O Pioneers! Houston’s transgender community leads the way nationwide in the fight for TG rights by D.L. Groover

They are feared. Reviled. Ridiculed. AM-talk radio hosts brand them "freaks of nature" and "mutilations." They have lost family, friends, jobs. They are denounced from the pulpit. They are murdered.

They spend their life’s savings on arduous medical procedures and lengthy therapy sessions so they can find happiness. All they want is to find themselves. They are the transgenders, and in their determined struggle, they have changed our Houston community—for the better.

Houston is amazing in that we have perhaps the most effective and unified transgender community in the country. Galveston’s John Sealy Hospital and Rosenberg Clinic, formerly affiliated with the University of Texas Medical Branch, have long been the South’s preeminent sex-reassignment sites. Many prominent leaders in the national transgender community hail from the Bayou City.

We boast of Phyllis Frye (see "The Mother of Us All"), the transgendered lawyer who over 20 years ago, through personality and perseverance, forced the successful repeal of Houston’s ridiculous crossdressing ordinance. Frye has led transgender legal battles across the nation for decades and made national headlines in 2000 when she represented Christie Lee Littleton of San Antonio in her medical malpractice suit. Littleton’s suit was thrown out when the Texas court of appeals found her marriage to her husband null and void because Littleton had been born with that dangling Y chromosome.

Houston boasts of Vanessa Edwards Foster, crusading director of the National Transgender Advocacy Coalition, which sends out information on TG topics nationwide, and organizes an annual Capital Hill lobby day. (The next is May 13.) Houston boasts of Sarah DePalma, who has been holding HRC’s Elizabeth Birch’s feet to the fire about the HRC’s non-inclusion of transgenders in its campaigning for ENDA (see "Speaking Truth to the Powerful HRC"). Houston boasts of Dr. Peggy Rudd, the wife of a crossdresser, who has written My Husband Wears My Clothes, and Crossdressing with Dignity, both of which have been reprinted multiple times. The Houston area boasts of the first transgendered shelter in the country (see "Where the Need Is Greatest" ), led by Cristian Williams. Houston TG groups have staged a well-organized lobby day in Austin every two years for the past 12 years. These lobby days aren’t attended by just five or six diehard activists, but numbered 54 people last year.

Through the work of vocal TG leaders and such unrelenting allies as Ray Hill, the last three years have seen "transgender" added to the names and mission statements of many of our Houston community groups; "gay and lesbian" has been replaced by "GLBT," or just plain "queer." We now have the Greater Houston GLBT Chamber of Commerce. The GLBT Pride Parade. The 20-year-old "Lesbian & Gay Voices" on KPFT has become "Queer Voices." When Mayor Lee Brown signed the antidiscrimination ordinance in July 2001 stipulating that city employees were protected from discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, "gender orientation" (i.e. being transgender) was included without fanfare or pickets. And that prior January, when Janine Brunjes was appointed liaison to our community, she automatically called herself the mayor’s GLBT liaison, no further discussion needed.

Like most oppressed groups, transgender communities often have a tendency to splinter and fight among themselves. Those affluent enough to afford the various expensive procedures versus those without money. Crossdressers versus transsexuals. Gay versus straight. Houston was no different. But then 10 years ago, the many TG groups (see "TG Alphabet Soup") coalesced in the realization that their strength in the future lay in working together. The result: the Unity Banquet, founded by Peggy Rudd and Rene Fenner and celebrating its 10th year this April 20. This year, seven major-league corporations—including IBM and Shell Oil—have signed on as sponsors. The Unity Committee—which oversees the banquet and Unity Month (in March, in which all the TG groups attended each others’ meetings) and other combined TG projects such as participation in the Pride Parade and Empower—can be justly proud in announcing a sellout, a first for them—and a month in advance of the event. The Unity Banquet is unique, probably throughout the world. No other city can boast of celebrating all their transgender groups with such a show of solidarity.

"Houston has really been a cutting-edge community," says Brenda Thomas, treasurer of the Unity Banquet. Thomas is the leader of HIV outreach to the transgender community, and has been leading her 12-Step-style Helping Transgenders Anonymous for 11 years. "We just do things here. ‘Let’s do it,’ we say, and away we go.

"There’s so much talent in Houston. I really see the Houston groups stepping to the forefront and setting a pattern in terms of services for transgender people. I look for the community to go from a visible population of a couple hundred to the thousands. We’ve gotten a lot of acceptance in Houston. It hasn’t been easy; we’ve worked for it."

The Unity Banquet is both symbol and celebration. The reality can be seen in the many actions and accomplishments—and the strong leaders—that this growing community has produced in these 10 years.

Transgenders encompass the entire spectrum, from straight to gay, butch to femme, bi to intersex. They are MTFs (Male to Female), FTMs (Female to Male), drag kings and queens, crossdressers, cross-livers, androgynes, third-sexers, two-spirited, and gender blenders. They are post-op, pre-op, no-op.

They are among us every day, and have existed since the self-emasculated priests of Cybele (the "Great Mother" of Rome), the honored berdache of North America, and the hijra of India. This very magazine and this writer would not exist as we now are had it not been for the transgenders’ violent and proud protests against constant police harassment at the Stonewall, a drag bar in NYC’s Greenwich Village, which began the gay rights movement on a steamy June evening in 1969.

Transgenders are still fighting. Their non-inclusion in the federal Employment Non-Discrimination Act (ENDA), jointly sponsored by Representative Chris Shays (R-Connecticut) and Senator Edward Kennedy (D-Massachusetts), has been marked by ugly protests and remains stalled in the Senate since October 11.

Below are brief profiles from the technicolor kaleidoscope that is the Houston transgender community. Some are straight, some gay. They have fought for personal expression, and all extol the absolute liberation in opening those damned musty closets and stepping out into the health of society’s sun.

Corporate Activist

At 40, he was on his fourth marriage. He worked at Shell Oil’s Deer Park chemical plant. He had two children. The push to confirm, hellbent to be macho, battled intense feelings buried within since he was four. Mid-life crisis set in with a vengeance. Frustrated and depressed, he could no longer live with himself and knew what he had to do. There would be no turning back. He started hormone therapy and, two years ago, transitioned on the job. Since then, nothing has been the same for Sara Rook. Now a senior technical associate with Shell International, she works in research and development all over the world. Her children live with her and have themselves counseled children of trans parents.

"You’ll see them at the Unity Banquet, " she beams. "They come to everything."

Gender-reassignment surgery is definitely in the future, perhaps as soon as five months. For the first time, Sara Rook feels complete.

Through the auspices of Shell’s corporate diversity office (see interview with Shell CEO Steve Miller, "The CEO That Could"), Rook presents her transition story to Fortune 500 companies, human resources representatives, and diversity consultants. She does this good work as a volunteer and on her own time. Two weeks after Aetna Insurance attended one of her seminars, the company added gender identity to their internal policies.

Corporate America is catching up. Apple, Kodak, NCR, American Airlines, Verizon, and Xerox have seen the gender-friendly profitability for such all-inclusive practices. (The irony is that while Shell sends Rook to trumpet gender inclusiveness, the company has not implemented such a policy for its own workers. It’s only a matter of time, Rook says with confidence.)

"I’ve worked for Shell 14 years, two years as a woman and 12 years as a man," Rook says. "Companies realize that the baby boomers are gone. The job market’s drying up. In the next 10 years there’s not going to be a hell of a lot of qualified people, and the diverse companies are the ones that’ll hang on to the best employees. That’s just a fact. The Exxons of the world are going to be in a world of hurt. A lot of transgender people are out there, and they quit their jobs. There are companies losing good people because they don’t have gender identity [policies]."

Co-chair of the Unity Committee, Rook and the other committee members are "beside themselves" at the success of their banquet.

"More and more of us are becoming less afraid to be out, " says this no-nonsense Houston native. "Although it’s still the most closeted community in the world, I have no qualms about saying. There are literally hundreds and hundreds of us around, but you don’t know it. The typical transsexual transitions, quits his or her job, has the surgery, moves to another city, and starts a new life. You don’t know they’re there.

"I’ve done good in my transition. I guess I’m one of the exceptions. It’s sad that so many of us get fired and lose homes. I’ve been very lucky and fortunate that my life has gone nowhere but up since I transitioned."

Hellbaby

A senior majoring in French at the University of St. Thomas, Randy, 21, is the next generation of TG. Post gen-X, s/he (Randy's preferred pronoun) is smart, clever, and knows enough to know s/he doesn’t know everything. Randy is part of her drag king persona, Randyman Dragon. A priest at the school calls him "hellbaby." (For this article, we’ll alternate "him" and "her," since grammar is still so inadequate for so many of our modern lives, and Randy would think it cool.) S/he’s been out in the community for one and a half years.

When s/he read about the formation of STAG last year, the FTM support group founded by Troy Ham, s/he knew s/he had found kindred spirits.

"I didn’t have a word to describe myself, and when I finally figured out what it was, Hey, cool, there are more people like me. I was looking for gender-variant people who weren’t MTF necessarily, but who were younger. I had been to a couple of conventions—I went to the Drag King Extravaganza in Columbus and the FTM International Conference in Seattle—but there were no organizations in Houston. The minute I found STAG, I was like, Oh, my God, this is awesome.

"I’m still in that whole process of defining myself. It’s kind of weird, because I’m not like a real transsexual or something, nor will I probably ever be. I’m just . . . here. I shift in between stuff. I use my real name and ‘Randy’ interchangeably. I use pronouns interchangeably, whatever I feel like being."

S/he prefers the word "hermaphrodite" to describe herself. Although some of his friends don’t like the term, s/he likes the sound of the word.

"I’m an intersex person, and so technically I don’t have a sexuality. I can’t be gay or straight, because I’m neither gender. I prefer the H word. I generally define myself as gender-variant, because you raise less eyebrows that way. Sometimes, I feel like the intersex people are the lowest on the whole scene. A gender-variant person is very difficult to comprehend, even for me!

"My mom kind of knows. We were in K-Mart and I was buying supplies for one of my drag shows. I had to get a back brace for a chest binder and had to get a jockstrap so I could do my packing. I’m totally embarrassed to do this. We’re in the sports section and I’m very discreetly trying to find what sizes. I guess they’re measured by penis size, or whatever. I was trying to find waist size. My mom is like, Hurry up, hurry up. I’m walking past the aisles, glancing, not lingering too long in case anyone sees me. Mom brings over a sales assistant. ‘This is my daughter, can you help her find a jockstrap?’ I was so mortified, I just grabbed the first one and ran. Then the cashier saw all this bizarre stuff—back brace, tight sports bras, and the jockstrap—she looked at me and then at my mom. And mom said, ‘Yes, it’s all for my daughter.’ It was awful. That’s the story of my life."

Randy’s well aware that a gay student union is out of the question at a Catholic private school because of their no-tolerance views on homosexuality, and their exemption from federal discrimination laws. S/he takes this in stride.

"The Catholic church has every right to believe that. I could spend all my time fighting to change the pope’s mind, or I can focus on what I can do. But there’s no hard feelings. I don’t need to have an organization to validate myself. I’m happy with who I am."

S/he suddenly laughs. "By the way, there’s an F on my driver’s license. It doesn’t stand for female, it stands for Fabulous!"

Oh, I'm Just Ordinary

Wendy Russell, with her soft speaking voice, makes you listen. She moved to Houston 13 years ago from Denver to take a job in the oil and gas industry. A member of TATS and HGTA, she’s been in the community five years. She’s been crossdressing in public 30 years.

Married for 24 years, and now in the process of divorcing, she and his wife waited until their daughters had grown up before separating. Wendy plans to have reassignment surgery.

"I felt a strong obligation to go ahead and make sure they were taken care of. It’s held me back and I’ve paid a huge emotional price for it over the years. But unlike a lot of members in our community, I’ve managed to have a career that has afforded me some degree of security in the future. A lot of people don’t have that. But it’s been difficult. It came to a point where I just couldn’t bear to face it any more.

"My daughters are embarrassed about it with their friends, of course. They didn’t know for most of the time. That was one of the agreements that my wife and I had, to keep it from them for developmental and social reasons. In some ways, it’s not unlike the gay community in the secretiveness of it. People don’t understand. It’s not really the sex thing, at all. It’s in the head, not between the legs.

"Men don’t understand why MTF transsexual or transgendered people would want to be anything other than male. It’s an educational process that people have to go through to understand where we’re coming from."

As more companies add gender identity to their mission statements, Wendy foresees positive changes in society, but education is still the key for transgender success.

"Since there are so few of us in society, especially out in public, we tend to be more of the sensationalism, which is good and bad. But then you see things like The Education of Max Bickford—they have a transsexual on the show as a regular character and it’s presented in a very good light. People are getting used to us. The fact is that we’re not strange people, we’re just different people, trying to live our lives as productive citizens and hold down regular jobs.

"There’re still homophobic people out there; I work with some, and it’s hard to get them even to realize they’re homophobic. But I think it’s improving. That’s what a lot of our outreach-type groups are doing. I’ve been up to Austin twice myself lobbying for TGAIN. What was good is that we were out in public and talking to people who had never met a transgender person before. We were showing a different face to what they’ve seen on daytime TV.

"We try to take care of our own and help others out, but we don’t want to be isolated because you just create a larger closet for yourself. The idea is to fully transition and move back into society. I can’t hide who I was, and I won’t deny those experiences. But at the same time, it’s not what I want to be or present myself as in the future, either."

Gun-Totin’ Airplane Mama

Brandi Williams is a pistol; a pink one now that she’s bought her Colt 45 and joined the GLBT group whose motto is Armed Gays Don’t Get Bashed. She tells it like it is with a plainspoken candor that earns her accolades as a facilitator for HTGA (and before that with Tri-Ess). She’s a looker, too, a beautiful blond with a zest for life, now that she’s finally found her own.

For two decades she was Tim, the aircraft mechanic. Now she’s Brandi, who has successfully transitioned on the job at Southwest Airlines. She still crawls all over the airplanes scheduled for inspection.

"There’s one guy on the crew who still won’t call me Brandi; he just calls me Williams. Every once in a while people slip, of course—it’s normal—and say ‘he.’ I don’t hear Tim anymore, but I still hear the wrong pronoun."

She takes these lapses, intentional or not, with comic resignation and great inner strength.

"The best way to put it, as some of the girls at work said, ‘You must have a lot of balls.’ Yes, I do have a lot of balls—they’re small tiny balls now because of the hormones—but I have had to have a lot of balls. When I divorced my kids’ mom and moved out, I was kind of afraid to do that because always in the back of my mind, I knew there was gonna be no stopping me."

She hasn’t slowed down. Her teenage children still don’t completely understand what happened—two divorces and a new mom later—but they’re with her and love her unconditionally. Brandi is planning sexual reassignment surgery in 2003 after daughter Rebecca graduates from high school.

"Seven or eight years ago, I was still trying to fit in. To do that, a lot of crossdressers or wannabe transsexuals deny it, just like in the gay community. And what to you do? You do the opposite. You go to the extremes. You try to be real macho, you grow a beard, then shave it off, then immediately grow it back. Always fighting that inner battle just wears you down. You feel so weird, you can’t identify with either gender, [you’re] in limbo. And then you realize you’re not the only one."

Tri-Ess, the national support group for heterosexual crossdressers, was Brandi’s first contact with other TGs, and she arrived at the very beginning of the Houston chapter. The friendships forged in those early years have only grown stronger. She was facilitator of the local chapter from ’95 to ’99, but she realized that what she truly wanted was something this support group couldn’t give her. If she was transsexual, she had to move on.

"I go to the HGTA meeting for others who don’t know what they’re doing, like the parent crossdresser with kids. ‘I’m moving out, I’m fed up with the wife.’ I try to help them through it or jump on their shit. No, you don’t do that. You can always get another wife, another lover, significant other, but you can’t get other kids. They’re yours. You got to take care of them first. And before you can take care of them, you got to take care of you. That’s one of my high horses."

The Doctor from Galveston

Articulate, intelligent, and composed, Dr. Collier Cole is the embodiment of the Rosenberg Clinic, Galveston’s gender treatment program, which is generally regarded as the best TG clinic in the South. Founded in 1976 as part of the University of Texas Medical Branch, the clinic expanded into the private sector in 1980, where the staff shares duties and a few are full-time faculty at UTMB.

"I’m a clinical professor in the department of psychiatry at UTMB," explained Cole, "but then several of us do our clinical work in private practice. It’s sort of a combined Rosenberg Clinic/UTMB program. We have approximately half a dozen professionals who have been involved with our team now for over 20 years, and these include psychiatrists, psychologists, surgeons, endocrinologists, Ob-Gyn surgeons. We offer a full range of services to the transgender community, including counseling, hormone therapy, surgery, referrals for those who need speech therapy assistance, and legal advice.

"More and more transgender folks are coming out of the closet to seek their new identity and establish themselves. Certainly, a lot of the pioneers, so to speak, the old-timers that did this back in the ’70s, helped clear the road. I think many of the self-help groups over the years, such as GCTC, TATS, and CATS, and all the crossdresser groups, have provided invaluable self-esteem and support to those coming out of the closet. I think, too, there’s better public understanding. The Houston Chronicle had an article last year [that reported] where even business today is less concerned with people who are transsexual, provided they know how to do their job. I think slowly things are changing, but there are still problems."

Sex-reassignment surgery is not cheap. It can run anywhere from $20,000 to $30,000 in the U.S., says Cole. Most insurance companies do not cover it and list gender-related procedures, including hormone treatment, in the exclusion section of the policy. To assuage such heavy costs and the years of saving, many opt for surgery in Canada or overseas, especially in Thailand. Always mindful of the patient, Dr. Cole does not discourage foreign travel, and says that Asian surgery is "very, very good."

When the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association formed in Minneapolis in 1980, named after the premier 20th-century patron saint of transgender researchers, quality control in gender reassignment was finally established, Cole explained. Until its universally accepted guidelines, "Standards of Care," were introduced, there were no rules for what was then called the treatment of gender identity disorder.

"You could go to one place and get surgery the next day; another place would say [wait] two years; one place three months," said Dr. Cole. "These standards have really set a guideline and evolved over the years and, I think, are much more consumer-friendly now. The whole association is much more sensitive to the needs of the patient. By legitimatizing this in terms of the medical approach, we hope that more insurance companies can fall in line and more courts can recognize this as being a legitimate condition.

"I’m just so glad what I’ve seen over the years. A lot of the self-help organizations that tended to be sort of in their own corners and sometimes at cross purposes have finally come together and have really united under that transgender umbrella. Everybody has realized perhaps from the history of the gay and lesbian movement to unify and pull for the same cause. They come together and recognize, Hey, we’re all about the same thing. That’s been very unique and the Unity Banquet is exceptional."

What a dull place our community would be without the transgenders. Hard-working, proud, savvy, resilient, strong —their admirable traits enhance our neighborhood and inspire us. They are our friends, lovers, moms, and dads. They are family. They were there at the birth of the gay rights movement—hell, they delivered the baby!—and for that we are eternally grateful. Their inclusion is a given. They are us.

If you have any comments about this article, please email them to letters@outsmartmagazine.com.