatment for whatever he had?

He looked up Dr. Kathleen Farrell, a clinical psychologist who had spoken at the Largo meeting. Farrell, who has a Ph.D. from the University of Cincinnati, has spent more than 20 years working with gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people in the Tampa Bay area. She also founded Starburst, the area's first transgender support group .

Steve drove to her office in a St. Petersburg church. Shaking, he knocked on the door.

Farrell told Steve to stand in front of a large oval mirror. She asked, "What do you see?"

He saw a pasty man with short brown hair, a few flecks of gray creeping up the temples. He had a thick neck, strong jaw and full lips. Steve ran his hand across his stubbly cheeks. It felt so wrong.

Steve told Farrell about his childhood, about the clogs and tennis dress, about trying to kill Susan and live with Donna. He told her about his journals. For the last year he had been keeping two - one for Steve and one for Susan.

Farrell asked him: If you could take a pill that would make you feel the same on the inside as you are on the outside, would you take it?

Steve didn't hesitate. "Absolutely not."

- - -

The psychologist ran tests. Steve's blood work and testosterone levels were normal. After three months of counseling, Farrell diagnosed him with gender identity disorder. No other mental illness, she said, could explain his lifelong desire to be female.

The disorder is described in detail in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard guide for psychological diagnosis.

"There must be evidence of a strong and persistent cross-gender identification, which is the desire to be, or the insistence that one is, of the other sex," the manual says. "There must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one's assigned sex."

There's no cure for the condition, Farrell said. But there is treatment. Steve could start taking hormones. He could take pills to suppress his testosterone, others that would add estrogen. He would grow breasts. He could have electrolysis to remove his beard and body hair. He could start to feel and look more like a woman.

Steve hesitated. What would he tell his employees at City Hall? How would he explain his physical changes to the commission?

He met with Farrell for eight or nine months but still wasn't ready to start hormone therapy. One day, Farrell told him, "I want to meet Susan."

At their next appointment, Farrell says, a professional and "extraordinarily well-dressed woman" walked though the door, looking frightened.

"So," Steve asked, fidgeting in his dress. "What do you think?"

"You're a beautiful woman," said his therapist. He believed she meant it.

- - -

In March 2004, Steve told Donna he realized they'd grown apart and he was sorry. He said he was working on something that would make things better.

"I thought maybe he was planning a second honeymoon or a cruise, some kind of romantic getaway," Donna says. "I was getting pretty excited to find out how he was going to improve our marriage."

One night while Travis, then 10, was at a friend's house, Donna made a candlelight dinner. Steve poured wine. He handed her an eight-page typed letter.

It started out tracing the history of their relationship, their love. Then he got to the part where he said he had been seeing a therapist. "I need to become the person that I really am," Steve wrote to his wife. "And that person is a woman."

Donna read that page five times. The words were blurry through her tears. Her head hurt. Her stomach was in knots. "I kept thinking: I gotta get out of here," she says. "I gotta grab Travis and run."

"What about this," she asked Steve, "is going to make our marriage better?"

He said he didn't want a divorce. He just wanted to be who he was supposed to be. Sure, they'd have to adjust their relationship. But he still wanted to be Travis' parent and her partner. He'd just be Susan.

He knew he was asking a lot, but hoped somehow she would understand.

- - -

For two days, Donna stayed in bed crying.

If Steve could take a pill to suppress testosterone, couldn't he take one to add it? If his body and his brain didn't match, wouldn't it be easier to fix his mind than mess with his body? If he had lived with this for more than 40 years, why couldn't he live with it the rest of his life?

"I can't keep myself split," Steve remembers telling her. All his life, he had "put who I am aside for my parents, my career, society, my family." He says he felt like the alien in a Star Trek episode who could take on the form of whatever creature it was around. But the alien got sick and couldn't keep up the illusion. "I'm too tired," Steve said. "I can't do it anymore."

He told Donna he had come to understand how people could commit suicide. At times he thought it would be easier to die than put everyone through the humiliation they would suffer when he became a woman.

He had agonized about Travis. He had asked himself whether he could wait until his son was older before making the change. He had decided he couldn't. It would kill him. It had come down to this, he told Donna: Would it be better for Travis to have a dead dad? Or a dad who wanted to be a woman?

Steve gave Donna books and articles to read, Web sites to study and chat rooms for partners of transgender people.

"I had nothing in common with them," Donna says. "All those people were planning to stay with their partners, even after the transition. I couldn't do that."

She went to see Farrell, who told her many families work through this. Another therapist told her not to make any life decisions while the hurt was so raw.

Donna took off her wedding ring. She and Steve made a two-year plan:

Steve would start electrolysis and hormone therapy. Donna would go back to school to become a medical technician. They'd continue living as a family while he embarked on his new life. When Steve was ready to be Susan, he would move out.

They wouldn't tell Travis - or anyone - until 2007.

- - -

It hurt so much, having his beard ripped out. "Like 10,000 bees stinging your face," Steve says. Every three weeks, he'd go back for more treatments. Sometimes the technician would have to stop because he was shaking so hard.

He told his employees he had a skin condition. He got in the habit of tracing his fingers across his cheeks, exploring the softness. He started shaving the backs of his hands, then his wrists, arms and legs.

One day, during a run, Steve felt raindrops dappling his forearm. He couldn't remember ever feeling that sensation: rain right on his skin. He stopped and stood there, basking in it.

He canceled his weekly haircuts because he wanted his short crop to grow to his shoulders. He became a vegetarian and dropped 35 pounds. The hormones he was taking made him lose muscle tone. He could no longer get an erection. His breasts started to swell. He started having to wear tight undershirts beneath his dress shirts so his employees wouldn't notice.

Steve: "It was amazing, feeling those changes in my body, watching it evolve ... to what it was supposed to be."

Donna: "It was heartbreaking, seeing those changes in his body, watching him feminize himself. He was my man."

- - -

Steve was getting ready to go public. He told his brother and sister, who said they supported him. And he confided in the Largo police and fire chiefs, who were close friends as well as colleagues.

Steve chose Jan. 1, 2007, as the day he would tell Mayor Pat Gerard. She would be an important ally. Over the next few weeks, he would spill his secret to the city commissioners, then his employees. He planned to start coming to work as Susan in the summer. Sex change surgery was still way off, maybe a year or more.

At 7 a.m. the morning he was going to meet the mayor, he pulled out his journal to write about his anxieties. Travis had given him the book, a birthday gift.

Steve opened the cover. The first page was filled with loopy script.

"Dad," Travis had written. "I want to tell you that you're, like, the most perfect dad. You have taught me almost everything I know. Except for school stuff. I've had so much fun with you. My most favorite time was going to the Keys. ... I can't tell you how much I love you because it would fill up this whole book."

Steve turned the page, but he was too choked up to write.

He told the mayor that morning, but still didn't tell his son.

- - -

The two-year plan called for Steve to move out in March, while Travis was on spring break. After school was out, Donna would take Travis to her sister's house in Kansas. Then Steve would make his announcement.

But in February, someone leaked Steve's secret to the newspaper. A story was going to come out soon. That night, Steve called his dad. His mom died a few years ago.

Web Stanton hasn't seen his oldest son in years. "Have you thought about this?" he asked.

All my life, Steve said.

"Okay," his dad remembers saying. "I guess you do what you have to do."

The next day, at a press conference at City Hall, Steve told the world he planned to have a sex change operation and start using the name Susan. The news instantly spread on TV and the Web.

By that evening, Travis still hadn't heard. Steve and Donna sat down with him and told him. Are we still going to go scuba diving? Travis asked his dad. Are we still going to ride in the Jeep?

Of course, Steve assured him. Even when I look different, I'll still be your dad.

Travis had another question: Can I see Susan?

Steve unlocked the file cabinet in his study and pulled out two digital prints. He had used a timer and a tripod to take the photos in his own living room.

Travis stared at the pictures. "That's you?" he finally asked. "You look like a girl."

- - -

Steve stayed up late after the commissioners cast their votes and Naomi Judd sang and Donna and Travis hugged him at the door.

For the first time in years, he didn't write in his journal that night. Reporters hung around him all the next day. Almost a week would go by before he got the chance to take the leather-bound volume from his briefcase.

He finally wrote again late that Sunday, eight pages in a single voice, Steve and Susan musing together.

"I suspect my future will be in many Largos across the nation. We shall see," said the last paragraph. "I started this journey with a simple hope: Just to be me."

Epilogue

Since the city moved to fire him, news crews from across the country have knocked on Steve's door and set up cameras around his pool. Transgender advocates have urged him to join their cause and push for federal laws to protect people like him.

On Thursday, he appealed his dismissal with the help of a new lawyer from a gay and transgender advocacy group. He still loves Largo, he says, and doesn't want to leave.

He and Donna haven't decided when Steve will move out. They are trying to make things as easy as possible for Travis. They have talked to Travis' teachers and taken him to a family counselor.

Steve isn't sure when he'll start wearing Susan's clothes all the time. He says he's waiting for his hair to grow out so he doesn't have to wear a wig.

News researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this story.

About the story

Steve Stanton sat for hours of interviews and allowed a reporter to read passages from his journals. He gave permission to Dr. Kathleen Farrell, his psychologist, to speak to the Times about his treatment. Donna Stanton shared her story in a single, four-hour interview. Through his parents, Travis gave permission to quote from the note he wrote in his father's journal.

Lane DeGregory, a feature writer for the Times, can be reached at (727) 893-8825 or degregory@sptimes.com.

Lorri Helfand, who covers Largo, can be reached at (727) 445-4155 or lorri@sptimes.com.

© 2007 • All Rights Reserved • St. Petersburg Times
490 First Avenue South • St. Petersburg, FL 33701 • 727-893-8111

An interview with Mr. Deity . . .

. . . on the origin of women, gays, wearing a kilt, getting rid of the dinosaurs, politics, etc.

Coming out TS at work

There's been a lot of discussion in the media recently about coming out TG/TS at work. The link above from tsroadmap.com is the best single resource page on the net I know.

Discuss issues with your therapist. Don't go too fast. Use resources wisely.

daffodil with friends

Nepali becomes both man and woman

By Charles Haviland
BBC News, Kathmandu

The authorities in Nepal have granted a man who dresses and behaves as a woman both male and female citizenship.

The unprecedented legal status was given to 40-year-old Chanda Musalman.

Conservative and religious Nepal, like many Asian countries, has a sizeable community of people who are born male but behave as women.

It is unclear how this unique legal status will play out in practice - for instance, how it will affect Chanda's marriage rights.

Constitution

With elections approaching, government teams are currently touring the country issuing certificates of citizenship.

One team came to Chanda's village in western Nepal.

Chanda, who has had no sex-change surgery, asked the officials to erase the words male and female, listed under gender.

They obliged, and ascribed Chanda's gender as "both".

A local campaign group, the Blue Diamond Society, has thanked the government for the move, which it described as a victory for sexual and gender minorities.

In the past the group has accused both the police and the Maoists of harassing transgendered people in the streets of Kathmandu.

It is now lobbying to get the rights of sexual minorities explicitly protected in the new constitution, to be drawn up after the elections.

February 1, 2007

At Home With Renée Richards

The Lady Regrets

By JOYCE WADLER

CARMEL, N.Y.

BEFORE Dr. Renée Richards had a sex-change operation, when she was an up-and-coming eye doctor and one of the top-ranked amateur tennis players in the East, she could be, by her own estimation, an arrogant fellow, tough and demanding. Talking with her three decades later, one still has the uneasy sense, at times, of that impatient male surgeon trapped in her body trying to break out.

Not that Dr. Richards, 72 and still practicing, is ever anything but polite. She comes outside in the rain, in sneakers, warm-up pants and a red sweater, to greet her visitor, reining in her enthusiastic, 140-pound Bernese mountain dog. She’s had her assistant, Arleen Larzelere, 60, prepare lunch. She provides a tour of her cozy three-bedroom cottage in the hamlet of Kent Cliffs, in Putnam County, an hour north of New York City: the faded chintz armchairs, the walk-in closet where a mink shares space with a golf bag that bears her name.

But as the conversation prompted by Dr. Richards’s new memoir, “No Way Renée,” runs to two hours, she grows restless. Dr. Richards is 6’2”, with the rangy body of a lifelong athlete, and in maturity, her angular bone structure seems to be pushing its way to the fore. And as she wearies of the interview, her body language seems to become more traditionally male, suggesting an athlete who is wearying of the game.

“You’re writing this book all over again,” she grouses.

And, later, on another subject, “I can explain, but I don’t think you’re going to be able to follow it.”

Time to talk about, uh ... décor. Those antique tennis illustrations; the plaque marking your induction into the Eastern Tennis Hall of Fame in 2000. It appears, Dr. Richards, that there are no photos of you as a man.

“I don’t like to have pictures of me as a guy in the dining room or living room,” says Dr. Richards, who was once Dr. Richard Raskind. “I threw away most of the pictures of Dick. In fact, pictures of Dick with a beard, I destroyed.” She leads the way to the bedroom, where there are photos of her as both a handsome young male Naval officer and a good-looking middle-aged woman. In one photo of herself, Renée stands with her father, who refused to acknowledge her sex change, even when she visited him in a skirt.

He’s smiling at you, the reporter says.

“Sure he’s smiling, you kidding?” Dr. Richards says. “The sun rose and set over me. Every clipping about me, Dick or Renée, he saved.”

Dr. Richards never wanted to be a pioneer. But in 1976, while taking part in women’s amateur tennis competitions, she was revealed to have once been a man, setting off a media feeding frenzy. The next year, when the United States Tennis Association tried to prevent her from playing in the women’s events at the U.S. Open, Open, she went to court and won the right to play.

“No Way Renée: The Second Half of My Notorious Life,” written with John Ames, deals with the long-term consequences of her surgery. Dr. Richards writes of life as a very young boy, when an older sister, “after pushing my penis into my body,” would say “Now you’re a little girl”; of their psychiatrist mother who occasionally dressed him in a slip. As an adult, there was off-and-on use of female hormones, which left Dr. Richard Raskind with breasts. He tried to compensate in the early years of his marriage by acting tough.

“I swaggered like a macho man,” Dr. Richards writes, “but I jiggled when I did so.”

The marriage, which produced a son, ended in divorce. Nor did Dr. Richards’s sex change bring her the great love affair with a man of which she dreamed, although there was affection and sex. Romance with a woman does not interest her. Though she has lived with Ms. Larzelere, her former office manager, for almost 25 years — she turns over her check each week and Ms. Larzelere handles the grocery shopping and cooking — their relationship is not romantic.

Dr. Richards says there is a bond because both were scarred by their childhoods, Ms. Larzelere by an alcoholic father who beat her. Ms. Larzelere, a warm woman who is so insistent about being a caregiver that she calls the reporter three times with an offer to pick her up at the train station, explains it more simply. “I just take care of people,” she says, “that’s what I do.” Now divorced, Ms. Larzelere says she gave up on men in her mid-30s.

Dr. Richards’s book also deals with the effects of her surgery on her son, Nick Raskind, now grown. Mr. Raskind was 3 years old at the time of the sex change, but was not told about it until he was 8. (When Dr. Richards saw her son during that period, she dressed as a man and wore a short gray wig.) Dr. Richards takes responsibility for her son’s problems: getting tossed out of prep schools; running away to Jamaica at 13. These days, Mr. Raskind is a New York City real estate broker specializing in lofts in the financial district, and Dr. Richards bunks at her son’s Park Avenue apartment when she works in Manhattan.

Would Mr. Raskind be willing to talk about Dr. Richards?

“If he thinks it would help him sell some lofts, he will,” she says.

Mr. Raskind seems perfectly comfortable speaking about the woman who still considers herself his father — although he’s annoyed that his problems were always blamed on the sex change. He also refers to Dr. Richards as “he.”

Why?

“Because I have a mother that’s a woman,” he says. “My father could have an elephant change — he could be a dromedary — and he’d still be my father.”

He has no memory of being told about his father’s change.

“For a kid, it was a non-event,” he says. “I was a pretty fat little kid and I used to get teased about being fat a lot. Then between the time I was 10 and 13, kids at school did know about it and I used to get teased about it. That was the driving force behind me getting into martial arts very seriously later in life.”

Back to Dr. Richards, who is surprisingly conservative. She calls the 2004 decision of the International Olympic Committee, which allows transsexuals to compete, “a particularly stupid decision,” explaining that when she sued to play at the U.S. Open, she was 40. “I wasn’t going to overwhelm Chris Evert and Tracy Austin, who were 20 years old.”

And while she believes same-sex couples should receive the same benefits as those who are married, her idea of marriage demands a man and a woman.

“It’s like a female plug and an electrical outlet,” she says.

In Ms. Larzelere, she seems to have a wife, she is told. “How many famous actresses have said, ‘I want a wife,’ ” Dr. Richards says. “Katharine Hepburn had somebody like Arleen who lived with her for the final 30 years.”

In her book, Dr. Richards never writes that she regrets having had her surgery, yet she lists so many regrets relating to her sex change that it is like someone who returns again and again to the edge of a great pit, but refuses to leap in. Those feelings were also evident in past interviews.

“In 1999, you told People—” the reporter begins.

Dr. Richards interrupts.

“—I told People what I was feeling, which I still feel: Better to be an intact man functioning with 100 percent capacity for everything than to be a transsexual woman who is an imperfect woman.”

In the same interview, Dr. Richards talked about wishing for something that could have prevented the surgery.

“What I said was if there were a drug, some voodoo, any kind of mind-altering magic remedy to keep the man intact, that would have been preferable, but there wasn’t,” Dr. Richards says. “The pressure to change into a woman was so strong that if I had not been able to do it, I might have been a suicide.”

Does she regret having the surgery?

“The answer is no.”

Dr. Richards’s game is no longer tennis; her knees are shot. Her great passion now is golf.

“I swing a golf club four times a week, every chance I get, ” she says. “I try to cram in what I didn’t have until starting 12 years ago. And I can’t do it. No matter how excellent an athlete I was, maybe it’s like having a sex change, it’s something I can’t undo: I can’t undo the fact I didn’t play golf when I was a kid.”

And, see No Way Renee: The Second Half of My Notorious Life at your favorite book seller.

Christian college in Jackson fires transgender professor

I suppose the argument is "God didn't create a TG professor. The devil made him do it!"

February 4, 2007
ASSOCIATED PRESS

JACKSON — A private, Christian university is firing a transgender professor who began appearing as a woman on campus in 2005.

John Nemecek, 55, who goes by Julie Marie Nemecek and often wears a wig and dress, is fighting the dismissal by Spring Arbor University, which takes effect June 1.

The ordained Baptist minister has filed a discrimination claim with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“I have worked hard for this university, have been praised for my performance, and I have done nothing immoral or sinful,” Nemecek told the Jackson Citizen Patriot for a story published today.

Officials at Spring Arbor, which is affiliated with the Free Methodist Church, declined to comment to the newspaper. They said in a statement released by a public relations firm: “We expect our faculty to model Christian character as an example for our students.”

Faculty who “persist with activities that are inconsistent with the Christian faith” may be fired, the statement said. In their response to Nemecek’s EEOC complaint, college officials said the Christian mandate is critical to Spring Arbor and is protected by civil rights laws.

Nemecek, who has worked for the university for 16 years, was told in December that he had violated an updated contract that included a ban on his appearing as a woman on campus or in the town of Spring Arbor, a city of 2,200 located 95 miles west of Detroit.

Nemecek began his transformation in 2005 with estrogen therapy. Soon after, the college prevented him from teaching in classrooms, interviewing prospective employees or attending graduation ceremonies.

Nemecek has worked out of his home for more than a year, directing online classes.
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"My Unique Family" will air on TLC this evening at 10 PM, SF Bay Area, Comcast channel 50 in my area.

I'm told it will include something dealing with a family situation involving a TS.

Replayed at 1 AM for you late birds.

Check your local listings.

Kate Bornstein on her new book "Hello Cruel World."

In this video Kate talks about her new book and answers questions.

What do you think of her advice?

Also, are those tattoos on her arms?

On Campus, Rethinking Biology 101

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 7, 2004
On Campus, Rethinking Biology 101
By FRED A. BERNSTEIN
ARRIVING in Providence last fall to begin his senior year at Brown University, Luke Woodward didn't have to tell friends what he had done on his summer vacation.

They could tell with one glance. Before the summer Luke had had the body of a woman. Now Luke's breasts were gone, leaving a chest more compatible with Luke's close-cropped hair, baggy jeans and hooded sweatshirts. Some classmates had chipped in to pay for the surgery; to cover the rest, Luke took out loans.

Thanks to the ''chest surgery,'' Luke said, ''my quality of life is better.'' Before, if Luke entered a women's bathroom on campus, ''someone might yell, 'Oh my God, there's a man here' and call security,'' he said. ''In men's bathrooms I'd have to fold my arms over my chest and hope that no one would notice.'' Now he and several other Brown students are pressing the university to create more single-stall bathrooms, so students who don't look clearly male or female can avoid harassment. . . .Read More

Copyright 2007 The New York Times

Sex and Voices

NPR ran a short (6 min. or so) piece on sexual selection and sex differences in human voice pitch this past Saturday on their "All Things Considered" program.

Interesting report!

"Finding love as a transman"

"Loren Cameron dishes about figuring out what he likes, who he likes, and how he likes it in his years as a transman."

He also notes, "...In my clan there are two of us who are transsexuals: my brother became my sister."

water, rocks and leaves

RED WITHOUT BLUE

"Inherent to the condition of identical twins is the yearning for individuality in the constant presence of a mirror image. "Red Without Blue" reflects on the meaning of twinship and the search for identity through the eyes of Mark, an identical twin, who examines his evolving relationship with his transgender twin, Claire, as she transitions from male to female. Through intimate interviews and striking archival footage, "Red Without Blue" portrays a deeply personal and self-analytical look at the unique and unswerving relationship between Mark and Claire as they each struggle to define their individual identities."

City Drops Plan to Change Definition of Gender

December 6, 2006

By DAMIEN CAVE

New York City’s Board of Health unexpectedly withdrew a proposal yesterday that would have allowed people to alter the sex on their birth certificates without sex-change surgery.

The plan, if passed, would have put New York at the forefront of a movement to eliminate anatomical considerations when defining gender. It had been lauded by some mental health professionals and transgender advocates who said it would reduce discrimination against men and women who lived as members of the opposite sex.

But after the proposed change was widely publicized recently, board members and officials with the Department of Health and Mental Hygiene said that a surge of new concerns arose. Vital records experts said that new federal rules regarding identification documents, due next year, could have forced the policy to be scrapped.

Health officials said patients at hospitals asked how doctors would determine who would be assigned to the bed next to them. And among law enforcement officials, there were concerns about whether prisoners with altered birth certificates could be housed with female prisoners — even if they still had male anatomies.

“This is something we hadn’t fully thought through, frankly,” said Dr. Thomas R. Frieden, the city’s health commissioner. “What the birth certificate shows does have implications beyond just what the birth certificate shows.”

The board did approve a more minor change: Under a law passed in 1971, people who can prove that they had sex-change surgery could delete the male or female designation from their birth certificates. Now, they can change it.

Dr. Frieden said that this would bring New York City in line with most of the country and would help alleviate the transgender community’s concerns about discrimination. He said that going any further would have thrust New York into uncharted territory.

“We felt going into it that it was fairly standard, that other states had it on the books,” Dr. Frieden said. “But as we looked into it, we discovered that it was implicit, not explicit.”

He said it was “unfortunate” that the panel of experts convened by the department to address the proposal did not include anyone from institutions that may have been affected, like jails, schools or hospitals.

The panel instead consisted of doctors, mental-health professionals and advocates who overwhelmingly supported the plan.

Board members said the city should not act alone. Though the board has eagerly jumped ahead with bans on trans fats and smoking in restaurants, it decided against legislating gender on its own.

“We are not the only Department of Health. There is also the New York State Department of Health, federal regulations, and we cannot make this decision alone, said Dr. Sixto R. Caro, a board member and private practitioner in Brooklyn and Manhattan. “We must make the decision together with the Department of Health of New York State. That’s one of the reasons we had no choice but to wait.”

But according to some supporters of the withdrawn proposal, the motivations behind the city’s decision may have more to do with comments like the one sent to the health department by e-mail that asked, “Are you guys losing all sense of moral values?”

James Jay Carafano, a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, a conservative research group, said that the new federal identification rules would leave room for public and private agencies to address the issue of the gender.

However, transgender advocates accused the city of bowing to pressure from institutions and residents who feared interacting too closely with men who live as women and women who live as men. They noted that the city would have required doctors to verify that the gender change was permanent.

“I fear that because of the public attention the proposed change had attracted, they lacked the courage to give the proposed amendment the consideration it deserved,” said Shannon Minter, a board member and lawyer for Transgender Law and Policy Institute in New York. “That’s very disappointing.”....

Sewell Chan contributed reporting.

Supporting Boys or Girls When the Line Isn’t Clear

By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN
Published: December 2, 2006 NYTimes

OAKLAND, Calif., Dec. 1 — Until recently, many children who did not conform to gender norms in their clothing or behavior and identified intensely with the opposite sex were steered to psychoanalysis or behavior modification.

But as advocates gain ground for what they call gender-identity rights, evidenced most recently by New York City’s decision to let people alter the sex listed on their birth certificates, a major change is taking place among schools and families. Children as young as 5 who display predispositions to dress like the opposite sex are being supported by a growing number of young parents, educators and mental health professionals.

Doctors, some of them from the top pediatric hospitals, have begun to advise families to let these children be “who they are” to foster a sense of security and self-esteem. They are motivated, in part, by the high incidence of depression, suicidal feelings and self-mutilation that has been common in past generations of transgender children. Legal trends suggest that schools are now required to respect parents’ decisions.

“First we became sensitive to two mommies and two daddies,” said Reynaldo Almeida, the director of the Aurora School, a progressive private school in Oakland. “Now it’s kids who come to school who aren’t gender typical.”

The supportive attitudes are far easier to find in traditionally tolerant areas of the country like San Francisco than in other parts, but even in those places there is fierce debate over how best to handle the children.

Cassandra Reese, a first-grade teacher outside Boston, recalled that fellow teachers were unnerved when a young boy showed up in a skirt. “They said, ‘This is not normal,’ and, ‘It’s the parents’ fault,’ ” Ms. Reese said. “They didn’t see children as sophisticated enough to verbalize their feelings.”

As their children head into adolescence, some parents are choosing to block puberty medically to buy time for them to figure out who they are — raising a host of ethical questions.

While these children are still relatively rare, doctors say the number of referrals is rising across the nation. Massachusetts, Minnesota, California, New Jersey and the District of Columbia have laws protecting the rights of transgender students, and some schools are engaged in a steep learning curve to dismantle gender stereotypes.

At the Park Day School in Oakland, teachers are taught a gender-neutral vocabulary and are urged to line up students by sneaker color rather than by gender. “We are careful not to create a situation where students are being boxed in,” said Tom Little, the school’s director. “We allow them to move back and forth until something feels right.”

For families, it can be a long, emotional adjustment. Shortly after her son’s third birthday, Pam B. and her husband, Joel, began a parental journey for which there was no map. It started when their son, J., began wearing oversized T-shirts and wrapping a towel around his head to emulate long, flowing hair. Then came his mother’s silky undershirts. Half a year into preschool, J. started becoming agitated when asked to wear boys’ clothing.

En route to a mall with her son, Ms. B. had an epiphany: “It just clicked in me. I said, ‘You really want to wear a dress, don’t you?’ ”

Thus began what the B.’s, who asked their full names not be used to protect their son’s privacy, call “the reluctant path,” a behind-closed-doors struggle to come to terms with a gender-variant child — a spirited 5-year-old boy who, at least for now, strongly identifies as a girl, requests to be called “she” and asks to wear pigtails and pink jumpers to school.

Ms. B., 41, a lawyer, accepted the way her son defined himself after she and her husband consulted with a psychologist and observed his newfound comfort with his choice. But she feels the precarious nature of the day-to-day reality. “It’s hard to convey the relentlessness of it, she said, “every social encounter, every time you go out to eat, every day feeling like a balance between your kid’s self-esteem and protecting him from the hostile outside world.”

The prospect of cross-dressing kindergartners has sparked a deep philosophical divide among professionals over how best to counsel families. Is it healthier for families to follow the child’s lead, or to spare children potential humiliation and isolation by steering them toward accepting their biological gender until they are older?

Both sides in the debate underscore their concern for the profound vulnerability of such youngsters, symbolized by occurrences like the murder in 2002 of Gwen Araujo, a transgender teenager born as Eddie, southeast of Oakland.

“Parents now are looking for advice on how to make life reasonable for their kids — whether to allow cross-dressing in public, and how to protect them from the savagery of other children,” said Dr. Herbert Schreier, a psychiatrist with Children’s Hospital and Research Center in Oakland.

Dr. Schreier is one of a growing number of professionals who have begun to think of gender variance as a naturally occurring phenomenon rather than a disorder. “These kids are becoming more aware of how it is to be themselves,” he said.

In past generations, so-called sissy boys and tomboy girls were made to conform, based on the belief that their behaviors were largely products of dysfunctional homes.

Among the revisionists is Dr. Edgardo Menvielle, a child-adolescent psychiatrist at the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington who started a national outreach group for parents of gender-variant children in 1998 that now has more than 200 participants. “We know that sexually marginalized children have a higher rate of depression and suicide attempts,” Dr. Menvielle said. “The goal is for the child to be well adjusted, healthy and have good self-esteem. What’s not important is molding their gender.”

The literature on adults who are transgender was hardly consoling to one parent, a 42-year-old software consultant in Massachusetts and the father of a gender-variant third grader. “You’re trudging through this tragic, horrible stuff and realizing not a single person was accepted and understood as a child,” he said. “You read it and think, O.K., best to avoid that. But as a parent you’re in this complete terra incognita.”

The biological underpinnings of gender identity, much like sexual orientation, remain something of a mystery, though many researchers suspect it is linked with hormone exposure in the developing fetus.

Studies suggest that most boys with gender variance early in childhood grow up to be gay, and about a quarter heterosexual, Dr. Menvielle said. Only a small fraction grow up to identify as transgender.

Girls with gender-variant behavior, who have been studied less, voice extreme unhappiness about being a girl and talk about wanting to have male anatomy. But research has thus far suggested that most wind up as heterosexual women.

Although many children role-play involving gender, Dr. Menvielle said, “the key question is how intense and persistent the behavior is,” especially if they show extreme distress.

Dr. Robin Dea, the director of regional mental health for Kaiser Permanente in Northern California, said: “Our gender identity is something we feel in our soul. But it is also a continuum, and it evolves.”

Dr. Dea works with four or five children under the age of 15 who are essentially living as the opposite sex. “They are much happier, and their grades are up,” she said. “I’m waiting for the study that says supporting these children is negative.”

But Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a psychologist and head of the gender-identity service at the Center for Addiction and Mental Health in Toronto, disagrees with the “free to be” approach with young children and cross-dressing in public. Over the past 30 years, Dr. Zucker has treated about 500 preadolescent gender-variant children. In his studies, 80 percent grow out of the behavior, but 15 percent to 20 percent continue to be distressed about their gender and may ultimately change their sex.

Dr. Zucker tries to “help these kids be more content in their biological gender” until they are older and can determine their sexual identity — accomplished, he said, by encouraging same-sex friendships and activities like board games that move beyond strict gender roles.

Though she has not encountered such a situation, Jennifer Schwartz, assistant principal of Chatham Elementary School outside Springfield, Ill., said that allowing a child to express gender differences “would be very difficult to pull off” there.

Ms. Schwartz added: “I’m not sure it’s worth the damage it could cause the child, with all the prejudices and parents possibly protesting. I’m not sure a child that age is ready to make that kind of decision.”

The B.’s thought long and hard about what they had observed in their son. They have carefully choreographed his life, monitoring new playmates, selecting a compatible school, finding sympathetic parents in a babysitting co-op. Nevertheless, Ms. B. said, “there is still the stomach-clenching fear for your kid.”

It is indeed heartbreaking to hear a child say, as J. did recently, “It feels like a nightmare I’m a boy.”

The adjustment has been gradual for Mr. B., a 43-year-old public school administrator who is trying to stop calling J. “our little man.” He thinks of his son as a positive, resilient person, and his love and admiration show. “The truth is, is any parent going to choose this for their kid?” he said. “It’s who your kid is.”

Families are caught in the undertow of conflicting approaches. One suburban Chicago mother, who did not want to be identified, said in a telephone interview that she was drawing the line on dress and trying to provide “boy opportunities” for her 6-year-old son. “But we can’t make everything a power struggle,” she said. “It gets exhausting.”

She worries about him becoming a social outcast. “Why does your brother like girl things?” friends of her 10-year-old ask. The answer is always, “I don’t know.”

Nila Marrone, a retired linguistics professor at the University of Connecticut who consults with parents and schools, recalled an incident last year at a Bronx elementary school in which an 8-year-old boy perceived as effeminate was thrown into a large trash bin by a group of boys. The principal, she said, “suggested to the mother that she was to blame, for not having taught her son how to be tough enough.”

But the tide is turning.

The Los Angeles Unified School District, for instance, requires that students be addressed with “a name and pronoun that corresponds to the gender identity.” It also asks schools to provide a locker room or changing area that corresponds to a student’s chosen gender.

One of the most controversial issues concerns the use of “blockers,” hormones used to delay the onset of puberty in cases where it could be psychologically devastating (for instance, a girl who identifies as a boy might slice her wrists when she gets her period). Some doctors disapprove of blockers, arguing that only at puberty does an individual fully appreciate their gender identity.

Catherine Tuerk, a nurse-psychotherapist at the children’s hospital in Washington and the mother of a gender-variant child in the 1970s, says parents are still left to find their own way. She recalls how therapists urged her to steer her son into psychoanalysis and “hypermasculine activities” like karate. She said she and her husband became “gender cops.”

“It was always, ‘You’re not kicking the ball hard enough,’ ” she said.

Ms. Tuerk’s son, now 30, is gay and a father, and her own thinking has evolved since she was a young parent. “People are beginning to understand this seems to be something that happens,” she said. “But there was a whole lifetime of feeling we could never leave him alone.”