The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [104]
But then I went away to college and started reading books and I found out that “Well, okay, you can be a lesbian.” So I did that for a long time, but I always felt like a spy. In the bathroom especially, in gym, I always felt like a spy. “I’m not supposed to be in here.” So it wasn’t until I was forty-seven that I started taking hormones. There’s an FTM support group here [in San Francisco]. I went there in 1990, and there was this whole roomful of men. Oh my God! I didn’t go back for six years. It freaked me out so much. I’m like, “There’s a bunch of men in there. I don’t like men. Men are the patriarchy. Men are bad.” But finally, I just got really angry. I’d go to the store or something and give people my driver’s license to write a check and they’d read the female name and call me “ma’am.” And I would feel really angry because I’m not that person. Don’t call me “ma’am.” And I was a butch lesbian, so people would a lot of time call me “sir” but then when I would talk, because I had a female voice, they’d say, “Oh, I’m sorry,” and maybe they would be nice to me or maybe they wouldn’t.
Q: Did people mostly read you as female at that time?
Here in San Francisco, because there are so many lesbians, and a butch lesbian is identifiable, people would identify me as a butch. So then of course there was all the homophobia.
Q: In San Francisco? [interviewer feigns shock]
Yes. And gay men don’t like women very well either, so you go down to the Castro, and gay men weren’t really happy to see you. I went in to get my hair cut one time, and they just left me sitting there for an hour. I kept waiting and waiting.
Q: Sounds like you couldn’t really find a home in any community—in the lesbian community or the larger gay community. When did you begin to think that you might be transgendered?
I always wore men’s clothes. I got rid of women’s clothes sometime in the early seventies. I remember taking them all to the dump. You know those big Dumpsters? I left them all draped over it. So I always wore men’s clothes. And I always felt like transgendered people were my family, but I didn’t really know why. I always kind of gravitated toward drag queens, people who were on the edge of gender somehow. Those were always the people I liked. In queer bars these people were often on the outside of things. So one night I’m at the lesbian bar, and I see a man dressed to the nines, and he’s a transvestite, and he’s with his wife who is a transvestite the other way. So we become friends, and I start hanging out with them. She tells me about a television show that wants to talk to female-to-male transvestites. It’s not a category that anybody talks about. Women can wear men’s clothes, and nobody looks at them. So that’s when I go, “Oh, there’s a transgender community.” I was about thirty-five at the time.
So I sat with that for a while. I was a cross-dresser for a while. As I met more and more people in my community, and I heard FTM transsexuals talk, I’m like, “Gee, that sounds really familiar.” I spent a long time going, “Well, we’re kind of the same, but I go up to this line but I don’t go over, and they do.” Finally, I decided to go to that meeting in 1990 when I was about forty. And I got so freaked out. I was like, “No, I don’t want to be a straight white guy.” But by ′96 or 97, I said to myself, “This isn’t working out at all.” And I thought, “Who can you live your life for but you? I’m in my forties.” So I started hormones in October of ‘97. And I met Marianne right before I started hormones. So she’s seen me as a girl, and now I