November 12, 2020 • 43 mins
For the first 40 years of her life, Jennifer Finney Boylan figured the price of living her truth would be much too steep; by opening up about who she really was, she assumed she’d lose everything, including the love of her life. But over time, it became clear that hiding who she really was had taken its own toll—on herself, on her family, and on her marriage.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. So
let's let me paint a scene for you. Say it's four,
I'm fifteen or sixteen years old, and everyone's gone out
for the night. And there I am, this slender, feminine
(00:22):
creature with shoulder length blonde hair, and I'm standing at
a high window in my parents haunted house, big old, drafty,
creepy house in what was once the country around Philadelphia.
And I'm standing in a window and I'm looking down
and I watched the pale lights of my sister, who's
(00:43):
the last person to leave the house. She drives off
on the Volkswagen. Now I'm alone in this house and
I'm looking at the clock. Let's say it's so now
I've got a couple of hours. So we sweep down
the creaking steps from the third floor, and I grab
a dress and all the kind of body patting that
(01:07):
I'm going to need, and some pantios and some makeup,
and you put your clothes on quick, and then you
kind of stand before the mirror and you do your
makeup and you look in the mirror and you know,
I mean I was. I was a very feminine looking person,
even when I wasn't on farm, and you know, for
(01:30):
all the world there's a relatively normal looking and I
know normal is a charged words, so maybe I should
be careful. But there I am. If i'd left the house,
which I would never have done that I've left no house,
maybe you wouldn't have looked twice at me, like there's
some hippie girl, you know. And I'm just kind of
(01:50):
looking in the mirror with the sense of both profound
joy because there's the person that I am. There is
the girl that has lived in my heart but I
never get to see except when no one is home,
but also profound sorrow because I know I can't be
this person, because I know I can't live in the
(02:11):
world as myself. That's Jennifer Finney Boylan, writer, professor, transactivist,
author most recently of Good Boy, My Life in Seven Dogs,
as well as the classic memoir She's Not There. Jenny's
is a story of the deepest kind of secret, the
(02:33):
kind that we hold in a wordless place, the kind
that will not let go of us, the kind that
will force its way out from its depths until we
release it, and when we release it, it finally releases us.
(02:57):
I'm Danny Shapiro, And this is family secret. It's the
secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep
from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. It's
like I've got the nuclear codes here and here it is.
(03:18):
Here's the way. If I wanted to, I could blow
up my life. All I'd have to do with you
to walk outside, and I'm knowing that, you know, my
parents are coming back from their dinner with their friends.
My sister might come back. Anything could happen. Maybe my
friends are going to stop by without telling me. Are
all the doors in the house locked? They might not be.
And sometimes people would come home and I have to,
(03:41):
you know, do a quick retreat. But on this particular night,
let's just say, when all is said and done, they
put everything back, put the earrings back in the mother's
jewelry box, put the clothes back on the hangars where
they're supposed to come from. Then I hear the car
coming in in the driveway, and my mother comes up
the stairs, and of course I've I've now washed off
(04:01):
the neckup, and I've done everything I have to do
to look like myself again, as if you know, nothing
has happened. And mom comes in, Did you have a
nice night here? Yeah? What did you do? Well? I
watched Carol Burnett show. Okay, we'll see you in the morning,
and that was my reality. You know that I've had
(04:23):
this just unbelievably powerful, both joyful and tragic experience alone
in the creepy old house, and then everything would have
to get restored, like nothing had happened to hide the
scene of the crime, you know, And I'd wonder, was
this dress facing this way or that way on the hangar?
Will anyone know that I moved these ear rings? Describe
(04:49):
the landscape of your childhood, Well, I grew up in
rural Pennsylvania and it was a place where a engle
road had been carved through a pretty deep pine forest,
and our family lived on one side of the road
and on the other side of the road. We're just
lots and lots of trees that went on forever and
(05:13):
through that forest. It sounds very like I don't know,
Middle Earth or something, but through that forest there was
an old I guess a cobblestone road from a hundred
years before, and a lot of old stone houses that
had been abandoned, and on some levels it was like
the coolest thing if you were a kid, to be
able to just you know, get up in the morning
(05:35):
and disappear into those woods. And sometimes I have the
dog with me. We had a Dalmatian named Playboy, who
was like the worst dog in the world, but you know,
not to me, and so I would disappear into those woods.
In some ways, it was very much kind of a
world of imagination. I was left on my own a
lot as a kid, and there's a way it's funny.
(05:57):
It's the one way in which I look back on anything. Wow,
what a kind of a sad childhood, you know, it
just kind of because I spent most of my time
kind of alone, wandering around this forest. But on the
other hand, being alone is just how I liked it.
It's the place I actually wanted to be. And if
my parents or my sister had actually asked me to
take part in their world, which was a really different
(06:19):
different from mine, it would have been have been nice
to have been asked, but then I probably would have
given him the slip. Anyway, Were you and your sister
close in age, Um, she's about a year and a
couple of months older than I am, So yeah, we're
pretty close n Eche, but very different temperament. You know.
So I was a boy then and and she was not.
(06:43):
She was a great equestion, She wrote courses. She was
just brilliant at you know, as a kid. She became
one of the best writers in all of Pennsylvania. And
it was you know, it's kind of like the stories
you hear of people who have a sibling who is
like a gymnast or an ice skater or I don't know, something,
I was some kind of obscure athletic talent, you know.
(07:04):
She like she was what's the thing with the brooms
in the Olympics curling that that you throw of this
little tattle and then people like go ice skating in
front of it and they're like sweeping the ice. Well,
it was like that. It was like being the sibling
of a world class curler, and uh, their lives revolved
around that. From the time I was you know, nine
(07:26):
or so, the family would often disappear on the weekends
to go to you know, horse shows wherever. My sister
would right around in a ring from and um, meanwhile
I was out in the woods, living in another world.
My mother was an immigrant to this country. She um
(07:47):
was born in East Prussia, which is a country they
don't have anymore. She came to this country in the
twenties and her English was not very good. She spoke
German then, and she to the story of coming back
from church and h she didn't understand. Why did American
pastors say that your head was going to run over?
(08:10):
What is her head running over? And it's like what
he said, Yeah, he said, my cup runneth over. Well,
for those of you who don't speak German, whause most
people copped as the German word for head. So when
she heard mine cup was running over, she was very confused.
She was the second oldest of seven children. My grandmother,
(08:32):
her mother was essentially a single mother. My grandfather would
show up every year or so, get her pregnant, and
then disappear again. And they lived at this kind of
unbelievably hard life on what they called a dirt farm
in New Jersey. And yeah, my mother had this unbelievable
safe and optimism and buoyancy. And it's always kind of
amazed that sometimes we think of people who are kind
(08:55):
of cheerful and buoyant as people who are superficial and
people who have to them, and yet my mother had
being experienced about the most shocking poverty and the and
the most shocking abuse from her um father and other
men in that farm town, responded to all of that
with this kind of steely buoyancy. And when we were
(09:18):
sarcastic teenagers years and years later, decades later, the worst
thing that anybody could call my mother was Glinda the
good witch. That was that was their sarcastic name from
my mother, because she very much had that thing, that
Billy Burke thing. She was the good witch. My father
was irish. His father died young also, and his mother remarried,
(09:43):
each time a whole bunch of times, each time more
disastrously than the one before, And eventually, by the time
he was nigh school, he was living with friends back
So both of my parents grew up essentially with a
single parent and raised by friends and or by themselves.
And my mother had said she would never get married.
(10:03):
She just thought there's too much evil from men. And
then she met my father. She was I think almost forty,
she'd become a book buyer. She finally got out of
New Jersey and invented a life for herself what was
then called a book buyer back when books were sold
on the first floor of department stores. She was the
person who chose what books were for sale. And so
(10:25):
she had this kind of glamorous publishing career in her
thirties where she would take the take the train to
New York City and have lunch with Bennett's surf. And
she gave all that up when she was I think
almost forty. My father was almost thirty. But there was
like eleven years apart from them, and so here's this
(10:45):
German woman marrying this Irish intellectual. Even now I still
look at I think, what bizarre marriage. But they just
a journ each other. Their names were Dick and Hilda Guard.
I think that's probably important dimension. Also, I remember, as kneeds,
You're being a little stone lying on the couch one day,
thinking my parents are named Dick and Hilleguard, like there's
(11:08):
no hope for me. Like my parents are Dick and
hillde Guard, like whoa man. They had my sister and
they had me, and we lived in the country in Pennsylvania.
My father had wanted to be a medieval historian, but
you know, there was no money for him to go
(11:28):
to grad school, so he became a banker, and banking
never I think quite treated him with the same love
I think that medieval history would have. But he was
the kind of quiet, quietly, funny, bookish men, and he
loved his wife, he loved his kids, and he loved dogs.
We had one terrible dog after another. So your father
(11:52):
passed away when you were twenties six, I think, yeah.
He had he had melanoma. He first got it when
I was in uh, I think ninth grade, and they
had a mole taken off and he was okay for
six or seven years, and then another mole taken off,
and then he was okay for three years or four years,
and then uh and then the last time you got it,
(12:14):
you know, as the saying goes, they didn't get at all.
And so he was in remission I think three times,
and then when it finally laid him low, he was
he was gone within the year. So yeah, it was
in my twenties. Do you ever think about what it
would have been like to come out to your father, Um,
I guess I've thought about that. I think it would
(12:35):
have gone badly, so I don't think about it a lot. Um.
He was an open minded man, but He also had
a very strong sense of the consequences of your decisions
and if they affect other people. One of his best
friends from high school who was called my uncle so
and so, you know when I was a kid, that's
he was one of those people that you weren't related
(12:56):
to that you called your uncle. Um divorced his wife
and married someone else midlife, the way people do. And
my father never gave me and never spoke to him again,
like it was dead to him because he had four children.
And my father just felt, you know, you've done you've
done the wrong term, so he cut him off. I
guess that's a fine line between having between morals and moralistic.
(13:20):
Also in their circle that you know, they just didn't
know gay people, they didn't know queer people. It's a
very repressive culture. And um, I mean they had a
two or three friends that were just obviously gay. You'd
have to be completely blind not to know that these
men were gay. And yet nearly to her dying day,
and my mother would never would always say, oh, well,
I hope ed finds the right woman some day. I'm like, um,
(13:43):
but you know, I guess that's just the culture that
they grew up with in the thirties and forties. You know,
my life is not easy, but it was a lot
easier than it would have benified grown up in that era.
I know you've said that when you think about your childhood,
you do you think of it as a boyhood? Do
you still feel that way or The reason that I
(14:05):
always tiptoe around that is because, um, I'm aware that
for other transgender women, they have a narrative which I
respect and which is real, and the fact that my
experience is a little different doesn't mean that there's should
not be respected. You know, there are a lot of
transgender women who would say I went through transition when
I was thirty, but I was always a woman, And
(14:27):
I mean, and that's true for me also in a
kind of spiritual a in a kind of private way.
But you know, I also I lived in the world
as a boy. I mean, I knew, I knew what
the truth was about who I was from a very
very early age, but I didn't tell anybody because I figured,
I don't know, like, I didn't have the language for
it. It It just seemed insane, and there were I just
(14:49):
didn't know that there were other transgender people in the world.
So I kept it private and I lived as far
as the rest of the world could see as a boy.
And I didn't go through transition until I was prety,
you know, So I did live in that body for
all those decades and socialized male. That doesn't make me
less of a woman now post transition, and there's nothing
(15:12):
to apologize for. But I do think of it as
a boyhood, you know, not a boyhood like the other
boys that I knew, that's for sure. But you know,
it was what it was, and it wasn't the life
that I wanted, and it wasn't a life that I understood,
and it just felt weird, man, I mean it was.
It was a really strange way to be in the
(15:32):
world because not only do you have the sense of
yourself of being different and having a problem that you
can't solve, but you also have a pretty big secret.
You have a an atomic secret that you don't have
a language for. You don't know how to to share
your what's in your heart, your most fundamental truth with
the people who love you, and it's a pretty hard
(15:52):
thing for an eight year old to carry around on
their shoulders. So my way of dealing with it was
just to become this tremendously hysterical person. You know, I
was disruptive in school. I was it was pretty funny
at times. Some of my material was pretty good. But
I also I was just kind of driven to constantly
(16:15):
be creating, you know, b Arnie hand over foot. You know,
I would make up songs, and I make up stories,
and I would go charging off into the woods and
invent you know, a whole other other worlds that felt
like a safer and more forgiving place to be than
the world I lived in. We'll be back in a
(16:39):
moment with more family secrets. It's so interesting, Jenny, because
you're talking about in not having the language for something
that is so huge, but literally does not having the words,
(16:59):
not having ing the terms, not having access to being
able to describe it, not just two other people, but
to yourself. It strikes me listening to you that that's
also the birth of a writer in a certain way,
because at least the way that I always think about
the impulse to write is finding the words, finding the language,
(17:23):
or intervening in the dynamics of loss or or childhood
where there wasn't the ability back then too to speak, Yeah,
and to and to find a narrative of your own
life that makes that makes sense, that can actually change
the payoffs of your the life that you're experiencing into
(17:43):
something that has form and function and logic. It remains
to this day a very difficult thing to explain to
other people who don't feel the thing that you feel,
and so because they don't feel the thing that you feel,
they assume that what you feel must be something you
don't feel, or it must be something that that is.
(18:05):
You're just crazy, you're just wrong. The experience of a
lot of transgender people, you know, it reminds me of that.
There's I think it's a heny youngman joke where guy
isn't it the doctor and he says, doctor, doctor, I've
I get a terrible paint every time I go like this,
what should I do? And the doctor says, don't go
like that. You know, you know, and people will argue
(18:26):
with you. They'll say that, well, your chromosome says you're this,
so that's that you should I've been tweeting with you
for thirty seconds. But I understand your life, but I
than you do. I think to some degree, there's also
a desire to to explain things to other people. And
I think in my my first memoir, Um, She's Not There,
(18:47):
which is an account of transition, there's a tone and
I mean I wrote that book going on twenty years
ago now, but there's a there's a feeling to that
book now when I read it, I feel a tone
of apology or justification to it, because you know, in
those days, you know, twenty years ago, there was so
(19:08):
little um discourse around trans identity that you know, I
think people felt like I'd made the whole thing up myself.
So a lot of that book, a tone of it
from author to reader, is a tone of someone saying,
please forgive me, I'm so sorry, uh for for being
(19:29):
myself and for feeling the things I felt. I hope
you'll toss this out with me. And it's the thing
looking at it now seems really I don't want to
say dated, but it's certainly I wouldn't write anything about
translegdentity with that attitude. Now now I've my attitude be
much more like, well, I'm here on the planet. Isn't
(19:49):
this great busness a gift? How lucky was I to
experience the world and in these different ways? And if
you can't ride on this train with me. Well, that's okay,
we'll stop the train. We'll throw you off. When a
difference twenty years makes well, I think it's just the
result of people coming out. It's the result of more
(20:11):
and more people being known. It's the result of their
being more different kinds of transgender people in the public eye.
I mean, it used to be that kind of nice, possible.
Middle aged white ladies were the only transgender people you saw,
except for drag queens who interacted with the world in
a very in a very different way. But you know,
now we've got all kinds of trance stories out there.
(20:34):
We have a saying, um, if you've met one transgender person,
you've met one transgender person. And I'm not ignorant, I
know that this is all still really new for a
lot of people, and a lot of people are still
catching up, but increasingly and to our children's generation, um,
this is this is just kind of the way things are,
and it's just not that big a deal. And in
(20:56):
a way, that's sorrel. I always wanted to live in
a world where I was born, where it was just
not that big a deal and I could just be
myself and no one would have to have a heart
attack about it. I've often thought that the change in
my life was not a change about going from male
(21:16):
the female. The thing that changed me was going from
a person who had a secret to a person who
doesn't have a secret. And if you have a secret,
it is like having a Saint Bernard. It's something like
an invisible Saint Bernard that that follows you everywhere, like
(21:38):
you can't leave the house unless the secret comes with you,
and the secret has to be tended, you know. I
remember being in like a social situation when I was
like sixteen, and somebody mentioning um a transgender person, although
that wasn't the language that was used back in those days,
but someone would say that word and I would freeze,
(21:58):
and my heart beat a triple and sweat would start
to pour down the signs of my face because I
knew that I then had to imitate a person for
whom this topic was of no special interest, and sometimes
it was very hard to remember what those people acted like.
(22:19):
But it means you're also not telling the truth of
the person that you love by the person you love.
Jenny's referring to her wife. Did the two of them
have been together? Well for a very long time, and
what a ride it has been. I mean, so I've
been married now for what thirty two years I think
(22:41):
now um Dee and I have been been together, so
it's twelve years as husband and wife and twenty years
as a wife and wife. Well, for the twelve years
that I was married before I came out, my wife died.
Whom I love I did not know because how did
she not know? Because I didn't tell her? Why did
I not tell her? Because I didn't tell myself because
(23:02):
I didn't want it to be true, because I figured
if I said this out loud, it would open the
door to a life of marginality and suffering and violence
and possibly murder. I mean, in the stories of transgender
people that I knew. That's what happened to people. I
didn't know there was a way of being in the world.
(23:23):
So I had to keep the secret from myself. But
it also been keeping the secret from the person that
I love. You know, the whole point of being in
love with someone and embarking upon the adventure of marriage
and sharing a life together. It's pretty hard when you're
trying to keep the secret from that person. But then
(23:44):
you're also trying to keep that secret from yourself. It's crushing.
And there are people, they're millions of people. And it's
not just transgender people either. There are millions of people
in the world who are burying that secret and are
bearing it every single day. We're bearing some secret, something
that if they admit to themselves, will atomize the world
(24:07):
they live in, or think that it will. And I
think for men in particular, there's a sense that so
I was I was brought up, is that is your
job to protect the people around you. And you know,
not not just women, but you know especially women and
children that you have children, that it's your job to
stand between the people you love and trouble. If there
(24:28):
are arrows coming in, you want to be in a
position that they're going to hit you and let the
people that you love escape. So to be the person
who's suddenly responsible for trouble, to be the person who's
actually the fact of your life, the secret that you reveal,
be the source of the trouble, it's just a very
very agonizing and terrible thing. And so again for me,
(24:51):
that was the big thing. It wasn't it wasn't being
trapped so much as it was having something that I
hadn't been honest about to the person that I care
most about in the world. So what was the turning
point for you? After twelve years of what you're describing
as a kind of knowing but not fully articulating to
(25:14):
yourself that this was the case, There was a day
which i'll describe to you. But before that day, I mean,
which was like a turning point. I would describe it
more though as an erosion rather than a decision. It
wasn't like one day I said, you know, now I
shall change my name to Tiffany Shaniel and I you know,
(25:35):
and I walked down the stairs and sequence. It wasn't
like that, although actually I know, I hope people who
have done that too, and that's you know, and that's fine,
But um, you know, you can think about it if
you're walking along the road with a stone in your shoe,
a little, tiny little stone in your shoe, and you
could probably walk a mile or so. In fact, here's
the story. We lived in Ireland in our kids were little,
(26:02):
they were under the age of five or six, and
I loved living in Cork. I had a job teaching
at University College Cork, and one day, we had some
people over and doorbell rang and somebody turned quickly in
a wine glass fell onto the floor. In fact, maybe
the wine glass had fallen days before. But what remembers
that that there was a tiny little chart of the glass,
(26:22):
like you know, the size of like just a tiny
little sliver of a fingernail. Anyway, I must step on
that as I went to answer the door. So I
got this little sliver of glass in the heel of
my foot, which is so little that I probably didn't
even recognize it at the time. And uh, you know,
a couple of days later and they were thinking, oh,
my foot kind of hurts, but you know, I'll just
keep walking, because what are you gonna do, you know.
(26:46):
And then a few days later went by and it
got worse and worse, no worse. And you know, I
walked all over that city because that's what you wouldn't
know what you do when you live, especially there there
was not a lot of driving cars. I walked everywhere,
and slowly but surely I realized that I was going
to have to go to the hospital and I had
(27:06):
this thing taken out of a foot well, which I
finally did. And I'll spare you the description of the
hospital in Cork, Ireland, which was surprisingly the opposite of modern.
It was really gruesome and uh, to get this thing
out of my foot, they had to do an operation
and there was not good anesthetic and it was really,
really horrible. And finally my wife picked me up in
(27:30):
the car the end of the day and we went
to go get because there were some pain killers, so
she went into the apothecary to get the pain killers.
When she came out, she found me in the car
sobbing my brains out, sobbing harder than I think she
maybe had ever seen me cry in a dozen years
(27:51):
of marriage and knowing each other for twenty years before that.
And it was clear to me what I was crying
about wasn't the fact that I did I'd hurt my foot.
What I was crying about is the fact that that
was my life. I've been walking year after year, day
after day with this little thing that I was caring
that I was pretending I didn't hurt, but it did hurt,
(28:15):
and you, I mean, and finally you just reach to
day where you're like, I can't walk another step. We
got back from Ireland and I started therapy with the
following autumn. So you know why, then the real question
is why not years and years and years before. Why
did it picks along? I don't know. Because I was
a coward, because I was afraid, um, I felt like
(28:38):
I had too much to lose. You know, it's making
me think of one of my favorite quotes is from
Gnostic Gospels, from the Gospel of St. Thomas, which goes, um,
if you bring forth what is within you, what you
bring forth will save you. If you do not bring
(28:59):
forth what is within you, what you do not bring
forth will destroy you. That's right. I remember that St. Thomas.
You're good, Danny Shapiro. I mean you make me think
about the spiritual aspect of all this. I have become
more faithful and spiritual. I think post transition um in
(29:22):
part because I got to see the power of what
love can do. Because when I did finally tell my
wife t D it wasn't an easy passage, but in
the end she decided that she was going to stay
with me, which I didn't know she would, And my
children continued to love me, and in some ways, the
(29:44):
thing that surprised me most was when I came out
to my mother, who was when I came out to her.
She was in her early eighties, evangelical, Christian, conservative, Republican
women in the Philadelphia suburbs, and you know that pretty
good feeling. This is not going to be her idea
of a good way to improve our relationship. But you know,
(30:07):
I told her, and I said, I'm sorry I didn't
tell you this when I was six years old, but
I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And you know,
around on queue, I started weeping. And then my little
mother got out of her chair and she sat down
next to me, and she put her arms around me,
and she said, I would never turn my back on
my child. She said I'll always love you. And I said, yeah, okay,
(30:32):
but when everyone finds out that I'm your daughter now,
isn't that going to be embarrassing and a scandal. And
she said, well, quite frankly, yes, But she said I
will adjust. And she wiped the tears off my eyes,
and she said love will prevail, and she quoted First Corinthians,
(30:57):
these three remain hope, they ape and love, but the
greatest abuses love. And she died nine years ago at
the age of but I still carry that around. Love
will prevail, because in my life love has prevailed, and
that's part of what I think has turned me towards
(31:19):
having a faith again. We'll be right back. I've often
thought of Jenny's life and what happened in the aftermath
of her transition as really at its core being about
(31:44):
the triumph of love, the human struggle to become ourselves
and to trust that the people who love us will
love us down to the core of our authentic being,
because isn't that what it's all about in the end.
So now sixty two years old, now i'm generously you
(32:05):
could call me a middle aged woman. And the person
that I dreamed of being except older is the person
that I see in the mirror in the morning. And
I don't even think about it. I mean I don't
even think about gender most of the time anymore. I
(32:25):
get up, I have a cup of coffee, I read
the paper, I write my column for the New York Times,
which is usually not about transgender people. So the thing
that was once the most profound impossible thing in the
world is now the thing that is. It's not gone,
but it is receded. And in some ways I'm living
(32:46):
the life that I never thought was even remotely possible.
And part of that is because I was very lucky.
Part of it was because I was surrounded by people
who chose when they were given the chance to love me,
rather than two run away. Three years ago, my older
(33:07):
child came to me and told me that they too
were treads and had already embarked upon transition. And I
think back to when I told my mother, and my
mother told me that loved will prevail, and she put
her arms around me. My reaction to my own child
was in fact, possibly less generous. I was freaked out.
(33:31):
I thought, did I do this? Did I somehow make
this look like it was fun? And I was oddly
or maybe maybe not so udly at all. I guess
my first thought was just that my life has been really,
really hard, and I don't want I didn't want my
child's life to be hard and the way that my
life was hard. But then, I hope not too much
(33:53):
time later, I understood that it wasn't about me for once,
and also that the world that my daughter is living
in is different. And in part can I say this,
in part because some of the work that I had
a hand in doing, in part because a lot of
(34:16):
transgender people over the last twenty years have lived their
lives out and without shame, and have told the stories
of their lives so that my daughter's generation lives in
the world which is more forgiving and free. And when
she came out, she didn't spend a year or two
(34:38):
going around to everybody she knew apologizing and asking for forgiveness.
She went on Facebook and said, well, I'm trance. This
is my new name, and most of her friends were like, oh,
good for you. So that's what happened in twenty years.
It's astonishing and wonderful. I mean, I my son is
(35:00):
twenty one, and I see that in his world and
his friends and for the last six seven years since
high school, you know, just a kind of very very
different way of thinking and being in the world, and
a lack of a need to put people in and
(35:22):
people's identities and genders and um sexualities and ways of
identifying themselves into boxes. They just don't do it. Yeah,
you know what, I wonder, Danny, I wonder if I
were fourteen now, would I still be hiding myself? Would
I still you know, head off into the into the
(35:43):
woods with the dog and kind of play the game
I used to play, which was Girl Planet, which I
would pretend that I was an astronaut who crashed on
a alien planet where the atmosphere turned you into a girl.
Would I spend you know, a Friday night hurriedly putting on,
(36:03):
you know, my sister's hippie dress, or would I be
as cool as my children are and their friends are
and and say, yeah, sure, I'm trance, you know whatever.
I don't know. It might just be that I'm naturally.
It seems weird to say a shy person for someone
who is so constantly in the public eye. But um,
(36:27):
I think I've always cared a lot about what other
people think, which I know is stupid. You know, I've
always sought for approval outside of myself, which is I know, stupid.
Um And I've always wanted to fit in, which is
I know stupid. Well, I don't know. I think I
(36:47):
would be different. But it's funny now to look back
on all this, because the world is more in some
places to some degree, a more forgiving place. But you know,
it happened. I mean, it happened because of the work
that I was part of, but it also happened, you know,
I don't want to sound two melancholy, but I think
a little bit about that scene at the end of
(37:08):
Lord of the Rings when Frodo was taking his leave
of his friends and he says, we set out to
save the shire, and the shire has been saved, but
not for me. And he says, you know, they're sometimes
the work you do, it's not work that's going to
benefit you. It's going to benefit the people who come
after you. And now I know I'm sounding Lachrymose here,
(37:32):
but no, Actually it makes me think back to what
your mother quoted to you from the Corinthians. I'm a
very lucky person, and I'm grateful for all the gifts
I've been given, but a lot of the gifts have
been given about like curses when I was younger. It
is hard for me sometimes not to look at people
(37:54):
who didn't get the gift of difference and think it
would have been easier, wouldn't it to live other life?
But on the other end, then I would have been boring,
And it's hard to appreciate things you don't have to
fight for, including happiness, including love, including the gift of
(38:16):
your own soul. What's that old gospel song you've got
to walk that lonesome valley. You've gotta walked up by yourself.
So I mean that's what we do. We walked that
lonesome valley and and yeah, sure it's between from my
In my case, it was, it was between the worlds
of men and women. But it was also the valley
of having a secret and being unknown and being known.
(38:36):
It's the valley between having the self that you see
be an absolutely amazing secret, is known only to you,
caught a glimpse in the mirror fleetingly for you know,
a few minutes once every few weeks, and it being
(38:57):
just the kind of Quotitian fact of your life that
you don't think about. You get up and you get
downstairs and you have some coffee. My mother held on
to that haunted house until her nineties. She died in
the house. Actually she lived in it for forty years,
and I remember, long past transition. I had this funny
experience where I went back the year before she died,
(39:18):
and then I didn't know she was going to die,
but she was ninety four at the time. So I
got a job teaching at a little college. They offered
me a job to teach their first semester, and I thought, well, okay,
and so I took my leave. I got permission from
my wife and my kids to live with Mom for
the false semester, and the taught school at the little
(39:38):
college called Arth Sina's College. And I come home and
I'd make mom lamb chops for dinner, and we drink
at and then we'd watched Jeopardy, and it was like,
after all those decades, all of the turmoil was done.
It was just a mother and her daughter, you know,
eating lamb chops. And remember one night, there's a ghost
(40:02):
that you would sometimes see on the third floor of
that house. There was a mirror and another sounds insane,
but I wasn't the only one who thought there was
a mirror. And you'd see this kind of pale figure
of this kind of older woman in a long white
like a nighty or something. She always be looking over
(40:24):
your shoulder and then you turn around there be no
one there. It was bad when you'd see her. We
wouldn't happen a lot, you know, once a year, maybe
once for a couple of years. You can see it.
A friend of mine once saw her drift through the
guest treatment in the middle of the night while he
was asleep, but usually she was in the mirror. And
I don't know what the story was of this person.
Later on I hired actually like Ghostbusters to check it out,
(40:46):
what the paranormal investigators, and they're like, well, you got
something here, we don't know what it is. And I
should also say I don't really believe in ghosts, because
you know, I kind of think it's bullshit. But and
they my mother dinner, I cleaned up dinner, I went
upstairs to my high school bedroom and I went to
the bathroom and then out of the corner of my eye,
(41:07):
I saw this figure in the mirror, and I thought
to myself, Holy ship, there she is again. After all
these years, that ghost is still here. And then I
turned around, and of course you can see where the
story is going. It was just me. Now, I was
the older woman in the ninety you know, and I
(41:28):
kind of wondered, was that the ghost that I was
seeing when I was a kid? Was it the ghost
of the person that I eventually turned out to be.
Sounds crazy, isn't it. Can you be your own guardian angel?
Can you look back over the years, maybe when I
was a kid and living this arcane private life. Something
(41:50):
in me knew or hoped that there was a possible
world some day in which I would be solid, you know,
but I would be openaking in the world ranther than
just as kind of specter. Family Secrets is an I
(42:18):
Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and
Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to
give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
(42:40):
That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at
fami Secrets pod m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
(43:14):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets is a production of I Heart Radio. So
let's let me paint a scene for you. Say it's four,
I'm fifteen or sixteen years old, and everyone's gone out
for the night. And there I am, this slender, feminine
(00:22):
creature with shoulder length blonde hair, and I'm standing at
a high window in my parents haunted house, big old, drafty,
creepy house in what was once the country around Philadelphia.
And I'm standing in a window and I'm looking down
and I watched the pale lights of my sister, who's
(00:43):
the last person to leave the house. She drives off
on the Volkswagen. Now I'm alone in this house and
I'm looking at the clock. Let's say it's so now
I've got a couple of hours. So we sweep down
the creaking steps from the third floor, and I grab
a dress and all the kind of body patting that
(01:07):
I'm going to need, and some pantios and some makeup,
and you put your clothes on quick, and then you
kind of stand before the mirror and you do your
makeup and you look in the mirror and you know,
I mean I was. I was a very feminine looking person,
even when I wasn't on farm, and you know, for
(01:30):
all the world there's a relatively normal looking and I
know normal is a charged words, so maybe I should
be careful. But there I am. If i'd left the house,
which I would never have done that I've left no house,
maybe you wouldn't have looked twice at me, like there's
some hippie girl, you know. And I'm just kind of
(01:50):
looking in the mirror with the sense of both profound
joy because there's the person that I am. There is
the girl that has lived in my heart but I
never get to see except when no one is home,
but also profound sorrow because I know I can't be
this person, because I know I can't live in the
(02:11):
world as myself. That's Jennifer Finney Boylan, writer, professor, transactivist,
author most recently of Good Boy, My Life in Seven Dogs,
as well as the classic memoir She's Not There. Jenny's
is a story of the deepest kind of secret, the
(02:33):
kind that we hold in a wordless place, the kind
that will not let go of us, the kind that
will force its way out from its depths until we
release it, and when we release it, it finally releases us.
(02:57):
I'm Danny Shapiro, And this is family secret. It's the
secrets that are kept from us, the secrets we keep
from others, and the secrets we keep from ourselves. It's
like I've got the nuclear codes here and here it is.
(03:18):
Here's the way. If I wanted to, I could blow
up my life. All I'd have to do with you
to walk outside, and I'm knowing that, you know, my
parents are coming back from their dinner with their friends.
My sister might come back. Anything could happen. Maybe my
friends are going to stop by without telling me. Are
all the doors in the house locked? They might not be.
And sometimes people would come home and I have to,
(03:41):
you know, do a quick retreat. But on this particular night,
let's just say, when all is said and done, they
put everything back, put the earrings back in the mother's
jewelry box, put the clothes back on the hangars where
they're supposed to come from. Then I hear the car
coming in in the driveway, and my mother comes up
the stairs, and of course I've I've now washed off
(04:01):
the neckup, and I've done everything I have to do
to look like myself again, as if you know, nothing
has happened. And mom comes in, Did you have a
nice night here? Yeah? What did you do? Well? I
watched Carol Burnett show. Okay, we'll see you in the morning,
and that was my reality. You know that I've had
(04:23):
this just unbelievably powerful, both joyful and tragic experience alone
in the creepy old house, and then everything would have
to get restored, like nothing had happened to hide the
scene of the crime, you know, And I'd wonder, was
this dress facing this way or that way on the hangar?
Will anyone know that I moved these ear rings? Describe
(04:49):
the landscape of your childhood, Well, I grew up in
rural Pennsylvania and it was a place where a engle
road had been carved through a pretty deep pine forest,
and our family lived on one side of the road
and on the other side of the road. We're just
lots and lots of trees that went on forever and
(05:13):
through that forest. It sounds very like I don't know,
Middle Earth or something, but through that forest there was
an old I guess a cobblestone road from a hundred
years before, and a lot of old stone houses that
had been abandoned, and on some levels it was like
the coolest thing if you were a kid, to be
able to just you know, get up in the morning
(05:35):
and disappear into those woods. And sometimes I have the
dog with me. We had a Dalmatian named Playboy, who
was like the worst dog in the world, but you know,
not to me, and so I would disappear into those woods.
In some ways, it was very much kind of a
world of imagination. I was left on my own a
lot as a kid, and there's a way it's funny.
(05:57):
It's the one way in which I look back on anything. Wow,
what a kind of a sad childhood, you know, it
just kind of because I spent most of my time
kind of alone, wandering around this forest. But on the
other hand, being alone is just how I liked it.
It's the place I actually wanted to be. And if
my parents or my sister had actually asked me to
take part in their world, which was a really different
(06:19):
different from mine, it would have been have been nice
to have been asked, but then I probably would have
given him the slip. Anyway, Were you and your sister
close in age, Um, she's about a year and a
couple of months older than I am, So yeah, we're
pretty close n Eche, but very different temperament. You know.
So I was a boy then and and she was not.
(06:43):
She was a great equestion, She wrote courses. She was
just brilliant at you know, as a kid. She became
one of the best writers in all of Pennsylvania. And
it was you know, it's kind of like the stories
you hear of people who have a sibling who is
like a gymnast or an ice skater or I don't know, something,
I was some kind of obscure athletic talent, you know.
(07:04):
She like she was what's the thing with the brooms
in the Olympics curling that that you throw of this
little tattle and then people like go ice skating in
front of it and they're like sweeping the ice. Well,
it was like that. It was like being the sibling
of a world class curler, and uh, their lives revolved
around that. From the time I was you know, nine
(07:26):
or so, the family would often disappear on the weekends
to go to you know, horse shows wherever. My sister
would right around in a ring from and um, meanwhile
I was out in the woods, living in another world.
My mother was an immigrant to this country. She um
(07:47):
was born in East Prussia, which is a country they
don't have anymore. She came to this country in the
twenties and her English was not very good. She spoke
German then, and she to the story of coming back
from church and h she didn't understand. Why did American
pastors say that your head was going to run over?
(08:10):
What is her head running over? And it's like what
he said, Yeah, he said, my cup runneth over. Well,
for those of you who don't speak German, whause most
people copped as the German word for head. So when
she heard mine cup was running over, she was very confused.
She was the second oldest of seven children. My grandmother,
(08:32):
her mother was essentially a single mother. My grandfather would
show up every year or so, get her pregnant, and
then disappear again. And they lived at this kind of
unbelievably hard life on what they called a dirt farm
in New Jersey. And yeah, my mother had this unbelievable
safe and optimism and buoyancy. And it's always kind of
amazed that sometimes we think of people who are kind
(08:55):
of cheerful and buoyant as people who are superficial and
people who have to them, and yet my mother had
being experienced about the most shocking poverty and the and
the most shocking abuse from her um father and other
men in that farm town, responded to all of that
with this kind of steely buoyancy. And when we were
(09:18):
sarcastic teenagers years and years later, decades later, the worst
thing that anybody could call my mother was Glinda the
good witch. That was that was their sarcastic name from
my mother, because she very much had that thing, that
Billy Burke thing. She was the good witch. My father
was irish. His father died young also, and his mother remarried,
(09:43):
each time a whole bunch of times, each time more
disastrously than the one before, And eventually, by the time
he was nigh school, he was living with friends back
So both of my parents grew up essentially with a
single parent and raised by friends and or by themselves.
And my mother had said she would never get married.
(10:03):
She just thought there's too much evil from men. And
then she met my father. She was I think almost forty,
she'd become a book buyer. She finally got out of
New Jersey and invented a life for herself what was
then called a book buyer back when books were sold
on the first floor of department stores. She was the
person who chose what books were for sale. And so
(10:25):
she had this kind of glamorous publishing career in her
thirties where she would take the take the train to
New York City and have lunch with Bennett's surf. And
she gave all that up when she was I think
almost forty. My father was almost thirty. But there was
like eleven years apart from them, and so here's this
(10:45):
German woman marrying this Irish intellectual. Even now I still
look at I think, what bizarre marriage. But they just
a journ each other. Their names were Dick and Hilda Guard.
I think that's probably important dimension. Also, I remember, as kneeds,
You're being a little stone lying on the couch one day,
thinking my parents are named Dick and Hilleguard, like there's
(11:08):
no hope for me. Like my parents are Dick and
hillde Guard, like whoa man. They had my sister and
they had me, and we lived in the country in Pennsylvania.
My father had wanted to be a medieval historian, but
you know, there was no money for him to go
(11:28):
to grad school, so he became a banker, and banking
never I think quite treated him with the same love
I think that medieval history would have. But he was
the kind of quiet, quietly, funny, bookish men, and he
loved his wife, he loved his kids, and he loved dogs.
We had one terrible dog after another. So your father
(11:52):
passed away when you were twenties six, I think, yeah.
He had he had melanoma. He first got it when
I was in uh, I think ninth grade, and they
had a mole taken off and he was okay for
six or seven years, and then another mole taken off,
and then he was okay for three years or four years,
and then uh and then the last time you got it,
(12:14):
you know, as the saying goes, they didn't get at all.
And so he was in remission I think three times,
and then when it finally laid him low, he was
he was gone within the year. So yeah, it was
in my twenties. Do you ever think about what it
would have been like to come out to your father, Um,
I guess I've thought about that. I think it would
(12:35):
have gone badly, so I don't think about it a lot. Um.
He was an open minded man, but He also had
a very strong sense of the consequences of your decisions
and if they affect other people. One of his best
friends from high school who was called my uncle so
and so, you know when I was a kid, that's
he was one of those people that you weren't related
(12:56):
to that you called your uncle. Um divorced his wife
and married someone else midlife, the way people do. And
my father never gave me and never spoke to him again,
like it was dead to him because he had four children.
And my father just felt, you know, you've done you've
done the wrong term, so he cut him off. I
guess that's a fine line between having between morals and moralistic.
(13:20):
Also in their circle that you know, they just didn't
know gay people, they didn't know queer people. It's a
very repressive culture. And um, I mean they had a
two or three friends that were just obviously gay. You'd
have to be completely blind not to know that these
men were gay. And yet nearly to her dying day,
and my mother would never would always say, oh, well,
I hope ed finds the right woman some day. I'm like, um,
(13:43):
but you know, I guess that's just the culture that
they grew up with in the thirties and forties. You know,
my life is not easy, but it was a lot
easier than it would have benified grown up in that era.
I know you've said that when you think about your childhood,
you do you think of it as a boyhood? Do
you still feel that way or The reason that I
(14:05):
always tiptoe around that is because, um, I'm aware that
for other transgender women, they have a narrative which I
respect and which is real, and the fact that my
experience is a little different doesn't mean that there's should
not be respected. You know, there are a lot of
transgender women who would say I went through transition when
I was thirty, but I was always a woman, And
(14:27):
I mean, and that's true for me also in a
kind of spiritual a in a kind of private way.
But you know, I also I lived in the world
as a boy. I mean, I knew, I knew what
the truth was about who I was from a very
very early age, but I didn't tell anybody because I figured,
I don't know, like, I didn't have the language for
it. It It just seemed insane, and there were I just
(14:49):
didn't know that there were other transgender people in the world.
So I kept it private and I lived as far
as the rest of the world could see as a boy.
And I didn't go through transition until I was prety,
you know, So I did live in that body for
all those decades and socialized male. That doesn't make me
less of a woman now post transition, and there's nothing
(15:12):
to apologize for. But I do think of it as
a boyhood, you know, not a boyhood like the other
boys that I knew, that's for sure. But you know,
it was what it was, and it wasn't the life
that I wanted, and it wasn't a life that I understood,
and it just felt weird, man, I mean it was.
It was a really strange way to be in the
(15:32):
world because not only do you have the sense of
yourself of being different and having a problem that you
can't solve, but you also have a pretty big secret.
You have a an atomic secret that you don't have
a language for. You don't know how to to share
your what's in your heart, your most fundamental truth with
the people who love you, and it's a pretty hard
(15:52):
thing for an eight year old to carry around on
their shoulders. So my way of dealing with it was
just to become this tremendously hysterical person. You know, I
was disruptive in school. I was it was pretty funny
at times. Some of my material was pretty good. But
I also I was just kind of driven to constantly
(16:15):
be creating, you know, b Arnie hand over foot. You know,
I would make up songs, and I make up stories,
and I would go charging off into the woods and
invent you know, a whole other other worlds that felt
like a safer and more forgiving place to be than
the world I lived in. We'll be back in a
(16:39):
moment with more family secrets. It's so interesting, Jenny, because
you're talking about in not having the language for something
that is so huge, but literally does not having the words,
(16:59):
not having ing the terms, not having access to being
able to describe it, not just two other people, but
to yourself. It strikes me listening to you that that's
also the birth of a writer in a certain way,
because at least the way that I always think about
the impulse to write is finding the words, finding the language,
(17:23):
or intervening in the dynamics of loss or or childhood
where there wasn't the ability back then too to speak, Yeah,
and to and to find a narrative of your own
life that makes that makes sense, that can actually change
the payoffs of your the life that you're experiencing into
(17:43):
something that has form and function and logic. It remains
to this day a very difficult thing to explain to
other people who don't feel the thing that you feel,
and so because they don't feel the thing that you feel,
they assume that what you feel must be something you
don't feel, or it must be something that that is.
(18:05):
You're just crazy, you're just wrong. The experience of a
lot of transgender people, you know, it reminds me of that.
There's I think it's a heny youngman joke where guy
isn't it the doctor and he says, doctor, doctor, I've
I get a terrible paint every time I go like this,
what should I do? And the doctor says, don't go
like that. You know, you know, and people will argue
(18:26):
with you. They'll say that, well, your chromosome says you're this,
so that's that you should I've been tweeting with you
for thirty seconds. But I understand your life, but I
than you do. I think to some degree, there's also
a desire to to explain things to other people. And
I think in my my first memoir, Um, She's Not There,
(18:47):
which is an account of transition, there's a tone and
I mean I wrote that book going on twenty years
ago now, but there's a there's a feeling to that
book now when I read it, I feel a tone
of apology or justification to it, because you know, in
those days, you know, twenty years ago, there was so
(19:08):
little um discourse around trans identity that you know, I
think people felt like I'd made the whole thing up myself.
So a lot of that book, a tone of it
from author to reader, is a tone of someone saying,
please forgive me, I'm so sorry, uh for for being
(19:29):
myself and for feeling the things I felt. I hope
you'll toss this out with me. And it's the thing
looking at it now seems really I don't want to
say dated, but it's certainly I wouldn't write anything about
translegdentity with that attitude. Now now I've my attitude be
much more like, well, I'm here on the planet. Isn't
(19:49):
this great busness a gift? How lucky was I to
experience the world and in these different ways? And if
you can't ride on this train with me. Well, that's okay,
we'll stop the train. We'll throw you off. When a
difference twenty years makes well, I think it's just the
result of people coming out. It's the result of more
(20:11):
and more people being known. It's the result of their
being more different kinds of transgender people in the public eye.
I mean, it used to be that kind of nice, possible.
Middle aged white ladies were the only transgender people you saw,
except for drag queens who interacted with the world in
a very in a very different way. But you know,
now we've got all kinds of trance stories out there.
(20:34):
We have a saying, um, if you've met one transgender person,
you've met one transgender person. And I'm not ignorant, I
know that this is all still really new for a
lot of people, and a lot of people are still
catching up, but increasingly and to our children's generation, um,
this is this is just kind of the way things are,
and it's just not that big a deal. And in
(20:56):
a way, that's sorrel. I always wanted to live in
a world where I was born, where it was just
not that big a deal and I could just be
myself and no one would have to have a heart
attack about it. I've often thought that the change in
my life was not a change about going from male
(21:16):
the female. The thing that changed me was going from
a person who had a secret to a person who
doesn't have a secret. And if you have a secret,
it is like having a Saint Bernard. It's something like
an invisible Saint Bernard that that follows you everywhere, like
(21:38):
you can't leave the house unless the secret comes with you,
and the secret has to be tended, you know. I
remember being in like a social situation when I was
like sixteen, and somebody mentioning um a transgender person, although
that wasn't the language that was used back in those days,
but someone would say that word and I would freeze,
(21:58):
and my heart beat a triple and sweat would start
to pour down the signs of my face because I
knew that I then had to imitate a person for
whom this topic was of no special interest, and sometimes
it was very hard to remember what those people acted like.
(22:19):
But it means you're also not telling the truth of
the person that you love by the person you love.
Jenny's referring to her wife. Did the two of them
have been together? Well for a very long time, and
what a ride it has been. I mean, so I've
been married now for what thirty two years I think
(22:41):
now um Dee and I have been been together, so
it's twelve years as husband and wife and twenty years
as a wife and wife. Well, for the twelve years
that I was married before I came out, my wife died.
Whom I love I did not know because how did
she not know? Because I didn't tell her? Why did
I not tell her? Because I didn't tell myself because
(23:02):
I didn't want it to be true, because I figured
if I said this out loud, it would open the
door to a life of marginality and suffering and violence
and possibly murder. I mean, in the stories of transgender
people that I knew. That's what happened to people. I
didn't know there was a way of being in the world.
(23:23):
So I had to keep the secret from myself. But
it also been keeping the secret from the person that
I love. You know, the whole point of being in
love with someone and embarking upon the adventure of marriage
and sharing a life together. It's pretty hard when you're
trying to keep the secret from that person. But then
(23:44):
you're also trying to keep that secret from yourself. It's crushing.
And there are people, they're millions of people. And it's
not just transgender people either. There are millions of people
in the world who are burying that secret and are
bearing it every single day. We're bearing some secret, something
that if they admit to themselves, will atomize the world
(24:07):
they live in, or think that it will. And I
think for men in particular, there's a sense that so
I was I was brought up, is that is your
job to protect the people around you. And you know,
not not just women, but you know especially women and
children that you have children, that it's your job to
stand between the people you love and trouble. If there
(24:28):
are arrows coming in, you want to be in a
position that they're going to hit you and let the
people that you love escape. So to be the person
who's suddenly responsible for trouble, to be the person who's
actually the fact of your life, the secret that you reveal,
be the source of the trouble, it's just a very
very agonizing and terrible thing. And so again for me,
(24:51):
that was the big thing. It wasn't it wasn't being
trapped so much as it was having something that I
hadn't been honest about to the person that I care
most about in the world. So what was the turning
point for you? After twelve years of what you're describing
as a kind of knowing but not fully articulating to
(25:14):
yourself that this was the case, There was a day
which i'll describe to you. But before that day, I mean,
which was like a turning point. I would describe it
more though as an erosion rather than a decision. It
wasn't like one day I said, you know, now I
shall change my name to Tiffany Shaniel and I you know,
(25:35):
and I walked down the stairs and sequence. It wasn't
like that, although actually I know, I hope people who
have done that too, and that's you know, and that's fine,
But um, you know, you can think about it if
you're walking along the road with a stone in your shoe,
a little, tiny little stone in your shoe, and you
could probably walk a mile or so. In fact, here's
the story. We lived in Ireland in our kids were little,
(26:02):
they were under the age of five or six, and
I loved living in Cork. I had a job teaching
at University College Cork, and one day, we had some
people over and doorbell rang and somebody turned quickly in
a wine glass fell onto the floor. In fact, maybe
the wine glass had fallen days before. But what remembers
that that there was a tiny little chart of the glass,
(26:22):
like you know, the size of like just a tiny
little sliver of a fingernail. Anyway, I must step on
that as I went to answer the door. So I
got this little sliver of glass in the heel of
my foot, which is so little that I probably didn't
even recognize it at the time. And uh, you know,
a couple of days later and they were thinking, oh,
my foot kind of hurts, but you know, I'll just
keep walking, because what are you gonna do, you know.
(26:46):
And then a few days later went by and it
got worse and worse, no worse. And you know, I
walked all over that city because that's what you wouldn't
know what you do when you live, especially there there
was not a lot of driving cars. I walked everywhere,
and slowly but surely I realized that I was going
to have to go to the hospital and I had
(27:06):
this thing taken out of a foot well, which I
finally did. And I'll spare you the description of the
hospital in Cork, Ireland, which was surprisingly the opposite of modern.
It was really gruesome and uh, to get this thing
out of my foot, they had to do an operation
and there was not good anesthetic and it was really,
really horrible. And finally my wife picked me up in
(27:30):
the car the end of the day and we went
to go get because there were some pain killers, so
she went into the apothecary to get the pain killers.
When she came out, she found me in the car
sobbing my brains out, sobbing harder than I think she
maybe had ever seen me cry in a dozen years
(27:51):
of marriage and knowing each other for twenty years before that.
And it was clear to me what I was crying
about wasn't the fact that I did I'd hurt my foot.
What I was crying about is the fact that that
was my life. I've been walking year after year, day
after day with this little thing that I was caring
that I was pretending I didn't hurt, but it did hurt,
(28:15):
and you, I mean, and finally you just reach to
day where you're like, I can't walk another step. We
got back from Ireland and I started therapy with the
following autumn. So you know why, then the real question
is why not years and years and years before. Why
did it picks along? I don't know. Because I was
a coward, because I was afraid, um, I felt like
(28:38):
I had too much to lose. You know, it's making
me think of one of my favorite quotes is from
Gnostic Gospels, from the Gospel of St. Thomas, which goes, um,
if you bring forth what is within you, what you
bring forth will save you. If you do not bring
(28:59):
forth what is within you, what you do not bring
forth will destroy you. That's right. I remember that St. Thomas.
You're good, Danny Shapiro. I mean you make me think
about the spiritual aspect of all this. I have become
more faithful and spiritual. I think post transition um in
(29:22):
part because I got to see the power of what
love can do. Because when I did finally tell my
wife t D it wasn't an easy passage, but in
the end she decided that she was going to stay
with me, which I didn't know she would, And my
children continued to love me, and in some ways, the
(29:44):
thing that surprised me most was when I came out
to my mother, who was when I came out to her.
She was in her early eighties, evangelical, Christian, conservative, Republican
women in the Philadelphia suburbs, and you know that pretty
good feeling. This is not going to be her idea
of a good way to improve our relationship. But you know,
(30:07):
I told her, and I said, I'm sorry I didn't
tell you this when I was six years old, but
I was afraid you wouldn't love me anymore. And you know,
around on queue, I started weeping. And then my little
mother got out of her chair and she sat down
next to me, and she put her arms around me,
and she said, I would never turn my back on
my child. She said I'll always love you. And I said, yeah, okay,
(30:32):
but when everyone finds out that I'm your daughter now,
isn't that going to be embarrassing and a scandal. And
she said, well, quite frankly, yes, But she said I
will adjust. And she wiped the tears off my eyes,
and she said love will prevail, and she quoted First Corinthians,
(30:57):
these three remain hope, they ape and love, but the
greatest abuses love. And she died nine years ago at
the age of but I still carry that around. Love
will prevail, because in my life love has prevailed, and
that's part of what I think has turned me towards
(31:19):
having a faith again. We'll be right back. I've often
thought of Jenny's life and what happened in the aftermath
of her transition as really at its core being about
(31:44):
the triumph of love, the human struggle to become ourselves
and to trust that the people who love us will
love us down to the core of our authentic being,
because isn't that what it's all about in the end.
So now sixty two years old, now i'm generously you
(32:05):
could call me a middle aged woman. And the person
that I dreamed of being except older is the person
that I see in the mirror in the morning. And
I don't even think about it. I mean I don't
even think about gender most of the time anymore. I
(32:25):
get up, I have a cup of coffee, I read
the paper, I write my column for the New York Times,
which is usually not about transgender people. So the thing
that was once the most profound impossible thing in the
world is now the thing that is. It's not gone,
but it is receded. And in some ways I'm living
(32:46):
the life that I never thought was even remotely possible.
And part of that is because I was very lucky.
Part of it was because I was surrounded by people
who chose when they were given the chance to love me,
rather than two run away. Three years ago, my older
(33:07):
child came to me and told me that they too
were treads and had already embarked upon transition. And I
think back to when I told my mother, and my
mother told me that loved will prevail, and she put
her arms around me. My reaction to my own child
was in fact, possibly less generous. I was freaked out.
(33:31):
I thought, did I do this? Did I somehow make
this look like it was fun? And I was oddly
or maybe maybe not so udly at all. I guess
my first thought was just that my life has been really,
really hard, and I don't want I didn't want my
child's life to be hard and the way that my
life was hard. But then, I hope not too much
(33:53):
time later, I understood that it wasn't about me for once,
and also that the world that my daughter is living
in is different. And in part can I say this,
in part because some of the work that I had
a hand in doing, in part because a lot of
(34:16):
transgender people over the last twenty years have lived their
lives out and without shame, and have told the stories
of their lives so that my daughter's generation lives in
the world which is more forgiving and free. And when
she came out, she didn't spend a year or two
(34:38):
going around to everybody she knew apologizing and asking for forgiveness.
She went on Facebook and said, well, I'm trance. This
is my new name, and most of her friends were like, oh,
good for you. So that's what happened in twenty years.
It's astonishing and wonderful. I mean, I my son is
(35:00):
twenty one, and I see that in his world and
his friends and for the last six seven years since
high school, you know, just a kind of very very
different way of thinking and being in the world, and
a lack of a need to put people in and
(35:22):
people's identities and genders and um sexualities and ways of
identifying themselves into boxes. They just don't do it. Yeah,
you know what, I wonder, Danny, I wonder if I
were fourteen now, would I still be hiding myself? Would
I still you know, head off into the into the
(35:43):
woods with the dog and kind of play the game
I used to play, which was Girl Planet, which I
would pretend that I was an astronaut who crashed on
a alien planet where the atmosphere turned you into a girl.
Would I spend you know, a Friday night hurriedly putting on,
(36:03):
you know, my sister's hippie dress, or would I be
as cool as my children are and their friends are
and and say, yeah, sure, I'm trance, you know whatever.
I don't know. It might just be that I'm naturally.
It seems weird to say a shy person for someone
who is so constantly in the public eye. But um,
(36:27):
I think I've always cared a lot about what other
people think, which I know is stupid. You know, I've
always sought for approval outside of myself, which is I know, stupid.
Um And I've always wanted to fit in, which is
I know stupid. Well, I don't know. I think I
(36:47):
would be different. But it's funny now to look back
on all this, because the world is more in some
places to some degree, a more forgiving place. But you know,
it happened. I mean, it happened because of the work
that I was part of, but it also happened, you know,
I don't want to sound two melancholy, but I think
a little bit about that scene at the end of
(37:08):
Lord of the Rings when Frodo was taking his leave
of his friends and he says, we set out to
save the shire, and the shire has been saved, but
not for me. And he says, you know, they're sometimes
the work you do, it's not work that's going to
benefit you. It's going to benefit the people who come
after you. And now I know I'm sounding Lachrymose here,
(37:32):
but no, Actually it makes me think back to what
your mother quoted to you from the Corinthians. I'm a
very lucky person, and I'm grateful for all the gifts
I've been given, but a lot of the gifts have
been given about like curses when I was younger. It
is hard for me sometimes not to look at people
(37:54):
who didn't get the gift of difference and think it
would have been easier, wouldn't it to live other life?
But on the other end, then I would have been boring,
And it's hard to appreciate things you don't have to
fight for, including happiness, including love, including the gift of
(38:16):
your own soul. What's that old gospel song you've got
to walk that lonesome valley. You've gotta walked up by yourself.
So I mean that's what we do. We walked that
lonesome valley and and yeah, sure it's between from my
In my case, it was, it was between the worlds
of men and women. But it was also the valley
of having a secret and being unknown and being known.
(38:36):
It's the valley between having the self that you see
be an absolutely amazing secret, is known only to you,
caught a glimpse in the mirror fleetingly for you know,
a few minutes once every few weeks, and it being
(38:57):
just the kind of Quotitian fact of your life that
you don't think about. You get up and you get
downstairs and you have some coffee. My mother held on
to that haunted house until her nineties. She died in
the house. Actually she lived in it for forty years,
and I remember, long past transition. I had this funny
experience where I went back the year before she died,
(39:18):
and then I didn't know she was going to die,
but she was ninety four at the time. So I
got a job teaching at a little college. They offered
me a job to teach their first semester, and I thought, well, okay,
and so I took my leave. I got permission from
my wife and my kids to live with Mom for
the false semester, and the taught school at the little
(39:38):
college called Arth Sina's College. And I come home and
I'd make mom lamb chops for dinner, and we drink
at and then we'd watched Jeopardy, and it was like,
after all those decades, all of the turmoil was done.
It was just a mother and her daughter, you know,
eating lamb chops. And remember one night, there's a ghost
(40:02):
that you would sometimes see on the third floor of
that house. There was a mirror and another sounds insane,
but I wasn't the only one who thought there was
a mirror. And you'd see this kind of pale figure
of this kind of older woman in a long white
like a nighty or something. She always be looking over
(40:24):
your shoulder and then you turn around there be no
one there. It was bad when you'd see her. We
wouldn't happen a lot, you know, once a year, maybe
once for a couple of years. You can see it.
A friend of mine once saw her drift through the
guest treatment in the middle of the night while he
was asleep, but usually she was in the mirror. And
I don't know what the story was of this person.
Later on I hired actually like Ghostbusters to check it out,
(40:46):
what the paranormal investigators, and they're like, well, you got
something here, we don't know what it is. And I
should also say I don't really believe in ghosts, because
you know, I kind of think it's bullshit. But and
they my mother dinner, I cleaned up dinner, I went
upstairs to my high school bedroom and I went to
the bathroom and then out of the corner of my eye,
(41:07):
I saw this figure in the mirror, and I thought
to myself, Holy ship, there she is again. After all
these years, that ghost is still here. And then I
turned around, and of course you can see where the
story is going. It was just me. Now, I was
the older woman in the ninety you know, and I
(41:28):
kind of wondered, was that the ghost that I was
seeing when I was a kid? Was it the ghost
of the person that I eventually turned out to be.
Sounds crazy, isn't it. Can you be your own guardian angel?
Can you look back over the years, maybe when I
was a kid and living this arcane private life. Something
(41:50):
in me knew or hoped that there was a possible
world some day in which I would be solid, you know,
but I would be openaking in the world ranther than
just as kind of specter. Family Secrets is an I
(42:18):
Heeart Media production. Dylan Fagan is the supervising producer and
Bethan Mcaluso is the executive producer. We'd also like to
give a special thanks to Tyler Klang and Tristan McNeil.
If you have a family secret you'd like to share,
leave us a voicemail and your story could appear on
an upcoming episode. Our number is one eight eight secret zero.
(42:40):
That's secret and then the number zero. You can also
find us on Instagram at Danny Ryder and Facebook at
facebook dot com slash Family Secrets Pod and Twitter at
fami Secrets pod m. For more podcasts for My Heart Radio,
(43:14):
visit the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever
you listen to your favorite shows.
Family Secrets News
Host
Dani Shapiro
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