by Carol Brooks

This is the story of my life’s journey to discover the truth about who I am. I remember being about five or six, and playing with the daughter of my mother’s best friend. Somehow, we started playing dress up and I wore her dresses. It felt so good, and I couldn’t understand why I couldn’t wear them all the time. My parents never knew that we did this. I would wear this little girl’s nightgown and panties. As I got older, I remember riding my bike down to her place and wearing panties and a slip under my trousers. I was both thrilled and nervous.

When I was about nine or ten, my mother would make me wear my sister’s dress so that she could hem it. I complained, but my mother said my sister was too busy doing household chores so I had to do it. Sometime later, my sister found out that I wore one of her dresses, and I was punished for that. I had to wear the dress all day while they called me Susie, and tried to shame and embarrass me. They told my only grandfather, and he too would call me a sissy and a little girl. They taunted me saying that men are strong and don’t cry, and definitely don’t wear dresses. Only sissies do!

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By Laura Grace Holtsberry

Take a moment and if there happen to be a few people around you, or maybe you can take time to remember the images of those you know, or maybe try this exercise the next time you can be with your friends; stop and study the faces and the bodies of all those you see. It should not take long to discover how incredibly different they are. We may be similar in many ways but there is no mistaking how incredibly unique each and every person is.  This uniqueness even extends into family groups even to those who are identical twins.

However, as you look at them, even upon those voices that are so familiar to you, do you really know them?  As we look upon their bodies, their outward appearance, and as we listen to the sound of their voices, we make so many decisions about a person’s worth, their roles and how we shall treat them. Yet to be honest, what we see tells us very little about who this person really is. We see what they want us to see, and if what we see is what we expect to see, then we will pay scant attention to anything else. I am reminded of the Eddy Arnold lyric made famous by Ray Charles “You’re just a friend, that’s all you’ve ever been, but you don’t know me”

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From Helene…

So much has changed over the past few years. My beautiful daughter with the lithe body of an athlete is now my good looking, sturdily built son with a close cut beard. I no longer see the daughter except in my thoughts or old photos that I try, unsuccessfully, not to look at. In the beginning of Henry’s transition there were times I did not even recognize him. I guess I was still looking for Eve.

Eve and I always had a very close, typical mother-daughter relationship. We’d discuss everything she wanted to discuss, hug, enjoy spending time together, go to movies, laugh, talk about the family. You get the picture. That she didn’t like to shop, get a manicure, sit with her knees together didn’t rattle me. She liked boys, had boyfriends. But she did kind of walk like a truck driver and carrying a purse was something we laughed about since they way she held it made it appear that it was a smelly bag of trash. I dreaded the weekends because she would come home after being out with friends and throw herself on my bed in tears that she didn’t fit in. I attributed this to the fact that she was adopted (she’s Korean, I’m not) and teenage angst in general. I must have been living on another planet.

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By David Johnsrud

Being posed for a photograph in a red velvet dress, both the photographer and my mother had difficulty getting me to look up and smile, to hold the phone next to my ear as if I were talking on it. They wanted me to look up, but I kept looking down at the expanse of brightly colored dress, white leather baby shoes, and especially the itchy strangeness on my upper arms where the gathers held the fabric close in bunches. I was aware of one thing: This was all wrong. The date on the photo puts my age at 22 months.

It was a feeling that would become so commonplace as to almost be tolerable at times: The strangeness and humiliation of being literally forced into feminine-appropriate attire and behavior, coupled with the realization that not all girls were uncomfortable being girls, which was my first lesson in gender dysphoria: Not everyone has it. It shocked me to realize that most girls indeed liked being girls.

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