Lynn Conway's Retrospective
Lynn Conway [Draft of 3-15-04.]
Copyright © 1999-2004, Lynn Conway.
All Rights Reserved.
 
 
 
PART I: CHILDHOOD AND EDUCATION


This journal opens with reminiscences of my childhood, school and college years. My gender problems were a big focus of my attention during all those years, and stimulated my lifelong interest in scientific exploration. When I was young there was little scientific or medical knowledge about such gender problems, and even the most basic sex and gender issues were seldom talked about. I was completely on my own to find my way as best I could.
 
In Parts I and II we begin with the very personal story of my struggles in the 1940's and 1950's, and how I finally found a complete solution in the 1960's. Given the way things were when I transitioned, that came at the price of being fired by IBM, being rejected by all my family and friends, having to start a new career all over again in a secret new identity, and then having to live in "stealth mode" for almost 31 years. PART II concludes with a sketch of my early research career as a boy, and then my final gender transition.
 
If I'd been born in the 1980's, and had coped with transsexualism as a teenager in the 1990's, there's a chance I'd have been allowed to socially and hormonally transition in high school or college, and undergo SRS at age 18 to 20. If born to understanding parents who'd supported such an early transition, I could have gone on to a full and normal life as a young woman, and this story would have turned out very differently. By never maturing as a boy, my family would have known me only as their daughter and would still know me today. Perhaps I'd have married and have adopted children, which was my dream as a young woman. However, this story starts in the 1940's, long before such gender identity conditions were understood.
 
In order to convey the reality and depth of my situation early in life, Part I and Part II include VERY EXPLICIT cross-gender and gender-transition material. These writings are my sincere effort to convey what it is like for someone who is inherently a girl to be forced to grow up as a boy. Some readers will find these writings informative, but others may find them unsettling. Therefore, those who are mainly interested in my post-transition research career should start with PART-III of this Retrospective. For more background on gender identity conditions, see Lynn's TG/TS/IS Information site.
 
 
Always be a first-rate version of yourself, instead of a second-rate version of somebody else -
- Judy Garland
 
 
 
 

 CONTENTS OF PART I:

 
1. Early Childhood
Bliss
The Nightmare Begins
Dreams
 
2. Education
Public School Years
High School Years
M.I.T.
My Early Transition Attempt
What am I to do?
Columbia University
Loneliness, Companionship, Responsibility
Time to go to work
 
 

 PREFACE

  PART I

 PART II

 PART III

 PART IV

  PART V

 PART VI
 
 
 
 
1. EARLY CHILDHOOD
 
I was born to loving parents. My father was a chemical research engineer who worked for The Texas Company (Texaco) in New York City. My parents met while my father was on an engineering field assignment to build some chemical processing plants in Texas. My mother had grown up in rural Texas, and had graduated from a teachers' college there. She was teaching kindergarten in Texas when they met and began dating.
 
Shortly after they were married, my father was transferred to New York City. When I was born my parents were living in an apartment in Hartsdale, N.Y., where I spent my early childhood. My parents were a quite a neat team for raising and mentoring a child with a curious and creative mind, at least for a while.
 
Age 4 months: With my father and mother
 
 
Bliss
 
It's wonderful how photographs reach out to us over time, helping renew distant memories and making them vivid again. This is especially true of our early childhood times, times that most people seldom reflect back on. My memories go back till I was 2 and a half or so, with fragments going back earlier. A collection of photos from that time have helped to keep those memories alive. Some things stand out, like going outside and playing in the snow, and going to the train station to pick up my daddy after work. I was amazed by the trains, and loved to watch them go by.
 
 
Almost age 3: I loved to be outside in the snow
 
 
I remember many little vignettes and scenes from the joyful, blissful time up until I was about age 4. Some memories stand out incredibly clearly because of surprising or funny or scary circumstances, like the first time we went to the movies. I must have been three, and it seemed like being transported to another world. I was mesmerized by the moving black and white images on the screen - and the fantasy world we could look into there. I still recall flashes of scenes of driving home from that movie on a summer day.
 
During those years I played a lot with close friends who were almost all girls. There were all sorts of funny, silly things we loved to do together. I was becoming very aware of my body and loved the way it felt all soft and sensual and rubbery. I enjoyed being close to my mother and my girl friends who all seemed to feel the same way. I especially loved taking baths and being all "soapy" and slippery all over. Things like that seemed very special to me, and I can remember flashes of scenes in the bathtub from a very early age.
 
However, there were some early warnings that something was amiss, and that I was living in a dream world. For example, since I was a "boy", I wasn't allowed into the baby shower party when my brother came along. My mother decided that she only wanted women and girls there. I felt very left out, and started to sense that there were magical aspects of girl's lives that I was not going to be allowed to experience. But why, I wondered?
 
 
My third birthday: With some of my friends
 
 
The Nightmare Begins
 
Sometime in my fourth year a terrible nightmare began. I think it may have started in a store where I saw a print dress like my friend Janet had. It took some courage, but I asked my mother if I could have a dress like that. After all, why couldn't I just wear a dress and "be a girl".
 
On reflection and using grown-up terms, I had at an early age observed and patterned on very clear kinesthetic, perceptual and emotional similarities in my movements, feelings and reactions to things with girls rather than with boys. It wasn't an identification with girls clothes or toys. It was deeper and more fundamental than that; something essential inside of me simply told me that I should be a girl. I didn't really understand why I couldn't be a girl, and didn't understand what my girl friends had done so that people let them be girls. It was all a mystery to me.
 
Anyway, this feeling made me want to try to be a girl, and that meant I was in very big trouble. "No you cannot have that dress. You are NOT a girl!" my mother shouted, and this is one of my earliest memories of feeling sheer terror. These conflicting signals went in and out of my consciousness for quite a while afterwards. It was very confusing, humiliating and frightening all at the same time, and nothing was ever the same after that.
 
Imagine the terrible angst felt by a little child who then asks her mother the heartfelt question "You mean I can NEVER be a girl?", and is immediately crushed by a loud "Absolutely not!" and is from then on subjected to intense pressure to act only like a boy. I was left with a sense that there was something terribly wrong with me, but I didn't understand what it was. I was left with a dull ache inside, and full of fear about doing things "wrong".
 
Worse yet, I wasn't allowed to play with my girl friends anymore, or be seen doing many things I'd loved to do. I guess my parents thought that being soft with me was "causing my problem", whatever it was. They began withholding all affection, hugs and cuddling from that time on. My life began to feel cold and isolated, and the absence of affection made the confusing nightmare worse. Rituals such as keeping my hair cut very short began to seem like deliberate torture.
 
I learned a powerful lesson. "Inappropriate gender behavior" by little children led to catastrophic reactions. However, I didn't really grasp why. My only escapes into girlhood after that time were carefully crafted ones in my daydreams, and then later in my school days and beyond in a secret parallel life that almost no one knew about. This living nightmare persisted for many years.
 
 
Dreams
 
Dreams are a wonderful thing, especially daydreams, where in your imagination you can make anything come true. I did a lot of daydreaming as a little child, and that became my way of visualizing and thinking about many things, and about figuring out how to make things better. It's great fun to daydream something wonderful, and then try to make it actually happen. It's a game I've always loved to play, and it's helped me out in life in many ways. After all, people can't stop you from thinking anything that you want to, and that inner experience can be full of little joys.
 
 
Age 4: Reading to my teddy bears
 
 
 
Age 4: With my baby brother
 
 
However, sometimes you cannot think of any way to make something very important to you actually happen. You then just keep on dreaming about it, and gradually discovering and inventing lots of secret ways to partly live the dream, continually hoping that someday you'll find the magic to make it all real. Thus it would be with my secret ambition to become a girl somehow.
 
 
Age 4: Daydreaming
 
 
 
 
2. EDUCATION
 
Public School Years
 
Going to kindergarten was a mixed blessing. It was scary, because I'd become shy and self-conscious due to the pressure to "be normal" at home. However, I loved the creative things we did there, all the art, music, make-believe play, making lots of things and story-telling. After a while, I began to make new friends at school. We had lots of books at home, and I learned how to read before entering first grade. I really aced that grade and then skipped second grade.
 
 
Age 4-1/2: Me and my little brother
playing with my beloved great-aunt Delia
 
 
When I was seven, my parents got divorced and we only say my father once every few years after that. The divorce was very traumatic for my mother, and really screwed up our lives for quite a while. We moved through a series of rooming houses and apartments before getting settled down in White Plains, N.Y., where my mother began to teach kindergarten again. Fortunately, we lived all to ourselves in a large, older house in a quiet neighborhood.
 
This period of insecurity and emotional trauma led to my becoming very, very shy. Living in hotels and rooming houses and eating out a lot felt awful to me, because my mother kept saying things like "sit up and eat properly, people looking at you". "People are looking at you" became almost a mantra with her - a knee jerk reaction to any situation where she felt embarrassed by me. Shyness was the inevitable result of two years of continually hearing this everywhere we went.
 
My mother herself was very pretty, and she was pursued by a number of bachelors over the years. However, she never dated again and never remarried. Being divorced back then meant that she had to endure a lot of stigmatization during the late forties and on into the 1950's. This hurt her deeply, and she just shut down emotionally, mainly living her life by trying to make "her boys" successful. She was always chiding me for the way I looked or acted, and obsessed over my school performance, which had declined during the 4th-6th grades.
 
During my early childhood years, by mother had gotten me into piano lessons, and I also went on to play the soprano saxophone. I was able to play well, but this only brought on the trauma of being required to play "solos" for visitors. This was always quite traumatic for me, because I was so shy back then.
 
One "music incident" I vividly remember: My piano teacher brought a wire-recorder to record my playing one day so I could hear it afterwards. The recoding amazed me, until I heard my voice talking on the tape! Oh my god, I sounded exactly like a girl! I was talking in a very feminine manner, but Ididn't realize it until I heard my voice on that tape. It totally freaked me out, and I turned red and ran out of the room.I thought for sure that my mother and everyone else would think I was "misbehaving" for talking that way, and would punish me even worse than years before. But she never said anything about my voice. Maybe she'd gotten used to it. Who knows.
 
Since my mother worked, I was often home alone. It was inevitable that I would discover, invent and explore many secret, special ways of being and playing like a girl, doing things like secretly playing with my mother's makeup when she wasn't around. However, there was no way to openly express my inner feelings and my longings to really be a girl. All I could do was watch other girls at a distance, and pray I could become one someday.
 
This was a dreary, sad period for me. I felt very isolated and lonely. I sensed a strange "otherness" in boys and hated to be grouped in with them. Sports presented a special problem. I held back and felt very awkward when forced into the boys' games. No one ever wanted me on their team. All the other boys were into pushing and shoving and shouting all the time, and I wasn't like that. I mostly liked to be quiet and daydream.
 
When stopping in at my mother's kindergarten class after school, I'd often see her hugging and giving all sorts of affection to other children. I guessed she was expected to do that there, so she did it. However, she was never that way with me at home, and this added to my sense of emotional isolation.
 
 
Age 7: With my brother (age 4)
 
 
In the summer of 1948, when I was 10 years old, my mother sent me and my brother to a boys' summer camp in Maine. This was scary at first, but turned out to be quite an adventure. We packed lots of stuff for the 10 weeks of camp and took the railroad train to "Camp Caribou", near Waterville, Maine. It was the first time my brother and I were away from home alone. At camp I learned how to swim, ride horses, go boating, how to fish and how to shoot a .22 rifle. I also learned lots about hiking, backpacking and camping-out. These were incredibly fun things to do, and triggered my lifelong interest in the great outdoors.
 
I felt so empowered by learning all those interesting new things that summer. Getting good at outdoors activities also helped me project a much more "boy-like" image.
 
I keenly felt a need to project a boyish persona, and to somehow fit in and "be like everybody else", at least most of the time when in public. In fact, over the coming years my life would be a constant struggle to appear like a normal boy during the day, but without yielding too much too maleness so that I couldn't seem like a girl to myself and others in private.
 
The summer camp was sort of like I'd gone to "acting school" to learn how to appear to be a real boy. I gradually covered-up my girly feelings by acting like a "tomboy" and becoming very "outdoorsy". It didn't feel too bad inside me, because I really loved being in the outdoors. It seemed natural to be a tomboy.
 
However, I got very uncomfortable that summer living in a small cabin with seven boys and no privacy. Every now and then pushing and shoving matches would break out that seemed awfully violent to me. Some of the boys then began prancing about and proudly showing their erections to each other. I was very innocent and ignorant, and this frightened me. I didn't like my genitals and I thought they were terribly ugly. I hid them from myself most of the time and tried not to think about them. I didn't yet comprehend the horrible implications of being a girl who was born with male genitals.
 
On the other hand, I felt a strange warm, tingly sensation all over whenever I was around my rifle instructor. He had blond hair and had a nicely tanned, well muscled body. He looked so handsome in his tight-fitting T-shirt and khaki pants. I can still remember him leaning down closely by me and coaching me on how to shoot. Although he was a college student then, he knew lots about shooting, being fresh out of the marines or the army. I think he took a special liking to me because I worked so hard on becoming a very good shot. Although I was only 10 years old, something stirred in me. Something I didn't yet understand.
 
That winter, my interest in new things zoomed off in an unexpected direction: I developed an incredible fascination with astronomy after visits to the Hayden Planetarium in New York City. There was just something about telescopes and astronomy that zapped my brain as if it were magic. My mind reeled with images of planets and galaxies and telescopes you could use to look at them. I began reading about science and astronomy at our city library, and then team up with a few schoolmates to explore and share various scientific hobbies. The power that scientific knowledge could convey amazed me. I began to understand not only how things worked, but how they came to be - and began a lifelong interest in "figuring things out".
 
Not visible to others, and hidden behind all these superficially "boy-like" activities, was a terrible growing turmoil inside my mind and all throughout my body. At the age of 11, my body seemed to become much more sensual and sensitive to touching. I loved the rubbery feeling of my body, and longed to be fondled and caressed all over. I also loved to be penetrated by things, and explored that overwhelmingly luscious feeling while taking baths. But there was no way to outwardly express my girly feelings socially and show the world what I felt like inside.
 
I saw a girl's genitals close-up for the first time that year when a girl friend of mine showed hers to me. We were only 11, but I think she had a crush on me. One time while we were playing, we hid under a neighbor's porch and she pulled her panties down and showed her genitals to me. She then wanted to kiss, which we did. Seeing her beautiful girl's genitals had a profound effect on me. I fully grasped what I was missing, and began to think of my own genitals as a ugly deformity. I could sense how my friend affirmed her beauty and desirability and sensuality by showing herself to me and then being kissed by me. I wished I could have such experiences too, and be able to show my body as a girl to eager boys, and have them kiss me too.
 
When I was 12, I spent some time in the summer at the lakefront home of family friends in Connecticut. Two beautiful girls about 15 or 16 years old were visiting there too. We went swimming together, and I got a chance to get very close to them. All of a sudden I felt an incredible angst as I saw close-up what nature was doing for these girls and wasn't going to do for me. They were becoming even softer, were growing breasts and were developing beautiful figures. I could deeply sense the joy they felt to be living inside their nubile female bodies.
 
Then, at age 13, male puberty really hit me. I was suddenly thrown into a deep personal hell. I did everything I could think of to forestall what was happening, but my efforts at maintaining physical softness and girlyness had only limited results and also brought me tons of trouble and humiliation.
 
To grasp the nature of this hell, imagine that you had a little daughter, who at age 4 you started raising as a boy, cutting her hair, and refusing to let her wear dresses or play with other little girls while she grew up. You also withheld all normal affection from her, the affectionate touching and hugging that all little girls crave. Then at age 13 you began administering male hormones to her, which suddenly begin to ruin her appearance and her chances in life forever afterwards as a girl and as a woman.
 
Can you imagine how she would feel about what was happening to her? If you can forget her outward appearances as a "boy", you might be able to visualize what the young (MtF) transsexual girl is going through emotionally as a teen-ager. Inwardly she is totally horrified at the thought of growing up and turning into a "man": of becoming large, craggy and hairy all over, of losing her softness, pretty voice and pretty hair, and of having grossly inappropriate genitalia protruding from her body and taking control of her body from time to time. Think what this is doing to all her childhood hopes and dreams about the future.
 
At the same time, she sees the wonderful things other girls are experiencing - the development of pretty female contours, breasts, beautiful hair and soft glowing skin. She sees how they cherish being girls among other girls, and how they daily celebrate the little joys of it all. She senses how they look forward to life as women, to having boyfriends, finding romance and getting married, and to having their own babies someday.
 
And remember, if she does anything to try to counter this horror and tries to be like a girl, society comes down on her with a terrible vengeance for "incorrect gender behavior for a boy". Even the simplest of things she might try to do to retain a little bit of femininity will bring on ridicule and humiliation. She can't even talk to anyone about it, not even her parents, and must suffer in silence.
 
Can you possibly begin to understand the girl's anguish? I tried to fight it but to no avail. What was happening to me simply broke my heart. At the same time the other girls were being transforming into lovely women, I was being turned into an ugly "male" freak who would never have a chance of finding love and happiness in life.
 
One reaction I had to this horror was to seek knowledge, scientific knowledge, about sex and sexual differentiation, the effects of sex hormones, etc. I began spending even more time in the city library and other places, obsessively exploring scientific and medical books and journals, searching for answers to the deep questions I was confronting. In the process I learned all about sexual anatomy and sexual differentiation, and how sex hormones cause the development of the secondary sex characteristics, which are the key visible observables as to whether you are a girl or a boy.
 
I also began a practice common among young, intensely transsexual girls. Ashamed of my male genitals and male arousals, I began to suppress penile erections by hiding my parts inside me and tucked under and behind me. Instead of sudden out-of-control male arousals, I often had long-lasting, "simmering arousals" deep inside me which I always perceived to be female in nature. And instead of masturbating like a boy, I would find ways to put pillows between my legs to press on my tucked parts, and reach orgasm that way.
 
I also began serious efforts to learn how to be presentable as a girl, learning how to use makeup correctly, and how to use my mother's sewing machine to make simple dresses and clothes from patterns. One summer my mother taught at the Teacher's College in Potsdam, N.Y.. By an incredible stroke of luck we stayed in a girl's sorority house that was vacant for the summer. I found a treasure trove of clothes, make-up, sewing materials and other wonderful stuff to experiment with. They even had a lot of really neat fake suntan stuff that was kind of like makeup that made your skin look nicely tanned. I loved to shave my legs and put that stuff on me. It made my legs look pretty like the other girls, and that made me feel tingly all over. I took a lot of stuff, as much as I dared, back home with me and secreted it all away.
 
During the eighth grade I began playing hooky by writing my own excuses. By building a reputation for being sickly, but still managing to get reasonable grades, I got away with this for a long time - skipping over 30 days that winter without getting caught! I stayed home for days at a time, secretly making and trying on clothes and practicing being like a girl, and playing with my body. Gaining experience in improving my appearance helped compensate a little bit for the terrible physical changes that were happening to me. I began to sense that I could use sheer will power and effort to guide the shape of my developing body - especially the musculature of my legs and torso. By constantly working at it I found that I could gradually shape my body contours to be more female and attractive.
 
My father, unlike my mother, had always seen through my real boy act. He visited us every few years, and first thing he'd do was a quick visual inspection for markers of femaleness. Especially in my later adolescent years, he always noticed some darn dead-giveaway that I couldn't totally hide. He'd catch glimpses of my shaved legs, carefully shaped eyebrows and clear nail polish. I did things like that as much as I dared, so I could quickly "cross-over" and be like a girl when alone at home. My father would glower his hate at seeing those things, probably thinking that it meant that I was becoming gay. I was always relieved when his visits ended (my father died in '67 just before my gender transition, so I never had to face his rage and humiliation for doing that).
 
My mother gradually became very preoccupied with her work and seldom interacted with me. Once in a while, right out of the blue, she'd say "Stop doing that! If you don't stop that I'm going to send you to military school!" But she never elaborated on what "that" was. I suspected she'd seen me acting girly, so I just cringed and tried to keep a low profile for a while. There was a military school somewhere over in Tarrytown, NY and the idea of getting sent there was totally terrifying.
 
However, my mother mostly seemed oblivious to what I was doing during my teens, as long as I got good grades in school. We never talked much, and she didn't seem to want to even be physically near me. Maybe she was just in denial.
 
My mother had grown up on a farm outside the small town of Evant in central Texas. We visited there during my teens, and I met some of my Texas relatives. They were very religious people, and attended the "tent revivals" in town while we were there that summer. I never went to those meetings, but I could hear all the shouting and screaming that went on there, and it was quite frightening. At a large family dinner one evening, someone asked me about my interests and I started talking about astronomy. All of a sudden the whole family acted as if they were shocked and horrified. But what had I done?
 
Well, I'd made a huge error by talking about how it was easy to measure the distance to the moon. That conflicted with their religious thinking that "such things were unknowable" because it had to do with "the heavens". I tried to explain how to do it, but they shouted me down and brought me to tears and then shamed me for crying because " boys don't do that". This incident taught me a lesson about ignorant religious zealot's fear and suspicion of science. Although my mother prided herself on being educated, she dared not go against her family's religious pronouncements and she didn't come to my rescue.
 
Then one night one of the older local Texas farm boys asked me if I'd "like to go swimming". Oh my god, he was so strong and handsome looking! Warmly attracted to him and tingling all over, I said yes. We sneaked off and went swimming naked in the dark in a big farm "tank" (that's what they call a farm pond in Texas). The water was warm, and had fun swimming playfully close together. It seemed harmless even though there was an element of flirting that was very sensual and exciting. All of a sudden my mother and some relatives came running out there. They all got incredibly freaked out that I'd gone swimming naked with an older boy, and I practically never heard the end of it. Seems that going to Texas was just plain trouble for me - a girly intellectual "boy" was just not in style there.
 
Other strange incidents happened during my early teens, and I don't know how or why. I remember having several friends outside my usual circle of "brainiacs" whom I'd see from time to time. I recall "staying over" at these boys homes once in a while, and actually "having to sleep in the same bed" with them. I don't know what the heck I or they were thinking, because nothing happened. By this time I didn't want to be a virgin" anymore, but I guess I didn't show enough signs of wanting love and these boys were too timid to make moves on me. These are strange memories of things that I pretended to myself "didn't happen", and are hard to pull back completely. I never thought of the word "homosexual", although I sort-of figured that was what I was at the time. I just had deep feelings of being attracted to and wanting to be "taken" by certain boys who caught my eye once in a while. These feelings felt so natural to me that I didn't put a name on them. They just happened.
 
Fortunately, I had a great aunt named Delia who now stayed with us occasionally in White Plains. Delia was a wonderful, loving woman who had enjoyed a long marriage to her dear "Pops" before he died. Delia O'Malley had come to America from Ireland early in the century, along with her sister Sarah O'Malley (my grandmother on my father's side). They'd both come over looking for husbands, and soon found them! Pops had been a U.S. Army Officer, and he and Delia had lived and traveled all over the world together.
 
Aunt Delia and I became great friends and spent a lot of time hanging out together during my teen years. I often helped her with cooking, which I never got a chance to do with my mother. One of these times she began quietly reminiscing about how much she loved "the boys", and enjoyed being around them. I instinctively sensed that she wasn't talking to me as if I were a "boy". She seemed to be talking to me as someone on "her side of the fence", while we were talking about the boys who were on the other side. I don't know how Aunt Delia figured me out, or what she actually thought my situation was. She just seemed to know, and treated me differently than "the boys". She was genuinely open and loving with me and would even hold and hug me, which no one else did back then - except for when I hugged my little brother. I often wished Delia could spend more time with us. I wanted to somehow explain to her the incredible turmoil I was feeling, but I could never find the words. I also wished that my mom had been more like her. [Delia passed away before my transition].
 
High School Years:
 
In the middle of all this turmoil, the Christine Jorgensen case hit the media. On December 1, 1952 the New York Daily News splashed a headline and front page photo about an ex-GI who had "been changed into a woman". No story remotely like this had ever been published widely before, and papers all across the country just wouldn't let the story go. The media obsessed over it in ways reminiscent of the Monica Lewinski - Bill Clinton story. I was only fourteen years old at the time, and in my first semester as a sophomore at White Plains High School.
 
 
 
 
Christine's story exploded into my mind. Suddenly there was a glimmer of hope, but oh so many questions too. My God, was she really changed? How on earth was this done? Science had clearly played a key role, especially new knowledge about the profound effects of sex hormones. But who did she know and how did she get them to do that to her? And why did everyone make such terrible fun of her and constantly harass her afterwards?
 
I was amazed to learn that society viewed being a woman as so demeaning a station in life that it was considered ridiculous for someone to want to be one, given any choice in the matter. Media images that females were silly, inferior beings confounded me, and conflicted with my own feelings of how wonderful it would be to be a woman. Fearful my classmates might see through me and subject me to ridicule, I forced myself even harder to appear as "normal" a boy as possible in public.
 
However, the Jorgensen case boosted my morale and my courage in efforts to "cross-over" and learn how to be a girl. A few people accidentally caught glimpses of me dressed as a girl once in a while, but my behavior was quiet and natural enough that I never had any bad reactions. Who knows what they thought was going on, but nobody ever told my mother about it. As time went on, I'd occasionally meet new straight boys who seemed to sensed this in me, who sensed my inner longings and were drawn to me, and those encounters made me feel incredibly warm and tingly all over. I began to get an almost irresistible urge to somehow find a boy whom I could "show my real female self too" and have him make love to me as a girl.
 
Suddenly, early in high school, I was "discovered" as being gifted when I went off the charts on some key tests. Being a boy at the time, I was then naturally guided by adults onto a fast track of elite math and science courses in my junior and senior years. I loved those courses and really aced them, already knowing a lot about the work from past readings. To my astonishment, I began getting huge amounts of positive feedback from all the adults around me.
 
By working at odd jobs and scrounging and trading, some friends and my brother and I were able to get stuff for exploring amateur astronomy, chemistry, electronics and photography during our junior high years and high school years. It was fun to be creative with stuff, whether it was sewing and making clothes in private, or working with wood, optics and electronics with boy friends. Designing and making things was tons of fun. I began to attract friends who got caught up in my enthusiasms for creative "projects".
 
These interests led to a series of telescope building projects, projects that got ever larger, followed by efforts to take photos through the telescopes and to develop and enlarge the photos ourselves. Something happened during that time that has stuck with me - a tendency to envision "wild projects", quickly plan them, and then drive them rapidly to conclusion. I just loved to get creative ideas and then make them a reality.
 
I learned a great lesson from these projects that would serve me well all through my life: When I needed money for something, all I needed to do was go wild at working for the money, and I'd get it somehow. When I got motivated by money, it overcame my shyness and I'd move heaven and earth to make it. One of the really great jobs I stumbled into while in high school was working as a "pin-boy" at a local bowling alley. This was before the automatic pinsetting machines, and it had to be done by people. This was an incredibly hard, dangerous, low-life kind of work, especially for a young teen who'd just gotten their working papers. Most of the other workers there were rough guys who weren't up to things like drive taxi's or putting things together on an assembly line. I did it because as an "unskilled worker" I could earn a lot of money quickly for my science projects.
 
I was kind of ashamed of actually doing that work, so I never told my friends about it - especially the ones who went bowling. Pin-boys were considered true "low-lifes" by bowlers. Mean spirited bowlers would sometimes even try to catch us by surprise, rolling their balls unexpectedly and trying hit us with them, then laughing when we jumped out of the way. This was my first experience of being a "low-life" in other people's minds, and it seemed real strange. I didn't understand why we pin-setters were thought of that way, but it is clear that we were. I learned that you just do what you gotta do - and then keep quiet about it elsewhere.
 
My science projects had another side-effect: They helped me project a very boyish "butch" image in public, and I began to work on that image as a kind-of protective mechanism. The secret seemed to be mostly in posture and stance, and I learned to do a credible job at that. However, I couldn't seem to learn how to project natural aggressiveness regular boys did.
 
 

Age 16, with my 6" reflecting telescope

 Photo of the moon with the 6"

 
 
Meantime, a new wonderful world of the mind, of ideas and of intellectual life opened up to me in high school, building upon my science interests. All my solitary reading and studying about science and astronomy now had a real outlet. I poured lots of energy into my school work after that, and also into outside scientific projects and readings. I especially loved observing with the 6" f/12 reflecting astronomical telescope that I had built.
 
White Plains High School was a truly remarkable place during the 50's. Many wonderful teachers taught there. I was deeply impacted by those teachers and by many courses in advanced mathematics, physics, history and English literature.
 
I loved to interact with the bright students in the advanced classes, and made many new friends based on mutual intellectual interests. Among these were a number of very intelligent, friendly, beautiful girls. I lived vicariously by sitting near these girls every school day, closely observing the way they were and following their adventures as best I could. I never dated girls in high school but loved to be around them, hoping I might learn how to be more like them.
 
I can vividly remember walking to school in the fall football season, smelling the burning leaves along the way. I often followed in the footsteps of groups of pretty girls. They'd notice me looking at them, and I'm sure it made them feel good to attract "male" attention. What they couldn't possibly imagine was that I was aching deep into my soul to be like them, to look like them, to feel like they did inside their bodies, and to fully live like them.
 
 
 White Plains High School, White Plains, N.Y.
in the 1950's
 
 
I watched how boys were stricken by and attracted to these girls, and how warmly and wonderfully they treated them. I day-dreamed about all the necking, petting and romancing that was going on at night in the boys' cars.
 
I never dated any girls while in high school, even though people would try to fix me up once in a while. I desperately wanted to be around girls, but as a girl and not as a boy. Making up various excuses for not dating, I put my energies into my hobbies and my studies.
 
Early in my sophomore year, along with several other boys in my Latin class, I became one of the favorites of our teacher Mr. Jacobs. He was an older rather stern but actually very friendly man who clearly "preferred young men". He occasionally asked me to spend some time "after hours" getting "special instruction". He would gently pull me to his side and wrap his arm around my waist as we delved ever deeper into the Latin language. I enjoyed this warmth, because no one else in the world except my Aunt Delia ever hugged me back then. I could sense that Mr. Jacobs was turned on by me as a boy, and this seemed very strange to me because I wanted more than anything to become attractive as a girl. His hugging me did make me feel tingly though, just like I'd felt around my instructor at summer camp. Everyone seemed to know that he was gay, but no one talked about it, or made fun of him, or thought that this was a problem. He was a highly respected teacher, and his advances were always quite harmless. However, our interactions helped me begin to sense the profound difference between straight guys and gay guys, and how I might attract them and why they might become attracted to me in such very different ways.
 
On going to White Plains High I also got more seriously into music. During my early childhood years, by mother had gotten me into piano and saxophone lessons, and I now went on to play the trombone. My mother suggested this for me. I think it may have been because it was very much a "boys" instrument back then (I'm guessing that she was somewhat worried by my androgynous persona at the time). By high school I was pretty good on the trombone, and played in the school marching band and the orchestra, and also in a local community symphony orchestra. These experiences furthered my life-long love of music, especially music that emotionally speaks to the soul.
 
While I was in high school, kids began hearing a new music on the radio called "rhythm and blues" - and it greatly added to the earthy, lusty feelings in the air back then. We started finding this music in the early 50's on a few small AM radio stations in New York City and northern New Jersey. It was black music and had lots of soul. It also had a profound sensuality that all teenagers picked up on, including me.
 
[ Note: In 1954, "Moondog" Alan Freed started mainlining this music to a wide audience as a DJ on WINS in New York City. He called it "rock and roll". I truly loved this new form of popular music, and I followed it passionately for many decades afterwards. Today, when I hear favorite pieces from the 50's, 60's, 70's and 80's, I feel transported in memories back to the times when those particular songs were in the air. Sometimes I can even "smell the smells in the air" from the past, so intense are the emotional connections and memories surfaced in my mind by popular music from the past.]
 
By now my girly sensual feelings had become incredibly strong. I was overtaken by feelings of wanting to dance to this new music as a girl. I longed to attract boys and be romanced, petted and made love to as a girl. But it was not to be, and I spent a lot of time in an state of deep frustration and denial.
 
However, my study efforts and passion for learning paid off. During my Junior and Senior years I nearly got all A's. I also got 100%'s in almost all of the New York State Regent's exams in math and science and graduated with honors, being high up into the top 10% of my class.
 
Without quite knowing what the heck had happened, I was accepted for admission at M.I.T. I'd applied there and also to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), but hadn't really expected to get into M.I.T. I remember my father making one of his rare visits, and taking me on an interview trip up there. He was a very prominent chemical engineer with ARAMCO by now, and lived most of the time in Saudi Arabia with his new wife and two new sons. With his WW-II exploits as chief engineer of the U.S. synthetic rubber program still resonated in chemical engineering circles, I recall him hobnobbing with the heads of several departments during our M.I.T. visit. I also remember him being incredibly uneasy around me, and not introducing me in a particularly proud way to the interviewers. He was such an authority figure that his rebuffs left me with a sense of growing dread and shame about who or what I was.
 
 
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M. I. T.)
 
I was 17 years old when I started my undergraduate work at M.I.T., enrolled as a student of physics. A quick study, I did extremely well there at first. I was on the High Honors Dean's List and ranked within the top two percent of the 900 freshman students at the end of that year. M.I.T. is such a special place, and has an atmosphere that's almost electric. I felt a rate of learning and intellectual development there that was truly fantastic. The passion for learning and the intellectual independence and confidence I developed there would stay with me for the rest of my life, and would empower all my later quests.
 
The feeling of knowing things deeply, of being able to work things out from first principles instead of superficial knowledge, felt wonderful to me. It was totally liberating. Everything seemed simpler and clearer that way. Even as a freshman, I began to be seen as a resource by my M. I. T. friends, as someone who could distill and explain the principles of things in cool ways they hadn't picked up in the classroom. This felt wonderful to me, and conditioned me into a way of approaching new knowledge: I'd distill it - simplify it - recast it - and then enthusiastically explain it to others in "my cool new way".
 
 

MIT on the Charles River, Cambridge, MA
photo by Liang-Wu Cai
 
 
For my first two years, I lived in the East Campus dorms and focused very hard on my studies. Although my parents paid my tuition, I had to provide much of the rest of the funding. I was a classic case of a student who should have had some kind of scholarship, but whose parents were "too well off" for that. Which was incredible, because we weren't actually well off - only my father was - and the only time I'd seen him in years was during that interview trip.As a result, I had to scratch, scrounge and work like heck for spending money all during my college years.
 
I worked for several summers on the assembly lines at Digby Products, Ltd., in White Plains, making ring binders and briefcases. I worked incredibly long hours there, sometimes 80 hours a week at near minimum wages, during the summer "crunch" of production for schools in the fall. At time and a half for everything over 40 hours, this added up pretty quickly. The small factory was near the train the station, in what was then an older part of town. Most of the work force was poor women and black men who came out by train from nearer New York City to work there. I greatly enjoyed the warm, easy companionship I found working among these people. Somehow I wasn't shy or inhibited when around friendly working class people. My ability to befriend and mingle so happily with them boosted my confidence in my social adaptability, which helped me greatly later on.
 
During the school year the first couple of years, I worked on the dormitory room-cleaning staff. This was boring, routine work, but was convenient to be able to work right in my own dormitory and the work paid OK if I just worked long enough hours.
 
But life wasn't all study and work. I enjoyed the chance to do other things whenever I could. I was thrilled to be able to learn to sail at the M.I.T. sailing club, and I spent a lot of time out on the Charles River during sailing seasons.
 
Being away from home for the first time, I benefited from a new freedom to explore my gender feelings and to begin to express my real self. I began acquiring lots of clothes and things for fully crossing over as "Lynn". I mail ordered my clothes from the Sears Roebuck catalog. This was an easy way to acquire nice, basic girls clothes, even while living in the M.I.T. dorms, and no one questioned getting packages from Sears. I was amazed at how much I learned, and how nice I could look and feel. However, I was sensually and sexually incredibly frustrated at not being able to openly express my femaleness, my passions and my desires to take a boyfriend. I desperately longed to be seen and desired as a girl by a boy.
 
After my second year, I moved into a nice rooming house with four other MIT students on Massachusetts Avenue near Central Square in Cambridge. I also began using some of my newly gained knowledge by working as an electronic technician part time in various M.I.T. labs. This paid more per hour and was far more interesting than working as a janitor!
 
I still enjoyed my studies and did well in school, but I increasingly found comfort and a feeling of warmth in quietly being like a girl, whenever and wherever I could.  Living in town and outside the M.I.T. dorms meant that I was a lot freer to do this from time to time, at least away from school. A lot of my thinking focused on how to be and feel really girly and attractive to boys, and on how I might eventually create an identity and maybe even live my life that way.
 
The four boys in the rooming house clearly knew I had begun dressing as a girl some of the time when I was alone. I'd done that tastefully, quietly and calmly and wasn't bothering anyone. I didn't talk about it or make an issue of it, but didn't really hide it either. I just did it, usually after having a glass or two of fortified wine to calm my nerves, and no one seemed to care. In fact, they were all very friendly with me and actually seemed to like me a lot. I recall the time when one of the boys, an M.I.T. student from Brazil, casually showed me a news photo of a very beautiful "travesti" performing at Carnival time in Rio. He commented on how very stunning she was, indicating his acceptance of such a beautiful person. We looked into each other's eyes, and I knew for sure he "knew about me" and that it really was OK with him. I'm guessing that he'd also explained "what I was" to the other boys there, and they were OK with it too.
 
As a freshman I had joined a Methodist Church youth group and a Friends meeting group, in order to find companionship. I often volunteered to help with meetings, working on food preparations, etc., which brought me into the warm company of friendly girls and women. This was nice, since there were very few girls to interact with at M.I.T. back then.
 
In the process, I formed a long-lasting friendship with an M.I.T. classmate Karl and his girlfriend Dorothy. They attended a Methodist Church in a working class area of Boston, and were the center of a lot of church-group social activities. I began going to church with them and tagging along on many of their youth-group outings. Carl had a big Ford station wagon that served as a group transport to all sorts of fun adventures. I remember many wonderful times, especially our summer outings to Revere Beach and Nantasket - the smells of warm summer evenings by the ocean, the sounds and lights and shouts from the amusement rides, and the strong feelings of being young and totally alive.
 
Karl and Dot knew that I was struggling with gender/orientation problems of some kind, and felt sorry for me. They even tried to fix me up with dates with girls a couple of times. However, these turned out to be social disasters since I had no idea what I was doing or why I was doing it. As time went on, Dot's family became like a real family to me, and I often spent time with them in their home. Dot and her mother and sisters were very kind to me during the later, more difficult times while I was attempting to transition in Boston, almost as if I were one of the family.
 
Adding to my problems was another looming issue: Although I was learning a tremendous amount at M.I.T., doubts had begun to creep into my mind about my future career. I loved studying physics and liked thinking about things that way. However, I had no concept of how I'd go any further with my studies after M.I.T., or even if I did, what a career in physics would be like. I had no role models and didn't understand the concepts of getting a Ph.D. and going on to an academic career. I was an ignorant innocent when it came to the big picture about scientific careers.
 
During this period, I also felt increasingly freakish looking and ugly. I didn't understand what the heck was making my face look so ugly (not having a clue about the slight brow-ridge that I was developing). I'd long felt that my nose was too big and now became completely obsessed with this horrible defect. I don't know how I got the nerve, but I told my mother that I needed to "get my nose fixed" so I'd "look more handsome". I'd talked with Dr. Kanzanjian, one of the top plastic surgeons in Boston back then, and he said he could make it smaller and straighter.
 
I didn't tell Dr. Kazanjian that I wanted to look girly. I just hoped for the best. My mother signed the papers, and I paid for and underwent the surgery. It was a nice improvement, but didn't solve the underlying problem. Others now seemed to think I looked either cute or handsome, depending on whether they thought I was a girl or a boy. However, I still felt awfully ugly and freakish looking, and only found much later in life what the real problems were (see Lynn's FFS).
 
As my junior year approached, my cross-gender feelings really began to take control, and I'd slid into serious and obvious difficulties in my personal life. Just appearing to be a girl and feeling like a girl clearly wasn't what I sought; I wanted to actually be a girl, to have a girl's body. Somewhere around this time, I began telling close friends that I preferred to use the nickname "Lynn" instead of "Robert".
 
 
My Early Transition Attempt
 
By 1958, my urges to become female reached a level that seemed like a biological imperative to me. It wasn't a genital sexual feeling, but an overall body feeling - a sensation of being girly and nubile all throughout my entire body, and longing for a boy to passionately take me and make love to me. I was desperate to break out of my shell, to be free to be seen as a girl, and as a girl to enter the mating rituals that all the other young people around me were entering. My body was driven by deep inner urges to mate with a man as a woman, and these urges were increasingly beyond my control.
 
Then I figured out how to get injectable female sex hormones (estrogens). I paid some working class friends of mine to steal them for me while they were burgling other drugs, and I got enough to last me several years, along with some reusable syringes. Based on knowledge from my readings, I began heavily self-medicating in an effort to physically transform myself as best I could. This was a deadly serious move. I did it without any medical supervision, and I'd never even had contact with anyone else who had ever taken female hormones. I wasn't sure where it would all lead, but felt driven to try it.
 
The subtle but deep effects of the estrogen were wonderful to me. My skin softened and became more rubbery. My body hair thinned and lightened. My breasts began to develop. I also began to feel warmer and better in ways that are hard to describe. My body increasingly tingled all over with a soft warmth and deep excitement. Instead of my sexuality being constrained and channeled into one "boy part", my entire body now experienced a ever deepening, flowering female sensuality.
 
My closer friends, upon noticing these results, showed a combination of fascination and pity for this kid to whom such inexplicable things were happening. I believe they instinctively sensed that I wasn't gay. Even though I really enjoyed being close to boys and liked being approached and touched and hugged by them, I never felt or displayed any urges to be excitedly sexually aggressive towards them. I vibed "girl" instead.
 
I think people who knew me thought I was suffering from some kind of "biological" problem. I went along with that, since it gave me an excuse to overtly slide over socially without it being "my fault". After all, very few people knew about the dramatic effects of cross-gender sex hormones back then. No one else had a clue as to what was happening to me.
 
To my surprise, I was quietly tolerated during my transition into androgyny. As the female warmth swept over me, my longings for romance grew strong. I'd learned more about how to make myself quietly attractive to boys as a girl. I carefully watched reactions of boys to my efforts at projecting vulnerability and femaleness with my eyes. Several classmates began to show interest in me, and started visiting me and staying over at my place from from time to time. I'd present myself as Lynn, and we'd drink wine together and make out a little. Eventually I attracted one boy into a relationship and fell in love with him. I awaited his visits tingling all over in anticipation. Sometimes we'd spend the evening and night together, having dinner and drinking and then going to bed. Necking and cuddling with him and sleeping at his side afterwards brought me a joy I'd never felt before in my whole life, even though I couldn't be a complete woman to him.
 
 
"Lynn" at age 20:
 
Becoming feminized and physically androgynous by taking female sex hormones during her early attempt at transition
 
 
1958
 
 
 
[ Note: this old print is mottled by age; I hope to make a better print from the negative soon ]
 
 
By this time I'd moved into a rooming house in the old South End, on Pembroke Street just off Tremont Street. At the time the South End was a very poor but quiet area of Boston, where you could pretty much come and go as you pleased. Most people there had there own problems to worry about, and would leave you alone. This became the time and place for me to gain more experience in the female social role, and to try to figure out how I might live in the future.
 
I still dressed and acted like a boy when going to my classes at M.I.T., but relaxed into being a girl most of the rest of the time. I was kinda cute and androgynous by now, so it wasn't too difficult to make these shifts back and forth work. I didn't get confused or flustered by different name-genderings since the transgendered name "Lynn" worked either way. I was extremely fortunate: I was only 5 feet 9 inches tall, weighed about 130 pounds, had a small waist merging into well rounded hips, and small slender hands and feet. Long efforts at feminizing the musculature and shape of my legs helped me look very attractive in dresses, where my legs tended to draw attention away from any imperfections elsewhere. Appearing to be naturally feminine when I wanted to wasn't a problem. It was a wonderful, warm experience for me.
 
The trouble was, I myself couldn't figure out what the heck was actually wrong with me. I wasn't in a clear category in any research papers or books that I'd come across. There had been a tiny handful of cases, such as Christine Jorgensen, of boys who had been changed into women. But they'd been treated as isolated cases of extreme sexual deviancy and subjected to continual public ridicule here in the U. S., where hospitals would not allow such operations.
 
Nevertheless, I knew that I had to become a woman somehow or find a way to live as a woman, or I was doomed. By now I also knew that whatever I did to solve things, I'd have to do it very secretly to avoid stigmatization and trouble with the law. I planned to do my best to be a girl now, and hoped to eventually get a "sex change" somewhere, someday.
 
While I was living in the South End, I shared my secrets with my friends Karl and Dorothy. Karl had transferred to Boston University in his junior year and was a pre-med student there now. I desperately sought his advice on what I might be able to do to eventually change my sex, and especially on how I might safely perform a castration surgery to immediately stop production of male sex hormones inside me. I figured quite correctly that if I could successfully castrate myself, I could instantly stop the terrible damage that testosterone was doing, and that the estrogen would then have a much more powerful feminizing effect. Once it was done, no one could make me "go back". I could always say later that it was due to some kind of accident, or due to "cancer" or whatever.
 
At first glance this plan will seem totally psychopathic to most people - but remember what is happening here: A young girl sees her entire life being being ruined and her body being physically mutilated by the effects of testosterone. Under the circumstances, she would do anything to stop this horror from happening.
 
I asked Karl for medical information on how I could operate on myself without risking too much pain, bleeding or infection. I needed this knowledge so I could avoid having to go to a hospital afterwards for help (I feared that I'd be committed to a mental institution if any doctors found out). I'd found out about methods and tools used to castrate animals, but I couldn't predict if I'd be able to take the pain, recover in secret and avoid having to go for help afterwards.
 
On hearing of my plans, Karl became very worried that I might seriously injure myself. He quickly arranged for me to see someone highly placed at the B. U. Medical School whom he thought might know something about "sexual disorders" and "sex changes". This turned out to be someone in a big fancy office - it may even have been one of the Deans of the school.
 
In a lengthy, tense meeting with this very senior physician, I explained my situation and sought information about hormone effects and about genital surgery. I'll never forget how vehemently this man came out against my efforts to change myself physically with hormones and my hope for genital surgery. The words of this prominent doctor rang in my head long afterwards: "Those operations don't make you into a woman - they only turn you into a freak! You can never become a woman! You've got to stop this sexual experimentation on yourself, or you will be institutionalized!"
 
Nothing had prepared me for this event. I became terrified that I'd be committed to Mattapan State Hospital in Massachusetts (a real 'Snake Pit') or that my family would find out about me and have me committed to an insane asylum in New York.
 
As I look back now, I realize that I'd lived a very sheltered life. I knew that homosexuality was considered "a perversion", but thought that was mainly among religious people like my Texas relatives. I had no clue as to how totally stigmatized gay people and cross-dressers were back then, even by "educated people". I simply hadn't been around, had no street smarts and hadn't picked up on the terror and dangers they faced. Almost no one was "out", so regular folks never showed how they felt about gays. The way Mr. Jacobs had been quietly tolerated at White Plains High School, and the way I'd been treated by my housemates - I guess that was all just luck, and wasn't at all representative of the usual reactions that "sexual deviants" got if they were "exposed" back in the 1950's.
 
However, without even realizing what the heck was happening, I had now been suddenly confronted with the rage, hostility and cruelty that rained down on those who were "worse than gay", i.e., people who wanted to change their sex. This was a disastrous and incredibly discouraging turn of events for me. Since I was young, I was still in awe of medical authority figures, so it never occurred to me that this senior physician was ill-informed and incredibly prejudiced, and was misrepresenting medical facts to me.
 
After this horrible episode my confidence really began to erode. In the face of overwhelming rejection by the medical authorities, I began to lose my dreams. My years of hopeful, rather innocent "scientific" gender exploration now seemed over, and were replaced with a sense of impending doom. I stumbled on in my transition attempt, but began to sense that I'd never find a true place in society. I especially worried that I might never ever find anyone who would love me and mate with me. I became uneasy about going to classes and lost my passion for my studies, contemplating a future life without love.
 
[Note: I was far ahead of my time back in 1959. If this scenario had been acted out now, I would have immediately been tracked into gender counseling and gender transition and would have had the chance for a much fuller life as a young woman.Today it would also have been relatively easy to obtain medical help and undergo castration, and then later undergo sex reassignment surgery. As it was, I was doomed to several years of further masculinization which would later prove incredibly difficult to erase, and to a roller-coaster personal trajectory that nearly resulted in my suicide.]
 
 
In the spring of 1959, I left M.I.T. without finishing my degree, and found work as an electronics technician. I had a notion of returning the next year, due to extreme pressure from my mother, who was taken totally by surprise at my not finishing that year.
 
The boy I'd been closest-to graduated that summer. However, I was lucky to find another sort-of straight boyfriend who was very sweet to me and who kept me company through these difficult times. He was a motorcyclist, and we had a lot of fun going on rides together all over New England. We also liked to hang out at various clubs, especially the Melody Lounge near Sculley Square in Boston (the area later known as the "combat zone"). A series of bands played rhythm and blues music there, and a diverse crowd of bikers, a few gays and various other cool people hung out there. To this day I still come alive and love to dance to the fantastically sensual rhythm and blues music that was in the air back then.
 
I was so mesmerized by my new boyfriend that I followed him around like a puppy. Our friends used to kid us by asking "hey, when are you two going to get married." Their kidding was gentle and warm, even though they all knew I was a boy. It was a kindly form of teasing and actually felt good to me. I dreamily wished that I could be his wife.
 
Although I felt joy in our physical closeness, I'd begun to feel a terrible, ever increasing frustration. Having to tuck, tape and hide my genitalia, it was difficult to fully express and release my womanly passions with a lover. Alcohol helped a bit, but not enough for real satisfaction. The session with the doctor at Boston University had torn away all my feelings of innocent exploration. I began feeling more and more like a horribly deformed freak, with no way out. I seemed to have become some kind of sexual outlaw, out of control, living on borrowed time with no future. Even so, I have many beautifully romantic memories from these times, and flashbacks of those memories later gave me confidence and hope for a better future as a woman.
 
[Note: Modern terminology would say that during this period I was living as a "transgendered" woman. The boys I had relationships with were straight boys who thought of me as a girl. Even though they knew I had "boy's parts" they never saw those parts during lovemaking, and the rest of me was "all girl"- someone who enjoyed yielding to the voluptuous feelings of penetrative sex in the strong arms of a loving man, and who never had those male mounting urges herself. This sort of relationship is a man-woman relationship and not at all like the relationship between two gay men. A tragic modern saga of a transgendered woman in a similar type of relationship is the story of Calpernia Addams and Pfc. Barry Winchell, documented in the N. Y. Times Magazine article An Inconvenient Woman, May 28, 2000, and in Calpernia's new book Mark 947.]
 
 
Although I'd built a fragile little life for myself and felt OK off campus, I finally became really scared about going back to my classes at M.I.T. the following year. The difficulties of shifting gender presentation back and forth were now getting to me, and my fear of being "caught and institutionalized" grew stronger.
 
I felt OK in the neighborhood near my rooming house, because the local beat cop knew about me and sort-of looked out for me. He'd probably learned the story from my landlord who'd been a Chief in the Navy and was very worldly-wise. I recall one time having dinner downstairs with my landlord and his wife. I overheard him in another room explain in a loud voice to a couple of his friends - "hey - they're just as good as a woman". I immediately knew he was talking about girls like me, from a guy's sexual viewpoint. His comment didn't bother me at all, and I even took it as quite a compliment.
 
Although safe in my neighborhood and the fringes of downtown Boston, I was increasingly afraid of somehow being detected and caught by the police elsewhere. Cross-dressing was considered a serious sexual perversion and was actually against the law back then. You could be arrested and jailed for doing it. I gradually became unhinged by stress and fear, worrying that I might get dumped into the infamous insane asylum at Mattapan State Hospital. I had to pull back and leave school without getting my degree.
 
Looking back on this critical period in my life, I felt a deep pang of empathy for the main character in the recent movie Boys Don't Cry. In that movie Hilary Swank plays a female-to-male (FtM) transsexual teenager named Brandon Teena. Brandon was born a girl, yet desperately tries to live life and find love as a boy. Brandon's joy when accepted and experiencing love, and his desperation and humiliation when exposed as a transsexual, are wonderfully and tragically revealed in that movie. Boys Don't Cry conveys some of the essence of transsexual experience and of our society's superstitious and hateful reactions to such persons.
 
 
What am I to do?
 
Though it greatly disappointed my family and relatives, who had no clue what I was going through, I left school and traveled around the country to try to figure out what to do. It was all sort of aimless and desperate, but I did learn some very important things. I spent some time in San Francisco, and it became clear there that I wasn't gay. Gay men wanted boyfriends, not girlfriends. They didn't want to make passionate love to a woman like a straight man does. Instead, they wanted to openly play with each other's boy parts. Such men weren't attracted to a girly person who concealed those parts, and who wanted to deny to herself and her lovers that she even had such parts.
 
I thought about becoming an entertainer, because some pretty "female-impersonators" were able to live mostly as women and the work gave them an "acceptable" rationale for doing that. Sadly, I was too shy and inhibited to "let myself go" and make any attempts at performing. I would have loved performing, and am sure that it would have brought wonderful psychic rewards. It would also have brought me in contact with the handful of transsexual girls then in among the drag queens in San Francisco, and they might have helped me learn the ropes at this critical time in my life. But I didn't know this at the time, and this cost me dearly in years of suffering.
 
Instead, I mainly thought about finding work in some small town as a waitress or salesgirl, if I could somehow fake my papers and get a job. But I worried about my longer-term fate. Passing as a girl would get more difficult as time went on, even when taking female hormones, unless I could stop production of male hormones in my body. I especially wondered how would I ever find a mate. Straight boys sometimes liked me as a fun girlfriend and sexual playmate, but I didn't think my little "love affairs" would ever get much beyond that level. I worried a lot about growing older all alone, once my youthful softness and looks were gone.
 
Anyway, to help pay for things at M.I.T., I'd done a lot of part-time work as an electronics technician, gaining, along the way, some experience in designing and building digital counters and logic circuits using vacuum-tube technology. During my time away from school, I worked as an electronics tech, repairing some of the early transistorized hearing aids. This was a "backroom", out of sight type of job. I became very skilled in this work, and although somewhat androgynous in appearance, I found it possible to get jobs as a boy at several locations around the country.
 
Something else that helped keep me balanced during these years was my love of the outdoors. On returning back east, I did a lot of hiking and rock scrambling, in the Hudson Highlands north of New York City, the Adirondacks of upstate New York and the White Mountains of New Hampshire. I loved to find special secret places to return to time and again. My favorite place of all was the high ledges on top of Breakneck Ridge, overlooking the Hudson River just northeast of West Point, where I could often be alone in a spectacularly beautiful place and just daydream.
 
During and after my time at MIT, I'd also tagged along with some classmates to the Quincy Quarries (more info), where they were learning how to do technical rock climbing, using ropes and pitons to protect the climber of nearly vertical climbs. This new type of climbing fascinated me. Though slender and initially not very athletic, I eagerly joined in, and later spent a lot of time practicing there. These activities also helped me cope and contain my angst. The sensual physical feelings, the tingle of excitement, the tinge of fear, the tight mutual dependence among climbing partners, and the whole atmosphere surrounding this then-exotic adventure sport were very compelling.
 
By mid 1961, my life stabilized a bit. I'd learned a lot while traveling around the country, and now realized how important it was to get into a good career and make a whole lot of money, fast. That was the only way to construct a springboard from which to launch some kind of life later on, whatever that might be. Though it tore me up, I knew that I must force myself to mask and even abandon my natural feelings and transition efforts, and identify as "Robert" again for a while. I'd finally run out of hormones by now, and couldn't figure out how to get any more. I'd never been able to find any real medical help or any explanation of my condition, and I was afraid of trying to steal hormones myself. My unassisted, isolated attempt at gender transition had failed.
 
Tail between my legs, I went home to White Plains where my mother and I lived in quiet mutual isolation and rejection. She was extremely embarrassed about my failure to graduate from M.I.T., and confounded by the lack of any explanation. I got a job as a technician at a hearing aid company near Tarrytown, and couldn't wait to get away from her and out on my own again.
 
Thus began a very strange period in my life. It was a time for work and saving money, and for study and learning. It was also a time to attempt finding acceptance again as a normal boy, just to get along. As I began "hanging out with the guys", I began to hear how lots of rough-edged, grown-up guys actually thought about women, or at least what they thought they were "expected to think about them". I learned how they looked down on them, and how they judged women's sexual behavior from a male point of view, from which viewpoint women's natural instincts and feelings seem bizarre and almost "perverted". Their comments and judgments brought back and intensified the earlier social stigmatization I'd felt, and it all really began to catch up with me.
 
I began feeling deep humiliation at how I'd behaved earlier in my life, at how I'd "totally degraded" myself, even though driven by heartfelt urges way beyond my control. The still lingering results of the female sex hormones constantly reminded me of what I had done to myself, and what had happened to me in the past. Now, instead of having sweet memories, I became embarrassed to think about the things I'd been doing. In those dark ages, being a sensual woman was considered a degrading thing from a guy's viewpoint, even for a natural born girl!
 
I began doing lots of real "guy" things to see if I could "save myself" from whatever it was that was haunting me. For several seasons, I went on deer hunting trips into the wilds of the Adirondack Mountains with the young guys from work. We'd backpack in even during dangerously late fall weather, camping in open leantos way in the back woods. I got further into rock climbing, and also got heavily into riding motorcycles (my biker boyfriend had taught me how to ride in '59). I bought a Harley-Davidson Sportster XLCH, a very hot bike for its day, and did a lot of very fast, dangerous riding, making long rides such as between Boston and New York even in the middle of winter.
 
To make the changes stick, I kept my hair cut extremely short (almost a crew cut), and I let the hair grow out on my legs. I began working out a lot at the YMCA, lifting weights and trying to "toughen up" my body. My testosterone level must have been really high by now, because the workouts rapidly added lots of well-toned, well-defined masculine musculature. Watching how guys projected themselves, I began to build up a hard-edged appearance. I could even manage to "look tough" if I needed to. Within a couple of years I seemed outwardly like a totally different person. Gads, other guys sometimes even seemed frightened of me, and would quickly step out of my way on the street. For a while I began to delude myself that maybe I could really toughen up and actually make it as a guy!
 
 
"Robert" on his Harley at ~age 24, trying really hard to look "butch"
 
 
The trouble was that I never made any psychic connection with that role. The period from mid '61 through '66 now has a dream-like quality in my memory. I remember my studies and my work well, and I remember doing lots of specific things. But I have no clearly-felt memories of me as a guy in the guy role inside a guy's body - even though I did a lot of things in that role in such a body.
 
That external person just wasn't me, but only a weirdly deranged act constructed as best she could by the girl inside. I don't know how the heck I managed to keep it going for six long years. Powerful womanly feelings kept sweeping back over me from time to time, and in the end there was no escaping them. Especially since I never got the regular guy urges to chase and mount girls. First and foremost though, in 1961, I needed to study hard again and get some kind of career going, as a boy.
 
[ Note: I've since come to cherish wonderful memories of my early life and transition attempts as "Lynn", and am now not at all ashamed of what I did while at M.I.T. My struggles to be a girl back then are all so understandable now, and are a simply a part of who I've been all along. And of course being a sensual woman is now a norm, rather than something shameful. Having been a woman for so many years now, I've instead come to feel rather embarrassed when reminded of various things I did as a "guy" during '61-'66. I don't feel any guilt about trying to be a "guy", because society coerced me in every imaginable way to do that. But that act was doomed, as we shall see. ]
 
During my time at M.I.T., I'd taken various courses in circuit theory and electronics. The tremendous advances in electronics knowledge made during WW-II, especially at the M.I.T.'s Rad-Lab, were then being poured out into the classrooms there, especially the new methods for calculating transient phenomena, and designing pulse and logic circuitry. I could sense wide-open vistas for creative work in the new electronics, and this intrigued me.
 
I decided that electronic design engineering was what I wanted to do as a career. I'd read a lot about the history of electrical engineering and electronics, and the development of knowledge in those fields. I greatly admired the work and the great impact on the world of the field's many heroes, especially characters like Steinmetz and Armstrong. It seemed that if the muse ever spoke to you as a creative engineer, you could change the world. By then, I'd even developed an adolescent fantasy that I might be able to do such things too.
 
Such fantasies helped me escape somewhat into the life of the mind, while working towards getting resources to somehow solve my problem later. After inquiring at several schools, I was able to put together a program of study at Columbia University's School of Engineering and Applied Science in New York City, to finish my B.S. in Electrical Engineering in one year.
 
 
Columbia University
 
Columbia was wonderful. It's a truly great university with a deeply intellectual tradition, and it is located in the world's greatest, most exciting city. By then I'd straightened myself out enough, and had a good enough act as being "hard-edged but cool", that I got along rather well as a boy. The classes were small, and my classmates were very bright and motivated. The faculty were outstanding. My courses that year were very stimulating. The digital computer was just then emerging as a vital new technology. Computers totally fascinated me, so I continued on for my M.S.E.E., focusing on digital design and computer programming.
 
 

 Low Library, Columbia University, New York City
Photo by Eileen Barroso
 
 
I didn't have a clear concept about what the Ph.D. meant for research careers, and was too shy to approach faculty members to learn more about their research. I also knew the clock was racing along in my personal life, and I didn't think I'd have the years, resources or record to go on for a Ph. D. But I really enjoyed my graduate course work, and wanted to learn as much as I could before going to work to make money.
 
As a side-benefit of being at Columbia, I was also able to take a series of outstanding courses and undertake many readings in cultural anthropology. Anthropology fascinated me, appealing to and giving meaning to my own self-perceived status as "outsider", observer and ethnographer. I've been something of an amateur "ethnographer" ever since. I always seem to be observing, charting and sorting the underlying pattern of roles and behaviors in the everyday lives of members of any community, clan or member-group that I find myself encountering - including those I participate in. This thought style proved to be very important in helping me visualize knowledge gaps and uncover technical opportunities in my later research work.
 
The timing of my studies at Columbia couldn't have been better with regards to computing. I was able to take a whole series of some of the earliest full-immersion courses available on the key hardware, software and mathematical aspects of digital computing, just the field was beginning to take off. I studied circuit theory with Prof. Omar Wing, pulse and digital circuit design with Prof. Jacob Millman, switching theory and logic design with Prof. Stephen Unger, programming methods with Prof. Theodore Bashkow, numerical methods with Prof. Mario Salvadori, and computer organization and advanced programming with Dr. Herbert Schorr (then an Adjunct Prof., from IBM Research). I also became more interested in mathematics, and studied further in number theory, linear mathematics, queuing theory, probability and statistics. And, I learned the stories of the newer heroes in computing like Alan Turing, Claude Shannon, M. V. Wilkes and John Backus.
 
I vividly recall an independent study project with Dr. Schorr in late '63. I was reading and trying to understand some recent research papers by M. V. Wilkes at Cambridge about his list processing language "WISP" and his explorations in self-compiling compilers and machine-independent compiling. To test my understanding, I took on the task of implementing a self-compiling compiler for a simple version of WISP on the IBM 1620 computer in Columbia's Engineering School, and then exploring the use of that compiler to bootstrap more sophisticated versions of WISP.
 
 
The IBM 1620 Computer System (a small, early 60's machine used in many universities):
 
 
You'd have to have known 1620's up-close to realize what an arcane effort this was. But the experience of getting hands-on access to a computer, and having it all to myself, was very exciting. Working late many evenings, I managed to get that little compiler working pretty quickly, and then explored the language bootstrapping process. Not only that, but I was able to learn all about the 1620 inside and out, hardware and software. I was thrilled at the intellectual sensation provided by the experience, and was now totally hooked on creating and making things work in the world of computing.
 
 
This is the paper by
M.V. Wilkes that launched me into my career in computer research*
 
*Those interested in Wilkes' historical early work in computing can retrieve pdf file copies of this paper (and a follow-on paper) at the following links (3.4 MB and 3.9 MB):

"An Experiment with a self-compiling compiler for a simple list-processing language"

"An Experiment with a self-compiling compiler for a simple list-processing language" (PART-2)

 

 

 
Loneliness, Companionship, Responsibility
 
When I started at Columbia in the fall of '61, I enjoyed my studies and kept very busy at them. However, I felt very isolated by my new gender circumstances. I had to constantly control how I acted and presented myself. "Lynn" gradually became internalized and "invisible" to everyone else. Although I was only 23 years old, my now butch presentation meant I had no chance of attracting a straight boyfriend as a girly person, and I became incredibly lonely ( I had zero interest in attracting a gay boyfriend who would want me as a "guy"). I began to feel deep angst and ongoing heartache, especially upon seeing other young people in love.
 
During the summer of '62, I again repaired hearing aids. I befriended a girl named "Sue" at the company I worked for. Sue was studying nursing in New York City, and during the '62-'63 school year we met a few times for lunch, took walks in the parks, etc. I didn't think of these get togethers as dates; we just seemed like really close, warm friends and I desperately needed companionship.
 
Sue was a very pretty, very warm-blooded girl. I knew that she'd had lots of romances, and that they hadn't worked out for her. I'd overheard from the guys at the hearing-aid company that she was "easy", and felt kind of sorry for her not finding anyone that way.  I didn't realize at the time how much Sue was aroused around "Robert". Given my own past experiences of feeling warmth as a girl around boys, I should have been aware of this. But it just didn't occur to Robert. I didn't think Robert was doing anything that would arouse girls. He definitely wasn't trying to arouse girls, and girls hadn't come on to Robert before.
 
One day in the late spring of '63 Sue became very aroused. She was highly experienced sexually, and she somehow managed to get Robert fully aroused and quickly jumped him and had intercourse with him. This totally amazed Robert, who had never even been intimate with a girl before. Lynn had always tucked those darn things inside and back through her crotch, and only got firm and aroused "down inside" when being approached by boys. Robert didn't anticipate this new situation, and didn't use any protection - heck, he'd never even bought a condom! I immediately assumed that Sue was on birth control pills, because she had had other affairs without getting pregnant. Also, in the back of my mind, I also figured that the estrogen therapy had ruined Robert's fertility anyway. But it hadn't, and Sue wasn't taking her birth control pills either. Sue became pregnant after just that one act of intercourse.
 
Suddenly my world was thrown into chaos. I didn't know what the heck to do. This was something I'd never in my wildest imagination expected to happen. She'd been with lots of guys and had never gotten pregnant before, so far as I knew. Why wasn't she taking her birth control pills?  I had just decided to continue on after my master's degree, thinking I might go for the Ph.D., or at least complete all the computer courses available at the time. I didn't even have a job lined up for that year other than a modest teaching assistantship at Columbia, and she knew that.
 
Even though Sue was Catholic, we discussed the option of abortion. I couldn't bring myself to explain my past to her, since that was so totally incredible and embarrassing, and I was in a state of denial and trying as hard as I could to "go straight". Sue never seemed to notice that I was still unusually soft and different and "young-looking" physically when unclothed - or else she liked me that way compared to other boys she'd been with. By now I'd built up my pectoral muscles a lot by working out, and they somewhat hid my residual breast development. However, my body shape still revealed the effects of 2-1/2 years of heavy doses of estrogen (it's still somewhat detectable in even later photos of Robert, in Part II).
 
As the summer went by, we got more and more concerned and confused about what to do. I felt very trapped by what appeared to be a clearly intentional pregnancy. It took me years to admit it to myself (I felt that stupid about it) but she had indeed entrapped Robert.  Given her modest working class background Sue probably thought Robert would be a "great catch". She'd gotten her hook into him and pressed hard for marriage. I kept resisting without telling her why. However, I realized that I didn't like the idea of an abortion either. I wasn't against abortions per se, and would have gone along with one if Sue had wanted one, but the very idea that a child was on the way amazed me and really seemed like some kind of wonderful miracle. All of this was extremely disorienting for me. (It wasn't until later that I even began wondering if the child were really mine...only Sue knows for sure...).
 
After that first time, Sue and I didn't have sexual relations again that summer. I guess she figured that was because of the chaos we were in. We often hugged a lot, held hands when walking, etc., and at least that provided some sense of warmth and connection for me. Sue didn't make any sexual advances or demands that summer. I became used to the warmth of our close companionship and began to feel OK about it - although I wasn't aroused by her nor felt passion towards her.
 
I don't know what I could possibly have had in mind. In a combination of repressed longings for a baby myself, deep feelings of responsibility for the unborn child, combined with affectionate feelings for Sue as a companion and powerful social pressures to be "normal", I caved in and Robert finally agreed to marry Sue.
 
I then began to wonder a bit if my strange past might have been some kind of temporary madness? Or was it just a "phase" that some boys go through? I just couldn't figure it out, and there was no one to turn to for help or advice. I even began to think maybe I'd gotten beyond it. Still, in the back of my mind there lurked a knot of fear, and my suspicions about the entrapment that said "this is a big mistake".
 
Robert and Sue married in a simple civil ceremony in White Plains, N.Y. in September 1963, and moved into a small upstairs apartment in a house near the White Plains railroad station. Sue was working as a nurse by now at White Plains Hospital. With her pay, along with Robert's graduate assistantship money, they somehow managed to through that school year. Sue had a beautiful little girl, "Kelly", in February, 1964.
 
Unfortunately no one knew back then what we know now: I was a classic case of early-onset male-to-female transsexualism. My eventual fate was already sealed, and was destined to be played out just a few years hence.
 
Time To Go To Work
 
By the end of '63 it was clear that Robert needed to find a job that next spring. Fortunately, I had done well on that cool WISP compiler work in the fall. That work not only impacted me personally by ramping up my fascination with computers, but it also apparently made a great impression on Dr. Schorr. Robert soon received a wonderful job offer, being invited to join Dr. Schorr's research group at the new IBM Research Center, in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. It now seemed in retrospect very fortunate that I'd stepped back from my earlier studies at M.I.T., looked for a new direction, found a true intellectual calling and gone on to study at Columbia. At least Robert had a great job lined up, and just in time!
 
 

 IBM T.J.Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, NY
 
 
 

 PREFACE

  PART I

 PART II

 PART III

 PART IV

  PART V

 PART VI