February 4, 2019 • 50 mins
When Karen Barnes wanted to find a way to tell her family at large what she had been struggling to understand herself — that one of her twin daughters had embraced a realization that she was a trans man — she figured it was easiest to do in one fell swoop. Much less a story about the difficulty of accepting the acceptable than a story about how best to survive. As a person. As a family.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:04):
They welcomed doing, they accepted him, and I think they
treated him better than when he was a girl. So
welcome back. All right here we are Azzy Confidential, and
uh we've got something special happening right now. Uh, not
(00:26):
too long ago, several months, a year doesn't make a difference.
It doesn't for you, o c s out there. It can't,
It can't possibly. But I got a letter. The letter
was from a woman who also happened to be a mother,
and it was an impassioned letter about her life and
her relationship with her son. So in the first for
Ozzy Confidential, we're gonna have the mother and the son
(00:49):
in the studio duel duel at the same time, uh,
and talking about a special kind of relationship forthwith ladies
and gentlemen. Karen and Dylan Barnes. Now, Karen came to me,
(01:11):
an editor, you know that this angry, disheveled that all
the all the common things you hear about editors are true.
She came up, I want to talk about my relationship
with my son. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know,
don't really what what was special about it? If they're
gonna make a movie about it, what's what's the special,
what's the what's the what's the artful device that makes
(01:32):
you your story worth telling? She as well, my son
Dylan used to be my daughter, Erica sold thank you
for taking the time to show up. This is very cool.
I know you guys are jet setters. Yeah, but we
covered a little bit before we started talking. Um. You
(01:54):
talked about how you got the piece to us, But
what was the Was there an origin story connected to
creating the piece? Yes. After Dylan started going through transition,
I didn't get a chance to talk to some of
our family members, and I felt like they might not
treat Dylan the way that I wanted him treated to
(02:17):
be loved and accepted. Where's his family now here in California?
And uh So I wrote them a letter and just said,
you know here, here's from my heart where I'm coming from. Um,
And the response I got from them was amazing. They
(02:38):
welcomed Dylan, they accepted him, and I think they treated
him better than ever before. In my mind, they were
more accepting than ever before when he when he was
a girl. So, UM, I thought, I've got something here.
I want to make a difference for other people. So
you you had actually written a letter to them and
(03:00):
sent it before it had gotten to me, oh a
year before or maybe nine months before. So their reaction
is actually what emboldened YouTube. Absolutely, and one and one
other thing. Um, I had the opportunity to meet one
of Dylan's friends who's a trans woman, and she was
telling her story to me about how she didn't have
(03:23):
family acceptance and that her mother didn't accept her as
a woman, and it was very very It made it
very very big impact on me, and I felt very
sad and I wanted to make a difference with other
parents and families. So did you did you tell Dylan
that you're going to write the piece before you start
working on the piece? No? In fact, I kept it
(03:45):
a secret from him. But then after I saw the
because I wasn't planning on doing anything with it after
that one effort that I'm sending it to the after
send it sending it to my nephews. So I, um so, then,
I are your nephews are the same age as you are? Okay,
almost exact? Okay, so these are people you grew up with. Yeah, okay,
(04:09):
all right, So I um so I thought, you know,
like I told you, I think I have something here.
So Dylan was visiting with me, and I said, Dylan,
I have this thing I've written, and I want you
to look at it because um I wanna distribute it
and I want your permission to distribute it. And so
(04:30):
he looked at it, and he asked me for a
red pen, and he took my red pen and he
started marking it. And I didn't know what he was doing,
and I said, what's wrong? He said, your grammar is terrible.
You need to get an editor. Was okay, that's all
you like to say. So did you did you have
(04:51):
any feelings in trepidation at all? She said, I'm going
to tell our story as it's connected to you, to
the world, or was it just like cool? I think
I had some feeling of trepidation just because it revealed
a lot of personal things. But then I realized that
I'm not embarrassed about them and that I could help
(05:13):
other people. So yeah, and the trepidation went away. But
I have transference, and it seems to me that commented
their experiences them knowing way before everybody else knew. Gosh, yeah, okay,
I mean so I knew when I was like five,
but I didn't know what it was like, I knew
(05:35):
that I was a boy, I knew that I was
a man, but well, I was a boy at the time,
but I didn't know that that was called transgender anything
like that. And then, you know, after a time of
kind of society denying that in me, I learned to
deny it in myself. It was like society, you mean
(05:57):
the people around you as a five year old, so family, exactly, friends, Yeah, school,
when I was in kindergarten probably, and you know, I
would go to the hair salon and be like, I
want this boy's haircut, and I would wear boxers underneath
my pants, and you know, family members would say like
(06:20):
what are you wearing or why are you wearing that?
And it would be funny, like people would make fun
of me for doing what I felt was naturally me.
And so for me, that's where the denial came in,
because it was like, oh, this is funny, this isn't
serious what I'm doing as a joke. And yeah, and
I remember asking my dad at a young age, like
(06:42):
how do people get sex changes? I didn't even know
how I knew what that was, and I remember him
explaining it to me. And and that's it. I don't
remember being like that's a possibility for me. I just
remember him telling me kind of what it was, and
that's it. How did you how did you process? I
guess maybe I should take a step back and ask
(07:05):
was the making fun of Did you perceive it to
be mean spirited or was it casual like that's a
funny outfit, or was it mean spirited? I perceived it
as being mean spirited most of the time. Um. Like,
when I was in kindergarten to second grade, I was bullied,
and I think it had to do with me looking different. Um,
(07:28):
but you know, lots of people are bullied for different reasons. Um,
But I was really bullied. And in second grade they
made a joke about putting a bomb in my house
and then things got really serious. Yeah, and things got
really serious, and I remember going to the principle's office
and having like a lot of anxiety as a kid
at that time. And then I remember, you know, I
(07:50):
switched schools because my sister was going to a like
a cooler school and I wanted to be there. It
was like a hippie school, and I remember going there
and still being kind of boyish, and then you know,
fourth grade came along, and I was like, I gotta
conform now or something, and I started dressing about nine
(08:10):
in fourth grade. Yeah, and then then I started dressing
more like a girl. I don't know. I think it
was like puberty was approaching, and I felt like, you know,
I didn't want to I didn't want to miss out,
you know, like I I felt so other for so
long that I was like, Okay, I'll conform now so
that I can like fit in. So, yeah, because I
(08:32):
went through a period when I was growing up, I'd
see a movie and I would have to dress like
the character from the movie, right, which is okay if
you're seeing like sound of Music. But when I was
like ten or Levin, so I'd come into re expensive
private school, dress like super Fly, which at the time
in a maxiquot platform shoes, a cane I had with
a feather. My very middle class mother said, you're not
(08:54):
leaving a house like that, you know. I okay. So
I show up at school and I was vaguely aware
of people making fun of me or being amused, but
I just didn't care because I knew I looked just
like the guy from the movie, and in mine that
was it so outside of and identification and external external
identification through clothes, what was happening inside your head? Like
(09:18):
you're like, Okay, I'm getting a lot of grief or
just wanting to wear what I wear. But was there
other stuff happening in your head that was like kind
of that felt to you like I know something that
they don't know. It's not just a stud I'm wearing
shorts of sneakers and I'm a tomboy and that kind
of stuff. Hey, anybody can see that, but it was
there stuff happening inside your head that other people didn't know. Thoughts, feelings, ideas. Definitely.
(09:42):
I think I think after that whole bullying thing and
the bomb thing, it really got to my head and
it made me go into a denial of just like
I can't be this way because it's dangerous, like it's
and and the kids were joking and they were young,
and like, you know, they weren't going to bomb my house.
But I think I took it like really seriously at
(10:05):
that age and just kind of internalized that as like
this is not okay, and like in order to keep
myself and my family safe, I need to be a
certain way. And I need said we're gonna bomb your
house because you look like a boy. I don't know
if they said because you look like a boy. But
for two years they bullied me, and they you know,
(10:26):
I had this best friend who was a girl, and
they would just make up things about me, like he's
picking his nose now, or like you know, just and
like laugh and I just always had this audience of
people who were laughing at me. That's how I felt.
So I felt like paranoid. Yeah, And so I felt
like paranoid that if I was who I really was,
(10:48):
that there would be like a group of people laughing
at me. Now we you, I mean, were you aware
of this? I mean, I'm a parent as well, so
I know what happens to my kids. School a very
frequently the last to know. But you're you're there, holiday dinners,
you're day day. I knew nothing that that he was
getting bullied. What happened was he stopped wanting to go
(11:11):
to school. UM, and this was probably around the middle
of first grade. Stop wanting to go to school, and
UM said he was sick. And then in the middle
of the day, all of a sudden he'd get better.
And this happened many, many, like three days, and all
of a sudden, we thought there's a pattern here. And
(11:31):
he wouldn't tell us why, but he told his sister,
and then his sister told us, and I immediately called
the principal at home, and I said, I want something
done about this. This is not okay with me. I
didn't know how serious it was for him, but it
was serious for me. And the principal said, oh, kids
(11:52):
will be kids, it's not anything to worry about. So
he wanted to go to the other school. But for me,
it was a I wanted him out of that school.
And I don't think I ever knew how traumatic and
how it affected Dylan until he started to go through
transition and told me why he was trans I mean,
(12:15):
I was clueless. Now you're walking around you decided now,
look it's safer on nine, I'm just gonna I gotta
suppress this because I can't keep living like this. Right,
you do get into the cool school, right, okay? Um
didn't continue there or not for a little while. I
remember in third grade, like you were saying, how you
like to dress up his characters. I would see a
(12:36):
boy that would have something and I needed it. Like
we went around shopping for this that that this boy
had for so long. It was like a Tommy Hill
figure like puffy jacket, and he was really cool. That
guy was. He wasn't cool, he was like really smart,
and I was like, I want to be him. So
I started wearing what he wore. And then I remember
(12:57):
this guy had these shoelaces that were like bunge shoe
laces at the time, and I was like, I need those,
and I got those, and then fourth and fifth grade
came and I don't know what happened. I was just, oh, well,
everybody in my family knows about the headband because I
had really short hair. And then I was like, okay,
I'm gonna like be a girl now or whatever. And
so I used this headband to like segue like I
(13:20):
was growing my hair out and it made me look
more feminine. So like I wore this headband for like
every day for a year, and so when my family
talks about it, they'll be like the headband, Like everyone
knows about the head but what did you think the
headband was going to do? I don't know. I was
really connected to those kinds of things, like when I
really liked hats, as a kid, like yeah, and like
(13:43):
it made me feel more masculine. I think that was
part of it. And when we went on like trips,
and I was very serious about my hat, and one
time it flew off and in a car in Mexico
or something, the guy turned like does a you turn,
pulls back onto the street, like swipes it up, and
I get my hat back, like raising Arizona. Yeah, the road.
(14:03):
That's very cool. Alright. So so now you're you're you're nine,
You're you're in school. You're suppressing, but you're you're still
making manifesting ways at a private to you like the headband,
the hat and so on. Was there? Did you proceed
a pace to high school and everything's okay, You've got
like a comfortable suppression. No, No, everything got really serious
(14:27):
in middle school because that's when puberty started to really happen.
I didn't really like recognize at the time, this is
what's wrong, Like, oh, I don't want to, you know,
become a woman. I just was like really depressed, clinically depressed.
And it brought out a lot of bad being, like
a lot of behaviors that were not ideal, like self
(14:49):
harming behaviors, and then I got you know, antidepressants. And
then in high school, like the first year was really
hard for me. And I mean I always hung out
in the theater in high school because that's where I
felt comfortable, like, and I only hung out with theater
kids really And then I did sports, which I did lacrosse,
(15:11):
and I did track and field and water follow I
did a lot of random sports, but yeah, sports, Like
I mean, I had a lot of body issues, like
I hadn't eating disorder, and so sports being active was
what made me feel better about myself. So because it
was the er fins and it makes I mean biologically
(15:32):
it makes sense. So so it seems like this it's
a philosophical quandary, right, like you feel these changes, I'm
becoming something I don't want to be. Yeah, something not
only do I don't want to be, but I cannot stop.
This was that largely what was happening. It was like
being out of control and the fact that not just
(15:54):
out of control, but like that it's you're going to
change into something that isn't you Like, oh, I'm out
of control and this isn't something I ever wanted. But
now now you're in high school, now so middle school,
this is the Internet age. So you asked your father
(16:15):
early on about sex change. Had you started thinking about
it in a more directed way, or was it just
as general, kind of in more a sense of, man,
I'm depressed, and maybe you're thinking that this is just
kind of puberty, young person moods thing. Yeah, no one thought,
you know, no one thought back, oh, remember that time
when Dylan was dressing as a boy, and maybe like
(16:37):
that's a thing and maybe he should talk about it.
Not even myself. I couldn't even do that for myself.
And so it's just like, oh, Dylan's depressed, and the drugs,
like the antidepressants work, but there's still something wrong or
there's still something missing to this equation. And I mean
for a parent, I mean, especially from the generation that
I came from, thinking your child could be transgender was
(17:03):
just not even a possibility. So he was. She was
a tomboy, you know, and the issue she was having
emotionally was just puberty. I mean, that was our logic.
Did you going along with the tomboy piece, did you
(17:23):
think there's a possibility that my daughter is a lesbian? Yes,
of course, because she liked she liked women, too. Yeah.
So yeah, I always knew I liked women too, Like
when I was five and I was you know, I
knew I was a boy. I was also like, I
like women, and so that's what I was for, you know,
in middle school I came out as bisexual, and then
(17:45):
in high school, I don't know, I used you know,
there are so many terms now, I was like pan sexual,
like fluid. Yeah, so like I knew I liked women,
and so I was very much in the LGBT community
in high school and high school, and I would have
So did this provide you some cover at this point now,
(18:07):
because you finally, Okay, I can be in a place
where I'm not being mocked, right, Yeah, definitely, No, it was.
That was really helpful. I had a lot of friends
who were gay. There are a lot of gay people
in the theater, you know, so that was kind of
my community. And I was in the g s A,
so that was helpful as well, which stands for the
Gay Straight Alliance, so the Gay Stright Alliance. That doesn't
(18:30):
necessarily include trans you know, but we did have a
transgender person in the Gay Stright Alliance and I knew
him pretty well because he went to middle school where
I went to middle school, and I went to an
all girls school, so he kind of went through that
before me, and not even like I saw him and
I knew I identified with him in some way. And
(18:51):
I remember at one point I cut my hair and
died it like he did. But I still did not realize.
You yourself did not realize like why I was doing that.
It sort of makes sense to me, right, if I
think about my early sexual strivings. I remember being four
years old, five years old and throwing my pencil onto
the teacher's desk. It's like, look the teacher's desk, pick
(19:14):
up the pencil, right, But I didn't think about that
until I got to be an older adult person. I
was like, oh, this is what's manifest now, is a
certain aspect of heterosexuality. I mean, you know, I mean,
I don't know what I expected, but that's that's kind
of kind I was doing. So again, it makes sense
that you would have gone back to say, how come
(19:35):
I didn't see it then? How come I didn't see
it then? But now you're in high school in the
g s A with somebody who's trans. He said, I
always liked the guy, but do you ever start to
think still not still not okay, very much in denial
about it. So was it the laughter factor? Was it
the you had found your way and you figured this
is my way I can Yeah, I think that's it was.
(19:56):
I was comfortable, like it was easy, you know, I
had found a commu unity that would accept me that way.
And I was very like gender fluid, and I would
have periods of time where I would be more butch,
and then I would have periods of times where would
be more feminine and it would just kind of switch
off like that a lot um. But I think I
(20:17):
was my biggest fear was of not being accepted. And
I think that fear was so strong that I was
able to put like my true identity on the back
burner for so long because I was accepted, right because
of course college comes with building communities, right exactly. I
was surrounded you know, I'm surrounded by people all the time. Busy.
(20:38):
That's another thing, just being busy, like especially in high
school with the S A T s and getting into
college focusing on what do I want to major? And
I didn't really think about myself that much. It's a
great line that more ascorsation line about morbid self attention
if you think about other things, right, But then you
get out of college. So then I get out of
(21:00):
Are you still during this college period? Are you still
are you still on antidepressants? Yeah? Okay, So through high
school to college, Okay, all right, I get out of college,
and I'm alone more than I've ever been in the word.
Which school did you go to? I went to Pittser College.
Oh my daughter's there. Cool. Yeah, Wow, that's a small world.
(21:23):
Yeah alright, so okay, so yeah, I'm alone, like I've
never been to college. You've got your degree in UM.
I created it in Eastern and Western Perspectives on Mental health,
so essentially psychology. Yeah, and I just had so much
more time to focus on myself. And not only that,
(21:45):
but I went out into the world and I was
like looking for a career and in college, like at Pitzer,
in that bubble, it's I mean, Pitzer has people like
you know, they're trans people are people going by Z
like there's they then and it's just a bubble and
(22:10):
it's comfortable. And and then I get out into the
world and it's not like that. And I mean where
I was, I was like working in Beverly Hills at
a restaurant where they required you to dress like very
um gender specific, just like no um it was. It
(22:34):
was just like a fancy restaurant and they were like,
you know, women have to wear dresses all the time,
and you have to wear makeup. And one time that
they made me put on more lipstick at work because
I wasn't wearing enough, which is weird. And I just
started to get really really depressed, just like suicidal. At
(22:54):
this point, I was just yeah, and I was just
so unhappy, and I was like, why, you know, why
am I so unhappy? Like and that's when I started
to kind of like break down in a way. And
the breakdown is what led me into the realization that
I needed to start my transition. And people, you know,
(23:19):
like by my last year of school, people like my friends,
he knew me I had short hair at that time,
and my friends would be like Eric, Like they'd call
me Eric as like a not a joke, like but
like you know, like that's your other personalities name or something.
(23:39):
Based on how often I hear from my kids who
are in college, did we you privy to any of
this or I mean, after he got out of college
and went into that first job. I knew that he
was having some sort of breakdown. You could still talking
on the phone or oh yeah, because we lived in
l A temporarily for a couple of years, and during
(23:59):
that time, around the time he graduated from college, and
so he saw that whatever it was, it was pretty
serious and we were very concerned. So you knew that
you were going to do something, that you had to
do something before anybody else knew. How did the how
did how did it frame itself in your head? Right?
(24:21):
So you're depressed, like suicidal depressed. You know something's going on.
You've taken the classes, right, you knew you your major,
so you know something's going on. At what point did
you go like, I gotta I gotta fix this. I
can't keep living like this. Well, I was living in
a co op with a roommate, and I had quit
my job because I just had the restaurant. Yeah, and yeah,
(24:47):
I was just like I was a mess. Like I
would call my family members crying like every day, being
like I hate this, it sucks um And then and
then I quit my job, and then I moved back
in with my parents, and then I was really isolated
I started to have a lot of anxiety, and I
started to have panic attacks all the time, and we
(25:10):
probably went to the emergency room like seven times in
one week because I thought that like one I thought
I was having a heart attack, and then at one
point I thought I had cancer that nobody could find,
which apparently is like something that actually happens to some
trans people where they think like they have a sickness
inside of them. It's like a denial, like it's like
(25:32):
the real sickness is that it's your body that's not
right for you. But I was like, I have cancer,
nobody can find it. Um And then, you know, every
day just started to become brutal, Like I started to
lose so much weight that it was like, well, if
I don't start eating more, I'm going to dive like
(25:53):
of malnutrition. Yeah. Yeah, so the idea makes itself known
(26:19):
to you through this haze of depression or you start
to pull out secondary effect. Okay, So I had a
really good friend, like a really close friend who had
transitioned while I knew him from Jessica to Mason, and
you know, we were good friends and I liked him
and I admired him for being true to himself, and
(26:44):
I kept him as a friend, and at some point
I realized, like, I mean, he inspired me to to
transition because I saw him go through it. It was
really hard and it scared me. But I also knew
that I had somebody, like I had some kind of
comm entity. I guess like part of the realization was like, oh,
I hate my clothes. I don't want to wear these clothes.
(27:07):
I hate my body, like I have a really bad
eating disorder. And I almost felt like I just felt
like I couldn't function with the amount of time that
would take me to like get dressed in the morning
because I couldn't pick the right clothes, or like the
amount I needed to work out every day to feel
mentally healthy. I was like, this is not normal, Like
this is not what most people have to deal with.
(27:30):
I think I started talking to certain friends and they
started Like one of my friends, I was talking to
her and I was like, I'm just really depressed. I
don't even even think I told her that I was
thinking about that I needed to transition or something. And
she sent me a video with like lover and clocks,
and I was like, you should watch this because she
knew before I did, like before I admitted it to
(27:51):
myself and I watched it. I was really inspiring. And
I think as I started to watch these other people
like be who they were, that is when I started
to realize I can do that. And then I just
started to remember the past, like, oh yeah, it's always
been this way. Oh yeah, I remember that time I
(28:11):
asked my dad when about a sex change, and those
things started to come back. And then I remember and
I was in therapy and so and then I remember
the bomb thing and they being bullied, and then I
realized it all started to connect like puzzle pieces. So
it sounds like it was much harder to get to
that point for a variety of different reasons than it was.
(28:35):
I mean, because as an outsider, you would say, well,
the harder part would be too, I gotta sit down,
tell ma, I gotta doubt that I got to I
gotta tell everybody. It sounds like the harder part was
getting to telling yourself right it was, yeah, absolutely, And
then I mean, there were there's a lot of fears.
There's like fear of being accepted, fear of you know,
(28:56):
scarring scars from having surgery, like fear of not loving
your own self. Um, fear of just just lots of fears,
I mean, homelessness, like everything that you could think of
that's associated with like being a part of a minority.
I guess yeah, yeah, right, So okay, so you come
(29:24):
to this realization and then I think it was based
on the piece the therapist who called you and it
introduced you to the topic. Is that all right? Did
you did the therapist ask you if if if they
think it was a woman? Yeah, Katie, Yeah. Did she
ask you if she could talk to them? She did.
I remember I went into treatment and I didn't bring
(29:49):
it up right away. It was kind of something I
was like, Oh, I'm gonna try to get better and
then um, you know, maybe I'll bring up the transition stuff.
Then at one point I just I felt so comfortable
with this woman that I went in one day. I
was just like, I'm transgender, and she was like, great,
(30:12):
let's tell your medical team. And the fact that she
reacted that way was I mean, it was life changing
because if she had said, really, are you sure, I
would have been like, I don't know if I'm sure? Yeah,
and I would have I mean, I was already in
so much denial and questioning of it myself that like
I came out to her that day, we and then
(30:33):
we told the team and then she was like, do
you want me to call your mom and tell her
about this? And I said, that would be amazing if
you could do that. And and then from that day off,
like for the rest of treatment, I had to carry
like a piece of paper that said I am a
man and I am transgender, because I would go into
this like thought like circle where I'd be like, wait,
(30:56):
maybe I'm not and then it would go like, oh, hey,
I'm not. I'm not, and like I would deny it,
and I had to remind myself of who I really was,
like on a piece of paper, and I carried it
around with me in my It was like a note card,
I think, handwritten or typed handwritten, your handwriting or yeah,
my handwriting. I've never heard this before. So now the
(31:21):
medical team calls you, yeah, Katie, yeah Katie and says,
you know, Dylan Strands is trans and your response, well,
the first thing was before Dylan went into UM, into
this place that you know, the for therapy and stuff
(31:42):
and for UM just finding out what was going on
because there were so many things. I mean, he was
dying of all these diseases, he was losing weight, he
couldn't sleep, We were worried that he was suicidal. It
was such a relief to put to put him in
in a place that he was going to get the
services that he needed and really sort out what was
going on. So maybe a day or two before we
(32:06):
had actually checked him in, he and I were driving
in the car, probably from a doctor's appointment. He said,
you know, I think I might be transgender. And I
lost it because to me, it's like I've got this child.
You know, of course he was an adult, but to me,
he's still a child. He's um, you know, I'm afraid
(32:27):
that it is he going to live till tomorrow. And
so I got upset and I said, I want you
to just get to the point where you can figure
out what you really want and uh and be stable
and gained some weight back, and then we can talk
about if you're a transgender. So I think for him
that was kind of like, oh, she's not going to
(32:48):
accept it, But for me it was like so beyond
all the other things I was worried about with him.
So when Katie called me and she told me. Even
though he had introduced stick to me, it was like
I had never heard it before. And you know that
feeling or somebody tells you something horrible in your heart
just seems to like all the way into your stomach,
(33:10):
or your stomach seems to fall out. I don't know
that feeling like. And the first thing, as I said
in my article, is is I felt fear for what
does this mean for him? You know, is you know,
are people going to accept him? Is he going to
be you know, um, is it going to be hard
for him to get a job, or you know, are
(33:31):
people going to be prejudiced? Stuff like that? And what's
it going to be like to go through surgery? So
that was my first stop. And my second thought was
because I thought, oh I have to tell everybody, I
have to tell family, was what are people going to
think about me? You know, are they going to think
I was a bad mother? Do they think I, you know,
I caused it somehow, or you know that I'm I'm
(33:51):
too liberal? And I you know, I accepted this and
I should have never accepted it. And then of course
about I don't know. That lasted maybe three minutes, and
then I said to myself, Karen, that is absolutely you know,
and that was it. But I was still really upset,
and um, so I went I, you know, I drove.
(34:12):
I was on the freeway on the phone with the therapist.
So I drove home, walked in to the house. My
husband was in the house. I walked into to tell him,
and I didn't tell him I was upset. I just
told him what had happened, you know, that I had
gotten the skull. And he looked at me and goes,
that makes perfect sense. And I was like, what what,
You're not worried, You're not upset. And it just made
(34:34):
me balanced and grounded and and that was the beginning. Uh.
And so when you get home, so you're there, it's
still on therapy. When you get home, were you driving
back were you just like, oh, it'll be fun to
see everybody. How were you anticipating that there's going to
(34:55):
be a little friction or just I was definitely worried,
h But I wasn't worried about my mom or my
dad and my siblings. I was worried about my cousin's
and extended family, the ones the ones that she ended
up contacting, Yeah, right, because they are a big part
of our lives, and the fear was losing them and
(35:18):
I didn't want that, but I was also afraid of
that they wouldn't take it seriously because nobody had taken
it seriously before this moment. So so now to deal
(35:59):
with the issue of of explaining to the family. But
it seems like now the other stuff that was making
life difficult for you would have started to recede. Right,
It's like I got, I got a plan, right, I
got I got this plan. Um. And so how soon
after this meeting with Katie did you start the transition?
(36:20):
Probably like right, I mean, well, I guess you left
her office with a piece of paper, right, Yeah, So
that was the beginning. And then and then I had
some good friends there and they were really supportive, and
they were like, you need to have everybody call you
by mail pronouns now and we're going to support you
(36:40):
and when people don't like, will correct them if you don't.
So I started doing that. I started I need to
think of a new name. Did you did you pick
Dylan or do you let your parents pick Dling. I
picked Dylan with some friends and it was because of
Bob Dylan and I just felt like really identify with
(37:00):
Bob Dylan. That's a guy from h to one. Okay,
thank god, alright, um, he's you know, Bob Dylan is
a Jewish you know, musician, and he changed the world
with his lyrics and I really admired him. So that's
(37:22):
why I chose the name of Dylan. So so it
began immediately and how long how long starting with a note?
How long did it take from So it took about
like like three or four months before I went onto hormones.
I was in Arizona when I was in treatment. So
I came back to l A and then I started
(37:45):
getting information on where I could go to get hormones.
And then I went to the LGBT Center and I
had my first consultation, and things really did start to
get better. I mean I still have like this is
pre hormones. Now you're you get back to l A
(38:07):
and you're starting to take the hormones. Yeah, I get
back to l A, I'm starting to take the hormones.
Um which which ones? Which which one? Though you don't
know this, but this is this brings our whole series
full circle because the very first one we did was
about steroids. Um, specifically me and steroids. Okay, yeah, because
(38:28):
I had a past history which they interviewed me on
the first of this series. So interesting, um so. But
so I went scipienate and that they susted on. I'm
pretty sure it's sipienate. OK. That sounds familiar to me.
And I remember looking up that there were different kinds
and I was like, why is what is that? Yeah?
(38:49):
So taking that, um, I remember the first time I
took it, it made me really hungry. That was good
because I was having issues eating and energy. I mean,
I just felt energized. I remember working out after that
was like the best work out of my life. Yeah.
(39:11):
I haven't taken them in a long time, but I
really missed them. These are all it all really true.
So yeah, you worked out like crazy. You're eating Yeah, um,
I was using the men's bathroom, which was scary, but
no one looks at you in the men's bathroom, so
it didn't matter. We'll see what you've got. Like it's
(39:40):
there's like this great spy quality because your vantage point
on how the different genders do what they do is unique.
You know, It's not like I don't I have no idea. Yeah,
I've got three daughters, four sisters. Still don't have any
idea really what what's happening? So what did you? What did?
What did you what? Like? What was some of the
(40:01):
more salient kind of like if you had to write
this as a book and you were like, yeah, okay,
I made this transition and this is stuff I thought
was kind of bullshitt you before. But no, like, let
me tell you, I mean you have more energy you're
working out with. There any other markers that from your
life as a woman, you would go, I had no idea. Yeah,
(40:22):
I guess so I always thought like, oh, you know,
women and men are that different, Like I don't get why,
you know we have these differences so much. And then
then I started taking hormones, and I remember my music
taste changed a little bit from what to want more aggressive, more.
I remember my sister commenting like, did you realize your
(40:44):
music taste has changed? It's more, you know, probably more aggressive,
more beats, Like I'm more into beats. Um, yeah, I
mean less emotional in a way like a lot of
I know a lot of transguise who say like I
couldn't cry after I started taking testosterone. That hasn't happened
to me. But like, I mean, you're not getting a period,
(41:05):
like every month, You're not having like a It's like,
I think the difference is like as a woman, you know,
it would be like I'd expect to be really really
emotional for a week every month, whereas as a man,
it was more like any day I could be like
more angry. Usually it was anger or like you know, impatient.
(41:28):
It could be any day, like it could be just
for a day, Like it could just be for like
a few hours. So that was one big difference. So
I quickly, as I was transitioning, I quickly started to
realize what I really wanted to do. It was like
almost I created this space in my brain that I
(41:48):
had been occupying so much like being in denial about
this had been occupying so much of my brain in
this weird way for so long that it was like
clarity had just come to me, like mentally physically, and
so um, I decided that I wanted to go to
school for audio engineering and do like music related stuff.
(42:10):
And so I went back to school for music production,
and uh, most of my teachers were men. Um it's
a very like male dominated industry still, and I just remember,
like there was one woman in our program, and she
was treated so much differently than everybody else, and I
(42:31):
just saw it so much clearer. Like I remember, I
didn't know anything. I was like just at the same
level as this girl, like of not knowing anything. She
didn't really know. She was kind of a beginner like
I was in terms of production, but all the other
guys had had experience, and I was treated like I
knew everything because I was a man, and she was
treated like we need to teach her every like we
(42:53):
need to explain it to her, like every step of
the way, Whereas they talked to me, like my teachers
would talk to me like you know, and I'd just
be like, m I know, not dating, because I was
going to say, I'm sure they always ask about dating,
but since you've never done an interview, they haven't asked
you about dating. Yeah. Dating. It's challenging, especially because like
(43:18):
I am more passing, which is like what that means
is that like if someone passed me by on the street,
they would not necessarily be able to tell that I
was transgender man, whereas other people are less passing, And
so it's hard because it's like I'll find somebody ILike,
like a woman that I like, and I'll worry if
(43:40):
she knows that I'm trance or not. And then it's
like I almost have to expose that about myself, like
come out to them. And it kind of sucks because
it's like, you know, normally people don't have to like
expose something that they're worried that, like they'll be rejected
based just on the fact that they were like, oh,
(44:00):
by the way, I'm trans and then they're like not
interested anymore. But the good thing is, like I'm very
out on Instagram, Like I talk about my transition on Instagram,
and a lot of the time when I meet girls,
it's like, oh, do you have an Instagram? And then
they see on there like it that you know, this
is a transman, and then they can decide if they
(44:20):
want to continue with that or not. And like that's
the same with dating apps now, I think too. It's
like you can put like trans man and then but
then there's a worry that like you're going to be
fetishized or something. You know, like people are only going
to be interested in you because you're trans, like they're
into that, and that's a scary thing. But That's why
(44:40):
I don't really use dating websites. I would rather like
meet somebody in person and see if I like them
there for long term things because as African American male
people finishes African American man, So for long term things,
it's a drag. You don't want to date somebody who's
a member of a fan club, right, Yeah, but you
know for sure to engagement. Yeah, yeah, but that's good.
(45:03):
I like that the gate keeping. It just solves the problem. Yeah.
But I think I think my like market for women
like would be bisexual women, mostly because they're just more
open and accepting and they're more knowledgeable about the trans community,
(45:24):
and they're into both genders, so it's like not I mean,
if you haven't necessarily like had the surgeries and stuff,
it's not going to be as much of an issue. Yeah,
knowing what you know now looking back, is there anything
that you would have done differently from how it was
it actually happened? Well, I'm I have met some families
(45:45):
who have children that are five years old that are
acting the opposite gender of their birth and the families
know so much more than I did years ago that um,
they are they are letting their child live as the
gender they prefer, and their families are accepting it because
(46:08):
it's more accepted. So if I could turn back the
clock but know about the future, yes, I do everything differently,
But given where I came from and the culture I
grew up in and the environment in the early nineties,
it wasn't the same as today. So I'd like to
(46:30):
say yes, but I think it would probably have played
out almost exactly the same. Los Angeles. Yeah, so yeah.
I mean I also have times where I think, man,
if only like when I was five and I came out,
somebody was like, great, let's have you talked about in
(46:51):
therapy or like let's you know, explore this and like
focus on it. And then I could have like stopped,
I could have like been or whatever, you know, like
I could have looked more masculine because I would have
grown up as a man and not gone through female puberty.
But then I have times where I'm like, actually, it's
really cool because I got to live as a woman
(47:12):
and a man, and I got to be raised as
a woman, and now I can talk to women, you know,
like now I really understand women really well, and so
like that's cool, and so I kind of flipped like
I kind of flipped back and forth of like, you know,
I wish that, like a long time ago, things were different,
and then I'm like waiting, No, actually, this is really
(47:32):
cool and everything happened for a reason, and that's how
I got to this place. I have to go back
and say one thing, one thing I wish I had
done differently is knowing that those boys. I knew that
those boys had threatened to bomb Dylan and the whole family,
and I thought by getting him out of that situation
(47:54):
was enough. But in retrospect, that's when I should have
found a therapist, and I didn't. I didn't. It took
two years before I realized how really impactful that episode
was in Dylan's life. You see, this is where I
know I'm a New Yorker because I thought you were
going to go completely different. That's when I realized I
(48:16):
should have gone to that school with a baseball bat
something like believe me, okay, even in California. Well, thank
you guys for taking the time, thank you for having us.
(48:49):
So that's Karen Dylan. They just rolled on out of here,
making this our fifth fifth in a series of Ozzy
Confidential from my head, in my heart, my mouth, to
your ears. Know this. Thanks for listening. I appreciate it.
I am Eugene S. Robinson. Your host is Ozzy dot
(49:11):
com Azzi Confidential for the surprising, the shaking, the stunning,
the shocking. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Come back.
Next up on OSI Confidential. We travel hundreds of thousands.
(49:36):
Ten we can't say we travel a certain number of
undisclosed miles to an undisclosed location where we call the
phone and got another number and went to another place,
much like a scavenger or a snipe hunt to meet
a Mr. Jim Wesley rawls as Jim Wesley, Comma Rawls
(49:57):
or Jim Rawls Colma Wesley. I'll explain it all later.
He's ahead of the American Redoubt movement, survival blog guy,
and a firm believer in the fact that we're all
going to Hell in a hair basket. Next up on
Oz's confidential s
They welcomed doing, they accepted him, and I think they
treated him better than when he was a girl. So
welcome back. All right here we are Azzy Confidential, and
uh we've got something special happening right now. Uh, not
(00:26):
too long ago, several months, a year doesn't make a difference.
It doesn't for you, o c s out there. It can't,
It can't possibly. But I got a letter. The letter
was from a woman who also happened to be a mother,
and it was an impassioned letter about her life and
her relationship with her son. So in the first for
Ozzy Confidential, we're gonna have the mother and the son
(00:49):
in the studio duel duel at the same time, uh,
and talking about a special kind of relationship forthwith ladies
and gentlemen. Karen and Dylan Barnes. Now, Karen came to me,
(01:11):
an editor, you know that this angry, disheveled that all
the all the common things you hear about editors are true.
She came up, I want to talk about my relationship
with my son. I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah, you know,
don't really what what was special about it? If they're
gonna make a movie about it, what's what's the special,
what's the what's the what's the artful device that makes
(01:32):
you your story worth telling? She as well, my son
Dylan used to be my daughter, Erica sold thank you
for taking the time to show up. This is very cool.
I know you guys are jet setters. Yeah, but we
covered a little bit before we started talking. Um. You
(01:54):
talked about how you got the piece to us, But
what was the Was there an origin story connected to
creating the piece? Yes. After Dylan started going through transition,
I didn't get a chance to talk to some of
our family members, and I felt like they might not
treat Dylan the way that I wanted him treated to
(02:17):
be loved and accepted. Where's his family now here in California?
And uh So I wrote them a letter and just said,
you know here, here's from my heart where I'm coming from. Um,
And the response I got from them was amazing. They
(02:38):
welcomed Dylan, they accepted him, and I think they treated
him better than ever before. In my mind, they were
more accepting than ever before when he when he was
a girl. So, UM, I thought, I've got something here.
I want to make a difference for other people. So
you you had actually written a letter to them and
(03:00):
sent it before it had gotten to me, oh a
year before or maybe nine months before. So their reaction
is actually what emboldened YouTube. Absolutely, and one and one
other thing. Um, I had the opportunity to meet one
of Dylan's friends who's a trans woman, and she was
telling her story to me about how she didn't have
(03:23):
family acceptance and that her mother didn't accept her as
a woman, and it was very very It made it
very very big impact on me, and I felt very
sad and I wanted to make a difference with other
parents and families. So did you did you tell Dylan
that you're going to write the piece before you start
working on the piece? No? In fact, I kept it
(03:45):
a secret from him. But then after I saw the
because I wasn't planning on doing anything with it after
that one effort that I'm sending it to the after
send it sending it to my nephews. So I, um so, then,
I are your nephews are the same age as you are? Okay,
almost exact? Okay, so these are people you grew up with. Yeah, okay,
(04:09):
all right, So I um so I thought, you know,
like I told you, I think I have something here.
So Dylan was visiting with me, and I said, Dylan,
I have this thing I've written, and I want you
to look at it because um I wanna distribute it
and I want your permission to distribute it. And so
(04:30):
he looked at it, and he asked me for a
red pen, and he took my red pen and he
started marking it. And I didn't know what he was doing,
and I said, what's wrong? He said, your grammar is terrible.
You need to get an editor. Was okay, that's all
you like to say. So did you did you have
(04:51):
any feelings in trepidation at all? She said, I'm going
to tell our story as it's connected to you, to
the world, or was it just like cool? I think
I had some feeling of trepidation just because it revealed
a lot of personal things. But then I realized that
I'm not embarrassed about them and that I could help
(05:13):
other people. So yeah, and the trepidation went away. But
I have transference, and it seems to me that commented
their experiences them knowing way before everybody else knew. Gosh, yeah, okay,
I mean so I knew when I was like five,
but I didn't know what it was like, I knew
(05:35):
that I was a boy, I knew that I was
a man, but well, I was a boy at the time,
but I didn't know that that was called transgender anything
like that. And then, you know, after a time of
kind of society denying that in me, I learned to
deny it in myself. It was like society, you mean
(05:57):
the people around you as a five year old, so family, exactly, friends, Yeah, school,
when I was in kindergarten probably, and you know, I
would go to the hair salon and be like, I
want this boy's haircut, and I would wear boxers underneath
my pants, and you know, family members would say like
(06:20):
what are you wearing or why are you wearing that?
And it would be funny, like people would make fun
of me for doing what I felt was naturally me.
And so for me, that's where the denial came in,
because it was like, oh, this is funny, this isn't
serious what I'm doing as a joke. And yeah, and
I remember asking my dad at a young age, like
(06:42):
how do people get sex changes? I didn't even know
how I knew what that was, and I remember him
explaining it to me. And and that's it. I don't
remember being like that's a possibility for me. I just
remember him telling me kind of what it was, and
that's it. How did you how did you process? I
guess maybe I should take a step back and ask
(07:05):
was the making fun of Did you perceive it to
be mean spirited or was it casual like that's a
funny outfit, or was it mean spirited? I perceived it
as being mean spirited most of the time. Um. Like,
when I was in kindergarten to second grade, I was bullied,
and I think it had to do with me looking different. Um,
(07:28):
but you know, lots of people are bullied for different reasons. Um,
But I was really bullied. And in second grade they
made a joke about putting a bomb in my house
and then things got really serious. Yeah, and things got
really serious, and I remember going to the principle's office
and having like a lot of anxiety as a kid
at that time. And then I remember, you know, I
(07:50):
switched schools because my sister was going to a like
a cooler school and I wanted to be there. It
was like a hippie school, and I remember going there
and still being kind of boyish, and then you know,
fourth grade came along, and I was like, I gotta
conform now or something, and I started dressing about nine
(08:10):
in fourth grade. Yeah, and then then I started dressing
more like a girl. I don't know. I think it
was like puberty was approaching, and I felt like, you know,
I didn't want to I didn't want to miss out,
you know, like I I felt so other for so
long that I was like, Okay, I'll conform now so
that I can like fit in. So, yeah, because I
(08:32):
went through a period when I was growing up, I'd
see a movie and I would have to dress like
the character from the movie, right, which is okay if
you're seeing like sound of Music. But when I was
like ten or Levin, so I'd come into re expensive
private school, dress like super Fly, which at the time
in a maxiquot platform shoes, a cane I had with
a feather. My very middle class mother said, you're not
(08:54):
leaving a house like that, you know. I okay. So
I show up at school and I was vaguely aware
of people making fun of me or being amused, but
I just didn't care because I knew I looked just
like the guy from the movie, and in mine that
was it so outside of and identification and external external
identification through clothes, what was happening inside your head? Like
(09:18):
you're like, Okay, I'm getting a lot of grief or
just wanting to wear what I wear. But was there
other stuff happening in your head that was like kind
of that felt to you like I know something that
they don't know. It's not just a stud I'm wearing
shorts of sneakers and I'm a tomboy and that kind
of stuff. Hey, anybody can see that, but it was
there stuff happening inside your head that other people didn't know. Thoughts, feelings, ideas. Definitely.
(09:42):
I think I think after that whole bullying thing and
the bomb thing, it really got to my head and
it made me go into a denial of just like
I can't be this way because it's dangerous, like it's
and and the kids were joking and they were young,
and like, you know, they weren't going to bomb my house.
But I think I took it like really seriously at
(10:05):
that age and just kind of internalized that as like
this is not okay, and like in order to keep
myself and my family safe, I need to be a
certain way. And I need said we're gonna bomb your
house because you look like a boy. I don't know
if they said because you look like a boy. But
for two years they bullied me, and they you know,
(10:26):
I had this best friend who was a girl, and
they would just make up things about me, like he's
picking his nose now, or like you know, just and
like laugh and I just always had this audience of
people who were laughing at me. That's how I felt.
So I felt like paranoid. Yeah, And so I felt
like paranoid that if I was who I really was,
(10:48):
that there would be like a group of people laughing
at me. Now we you, I mean, were you aware
of this? I mean, I'm a parent as well, so
I know what happens to my kids. School a very
frequently the last to know. But you're you're there, holiday dinners,
you're day day. I knew nothing that that he was
getting bullied. What happened was he stopped wanting to go
(11:11):
to school. UM, and this was probably around the middle
of first grade. Stop wanting to go to school, and
UM said he was sick. And then in the middle
of the day, all of a sudden he'd get better.
And this happened many, many, like three days, and all
of a sudden, we thought there's a pattern here. And
(11:31):
he wouldn't tell us why, but he told his sister,
and then his sister told us, and I immediately called
the principal at home, and I said, I want something
done about this. This is not okay with me. I
didn't know how serious it was for him, but it
was serious for me. And the principal said, oh, kids
(11:52):
will be kids, it's not anything to worry about. So
he wanted to go to the other school. But for me,
it was a I wanted him out of that school.
And I don't think I ever knew how traumatic and
how it affected Dylan until he started to go through
transition and told me why he was trans I mean,
(12:15):
I was clueless. Now you're walking around you decided now,
look it's safer on nine, I'm just gonna I gotta
suppress this because I can't keep living like this. Right,
you do get into the cool school, right, okay? Um
didn't continue there or not for a little while. I
remember in third grade, like you were saying, how you
like to dress up his characters. I would see a
(12:36):
boy that would have something and I needed it. Like
we went around shopping for this that that this boy
had for so long. It was like a Tommy Hill
figure like puffy jacket, and he was really cool. That
guy was. He wasn't cool, he was like really smart,
and I was like, I want to be him. So
I started wearing what he wore. And then I remember
(12:57):
this guy had these shoelaces that were like bunge shoe
laces at the time, and I was like, I need those,
and I got those, and then fourth and fifth grade
came and I don't know what happened. I was just, oh, well,
everybody in my family knows about the headband because I
had really short hair. And then I was like, okay,
I'm gonna like be a girl now or whatever. And
so I used this headband to like segue like I
(13:20):
was growing my hair out and it made me look
more feminine. So like I wore this headband for like
every day for a year, and so when my family
talks about it, they'll be like the headband, Like everyone
knows about the head but what did you think the
headband was going to do? I don't know. I was
really connected to those kinds of things, like when I
really liked hats, as a kid, like yeah, and like
(13:43):
it made me feel more masculine. I think that was
part of it. And when we went on like trips,
and I was very serious about my hat, and one
time it flew off and in a car in Mexico
or something, the guy turned like does a you turn,
pulls back onto the street, like swipes it up, and
I get my hat back, like raising Arizona. Yeah, the road.
(14:03):
That's very cool. Alright. So so now you're you're you're nine,
You're you're in school. You're suppressing, but you're you're still
making manifesting ways at a private to you like the headband,
the hat and so on. Was there? Did you proceed
a pace to high school and everything's okay, You've got
like a comfortable suppression. No, No, everything got really serious
(14:27):
in middle school because that's when puberty started to really happen.
I didn't really like recognize at the time, this is
what's wrong, Like, oh, I don't want to, you know,
become a woman. I just was like really depressed, clinically depressed.
And it brought out a lot of bad being, like
a lot of behaviors that were not ideal, like self
(14:49):
harming behaviors, and then I got you know, antidepressants. And
then in high school, like the first year was really
hard for me. And I mean I always hung out
in the theater in high school because that's where I
felt comfortable, like, and I only hung out with theater
kids really And then I did sports, which I did lacrosse,
(15:11):
and I did track and field and water follow I
did a lot of random sports, but yeah, sports, Like
I mean, I had a lot of body issues, like
I hadn't eating disorder, and so sports being active was
what made me feel better about myself. So because it
was the er fins and it makes I mean biologically
(15:32):
it makes sense. So so it seems like this it's
a philosophical quandary, right, like you feel these changes, I'm
becoming something I don't want to be. Yeah, something not
only do I don't want to be, but I cannot stop.
This was that largely what was happening. It was like
being out of control and the fact that not just
(15:54):
out of control, but like that it's you're going to
change into something that isn't you Like, oh, I'm out
of control and this isn't something I ever wanted. But
now now you're in high school, now so middle school,
this is the Internet age. So you asked your father
(16:15):
early on about sex change. Had you started thinking about
it in a more directed way, or was it just
as general, kind of in more a sense of, man,
I'm depressed, and maybe you're thinking that this is just
kind of puberty, young person moods thing. Yeah, no one thought,
you know, no one thought back, oh, remember that time
when Dylan was dressing as a boy, and maybe like
(16:37):
that's a thing and maybe he should talk about it.
Not even myself. I couldn't even do that for myself.
And so it's just like, oh, Dylan's depressed, and the drugs,
like the antidepressants work, but there's still something wrong or
there's still something missing to this equation. And I mean
for a parent, I mean, especially from the generation that
I came from, thinking your child could be transgender was
(17:03):
just not even a possibility. So he was. She was
a tomboy, you know, and the issue she was having
emotionally was just puberty. I mean, that was our logic.
Did you going along with the tomboy piece, did you
(17:23):
think there's a possibility that my daughter is a lesbian? Yes,
of course, because she liked she liked women, too. Yeah.
So yeah, I always knew I liked women too, Like
when I was five and I was you know, I
knew I was a boy. I was also like, I
like women, and so that's what I was for, you know,
in middle school I came out as bisexual, and then
(17:45):
in high school, I don't know, I used you know,
there are so many terms now, I was like pan sexual,
like fluid. Yeah, so like I knew I liked women,
and so I was very much in the LGBT community
in high school and high school, and I would have
So did this provide you some cover at this point now,
(18:07):
because you finally, Okay, I can be in a place
where I'm not being mocked, right, Yeah, definitely, No, it was.
That was really helpful. I had a lot of friends
who were gay. There are a lot of gay people
in the theater, you know, so that was kind of
my community. And I was in the g s A,
so that was helpful as well, which stands for the
Gay Straight Alliance, so the Gay Stright Alliance. That doesn't
(18:30):
necessarily include trans you know, but we did have a
transgender person in the Gay Stright Alliance and I knew
him pretty well because he went to middle school where
I went to middle school, and I went to an
all girls school, so he kind of went through that
before me, and not even like I saw him and
I knew I identified with him in some way. And
(18:51):
I remember at one point I cut my hair and
died it like he did. But I still did not realize.
You yourself did not realize like why I was doing that.
It sort of makes sense to me, right, if I
think about my early sexual strivings. I remember being four
years old, five years old and throwing my pencil onto
the teacher's desk. It's like, look the teacher's desk, pick
(19:14):
up the pencil, right, But I didn't think about that
until I got to be an older adult person. I
was like, oh, this is what's manifest now, is a
certain aspect of heterosexuality. I mean, you know, I mean,
I don't know what I expected, but that's that's kind
of kind I was doing. So again, it makes sense
that you would have gone back to say, how come
(19:35):
I didn't see it then? How come I didn't see
it then? But now you're in high school in the
g s A with somebody who's trans. He said, I
always liked the guy, but do you ever start to
think still not still not okay, very much in denial
about it. So was it the laughter factor? Was it
the you had found your way and you figured this
is my way I can Yeah, I think that's it was.
(19:56):
I was comfortable, like it was easy, you know, I
had found a commu unity that would accept me that way.
And I was very like gender fluid, and I would
have periods of time where I would be more butch,
and then I would have periods of times where would
be more feminine and it would just kind of switch
off like that a lot um. But I think I
(20:17):
was my biggest fear was of not being accepted. And
I think that fear was so strong that I was
able to put like my true identity on the back
burner for so long because I was accepted, right because
of course college comes with building communities, right exactly. I
was surrounded you know, I'm surrounded by people all the time. Busy.
(20:38):
That's another thing, just being busy, like especially in high
school with the S A T s and getting into
college focusing on what do I want to major? And
I didn't really think about myself that much. It's a
great line that more ascorsation line about morbid self attention
if you think about other things, right, But then you
get out of college. So then I get out of
(21:00):
Are you still during this college period? Are you still
are you still on antidepressants? Yeah? Okay, So through high
school to college, Okay, all right, I get out of college,
and I'm alone more than I've ever been in the word.
Which school did you go to? I went to Pittser College.
Oh my daughter's there. Cool. Yeah, Wow, that's a small world.
(21:23):
Yeah alright, so okay, so yeah, I'm alone, like I've
never been to college. You've got your degree in UM.
I created it in Eastern and Western Perspectives on Mental health,
so essentially psychology. Yeah, and I just had so much
more time to focus on myself. And not only that,
(21:45):
but I went out into the world and I was
like looking for a career and in college, like at Pitzer,
in that bubble, it's I mean, Pitzer has people like
you know, they're trans people are people going by Z
like there's they then and it's just a bubble and
(22:10):
it's comfortable. And and then I get out into the
world and it's not like that. And I mean where
I was, I was like working in Beverly Hills at
a restaurant where they required you to dress like very
um gender specific, just like no um it was. It
(22:34):
was just like a fancy restaurant and they were like,
you know, women have to wear dresses all the time,
and you have to wear makeup. And one time that
they made me put on more lipstick at work because
I wasn't wearing enough, which is weird. And I just
started to get really really depressed, just like suicidal. At
(22:54):
this point, I was just yeah, and I was just
so unhappy, and I was like, why, you know, why
am I so unhappy? Like and that's when I started
to kind of like break down in a way. And
the breakdown is what led me into the realization that
I needed to start my transition. And people, you know,
(23:19):
like by my last year of school, people like my friends,
he knew me I had short hair at that time,
and my friends would be like Eric, Like they'd call
me Eric as like a not a joke, like but
like you know, like that's your other personalities name or something.
(23:39):
Based on how often I hear from my kids who
are in college, did we you privy to any of
this or I mean, after he got out of college
and went into that first job. I knew that he
was having some sort of breakdown. You could still talking
on the phone or oh yeah, because we lived in
l A temporarily for a couple of years, and during
(23:59):
that time, around the time he graduated from college, and
so he saw that whatever it was, it was pretty
serious and we were very concerned. So you knew that
you were going to do something, that you had to
do something before anybody else knew. How did the how
did how did it frame itself in your head? Right?
(24:21):
So you're depressed, like suicidal depressed. You know something's going on.
You've taken the classes, right, you knew you your major,
so you know something's going on. At what point did
you go like, I gotta I gotta fix this. I
can't keep living like this. Well, I was living in
a co op with a roommate, and I had quit
my job because I just had the restaurant. Yeah, and yeah,
(24:47):
I was just like I was a mess. Like I
would call my family members crying like every day, being
like I hate this, it sucks um And then and
then I quit my job, and then I moved back
in with my parents, and then I was really isolated
I started to have a lot of anxiety, and I
started to have panic attacks all the time, and we
(25:10):
probably went to the emergency room like seven times in
one week because I thought that like one I thought
I was having a heart attack, and then at one
point I thought I had cancer that nobody could find,
which apparently is like something that actually happens to some
trans people where they think like they have a sickness
inside of them. It's like a denial, like it's like
(25:32):
the real sickness is that it's your body that's not
right for you. But I was like, I have cancer,
nobody can find it. Um And then, you know, every
day just started to become brutal, Like I started to
lose so much weight that it was like, well, if
I don't start eating more, I'm going to dive like
(25:53):
of malnutrition. Yeah. Yeah, so the idea makes itself known
(26:19):
to you through this haze of depression or you start
to pull out secondary effect. Okay, So I had a
really good friend, like a really close friend who had
transitioned while I knew him from Jessica to Mason, and
you know, we were good friends and I liked him
and I admired him for being true to himself, and
(26:44):
I kept him as a friend, and at some point
I realized, like, I mean, he inspired me to to
transition because I saw him go through it. It was
really hard and it scared me. But I also knew
that I had somebody, like I had some kind of
comm entity. I guess like part of the realization was like, oh,
I hate my clothes. I don't want to wear these clothes.
(27:07):
I hate my body, like I have a really bad
eating disorder. And I almost felt like I just felt
like I couldn't function with the amount of time that
would take me to like get dressed in the morning
because I couldn't pick the right clothes, or like the
amount I needed to work out every day to feel
mentally healthy. I was like, this is not normal, Like
this is not what most people have to deal with.
(27:30):
I think I started talking to certain friends and they
started Like one of my friends, I was talking to
her and I was like, I'm just really depressed. I
don't even even think I told her that I was
thinking about that I needed to transition or something. And
she sent me a video with like lover and clocks,
and I was like, you should watch this because she
knew before I did, like before I admitted it to
(27:51):
myself and I watched it. I was really inspiring. And
I think as I started to watch these other people
like be who they were, that is when I started
to realize I can do that. And then I just
started to remember the past, like, oh yeah, it's always
been this way. Oh yeah, I remember that time I
(28:11):
asked my dad when about a sex change, and those
things started to come back. And then I remember and
I was in therapy and so and then I remember
the bomb thing and they being bullied, and then I
realized it all started to connect like puzzle pieces. So
it sounds like it was much harder to get to
that point for a variety of different reasons than it was.
(28:35):
I mean, because as an outsider, you would say, well,
the harder part would be too, I gotta sit down,
tell ma, I gotta doubt that I got to I
gotta tell everybody. It sounds like the harder part was
getting to telling yourself right it was, yeah, absolutely, And
then I mean, there were there's a lot of fears.
There's like fear of being accepted, fear of you know,
(28:56):
scarring scars from having surgery, like fear of not loving
your own self. Um, fear of just just lots of fears,
I mean, homelessness, like everything that you could think of
that's associated with like being a part of a minority.
I guess yeah, yeah, right, So okay, so you come
(29:24):
to this realization and then I think it was based
on the piece the therapist who called you and it
introduced you to the topic. Is that all right? Did
you did the therapist ask you if if if they
think it was a woman? Yeah, Katie, Yeah. Did she
ask you if she could talk to them? She did.
I remember I went into treatment and I didn't bring
(29:49):
it up right away. It was kind of something I
was like, Oh, I'm gonna try to get better and
then um, you know, maybe I'll bring up the transition stuff.
Then at one point I just I felt so comfortable
with this woman that I went in one day. I
was just like, I'm transgender, and she was like, great,
(30:12):
let's tell your medical team. And the fact that she
reacted that way was I mean, it was life changing
because if she had said, really, are you sure, I
would have been like, I don't know if I'm sure? Yeah,
and I would have I mean, I was already in
so much denial and questioning of it myself that like
I came out to her that day, we and then
(30:33):
we told the team and then she was like, do
you want me to call your mom and tell her
about this? And I said, that would be amazing if
you could do that. And and then from that day off,
like for the rest of treatment, I had to carry
like a piece of paper that said I am a
man and I am transgender, because I would go into
this like thought like circle where I'd be like, wait,
(30:56):
maybe I'm not and then it would go like, oh, hey,
I'm not. I'm not, and like I would deny it,
and I had to remind myself of who I really was,
like on a piece of paper, and I carried it
around with me in my It was like a note card,
I think, handwritten or typed handwritten, your handwriting or yeah,
my handwriting. I've never heard this before. So now the
(31:21):
medical team calls you, yeah, Katie, yeah Katie and says,
you know, Dylan Strands is trans and your response, well,
the first thing was before Dylan went into UM, into
this place that you know, the for therapy and stuff
(31:42):
and for UM just finding out what was going on
because there were so many things. I mean, he was
dying of all these diseases, he was losing weight, he
couldn't sleep, We were worried that he was suicidal. It
was such a relief to put to put him in
in a place that he was going to get the
services that he needed and really sort out what was
going on. So maybe a day or two before we
(32:06):
had actually checked him in, he and I were driving
in the car, probably from a doctor's appointment. He said,
you know, I think I might be transgender. And I
lost it because to me, it's like I've got this child.
You know, of course he was an adult, but to me,
he's still a child. He's um, you know, I'm afraid
(32:27):
that it is he going to live till tomorrow. And
so I got upset and I said, I want you
to just get to the point where you can figure
out what you really want and uh and be stable
and gained some weight back, and then we can talk
about if you're a transgender. So I think for him
that was kind of like, oh, she's not going to
(32:48):
accept it, But for me it was like so beyond
all the other things I was worried about with him.
So when Katie called me and she told me. Even
though he had introduced stick to me, it was like
I had never heard it before. And you know that
feeling or somebody tells you something horrible in your heart
just seems to like all the way into your stomach,
(33:10):
or your stomach seems to fall out. I don't know
that feeling like. And the first thing, as I said
in my article, is is I felt fear for what
does this mean for him? You know, is you know,
are people going to accept him? Is he going to
be you know, um, is it going to be hard
for him to get a job, or you know, are
(33:31):
people going to be prejudiced? Stuff like that? And what's
it going to be like to go through surgery? So
that was my first stop. And my second thought was
because I thought, oh I have to tell everybody, I
have to tell family, was what are people going to
think about me? You know, are they going to think
I was a bad mother? Do they think I, you know,
I caused it somehow, or you know that I'm I'm
(33:51):
too liberal? And I you know, I accepted this and
I should have never accepted it. And then of course
about I don't know. That lasted maybe three minutes, and
then I said to myself, Karen, that is absolutely you know,
and that was it. But I was still really upset,
and um, so I went I, you know, I drove.
(34:12):
I was on the freeway on the phone with the therapist.
So I drove home, walked in to the house. My
husband was in the house. I walked into to tell him,
and I didn't tell him I was upset. I just
told him what had happened, you know, that I had
gotten the skull. And he looked at me and goes,
that makes perfect sense. And I was like, what what,
You're not worried, You're not upset. And it just made
(34:34):
me balanced and grounded and and that was the beginning. Uh.
And so when you get home, so you're there, it's
still on therapy. When you get home, were you driving
back were you just like, oh, it'll be fun to
see everybody. How were you anticipating that there's going to
(34:55):
be a little friction or just I was definitely worried,
h But I wasn't worried about my mom or my
dad and my siblings. I was worried about my cousin's
and extended family, the ones the ones that she ended
up contacting, Yeah, right, because they are a big part
of our lives, and the fear was losing them and
(35:18):
I didn't want that, but I was also afraid of
that they wouldn't take it seriously because nobody had taken
it seriously before this moment. So so now to deal
(35:59):
with the issue of of explaining to the family. But
it seems like now the other stuff that was making
life difficult for you would have started to recede. Right,
It's like I got, I got a plan, right, I
got I got this plan. Um. And so how soon
after this meeting with Katie did you start the transition?
(36:20):
Probably like right, I mean, well, I guess you left
her office with a piece of paper, right, Yeah, So
that was the beginning. And then and then I had
some good friends there and they were really supportive, and
they were like, you need to have everybody call you
by mail pronouns now and we're going to support you
(36:40):
and when people don't like, will correct them if you don't.
So I started doing that. I started I need to
think of a new name. Did you did you pick
Dylan or do you let your parents pick Dling. I
picked Dylan with some friends and it was because of
Bob Dylan and I just felt like really identify with
(37:00):
Bob Dylan. That's a guy from h to one. Okay,
thank god, alright, um, he's you know, Bob Dylan is
a Jewish you know, musician, and he changed the world
with his lyrics and I really admired him. So that's
(37:22):
why I chose the name of Dylan. So so it
began immediately and how long how long starting with a note?
How long did it take from So it took about
like like three or four months before I went onto hormones.
I was in Arizona when I was in treatment. So
I came back to l A and then I started
(37:45):
getting information on where I could go to get hormones.
And then I went to the LGBT Center and I
had my first consultation, and things really did start to
get better. I mean I still have like this is
pre hormones. Now you're you get back to l A
(38:07):
and you're starting to take the hormones. Yeah, I get
back to l A, I'm starting to take the hormones.
Um which which ones? Which which one? Though you don't
know this, but this is this brings our whole series
full circle because the very first one we did was
about steroids. Um, specifically me and steroids. Okay, yeah, because
(38:28):
I had a past history which they interviewed me on
the first of this series. So interesting, um so. But
so I went scipienate and that they susted on. I'm
pretty sure it's sipienate. OK. That sounds familiar to me.
And I remember looking up that there were different kinds
and I was like, why is what is that? Yeah?
(38:49):
So taking that, um, I remember the first time I
took it, it made me really hungry. That was good
because I was having issues eating and energy. I mean,
I just felt energized. I remember working out after that
was like the best work out of my life. Yeah.
(39:11):
I haven't taken them in a long time, but I
really missed them. These are all it all really true.
So yeah, you worked out like crazy. You're eating Yeah, um,
I was using the men's bathroom, which was scary, but
no one looks at you in the men's bathroom, so
it didn't matter. We'll see what you've got. Like it's
(39:40):
there's like this great spy quality because your vantage point
on how the different genders do what they do is unique.
You know, It's not like I don't I have no idea. Yeah,
I've got three daughters, four sisters. Still don't have any
idea really what what's happening? So what did you? What did?
What did you what? Like? What was some of the
(40:01):
more salient kind of like if you had to write
this as a book and you were like, yeah, okay,
I made this transition and this is stuff I thought
was kind of bullshitt you before. But no, like, let
me tell you, I mean you have more energy you're
working out with. There any other markers that from your
life as a woman, you would go, I had no idea. Yeah,
(40:22):
I guess so I always thought like, oh, you know,
women and men are that different, Like I don't get why,
you know we have these differences so much. And then
then I started taking hormones, and I remember my music
taste changed a little bit from what to want more aggressive, more.
I remember my sister commenting like, did you realize your
(40:44):
music taste has changed? It's more, you know, probably more aggressive,
more beats, Like I'm more into beats. Um, yeah, I
mean less emotional in a way like a lot of
I know a lot of transguise who say like I
couldn't cry after I started taking testosterone. That hasn't happened
to me. But like, I mean, you're not getting a period,
(41:05):
like every month, You're not having like a It's like,
I think the difference is like as a woman, you know,
it would be like I'd expect to be really really
emotional for a week every month, whereas as a man,
it was more like any day I could be like
more angry. Usually it was anger or like you know, impatient.
(41:28):
It could be any day, like it could be just
for a day, Like it could just be for like
a few hours. So that was one big difference. So
I quickly, as I was transitioning, I quickly started to
realize what I really wanted to do. It was like
almost I created this space in my brain that I
(41:48):
had been occupying so much like being in denial about
this had been occupying so much of my brain in
this weird way for so long that it was like
clarity had just come to me, like mentally physically, and
so um, I decided that I wanted to go to
school for audio engineering and do like music related stuff.
(42:10):
And so I went back to school for music production,
and uh, most of my teachers were men. Um it's
a very like male dominated industry still, and I just remember,
like there was one woman in our program, and she
was treated so much differently than everybody else, and I
(42:31):
just saw it so much clearer. Like I remember, I
didn't know anything. I was like just at the same
level as this girl, like of not knowing anything. She
didn't really know. She was kind of a beginner like
I was in terms of production, but all the other
guys had had experience, and I was treated like I
knew everything because I was a man, and she was
treated like we need to teach her every like we
(42:53):
need to explain it to her, like every step of
the way, Whereas they talked to me, like my teachers
would talk to me like you know, and I'd just
be like, m I know, not dating, because I was
going to say, I'm sure they always ask about dating,
but since you've never done an interview, they haven't asked
you about dating. Yeah. Dating. It's challenging, especially because like
(43:18):
I am more passing, which is like what that means
is that like if someone passed me by on the street,
they would not necessarily be able to tell that I
was transgender man, whereas other people are less passing, And
so it's hard because it's like I'll find somebody ILike,
like a woman that I like, and I'll worry if
(43:40):
she knows that I'm trance or not. And then it's
like I almost have to expose that about myself, like
come out to them. And it kind of sucks because
it's like, you know, normally people don't have to like
expose something that they're worried that, like they'll be rejected
based just on the fact that they were like, oh,
(44:00):
by the way, I'm trans and then they're like not
interested anymore. But the good thing is, like I'm very
out on Instagram, Like I talk about my transition on Instagram,
and a lot of the time when I meet girls,
it's like, oh, do you have an Instagram? And then
they see on there like it that you know, this
is a transman, and then they can decide if they
(44:20):
want to continue with that or not. And like that's
the same with dating apps now, I think too. It's
like you can put like trans man and then but
then there's a worry that like you're going to be
fetishized or something. You know, like people are only going
to be interested in you because you're trans, like they're
into that, and that's a scary thing. But That's why
(44:40):
I don't really use dating websites. I would rather like
meet somebody in person and see if I like them
there for long term things because as African American male
people finishes African American man, So for long term things,
it's a drag. You don't want to date somebody who's
a member of a fan club, right, Yeah, but you
know for sure to engagement. Yeah, yeah, but that's good.
(45:03):
I like that the gate keeping. It just solves the problem. Yeah.
But I think I think my like market for women
like would be bisexual women, mostly because they're just more
open and accepting and they're more knowledgeable about the trans community,
(45:24):
and they're into both genders, so it's like not I mean,
if you haven't necessarily like had the surgeries and stuff,
it's not going to be as much of an issue. Yeah,
knowing what you know now looking back, is there anything
that you would have done differently from how it was
it actually happened? Well, I'm I have met some families
(45:45):
who have children that are five years old that are
acting the opposite gender of their birth and the families
know so much more than I did years ago that um,
they are they are letting their child live as the
gender they prefer, and their families are accepting it because
(46:08):
it's more accepted. So if I could turn back the
clock but know about the future, yes, I do everything differently,
But given where I came from and the culture I
grew up in and the environment in the early nineties,
it wasn't the same as today. So I'd like to
(46:30):
say yes, but I think it would probably have played
out almost exactly the same. Los Angeles. Yeah, so yeah.
I mean I also have times where I think, man,
if only like when I was five and I came out,
somebody was like, great, let's have you talked about in
(46:51):
therapy or like let's you know, explore this and like
focus on it. And then I could have like stopped,
I could have like been or whatever, you know, like
I could have looked more masculine because I would have
grown up as a man and not gone through female puberty.
But then I have times where I'm like, actually, it's
really cool because I got to live as a woman
(47:12):
and a man, and I got to be raised as
a woman, and now I can talk to women, you know,
like now I really understand women really well, and so
like that's cool, and so I kind of flipped like
I kind of flipped back and forth of like, you know,
I wish that, like a long time ago, things were different,
and then I'm like waiting, No, actually, this is really
(47:32):
cool and everything happened for a reason, and that's how
I got to this place. I have to go back
and say one thing, one thing I wish I had
done differently is knowing that those boys. I knew that
those boys had threatened to bomb Dylan and the whole family,
and I thought by getting him out of that situation
(47:54):
was enough. But in retrospect, that's when I should have
found a therapist, and I didn't. I didn't. It took
two years before I realized how really impactful that episode
was in Dylan's life. You see, this is where I
know I'm a New Yorker because I thought you were
going to go completely different. That's when I realized I
(48:16):
should have gone to that school with a baseball bat
something like believe me, okay, even in California. Well, thank
you guys for taking the time, thank you for having us.
(48:49):
So that's Karen Dylan. They just rolled on out of here,
making this our fifth fifth in a series of Ozzy
Confidential from my head, in my heart, my mouth, to
your ears. Know this. Thanks for listening. I appreciate it.
I am Eugene S. Robinson. Your host is Ozzy dot
(49:11):
com Azzi Confidential for the surprising, the shaking, the stunning,
the shocking. Thanks for listening. We'll see you soon. Come back.
Next up on OSI Confidential. We travel hundreds of thousands.
(49:36):
Ten we can't say we travel a certain number of
undisclosed miles to an undisclosed location where we call the
phone and got another number and went to another place,
much like a scavenger or a snipe hunt to meet
a Mr. Jim Wesley rawls as Jim Wesley, Comma Rawls
(49:57):
or Jim Rawls Colma Wesley. I'll explain it all later.
He's ahead of the American Redoubt movement, survival blog guy,
and a firm believer in the fact that we're all
going to Hell in a hair basket. Next up on
Oz's confidential s
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