The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [160]
Q: Have you met any other Vietnam vets who have transitioned?
Yeah, sure. Including one SEAL.
Q: That’s one of the most unexpected things I’ve discovered during my research, the number of transgendered veterans. Nobody outside the community knows about that.
Yes, well there is a tendency, I think, within the transgender community to go into the military or very macho roles that will help you conform. I liked scuba diving and I wanted to become a navy diver, but I liked to fly also, so I wound up in aviation. I was very happy to get out [of the service] and I didn’t think that I would miss it, but I did. To this day, I still miss it.
Q: What did you do when you got out of the army?
When the army discharged me, I went back to college and I enrolled in a class in career development to find out where my interests lay, and my counselor said, “You’re not going to believe this. Numbers one and two on the list are Catholic nun social worker and Catholic nun teacher.” And I said, “Well, you’re not going to believe this, but that was my dream as a child. I wanted to be a nun.” We were Protestants but we lived in an all-Catholic neighborhood and we lived across the street from the convent. And all throughout my childhood I would go across the street and sit on the steps and talk to the nuns. I loved them.
So then I spent the next ten years looking for a community that would accept me. Because of all the notoriety [from the military case] I would always be up-front with them and say, “This is my past, but I feel called,” and I always got nice letters back saying, “Thank you, but don’t call us and we ‘re not going to call you.” So, finally, I was down at Saint Clements, and a very dear friend of mine said, “Have you ever considered the Franciscans?” In the meantime I had a spiritual director and I told him that I had written to them, and he said, “Well, they probably won’t write back,” but I got a letter back that said, “Why don’t you come visit?” So I drove up and spent a week with them, and I got some interesting lessons when I was there. The first morning, I was walking down the hallway with the mother superior. She came about up to here on me and she was Scottish and about seventy years old—and I referred to her as a nun and she did an about-face and looked up at me and said, “The cloistered are nuns and we are sisters, and don’t you ever forget that.” I said, “Oops.” Then she explained the difference to me.
Then I came back here and talked to my spiritual counselor, and he said, “What do you want to do?” I told him I wanted to close up my business and join the Franciscans. They invited me to come up and spend another week, and I did, but in the end they couldn’t do it [accept her into the community]. It was a small community, and they felt that because of my notoriety, the press would probably come down on us like a ton of bricks.
I told my spiritual director that I had been turned down, and he said, “You don’t need those old ladies anyway. What God is calling you to do is start a new social order for social justice. Write to the Episcopal nuns here and get their instructions on how to start a rule.” So they sent me the book, and I started writing the rule, and soon I had two other women join me and we wrote the rule together. All of a sudden the doors started opening up and we got support, even from the hierarchy. I got a letter from the bishop congratulating me and saying he wanted to come down to the service. Then the press got hold of it, through a woman that I worked with, and the next day it was all over. The bishop renounced me in an article in the L.A. Times. Sol made my vows, but it was a fiasco. The Episcopal Church jumped ship. They didn’t bother to put the lifeboats down; they just bailed. They had a Spanish Inquisition at Saint Clements, and so I finally left Saint Clements.
Qj Obviously, you’ve had some horrific experiences