On the Science of Changing Sex

This past year has been traumatic. For me. For the transsexual population.

I watched as my husband was in and out of the hospital and finally died at home under hospice care this past June.

We all watched as the governments of the US, the UK, and Canada attacked the transsexual community over and over again, attempting to make our lives miserable. Cruelty is the point.

But interestingly, as I have worked through the grief of losing Jeff while simultaneously reeling back from the seemingly unending loss of our rights and medical care access, I’ve also been looking back over my life, putting it all into perspective. If you haven’t already, you may wish to read my short bio in my ‘about’ page: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/about/ However, a quick recap. I began social and medical transition in my teens beginning in the mid-1970s. Yes, that’s 50 some years ago. So let me take you back to those years.

For my younger readers, it may be a very odd place to imagine; no smartphones, no internet, and nearly no information about gender dysphoria / transsexuality. Most homes had only one landline and if one had siblings, there was always competition for the phone. Oh… and your friends from school might live in another billing zone, even if only a few miles away, so parents limited your time on the phone to save money. Lengthy, long distance calls to friends away at college? Forget it! Thus, it was common to write letters to friends, in cursive. It took days for messages to go out and get a reply.

The only US state where it was legal to be gay was Illinois… Yes, there was Stonewall a few years earlier… but in reality, that had almost no effect on day to day life in the Silicon Valley suburb where I grew up. Gay/Straight Alliance at school? Forget it! The American Psychiatric Association had only delisted homosexuality as a mental illness at the end of 1973, too late to keep me from having been sent to conversion therapy that summer by my mother for being “one of those people”. It wasn’t the first time I had been sent to such therapy. I had been sent to another therapist at age ten for being a “sissy boy”.

I started formally “coming out” at age 15, the spring of 1973, to a few select friends, both boys and girls. One girl cut me off completely because of it. She wouldn’t be the last. But by and large, most of my friends were accepting and NOT surprised. Dennis certainly wasn’t when I came out to him that spring dressed head to toe in a cute outfit I had borrowed from Cassie. I had hoped that he would accept me as his girlfriend… that was not to be. A few months later, I met Kevin… the boy I was to have a serious crush on the rest of my high school years. I hid it from him, knowing he would never accept me either.

It was my hope and efforts to find a loving boyfriend and eventually a true husband that the rest of this essay will cover. After all, I had to kiss a lot of frogs before I found my prince in Jeff, to become the love of my life, my legal husband for 26 years, 28 years my lover. But then, I REALLY like kissing men.

By the fall of 1974, the beginning of my senior year, I had “come out” to even more of my friends, classmates, and trusted adults. The previous summer, I had had a full time job as a nanny taking care of two boys, aged four and ten. Amusingly, the advertisement I had responded to the previous spring had been looking for a girl…. they got me instead. They had figured out during our interviews that I was not “straight”, of course. During the course of that summer I was gifted by the family, a small feminine wardrobe and later a letter of recommendation using my new name and gender. I carefully hid some of the clothes in my bedroom, but the bulk of it I stored at a couple of female friends’ houses.

You can read more about my experience taking care of children here: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2024/06/09/baby-dolls-and-barbie-dolls/

My friend Lynn’s mother was very understanding and supportive. Their house was just a couple blocks from school. So, while I had to present as a “boy” at school, afterschool I would stop by Lynn’s house to change and put on my make-up. From there, I would go out shopping or just hang out at the mall. Kids from school would of course see me there. Some surprised, most not. One of my friends told me that a boy from her crowd said, after having seen me there, that I had “great legs”.

You can well imagine how upset my homophobic/transphobic family was about all this. In November, I had a 20 minute crying jag/conversation with my mother begging her to help me transition so that I could go to college as a girl. She was NOT supportive and her first question, said in a hateful tone, “have you had sex with boys yet”? In the end, she made it clear that the family would NOT support me if I transitioned. They would only support my ambition of going to college if I promised to never present as a girl. This I refused…. so in the end, I wasn’t able to accept the admission I had received from a California State college. I cried so hard when that happened.

In early January, after a very ugly confrontation with my mother, in which she dumped me on my father, he suggested that I should seek counseling from an expert. Of course, he was in essence, demanding that I be sent to conversion therapy, yet again. But this time, I was ready. Though my assiduous research at the public library, I had found the contact information for the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Program and their psychiatrist, Dr. Norman Fisk, the man who had coined the term. The previous fall, I had called them but had been told that since I was legally a minor, I had to have my parents permission to be in the program. My parents thought that the program was about conversion therapy, so my father agreed to make the arrangements. It did not go as they expected, as I have written about before, elsewhere.

After that, I brought my small wardrobe back home and hung it proudly in my closet, throwing or giving away most of my “boy” wardrobe, daring my mother with a glare to do something about it. My mother accused me of having stolen the money to buy the clothes, as clearly I could not have afforded them. I continued to present as a boy at school to keep the peace, but I made it clear I was headed towards full social and medical transition the moment I turned 18 and graduated the same week.

When that day came, I was informed that I was no longer welcome in my mother’s house and my father refused to allow me to move in with him. (My parents were divorced.) It took me a few weeks to gather supplies and to find a place… but I moved out that summer. I got my driver license and other ID changed to my new name and gender with no problems, due in part to documentation from Stanford that said I was “predominately female” and the fact that I could pass as female even before starting HRT. Life was about to become “uncertain”. But this essay is about looking for a boyfriend/husband… focusing primarily upon the four boys/young men that I had known in high school prior to full time transition, as I believe their examples answer questions about some of the men that date transsexuals and about me in particular.

In a previous essay, I wrote about my sexual debut the following fall: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2024/06/15/i-wantonly-committed-a-felony/

At the beginning of the fall term of 1975 at Los Altos High, a group of students, members of the Los Altos Science Fiction & Fantasy Association (LASFA) were having a club meeting to discuss an 8mm fanfilm project to create a silent short homage to Star Trek. Although there were almost as many girls in the club, not enough girls had signed up to play roles in the scripted film. The club was the largest and most successful club on campus. I had been a member. While other clubs were subsidized by the school, LASFA was not, as it had always made money on it’s club projects, most especially the annual fanzine, a collection of short Sci-Fi stories written by members. The ’74//75 edition included one of my stories, published under my new name. (Yes, I’ve been an avid writer all of my life. Check out my two Sci-Fi novels. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08MD91VN6?binding=paperback&ref=dbs_dp_rwt_sb_pc_tpbk )

Side note: The club’s faculty supervisor, Mrs. Church, was one of the teachers who supported me and helped with issues regarding my transition and getting my school records changed. I also suspect that she was the one who approached Coach Bottom to find a way to get me out of boy’s PE: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2017/06/04/its-just-not-fair/

Since not enough girls had signed up, it was suggested that they could have boys play some of the female roles. One of the members piped up, “We could put a wig on YYYY to play Yeoman Rand…” at which Dan, an old friend of mine spluttered, having mistaken the “YYYY” name to refer to me since it was similar sounding to “XXXX” that was an androgynous nickname I had been called in Jr. and High School. Jordan Brown, then a sophomore, looked at Dan and drolly remarked, “I rather get the impression that XXXX wouldn’t need a wig.” Dan then acknowledged to the club that yes, I was transsexual and was now living as a girl in another county. Jordan asked for my postal address from Dan, who got it from my friend Barby, who he was dating.

(Story of my unfortunate beginnings with Barby: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2024/04/22/excerpt-from-my-memoire-a-life-in-transition/)

Jordan had, obviously, been a freshman when I was a senior. He was not in my inner circle of friends, but was often in the group of kids that gathered in the same spot each day during lunch. And of course, he would have seen me during LASFA club meetings. Thus, he would have seen and heard me every school day for the whole year. It’s also possible that he had seen me at the mall or out with friends elsewhere, when I was dolled up pretty in my new wardrobe. Jordan was, like most of the kids in our crowd and in LASFA, exceedingly bright. As he had been accelerated, skipping a grade in elementary school, he was also very young for a freshman, 13 years old.

Jordan wrote a letter to me in which he openly admitted that he had had a crush on me since the previous year. Think about that for a moment. Here was a straight 13 year old boy with a serious crush on a 17 year old transgirl in transition, and willing to admit it to her. What followed was a sweet correspondence between us. There was no other way since at 14, he couldn’t drive and I didn’t own a car, or even have a phone at first. For Christmas, he sent a box of assorted chocolates. (I’m a chocoholic.) Let me make this VERY CLEAR because there are transphobes and even envious transsexuals, Jordan and I were NEVER “intimate”. My interest was always in men roughly my age and older. But, over the next couple years, we did see each other, hang out, go out on “dates” like bowling, etc. We would sometimes introduce ourselves, “My name is Candice Brown” then he would say, “My name is Jordan Brown”. Then we would look at each other as if it was the first time, then turn back to our new acquaintance and say in perfect unison, “No relation.”

Fast forward to 1997. Jordan and his new wife visited me to catch up, not having seen each other for a while. During our visit, he made it clear to me that he had shared with his wife that I was transsexual and that I had been his first girlfriend. Think about THAT for a moment. Here was a straight man, proudly proclaiming to his wife that he had had a crush on me, a transsexual, as a teenager. She joked, referring to me, “Of course, you were as attractive then as you are now.” After having surprised me with her very warmly accepting attitude, it was my turn to surprise her by asking, “When are you due?” It was too early to be showing, her tummy still flat. Her mouth dropped, “How did you know? We haven’t even told anyone yet!”. “I can tell. It’s obvious to me; you are glowing!”

Rewind back to ’69-’71 at Cupertino Jr. High. My circle of friends is expanding to include boys for the first time in my life. I had always thought that “boys were stupid” until then. Among my new circle were two brothers, Greg and Jeff (not my future husband, of course…. Jeff was a VERY common name in my age cohort). Jeff was shy around girls, Greg was not. But Greg could also be a jerk. In one particular incident he started saying some cutting, unkind words, about my friend Carrie, a friend of mine since 3rd grade, loud enough for Carrie to overhear. To shut him up, I stamped on his foot to get his attention and glared at him. “What?” he replied, as though he was innocent of any wrong doing.

When their parents divorced in ’71, the 50/50 split of child custody was to split Jeff and Greg. Jeff with their father, Greg with their mother. Thus, Greg transferred from Homestead to Los Altos High to live in his mother’s new house. So, when I did the same in ’72/’73 school year, Greg was already there. Over the next few years, Jeff would often visit his mother and Greg… and me both on the Los Altos campus and drop by our family home… often bringing Kevin, his best friend, with him (did I mention that I had a crush on Kevin?).

When I first got to Los Altos High, Greg was dating Cassie. But, true to form, he was being a jerk. Cassie asked me to help understand him. That’s how we became friends. Take a moment to think about this. Can you imaging a girl asking a straight boy for dating advice? Seriously? There’s a reason I came out to her earlier than to others. Greg later dated several other girls in my circle, including Beep.

Fast forward to February 1976. I’m staying at my father’s apartment for a few days, just off the Stanford Campus, as he was gone on a biz trip. He allowed me to use his apartment so that I could attend a gathering at the Stanford Gender Dysphoria Clinic, the very first time I had ever met any other “transsexuals”. It was a VERY confusing moment. I guess my father still thought that perhaps they would try to “cure” me. I put out the word to my crowd that I was in town and would be welcoming visitors. I even hosted a gathering one evening. The next day, Greg dropped by.

He was very solicitous and charming… and yes, we did become “intimate”, more fool I. I should have known better because later, he said things that were cutting and unkind. Nice to know that he treated me just like all the other girls he dated.

Again, think about this for a moment. Here was a straight boy/young man who had known me for years, who found me sexually attractive and even put me in the same sexist category of people to be used and abused as natal female girls.

Because I was a VERY naïve ‘straight’ teenaged transgirl about to lose yet another housing situation, I foolishly accepted an invitation to room with one of the post-op transwomen I met at that first Stanford Seminar. I’ve written about that mistake and the consequences before: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2010/02/20/do-as-i-say-not-as-i-do/

During the time I roomed at Karen’s, I met and dated a couple young men I met at school and at a club. Karen was very jealous. I mistook her behavior for envy of my success at dating men. Little did I realize the truth. I held a party at her apartment, inviting friends, but old and new, in the hopes that she would find a man she liked and liked her back (foolish hope given that she looked like a football jock in a frock). But at that party, one young man, a guest of one of the girls in my crowd, I had known for years, Don, and I hit it off.

Don was my brother’s best friend. He was tall, dark, and handsome as the old saying goes. He was a frequent guest at my mother’s house, often for dinner. He had often traipsed through my bedroom, as it was the quickest way to the backyard, my bedroom having a sliding glass door. He and my brother had rebuilt a motorcycle in our garage. I had helped him and my brother, along with a number of his other buddies, make an 8mm silent “Western”, as the camera operator. I had teased and laughed at them as they took pot shots at a dove in the backyard with our family .22 rifle, and missed over and over. They mocked me back, snickering, intimating that the femmie fag couldn’t handle a gun. I hit it with my first shot. Through it all, Don never taunted me, never made fun of me, never made any homophobic or transphobic remarks or insults, was always kind and friendly, unlike my brother and his other friends.

Don had recently broken up with his long time girlfriend Linda. I never learned why. We ended up talking through the whole night, retiring to his car so as not to disturb Karen. By the end of the night, we were making out. (I did mention that I love kissing men, right?) After that night, he would take me out on dates. First, he helped me recover my bicycle from where Curly, my old roommie, had moved to in the Santa Cruz mountains, on “wommyn’s land”. Don had to stay with the car as men weren’t allowed, but I was. Another time we took a long romantic walk at a park, holding hands. He introduced me to his parents. His mother seemed to like me a lot. He was everything I had ever hoped for in a boyfriend. And yes, we were occasionally “intimate”.

But then the world came crashing down on us both.

Someone had told my brother about Don and I. He told my mother. She told Don’s father that that cute girl his son was dating was “really a boy”. Both of my parents showed up one night at Karen’s apartment to read me the ‘riot act’. I had to sit and listen to their homophobic ranting for several hours. My mother also took the opportunity to get in a few transphobic digs into me, sliding that knife between the ribs and twisting it, making gratuitous and false remarks about my appearance and taste. (Read more about my mother’s nasty transphobia here: https://sillyolme.wordpress.com/2024/03/12/family-memories/)

I was used to this type of abuse. Don wasn’t. It destroyed him.

His homophobic father forbade him from seeing or even talking to me on the phone. I cried while on the phone to his mother as she told me this. As a teenager, he still lived with his parents of course. My mother forbade him from coming to her house. My brother cut off their friendship. I would occasionally see Don with his other friends at old haunts and through other mutual friends, but he was always cold and distant. We never got a chance to talk about any of it. I still blame my mother for what happened.

Time heals. A few months later, I’m now 19 years old and another old high school friend, Bob, pays a call at my apartment that I shared with Stella, who was likely the only other teenager in the Stanford program.

Bob was other classmate / friend who had been a member of LASFA. At school, he had occasionally caught me alone and engaged me in long intellectual conversations. A few times he even cajoled me into playing chess against him. This was always a drubbing for me as I was not a chess player while he was. He habitually carried a travel chess set. Since he always won, I asked him once why he wanted to play against me. He answered that I improved his end game because as the pieces dwindled, my raw intellect made up for my utter lack of chess knowledge. I was hard to beat at the end he said.

In school, Bob had had long lanky hair to his waist. He wore geeky thick black frame glasses and even on warm days he wore a dark woolen naval pea coat. But on this fine early summer day, he arrived with his sandy brown hair professionally styled into a classic ’70s lion’s mane to his shoulders. His geeky glasses replaced with sleek gold frames. And no pea coat to hide his athletically toned muscles. He had transformed from a nerd to a ’70s teen heart throb!

During the course of our conversation as we sat on my studio apartment’s couch/beds, Bob made a terrible pun with me being transsexual as part of the punch line. In retaliation I started a tickle fight. Turned out that he was very ticklish. To defend himself he wrestled me to the floor, pinning both of my wrists above my head. Then he realized that he was on top of me, face to face, with my arms pinned. There was a long moment as we looked into each other’s eyes, then he kissed me. I returned the kiss with growing passion. (Did I mention that I REALLY REALLY like kissing men?)

We saw a lot of each other that magical summer. And yes, we were “intimate”. But all good things must end. He went off to college on the east coast, to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute that fall to study engineering. I wrote letters to him often, scenting them with my perfume to remind him of being with me. I couldn’t afford to do it often, or for very long, but I called him long distance a couple times. One time, I got one of his roommates who seemed to want to hang onto the call while Bob was in the shower. This roommate related that everyone was envious of him since he had a girlfriend at home and none of the others did. He told me that Bob had said I was very pretty…. and was even smarter than he was! This roommate also told me that Bob would occasionally open the drawer on his desk where he kept my letters just to get a waft of my perfume.

During Xmas break, Bob returned home and it was just like it was the previous summer save for a couple items.

First, the LASFA crowd had a reunion at our favorite pizza joint. I had arrived first. When Bob arrived after nearly everyone else, Jan and I (another close friend from our days at school and beyond) made room for him between us. Bob kissed me very passionately on the lips, out in the open, for all of our friends to see.

Bob’s family invited me to a family dinner. As I had gotten a job as a secretary at a Silicon Valley firm but was still going to classes at a local community college part-time, his folks asked me all about my educational and career plans. I didn’t have any at that point, really. Both of Bob’s parents were Silicon Valley engineers. In fact, his mother was rather senior at her firm and she was then the president of the local chapter of the Society of Women Engineers. She pressed hard to convince me that I should study to become an engineer too. For Xmas, Bob had commissioned his father, whose hobby was making silver wire jewelry, to make me a delicate, feminine, silver choker for me. (I still have it, almost 50 years later.)

There was just one fly in the ointment for me. Bob was dating other girls. He made it clear that he and I were not exclusive. I could live with that, if I had to, and I did. For the next five years or so, he and I dated on and off while he dated other women, including just about every one of the young women in our mutual circle, Jan, Liz, Barby, Robyne, etc. Because of the non-exclusive nature of our relationship, my friend Pat, who I had met when Joy and she become lovers, called him my “boy toy”. Joy was far less friendly to him, largely for the same reason as Karen had been to my earlier boyfriends. He was the only man I was “intimate” with both pre- and post-op. In the end, he married Jan. They have two kids, girls.

Bob, Jan and I remain friends. Bob even attended Jeff’s and my wedding.

Looking back, the question that these four boys/young men answered is why would straight men, not gay, not bisexual, not “chasers”, have been attracted to me having known me in school where I had been required to present as a boy? It’s really two questions, why any straight men would with any transsexual woman and why me? I believe that Dr. Richard Green answered that in his 1974 book on transsexuals,

“The men who fall in love with and perhaps marry women who are themselves former males, by and large, have known their partners only as women.  Their prior sexual experiences have been only with females.  They consider themselves heterosexual and their relationships heterosexual.  To varying degrees they are consciously and unconsciously aware of the biologic status of their partners, but it would be simplistic and would furthermore blur generally accepted definitions to call these men homosexual.  Rather they are men who respond to the considerable femininity of male-to-female transsexuals, ignoring the dissonant cues of masculinity.”

“Respond to the considerable femininity,” even though I had nominally been presenting as a boy in school…

The point is that sexual orientation does NOT focus exclusively upon genitalia. One’s sexual ideal also includes people’s whole bodies,, their form, their personalities, their mannerisms, their “energy” (for lack of a better word for it). Gay men are attracted to masculinity, in both face, body, and manner. Just look at their distaste for “femmes”, their nasty jokes about “and then he opened his mouth and a purse fell out.” Straight men are attracted to femininity… and not just the presence of a vagina. While looks are important, so are personality and manner… I had all of that even before HRT and SRS. What had made me a target for homophobic bullies also made me attractive to these straight young men.