TransActive – “Precious Time”

Christine Beatty’s first idea for her column this month was a lighthearted take on New Year’s resolutions. She had it all planned out but something else came up at the last minute. One of us had dropped out of the community and Christine learned that the dropout had committed suicide. The lighthearted topic had to take a back seat for a column about that suicide and why it may be time for a serious New Year’s resolution.

When I first planned this month’s column I’d envisioned a light and playful feature on the topic of New Year’s resolutions. I would have gently provoked readers who might be hesitating to move ahead with their gender transition or gender play or whatever they’ve been holding back on. I might have given the article some kind of comical or even vulgar title like, “Be All That You Can Be” or perhaps “Get Off the Pot” or “Oh, Shit, I Could Have Had a V-8!” Then I got a piece of news that took any humorous wind out of my literary sails: a suicide. And the events that developed soon after sickened me as much as Bush’s 2004 reelection.

In April 2007, a longtime sportswriter that Los Angeles Times readers knew as “Mike Penner” came out as a transsexual woman. She took the name of Christine Daniels, writing under that byline. The Times publicly stood by her, and she continued to write her sports column plus a blog she entitled “Woman in Progress.” Several other close transwomen in my life and I had exchanges with her, however she did not sustain contact with us. Then in 2008 she dropped out of sight from the LA Times. I tried writing her to ask if she was okay but got no reply. All the newspaper would say was that she was on “sabbatical.” After a few months I got caught up in writing my book and forgot all about Christine Daniels.

On November 28^th, the Times reported that “Mike Penner” had committed suicide. The article stated that Christine had detransitioned in 2008 and went back to her male name, but offered few details beyond that. Most disturbingly, every Times article since her death put quotation marks around her woman’s name, as if it were a false name, and consistently referred to her as “Mike” and “he.” While the Times does have a history of disrespecting the gender of the transgender subjects it covers, I suspect this was not entirely the case this time.

I believe I know why Christine had tried to go back to manhood. I’d detransitioned myself in 1986, not because I no longer believed I was a woman but because I couldn’t handle all of the rejection and self-doubt and hopelessness. When she announced her transition in 2007, she wrote in her column, “It has taken more than 40 years, a million tears and hundreds of hours of soul-searching therapy for me to work up the courage to type those words” [that she was now a transsexual sportswriter]. She also stated, “I gave it as good a fight as I possibly could. I went more than 40 hard rounds with it. Eventually, though, you realize you are only fighting yourself and your happiness and your mental health — a no-win situation any way you look at it.”

Her transition in 2007 had the hallmarks of a decision given great consideration over a long period of time, not as a whim or the result of a midlife crisis. (Her decision was considered far longer than mine, which took less than a year after I began to have doubts about my gender.) A decision that took as long to reach as hers is not one that would be lightly rescinded. Realizing what Christine probably went through inspired me to submit the following Op-Ed to the LA Times, which four days later declined to print it.

Op-Ed submitted to the Los Angeles Times on Sunday, November 29^th:

I was saddened though not surprised to read of the death of Christine Daniels, known to most Los Angeles Times’ readers as sportswriter Mike Penner. While Christine Daniels apparently “de-transitioned” in 2008 and resumed using the name “Mike,” I know from personal experience that hers was likely a decision made under great duress and with a heavy heart.

Transsexual women like Christine Daniels, who for decades fight the inner truth of their gender out of fear, often reach a place in middle age where the fear of what they might do to themselves if they don’t transition finally surpasses their fear of how others will react. It becomes a “damned if they do and damned if they don’t” situation. Christine Daniels reached her breaking point two years ago.

What she doubtlessly found, as many middle-aged transitioners do, is that the families, friends and careers they have built up over the entire adult lives react with shock, fear and anger at what they see as a betrayal. Usually these friends and loved ones have little idea of the internal battle their husband or father or child or colleague or friend has waged for so long. All they can see is how the transition will affect them.

Usually decision to accept one’s transsexualism brings great relief that the internal fight is over, a sense excitement at the new possibilities, but then the others in your life learn what you intend and then the blame and ostracism and retribution begins. The hope and optimism become tainted with fear.

When I first transitioned in my mid-twenties in 1985, I was stripped of my friends, family, my job and my academic career. I hit bottom in every way possible and found myself in a despair I could never have imagined. After only fifteen months I threw in the towel and tried to go back to being a guy much the same as Christine tried to go back to being “Mike.” That’s when my suicidal arc began in earnest. By late 1988 I faced killing myself or returning to transition. It was as much divine intervention as dumb luck I lived to re-transition.

Christine Daniels faced all of my problems tenfold, a multitude who knew of her only as Mike until her announcement in 2007. She had not only her family of origin, there was also her family of marriage, a career spanning decades and reaching thousands of fans. Finally, and perhaps the greatest of hurdles was that Christine worked in the macho world of Sports. Perhaps only Christine and those closest to her know of all the professional doors that closed in her face after her transition.

I did not know Christine personally nor exactly how difficult her transition had become for her. However, I do know how tough it became for me and for the hundreds if not thousands of transgender people I’ve met in twenty-four years. I’ve seen how spouses and children begin hating us. I know of the total excommunication by “friends” and family. I know of the employment discrimination, of the derision and disgust and demonizing by total strangers. I know the fear that you will never ever be happy ever again, that you will die a painful and lonely death.

Worst of all, I know of the self-betrayal of trying to go back to the gender from whence one came, the feeling of cowardice and the deepest hopelessness of all: that no matter what you do, you will never find peace. Those who believe they can successfully shame or threaten a transgender person from following their path need only look to Christine’s tragic end to know that putting the mask back on is not the answer.

Christine wrote of knowing of her gender issue since childhood and of hundreds of hours in counseling, so making the decision to live as Christine was made only after careful deliberation. Transition is a path not lightly chosen; it is not a whim. Transsexual people know going into it that they will face much difficulty, pain, opposition and fear born of other people’s misunderstanding. Yet we do it because we have only one real choice: between being true to ourselves or killing ourselves.

To be a transsexual woman (or man) is not a choice, just the decision to do something about it. There will be those who think Christine’s decision to attempt to switch back was because she was confused, but I’ve seen this situation so many times over two-plus decades — and lived it myself — to so easily write it off. It’s easier to blame Christine for her own death, to write her off as confused and fundamentally unhappy, because it lets us off the hook for our failure to support her or at least try to accept her.

The real tragedy is that if she had first transitioned around my age (in the Eighties) or younger, she’d at least had a fighting chance. With less to lose in terms of career and family and friends, she’d have had a chance to begin her life anew as I and many like me have. Thank God the transgender youth of today have more of a chance than back in my day. With all of the online support, an explosion of information, a political movement and more social understanding than there was twenty years ago, there is reason to have great hope.

This social evolution of the transgender community is too late to help Christine Daniels, but her tragic death needn’t be meaningless. Christine’s passing can at least help spread awareness that people like us don’t really have a choice, that happiness cannot be gained by denying one’s own truth and that all of us suffer when a life is lost to ignorance and fear. It saddens me deeply that Christine Daniels was only able to find peace in death and it saddens me even more knowing it needn’t have been that way.

Sincerely,

Christine Beatty

What’s most disturbing about the LA Times‘ post mortem treatment of Christine Daniels is not the erasure of her female identity. Given that she had apparently abandoned her transition in 2008 and had resumed her old name of “Mike,” I cannot fault the paper for using that name and male pronouns. What frustrates me is how the paper and her colleagues perpetuate the idea that “Mike” was just a tortured and fundamentally unhappy guy who probably would have killed “himself” no matter what gender s/he lived in. And I’m fairly certain why this viewpoint seems reasonable to them: after knowing “Mike” so many years they couldn’t see their friend and colleague as anything but a man.

The principal dangers of delaying one’s transition are manifold. The two greatest consequences are completely intertwined: the personal and the relational. The more time and effort a person with MtF gender conflicts invests in pursuing life as a man, the more rebuilding there will be to do and the harder the transition will be. There will be much more history to undo or revise. Often one’s career must be rebuilt, sometimes from the ground up.

The true Mount Everest of rebuilding is in relationships. The longer the people know you as your birth name and have built up a mental image of you as your assigned gender, the harder it is for them to conceive of you as anything else. One’s closest friends and associates, especially the immediate family — spouse and children — more often than not consider transition an act of a betrayal: they have been lied to all this time and now they may feel abandoned. A wife is most likely of all to feel betrayed, seeing her husband renege on the obligation to be her man. While the details of Christine Daniels’ divorce were not reported, it was after she announced her transition that she divorced from wife, Times staff writer Lisa Dillman.

Total strangers can be just as judgmental. Given Christine Daniels’ fame as “Mike Penner” it equates to tens of thousands of fans who know nothing about her or about transgender issues and yet who formed opinions, good and bad, about her change. As one Times reader opined, “It’s a pity you couldn’t get the substantive therapy you needed. There’s nothing ‘natural’ about what you describe, and the fact that your DNA doesn’t change is proof.” Given Christine’s coverage of the macho world of sports and everyone who knew her as a man named “Mike,” I suspect she faced more negativity than we will ever know.

Still, nobody can beat us up like ourselves. We feel regret for living a lie for so long and for all the precious time we’ve wasted. We regret all the heartbreak our transition causes in people who likely never knew whom we are inside. Then there’s the regret of the effort a transition will take. A lifetime of socialization as a man, of speaking in a man’s voice, of practicing those behavioral cues that proclaim gender, these all take time and effort to undo that an earlier transition would have made more of an easier time of. And while a later transition can provide a financial foundation for the medical aspects, the personal and social costs can make for a significant trade-off.

While I have so far focused on transsexual transition, every word I’ve written applies to gender play as well. Have you fantasized about moving from partial crossdressing to a full transformation, or from dressing up in private to sharing your play with another or even to going out in public? What’s stopping you — I mean really stopping you — besides fear?

Certainly it’s a reasonable fear given how gender play is demonized and pathologized by people who don’t know any better. But outside of your marriage, whose business is it really? After all, you’re not hurting anyone. However, given the importance of honesty in a relationship, that one’s area where the “it’s nobody else’s business” argument falls short. Lack of honesty can kill a marriage or other relationship faster than anything.

Once a relationship progresses to a serious turning point —moving in together, proposing marriage or actually tying the knot — there’s no better time to reveal a gender issue. Lying or sneaking around will ultimately cripple if not destroy a relationship, so cards on the table is the best policy. Sometimes a partner can surprise you with their tolerance, acceptance or even enthusiasm. You’ll never know if you don’t discuss. However hiding the issue until years or decades are invested will seldom be regarded as anything other than deceit and betrayal.

Even if your partner is less than enthused after you’ve disclosed your secret, you’ve been honest and that can only have a positive impact in the long run. Had I not confessed to my wife-to-be in 1983 that I had for years struggled to give up a crossdressing urge — a secret I could not withhold going into the relationship — I believe our divorce in 1985 would have been significantly more toxic and hateful. Still, it was pretty ugly for months, but less than a year later we were good friends.

All that said, this principle of honesty is best suited for near the beginning of a relationship, when there less of an investment in time, emotions and commitment. For a long term partnership I certainly wouldn’t make a blanket suggestion about telling one’s spouse a secret she may or may not be able to handle. You will have to make that judgment based on experience. However if she religiously listens to The Jesus Channel or Dr. Laura Schlessinger, I’d hazard to guess that revealing your secret would be in nobody’s best interest — unless the relationship is already is headed toward the proverbial iceberg, Titanic-style. However, unless there are minor children in the picture, you might want to ask yourself why you stay in a relationship where you feel forced to hide your true self. In the end, who really benefits?

Whether the decision is to move ahead with transition, to get into or expand gender play, to be honest with a loved one, or even to explore your issues in therapy, your first move begins with a resolving yourself to action. With a new year rapidly approaching, it’s an excellent time to reflect on where you’ve been, where you might want to go and how to get there. There’s a whole big world out there with so many possibilities, and life is too precious to waste on dreaming about what could be. You could turn around ten, twenty or more years later and realize you’ve wasted precious time.

Christine Beatty is a transsexual woman, who has written professionally since 1991 for transgender, gay and mainstream publications. In addition she’s been activist in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender community for twenty years. A native of the San Francisco Bay Area she has lived in Los Angeles since 1999. Her website is www.glamazon.net

Category: Transgender Body & Soul, Transgender Opinion