My childhood was quite happy, up until the sixth grade. I had kind and loving parents, and a younger brother, with whom I got along very well. I was an excellent student and an avid reader, always identifying with the heroes of the many novels I read.
Me on a visit to North Carolina. I was scared to death that I was going to fall into the water, but you wouldn't guess it by looking at the pose, would you?
But this was the 50's, and when the age arrived that boys started to become men and girls women, things started going wrong. It wasn't until about that time that I consciously realized I definitely did not want to grow up to become a woman. However, I didn't particularly wish to be a boy such as the ones I saw around me as I started high school. No. I wanted to be a man, like my father. I discovered short haircuts, tailored jackets, oxfords, mannish blouses, briefcases – but alas! In those benighted times, girls still had to wear skirts to school and on any other important social occasion. There was no getting around that. Passing as male was made totally impossible. The only thing I could be was a freak.
With my Dad, Easter 1960
So I spent my high school years as exactly that. Since I was also one of the best students in my class, the teachers didn't bother me much. Other students were less kind, but there was none of the violence that we see in our schools nowadays. I remained physically unscathed, but psychologically I was miserable, especially as my body insisted on maturing in a female manner, despite my earnest efforts to disguise what was going on.
High School
Unlike many FTM's and lesbians, I never took the athletic route. I was a scholar and a gentleman, but had absolutely no interest in sports of any kind. That would have required using my body, and I loathed it far too much to want to train it to do anything, especially in front of other people or in girls' sports.
Finally, when it came time to begin college, I gave up. I told myself I had to live in the real world, whether I liked it or not. I started dressing, if not overly feminine, at least feminine enough to be taken for a more or less normal young woman.
As a college student
From then on, I tried to fit in. After college, I met a man, fell in love, got married, and had a child.
Ira Kay. Our wedding day.
Then along came the Women's Liberation movement. At last, some acknowledgement that I wasn't necessarily crazy not to want to live up to the current stereotype of womanhood!
Then the Gay Liberation movement arrived, and I wondered if perhaps my problem was simply that I was a lesbian.
Sex with my husband was physically satisfying, but psychologically disturbing. There was still this feeling that I should be a man. In my dreams, in my fantasies, sexual and otherwise, I simply could not see myself as a woman.
In a time of great depression and upset, I left my husband and my son, determined to explore life as a liberated lesbian in the gay mecca of Provincetown. While I had many terrific experiences in this town, which my heart, although not my body, still calls home, sex with a woman as a woman still was not what I truly wanted.
I was a phenomenal failure as a lesbian, but I still found men attractive now and then. Those were the good old days, before AIDS became a national disaster and casual sex a game of Russian Roulette. For several years, I worked as crew on the schooner Olad, sailing tourists around Cape Cod Bay. These were some of the best years of my life. I dressed as I wished and was often mistaken for a man.
On the deck of the OLAD
But P'town is a hard place to earn a living, and I eventually had to leave, for financial reasons. Back in the "real" world, I went on for some 20 more years, knowing that in my heart and soul, I was somehow a man, but to everyone else, I was unavoidably a woman. Androgyny became my style. I wrote stories and even novels about my male alter egos in other science fiction universes, having a goodly number of them printed in fan magazines.
With my Dad, 1990
Living now in a town in North Carolina, I met a transsexual woman and she became my friend. We talked a lot. I saw articles beginning to appear in mainstream magazines about transsexuals. I knew immediately that that's what I was. All the pieces fit together. But I wasn't in a financial position to even consider doing such a thing, so I wrote it off as unattainable. Too old. Too poor. Too unwilling to rock the boat of the life I had made for myself, at this stage of the game.
Besides, I defined myself as essentially bisexual, but was still much more attracted to men than I was to women, so I couldn't want to be a man, could I? Surely, I'd want a woman, if I were really a man. This confused me for some time, until I did more research into the subject.
I found that there are many misconceptions about transsexuals, but the biggest one is usually whether it's related to being gay or bisexual. It is not. Sexual orientation and gender identification are two entirely separate things.
Now it really began making sense. I don't feel this way because I'm a lesbian. In fact, I am not a lesbian. Lesbians are women who love other women. I am neither. If I identify psychologically as anything, it is as a gay man.
In my 50's, I went to a technical college, got a better job, inherited a little money, and saw my body begin to change as I went through menopause. This was good. Unlike most women, I welcomed the changes. In fact, it occurred to me that I could continue those changes. My unloved body was no longer something carved in stone. I wasn't young anymore, but I wasn't dead yet. Somewhere a switch in my mind clicked over to a different setting. I may have been born a woman, but, by the gods, I would die a man!
The MRI technologist at work
Everything fell into place. I went to Fantasia Fair, a week-long transgender convention. I needed to see others like me, and I did. Jamison Green was there. I was heartened by the thought that I could be as much of a man as he was.
I started hormones, talked to a psychologist, changed my name, began telling my friends and co-workers what I was doing, consciously began choosing clothing to look like a man, and had chest reconstruction surgery.
Sounds easy, huh? Not really. What can be told in two minutes took almost two years to experience.
But I know who I am and where I'm going now. I like my body and the changes I'm making in it. I like my life, and I like myself. And I look forward to becoming even more the man I have always known I was.
With my lovely lady, Katherine, on the waterfront
My wonderful son, Freddy, and his wife, Ada, who will be making me a grandfather in the near future. (Freddy died in 2006. For more on this, and for photos of the grandchildren, see his Memorial Page)
