There have been some changes around here, so I feel that I should reintroduce myself. Hi, I’m Jennifer. I’m a 43 year old married, trans, queer mother of two, with ADHD. Three of those things are new since my last blog post. Or rather, they’re newly recognized, and this post covers the first two, being a queer trans woman. So let’s go back to the beginning.
Ancient History
I’m not sure when I first realized I should have been a girl, but I think I remember when I realized I wasn’t allowed to be. I grew up in Spain away from American media. The only movies I remember us having were Star Wars and The Adventures of Robin Hood. I was probably in first grade when I played Star Wars with the other kids who came with their parents to our house. I wanted to be Princess Leia, she was pretty and everyone cared about her. It is strongly imprinted on me that this wasn’t ok, even though I can’t remember how I knew.
For a few years in Spain my best friend was a girl a little older than me. One time I went to a sleepover at her house. We went to the convenience store, bought some frosting, and ate it straight out of the tub. Sometimes things you think are rules are just society’s expectations. That night I woke up and got a drink from the faucet, but they were doing water main work in her neighborhood. I got sick from it and threw up. Sometimes things you think should just work don’t. A few years later we visited her in the US. We played a game where you laid down interconnecting rooms and she told me about Dr. Who. She’d grown into herself. I was still lost.
I remember sitting on the swings outside of the elementary school I went to after school one day. A boy I knew a few years older than me walked up wearing a black leather skirt. I was dumbfounded. He told me it was gender swap day. That moment is seared in my brain. There were situations where this was a thing you could just do.
We eventually came back to the US. I was fascinated with girls stuff. Whatever that was a strictly gendered expression of femininity, be it clothes, or My Little Pony. Then I started to be exposed to more media, and it became even more obvious that pretending you were a girl was wrong. People who tried, even insincerely, were the joke, and those jokes were all over TV shows and movies. It became a shameful secret.
The Middle Ages
When I hit puberty I got boobs, which didn’t seem like much of a blessing at the time. I remember my parents taking me to the doctor and instead of the correct diagnosis (gynecomastia) he told them it was just baby fat, and that he had another patient who had real developing breasts. Like that was obviously a horrible, horrible thing. It didn’t seem horrible to me. I don’t remember feeling bad for them, it was just remarkable. My parents didn’t do anything about my boobs, I just wore a coat all the time for the next 6 years and receded into myself. I can’t imagine how I would feel now if they had.
In high school I tried to be normal, had a best friend who was a guy, though we didn’t hang out much outside of school. Most of my friends were girls. I had some severe crushes which were probably manifestations of me finding someone who I really wanted to be like. I ended up at girls sleepovers a few times. They gave me scrunchies. I grew my hair really long but didn’t know how to take care of it, so it ended up a giant knotted mess.
In February of 1994 I logged in to an internet text based multiplayer role playing game called Ghostwheel and created a character named ShadowFox. She was me, the me I couldn’t be in the real world. Emotional, outgoing, caring, a mess. She lasted till November, when I told everyone I wasn’t actually a her and switched to a boy name. We were starting to have in person meetups, and the fiction wasn’t going to last.
Towards the end of high school I stumbled into getting a girlfriend. We watched The X-Files together, and I was terrified I was going to do something bad to her because everything I’d been taught told me that boys were hormonally driven monsters who’d just as soon rape you than look at you. After a few months summer came and I stopped calling. Later she got another boyfriend and we became friends again. I was better at that. By then I’d looked up surgical transition online and came to the conclusion that while it was possible, it wasn’t possible for me. If I couldn’t do something right, what was the point? I was 5’10”, stout, and puberty had done its work. I was never going to be like my girl friends.
After high school I kept finding girls who I wanted something from that I couldn’t define. Somehow they could tell that I was lost. I met an older bi poly girl and we dated for a while, which worked till it didn’t. There were too many expectations, too many hang ups, I was still growing up, and I wasn’t being honest with myself. We ended up as complicated friends.
I started hanging out with a group of friends after high school a lot, people who’d graduated after I had, but were around the same age as me. We played role playing games. I had a lot of girl characters. Same in video games. RPG? Always a girl. Femshep all the way.
Eventually, having totally failed at relationships and having moved out of my parents house for a little place of my own, I tried poking around an online dating site. I found a girls profile who seemed cool, tracked down her homepage, and sent her an email. She replied, and we started emailing. She was working after having a bad college experience. I invited her over and made dinner, badly. She was smart and funny and made me feel good, but my hang ups were still there. I didn’t know how to be in a relationship except the kind I’d seen in Disney movies. We tried being friends. She kept coming over. I figured out a little more. I’m not sure how my weird gender issues came out, but they did.
The stubborn girl didn’t give up on me, and I eventually realized we were meant for each other. I asked her, she said yes, and so Irma and I got married. She knew my secret, didn’t judge me for it, and loved me anyway. We always thought it was just going to be that, a secret.
Over the years my role playing game friend group grew and morphed and added people, and seemingly all of a sudden the group of people we hung out with was half queer and mostly girls. This suited me fine. Boys were a mystery to me. I didn’t feel like I understood most of them. It was obviously better to be a girl, but they all seemed content to be boys. We did things like a game night where all the girls tried on corsets, and I stood in the kitchen and smiled and tried not to collapse in on myself.
I didn’t like my body. I wore baggy t-shirts and jeans or cargo pants. I hated dressing up and tried to never do it. I hated having tight or even well fitting boy clothes on. The face in the mirror was weird to look at. Every time I saw a successful guy, I would try and figure out how they did it, what they had that I obviously didn’t, and what was wrong with me that I couldn’t. I got pretty good at pretending to be a guy, but I wasn’t happy.
A few years later Irma and I decided to have kids. I was terrified at the prospect of having a boy, because I didn’t know how to be one, and how was I going to show him. In the end we lost our first, and it broke us, but a year later we had a beautiful little baby girl. She was amazing. Around the same time Irma’s parents had adopted a kid inside the family, who a few years later came out to us as trans. I wish I’d been more supportive, but he wasn’t our child, and it was easy to not engage. If he’d been a trans woman, would I have felt differently? Probably. But he was a boy, and wanted to be something that I didn’t get.
Through some friends we got introduced to a trans hair stylist, and she cut my hair a few times. She was brave, I wasn’t, but she transitioned from presenting as a gay man to a straight woman, which wasn’t me. I knew I didn’t like boys. She came to one of my wife’s relative’s wedding receptions. There were jokes from people whose opinions I cared about. I stuffed my feelings down.
I went to tech conferences and started to see more trans women there. They were so brave, but seemed so lonely, or so I assumed. I complimented Ina Fried on her cute cardigan via a tweet at SXSW. I was the photographer at an AlterConf and was really proud when one of the trans woman presenters said my picture was the best one of her speaking anyone had ever taken. I joined Vox Media and worked with a trans woman while onboarding. We ended up in an elevator at a company all hands a month later with a bunch of sweaty old guys who wanted to chat. She held her composure. I was terrified for her. I was just a very understanding ally.
We were doing well, or so it seemed. We’d bought a bigger house, and had another kid, this time a little boy. I’d let myself go, and I was getting older. I got into fitness, one of my friends wanted a video-chat workout partner, so I started exercising four days a week. I lost weight, I got stronger. I was doing what I was supposed to as a guy.
Eventually the kids went to school, and I ended up on the playground during morning dropoff, five days a week sitting there watching other moms chat and be fashionable in their cute dresses or exhausted and comfortable in their athleisure. I wanted to be one of them more than anything. But I couldn’t be, I was just the very shy, loving dad. That went on for four years. I crammed everything down inside the best I could. I was blank and numb a lot of the time.
At home I started to take on the mom role more. I couldn’t help it. I loved it. I loved making the kids lunches and drawing little notes for them. I loved dropping them off at school, and putting them to bed at night. I loved making food for everyone, and seeing people sit down and enjoy it. I even sometimes liked doing the laundry. But it wasn’t enough.
Wanting to be a girl was still a shameful thing, and shameful things end up popping up in fantasy and when I was alone. It couldn’t go beyond that. The trans women I knew at work were brave and strong and lived in New York or San Francisco and were way different than me. I was just a guy who wanted to be a girl their whole life, and that was different, right? The fact that when the kids slipped up and called me mom it made super happy? Let’s not talk about that.
I had a temper that didn’t feel like mine. I’d tried testosterone injections for a while, but that hadn’t fixed me. I couldn’t really imagine the future, except through hazy visions from aspirational TV shows. I looked at older men and despaired of what I might turn into. I’d let my career be driven first by an ADHD driven distrust of authority, and then by attempting to impress my parents. It had made us comfortable but hadn’t made me really happy. Being able to put together families at work made me happy, especially as I was able to add more women to the teams I ran, but at the end of the day being a mom to some other grownups wasn’t enough. I needed to be something more.
The Awakening
In May of 2019 we packed up the family and went to PyCon in Cleveland. The python community, as a general rule, is nice to trans folks. I reluctantly put a ‘he/him’ sticker on my badge. But there were trans women there. Cute trans women with friends, who were accepted and celebrated, walking around in their cute dresses being cute and happy. Something inside of me cracked. I was miserable.
A month later Emily VanDerWerff came out as trans in a review of the Handmaid’s Tale. I’d loved Emily’s writing since she was reviewing Community at The A.V. Club. I’d seen myself in her writing about being adopted. She wasn’t a 20 year old, she was just a few years younger than me. She had a career. She had decided she couldn’t keep her secret anymore, and was happier for it.
I started reading experiences of more trans women. So many of them clicked. They’d experienced the same thing, had the same thoughts. They said that if you wanted to be a girl you could just be a girl. They said that it had saved their lives. In the end it turned out that it wasn’t about what I was allowed to do, or how pretty or passing I would be, or what society would approve of. It was about what I had to do for me so I could live.
A few months later I sobbingly confessed to Irma that I was a girl and I couldn’t not be. She was supportive, she didn’t try to convince me otherwise, but in that moment our whole relationship changed. The plans we had for our future suddenly evaporated, and we were back at square one.
We spent a lot of months trying to figure out what it meant. I started dressing more femme and pushing presentation boundaries. I made a lot more bad style choices. I’d been growing my hair out for a year, and Irma helped me find a trans friendly stylist who would give me a girly cut. We went on a bunch of trips that all felt like the last. I formed strong opinions about rose gold Disneyland Mouse ears. We went to Europe and I got a lot of second glances in airport bathrooms. Security folks were confused, pointing me back and forth between the boy and girl screeners, and I hadn’t even really started transitioning yet. Irma found me a place to start doing laser hair removal, trying to get rid of the beard that in nearly 30 years I’d never once grown out.
I realized if I was going to transition at work, I didn’t want to do it while I managed anyone. Forcing someone else to accept my transition seemed like too much. I left my team, and ended up floating. Vox was the most trans-friendly place I could imagine to transition, and I’d been avoiding thoughts of other directions my career could take for years because of it.
In February I came out to Emily VanDerWerff, and she invited me to a slack of hers with a bunch of other trans women. It was like coming home. Everyone had so many shared experiences, fears, hopes. I learned a ton, and had a caring group of people to vomit my fears onto who were going through or had gone through the same thing. I met straight and bi trans women who were attracted to men. I thought about it and came to a satisfactory conclusion that no, thanks, they could keep them. I even met a girl really into vintage fashion who I can share outfits and tips with.
I found a trans friendly therapist. Irma and I found an informed consent clinic where I could go and get a hormone replacement therapy prescription without jumping through too many hoops like presenting as a woman in public for a year. Irma went with me. I was so nervous when they took my blood pressure the doctor joked about how high it was. I asked the doctor how many people she’d prescribed hormones to, and how many people had stopped. She said she’d treated hundreds, and only two had stopped. One was a teen and probably hadn’t really figured things out, and the other had family pressure to not transition. That seemed like really good odds.
On Leap Day, in the airport in Dallas on our way to Japan I took my first dose of Spironolactone, a testosterone suppressant and Estradiol, to increase estrogen. Thankfully we were heading into a pandemic, and the next few weeks of traveling around Asia didn’t give me a lot of time to think about whether anything was happening. We got back, and got used to life in quarantine. Irma’s 16 year old trans brother moved in with us. We made sure to use the right name and pronouns. I didn’t have anger triggers like I did before. I could feel emotions more. Things that had been pushed down for so long were breaking loose. Animal Crossing came out and I setup my Nintendo Online account as Jennifer. It was just out there for all of my friends to see.
I got the opportunity to take a security role at Vox working for one of our only women Directors, the kind of savvy New Yorker who I was both in awe of and kind of terrified of. A few months later I told her, and asked her to look into what it would take to transition at work. She was nice and supportive and everything I needed.
Being extremely online since the mid 90’s, I’d gotten my first or full name as my username at a lot of places, something that came back to bite me. I wrote some python code tried cramming unique words together to find something that was broadly available. I landed on objectfox, throwing it all the way back to that text based role playing game 25 years before. I started changing usernames and switching account names to ‘J. Kramer’.
Irma and I created a spreadsheet of people we needed to tell. This person before that. Kids before parents. Parents before family. Family before work. Work before Twitter. We tried to figure out what to do with Facebook. In the end I mothballed it and started fresh.
I told the kids on June 12th. They took it well. My daughter was on board immediately. A little while later we were able to get our ears pierced together, which was a great mother/daughter bonding experience. My son took a little longer till he was there. He’d seen a lot of transphobic jokes and imagery in TV. It made him uncomfortable. Having a trans kid in the house already helped a little with the concept, but not so much with the execution. There weren’t as many jokes about trans men. But he came around, and he’s excited to have two moms.
I told Haley, my personal trainer a few days after the kids. She’d seen me go from paint splattered gym shorts to mauve leggings over two years, and even a pink unicorn onesie that one Halloween, and was one of the people I talked to most. I was anxious to tell her, because like every friendship, I treasured it and didn’t want to lose it, and like almost everyone I told from then on, she was super happy for me. Once I was out to the kids and out to Haley it was easier to go full time at home. Irma did my nails, something I’d never done before. I started ‘borrowing’ clothes I thought were cute from her side of the closet. The kids started calling me mum.
I told my parents on July 1st, and Irma told hers the next day. After months of presenting more femme before the pandemic, my parents weren’t surprised. They may have memories of me pushing the gender boundary that even I’ve forgotten, but they haven’t shared them yet. It took them a while to come around, but they eventually did. They compliment me on my cute dresses and tell me how much happier I seem.
A week after we told our parents I came out to our friends in Slack. Everyone was nice. I was scheduled to come out at work a week after that, but ended up having to push it a week at the last minute. That hurt, but Irma had arranged for a surprise drive by coming out party with our friends, which was beautiful and amazing. A week later when I came out at work everyone was nice. People I’d never even talked to wished me well. Two days later I posted a tweet to Twitter, and a few days after that a story on Instagram, and I was out. I was Jennifer. From beginning to end it took 2 months.
Transitioning in the pandemic has been a mixed blessing. I was able to basically go full time only 4 months into hormones, because my style is super femme and I wear a mask whenever I’m out. On the other hand, I was only able to come out in person to Nadia, my friend and editor of Eater Austin, and I haven’t been able to give people hugs I’ve been dying to give for years. I also can’t hang out with the other moms at school, because dropoff is a quick, contactless affair in a time of COVID. But those things will happen in time, and they’ll be just as sweet when they do.
My voice is still awful. Hormones don’t do anything for that, and after 3 attempts I’m still without a voice therapist. I need to do something about the blonde hair on my face that laser didn’t get, but we’re looking into options for that. Hormones can make your feet and hands shrink and can make you shorter, as the fat redistributes and the cartilage changes. I may have lost half a shoe size, but I’m still 5’10” and wide shouldered. Fortunately fat is moving around other places, which is nice, and when I look in the mirror I can kinda see something that I like. I have no idea how well I pass, which isn’t something all trans women want, but is something that’s important to me. I still have a long way to go, but those first big steps have been taken, and I love who I am.
I try not to think about transitioning earlier. I have friends who’ve transitioned at 23, and some who’ve transitioned at 53, and we’re all kind of jealous of the kids who transition at 13. We have the same fears, some of us just have more mileage. We all try to have hope for the future.
Our future is still hazy, and transitioning has cut off a lot of options. I’m glad we went to Africa before I transitioned. There’s a lot of anxiety about even visiting Mexico. But there are nice things, too. I love being me and being accepted in women’s spaces I was a stranger to before. I love being able to have honest conversations with my girl friends as myself. I love swapping hair and makeup tips with the waitstaff when I pick up to go dinner. I love that Irma and I merged our closet together. I love putting time into doing my hair and knowing it looks good, and I love not wanting to bother and throwing it into a hairclip. I love being more emotionally honest. I love people who haven’t come out yet reaching out and letting me know that I encouraged them. And now I can look at older women and go ‘hmm, yea, that seems nice, I could be her and be happy’.
And that’s pretty great.
