Adventures In Genderland: Part One
Part One: The Mirror Cracked
by Cathy Platine
Once upon a time................. Ok, a few years ago, a gender dysphoric named Cathy (for yes, I already was calling myself that) screwed up her courage enough to call the local transgendered support group. This started my strange adventures with the gender "community". I had gotten the number from a phone call to IFGE whose number in turn I'd gotten from a TV talk show. That first contact took every single ounce of courage in me. I admitted to someone besides my spouse for the first time in my life that I was transgendered. After several calls I got my courage up to the point of asking about attending a meeting and was told I would have to be "screened" first. Screen consisted of my going to a local restaurant, alone, and meeting some of the member of the club while dressed as female. Now understand, never in my life had I gone anywhere dressed female that anyone could see me. I had ventured out in the dead of night many times, I'd driven around dressed female, but never had I let anyone but my spouse see me that way.
I went. Such simple words, they do not begin to express the terror I felt, I'm not sure there are words in the English language that can. The restaurant was closed, changing management and I hadn't been contacted to let me know that. It was to be another year and a half before I contacted those people again.
In the meantime, my father passed on and my life as it was went on. I continued to try to reach out and in the fall of 1995 I got my first real computer. One of the very first things I did with it was get AOL and go straight for the gender areas. I ran up an unbelievable bill that first "free" month, in AOL charges and long distance both. Wiser and poorer, I signed up for Compuserve and joined the Genderline group of the human sexuality forum. It was there I met Kori. Kori suggested I attend a meeting of the Crystal Club. I wrote back and told her what had happened. Her reply was that they had dropped the in person screening and all I had to do was call the screening officer, get the address and then attend.
This time the call was easier to make. I reached Luanne, the screening officer and the wife of one of the crossdressing members of the club. She told me the next meeting was the Christmas dinner meeting and there would not be another meeting for a month and a half after that. I was told that I was welcome to attend.
After telling my spouse of my intentions and dealing with the disagreement about it. I went. This time I was not as shy and walked right in and met several of the members including Luanne and Kori and Kori's wife. That night another first-timer who also was active on Genderline attended. Sarah Fox. During the course of the evening I was struck by one main impression. The crossdressers all gathered in knots and mostly talked about cars and sports and the wives did all the cooking, serving and cleaning up afterwards. This didn't stop me from joining the club that night. This and the fact that the people I talked to most of the night were the wives of a couple of members and a visiting lesbian lady from the local women's shelter who was there to receive the donations that the club makes every Christmas of dolls and toys in lieu of a Christmas exchange. Just having people who accepted me as Cathy was such an incredible rush that I would have overlooked almost anything.
In the ensuing months the club became a lifeline to my sanity. Between the meetings and my online "therapy", for that's what my involvement online truly was, therapy, I managed to keep my soul together. On March 4, 1996 a transsexual woman facing her final doubts prior to her own surgery made a simple post on Genderline. She asked if you only had a year to live, would you still spend it recovering from SRS? (sexual reassignment surgery) My own answer to that question forced me to finally face once and for all that I was a transsexual, something I already knew down deep,. That was the lowest day of my life. I now mark that day as the end of my old life and the beginning of my new one. That day I started taking herbal estrogens. That day I set the wheels in motion to change my entire life with my eyes open. That was the first time I realized that I was either going to live as Cathy the rest of my life or die.
From that low point I went up. Slowly I learned to throw off my shame and fear of ridicule for being transgendered. I went back and re-studied the works of ancient history and the beginnings of magick and found hidden there the knowledge that I was part of a long proud history of transsexual priestesses. I took my first time out of state trip as Cathy that June to visit a transsexual sister who also was a cabinetmaker and who was the one there for me that terrible long day in March via the phone. I learned about the Standards of Care for transsexuals and faced the fact that I was going to have to go to a therapist in order to get the "real" thing, real estrogens.
I have no particular love of therapists. I view most of them as more screwed up than the general population and generally trust them as far as they can physically be thrown. I grew up on psychology textbooks, that having been my father's major in college and a minor of my own. I had cut my teeth on the subject of transsexuality with Dr. Benjamin's book in the early seventies and the works of Stroller, Green and Money after that. I now knew that Green, Money and Stroller didn't have a clue and soon learned that Money was also intellectually bankrupt as well. I was horrified at the idea of having to put myself in the hands of people like this.
Faced with the necessity of following the Standards of Control, I asked Kori for the number of the Central Ohio Gender Dysphoria Association aka Meral Crane. I screwed up the courage to call and after a five second phone conversation, was sent the "information" package.
Another rude awaking. Hundreds of dollars in pre-acceptance fee with no guarantee of acceptance, monthly meeting fees, a contract that you'd never bitch about having passed control of your transition over to her and months and months of therapy before hormones. A few minutes with a calculator showed me at least six months and $1500 bucks minimum before I'd be allowed to get hormones. My business was failing and I was barely making enough to keep my family going. I was told by Kori in no uncertain terms that only Ms. Crane's program would lead to hormones and surgery in central Ohio. I studied the Standards of Control and learned that was an out and out lie.
I have been a loner most of my life. I was self-employed without any of the usual "safely net" that most americans take for granted such as unemployment and worker's compensation. I was used to striking out on my own when I had too. For these reasons I decided to find my own therapist and go the route my own way without the program. I made several calls and set up an appointment with a therapist who I was told had some experience with transgendered clients. I met a wonderful woman named Marty Keyes who listened patiently to my initial session where I told her straight out that I didn't want therapy, I wanted hormones, but if I had to spend money I couldn't afford, I wanted my money's worth. She agreed.
I started therapy, reluctantly agreed to an MMPI when Marty's boss insisted on it and learned to my surprise that she was an expert on transsexuality who had recently moved back to central Ohio and hadn't expected to have another transsexual client, let alone have one just walk in like I did. Kori continued to push Ms. Crane's group at me. I finally wrote a very pointed email outlining my objections to that group.
October of that year found me starting estrogen replacement therapy with the same doctor Ms. Cranes transies went to and informally thrust into leadership of the Crystal Club. I dragged Sarah Fox into leadership as the newsletter editor with me. Suddenly I was community leader. Kori called me and invited me to the gender group's Christmas party. I thought about it and wanting contact with other transsexuals decided to say yes when I was called back and told that Meral Crane had decided that my presence would possibly upset the "real" transsexuals. That is an exact quote. The party in question was not an "official" group one, but as I was to learn, Meral's word was law anyway.
I was told by Luanne, who was still the screening officer, that the club always invited Meral to it's Christmas party. I did so in spite of the insult I had just received. The night of the Christmas party I spent hours working on my hair. My hair is all my own and the one thing about myself that I'm really happy with. I met Ms. Crane at the party and we had a short conversation during the party. She seemed quite nice personally and I felt that was that. I explained that I was seeing another therapist and was on hormone therapy as well. I thought that was the end of that. I was wrong.
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