Living the Dream

Gender Shift as Systems Change Management

by Josie Emery

(The Gender Centre advise that this article may not be current and as such certain content, including but not limited to persons, contact details and dates may not apply. Where legal authority or medical related matters are cited, responsibility lies with the reader to obtain the most current relevant legal authority and/or medical publication.)

I don't see what the problem is Alan said. you've done organisational change management. You know the routine. Identify key stake-holders. Bring them aboard early and make them part of the change process and show them how this change represents a win-win situation for everyone. Make them part of the change story.

He sat back and looked at me. I stared at him. My mind was doing two things simultaneously. One was saying, "I've just told him I've lived a shameful lie all my life as a deeply closeted cross-dresser. I've told him I cannot go on any more and will have to live fulltime as a woman. And he acts like its not a problem when all my life this has been the one revelation of which I was too ashamed to ever tell anyone."

The other was saying, "Bloody hell! He's right! I've never seen it put so clearly. But that means I have to let everyone at work know as soon a possible, plus my key clients, Board and Council long before there's any recognisable changes in myself or my presentation."

I studied him closely. He was clearly thinking through the strategy. My news had not shattered his world or mine. He was not angry for me having said nothing in those moments when he was revealing something of himself to me. As far as I could see we were still friends and work related colleagues.

To have reached this point had taken over fifty years of my life and two marriages. It had meant many years afraid to open the door and go outside which had impacted significantly on career and income. For many years I'd had the ability to sit alone in a room wearing women's clothes and hammering out stories that could be sold for reasonable sums of money. But in the last decade there'd only been one story I needed to tell, the one I was too afraid and ashamed to tell. It was this:

"I was born with male appearance and appendages but my mind, my soul and heart said all along that I was female."

I was four years old. My name was John. I was my parents first son. It was soon after they'd built the farmhouse on the sandy hill beside the highway. My brother and I shared a room: the boys room. Its window faced down the highway and at night the oncoming lights would flicker around the walls as the sound of the passing trucks built and built, then downshifted for the hill, and then fell away, deeper and deeper, quieter and quieter until the truck rounded the far end of the long saltpan and its roar would gust back to me as I lay there awake.

I was trying to assimilate new and secret knowledge. There was a girl inside me. She seemed like a princess sitting there looking back at me when I turned my gaze inward. We would stare at each other silently, gravely as children do when they meet for the first time. She was me. So, who was I?

I prayed to God, father, please make me into a girl. Please. Please make me into a girl I cried with a strange need that no one recognised.

"John is a sensitive child. He's a bright kid but has too much imagination. It gets him so excited he can't sleep."

It wasn't imagination, it was fear that would keep me awake for those fifty plus years. Six months before the conversation with Alan I had booked six sessions with a counsellor because of work-related stress. My father had just died. I was falling apart in a three-day-a-week job and with a partner who could no longer handle my constant shifts between masculine and feminine presentation. I was addicted to Valium and sleeping pills.

Prior to seeing this woman there'd been four major attempts at therapy. In the first I was set the question: "Why are you afraid to be a man?" In the second I was told: "your cross-dressing is an epiphenomenon of something deeper. When we have sorted that out it will disappear. The third was super-Freud: your cross-dressing is the way you shield from yourself the primal scene of having witnessed your parents having sex. The fourth pointed out to me that I had no sense of self. I derived that sense from whoever my partner was. He made me see, starkly and clearly, that the woman I loved so dearly and desperately was the woman I wanted to be.

The new therapist was not a psychiatrist but a social worker. She put me in a room with a sand-tray and a heap of dolls and told me: "Play!" I played. I was soon creating that primal scene. After three times playing I realised that whenever I reached for a doll to represent myself it was always a girl doll. Whenever I drew a representation of myself it was that four-year old's vision. There, at my core, was a girl.

That was the answer to my lack of a sense of self. That was the answer to why I was afraid to be a man. Because I wasn't. The deeper issue I had resolved that was now curing my cross-dressing was to see that my core identity was female and now I had no desire to cross-dress as a man any more. I wanted to live in the full glory of my true gender, woman.

How would I do it? That was the question. The terror of admitting to myself that I was a woman was now replaced by the overwhelming anxiety of how someone as seemingly masculine and culturally enmeshed as a man could ever possibly break free. Height, weight, beard, hairline, voice, body shape, etc. The prospect was overwhelming.

In the months preceding my realisation I had struggled to hold life together by focusing as a recovering alcoholic might on getting through one hour at a time, one day at a time, one night, one week. I had learnt a valuable lesson about focus and about eliminating the crippling fear that imagination can create. I brought that knowledge into play and I also found pictures my mind could hold that would keep me going.

I remembered the time I had built a boat.

How does a non-shipwright build a boat? By having a plan, by having materials, by having expert advice, and by then getting up each morning and going into the shed and fastening one piece of wood to the next.

Another picture from the extreme sports of my past. Rock-climbing. One hand in front of the other. Eyes focused on the crack, the crevice. Never looking down. Mind fully-focused on the immediate moment. Onward and upward.

One step at a time was how I needed to approach this momentous change to my life.

But helpers were what I needed most and they seemed in short supply. I became aware that public advocates of gender change often had political agendas to push that did not match my needs, my ideology or my lifestyle. I sought my help where I felt comfortable: amongst people who philosophically were attuned to my needs. Those people were management consultants like my friend Alan.

There had been a decade when I did a lot of change management and leadership development work. You can only do that stuff if you believe deeply that real change is possible. Your assessment of the difficulties ahead for the participants must be sober, logical and clear.

But you can only effect that change if you are prepared to trust your creativity and your instincts. You must be comfortable working with the logical mind and the creative mind simultaneously, and with taking big risks.

I struck up a conversation with a fellow traveller on a plane. She was a leadership coach called Lisa, from New York. I told her I had just taken a new, high profile, high-powered job that was taking me way out of my comfort zone. I knew she would pitch her services.

Taking a new job was a result of confronting my urgent inner need. The place I had worked part-time had an embedded misogynistic culture. I was no longer comfortable there. The job I won was fulltime with a decent salary and a gender-diverse supportive culture. And, in a sense, it was the job towards which I had been working all my life. Things were paying off: relationships built, expertise gathered along the way. Above all, income.

For decades one of the ways I'd kept myself from making this change was to see it as financially impossible. Recently I'd seen that belief worked both ways. I kept myself broke in order to have a reason not to make the change.

But now I'd been hired as a man to be the public face of my sector. The organisation was constantly under media scrutiny. I was in a leadership position and not working under a clearly recognisable set of award conditions: the job was performance-based.

I could lose the job if I did not meet outcomes requirements. Fifty-hour weeks meant the pressure on my hidden life was enormous. I knew I could not maintain my work level and standard and flip back and forth: man / woman, man / woman.

Lisa said she could help me raise my performance levels to ensure I could do the job well. "Lisa", I said, "to do this probably means that I will have to explore a lot of the deepest things within me." She smiled and nodded, "that's so right," she said, "you will really have to dig deep. She was like me. She believed in inner searching and inner change. Well, her belief had yet to be tested, "And I'll have to trust you with my inner stuff." I continued, watching her starry eyes. She nodded. She could see my rising anxiety. I concentrated on maintaining my calm, maintaining eye contact, keeping the tremor from my voice. "Lisa," I said, "there's something I have to tell you if we are to work together." She smiled encouragingly. She had no idea what was coming. "Lisa," I said, "inside, I am really a woman." Her eyes went wide. Her jaw hit the table. I plunged on. It was like swimming in the heart of winter. It was the pacing back and forth on the edge of the pool that was hard. Once you were in the water you just kept going.

I was four years old when I saw my female self. Five minutes later she spoke.

"Well," she said, "that's the first time I've heard that said by a man in a tweed jacket!"

I knew two things. One, I could work with her. Two, I could no longer wear that tweed Armani jacket.

We drew up a two column plan. Column one listed what I wanted to achieve at work. Column two listed what I wanted to achieve as a transitioning transsexual woman

For most of my life I had fought a hard campaign of denial. I retreated step by grudging step, like the diggers on the Kokoda Track. Okay, I liked to wear women's clothes because it felt good. Okay, I needed to wear women's clothes to feel good. Okay, I had a large inner sense of being feminine that had to be assuaged. Okay, I was a transvestite and there's nothing wrong with that. Okay, I needed to live part-time as a woman, but I was still a man.

How I scorned those unfortunate fools who had come to believe that they really were women. They were dupes in the culture wars. They lacked the imagination to sustain this as a form of gender-play. Why would anyone knowingly and willingly give up all the rewards our culture heaps on men to become a woman? Even worse, to become an older woman? The bottom of the social heap. To live as neither one thing nor the other. Such people were to be pitied.

But step-by-step I had been stripping away the lies I told myself and told those nearest and dearest to me. And now, with Lisa, I was finally able to say it. "Lisa, I am a transitioning transsexual woman."

That left only my mother to tell. That was the conversation I had needed to have all my life. As Lisa brought me to see, it was the conversation behind every other conversation with every other person that I had. "Mum, what will you think when I tell you that I really am a girl? Will you still love me?" The longer I delayed it, the worse my life became. The worse became everyday communications.

"We need to have a meeting," I told my boss. "There's something I have to tell you. It's about a huge change happening in life that will profoundly affect the way I present at work and the way people interact with me."

His eyes opened wide in alarm. He already knew something was wrong. He'd given me my three month's critical feedback about my nervousness in meetings. I never met peoples eyes. I was unfocused. My team was in disarray, not knowing where I was taking them.

I had finally told my mother. The result had been everything I could have feared. She was angry, bitter, confused. She denied any knowledge of my condition. Previously I'd lost the woman I'd loved with this revelation. Now I had lost my last link with my childhood.

And for the first time in my life I was free. I could look people in the eye and tell them the truth. I was terrifyingly alone, but I was free.

"Give me a heads-up," he pleaded. "Some kind of briefing before the meeting."

I left a copy of "True Selves: a guide to transsexualism" and a short note explaining my conditions in his In Tray.

I was terrified. I was convinced that they would demote me to a job out of the public eye, down in the basement with Quasimodo. My boss had a reputation for a wild temper when things didn't go his way. I was full of shame and humiliation as I presented for the meeting with him and the head of Public Relations. I'd been on oestrogen for three months. I sat down and burst into tears.

John, he said. We hired you for your mind, your leadership your vision. You've ably demonstrated them to us. What can we do to assist you through this process?

All Staff

This note is to let you know that 1 June will be the first day in the office for Josie Emery, Director Literature. Josie is the M.C. for the ... Award event tomorrow (Friday), and those of us attending look forward to speaking with her there.

I welcome Josie and thank the Human Resources team for working with all of us to help make this transition a remarkably smooth one within the organisation.

Executive Director Arts Development

Between those two moments were five months which I am glad I will never have to experience again. I knew they'd be tough and I knew I had to do them. To be so close to what for so many decades had been not just the unrealisable goal but also often the unrealisable nightmare. I could not afford to rush, or to alienate anyone with a careless word. I had to measure everything I said and everything I did. The oestrogen and anti-androgen were making their oh-so-welcome presence known in my body with sudden crashes of mood, inexplicable fevers, growing breast buds and muscle falling away. My hair was returning. But my beard was being extracted one painful hair at a time and nothing would change my voice but constant repetition of exercises and scales. Many of my deeply-rural family were outraged and I was ostracised. I was alone when more than ever I needed support.

I told Lisa I had no energy for work. I just could not bear putting on men's clothes and making the journey.

"So wear women's clothes."

"But I'm not to make the change until June 1. This is February!"

I stared at her. It was incomprehensible. But, everything else she'd told me to do had proven right.

I ransacked the second-hand shops and put on the most androgynous women's shirts I had. No one noticed a damned thing. Black trousers and striped shirt? So what? But the buttons do up the wrong way? Huh? What're you talking about? Oh, never mind.

I got my ears pierced. People thought it looked good. They liked the way my hair was growing.

Identify key stake-holders. Bring them aboard early and make them part of the change process and show them how this change represents a win-win situation for everyone. Make them part of the change story.

Alan's words were with me all the time. I began to tell my seven staff and other key people in the building. Each time I anticipated rejection. Each time I received understanding, support and care. Most wonderfully, other women in the building began to treat me as a woman.

I became aware that what I was doing was creating a drama, a narrative; a story that included them. They were on the journey with me. Women in my unit gave me fashion advice. Sometimes they teased me. Always they supported me.

On the day I learnt that my mother was dying of terminal cancer and did not want to see me, I broke down. Next day I found that my staff had emailed me a link. Josie, this is how we see our future. It was a link to a site for an all girl band in the Archie's comic strip. Josie & the Pussycats. I cried.

Then I learnt that gossip columnists wanted to out me in a way that would bring the organisation into disrepute. I was merely a pawn in a bigger power-play. I knew then that the only way for me to manage the story was to make sure I told it in a time and a place of my choosing.

My father was a man who fervently believed that luck had saved his life when Japanese troops had ambushed him in a hut in the jungle behind Madang, New Guinea. I'd always argued with him that there was no such thing as luck. Well, I needed to argue that because things never went well in my life. Stuff always came undone. I never got lucky breaks. I'd point out that his luck included having the discipline to take his Thompson sub-machine gun apart, clean it and reload it and place it beside his stretcher before collapsing with exhaustion. His luck consisted of a highly-tuned ear that heard the twig break above the sound of the violent windstorm lashing the jungle and woke him from that exhausted sleep. His luck included weighing the situation up and knowing the only hope was to charge the patrol moving towards the hut before it could go to ground. And then doing it! Acting upon what he knew. None of that was luck. I could account for every act that got him clear of the hut with his Tommy Gun, his life, but no boots.

When Federal Cabinet speechwriter, right-wing commentator and journalist, Christopher Pearson offered me his weekly column in the Weekend Australian in which to come out with right to edit the final draft of the copy, at first thought it was heaven-sent luck. A dignified coming-out in the national paper, with the imprimatur of such a person, would halt any further gossip or criticism from the right. And the left would not comment because to do so would make them look uncool.

But, as with my dad's actions, there was a chain of events that linked Christopher and me back thirty years to literary magazines in Adelaide. It was not luck but the pattern working itself out.

Lisa said it was because I had finally told my truth. When you tell your truth then the universe supports you, she said. Well, she is so New York!

All my life I would wake in high fever from a constant terrifying nightmare in which I would suddenly discover myself out in public as a woman. There would be nowhere to run. Nowhere to hide. And yet, as I looked around me in the dream, no one seemed to notice. Yet my terror was overwhelming.

I now live that dream every day. The only difference is that the fear has vanished. In its place is a calm, clear joy and certainty that I have, after so long, found my own true self and been prepared to live her.

Polare is published in Australia by The Gender Centre Inc. which is funded by the Department of Community Services under the S.A.A.P. Program and supported by the N.S.W. Health Department through the AIDS and Infectious Diseases Branch. Polare provides a forum for discussion and debate on gender issues. Advertisers are advised that all advertising is their responsibility under the Trade Practices Act. Unsolicited contributions are welcome, though no guarantee is made by the Editor that they will be published, nor any discussion entered into. The editor reserves the right to edit such contributions without notification. Any submission which appears in Polare may be published on our internet site. Opinions expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect those of the Editor, The Gender Centre Inc.I, the Department of Community Services or the N.S.W. Department of Health.