The following article originally appeared in the May 1998 issue of Pittsburgh’s Out and is republished here for the first time in its entirety as originally published. Some language is dated. Help us preserve Pittsburgh’s LGBTQ history, like this article, by contributing to our GoFundMe.
If there’d be any trouble, Cooper figured it would start that morning when he boarded the bus to school.
Yesterday afternoon The Ricki Lake Show had aired the segment on transsexuals, titled in typical tabloidese: “I was trapped in a man’s body… Now I’m a woman… Accept me as I am.” The 10 guests had included 13-year-old Cooper Evans Miller and his parent—once “William,” now “Wendi,” who had legally and biologically become a woman. Cooper had alerted classmates that he’d be on the show, but when asked why, he had only replied, “Just watch it. You’ll see.”
Although both Cooper and Wendi strongly believed the show would promote a positive understanding of the condition of transsexuals, during the taping the audience had seemed ambivalent, applauding them several times but reacting to other panelists with jeers and angry murmurs. It didn’t help that all of them first had to sit through the taping of another hourlong segment: “You’re fat and you wear tight clothing!”
Months earlier, Cooper’s mother had strenuously objected to the show: “What if all those people beat you up! Someone’s going to try to kill you!”
“Mom, be realistic,” Cooper had replied, but on the morning after the show aired he wasn’t quite as certain. For him—more than for Wendi, who had spent years dealing with the transformation from male to female—Cooper would have to confront the consequences in an environment of his peers, adolescents who were not particularly known for their acceptance of diversity.
Reaction came immediately. “I saw you on Ricki Lake yesterday,” a female friend said loudly from the back of the bus. “That was really cool. Is Ricki nice? Does she look cute in real life?’
“So why were you on Ricki Lake?” another student piped up.
Cooper paused and was about to respond when his friend remarked, “You’d have to see it.”
Cooper, now 15, comments, “Right then I knew there wouldn’t be anything negative. [Later on] kids would joke about it. A good friend who goofs around a lot said jokingly, ‘Is it true your dad’s a woman?’ [The show] made it easier to tell everyone. I was just a little freshman who had only been in that school for about two or three months, and I got a lot of publicity. No one expressed anything negative toward me. It was a chance to educate people.”
Not that Cooper himself hadn’t been confused at times, adjusting to the gradual changes in his life: the separation and divorce of his parents; seeing William the first time without his long, dark beard; finding a pair of women’s reading glasses at his dad’s apartment.
Then there was the night his father had a heart-to-heart talk with him. Cooper says, “We were in his apartment, and he sat me down and started explaining, ‘You feel like a boy, right?’ ‘Yeah.’ ‘Well, I feel like a woman.’ And I remembered seeing pictures of him dressed like a woman, and although it was kind of strange, I sort of accepted it. As far as parenting, he began to take more of a maternal role.”
Some time later when William explored the possibility of wearing a woman’s hair piece, Cooper burst into tears. “I thought I’d have two moms, which would be insane,” Cooper explains now. “It was kind of frightening, and I was upset I’d lose the fun person.”
His father hugged him and promised not to make another change. “I had the wig on order, but it hadn’t come yet, and I wanted to wear it all the time,” Wendi says now. “But I didn’t want to hurt Cooper. I’d figure something out. If I had to do it that I was one way with him and another without him, then I’d do it.”
Three weeks later the two reached a different impasse. Cooper wanted a pet snake; Wendi was opposed. “I’d really like you to have a snake, but your mother won’t let you keep it there so I’d have to keep it here,” his parent reasoned. “I’d have to clean it and feed it. Sometimes you just can’t have everything you want.”
As Wendi recounts the incident, both start to laugh. “My wheels are clicking, and his wheels are clicking,” Wendi says. “Then he said, ‘OK you can have the hair.’ And I said, ‘OK, you can have the snake.’”
At one point, Cooper’s mother halted all communication between the two.
“For two to three months we had no contact whatsoever,” Cooper says. “I started doing really bad in school. My mom now claims it’s because I found out Wendi was a transsexual, but the truth was that I wasn’t allowed to see my father. That was traumatizing. I was always outgoing; so it became very noticeable when I became quiet and didn’t care about how I looked.” Gradually, his parents worked out a less restrictive arrangement.
Two years after Wendi underwent a sex reassignment operation—or male-to-female surgery—Cooper decided to live with her full time. His mother lives nearby and still plays an active role in Cooper’s life.
Then they received the call from a producer at The Ricki Lake Show.Wendi Miller: “I’m very proud of him…” (Interrupted by audience applause.)
Ricki Lake: “He’s living proof that you are raising a well-adjusted teenager.”
The clinical term is gender dysphoria, confusion over identity because the brain signals that the individual is one gender but the physical body is that of the opposite gender. Like many transsexuals, Wendi knew at an early age that her interior and exterior identities did not match.
“Transgendered folks struggle with the term ‘gender dysphoria’ in the same way that gays, lesbians and bisexuals struggle with any of the pathological or clinical terms, like ‘homosexual,’” says Jim Huggins, associate director and cofounder of Persad Center Inc., who specializes in counseling services for sexual minorities. “That’s the term that’s in the DSM [the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Mental Disorder of the American Psychiatric Association], and so while all mental-health people use it, many of us find any statistical manual like that pretty restrictive. It doesn’t always explain what’s happening in the real world. Plus it’s a book of mental illnesses, so it already pathologizes a process many of us don’t think should be pathologized.”
Huggins concedes that transsexuality is a complex issue. Unlike others who are labeled transgendered— such as straight men who wear female clothing to become sexually aroused, crossdressers who are expressing another side of their personality or theatrical drag queens who are not necessarily dealing with gender issues— “transsexuals have always felt their internal gender identity did not match their genitals.”
Possibly one of the biggest obstacles to understanding was reflected by a typical question asked from the Ricki Lake audience: Why not forgo the operation and change the mind to match the body?
“Why not go to therapy, and we’ll adjust you to the body you’re in,” Huggins restates. “Well, why don’t all gays get heterosexually married? In terms of gender, it’s the same issue in a different way. Our society is so rigid about gender: You have to be either male or female, nothing anywhere in between, or people are going to be upset or uncomfortable. Generally by the time an adult comes to our offices at Persad, [changing the mind] doesn’t seem to be an option.”
Which is not to suppose that the individual is automatically going to sign up for an operation the next day. The majority of transsexuals do not opt for surgery to alter their bodies, although they might want to begin hormone therapy to develop more feminine or masculine characteristics. Speech therapy and electrolysis are also recommended for the male-to-female transition.
“A lot of people can’t afford the surgery,” Huggins comments, mentioning a range of $10,000 to $15,000 for the procedure. “They may have lost their jobs or in order to make the transition had to quit their jobs and focus on this. Many folks coming in for the evaluation are on medical assistance; so they’re probably not going to be able to afford the surgery because insurance company won’t pay for it, and certainly medical assistance doesn’t pay. It’s expensive.”
There are other costs as well. Electrolysis can be from $40 to $65 an hour, and may require hundreds of hours of treatment. To legally change her gender, Wendi spent a great deal of money and time, which necessitated obtaining a court order and fighting for every change, such as a new driver’s license and credit cards. Today Wendi is legally recognized as a woman.
Typically, to be recommended for surgery, individuals must be counseled by a therapist and live in the intended role for more than a year during a transitional period. Through therapy they explore how they’ll live their lives, regardless of whether they elect to have surgery or not.
“Usually people have a lot of agony and pain inside about this,” Huggins says. “They felt different from a very early age, and they’ve struggled their entire lives until they got to us. We try to help them heal the parts that are still wounded around this issue and work with them around other aspects of their lives.”
Like Wendi, many clients were married, with spouses, children and jobs that may be affected if they change their gender. “They have to make a lot of decisions along the way that are very complex,” Huggins adds. “To just jump into something without really thinking through the consequences is not a good idea.”
Also, during therapy they’re urged to consider their fantasies about what life will be like after changing genders. There are no guarantees that the change will secure the things they want, such as a job or a relationship.
After all of that, if the individual still desires surgery, the therapist makes the necessary recommendation. “This is probably one of the few times that mental-health people are making a medical recommendation for something that’s irreversible,” says Huggins. “We always follow that up with a second opinion from a therapist experienced in these areas.”
Ricki Lake (to post-operative transsexual about her $18,000 surgery to become a woman): “Wasn’t that painful?”
“I can’t convince myself that I’m male anymore than gay readers of Out could convince themselves that they are not gay,” Wendi states. “As far as the nature/nurture issue is concerned, it really doesn’t matter; it just is. Besides changing the body, there’s a spectrum of gender roles. Our society is much more comfortable with a masculine woman than a feminine man, and I found a gender role that I’m comfortable with and that society is comfortable with. Yes, I’ve had the surgery, and although there was a lot of trepidation going into the process, as soon as I did it wow I was so happy to be able to be who I thought I was.”
While not currently in a relationship, Wendi is philosophical about her longest one, to Cooper’s mother. “I was very much sexually attracted to women all my life, and so we had a fairly normal sexual relationship,” Wendi says. “I was monogamous and had no interest in anyone other than the woman I was married to. There were a lot of incompatibility problems, and we actually discovered that we make good friends, but living together was another story.”
As most transsexuals attest, Wendi knew from the earliest memory that her physical gender was incorrect. “It was an overwhelming thing that I never expressed—I intuitively felt I’d be punished for it,” she says.
In effect, she was. Wendi’s father died during her transition. Unable to deal with her transition, the family decided not to have a funeral. Rather than cause them any more anguish, Wendi agreed to stay away.
“That was the most horrible discrimination I ever faced in my entire life,” she says. “My father had had a massive heart attack, and while he was in the hospital for a week, I was not allowed to go see him. Everyone was quite sure that if I walked in, he’d drop dead.” She adds an ironic aside: “I didn’t, dad died anyway, and I got blamed for it.”
Today she is once again close to her mother and one of her sisters, but another sister has not been in touch with her for eight years. “If she walked through the door, I’d welcome her just like that,” she says, tearing up. “It upsets me to think about it—it’s the estrogen.”
She continues, “Most of us lose a lot; we lose our fathers, mothers, sisters, brothers, children. Church and society as a whole reject us, even the gay audience.”
To deal with some of her loss, as well as that of other transsexuals she met through Persad, three years ago Wendi became one of the founders of the Pittsburgh Transsexual Support Group. Unlike other transgendered groups, TSG specifically targets transsexuals; it meets every Thursday night at New York, New York.
Audience member at The Ricki Lake Show: “Only God can judge y’all.”
Wendi acknowledges that she is more fortunate than many transsexuals. Her relationship with Cooper and even her ex-spouse attest to what an extraordinary person she is—for any gender—caring, compassionate, self-assured and comfortable with her identity.
“There are remarkable stories,” Huggins says, “where parents, siblings and friends have come to accept this, but often a transsexual has to create a new family—which I think is similar to lesbians and gays who may not have the best relationship with their families of origin. By creating a pretty strong family of choice, we have more supportive people in our lives.”
Of follow-up interviews that Persad conducted, the outcomes largely were positive. “I would say almost all of the clients who actually had the surgery made the transition really well into their new role,” Huggins says. “They say they’ve seen it really as a godsend. They’re happier, and their lives have changed in a positive direction. Some describe it as having more energy to do other things in life now that they don’t have to focus on the evaluation and surgery. The majority feel they’ve made a good and successful decision and transition into a new role.”Ricki (ending the show): “As you’ve seen, transsexuals are like you and me. They have feelings, emotions and just want to be accepted in today’s society. We have taken great steps toward accepting other minority groups; so why should it seem so far-fetched to think that one day transsexuals can be accepted in our society and live their lives like anyone else?
For more information on local organizations for transsexuals, call the Pittsburgh Transsexual Support Group, (412) 661-7030; or see the listings for TransFamily and TransPitt in Out’s “Resources” guide.
Today she is once again close to her mother and one of her sisters, but another sister has not been in touch with her for eight years. “If she walked through the door, I’d welcome her just like that,” she says, tearing up. “It upsets me to think about it—it’s the estrogen.”
Wendi acknowledges that she is more fortunate than many transsexuals. Her relationship with Cooper and even her ex-spouse attest to what an extraordinary person she is—for any gender—caring, compassionate, self-assured and comfortable with her identity.
Of follow-up interviews that Persad conducted, the outcomes largely were positive. “I would say almost all of the clients who actually had the surgery made the transition really well into their new role,” Huggins says. “They say they’ve seen it really as a godsend. They’re happier, and their lives have changed in a positive direction. Some describe it as having more energy to do other things in life now that they don’t have to focus on the evaluation and surgery. The majority feel they’ve made a good and successful decision and transition into a new role.”
This article originally appeared in Pittsburgh’s Out. This article is preserved as a part of the Q Archives project. Please consider donating to help preserve Pittsburgh’s Queer history.
