Published October 1, 2019

Two years ago today, I came out as a transgender woman, as Carly. A year ago, less than a week before the first anniversary, which I considered my second first-birthday celebration, I touched on a little of what the previous year had been like.

Thinking about what to say on Carly’s second birthday has been richly rewarding and tantalizingly frustrating. The Bob Seger song “Against the Wind” played in my head more loudly the closer I got to the self-imposed deadline I had set for finishing the post.

What to leave in, what to leave out.”

So the day has arrived. Carly’s 2 years old! Her second birthday mani includes the blue butterfly, a symbol of her transformation, and two birthday candles. Also, a special sparkly version of the transgender symbol!

After a lot of writing, rewriting and thought, I finally finished this post, and I have to tell you that bad jokes about “the Terrible Twos” came to me much easier than any profound insights I’d imagined would fly to my fingertips as I typed. One thing holding me back is at the core of something I wrote a year ago: “As a very wise and caring transgender woman I know wrote on Medium, get your house in order before speaking for the rest of us. And while it’s possible to talk about one’s journey without trying to make it seem reflective of universal truths, I wanted to stick as closely to that recommendation as I could.”

Now, my filters and walls are falling, and have been for some time, so words are pouring out as if the floodgates of a lock or spillway have been opened. I hope you’re sitting comfortably, because this is going to take a while.

The most common question people have asked me — whether they knew me “before” or not — has been, “When did you know?” Answering that has been difficult. I’m reminded of the realization, more than six years ago in therapy, that progress is not linear, that we often have to circle back to the truth, sometimes only when we are ready to surrender to its gravitational pull, or at least unable to continue fighting it. The serpentine path of my realization of my true identity has more than a few plot points along the way.

Two days ago, I saw something on Twitter written by another trans woman, and I’d like for you to consider it as you continue to read about my life story in all of its zig-zaggery.

Most trans women did not play with dolls and did not “always know” as children.

It doesn’t mean we had an easy time or that we didn’t still suffer in different ways.

— Mia Violet (@OhMiaGod) September 29, 2019

I wanted to give Mia Violet, the author of “Yes, You Are Trans Enough: My Journey From Self-Loathing to Self-Love,” a big hug. Instead, I asked her permission to embed the tweet in this blog post. She said yes, with a ? icon of support thrown in.

There are some parts of my childhood and moments of discovery that are too personal to share, but as I continue describing the evolution of how I came to recognize me, Carly, it will at times be like coloring in the black-and-white shapes and scenes in a coloring book. (Oh, and we’ll come back to crayons soon!)

Another thing to keep in mind is something I wrote two days ago: retracing my steps from childhood to adulthood to womanhood is not like doing math. It’s not 2 + 2 = 4. It’s more like dancing a two-step that turns into a pratfall that becomes a slow walk that picks up the pace until it’s a jog, and then 2 + 2 = purple, and what are these jumping jacks for, and eight more burpees and omg pretty pink Slurpees, and then a tuck and roll, and the air is lavender, and baby steps, and left, a left, a left-right-left, and why does nothing I wear ever feel right, why am I marching this way, and also whose face is that in the mirror, and why does my hurt flutter when that relative calls me Carly-o, and of course my favorite color is pink blue, and can we go home now because … existing is exhausting.

The first try at trying to tell you

The original version of my coming-out post, seen only by a helpful, generous copyeditor friend, included this section:

My story, in macro and micro, is circular, not linear. There is no “this happened, therefore this must be true” conceit in the construction of what you are reading. These are remembrances, snapshots, scooped up from among the debris of a life spent trying to make sense of puzzle pieces that seemed to have been put into the wrong box by mistake.

In its imperfection, this story is a collection of moments along the way, memories that retrace the coordinates of a narrative without necessarily sharing specifics about the work and heartache that came with mining those moments for their hidden riches. They are threads of the tapestry, not the whole tapestry.

One could stop reading here without missing the main point. There is no “reveal” beyond what has been said. The rest is a rather long, curvy revisiting of those threads as the writer in me processes an important, transitional birthday the best way she knows how.

(By now, it should be painfully obvious how badly that piece needed an editor! And not just that, but how hard it was to word things in a way that those who were caught by surprise would understand.)

The way I wrote my rough draft, which had many revisions, was not meant to prove cause and effect, not intended to persuade, not chosen to support a logical conclusion. It was a glimpse into the concentric circles of my life, in a form that might help one better understand the context for what probably did not seem obvious, maybe even hinted at, from a distance.

This is the original beginning of that post from October 1, 2017:

My boss is a woman. So is my therapist. The same is true of my therapist before her. And the one before her.

My doctor is a woman, as were two of the three others over nearly two decades. So are most of the people in my department at work. So are some of my closest friends from throughout my life.

Two gifted, loving professionals in the intimate healing arts in Portland who have taught me so much about myself are women. So are the massage therapists who have nourished my health with touch and holistic care over many years.

Most of the people I follow on social media are women. The best writing — wonderfully free from the shackles and ignorance of patriarchal privilege — that finds its way to me is written by women. The same is true in all creative arts.

Are you seeing a pattern?

My three siblings are women. She who gave birth to us was a woman.

So am I.

Today is my birthday. In a sense, it is also Carly’s. Hi. I’m Carly.

That took long enough, Carly! Yes, I was doing my best, without realizing it, to soften the blow, or bury the lede, to borrow from newspaper parlance. Later in the piece, I came back to that beginning.

“In a different calendar year, when I began a writing exercise for my therapist to journal the layers of discovery happening inside me, what I was really doing — without realizing it — was beginning this piece that you are reading. At the time, I couldn’t imagine finding the courage to let it become Carly’s coming out.

“At the time, after jotting down the bare bones of the first few paragraphs, when I listed some important women in my life, I wasn’t ready to say, “so am I,” as in, “I, too, am a woman.” This was as far as I could go:

I might be (a woman) too, or at least, the best version of myself (better half?) might be. And she might even be the woman I’ve been waiting for all these years.

“A rambling, grasping first draft of plot points and self-analysis led to something approximating an imagining of the courage to follow the journey to what later would appear as a natural destination:

Maybe I’m the only woman, after all these years, who can fix me, save me, love me. I’m still exploring. I could change my mind. After all, it’s a woman’s prerogative.

Well?? We’re waiting!!

But Carly, you haven’t answered the question! When did you know??

Oh, on so many yesterdays scattered throughout my life. Before I sprinkle a few of them into this blog post, I’d like to circle back to what Mia Violet said and add this: Everybody has their own story. There is no one way to be a woman, and there is no one way to be a transgender woman.

I’d also like to talk a little bit about growing up identified as a boy who is expected to grow, perhaps with minimal instruction, to be a man. (The guts of what follows are also from that first draft in 2017.)

So much of my life has been marked by feeling disappointed in and let down by adult male role models, father figures and mentors. Only during the past several years of self-discovery in this new phase of my journey have I come to see that so much of that was my frustration at not being able to comfortably be the person they seemed to expect me to be.

I couldn’t make it work, and I grew to resent them. Imagine being told you were a boy, being pushed into being a man — often from a harsh, macho, militaristic leadership style — and having a largely unexplored, trapped Carly try to follow a script that felt foreign, often hostile, and internalizing the shame, the blame for failing to get it right. It was a recurring dynamic that, now, I compare to what it must be like for a fledgling actor who has been wildly miscast in a play.

It wasn’t just the coach who, upset that I hadn’t signed up for football, saw my crayons spill out of my book sack one day after school and said, “Oh, I guess you’d rather just color, huh?” I think about the neighbor’s dad who, watching us play football in the yard, said to me, “You look like a pregnant woman trying to run!” I think about the coach who said, “You drive like an old lady!” To be clear: These comments, and countless others like them, are not compliments. They are critiques of what is seen as weakness, of failure, the presence of something that is not masculine enough, of not being manly. They also are not “proof” of anything, but more on that later.

(Edited to add: While I was finishing this blog post, New Orleans Saints fans were celebrating Monday night’s victory against the Dallas Cowboys, and social media sites were littered with references to the “Cowgirls.” Harmless fun, right? Well, seeing all of it was, for me, an emotional ping back to this post, and to my past. Misogyny is deeply ingrained in the culture — football or otherwise — and don’t you know? The worst thing you can call a boy, especially in the football milieu, with its attendant expectations, is “a girl.” As for dragging cowgirls into this, having covered several high school state championship rodeos, I can attest that every cowgirl I ever met was a badass. And I’m offended for girls and cowgirls everywhere that their existence is used a cheap tool for emasculating male athletes.)

I think about the men, the coaches, the leaders for whom any gesture that wasn’t overtly “manly” was suspect, and worthy of derision. If you are familiar with the term “toxic masculinity” and have seen its manifestations, you might be able to imagine the stifling ways some children (and adults) are forced by society to try to conform to acceptable gender norms. In this regard, school years can be the most arresting of the truth trying to emerge from within.

In my first go-round with therapy, I tried to tackle this, in part by reading a recommended book, “At My Father’s Wedding: Reclaiming Our True Masculinity,” by John Lee. There is so much good in that book, but it could do only so much for me. It helped me to better understand my father, and father figures, but the empathetic part of me that learned from it was Carly, a person whose ability to extrapolate and assimilate was stunted by my refusal to see her for who she was. And she could no more reclaim her true masculinity than I could.

For much of my childhood, the four people who were most often home with me were female — my three sisters and our mom. My dad was often away at work, or fishing, or in some other way trying to ease his own pain. My mom’s friends visited, as did friends of my sisters. I felt most comfortable around them, because I didn’t quite seem to fit in with the boys I befriended. It’s not that I didn’t like them or enjoy their company, but their paths rarely seemed to be places where I felt safe to tag along. As years went by, I found myself gravitating toward the women in the room at whatever gathering I was at, and more at ease in or near those conversations. Much of the all-male chatter was awkward at best, and at worst, distasteful. (Some of what men say to each other, about women, even today horrifies me, mostly because of what they reveal about how the men see women and rate their worth.)

Because of the incongruity between how adult male role models and mentors saw me and directed me and the way I felt inside, I looked to women to help me. To make things right. To repair damage that I didn’t know how to explain. This played into the way in which society conditions us to see women as nurturers, and it placed an unfair burden on those in my life. Every girl or woman became, for me, Everywoman. As such, I expected them all to care, to help. And many did. But I was expecting them to give me comfort, when what I was truly searching for was the feeling of being comfortable in my own skin. That such a peace would be found in proximity to women was not a foreign concept to me. What I was missing was that it would present itself as Carly. I was looking in the right area. I just wasn’t looking in the right spot. Every intimate relationship with a woman was doomed to fail as long as I was looking for something from them that I had not yet accepted in myself.

Finally free to live the right life

When my 2017 coming-out-as-a-transgender-woman story started writing itself in my head, one line kept wanting to join the conversation I was having with myself: “I lived the wrong life.” That morphed into “I’ve lived the wrong life,” which eventually became “I am free to live the right life, however long or short it might be.”

When did I know? In fits and starts.

I could say more about that box of crayons spilling out of my book sack, and how my quickly tucking them back in while the coach admonished me (“Oh, I guess you’d rather just color, huh?”) was like a metaphor for hurriedly stuffing down deep inside of me the instinctive desire to let myself break free from the gender norms I was being conditioned to follow. To ask the questions I didn’t know how to ask.

I could talk more about how I felt hearing men telling me, “You look like a pregnant woman trying to run!” or “You drive like an old lady!” Or how, getting a perm as a teenager and young adult, walking through the salon with rods in my hair, I felt liberated and joyous at being able to step out from what had always felt like a prison of expectations I could never live up to.

It’s not that these men, and others, said these things to me, or their disapproving looks and tone when I didn’t conform to gender norms or whatever. It was how I felt, and how I ran away from that feeling and stuffed it down deep inside, confused and ashamed. How do I even help you understand what it’s like to not be seen as a girl, but to be likened to one, or compared mockingly to a woman, and to have no words to describe the electric charge running through you that says something you have no framework for understanding?

I could talk about the words sung by Sheena Easton in a song released a year after my father’s death — a time when I was lost at the start of adulthood, searching for a road map that, to my knowledge, didn’t exist. I could talk about feeling as if a part of my life was over, and feeling like I would never satisfy society’s parameters for “being a man,” since the primary person expected to teach me how was now gone.

You could have been with me instead of alone and lonely.”

My young adult mind initially heard that the way the composer intended, not the way it began tugging at and speaking in the voice of the emerging Carly, who tried everything she could to break through the noise and trappings of denial to invite me to let her in. And to let her out.

For years now, when I’ve imagined playing music again, the songs that I am singing are in a woman’s voice. They are women’s songs. When I hear Sheena Easton singing the words above, it is in the inner voice of Carly — speaking to the person trying to make sense of it all for so many confusing years.

“You could have been with me instead of alone and lonely.”

I’m doing it again

So, yes, once again I’m circling around it. That’s how I lived my whole life until coming out, though, so it’s only natural.

A decade ago, I emailed someone from my long-ago past and hinted at confusion over my true self. This was the first person who, if not what I would come to call LGBT, had lived outwardly outside the norms enough for me to feel comfortable reaching out in the hope of finding a sounding board, a confidant(e) about my journey. There was no response, and a deep search through my email history turns up nothing — not even the email I remembered sending. Had I imagined it? Had I dared only to think it, but not to send it? Was my questioning so vague as to sound weird and not worth a reply? And if indeed I did send it, why is there evidence of it? I will probably never know.

To be sure, nothing I have posted here forms what I think a lot of people who know me want to read: an ironclad case, the take-it-to-court evidence for me being a woman. Crayons over football? Being compared — mockingly, by men — to women? Being comfortable with curlers in my hair? None of it proves womanhood. But for me, every one of those moments, and many others, speaks to the voice on the inside that was trying to come out, and how I let my perception of society’s expectations for me squelch that voice and push her deep down inside for decades. I accepted the role of who they said I was because I was too afraid to challenge it.

And then there’s this: For many years, I didn’t understand there was an alternative, I had heard about people undergoing “sex-change operations,” but that couldn’t be me, right? And how would that work? I’d need someone to recognize me for who I really was, and who would that be? Everything required permission, and who would give me permission to be something other than what everybody thought I was? Everyone was telling me that I was a boy, a boy who would become a man, and that I just needed to learn how to be more of one, how to be a better one.

(Some day, I might share the relevant parts of the story of when, as a child, I kicked a hole in a wall in anger and frustration while putting on a pair of boys pants.)

I could tell you about my teenage years, when what was becoming my adult face was forming, and how it increasingly became a face I didn’t recognize as mine. The person looking back at me in the mirror was not me, so much so that in the morning, getting ready for school, I would turn off the bathroom light and do everything by the soft glow of the night light, unable to come to terms with what I saw reflected back at me.

Fast-forward through decades of avoiding mirrors and photographs of myself and together we’d blow past day-in, day-out cognitive dissonance that took a greater toll than I could ever put into words. I expect that we’ll go through it much slower but eventually talk more about that face in the mirror. Gender dysphoria is real, and it’s powerful.

There is a scene in the 1990 movie “Awakenings” in which Robert De Niro’s character, Leonard, sees himself in the mirror. Expecting to see a boy, he instead sees a middle-aged man, one whose life had almost completely passed him by while he was in a catatonic state. What he saw looking back at him left him confused, and the scene was almost too much for me to watch. It tickled a part of me that had been avoiding my real face because of how it showed me something that didn’t feel true.

A year or two before I saw the movie, someone I knew on the other side of the world shared her experience with looking in the mirror after evolving as a person. She was different, she said, so she expected there to be a different face. I didn’t realize until years later how much her words (which I heard on a cassette tape) spoke to something deep inside of me.

Before I wrap this up, I want to get back to crayons for a moment, after seeing this shortly before midnight:

Color affects us.
Everyone should have a paintbox
and a large box of crayons. pic.twitter.com/6ERgTmPwiW

— Dr. SunWolf (@WordWhispers) October 1, 2019

Live in all the colors, Carly says. Life is short.

‘Now it all makes sense’

It’s been a great two years, the best of my life. The support I’ve received — at work, out in public, in private — has been beyond what I could have imagined. A big thank you to all who have been so wonderful to me since my news of October 1, 2017.

In the coming days and weeks, I hope to better connect the threads of the tapestry for you. One person who doesn’t need me to do that is a woman who became my bestie two decades ago when I moved away from my hometown and started feeling a tiny bit freer to be me. Last year, after more than a decade of us not staying in touch, she discovered my blog and the news that I told the world two years ago today, and she contacted me for the first time in years.

After her initial words of encouragement and support, she emailed me to further explain her joy in seeing the plot twist in my story:

When I said I was looking forward to getting to know the “new you,” I wasn’t referring to simply the “female” you. I meant the free you, the authentic you, the happy you, the Pacific Northwest you, the you who not only writes about sports (blehh) but “life”… the you that I always knew was there and yearning to escape the pain. The (person) I knew before was a tortured soul, funny, brilliant, but deeply troubled. I sense in Carly a lightness, a joy and a camaraderie that delights me!  I am so, so, so happy for you. xo

I remember once, when I was sleeping over and we were snuggled on the couch watching a movie or something, I said that I felt completely “safe” with you from the beginning. I think you took it as a semi-insult. As in, “safe because you think I’m gay? Because I’m unattractive? Because I’m …”

What I meant was that, even besides just being a decent guy who wouldn’t harm a woman, I sensed that you “got it”, that you knew what it was like to be in my skin. It wasn’t because I wasn’t your type that I knew you wouldn’t try anything. I couldn’t really verbalize it then, but now it all makes sense.

Damn, girl. You told my story in one sentence, and here I have been, like a tortured writer, bleeding onto the page, struggling to put nouns in front of verbs that would make it clear. That’s it! Maybe I’ll put it on a T-shirt!

I couldn’t really verbalize it then, but now it all makes sense.

Carly

 

---

 

Coming Out logo by Top Vector Studio/via Shutterstock.

Everybody has their own story image by Constantin Stanciu/via Shutterstock.

Transgender pride flag painted on clenched fist by Ink Drop/via Shutterstock.