I don’t have a website, a photo gallery, or a philosophy to impart. Everything I want to say is in that one picture: being a transsexual woman does not preclude you from holding a position of respect and responsibility, nor from being able to smile about the whole business afterwards.
On the chance that it is of interest to someone, I will discuss my experience of transitioning in the aviation world of the late ‘80s. However, I don’t consider it crucial for the reader to proceed that far. In my view, this Success Page is about you, not us. For those who are transitioning, or thinking about it, it is to show that others have made it and are rooting for you. The fact that we have “succeeded” does not mean we were in any way superior or luckier than you. Believe me, along the way I endured every bit of the clinical depression, alcohol abuse, and personal despair that Lynn describes. Most of us did, at least then. Years ago this was a very solitary path, often with entirely uncertain outcome. Today it is still a long way from being easy, but there is no reason for it to be a solitary effort. I was lucky enough to have a few understanding and supportive friends, and that support made all the difference. It is in hope of offering someone else like encouragement that I have agreed to appear on this page.
There was a pivotal moment in my own transition when I attended a talk by a most remarkable woman. She was a well-placed executive, obviously of exceptional intelligence and with the relaxed bearing of one used to the trappings of authority. Her poise was such that I would have turned to look at her had she passed on the street. It was only as she commenced her talk on transsexualism that it occurred to me that she was post-operative herself. I thought “There, at last, is the thing I want to be.” It was not a casual moment; I was quite thunderstruck. Here was someone of such accomplishment that her gender transition rated barely a passing nod. I got to know her later and we became friends, and with time she subsided to merely mortal status in my mind. But I never forgot how important she had been as that first role model. So that is what I would urge of the reader. Look to this page for examples if you will, but then go out and do us one better. Be the one beside whom the next generation looks to us as nothing more than ordinary mortals. I would be far prouder of that than to be the best airline captain in the world.
That we still need to speak of “TS Success Stories” shows our legitimacy is not yet accepted as commonplace. Otherwise, why even speak of it? A transsexual in a menial occupation may be tolerated without comment, but one who emerges in any prestigious profession still finds herself faced with the prospect of rejection or dismissal. It is seldom acknowledged that resentment against a perceived gender defector may be a factor. Instead, worries about her ability to function under stress are offered, usually by the very people who are imposing it. Worse is the specter of mental instability - for a job of such responsibility, they say, that cannot be called into question to even the slightest degree. Airline pilots are not alone in facing these prejudices. But as mental stability and coolness under stress are two of our prime requisites, a story from this profession might prove instructive. I want to emphasize from the outset that I am not unique; I’m told that by now there are one or two of us at all the major airlines, and many of the minor ones as well. I can only hope they will choose to offer their stories too.
One might suspect there was an element of political challenge in choosing aviation as the arena for change. It certainly takes something other than higher brain function to stand in the center of a boys’ locker room, train a spotlight on yourself, and announce with a bullhorn that you want to be a girl. In my case idealism had nothing to do with it; the plain fact was I needed the money. One visit to the doctors was enough to convince me I was going to need it by the bushelful. Had that not been the case, I might have opted for the same obscurity that so many of us choose. But lacking that independent wealth, I found no other choice but to make my transition in a very public way. The fact that I might have given up flying had finances permitted should not be taken as evidence I was a misfit in the profession. I was not. In all other aspects I am very typical of my brethren: a life-long love of airplanes, started flying at sixteen, into the Air Force straight after college. But at the same time, I am equally typical of transsexuals. I cross-dressed at an early age, preferred female company, and was baffled and upset by the male hierarchical aggression that came so naturally to my so-called contemporaries. Like most transsexuals, I very early learned to hide those differences. As it happened, I was always seen as highly intelligent, so the standoffishness whose true root was gender was shrugged off as my being merely cerebral.
In a way, high achievement is unfortunate in a transsexual, as it makes us reluctant to give up the approbation we’ve enjoyed and get on with the task at hand. My building emotional pressure leaked out in all the usual ways, but I was twenty-five before I could steel myself into seeing a psychiatrist. I picked one the Air Force handily provided, a full colonel who assured me that any discussion was confidential. Unfortunately, it was also useless. It amounted to suck it up, Lieutenant, and get on with your job. Given that my job at the time was flying nuclear-equipped F-4’s, I’m not sure the country was well served by his employ. In any case, the sting of his dismissal was enough to make me retreat into a mental underground for five more years. It is the single incident in my life I should most like to see no one else ever repeat.
By then I had left the Air Force, flirted with graduate school, and gone back into the Air Force Reserve to fly C-5’s. When my Rubicon came it was a comical one - I was flying between Hawaii and Guam, reading a newspaper, and Ann Landers had one of those too-familiar 911 calls from a transsexual. I thought, here I am in the middle of the Pacific, in charge of twenty lives and a hundred million dollars of government property, and I’m ready to fall apart because some nut wants to wear a dress? She recommended a shrink in San Francisco, less than an hour from where I lived, so I clipped the column and stuck it in my pocket. When I got back I made an appointment to see him, and for the next two or three terrified days didn’t sleep at all. He was the late Paul Walker, a name which will occasion more than a few respectful nods, and he turned out to be quite the antithesis of his Air Force counterpart. I unfolded the grimy column, and he ruefully said that whenever she did that he was flooded with two or three thousand phone calls. Glad I had my dime handy early.
Dr. Walker was indeed a recognized expert in the field of gender, but it still took three or four years for him to dismantle the straw man the military had done so much to create. When I first dragged myself across his threshold, I had never met anyone who had so much as contemplated gender reassignment, much less undergone it, and I was about as inclined to embrace the idea as nuclear waste. What I had imagined was some secret shrink voodoo that would excise this strange zit on my psyche, and restore me with a spasm of relief to the self I imagined myself to be. Instead, most of that lengthy therapy was spent slowly hammering down walls of guilt and shame. It’s remarkable how little attention was required to resolving the question of gender once that was done. I’m sure it’s always like that, and how I hope that some young teen reads these stories and has the sense to sidestep those twin distractions.
In any case, for at least two of those years I was on estrogen, aided by the selective blindness of a couple of sympathetic flight surgeons. I knew what was coming - I’d done a search of all the regulations, and they quite clearly specified that transsexuals were persona non grata in the military. Something about being on hormone replacement rendering one unfit for worldwide service. I wonder if the handful of female generals, some surely past menopause, have read that and likewise patriotically excluded themselves from further duty.
But no matter; I’d not planned on hanging around anyway. By then I’d been hired at American Airlines, and I figured one uphill struggle at a time was enough. I quit my Reserve position, to widespread puzzlement. Didn’t I know I only had five more years before I could collect a retirement? Yes, I did. Then whatever for? I could only shrug, unable to explain that five years was longer than I could contain the ever-coiling spring. But I did take away one very fond memory. By then I’d become an Instructor Pilot in C-5’s, a position which mostly entails taking other pilots out and throwing simulated emergencies at them for practice. One of them, a pilot of lesser talent, told me “I’m sorry to see you go. So many IP’s just hammer at you and make you feel like dog crap, but you were always so easygoing and gentle. That made me feel so comfortable in the airplane, I felt like I could do anything.” I smiled; is there any more complimentary way of saying you act like a woman?
I’ve taken a few digs at the Air Force here, but I mean it no true malice. My commission remained in cold storage for a couple years, after which time two FBI agents showed up at my door, tasked with my disposition. They tugged at sweaty collars a lot, but aside from that were very cordial and respectful. So was all the subsequent correspondence I had with the Air Force, correspondence that said in essence “Our hands are tied; regulations are regulations.” When the inevitable divorce papers were served, they at least were good enough to issue them in the updated name, which saved me occasional embarrassment later. Fair enough.
At this point American Airlines deserves an unabashed plug. As with any organization, not all individuals have been accepting or kindly, but the overarching corporate policy of tolerance has remained unwavering. Of course it is the transsexual pilot who makes news, but there are a number of others in humbler positions whom the company has backed just as stolidly. American has won a number of awards as corporate champions of diversity, and it is true. Remember that next time you fly. Of course, at the time (a dozen years ago) I knew none of this. I had contacted the FAA, whispering into a pay phone and asking if they’d had any experience with this before. I knew full well they did; the well-publicized incident of Karen Ulane’s firing from Eastern Airlines has occurred just a few years before. “What airline are you with?” they asked. Uh, American, I said suspiciously. “Oh, well! You need to go see Dr. Wick, chief of your medical department. He knows all about this sort of thing.”
And so he did. He was unexpectedly amenable, for one who still held the Reserve military rank of two-star general. It turned out he was also a member of the Confederate Air Force, a group of hobbyists who maintain a fleet of WWII aircraft. One of its members had made this transition a few years before, and Dr. Wick had gotten to know her well. So by the time he met me he had grown comfortable, even blase with the idea, and said he had no qualms about giving the Flight Department his medical seal of approval. So with more than a little dread, as my starting point I picked the few flying friends I thought I could trust most. The first time, I think I circled three full hours before I was finally able to come to the point. Then I waited for the sky to fall in. And waited. And waited. Wow, this will be easy, I thought. It turned out that I had merely been astute in my choice of friends - they had kept the faith entirely, and not shared it with anyone. So with newfound confidence I dropped the same tidbit into the lap of a friend less carefully chosen, and suddenly the whole world blew up.
I had thought well, it’s going to be sensational, but how long can it be news? A couple weeks? A couple months? Hah. This friend would have made Paul Revere hang his head in shame. Word literally spread worldwide within days - an Air Force acquaintance told me he’d been somewhere in Asia, and there overheard two aircraft happily broadcasting my name to everyone within half a dozen countries. Another pilot training classmate said his phone had been ringing off the hook with people neither he nor I had heard from in years. This was the first time I came to realize just how small a community the aviation world is, and it wasn’t just pilots. Gate agents would find newly-important errands that brought them to the cockpit. Some, more forthright than others, would be honest and say “I’ve heard of you and wanted to meet you.” Notes appeared in my mailbox, thankfully not many, less physically threatening than merely snide. There were leers, avoidant glances, some catcalls over the radio. This day after day after day.
Logistically, I stayed in the male role for maybe six more months after going public. I did absolutely no public gender-bending. I wore a short-hair wig at work, and took care of such housekeeping details as ear piercing and electrolysis, but off duty on layovers it was just jeans, a neutral ponytail, and ever-looser sweaters. I told them what date the transition would be made, and I would thereafter have to periodically disappear until a series of surgeries were all complete. The first one was actually facial reconstruction, but I left the details to salacious imaginations. There followed the usual battery of other cosmetic work, but when it was time for the SRS, I never said a thing to anyone at work. I don’t think they knew anything about the real life test, and I just let them assume that it must have been done by then. Finally, there was no more money, energy, or necessity for anything more.
It was not without its comic aspects. The city where my doctors were located happened to be one I flew into frequently on the job. When I visited them, it was naturally in the female role. As it happened, the airport restrooms were directly across from that familiar gate, and like anyone just getting off an airplane it was customarily the first place I headed. But which door I headed for depended on which of the two lives I happened to be leading that day. But one day I found myself standing outside them and not for the life of me able to remember which way I was supposed to turn. The curiosity of onlookers was one of those moments that spurred me to quit dithering and get on with it. And there was one young captain, a wisecracking surfer-boy type, whom I had previously been friendly with but who now looked on working with me with the enthusiasm of a prospective galley slave. His wisecracking ways soon got the better of him, however, and he began speculating at the most inopportune times just what might reside within my pants. After a few speechless replays of this, I innocently responded with as lewd, graphic, and utterly fictitious a scenario as I could imagine. And would build upon it at equally inopportune times. So I’m sure there were more than a few passengers who wondered why an impending smooth landing turned suddenly into an arrival. But a flight attendant told me later he had become one of my biggest boosters.
The furor I’d imagined would last for a few weeks stretched into years, and I’d come home from almost every flight completely exhausted. But eventually it all started to go away. The only solution, I think, is for people to start forgetting what you used to look like, or even that anyone else ever existed. I can’t help being attuned to little clues - someone will ask “You flew fighters, didn’t you?” and I’ll wonder if they’re old enough to remember an era when there were no women fighter pilots. But just as often I’ll hear something like “Do you have children?” and see a face expectant of sharing the problems of motherhood from afar, and I know they have no idea. And lately I’ve started to realize how many people just don’t bother to care. I can’t think of the last time the subject came up directly. I am aware that all over country people I don’t remember say hi as I walk by, and it’s too easy for me to jerk back in suspicion and ignore an intent that was plainly honest and friendly. There are not that many female captains to begin with, and fewer still a good bit over six feet, as I am. So who wouldn’t remember? And sometimes they remember for just the simple reason they state - “I think you’re pretty.”
Transitioning has taught me two things. First is that integrity has no gender. If you hold your head up and treat others with kindness and respect, they will respond in kind and not worry about whether to stamp you pink or blue. Second is that there is hardly anything inherently male or female, save a few bodily functions. There is only shifting fashion. I used to agonize that my attraction to flying or motorcycles or other outdoor pursuits, things June Cleaver never did, were proof positive that I couldn’t possibly be female inside. Today an all-female airline crew is no big deal, every other Harley has a woman on it, and the F-18 that shoots you down is likely to be callsign Lipstick. The world changes. Female is not a thing you do; it’s what you are.
Yes, the world changes. Periodically, someone will come up and say how much they admire me, and that my example has inspired them to do this or that. I used to feel guilty about it, aware that my sole intent had been to hold on for dear life. I’d protest that I was no hero, but had simply found myself backed into a corner with no other escape than the one I took. That is the truth. Our little corner of peculiarity is too small, I think, to ever rewrite history. We can never benefit others as much as they have us. It is the other women, the more traditional kind, who have made big changes in my industry. They, and the black pilots and ethnic ones and even the gay pilots whose association can now advertise openly in our union magazine. These, I want to say, are the ones who did it; go drop your nickel in their collection plate. But all these quiet confessors before me have done is admit they need a little hope. They are not really saying that I’ve given it to them, just that they think I will understand. Hope, and the need to be understood; what more human of qualities are there? Just one; the need to be accepted. So now I just smile and say thanks. If you reach that point, try to do the same. You can’t find yourself much more accepted than that.