An Interview With Dana Fox

Dana Fox says she is the real deal. A go-to, where she wants to go, and do what she wants to do person. According to Dana, she’s fun and witty, not shy, and a bit of an exhibitionist. Added to that, she’ll describe herself as independent, a pro-bodily autonomous socialist liberal atheist, anti-fascist, and is out and proud, 24-7, 365 days a year. At the end of the day, a mature, transsexual female extraordinaire. In addition, Dana loves photography and writes transgender erotica. 

And to further quote Dana, she wants it known that transgender women are women.

Dana Fox

TGForum: Your adolescent years were tough.

Ms. Fox: In the beginning, I knew I was different from other kids at age four, and the first day of kindergarten I became acutely aware I was a girl in the wrong body when the teacher lined us up for our first class visit to the restroom, and I got in the girl’s line. She took my hand and pulled into the boy’s line and said, ‘no honey you’re a boy, you have to get in the boy’s line.’ Everyone laughed at me, I had an anxiety attack, threw up in the restroom and she called my mom to come and get me. Mom explained boys and girls bodies are different and I was a boy. I had no idea. I was very disappointed. I simply went with the kids I identified with. I spent most of my grade school years crying myself to sleep every night, praying to Jesus to please fix me or kill me. I finally realized by the time junior high school and puberty arrived, that was hopeless, so I just did what I could to fit-in.

The following 50 years were full of daily suicidal ideations, a male cover-up just to survive in this society. I finally reached the point of life, or death crisis and a failed attempt in 2012, and that’s when I decided I needed to go get gender counseling if I wanted to continue to live.

TGForum: Your social transition from male to female began in the Fall of 2014 and you started living as a woman about four months later. What issues did you face?

Ms. Fox: I had been quietly cross-dressing for about two years by this time while also attending gender counseling with a clinical psychologist. I had been to a few local public LGBTQ+ events as Dana and I was beginning to feel more at ease. I loved how it ‘just felt right’ to me presenting as female, nothing sexual.

I attended my first transgender weekend in Oklahoma City, November 2014 with Hanna Olson who leads HeartlandTG and friends at the Habana Inn. I had so much fun there that on the way home I decided as soon as I had enough clothes to go full-time, I would. I built most of my wardrobe on the cheap with pre-owned clothing from Goodwill and others to get started.

Here were my challenges. I came out to my family and close friends as transgender female summer of 2012 when I was 55 years old. Everyone was fairly accepting; my parents only comment when I came out to them –“Well honey, we love you and know you haven’t been happy, so if this will make you happy, then we support you.” My family had not seen me present as Dana until just prior to the weekend in Oklahoma on Halloween 2014. They were kind of shocked but not surprised.

I was working as a salesperson in a local family-owned piano/music store at the time. I had begun dressing more fem at work, women’s jeans/slacks and androgynous tops, some mascara and eyebrow pencil. I was out to the boss’s son I frequently worked with, but one day in early 2015 the boss popped in the store he said to just visit. I had known him for a number of years and was one of his loyal customers and we were friends. He asked me what was going on with me and my changes in appearance, so I told him I was beginning transition to female. He was concerned about how this would sit with his customers and I assured him I would keep it low-key at work, much like I was dressed that day, and I reminded him his customers were loyal to him and that they liked me and I had a good report with them. Everything was okay at work after that. At that point I was only socially transitioning – clothes, growing my hair, light makeup. I had a couple customers ask me as well. One long-time customer brought his transgender son (FtM) in to meet me, and we became instant friends. The boss was amused as he had no idea one of his best customers had a transgender child. I said, we’re everywhere Randy.

Out in public things weren’t quite as rosy. I put up with a lot of transphobias because I looked like a man in a dress, It was brutal and I went home crying a number of times and would hide for a week before I got the nerve up to go out again. People can be so insensitive and cruel.

Here’s an example. I went to a Blues Fest in Peoria, IL one weekend. There were two 20-something women standing in front of me. They were turning around and blatantly taking my picture with their phones and sending it to their social media friends within my sight while making fun of me loud enough for me to hear.

TGForum: Hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery followed. What was that experience like?

Ms. Fox: I began gender affirming hormone therapy a year later in February 2016. I wanted to make sure I could handle living as a woman in this society before I did anything irreversible. At that time I had to travel to Chicago to see my endocrinologist at Howard Brown every 90 days for labs and follow-up visits because there was no HRT in Peoria.

The hormones had an almost immediate and profound effect on my body and mind. Breast budding began just three months in and I dealt with some wild mood swings I would describe as PMS, all the symptoms without the menstrual mess. This eased a bit after about eight or nine months on hormones. Doc put me on injectable estradiol due my other health concerns and spironolactone to suppress the testosterone. I did okay with the hormones and began to feel more at ease in my skin.

Initially, I didn’t think I would want to get gender surgery, but the further I got into transition, the further I wanted to go. I was happy in my head and skin for once in my life. I started saving money and gathering information on gender affirming surgery.

Meantime, my music store boss was retiring, his kids were not interested in running the business, so I helped him close the store and sell-off all the stock. We closed the last time in early March 2017. Boss asked me what I was going to do after we closed. I said, probably try to find another job, if anyone will hire me. He said he felt that wouldn’t be a problem for a multi-skilled person like me. Strangely enough, that week an opportunity presented itself via the Peoria Transgender Society. Planned Parenthood of Illinois reached out to us looking for someone to fill a new position they had created to help their growing trans and gender diverse patients as transgender coordinator. It was basically a one day a week part-time patient advocate position within the social work department. The director was looking for a transgender person with life experience to assist the patients in finding and connecting to resources they need during transition like counseling, electrolysis, finding surgeons, changing names and gender markers, and performing insurance prior authorizations to get the patients’ meds covered. Long story short, the boss gave me wide leeway to create this position from scratch. When she hired me, we had about 300 transgender diverse patients in the fledgling program. Five years later I had built this program into a comprehensive case manager position with over 3000 patients. I was swamped and working three days per week part-time. When I told her I was retiring she hired two full-time employees to replace me, she split the job duties and hired one just to do the insurance PAs (very time-consuming), and the second as case manager. I trained both employees over the summer months before I retired in October 2022.

TGForum: Your surgery was conducted in Canada. Why?

Ms. Fox: It was clear to me my health insurance would not cover my gender surgery and I would have to come up with cash. Gender surgery in the U.S. is extremely expensive. The best doctors here all insist on doing the surgery in a hospital, so you have a surgeon’s fee, an itemized hospital bill, an anesthesia bill, and pathology bill. Everyone gets a piece. I considered Thailand and Canada because they both have world-renowned gender surgeons who have their own clinics, it’s all in-house, so you get one ebill, and it’s cash up front. I decided to go with GRS Montreal and Dr. Pierre Brassard; he quoted me $25,000 Canadian and with the exchange rate, that came out to about $19,500 U.S. in July 2018 when it had to be fully paid. I sold my beloved hand-made Shigeru piano to pay for my surgery in 2017, so I had the cash. They took great care of me, and Dr. Brassard is an artist with a scalpel. I am quite pleased with my result. I was there a little over a week and they sent me home wholly female.

TGForum: For many years you have been involved in your local trans community. How so?

Ms. Fox: I joined the Peoria Transgender Society initially and was very active in that group as well as in community activism and advocacy work. While I worked for Planned Parenthood I worked in Community Engagement for two years before the case manager position started taking all my time and developed into a tree days a week job, and that put me in touch with many influential people in the central Illinois area, I was a guest speaker at LGBTQ events, sat on a number of roundtable groups that looked for ways to solve problems in marginalized communities, belonged to the National Organization of Women, and performed sex education and trans awareness education in the Peoria Public High Schools and info-tabled for Planned Parenthood in many public venues as well.

TGForum: My sense is you used to hold stressful job positions, first as an intake coordinator for Planned Parenthood of Illinois and then as the gender-expansive case manager before retiring last year.

Ms. Fox: I have always held stressful positions. Apparently, I thrive on it. I started as a laborer in 1977 and moved up quickly through the union positions and finished my last 12 years as shift engineer at a large coal-fired electric generating station. I’m one of those people who need to stay busy doing something productive. When I finally landed at Planned Parenthood, my lady boss was a true visionary. She gave me a framework for what she wanted to accomplish and let me build it. This was pure pleasure, doing something I loved.

TGForum: You were also assigned to do local Planned Parenthood media interviews. You were their spokesperson.

Ms. Fox: Before I worked for Planned Parenthood, the local newspaper in Peoria reached-out to the Peoria Transgender society for some thoughts on how we felt about Planned Parenthood’s decision to expand their brand new GAHT (Gender Affirming Hormone Therapy) program downstate to Peoria, Pekin Bloomington. I did the newspaper interview. The photographer came to my house and took some photos to include with the article in the paper. The article was in the two local papers, the Peoria Journal Star and the Pekin Times. Front page above the fold. My mom about messed her pants. She was like, ‘Dana are you sure you want to be so out there? Aren’t you worried some nut-job may try to hurt you?’ I told mom trans awareness and visibility are super-important and I hoped it would help other trans folks find help, and I added the anti-trans nut-jobs were not going to deter me from my mission. This newspaper interview did not go unnoticed by the leadership at Planned Parenthood, and since I had become the go-to girl for everything trans, the external affairs department started sending me out on interviews around important dates like National Coming Out Day, Transgender Day of Visibility, Transgender Day of Remembrance and other events, newspapers, radio, social media to talk about the GAHT program and how to get help. I’m definitely out there.

TGForum: So, what is your philosophy on life?

Ms. Fox: Live and let live. I don’t understand why this is so hard for some people!

TGForum: Would you say today you are the happiest?

Ms. Fox: I am happy with me. I am a whole female person in both mind and body, happy and proud of what I’ve achieved in the community. I am not so happy with the political and social environment in this country. I put the blame firmly on the GOP and elements of the Christian religion that have targeted us, made us a political issue, and are bent on demonizing and erasing the transgender community. It’s very hateful Nazi-esque Hitler playbook shit they are doing to this community. I’m just a woman trying to live my life and be happy. I’m not hurting anyone. They are literally going to kill transgender kids through blatant denial of care with their discriminatory bans on gender affirming care for minors.

Tags: featured, Transgender

Category: Interview