TS/TV/CD Love Blog - Because Of Your Uniqueness

The following is an exert from an article by Angela Cara Pancrazio

Meet Donna Rose, a former jock who could bench press 300 pounds, who sometimes feels invisible as a woman.

When David Rosen became Donna Rose, the people in charge of the human resources department at her company didn’t know what to think. Nor did her colleagues. Lots has changed since then.

Corporations across the country are working to extend workplace protections to transgender employees, and Donna often shares her personal story to help managers understand the new challenges that many know nothing about. Transgender workers are becoming more visible at all employment levels. While companies don’t keep such statistics, it is estimated that 1,000 people seek sexual-reassignment surgery every year and as many as 40,000 postoperative transsexuals are living in the United States. Experts believe there are at least three to five times as many transsexuals who don’t have surgery.

In a hot pink floral dress, Donna Rose is a commanding presence as she stands in front of a room filled with dozens of managers and human-resources leaders with Eastman Kodak Co. She has her laptop queued up, filled with pictures that illustrate the message she has been asked to deliver to the Fortune 500 company.

When Donna was growing up as David, or Dave as everyone called him, inside she wasn’t sure what she was. She thought there was no one else like her. It was a lonely existence, trying to find others like herself who couldn’t understand what was going on inside. There were no resources. By personalizing her story to audiences across the country, she is doing for others what would have helped her decades ago.

Donna was born David Guy Rosen on Feb. 22, 1959. The first son of a theoretical biophysicist and a nurse, David never failed to meet expectations. As a child and then a teenager, he excelled as an athlete.

He later started a career in the booming high-tech industry and married. A son soon followed.

Then, 40 years after living his life as a man, David decided he could no longer ignore the gender issues that he had done his best to hide and repress since his youth. He began to embark upon the path that would lead him to Donna, his true self.

Donna began by bearing witness on her own life. She captured it all in her journal, which was eventually published as a memoir, Wrapped in Blue. Numerous speaking engagements followed the publication of the book, which she inscribed with one of her favorite quotations from the French Nobel Prize author Andre Gide:

“It is better to be hated for what you are than loved for what you are not.”

She could have lived her life as a female, as a successful manager for a leading high-tech company, keeping her identity as a postoperative male-to-female transsexual a secret. Instead, after enduring so much physical and emotional pain, she feels a deep sense of obligation to demystify transsexualism.

Donna gets many of the same questions. When did you know? When did you really know something was wrong?

Early, she says. She knew something more powerful was going on inside her, something more than typical adolescence.

As Dave’s voice became deeper, as the hair on his body began to grow, his physical transformation to manhood did not match how he felt on the inside. If he could have shaved the hair growing on his legs, he would have. If his mother had allowed him to dress as a girl for Halloween, he would have. By 13, his confusion about his gender seemed inescapable. At the same time he was playing football and hockey and building World War II airplanes, Dave began waking up in the middle of the night and tiptoeing into the bathroom to put on his mother’s makeup.

By the time he posed for the high school prom picture, like most teenage boys he had a girlfriend. In high school and college, there were two seasons for David: wrestling season and getting ready for wrestling season. Wrestling embodied how he looked at life: Everything was a competition, and he was out to win. By letting out his aggression on the wrestling mat, he could conquer what he was suppressing beneath his masculine exterior.

It was a foolproof disguise.

None of his family members or close friends knew of the struggle raging inside the young man posing in his back yard, wearing a sleeveless undershirt to show off his beefcake biceps and chest. Or the young, bearded husband in the following photograph, lying on a bed, bouncing his baby boy on his chest.

Dave met his future wife at Syracuse University. Within six months they were engaged. They married two years later in 1981. Dave was 22. He became a father at 26. He worked hard to be Dave, the successful husband and father.

His sister, Judy, thought Dave had so much machismo it seemed as if he had testosterone poisoning.

Dave was aggressive, fearless, ultra-conservative and homophobic. To his brother, Jay, Dave was a very what’s-in-it-for-me, self-centered, profit-driven, conscious-of-appearances kind of man. He had the two-story colonial house in the upscale Rochester suburb of Pittsford, a Corvette and a boat. Judy bought him one of those bumper stickers that read: He who has the most toys wins.

But Dave continued to battle his demons, trying to fight what he thought was wrong and sick.

About the time his son, Andrew, turned 1, Dave needed to find out if anyone else felt like he did. This was in the old days, the mid-1980s, before the Internet. But he remembered reading something about gender research at Stanford University. He called, and they steered him to a New Jersey psychologist.

He needed someone to validate his feelings or tell him he was wrong. He had spent his whole life trying to prove to himself that “it” wasn’t true. But his feminine side never left him. Each day, he saved money from lunch so the cash wouldn’t be missed at home. When he had enough for a ticket, he flew to meet the doctor and returned at the end of the day as if he had been at work.

The doctor agreed with Dave’s self-diagnosis, that he was someone who strongly felt that he might be the opposite sex - or transsexual. The medical diagnosis is gender dysphoria. But he cautioned Dave. Dave would have to be ready to risk everything he knew and loved. The road is hard, he said. People lose their spouses. They face discrimination everywhere, where they live, where they work, with their families, friends and society as a whole.

The fear of rejection and loss is so great that many transsexuals decide to lead double lives.

Dave’s greatest source of pain was hiding it from his wife. For his own sanity, he needed to tell her something. He gathered the courage to tell her one night in bed. He told her that he had a very strong feminine side to his personality. He told her that a part of his mind was feminine in thoughts and needs. Her response, which is typical of spouses in this situation, was to ask whether he was gay. But transsexualism is not about sexual behavior or sexual orientation. It’s about gender identity. For transsexuals, they have an overwhelming awareness that their mind and body do not match. Dave’s wife made it clear that she didn’t want to know anything about his feminine side.

He felt like an imposter. Dave found a way to let the steam out when he joined a local transgender support group he spotted in an alternative newspaper. People in the group told him about a makeup studio in Rochester. The pressure inside Dave came in waves. There were times that Dave didn’t give “Donna” a second thought. But every couple of months, he felt as if he would explode if he didn’t let his feelings out. For nearly a decade, Dave visited the studio during his lunch break. That was it. No one knew. Only Dave and the makeup artist. She accepted him.

For one hour, every couple of months, Dave expressed his feminine side. He hot a fresh start by moving to Scottsdale, Arizonat. He needed to prove to himself that his life was going to be better. His goal wasn’t to become a woman. His goal was to become himself.

The Internet opened up a whole new world. Dave discovered there were a lot of people like him. He found a local psychologist who specialized in gender issues. He was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, again. This time, he began taking hormones. In the Valley, Dave found a transgender support group.

First, he picked out his new name. He wanted to keep the same initials. He tried a few names like Diane, Debbie and Denise. But they didn’t seem to fit. Donna seemed to imply a certain strength. Donna also means “lady.” For a year, this was Donna: a shoulder-length wig, a little bit of makeup, a fluffy sweater tucked into a pair of jeans. Donna lived folded up in a bag in Dave’s desk drawer at work.

Dave hid Donna so well that his wife didn’t know. His close friends and neighbors, Sally and Ray Williams, had no inkling. They thought Dave and his wife were the perfect couple.

The couples lived so close they could pass a football between the fences that separated their north Scottsdale homes. They enjoyed watching Dave’s favorite team, the Buffalo Bills, play Ray’s favorite team, the New England Patriots. They partied together in the cul-de-sac. Every year at Christmas, Dave would hide his son’s presents at Sally and Ray’s house. Ray always admired how Dave could pick out such wonderful presents for his wife. Ray envied Dave. He’d tell Dave: “You’re making me look bad.”

Dave continued with the hormone-replacement therapy and meeting with his psychologist during lunch. Once again, his psychologist prepared him for the loss that most transsexuals experience. You could lose everyone, the psychologist warned.

He could never seem to find the right words to tell his wife. He had tried once, nearly a decade earlier. This time he knew that once he spoke the words, he could never “unspeak” them.

He followed the gender-change process quietly, trying to figure out if he wanted to live his life as a woman. Then it got too expensive to hide. When his wife found a check for $3,000 he had written out of their brokerage account, she wanted to know where it had gone. He told her. It was for the hormone therapy. She wanted her husband back. But Dave couldn’t come back. He moved out.

Dave was getting ready to become Donna at work. His workplace hired a human-resources consultant to talk to Dave’s coworkers. He reshaped his nose and had a breast augmentation. But the ball was rolling too fast. Dave panicked. He had been married 17 years. He missed his home life. He told his workplace to hold off in telling employees. He had his breast augmentation reversed. He asked his wife if he could come home. He assured her he was through with his self-discovery. She welcomed him with open arms.

By moving back home, Dave hoped that he and his wife could integrate a new Dave into their lives. His wife wanted the old Dave. But Dave couldn’t put “Donna” away. After a few weeks, Dave moved out again and started to transition to Donna full time. But the “Donna-in-the-desk-drawer look” mortified Dave. No matter what he did, the estrogen, another breast augmentation, the hundreds of hours of electrolysis, hiring a coach to unlearn masculine ways of walking and talking, when he looked in the mirror, he still saw Dave.

He looked like a man dressing up as a woman.

If Dave had to live looking like this out in public and at work for a year before he was allowed to have sexual-reassignment surgery, he wouldn’t make it. So before returning to work as Donna, Dave took one more step. He changed his face.

This is what people see first, he thought. This is what people judge you on. It took 13 hours for a San Francisco surgeon who specializes in feminizing faces to peel the skin off Dave’s face, reduce his brow bone, shorten his chin and shave his Adam’s apple. With the facial feminization surgery there would be no turning back. He was now vulnerable. He was now dependent. He needed people. And being needy was a scary thing for Dave.

“I still look back on those days and wonder how or where I found the courage to walk in that day because I don’t think anyone of us can understand how terrifying it can be.”

Dave and his wife divorced. Andy was 13. He accepted the news that his father wanted to be a woman, but when he actually saw Donna, he had a difficult time. The two didn’t see or speak to each other for a year.

Donna’s transition at work continued to be awkward. Her friends stopped inviting her to lunch. She was asked to quit the office fantasy football league. Her co-workers were uncomfortable. Donna wasn’t comfortable with their discomfort.

Donna underwent extensive facial feminization surgery to reshape the masculine features of her skull and face, hundreds of hours of painful electrolysis, intensive hormone-replacement therapy, voice therapy and sexual-reassignment surgery. She had her sexual-reassignment surgery in Neenah, Wis., with Dr. Eugene Schrang, one of the top reassignment surgeons. It cost approximately $30,000. When Donna woke up after surgery, her mother waited with a pack of pink bubble gum cigars to celebrate her rebirth. She moved to Texas to work at Dell Inc. and start a new life. Fifteen-year-old Andy decided to join her.

Donna wanted to live anonymously. She wanted to be the co-worker you have lunch with or the woman who lives next door with the teenage son.

People like her are losing their jobs, their homes and their families just because they’re revealing something about themselves. They are discriminated against. Ridiculed. They’re victims of hate crimes. In the worst-case scenarios, they are getting killed. She couldn’t emphasize enough how critical it is to be supportive, that when a transsexual decides to begin living as the other gender at work, a good transition is when no one dies.

Read Donna Rose’s story……

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