Speaker 1: Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. So
Speaker 1: let's let me paint a scene for you. Say it's four,
Speaker 1: I'm fifteen or sixteen years old, and everyone's gone out
Speaker 1: for the night. And there I am, this slender, feminine
Speaker 1: creature with shoulder length blonde hair, and I'm standing at
Speaker 1: a high window in my parents haunted house, big old, drafty,
Speaker 1: creepy house in what was once the country around Philadelphia.
Speaker 1: And I'm standing in a window and I'm looking down
Speaker 1: and I watched the pale lights of my sister, who's
Speaker 1: the last person to leave the house. She drives off
Speaker 1: on the Volkswagen. Now I'm alone in this house and
Speaker 1: I'm looking at the clock. Let's say it's so now
Speaker 1: I've got a couple of hours. So we sweep down
Speaker 1: the creaking steps from the third floor, and I grab
Speaker 1: a dress and all the kind of body patting that
Speaker 1: I'm going to need, and some pantios and some makeup,
Speaker 1: and you put your clothes on quick, and then you
Speaker 1: kind of stand before the mirror and you do your
Speaker 1: makeup and you look in the mirror and you know,
Speaker 1: I mean I was. I was a very feminine looking person,
Speaker 1: even when I wasn't on farm, and you know, for
Speaker 1: all the world there's a relatively normal looking and I
Speaker 1: know normal is a charged words, so maybe I should
Speaker 1: be careful. But there I am. If i'd left the house,
Speaker 1: which I would never have done that I've left no house,
Speaker 1: maybe you wouldn't have looked twice at me, like there's
Speaker 1: some hippie girl, you know. And I'm just kind of
Speaker 1: looking in the mirror with the sense of both profound
Speaker 1: joy because there's the person that I am. There is
Speaker 1: the girl that has lived in my heart but I
Speaker 1: never get to see except when no one is home,
Speaker 1: but also profound sorrow because I know I can't be
Speaker 1: this person, because I know I can't live in the
Speaker 1: world as myself. That's Jennifer Finney Boylan, writer, professor, transactivist,
Speaker 1: author most recently of Good Boy, My Life in Seven Dogs,
Speaker 1: as well as the classic memoir She's Not There. Jenny's
Speaker 1: is a story of the deepest kind of secret, the
Speaker 1: kind that we hold in a wordless place, the kind
Speaker 1: that will not let go of us, the kind that
Speaker 1: will force its way out from its depths until we
Speaker 1: release it, and when we release it, it finally releases us.
Speaker 1: I'm Danny Shapiro, And this is family secret. It's the
Speaker 1: secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep
Speaker 1: from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. It's
Speaker 1: like I've got the nuclear codes here and here it is.
Speaker 1: Here's the way. If I wanted to, I could blow
Speaker 1: up my life. All I'd have to do with you
Speaker 1: to walk outside, and I'm knowing that, you know, my
Speaker 1: parents are coming back from their dinner with their friends.
Speaker 1: My sister might come back. Anything could happen. Maybe my
Speaker 1: friends are going to stop by without telling me. Are
Speaker 1: all the doors in the house locked? They might not be.
Speaker 1: And sometimes people would come home and I have to,
Speaker 1: you know, do a quick retreat. But on this particular night,
Speaker 1: let's just say, when all is said and done, they
Speaker 1: put everything back, put the earrings back in the mother's
Speaker 1: jewelry box, put the clothes back on the hangars where
Speaker 1: they're supposed to come from. Then I hear the car
Speaker 1: coming in in the driveway, and my mother comes up
Speaker 1: the stairs, and of course I've I've now washed off
Speaker 1: the neckup, and I've done everything I have to do
Speaker 1: to look like myself again, as if you know, nothing
Speaker 1: has happened. And mom comes in, Did you have a
Speaker 1: nice night here? Yeah? What did you do? Well? I
Speaker 1: watched Carol Burnett show. Okay, we'll see you in the morning,
Speaker 1: and that was my reality. You know that I've had
Speaker 1: this just unbelievably powerful, both joyful and tragic experience alone
Speaker 1: in the creepy old house, and then everything would have
Speaker 1: to get restored, like nothing had happened to hide the
Speaker 1: scene of the crime, you know, And I'd wonder, was
Speaker 1: this dress facing this way or that way on the hangar?
Speaker 1: Will anyone know that I moved these ear rings? Describe
Speaker 1: the landscape of your childhood, Well, I grew up in
Speaker 1: rural Pennsylvania and it was a place where a engle
Speaker 1: road had been carved through a pretty deep pine forest,
Speaker 1: and our family lived on one side of the road
Speaker 1: and on the other side of the road. We're just
Speaker 1: lots and lots of trees that went on forever and
Speaker 1: through that forest. It sounds very like I don't know,
Speaker 1: Middle Earth or something, but through that forest there was
Speaker 1: an old I guess a cobblestone road from a hundred
Speaker 1: years before, and a lot of old stone houses that
Speaker 1: had been abandoned, and on some levels it was like
Speaker 1: the coolest thing if you were a kid, to be
Speaker 1: able to just you know, get up in the morning
Speaker 1: and disappear into those woods. And sometimes I have the
Speaker 1: dog with me. We had a Dalmatian named Playboy, who
Speaker 1: was like the worst dog in the world, but you know,
Speaker 1: not to me, and so I would disappear into those woods.
Speaker 1: In some ways, it was very much kind of a
Speaker 1: world of imagination. I was left on my own a
Speaker 1: lot as a kid, and there's a way it's funny.
Speaker 1: It's the one way in which I look back on anything. Wow,
Speaker 1: what a kind of a sad childhood, you know, it
Speaker 1: just kind of because I spent most of my time
Speaker 1: kind of alone, wandering around this forest. But on the
Speaker 1: other hand, being alone is just how I liked it.
Speaker 1: It's the place I actually wanted to be. And if
Speaker 1: my parents or my sister had actually asked me to
Speaker 1: take part in their world, which was a really different
Speaker 1: different from mine, it would have been have been nice
Speaker 1: to have been asked, but then I probably would have
Speaker 1: given him the slip. Anyway, Were you and your sister
Speaker 1: close in age, Um, she's about a year and a
Speaker 1: couple of months older than I am, So yeah, we're
Speaker 1: pretty close n Eche, but very different temperament. You know.
Speaker 1: So I was a boy then and and she was not.
Speaker 1: She was a great equestion, She wrote courses. She was
Speaker 1: just brilliant at you know, as a kid. She became
Speaker 1: one of the best writers in all of Pennsylvania. And
Speaker 1: it was you know, it's kind of like the stories
Speaker 1: you hear of people who have a sibling who is
Speaker 1: like a gymnast or an ice skater or I don't know, something,
Speaker 1: I was some kind of obscure athletic talent, you know.
Speaker 1: She like she was what's the thing with the brooms
Speaker 1: in the Olympics curling that that you throw of this
Speaker 1: little tattle and then people like go ice skating in
Speaker 1: front of it and they're like sweeping the ice. Well,
Speaker 1: it was like that. It was like being the sibling
Speaker 1: of a world class curler, and uh, their lives revolved
Speaker 1: around that. From the time I was you know, nine
Speaker 1: or so, the family would often disappear on the weekends
Speaker 1: to go to you know, horse shows wherever. My sister
Speaker 1: would right around in a ring from and um, meanwhile
Speaker 1: I was out in the woods, living in another world.
Speaker 1: My mother was an immigrant to this country. She um
Speaker 1: was born in East Prussia, which is a country they
Speaker 1: don't have anymore. She came to this country in the
Speaker 1: twenties and her English was not very good. She spoke
Speaker 1: German then, and she to the story of coming back
Speaker 1: from church and h she didn't understand. Why did American
Speaker 1: pastors say that your head was going to run over?
Speaker 1: What is her head running over? And it's like what
Speaker 1: he said, Yeah, he said, my cup runneth over. Well,
Speaker 1: for those of you who don't speak German, whause most
Speaker 1: people copped as the German word for head. So when
Speaker 1: she heard mine cup was running over, she was very confused.
Speaker 1: She was the second oldest of seven children. My grandmother,
Speaker 1: her mother was essentially a single mother. My grandfather would
Speaker 1: show up every year or so, get her pregnant, and
Speaker 1: then disappear again. And they lived at this kind of
Speaker 1: unbelievably hard life on what they called a dirt farm
Speaker 1: in New Jersey. And yeah, my mother had this unbelievable
Speaker 1: safe and optimism and buoyancy. And it's always kind of
Speaker 1: amazed that sometimes we think of people who are kind
Speaker 1: of cheerful and buoyant as people who are superficial and
Speaker 1: people who have to them, and yet my mother had
Speaker 1: being experienced about the most shocking poverty and the and
Speaker 1: the most shocking abuse from her um father and other
Speaker 1: men in that farm town, responded to all of that
Speaker 1: with this kind of steely buoyancy. And when we were
Speaker 1: sarcastic teenagers years and years later, decades later, the worst
Speaker 1: thing that anybody could call my mother was Glinda the
Speaker 1: good witch. That was that was their sarcastic name from
Speaker 1: my mother, because she very much had that thing, that
Speaker 1: Billy Burke thing. She was the good witch. My father
Speaker 1: was irish. His father died young also, and his mother remarried,
Speaker 1: each time a whole bunch of times, each time more
Speaker 1: disastrously than the one before, And eventually, by the time
Speaker 1: he was nigh school, he was living with friends back
Speaker 1: So both of my parents grew up essentially with a
Speaker 1: single parent and raised by friends and or by themselves.
Speaker 1: And my mother had said she would never get married.
Speaker 1: She just thought there's too much evil from men. And
Speaker 1: then she met my father. She was I think almost forty,
Speaker 1: she'd become a book buyer. She finally got out of
Speaker 1: New Jersey and invented a life for herself what was
Speaker 1: then called a book buyer back when books were sold
Speaker 1: on the first floor of department stores. She was the
Speaker 1: person who chose what books were for sale. And so
Speaker 1: she had this kind of glamorous publishing career in her
Speaker 1: thirties where she would take the take the train to
Speaker 1: New York City and have lunch with Bennett's surf. And
Speaker 1: she gave all that up when she was I think
Speaker 1: almost forty. My father was almost thirty. But there was
Speaker 1: like eleven years apart from them, and so here's this
Speaker 1: German woman marrying this Irish intellectual. Even now I still
Speaker 1: look at I think, what bizarre marriage. But they just
Speaker 1: a journ each other. Their names were Dick and Hilda Guard.
Speaker 1: I think that's probably important dimension. Also, I remember, as kneeds,
Speaker 1: You're being a little stone lying on the couch one day,
Speaker 1: thinking my parents are named Dick and Hilleguard, like there's
Speaker 1: no hope for me. Like my parents are Dick and
Speaker 1: hillde Guard, like whoa man. They had my sister and
Speaker 1: they had me, and we lived in the country in Pennsylvania.
Speaker 1: My father had wanted to be a medieval historian, but
Speaker 1: you know, there was no money for him to go
Speaker 1: to grad school, so he became a banker, and banking
Speaker 1: never I think quite treated him with the same love
Speaker 1: I think that medieval history would have. But he was
Speaker 1: the kind of quiet, quietly, funny, bookish men, and he
Speaker 1: loved his wife, he loved his kids, and he loved dogs.
Speaker 1: We had one terrible dog after another. So your father
Speaker 1: passed away when you were twenties six, I think, yeah.
Speaker 1: He had he had melanoma. He first got it when
Speaker 1: I was in uh, I think ninth grade, and they
Speaker 1: had a mole taken off and he was okay for
Speaker 1: six or seven years, and then another mole taken off,
Speaker 1: and then he was okay for three years or four years,
Speaker 1: and then uh and then the last time you got it,
Speaker 1: you know, as the saying goes, they didn't get at all.
Speaker 1: And so he was in remission I think three times,
Speaker 1: and then when it finally laid him low, he was
Speaker 1: he was gone within the year. So yeah, it was
Speaker 1: in my twenties. Do you ever think about what it
Speaker 1: would have been like to come out to your father, Um,
Speaker 1: I guess I've thought about that. I think it would
Speaker 1: have gone badly, so I don't think about it a lot. Um.
Speaker 1: He was an open minded man, but He also had
Speaker 1: a very strong sense of the consequences of your decisions
Speaker 1: and if they affect other people. One of his best
Speaker 1: friends from high school who was called my uncle so
Speaker 1: and so, you know when I was a kid, that's
Speaker 1: he was one of those people that you weren't related
Speaker 1: to that you called your uncle. Um divorced his wife
Speaker 1: and married someone else midlife, the way people do. And
Speaker 1: my father never gave me and never spoke to him again,
Speaker 1: like it was dead to him because he had four children.
Speaker 1: And my father just felt, you know, you've done you've
Speaker 1: done the wrong term, so he cut him off. I
Speaker 1: guess that's a fine line between having between morals and moralistic.
Speaker 1: Also in their circle that you know, they just didn't
Speaker 1: know gay people, they didn't know queer people. It's a
Speaker 1: very repressive culture. And um, I mean they had a
Speaker 1: two or three friends that were just obviously gay. You'd
Speaker 1: have to be completely blind not to know that these
Speaker 1: men were gay. And yet nearly to her dying day,
Speaker 1: and my mother would never would always say, oh, well,
Speaker 1: I hope ed finds the right woman some day. I'm like, um,
Speaker 1: but you know, I guess that's just the culture that
Speaker 1: they grew up with in the thirties and forties. You know,
Speaker 1: my life is not easy, but it was a lot
Speaker 1: easier than it would have benified grown up in that era.
Speaker 1: I know you've said that when you think about your childhood,
Speaker 1: you do you think of it as a boyhood? Do
Speaker 1: you still feel that way or The reason that I
Speaker 1: always tiptoe around that is because, um, I'm aware that
Speaker 1: for other transgender women, they have a narrative which I
Speaker 1: respect and which is real, and the fact that my
Speaker 1: experience is a little different doesn't mean that there's should
Speaker 1: not be respected. You know, there are a lot of
Speaker 1: transgender women who would say I went through transition when
Speaker 1: I was thirty, but I was always a woman, And
Speaker 1: I mean, and that's true for me also in a
Speaker 1: kind of spiritual a in a kind of private way.
Speaker 1: But you know, I also I lived in the world
Speaker 1: as a boy. I mean, I knew, I knew what
Speaker 1: the truth was about who I was from a very
Speaker 1: very early age, but I didn't tell anybody because I figured,
Speaker 1: I don't know, like, I didn't have the language for
Speaker 1: it. It It just seemed insane, and there were I just
Speaker 1: didn't know that there were other transgender people in the world.
Speaker 1: So I kept it private and I lived as far
Speaker 1: as the rest of the world could see as a boy.
Speaker 1: And I didn't go through transition until I was prety,
Speaker 1: you know, So I did live in that body for
Speaker 1: all those decades and socialized male. That doesn't make me
Speaker 1: less of a woman now post transition, and there's nothing
Speaker 1: to apologize for. But I do think of it as
Speaker 1: a boyhood, you know, not a boyhood like the other
Speaker 1: boys that I knew, that's for sure. But you know,
Speaker 1: it was what it was, and it wasn't the life
Speaker 1: that I wanted, and it wasn't a life that I understood,
Speaker 1: and it just felt weird, man, I mean it was.
Speaker 1: It was a really strange way to be in the
Speaker 1: world because not only do you have the sense of
Speaker 1: yourself of being different and having a problem that you
Speaker 1: can't solve, but you also have a pretty big secret.
Speaker 1: You have a an atomic secret that you don't have
Speaker 1: a language for. You don't know how to to share
Speaker 1: your what's in your heart, your most fundamental truth with
Speaker 1: the people who love you, and it's a pretty hard
Speaker 1: thing for an eight year old to carry around on
Speaker 1: their shoulders. So my way of dealing with it was
Speaker 1: just to become this tremendously hysterical person. You know, I
Speaker 1: was disruptive in school. I was it was pretty funny
Speaker 1: at times. Some of my material was pretty good. But
Speaker 1: I also I was just kind of driven to constantly
Speaker 1: be creating, you know, b Arnie hand over foot. You know,
Speaker 1: I would make up songs, and I make up stories,
Speaker 1: and I would go charging off into the woods and
Speaker 1: invent you know, a whole other other worlds that felt
Speaker 1: like a safer and more forgiving place to be than
Speaker 1: the world I lived in. We'll be back in a
Speaker 1: moment with more family secrets. It's so interesting, Jenny, because
Speaker 1: you're talking about in not having the language for something
Speaker 1: that is so huge, but literally does not having the words,
Speaker 1: not having ing the terms, not having access to being
Speaker 1: able to describe it, not just two other people, but
Speaker 1: to yourself. It strikes me listening to you that that's
Speaker 1: also the birth of a writer in a certain way,
Speaker 1: because at least the way that I always think about
Speaker 1: the impulse to write is finding the words, finding the language,
Speaker 1: or intervening in the dynamics of loss or or childhood
Speaker 1: where there wasn't the ability back then too to speak, Yeah,
Speaker 1: and to and to find a narrative of your own
Speaker 1: life that makes that makes sense, that can actually change
Speaker 1: the payoffs of your the life that you're experiencing into
Speaker 1: something that has form and function and logic. It remains
Speaker 1: to this day a very difficult thing to explain to
Speaker 1: other people who don't feel the thing that you feel,
Speaker 1: and so because they don't feel the thing that you feel,
Speaker 1: they assume that what you feel must be something you
Speaker 1: don't feel, or it must be something that that is.
Speaker 1: You're just crazy, you're just wrong. The experience of a
Speaker 1: lot of transgender people, you know, it reminds me of that.
Speaker 1: There's I think it's a heny youngman joke where guy
Speaker 1: isn't it the doctor and he says, doctor, doctor, I've
Speaker 1: I get a terrible paint every time I go like this,
Speaker 1: what should I do? And the doctor says, don't go
Speaker 1: like that. You know, you know, and people will argue
Speaker 1: with you. They'll say that, well, your chromosome says you're this,
Speaker 1: so that's that you should I've been tweeting with you
Speaker 1: for thirty seconds. But I understand your life, but I
Speaker 1: than you do. I think to some degree, there's also
Speaker 1: a desire to to explain things to other people. And
Speaker 1: I think in my my first memoir, Um, She's Not There,
Speaker 1: which is an account of transition, there's a tone and
Speaker 1: I mean I wrote that book going on twenty years
Speaker 1: ago now, but there's a there's a feeling to that
Speaker 1: book now when I read it, I feel a tone
Speaker 1: of apology or justification to it, because you know, in
Speaker 1: those days, you know, twenty years ago, there was so
Speaker 1: little um discourse around trans identity that you know, I
Speaker 1: think people felt like I'd made the whole thing up myself.
Speaker 1: So a lot of that book, a tone of it
Speaker 1: from author to reader, is a tone of someone saying,
Speaker 1: please forgive me, I'm so sorry, uh for for being
Speaker 1: myself and for feeling the things I felt. I hope
Speaker 1: you'll toss this out with me. And it's the thing
Speaker 1: looking at it now seems really I don't want to
Speaker 1: say dated, but it's certainly I wouldn't write anything about
Speaker 1: translegdentity with that attitude. Now now I've my attitude be
Speaker 1: much more like, well, I'm here on the planet. Isn't
Speaker 1: this great busness a gift? How lucky was I to
Speaker 1: experience the world and in these different ways? And if
Speaker 1: you can't ride on this train with me. Well, that's okay,
Speaker 1: we'll stop the train. We'll throw you off. When a
Speaker 1: difference twenty years makes well, I think it's just the
Speaker 1: result of people coming out. It's the result of more
Speaker 1: and more people being known. It's the result of their
Speaker 1: being more different kinds of transgender people in the public eye.
Speaker 1: I mean, it used to be that kind of nice, possible.
Speaker 1: Middle aged white ladies were the only transgender people you saw,
Speaker 1: except for drag queens who interacted with the world in
Speaker 1: a very in a very different way. But you know,
Speaker 1: now we've got all kinds of trance stories out there.
Speaker 1: We have a saying, um, if you've met one transgender person,
Speaker 1: you've met one transgender person. And I'm not ignorant, I
Speaker 1: know that this is all still really new for a
Speaker 1: lot of people, and a lot of people are still
Speaker 1: catching up, but increasingly and to our children's generation, um,
Speaker 1: this is this is just kind of the way things are,
Speaker 1: and it's just not that big a deal. And in
Speaker 1: a way, that's sorrel. I always wanted to live in
Speaker 1: a world where I was born, where it was just
Speaker 1: not that big a deal and I could just be
Speaker 1: myself and no one would have to have a heart
Speaker 1: attack about it. I've often thought that the change in
Speaker 1: my life was not a change about going from male
Speaker 1: the female. The thing that changed me was going from
Speaker 1: a person who had a secret to a person who
Speaker 1: doesn't have a secret. And if you have a secret,
Speaker 1: it is like having a Saint Bernard. It's something like
Speaker 1: an invisible Saint Bernard that that follows you everywhere, like
Speaker 1: you can't leave the house unless the secret comes with you,
Speaker 1: and the secret has to be tended, you know. I
Speaker 1: remember being in like a social situation when I was
Speaker 1: like sixteen, and somebody mentioning um a transgender person, although
Speaker 1: that wasn't the language that was used back in those days,
Speaker 1: but someone would say that word and I would freeze,
Speaker 1: and my heart beat a triple and sweat would start
Speaker 1: to pour down the signs of my face because I
Speaker 1: knew that I then had to imitate a person for
Speaker 1: whom this topic was of no special interest, and sometimes
Speaker 1: it was very hard to remember what those people acted like.
Speaker 1: But it means you're also not telling the truth of
Speaker 1: the person that you love by the person you love.
Speaker 1: Jenny's referring to her wife. Did the two of them
Speaker 1: have been together? Well for a very long time, and
Speaker 1: what a ride it has been. I mean, so I've
Speaker 1: been married now for what thirty two years I think
Speaker 1: now um Dee and I have been been together, so
Speaker 1: it's twelve years as husband and wife and twenty years
Speaker 1: as a wife and wife. Well, for the twelve years
Speaker 1: that I was married before I came out, my wife died.
Speaker 1: Whom I love I did not know because how did
Speaker 1: she not know? Because I didn't tell her? Why did
Speaker 1: I not tell her? Because I didn't tell myself because
Speaker 1: I didn't want it to be true, because I figured
Speaker 1: if I said this out loud, it would open the
Speaker 1: door to a life of marginality and suffering and violence
Speaker 1: and possibly murder. I mean, in the stories of transgender
Speaker 1: people that I knew. That's what happened to people. I
Speaker 1: didn't know there was a way of being in the world.
Speaker 1: So I had to keep the secret from myself. But
Speaker 1: it also been keeping the secret from the person that
Speaker 1: I love. You know, the whole point of being in
Speaker 1: love with someone and embarking upon the adventure of marriage
Speaker 1: and sharing a life together. It's pretty hard when you're
Speaker 1: trying to keep the secret from that person. But then
Speaker 1: you're also trying to keep that secret from yourself. It's crushing.
Speaker 1: And there are people, they're millions of people. And it's
Speaker 1: not just transgender people either. There are millions of people
Speaker 1: in the world who are burying that secret and are
Speaker 1: bearing it every single day. We're bearing some secret, something
Speaker 1: that if they admit to themselves, will atomize the world
Speaker 1: they live in, or think that it will. And I
Speaker 1: think for men in particular, there's a sense that so
Speaker 1: I was I was brought up, is that is your
Speaker 1: job to protect the people around you. And you know,
Speaker 1: not not just women, but you know especially women and
Speaker 1: children that you have children, that it's your job to
Speaker 1: stand between the people you love and trouble. If there
Speaker 1: are arrows coming in, you want to be in a
Speaker 1: position that they're going to hit you and let the
Speaker 1: people that you love escape. So to be the person
Speaker 1: who's suddenly responsible for trouble, to be the person who's
Speaker 1: actually the fact of your life, the secret that you reveal,
Speaker 1: be the source of the trouble, it's just a very
Speaker 1: very agonizing and terrible thing. And so again for me,
Speaker 1: that was the big thing. It wasn't it wasn't being
Speaker 1: trapped so much as it was having something that I
Speaker 1: hadn't been honest about to the person that I care
Speaker 1: most about in the world. So what was the turning
Speaker 1: point for you? After twelve years of what you're describing
Speaker 1: as a kind of knowing but not fully articulating to
Speaker 1: yourself that this was the case, There was a day
Speaker 1: which i'll describe to you. But before that day, I mean,
Speaker 1: which was like a turning point. I would describe it
Speaker 1: more though as an erosion rather than a decision. It
Speaker 1: wasn't like one day I said, you know, now I
Speaker 1: shall change my name to Tiffany Shaniel and I you know,
Speaker 1: and I walked down the stairs and sequence. It wasn't
Speaker 1: like that, although actually I know, I hope people who
Speaker 1: have done that too, and that's you know, and that's fine,
Speaker 1: But um, you know, you can think about it if
Speaker 1: you're walking along the road with a stone in your shoe,
Speaker 1: a little, tiny little stone in your shoe, and you
Speaker 1: could probably walk a mile or so. In fact, here's
Speaker 1: the story. We lived in Ireland in our kids were little,
Speaker 1: they were under the age of five or six, and
Speaker 1: I loved living in Cork. I had a job teaching
Speaker 1: at University College Cork, and one day, we had some
Speaker 1: people over and doorbell rang and somebody turned quickly in
Speaker 1: a wine glass fell onto the floor. In fact, maybe
Speaker 1: the wine glass had fallen days before. But what remembers
Speaker 1: that that there was a tiny little chart of the glass,
Speaker 1: like you know, the size of like just a tiny
Speaker 1: little sliver of a fingernail. Anyway, I must step on
Speaker 1: that as I went to answer the door. So I
Speaker 1: got this little sliver of glass in the heel of
Speaker 1: my foot, which is so little that I probably didn't
Speaker 1: even recognize it at the time. And uh, you know,
Speaker 1: a couple of days later and they were thinking, oh,
Speaker 1: my foot kind of hurts, but you know, I'll just
Speaker 1: keep walking, because what are you gonna do, you know.
Speaker 1: And then a few days later went by and it
Speaker 1: got worse and worse, no worse. And you know, I
Speaker 1: walked all over that city because that's what you wouldn't
Speaker 1: know what you do when you live, especially there there
Speaker 1: was not a lot of driving cars. I walked everywhere,
Speaker 1: and slowly but surely I realized that I was going
Speaker 1: to have to go to the hospital and I had
Speaker 1: this thing taken out of a foot well, which I
Speaker 1: finally did. And I'll spare you the description of the
Speaker 1: hospital in Cork, Ireland, which was surprisingly the opposite of modern.
Speaker 1: It was really gruesome and uh, to get this thing
Speaker 1: out of my foot, they had to do an operation
Speaker 1: and there was not good anesthetic and it was really,
Speaker 1: really horrible. And finally my wife picked me up in
Speaker 1: the car the end of the day and we went
Speaker 1: to go get because there were some pain killers, so
Speaker 1: she went into the apothecary to get the pain killers.
Speaker 1: When she came out, she found me in the car
Speaker 1: sobbing my brains out, sobbing harder than I think she
Speaker 1: maybe had ever seen me cry in a dozen years
Speaker 1: of marriage and knowing each other for twenty years before that.
Speaker 1: And it was clear to me what I was crying
Speaker 1: about wasn't the fact that I did I'd hurt my foot.
Speaker 1: What I was crying about is the fact that that
Speaker 1: was my life. I've been walking year after year, day
Speaker 1: after day with this little thing that I was caring
Speaker 1: that I was pretending I didn't hurt, but it did hurt,
Speaker 1: and you, I mean, and finally you just reach to
Speaker 1: day where you're like, I can't walk another step. We
Speaker 1: got back from Ireland and I started therapy with the
Speaker 1: following autumn. So you know why, then the real question
Speaker 1: is why not years and years and years before. Why
Speaker 1: did it picks along? I don't know. Because I was
Speaker 1: a coward, because I was afraid, um, I felt like
Speaker 1: I had too much to lose. You know, it's making
Speaker 1: me think of one of my favorite quotes is from
Speaker 1: Gnostic Gospels, from the Gospel of St. Thomas, which goes, um,
Speaker 1: if you bring forth what is within you, what you
Speaker 1: bring forth will save you. If you do not bring
Speaker 1: forth what is within you, what you do not bring
Speaker 1: forth will destroy you. That's right. I remember that St. Thomas.
Speaker 1: You're good, Danny Shapiro. I mean you make me think
Speaker 1: about the spiritual aspect of all this. I have become
Speaker 1: more faithful and spiritual. I think post transition um in
Speaker 1: part because I got to see the power of what
Speaker 1: love can do. Because when I did finally tell my
Speaker 1: wife t D it wasn't an easy passage, but in
Speaker 1: the end she decided that she was going to stay
Speaker 1: with me, which I didn't know she would, And my
Speaker 1: children continued to love me, and in some ways, the
Speaker 1: thing that surprised me most was when I came out
Speaker 1: to my mother, who was when I came out to her.
Speaker 1: She was in her early eighties, evangelical, Christian, conservative, Republican
Speaker 1: women in the Philadelphia suburbs, and you know that pretty
Speaker 1: good feeling. This is not going to be her idea
Speaker 1: of a good way to improve our relationship. But you know,
Speaker 1: I told her, and I said, I'm sorry I didn't
Speaker 1: tell you this when I was six years old, but
Speaker 1: I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And you know,
Speaker 1: around on queue, I started weeping. And then my little
Speaker 1: mother got out of her chair and she sat down
Speaker 1: next to me, and she put her arms around me,
Speaker 1: and she said, I would never turn my back on
Speaker 1: my child. She said I'll always love you. And I said, yeah, okay,
Speaker 1: but when everyone finds out that I'm your daughter now,
Speaker 1: isn't that going to be embarrassing and a scandal. And
Speaker 1: she said, well, quite frankly, yes, But she said I
Speaker 1: will adjust. And she wiped the tears off my eyes,
Speaker 1: and she said love will prevail, and she quoted First Corinthians,
Speaker 1: these three remain hope, they ape and love, but the
Speaker 1: greatest abuses love. And she died nine years ago at
Speaker 1: the age of but I still carry that around. Love
Speaker 1: will prevail, because in my life love has prevailed, and
Speaker 1: that's part of what I think has turned me towards
Speaker 1: having a faith again. We'll be right back. I've often
Speaker 1: thought of Jenny's life and what happened in the aftermath
Speaker 1: of her transition as really at its core being about
Speaker 1: the triumph of love, the human struggle to become ourselves
Speaker 1: and to trust that the people who love us will
Speaker 1: love us down to the core of our authentic being,
Speaker 1: because isn't that what it's all about in the end.
Speaker 1: So now sixty two years old, now i'm generously you
Speaker 1: could call me a middle aged woman. And the person
Speaker 1: that I dreamed of being except older is the person
Speaker 1: that I see in the mirror in the morning. And
Speaker 1: I don't even think about it. I mean I don't
Speaker 1: even think about gender most of the time anymore. I
Speaker 1: get up, I have a cup of coffee, I read
Speaker 1: the paper, I write my column for the New York Times,
Speaker 1: which is usually not about transgender people. So the thing
Speaker 1: that was once the most profound impossible thing in the
Speaker 1: world is now the thing that is. It's not gone,
Speaker 1: but it is receded. And in some ways I'm living
Speaker 1: the life that I never thought was even remotely possible.
Speaker 1: And part of that is because I was very lucky.
Speaker 1: Part of it was because I was surrounded by people
Speaker 1: who chose when they were given the chance to love me,
Speaker 1: rather than two run away. Three years ago, my older
Speaker 1: child came to me and told me that they too
Speaker 1: were treads and had already embarked upon transition. And I
Speaker 1: think back to when I told my mother, and my
Speaker 1: mother told me that loved will prevail, and she put
Speaker 1: her arms around me. My reaction to my own child
Speaker 1: was in fact, possibly less generous. I was freaked out.
Speaker 1: I thought, did I do this? Did I somehow make
Speaker 1: this look like it was fun? And I was oddly
Speaker 1: or maybe maybe not so udly at all. I guess
Speaker 1: my first thought was just that my life has been really,
Speaker 1: really hard, and I don't want I didn't want my
Speaker 1: child's life to be hard and the way that my
Speaker 1: life was hard. But then, I hope not too much
Speaker 1: time later, I understood that it wasn't about me for once,
Speaker 1: and also that the world that my daughter is living
Speaker 1: in is different. And in part can I say this,
Speaker 1: in part because some of the work that I had
Speaker 1: a hand in doing, in part because a lot of
Speaker 1: transgender people over the last twenty years have lived their
Speaker 1: lives out and without shame, and have told the stories
Speaker 1: of their lives so that my daughter's generation lives in
Speaker 1: the world which is more forgiving and free. And when
Speaker 1: she came out, she didn't spend a year or two
Speaker 1: going around to everybody she knew apologizing and asking for forgiveness.
Speaker 1: She went on Facebook and said, well, I'm trance. This
Speaker 1: is my new name, and most of her friends were like, oh,
Speaker 1: good for you. So that's what happened in twenty years.
Speaker 1: It's astonishing and wonderful. I mean, I my son is
Speaker 1: twenty one, and I see that in his world and
Speaker 1: his friends and for the last six seven years since
Speaker 1: high school, you know, just a kind of very very
Speaker 1: different way of thinking and being in the world, and
Speaker 1: a lack of a need to put people in and
Speaker 1: people's identities and genders and um sexualities and ways of
Speaker 1: identifying themselves into boxes. They just don't do it. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know what, I wonder, Danny, I wonder if I
Speaker 1: were fourteen now, would I still be hiding myself? Would
Speaker 1: I still you know, head off into the into the
Speaker 1: woods with the dog and kind of play the game
Speaker 1: I used to play, which was Girl Planet, which I
Speaker 1: would pretend that I was an astronaut who crashed on
Speaker 1: a alien planet where the atmosphere turned you into a girl.
Speaker 1: Would I spend you know, a Friday night hurriedly putting on,
Speaker 1: you know, my sister's hippie dress, or would I be
Speaker 1: as cool as my children are and their friends are
Speaker 1: and and say, yeah, sure, I'm trance, you know whatever.
Speaker 1: I don't know. It might just be that I'm naturally.
Speaker 1: It seems weird to say a shy person for someone
Speaker 1: who is so constantly in the public eye. But um,
Speaker 1: I think I've always cared a lot about what other
Speaker 1: people think, which I know is stupid. You know, I've
Speaker 1: always sought for approval outside of myself, which is I know, stupid.
Speaker 1: Um And I've always wanted to fit in, which is
Speaker 1: I know stupid. Well, I don't know. I think I
Speaker 1: would be different. But it's funny now to look back
Speaker 1: on all this, because the world is more in some
Speaker 1: places to some degree, a more forgiving place. But you know,
Speaker 1: it happened. I mean, it happened because of the work
Speaker 1: that I was part of, but it also happened, you know,
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound two melancholy, but I think
Speaker 1: a little bit about that scene at the end of
Speaker 1: Lord of the Rings when Frodo was taking his leave
Speaker 1: of his friends and he says, we set out to
Speaker 1: save the shire, and the shire has been saved, but
Speaker 1: not for me. And he says, you know, they're sometimes
Speaker 1: the work you do, it's not work that's going to
Speaker 1: benefit you. It's going to benefit the people who come
Speaker 1: after you. And now I know I'm sounding Lachrymose here,
Speaker 1: but no, Actually it makes me think back to what
Speaker 1: your mother quoted to you from the Corinthians. I'm a
Speaker 1: very lucky person, and I'm grateful for all the gifts
Speaker 1: I've been given, but a lot of the gifts have
Speaker 1: been given about like curses when I was younger. It
Speaker 1: is hard for me sometimes not to look at people
Speaker 1: who didn't get the gift of difference and think it
Speaker 1: would have been easier, wouldn't it to live other life?
Speaker 1: But on the other end, then I would have been boring,
Speaker 1: And it's hard to appreciate things you don't have to
Speaker 1: fight for, including happiness, including love, including the gift of
Speaker 1: your own soul. What's that old gospel song you've got
Speaker 1: to walk that lonesome valley. You've gotta walked up by yourself.
Speaker 1: So I mean that's what we do. We walked that
Speaker 1: lonesome valley and and yeah, sure it's between from my
Speaker 1: In my case, it was, it was between the worlds
Speaker 1: of men and women. But it was also the valley
Speaker 1: of having a secret and being unknown and being known.
Speaker 1: It's the valley between having the self that you see
Speaker 1: be an absolutely amazing secret, is known only to you,
Speaker 1: caught a glimpse in the mirror fleetingly for you know,
Speaker 1: a few minutes once every few weeks, and it being
Speaker 1: just the kind of Quotitian fact of your life that
Speaker 1: you don't think about. You get up and you get
Speaker 1: downstairs and you have some coffee. My mother held on
Speaker 1: to that haunted house until her nineties. She died in
Speaker 1: the house. Actually she lived in it for forty years,
Speaker 1: and I remember, long past transition. I had this funny
Speaker 1: experience where I went back the year before she died,
Speaker 1: and then I didn't know she was going to die,
Speaker 1: but she was ninety four at the time. So I
Speaker 1: got a job teaching at a little college. They offered
Speaker 1: me a job to teach their first semester, and I thought, well, okay,
Speaker 1: and so I took my leave. I got permission from
Speaker 1: my wife and my kids to live with Mom for
Speaker 1: the false semester, and the taught school at the little
Speaker 1: college called Arth Sina's College. And I come home and
Speaker 1: I'd make mom lamb chops for dinner, and we drink
Speaker 1: at and then we'd watched Jeopardy, and it was like,
Speaker 1: after all those decades, all of the turmoil was done.
Speaker 1: It was just a mother and her daughter, you know,
Speaker 1: eating lamb chops. And remember one night, there's a ghost
Speaker 1: that you would sometimes see on the third floor of
Speaker 1: that house. There was a mirror and another sounds insane,
Speaker 1: but I wasn't the only one who thought there was
Speaker 1: a mirror. And you'd see this kind of pale figure
Speaker 1: of this kind of older woman in a long white
Speaker 1: like a nighty or something. She always be looking over
Speaker 1: your shoulder and then you turn around there be no
Speaker 1: one there. It was bad when you'd see her. We
Speaker 1: wouldn't happen a lot, you know, once a year, maybe
Speaker 1: once for a couple of years. You can see it.
Speaker 1: A friend of mine once saw her drift through the
Speaker 1: guest treatment in the middle of the night while he
Speaker 1: was asleep, but usually she was in the mirror. And
Speaker 1: I don't know what the story was of this person.
Speaker 1: Later on I hired actually like Ghostbusters to check it out,
Speaker 1: what the paranormal investigators, and they're like, well, you got
Speaker 1: something here, we don't know what it is. And I
Speaker 1: should also say I don't really believe in ghosts, because
Speaker 1: you know, I kind of think it's bullshit. But and
Speaker 1: they my mother dinner, I cleaned up dinner, I went
Speaker 1: upstairs to my high school bedroom and I went to
Speaker 1: the bathroom and then out of the corner of my eye,
Speaker 1: I saw this figure in the mirror, and I thought
Speaker 1: to myself, Holy ship, there she is again. After all
Speaker 1: these years, that ghost is still here. And then I
Speaker 1: turned around, and of course you can see where the
Speaker 1: story is going. It was just me. Now, I was
Speaker 1: the older woman in the ninety you know, and I
Speaker 1: kind of wondered, was that the ghost that I was
Speaker 1: seeing when I was a kid? Was it the ghost
Speaker 1: of the person that I eventually turned out to be.
Speaker 1: Sounds crazy, isn't it. Can you be your own guardian angel?
Speaker 1: Can you look back over the years, maybe when I
Speaker 1: was a kid and living this arcane private life. Something
Speaker 1: in me knew or hoped that there was a possible
Speaker 1: world some day in which I would be solid, you know,
Speaker 1: but I would be openaking in the world ranther than
Speaker 1: just as kind of specter. Family Secrets is an I
Speaker 1: Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and
Speaker 1: Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to
Speaker 1: give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil.
Speaker 1: If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
Speaker 1: leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
Speaker 1: an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
Speaker 1: That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
Speaker 1: find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
Speaker 1: facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at
Speaker 1: fami Secrets pod m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
Speaker 1: visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
Speaker 1: you listen to your favorite shows.