February 28, 2025 • 56 mins
In this episode of 'Demystifying the Transgender Journey,' host Lynn Murphy interviews Wendy Cole, who shares her courageous and emotional journey of living 67 years in a man's body despite knowing from a very early age that she was a girl. Wendy talks about the challenges she faced, including family rejection, psychiatrists’ lack of understanding in the 1950s, and the societal stigma. She expresses the intense repression, anxiety, and depression she endured until her eventual transition at 67. Wendy explains the difference between transgender, transsexual, and crossdressers and emphasizes the mental toll of living a repressed identity. She also outlines her coaching program aimed at helping others facing similar struggles. Tune in to hear Wendy's inspiring story and learn more about the transgender experience.
For more information go to https://womenwhopushthelimits.com/demystifyingtransgender/
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Episode Transcript
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(00:00):
I happen to be one of those whoknew from a very early age, I was
going to grow up to be a woman.
By age 10 or so, Icouldn't take it anymore.
I told my mother.
I actually dressed up in some ofher clothes that would fit me.
I had watched her very attentivelydoing her makeup, so I did mine.
Even did my nails, and she told me,you have to get out of all of that.
(00:24):
I said, no, I'm a girl.
What do you really know aboutpeople who were born transgender?
Have you ever met someonewho's transgender?
Well, if you're like me, you'recurious, but hesitant to ask questions.
Well, welcome to Demystifyingthe Transgender Journey.
In our conversations with people who wereborn transgender, their families, friends,
and the professionals who support them,we ask probing questions and discover
(00:46):
insightful and educational answers.
You can also find more information onour website the transgender journey.
com.
Now let's get right into today's episode.
Welcome to today's episode ofdemystifying the transgender journey.
I'm Lynn Murphy, your host and founder ofwomen who push the limits and president
(01:08):
of key innovative business solutions.
I'm also the author of the book.
Women Who Push The Limits presents50 Life Lessons From Inspiring Women.
You can find that on Amazon.
I had the privilege forthat book of interviewing 50
inspiring and amazing women.
And today it's my pleasure to beinterviewing the amazing Wendy Cole.
She spent 67 years living in a man'sbody, even though by the age of three.
(01:33):
She knew she was a girl.
She's going to share with you what itwas like to finally transition when
she was 67 years old after livingall those decades and an identity
in a body that really wasn't hers.
Today, Wendy's going to tell youthe first part of her story and
we're going to get right into that.
Wendy, thank you so much for beinghere today and thank you for all you
(01:54):
do to bring your message and to bringinformation to the world about what
does it mean to be born transgender.
You definitely embody the mottoof Women Who Push The Limits,
which is find your voice, speakyour truth, and change the world.
Wendy, thank you fordoing that, and welcome.
Oh, Lynn, thank you so much.
What a beautiful introduction.
(02:15):
I'm so happy to be here.
I really am glad to have metyou and connected with you.
It's been amazing.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
So I'm just going to turnit over to you, Wendy.
You tell us your amazingand inspiring story.
As Lynn mentioned, I spentthe first 67 years of my life
living behind my male facsimile.
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I knew by age three, no later than earlyage four, that I was really a girl.
I didn't have the wordsfor it at the moment.
I didn't really think about it that much.
I just knew how I felt.
I knew that when I was in the companyof other little girls and playing
with them, I had a great time.
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It felt comfortable.
It felt natural.
As I proceeded on to school, Ireally learned the differences.
between girls and boys.
Most people look at it, you know,strictly as a sexual difference, but
what's underneath all of that is gender.
And it's something that mostpeople never really think about.
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And most people never reallyquestion their gender.
They just, it just is.
I'm either a man or I'm a woman.
Well, I happen to be one of those whoknew from a very early age, I was a girl.
I was going to grow up to be a woman.
That, that was not goingto happen with my body.
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It made the mistake of goingthe opposite direction.
And by age 10 or so, Icouldn't take it anymore.
I told my mother, I actually dressed upin some of her clothes that would fit me.
I had watched her.
I'm very attentively doingher makeup, all of that.
So I did mine.
I even did my nails and everything.
(04:00):
And I just sat there on the couch inthe living room and our little house,
uh, waiting for her to come home fromgrocery shopping and told her I'm a girl.
And she told me.
You have to get out of all of that.
I said, no, I'm a girl.
And she said, well, you have to get outof it before your father comes home.
This is the 1950s.
(04:20):
Yeah.
Not something that was accepted oreven understood at that time, was it?
Exactly.
I do distinctly remember before Iwent through this process of informing
my parents, there was a whole lotof discussion in newspaper articles
and all about Christine Jorgensen.
The A World War II vet who,uh, came back after the war.
(04:45):
She had had surgery inDenmark and she was a woman.
And what year was that?
It was in the early 1950s.
Early 50s, okay.
It really hit the papers and all of thatand it was still quite talked about.
So my parents really reflected onthat when I, uh, came out to them.
I was taken to a psychiatriccenter just south of Beacon,
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New York on the Hudson River.
It was the Craig house and I'm sittingthere with a psychiatrist and my parents.
And again, this is 1950s.
My mother was a typical fifties housewife.
I had counted on her for help,but there was only so much she was
emotionally able to do at that time.
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And with the relationship with myfather and everything, and my father
was very conservative, very strict.
Absolutely.
No sign of his was going to be a girl.
He had no concept of howto handle that, did he?
Oh, absolutely not.
That's one of the, one of thethings that I do is talk to
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parents of transgender people.
That's got to be so helpful.
I try my best to help them understand.
as best they can.
One of the things that I emphasizeis my life is a complete example of
what not to do with your children.
I was threatened at around age 10 afterour last visit to the psychiatrist.
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He used words like, well, this ismaybe just a little transvestism,
little boy's experiment.
And then he said, uh, he's tooyoung to diagnose as transsexual.
Did he even know whathe was talking about?
Uh, that was the term that theyused in those days for people who,
uh, like me, were born transgender.
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We've always been around.
Yeah, it's nothing new.
It's more talked about.
Is it more open now, or are theremore people who are transgender?
Well, who are visible coming out asit were, but there's still a huge
stigma and a lot of lack of knowledge.
And that's one of the thingsthat I'm hoping to do with all
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of my efforts of being this.
Visible and being out in publiclike this and speaking with people
and all this is something that isa part of the human experience.
It affects a small number of us,but it does have a very powerful
effect to think about you having tosuppress that for 67 years to have to.
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be someone you weren't, and to hideall that mm-hmm . And then to have
the, the authorities in your lifetell you it's just gonna go away.
You're too young tounderstand any of this.
Right.
But you did understand it.
I really didn't have a comprehensionof it from a medical perspective
or a sociological perspective.
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I just know how I felt.
Mm-hmm . The last trip to thepsychiatrist, my mother turned
to me and said, Okay, you have tostop insisting that you're a girl.
You have to change how you'rethinking, change what you do.
We don't ever want to hear this again.
And if it continues, we're goingto have you committed and fixed.
(08:00):
Those were the exact words.
And in the 1950s, granted it was thelater 1950s, That was a scary thing to
hear because now in hindsight I knowthat there was electroshock therapy,
there was all kinds of other thingsthat they did with people, who knows
what they would have done with me.
That's what fixed was, huh?
(08:20):
That's what fixed was.
Electroshock therapy.
Wow.
Even later in my life, I'll tell youmore about that when we get there.
Around age 10 is when Ibegan a life of repression.
You have no idea how psychologicallyhorrible that is to be repressing how
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you really feel about who you really are.
And what were some of the things,the impact that that had on you?
As I got into high school,I was terrified to date.
I was figuring people wouldhave to figure me out.
I have this big secret that I'm hiding.
As a result, I, uh, just repressed it.
It brought on all kindsof fears and anxiety.
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I was literally, uh, scaredthat somehow or another my
secret was going to come out.
That would lead to all kindsof problems with my parents.
It was 1960s in high school,like other, other guys.
I, I really liked the cheerleaders.
Different reasons.
Yeah.
Different reasons.
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I wanted to be one of them.
You didn't want to be out on thatfootball field or the basketball
court or, you know, hard driving.
That kind of thing?
No, that was one of the things that, uh,upset my father when I was younger was he
wanted me to play little league baseball.
The uniforms were hot and scratchy.
I don't know what they were made ofin those days, but they were very
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itchy and it was hot and The fieldwas not necessarily the nicest.
There was lots of dirt anddust and everything else.
And I was terrified ofgetting hit by the ball.
So I just didn't want to go.
There was always an argument and Iwas threatened with being punished
if I didn't go, so I would go andI was horrible at hitting the ball.
(10:06):
I just didn't want to be there.
You had those feminine feelings, notthe testosterone, the male feelings.
Exactly.
I would at times just be with the guys.
I would play football,touch football after school.
My reward for having done that was Igot punished for breaking my glasses.
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You couldn't win.
I couldn't win.
So, I just didn't feellike I fit in anywhere.
And that feeling did nothing but persist.
Did you have any friends yourage when you were in high
school or college or anything?
I did have a few guy friends.
Girls were off limits even thoughI felt would probably be more
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comfortable with them, but they wereoff limits because I had the secret
to hide and that was the end of that.
So social life was very limited.
I had a few close friendsthat I would do things with.
One of the things that I always triedto do was do things that might please
my, my father and parents, especially.
So, I was particularly goodat doing carpentry work.
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I learned that from my father, soI would do things around the house
I would do do various projects inthe yard, things like that, didn't
enjoy it didn't particularly like it.
But I just did what I hadto do to survive and get by.
I can say in all honesty from around10 or 11, anxiety, depression, fear,
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were very common feelings on a dailybasis for anyone that thinks that
this is a choice that I chose this,or I thought about it and just.
That I just decided thatI was a girl that's wrong.
This is not a choice and it nevergoes away from the moment you
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wake up in the morning to the timeyou go to sleep at night and then
it's probably even in your dreams.
I had been told by the psychiatristor actually he told my parents
never really talked to me.
It was the 1950s.
Of course, kids shouldbe seen and not heard.
Yeah, and kids should follow this whole.
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Routine this box thatthe boys should be in.
Right?
Exactly.
Yeah, it was the girl'sbox and the boy's box.
Neither are ideal because whatI've what I've since learned as a
result of my transition and havingtalked with a large number of women.
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Now, more as a equal or beingaccepted as one of the women
being socialized as female.
It has its own inherent problems.
I resisted a lot of my male socialization,did it grudgingly, but I did it because
it was the check boxes that I had tocheck off to prove that I was on the
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straight and narrow going forward.
None of this, you're, noneof this stuff, I'm a girl.
I Got drawn into all the malesocialization by parents, by school,
and even in my early 20s as I startedto branch out and begin to find a
career and my work and everything else,I was just going through the motions
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and checking the boxes just to fit in.
And carrying that, that weightof that secret and of the society
that expected you to be somebodydifferent and you weren't.
Exactly.
Wow.
So difficult, Wendy.
It's a horrible way to live and that'sone of the things that I impress on
parents is, I know you don't understand.
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My own parents didn't understandand didn't have the means to even
comprehend how this could be possible.
And I know that parents today don'treally have an understanding of it.
One of the first things they jumpinto is, what did I do to cause this?
Oh, so you had those kind of feelings.
No, that's what parents,parents think that.
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Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
What did I do to cause this?
It's nothing you did.
Nothing any parent did.
This is how, this is how I was born.
This is how your child was born.
Things get wired in the brain.
During the second trimester of birth.
In my case, my brain went female.
My body went male.
(14:28):
Later on in my life.
In 2017 when I had surgery at NYUMedical Center with Dr. Blue Bond, I
was joking around with all the peoplethat I knew at uh, uh, one of the bars
I went to frequently for happy hour.
And I used to go there not to drink somuch as to have conversations with people.
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And it was largely a gay bar.
The guys would ask me.
How can you do that?
You're going for that surgery.
Yeah, I'm getting mybirth defect corrected.
That's all.
And they were pretty proud of theirmale parts, so they didn't want to
think about getting rid of them, right?
The number of guys that would grab theircrotch and say, how can you do that?
(15:17):
But you never felt that waspart of you, it sounds like.
Exactly.
As a young kid, before I even came out tomy parents, I would go to bed at night.
We, I was raised in the Methodistchurch, went to church every Sunday,
went to Sunday school, went to MethodistYouth Fellowship, all of that stuff.
At night when I'd go to bed, partof my prayer was Gee, I'd love to
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wake up tomorrow morning as a girland my closet filled with pretty
clothes and everything would be fine.
But that never happened.
Of course.
Not until you were 67.
Exactly.
I went through high school.
I really didn't want togo to college at the time.
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I didn't know what Iwanted to do with my life.
I was In severe anxiety anddepression over all of this.
And of course I couldn'ttalk to my parents about it.
There was no one to talk to.
I couldn't talk to a friend or anyone.
It was your friends had no idea.
None.
Okay.
None.
And even at age 67, when I startedtelling people that knew me.
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They were mind blown, not a clue, but theother way that it affected me throughout
my life, I was told by the psychiatrist ata young age, once he has a career, he has
a wife, he has a house, he has a family,he'll forget all about being a girl.
I don't think that happened, kidding.
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No, not even close.
But in 1970, I was graduatingfrom college, I had forced myself
to go to an all men's college.
Thanks.
That was my last majoreffort to try to fit in.
It's kind of like the whole immersion.
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Your version of immersion therapy, huh?
Yeah, it didn't work.
No, I don't think thatstuff does work, does it?
No, it doesn't.
I got to a point where I justcouldn't stand it anymore.
Talk about life changes.
Well, here I am.
I'm graduating.
I'm going to be out on my own.
Now what?
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I had decided that there was no wayin hell I was going to go on through
the rest of my life like this.
I found a psychiatrist who agreedto work with me and help me.
I actually, I, I was living inan apartment in an old section of
the city connected in New York.
I had friends in town and Ihad a few friends on campus.
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That was pretty much it.
So the psychiatrist wanted me tostart coming out to people around
town because it definitely wouldn'tbe good walking onto campus as
a girl at that point in time.
Not in the 70s.
So this was before you foundyour last psychiatrist, right?
This was Oh yeah.
This was in the 70s.
(18:13):
Okay.
This was in the 70s.
He had me coming out to neighbors,so I went through my apartment
building, introducing myselfas Wendy to my neighbors.
I introduced myself tosome of my local friends.
Jeff came in from Ireland every summerto work at the local hospital, and I was
friends with Suzanne, his girlfriend.
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And when I came out to them, Jeffcouldn't get over how great I looked.
Suzanne offered to help me and wasvery supportive and all of this.
And I'm going, Yay, this is great.
None of my neighbors cared.
So you didn't get anadverse reaction from them?
No adverse reactions whatsoever.
(18:55):
Wow.
Guess when I got that?
And it was devastating.
When my psychiatrist took me toa quarterly meeting of a group
of psychiatrists, they met everyquarter in the hospital and
Schenectady in a conference room.
And I'm sitting there talkingwith this group, there's probably
15 to 20 of them in the, in theroom, all MDs, all psychiatrists.
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And were you dressed as a womanor were you dressed as a man?
I went as my male facsimile.
At that point, I still wasn't up todoing publicly, especially if I was
going to go anywhere near campus.
I was in there, I was talking forabout no more than five minutes.
And one of the psychiatrists standsup announces that he's done for today.
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I'll see you all next quarter.
Looks at me and says, you're a freak.
You should move to New York City andturn tricks like the rest of them.
Holy cow.
That was a New York psychiatrist.
By the way, to put this into context,one of the other things that in New York
State or New York City at that time, Iwould be arrested, fined, put in jail
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for appearing in public as a woman.
Wow.
That was the norm then, evenin a state like New York.
And that's why in 1969, everyone wentcrazy at Stonewall because they were
tired, especially the drag queens andthe, what was called then the transsexual
people were tired of getting harassedby the New York City So they were
(20:34):
arresting people, putting them in jail.
Yeah.
Good grief.
That was common.
And that's why the drag queens andthe transsexuals in those days, when
Stonewall started, they were amongthe first to start throwing bricks.
That's how bad it was for them.
So Stonewall was a riot was a yep,that was a bar in uh, Greenwich Village
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part of Manhattan and 19 somewhere of1969 Stonewall riots went on for days.
Historically, it's largely known asa gay riot, but it really wasn't the
gay guys that threw the first bricks.
The drag queens.
(21:15):
Did that make any difference?
What, what was the outcome of thator the impact of that of Stonewall?
Yeah.
I mean, did it make any difference?
It started the whole gay movement andthat was the beginning of it actually
starting at that point in time.
Oh, the first pride, I think,was the next year a pride parade.
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Oh, but though the nowadays, it'slike corporate sponsorship with
floats, all that kind of stuff.
Back in those days, itwas a protest march.
Oh, okay.
It had a whole different vibe.
And did people get arrested?
During that?
I don't know.
During the parades.
Yeah.
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It was very common for people to getarrested, but at least it got it visible.
It started stirring things up.
Right.
After that psychiatrist told me thatI was a freak, my next session with
my psychiatrist was when I found outmy medical diagnosis as of 1970 and
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before was a psychological conditionwith no treatment and no cure.
Having started, I didn't know that.
Keep in mind too, this is back inthe days when there's no internet.
I even went through My college libraryand several other university libraries
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looking for information on this.
There really, really wasn't muchinformation out there to be gathered.
I had no idea how many otherpeople, if any, felt like I did.
I felt all alone.
So you didn't have any interactionwith other transsexuals?
I didn't even know that there wereany around or how to meet or what
(23:01):
there was just no connectivity there.
And it was something that was soagainst the norms, which is where
people are trying to push us back tonow, it's such a horrible way to live.
You totally closet it.
Lock the way and you have tohide fear and the anxiety and the
(23:23):
depression are just overwhelming.
Well, I'm feeling like there's no oneelse, but you, nobody can understand
what's going on to get that kind ofreaction from medical professionals.
I mean, not just your parents whoaren't medically educated, but.
From medical doctors, right?
So horrible to you.
(23:43):
Exactly.
I had, uh, when I was busy comingout to people, one of the guys from
campus actually knocked on my apartmentdoor one day, one of the things
that I would do, I lived in my ownapartment, so I would get dressed as me.
And I would sit there and I wasworking on papers at the time.
So I would sit there at mydesk with my typewriter.
(24:06):
Yes, a typewriter.
Oh, I remember those.
Oh God, it wasn't even anIBM Selectric typewriter.
Was it even electric?
I started on a standard manual typewriter.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I was sitting there typingand, uh, I hear this knock
(24:27):
at the door and I go, Okay.
Well, normally I would just play quietand let them go away, but I hadn't had
this experience at the hospital yet.
I hadn't found out that I was apsychological condition with no cure.
I looked out through the littlepeephole, and it was, uh, one
of my acquaintances, Jerry.
(24:48):
I figured, okay, well, this would bethe first person from campus I've let
into my little world, and I let him in.
He was mind blown.
He looked at me and go,wow, you look amazing.
Uh, I think you look better as a girl.
So that's because I am a girl.
That's exactly it.
(25:10):
He looks at me and hegoes, okay, I get it.
I said, yeah, this is my secret.
This is what I've beenhiding the entire time.
You've known me for the last four years.
And he looks at me and hegoes, well, guess what?
I'm gay.
That's my secret.
Wow, we had such a conversation.
That whole incident in the hospital,the post wrap up, my uh, psychiatrist
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had made me come out to my parents,which of course didn't go well either.
I told him that and so that totally endedmy 1970 effort to transition and be me.
I figured out that uh, thedoctor wasn't that far off.
In those days, I had two choices, moveto San Francisco or move to Manhattan.
(26:00):
In either place, I would live underground,no longer part of society in any
way, shape or form, no real careerpossibilities in the normal sense of the
word, everything that people in society.
would normally expect to haveas options, they vanished
(26:22):
from me if I went that route.
Since 2015, especially when I gotonline, 2015 was when I discovered
that there was a transgender community.
I didn't know that.
That many years later, what I had foundout and I've, I've kind of put two and
two together recently, that person,Jerry, that I told you about Lynn,
(26:45):
he reached out to me and he wantedme to come to Woodstock, New York.
It was in 1970, 71, calledand said, I'm in Woodstock.
I've told a bunch of friends aboutyou and they want to meet you.
Wow.
Uh huh.
I told them about my uh, experiencewith the doctors in the hospital
(27:08):
and all of that and that I was doneand thank you very much, but no.
This past summer when I was staying inan extended stay, one of my friends,
Linda, she said, Wendy, you haveto watch this movie, Casa Susana.
It was a PBS film documenting 1962,the transgender cross-dressing
(27:32):
community of 1962, New York.
It was a place wherepeople met for weekends.
They would cross dress, or there werealso transsexuals that would go there.
And it was a place where like-mindedpeople could be together safely,
enjoy some time together without.
(27:54):
Any worries about anything bad happening,and you had no idea about that.
No idea that any of that was going on.
And my suspicion is, is that myfriend Jerry wanted to introduce
me to some of these people,and that was a path not taken.
Yeah, let me interrupt your storyfor just a minute to explain to me
(28:16):
and to our audience the differencebetween transsexual and crossdressers,
because I educate people and you'rethe one that the authority here.
Okay.
The transgender community iskind of a social construct,
which includes a lot of diverse.
People, they're all gendervariant and gender is a continuum.
(28:41):
It is a variation.
There is no man or no woman whois 100 percent on either extreme.
Everyone kind of falls somewherein that big middle area.
Some women might have some traitsthat are inherently masculine and Some
(29:01):
men might have some traits that areinherently feminine, and they just
sort of blend into everyday life.
As I said earlier, my brain went femalein the second trimester of birth.
That process can affect us differentlydepending on the degree of that change.
(29:22):
I just was affected to the pointwhere I knew I had to be a woman.
I knew I had to grow up, be a woman.
And that was what I was, whereassome people are not affected net
that to that degree, they're verysatisfied with their male lives, but.
(29:42):
There are times when theyjust want to feel feminine.
They'll dress in feminine clothes,they'll have makeovers done, they'll
wear nice wigs, or if they Have longhair or hair that they can style.
They'll have it styled and theymight go away from family and friends
and all of that for a long weekendlike Friday, Saturday, Sunday type
(30:07):
and go someplace where there's agathering of people and they'll
cross dress for the entire weekend.
That's very common and cross dressersare by and far, by and large, the largest
group within the transgender community.
There are subgroups in there, then there'slifestyles in there and all of that,
(30:28):
but by and large, they're men who, atleast for that time that they're dressed,
identify as female and feel feminine,but they're all too Happy to go right
back to their male lives and continue on.
Now, some of those people, largelya fairly small percentage of
(30:48):
those people, will actually go onto transition and become women.
Just basically, it's a startingpoint for some people to move on.
The transgender spectrum startson one extreme with non binary.
People who don't subscribe to anygender, they may present themselves
androgynously with no evidence ofbeing male or female in appearance.
(31:13):
Then there are those who are whatI call gender fluid, who are able.
That basically, in a very short periodof time, I even had a friend who was able
to do this in her car, changing out of adress and heels into a suit and tie and go
into a business meeting, close some deals.
(31:35):
Get back in her car, changeout of the suit and tie.
She had practiced voice, soher voice could go up or down
depending on the situation.
Back into her dress and heels and offshe goes and go to lunch, whatever,
perfectly happy doing that change over,you know, three, four or five times a day.
Wow.
But no desire to, to physically changesurgery or hormones or that type of thing.
(32:01):
In her particular case, Iwould say there is a desire.
It's just not the right time.
Oh, okay.
Some people put it offfor, uh, career reasons.
Some people put it off for family reasons.
I, for one, couldn't do that.
From 1970
until the late 1970s,I never cross dressed.
(32:25):
I never did anything like that.
It hurt too much to take everything off.
So I was always amazed at somebody whocould be so gender fluid, both with their
identity and with their presentation.
It was amazing.
You were hanging on to this secret.
You talk about the anxiety and thefear and the depression and everything.
How do you compare your situation to hers?
(32:47):
Where she's changing outfitsthree or four or five times a day.
Was she more free with that?
Did she not care that people knew?
What was it that was differentabout her or the same?
Well, I, I met her about six monthsafter I became Wendy full time.
Okay.
I would say the thing that was mostdifferent was she had started doing
(33:11):
this when she lived in New York City.
She worked on Wall Street and would gohome to her upper east side apartment,
get into a dress and go to a club inNew York called Lucky Chance, which
was a club that was run mainly bytranssexuals or transgender women.
(33:31):
Again, something I didn't know existed.
So she had an outlet, she had peopleshe could be herself with, where
you didn't really have that kindof an outlet or group of people.
Or a community, like you're saying.
Exactly.
So in 1974, I started mycareer in the tech field.
(33:52):
From that, I decided, okay, I've beentold all my life, check these boxes off,
you'll forget all about being a girl.
Yeah, okay.
So I got married.
Oh yeah, right.
Like that was gonna cure it.
Exactly.
I got married, we had two kids, wehad a house, and I had my career.
(34:13):
By 1978, I was miserable.
It didn't work, big surprise.
When you had even more stuff that youhad to hide from, you know, not only
was it just you, yourself, but thenyour career, your wife, your kids.
All, everything you werecarrying, it seems like you were
(34:34):
carrying all of that in addition.
Exactly.
Poor stuff piled on.
Let's just keep piling it on, huh?
Yep.
Piling it on.
Didn't fix what was broken to begin with
but it wasn't broken to begin with.
It was just not lined up.
Yeah.
Not, uh, the, the alignment ofwho I am was not aligned with
(34:57):
my outer body and my being.
Yeah, you weren't broken.
It was the situation that was broken.
Exactly.
Our audience needs to understand thatthat is a key piece of what you're
telling us that you weren't broken.
It was that birth defectyou talked about, right?
Because of all the socialnorms, social constraints, my
(35:19):
personal lack of any knowledge orawareness of what else was around.
I don't know how much that would havemade a difference because in my travels
around the internet since 2015, I'vetalked to quite a number of other people
who said to me things like, wow, I thoughtof just doing the same thing, but there
(35:39):
was no way I was going to do that becauseof the way society was at the time.
I would have to give up everythingthat I had ever worked for.
These were people who considered it intheir thirties, forties and fifties.
1978, I was asleep at night.
My wife woke me up, what's going on?
(36:00):
'cause I had been talking in my sleepabout being a woman that, all that
stress, all that repression, all thatanxiety was popping out at night.
Mm-hmm . And she didn't know, youhadn't talked to her about that?
No.
Just to be clear for the audience,, that's one of the things that I felt
(36:23):
guilty about from 1978 until 2015.
of having never told her how I reallyfelt about myself before we were married.
Uh, when she woke me up thatnight, I told her all about me.
and how I felt and how we got to here.
I expected to be divorced by morning.
(36:44):
I woke up the following morning andshe said to me, well, we're going to
stay together as long as you don'tpursue or do anything about this.
Okay.
More repression, huh?
Uh huh.
Well, at the time I said, okay, Ididn't even ask why I didn't go into
(37:07):
it because I knew on the other side, Ihad no options other than what I knew
from 1970 and in a short eight yearperiod, I'm sure society hasn't changed.
Yeah, I went along with it.
And it was a few days later, she askedme, maybe it might help you a little
bit to relieve some of the pressure ifyou bought some clothes and dressed.
(37:33):
Oh, I took her up on it.
I could only do it in the house.
I could only do it afterthe kids were asleep.
I could only do it at nighttime.
And that was it.
And I couldn't tell anybody about it.
So again, it's a big dark secret.
Did that help?
Or was it even just morestuff you had to pile on?
(37:54):
Oh, Lynn, you're so perceptive.
It's more stuff I piled on.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
It didn't help.
Taking everything off late at night,early in the morning, whenever, taking
everything off was nothing more thana reminder of what I couldn't be.
Yeah.
I didn't cross dress ordo anything like that.
(38:18):
I didn't even look anything up online whenwe got to the years when we had internet.
I never bothered to look or see anything.
Total repression.
The toll that it must have taken onyou and, and just even on your body, I
mean, mentally, physically, emotionally,that kind of toll, Wendy, I just can't
(38:40):
even imagine how you carried all that.
What a strong, courageous woman you are.
Thank you.
Well, what I've, what I learned throughthat whole experience and what I
learned on the other side of that washow powerful our minds really are.
All that fear, anxiety, and now shameand guilt because I'm married with,
(39:06):
with married kids and everything.
I mean, How more stuck can youget in a life that wasn't mine to
begin with, that I didn't want.
It was just a very difficult thing to gothrough, but what I did learn from that is
that my mind was actually making me sick.
(39:31):
Ooh.
At 39, I was diagnosed as type 2 diabetic.
My blood work was horrible withcholesterol and triglycerides and all
kinds of other stuff going on with me.
And I was quite overweight.
I didn't care what I looked like.
I didn't Care about anything like that.
(39:53):
I had, there were times when I hadto wear a suit and tie to go to work.
I didn't care how I looked in that.
So there was no stylish suits.
No.
And even when my wife at the timewould drag me off to a department
store to go shopping for newclothes because mine were just.
Worn out completely.
And I could care less Lynn.
(40:15):
I could care.
Yeah.
She would drag me into thedepartment store and show me this.
You'd look nice in this blah, blah, blah.
And the other one go, okay.
And she'd look at me and she'd go,you don't really want to be here.
No, you want to be over there.
The woman's department.
Yeah.
(40:36):
That was what I was afraid of.
Stop that.
Okay.
All through the 80s, I did my bestto repress this and deal with it.
Yeah, I smoked a lot of pot.
I drank a lot of beers.
All of that seemed to helpwith the repression and stuff.
Early 90s, she had suggested that Isee a therapist and a psychiatrist.
(41:01):
Basically, I found out that if you go intoa psychiatrist and you tell them about
your anxieties and your depressions andall that fun stuff, you don't really need
a legitimate underlying cause for it.
Just make up something.
Which is drugs, right?
I needed drugs for anxiety,depression, and all of that.
(41:22):
What a concept, right?
Here, just medicate yourself.
Exactly.
And as long as long as you'rewilling to come back for
appointments, you keep getting them.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So that's going to fix it.
Yeah, well, I was living in afog through the 90s, through the
early 2000s and right up to 2015.
(41:44):
I had seen various psychiatrists andgiven all kinds of cocktails of stuff.
Now I can safely say,
I am so grateful to my male facsimile,my male representative as you were.
I'm so grateful to him for not makingme a drug addict and alcoholic.
(42:05):
And the worst thing he did was get meon a bunch of psych meds, cocktails.
Like I said, you were astrong woman inside there.
My career in tech was a really good thing,especially the last 15 to 20 years where
I was a consultant and would go into a.
(42:26):
Corporation and develop a system for them.
I would put together applications forwhat they needed to run their business.
These were largely globalcorporations that I worked for.
I loved being in contract.
It was so much betterthan being an employee.
When you could do what you were good atand make a difference in a different way.
(42:48):
But it sounds like you were making ahuge difference to these corporations.
Yes.
What I was doing and the workI was doing was very detailed.
I had imposter syndrome goinginto it because up until 1992,
I had never been on a PC.
Okay.
I worked for digital.
They weren't PCs.
(43:08):
Yeah.
No.
I'd never been on a PC.
I'd never been on windows.
I had never had anyexperience with any of that.
So I taught myself and I taught myself.
Programming and Visual Basic.
I taught myself in Microsoft's,uh, web development programming.
And I taught myself, uh, howto build and design databases.
(43:30):
And I was really good at it.
How did that feel?
Did you feel like you were reallyaccomplishing something there?
I did.
Yes.
Yeah.
See, that's one of the things.
And the reason I'm going into this isthat's one of the things that people like
me need is a distraction, something Ican immerse myself in every day from the
(43:53):
time I wake up to the time I go to sleepto try and prevent those thoughts about
who I really am from coming into mind.
Okay.
So this was, was.
Taking your brain and making itdo something else, something else.
And then there's the satisfactionof teaching yourself those things.
(44:15):
Most people just.
Especially our age, andyou and I are close in age.
Most people our age just kind offreak out if they can't figure
out just the tiniest little thing.
Exactly.
I hope there was some pride in whatyou were doing, you know, satisfaction.
I actually made more moneydoing that than I ever did as an
employee, and I enjoyed it more.
(44:36):
I didn't have to play office politics.
I actually dealt with directors and vicepresident level type people, most of
the time it was fascinating and wherethe imposter syndrome came in was I was
self taught when I got into, uh, one ofmy contracts, there were like 60 other
(44:57):
contract people, they're all like me.
Working under contract.
And I started, uh, well,where did you learn this?
Oh, I taught myself.
I found out everybody taught themselves.
Very few people went to school for this.
Oh, they didn't have a littlecertificate from Microsoft or
something that said, Oh, you mightget something like I had one of those.
(45:22):
But you taught yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
But I found out that was more commonplace.
In fact, some of the better developer,better developers were people who
were self taught because like me.
I had bookshelves just filled.
I was a great customer ofAmazon books, all tech books.
(45:44):
Yeah.
Immerse yourself in the books,learn new stuff and go to work.
Wow.
That distraction.
So did that relieve some of theangst, some of the depression?
It did.
It did.
And a lot of the time I was workingfrom home, so I could even just sit
(46:04):
there and I wasn't cross dressingor doing anything like that.
And that never even cameinto mind as an option.
I was working from home andjust totally immersed in it.
Then at nighttime, when I would just be.
Kind of winding down andrelaxing and things like that.
I had my music.
I was into audio and video equipment.
(46:26):
I had surround sound before it was evenpopular and crank it up the concert hall
level and just immerse myself into itjust to get away from the inner thoughts.
Just as an example of how this neverleaves you, one of my contracts had
me working at a law firm in CenterCity, Philadelphia, and there was a
(46:48):
little park next to the building Iwas in, and I would go there and eat
outside, especially in the springtimeand all, and I'd see women walking by.
I had to go in.
Seeing them triggered me.
That's how I should be.
I knew I didn't, couldn'tdo cross dressing.
I knew I wasn't any of the otherparts of the transgender community.
(47:11):
There is a part of the transgendercommunity that is considered
in 20th century terms thetranssexual part of the community.
These are people like myself who havealways known they were different from
an earlier age, could be anywhere fromthe single digits into the teens, but
(47:32):
somewhere along there, they would figureout there was something different.
We either transition toliving full time as women.
Some of us choose to just do the hormonetherapy because what I found out in
2014, late 2014, in one of my darkperiods, everything had changed in 2012.
(47:54):
Now keep in mind, 1970,I would be arrested.
I was called a freak.
I was told that there was no cure.
and no treatment possible.
Forget it, you're on your own.
2012, uh uh.
2012, it became a condition you'reborn with, treatable by therapy,
hormone replacement therapy,and any necessary surgeries.
(48:18):
That's huge.
Big change, huh?
Big change.
World Professional Associationfor Transgender Health.
WPATH.
I think that was their version7 of their transgender health
guides to the medical community.
I think that was the version, ifI'm not mistaken, that caused the
(48:40):
medical community to agree andchange their diagnostic codes.
Oh, okay.
Then they have to retrain the doctors.
Think you were a freak.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, they're probably gone now.
When I found that out, my wife andI had been married for 40 years.
(49:01):
Actually, for, I spent 45 years repressingand not knowing what was going on, if
anything, in the way of my diagnosisor how people were living or whatever.
It was, uh, quite eye openingbecause I said I was in a dark place.
Suicidal ideation is notsomething that is uncommon.
(49:24):
It's not uncommon inthe transgender world.
It's not uncommon in the LGBT world.
People that feel alone and not acceptedare very likely to have suicidal ideation.
That's a reality.
I was there big time.
67 years old, never lived aday in my life the way I knew I
(49:48):
was or how I, I did look it up.
I found out everythinghad changed that day.
It was late in the afternoon.
I went upstairs to my wifewho was in our family room.
And I said, remember whatwe talked about in 1978?
It never left.
It's back.
And now I found out.
It's changed.
(50:08):
I'm going to start therapy.
I don't know where this will go,but I'm going to find a therapist.
That was in late 2014.
I spent the rest of 2014looking for therapists.
I did find one.
I wrote to clinics, emails.
Here's my story.
Is there anyone in your clinicthat would be interested in
(50:29):
helping me or working with me?
One of the ones I wrote to came back,she came back to me and she said, I'm
presenting it at our staff meeting and shegoes, I'll send your email to all of them.
and see if anyone's of interest.
Well, two were interestedand I picked Stephanie.
Something about her vibe from her picture,her eyes in her picture, and the profile
(50:53):
thing that she wrote up in her brochure.
I picked her January of 2015.
I went to therapy for the first time.
You just knew she was the one, didn't you?
Well, I wasn't sure at thatpoint, but I was very nervous.
I walked in.
Now, keep in mind, Lynn, she'sthe first person I've talked to
openly about this since 1970.
(51:15):
My wife and I didn't even reallyhave a long open conversation.
I just told her how I felt, what I'd beenthrough, et cetera, and left it at that.
That was the end.
Forty five years of just hangingon to that and not Feeling like
you could share in depth anything,anybody, any of that stuff.
Exactly.
(51:36):
Wow.
So what was that likewhen you met with her?
Oh my God, Lynn, it was an extendedsession because it was an intro session.
Uh, first session.
I sat there and poured my guts out.
It just felt so incredible to beable to freely talk to another
human being about what was goingon in my head and how I felt and
(51:58):
what I felt about who I really was.
And at the same time, I talked about howguilty I felt, the shame that I felt,
and how difficult it was to just get by.
This was probably the most, oneof the most powerful moments
up to that point in my life.
I'm standing up, I'm getting ready toleave the office, and Stephanie's sitting
(52:23):
there with my file folder on her lap.
She looks up at me and shegoes, what's your name?
Without even thinking, Ijust snapped back, Wendy.
My joy, amazement,everything was like, wow.
She crossed out my male facsimile'sname, wrote Wendy on my file folder,
(52:46):
and from that day forward, I was Wendy.
How amazing.
To have that, the quickest shift.
Uh huh.
To be acknowledged bysomeone just like that.
Exactly.
And she was the first person in myentire 67 year life to actually accept
me for who I am, what I am withoutany burden or need to understand.
(53:14):
I've got tears in my eyes now.
Oh, that's amazing.
Only a matter of A month and a halfearlier, I was going to end it all.
And now here she is totallyaccepting me for who I am.
Wendy, you have shared so much withus today and I'm just delighted
with everything we've talked about.
(53:35):
So let's talk a little bitabout your coaching program
and how people can contact you.
Okay.
Well, the best way to contact me,especially if you're tired of people
not hearing you, not believing you, uh,need someone to talk to about abuse,
trauma, people not understanding you,please reach out to me, meetwendycole.
(54:00):
com.
Find something to geton my calendar there.
and talk with me.
And if you're not quite ready forthat conversation yet, subscribe to my
newsletter, at least until you're ready.
And that way I can continueto support you from afar.
Whatever life change you'regoing through, I can help you
(54:20):
with and that's meet wendycole.
com and thank you to ouraudience for tuning in today.
I'm Lynn Murphy, your host andfounder of Women Who Push The Limits.
We've had such a conversation todaywith Wendy Cole, who is definitely.
A woman who pushes thelimits in so many ways.
Wendy, thank you for sharing with us.
(54:40):
For those of you who are listeningtoday, if you enjoyed this, please
subscribe to our channel, give us arating, leave a review, share this with
others and join our Facebook group.
There's a Facebook group forwomen who push the limits.
Look for that and join inour inspiring conversations.
Thank you for joining us today.
Stay safe, stay happy, and rememberour motto, find your voice.
(55:03):
Speak your truth and change the world.
I'm Lynne Murphy.
We'll see you next time.
Next time on Demystifying the TransgenderJourney Be yourself and blend in.
I don't like the word passing.
That's a big word in the community even.
No, it's not passing.
I refer to it as blending in.
Just blending into societyas any other woman.
(55:26):
Thank you for joining us todayon this episode of Demystifying
the Transgender Journey.
Remember to subscribe so youdon't miss a single episode
of our fascinating interviews.
You can also find more information onour website, thetransgenderjourney.
com.
So until next time, staycurious and stay kind.
I happen to be one of those whoknew from a very early age, I was
going to grow up to be a woman.
By age 10 or so, Icouldn't take it anymore.
I told my mother.
I actually dressed up in some ofher clothes that would fit me.
I had watched her very attentivelydoing her makeup, so I did mine.
Even did my nails, and she told me,you have to get out of all of that.
(00:24):
I said, no, I'm a girl.
What do you really know aboutpeople who were born transgender?
Have you ever met someonewho's transgender?
Well, if you're like me, you'recurious, but hesitant to ask questions.
Well, welcome to Demystifyingthe Transgender Journey.
In our conversations with people who wereborn transgender, their families, friends,
and the professionals who support them,we ask probing questions and discover
(00:46):
insightful and educational answers.
You can also find more information onour website the transgender journey.
com.
Now let's get right into today's episode.
Welcome to today's episode ofdemystifying the transgender journey.
I'm Lynn Murphy, your host and founder ofwomen who push the limits and president
(01:08):
of key innovative business solutions.
I'm also the author of the book.
Women Who Push The Limits presents50 Life Lessons From Inspiring Women.
You can find that on Amazon.
I had the privilege forthat book of interviewing 50
inspiring and amazing women.
And today it's my pleasure to beinterviewing the amazing Wendy Cole.
She spent 67 years living in a man'sbody, even though by the age of three.
(01:33):
She knew she was a girl.
She's going to share with you what itwas like to finally transition when
she was 67 years old after livingall those decades and an identity
in a body that really wasn't hers.
Today, Wendy's going to tell youthe first part of her story and
we're going to get right into that.
Wendy, thank you so much for beinghere today and thank you for all you
(01:54):
do to bring your message and to bringinformation to the world about what
does it mean to be born transgender.
You definitely embody the mottoof Women Who Push The Limits,
which is find your voice, speakyour truth, and change the world.
Wendy, thank you fordoing that, and welcome.
Oh, Lynn, thank you so much.
What a beautiful introduction.
(02:15):
I'm so happy to be here.
I really am glad to have metyou and connected with you.
It's been amazing.
Thank you.
Well, thank you.
So I'm just going to turnit over to you, Wendy.
You tell us your amazingand inspiring story.
As Lynn mentioned, I spentthe first 67 years of my life
living behind my male facsimile.
(02:37):
I knew by age three, no later than earlyage four, that I was really a girl.
I didn't have the wordsfor it at the moment.
I didn't really think about it that much.
I just knew how I felt.
I knew that when I was in the companyof other little girls and playing
with them, I had a great time.
(02:57):
It felt comfortable.
It felt natural.
As I proceeded on to school, Ireally learned the differences.
between girls and boys.
Most people look at it, you know,strictly as a sexual difference, but
what's underneath all of that is gender.
And it's something that mostpeople never really think about.
(03:18):
And most people never reallyquestion their gender.
They just, it just is.
I'm either a man or I'm a woman.
Well, I happen to be one of those whoknew from a very early age, I was a girl.
I was going to grow up to be a woman.
That, that was not goingto happen with my body.
(03:39):
It made the mistake of goingthe opposite direction.
And by age 10 or so, Icouldn't take it anymore.
I told my mother, I actually dressed upin some of her clothes that would fit me.
I had watched her.
I'm very attentively doingher makeup, all of that.
So I did mine.
I even did my nails and everything.
(04:00):
And I just sat there on the couch inthe living room and our little house,
uh, waiting for her to come home fromgrocery shopping and told her I'm a girl.
And she told me.
You have to get out of all of that.
I said, no, I'm a girl.
And she said, well, you have to get outof it before your father comes home.
This is the 1950s.
(04:20):
Yeah.
Not something that was accepted oreven understood at that time, was it?
Exactly.
I do distinctly remember before Iwent through this process of informing
my parents, there was a whole lotof discussion in newspaper articles
and all about Christine Jorgensen.
The A World War II vet who,uh, came back after the war.
(04:45):
She had had surgery inDenmark and she was a woman.
And what year was that?
It was in the early 1950s.
Early 50s, okay.
It really hit the papers and all of thatand it was still quite talked about.
So my parents really reflected onthat when I, uh, came out to them.
I was taken to a psychiatriccenter just south of Beacon,
(05:07):
New York on the Hudson River.
It was the Craig house and I'm sittingthere with a psychiatrist and my parents.
And again, this is 1950s.
My mother was a typical fifties housewife.
I had counted on her for help,but there was only so much she was
emotionally able to do at that time.
(05:28):
And with the relationship with myfather and everything, and my father
was very conservative, very strict.
Absolutely.
No sign of his was going to be a girl.
He had no concept of howto handle that, did he?
Oh, absolutely not.
That's one of the, one of thethings that I do is talk to
(05:48):
parents of transgender people.
That's got to be so helpful.
I try my best to help them understand.
as best they can.
One of the things that I emphasizeis my life is a complete example of
what not to do with your children.
I was threatened at around age 10 afterour last visit to the psychiatrist.
(06:10):
He used words like, well, this ismaybe just a little transvestism,
little boy's experiment.
And then he said, uh, he's tooyoung to diagnose as transsexual.
Did he even know whathe was talking about?
Uh, that was the term that theyused in those days for people who,
uh, like me, were born transgender.
(06:31):
We've always been around.
Yeah, it's nothing new.
It's more talked about.
Is it more open now, or are theremore people who are transgender?
Well, who are visible coming out asit were, but there's still a huge
stigma and a lot of lack of knowledge.
And that's one of the thingsthat I'm hoping to do with all
(06:54):
of my efforts of being this.
Visible and being out in publiclike this and speaking with people
and all this is something that isa part of the human experience.
It affects a small number of us,but it does have a very powerful
effect to think about you having tosuppress that for 67 years to have to.
(07:17):
be someone you weren't, and to hideall that mm-hmm . And then to have
the, the authorities in your lifetell you it's just gonna go away.
You're too young tounderstand any of this.
Right.
But you did understand it.
I really didn't have a comprehensionof it from a medical perspective
or a sociological perspective.
(07:38):
I just know how I felt.
Mm-hmm . The last trip to thepsychiatrist, my mother turned
to me and said, Okay, you have tostop insisting that you're a girl.
You have to change how you'rethinking, change what you do.
We don't ever want to hear this again.
And if it continues, we're goingto have you committed and fixed.
(08:00):
Those were the exact words.
And in the 1950s, granted it was thelater 1950s, That was a scary thing to
hear because now in hindsight I knowthat there was electroshock therapy,
there was all kinds of other thingsthat they did with people, who knows
what they would have done with me.
That's what fixed was, huh?
(08:20):
That's what fixed was.
Electroshock therapy.
Wow.
Even later in my life, I'll tell youmore about that when we get there.
Around age 10 is when Ibegan a life of repression.
You have no idea how psychologicallyhorrible that is to be repressing how
(08:41):
you really feel about who you really are.
And what were some of the things,the impact that that had on you?
As I got into high school,I was terrified to date.
I was figuring people wouldhave to figure me out.
I have this big secret that I'm hiding.
As a result, I, uh, just repressed it.
It brought on all kindsof fears and anxiety.
(09:02):
I was literally, uh, scaredthat somehow or another my
secret was going to come out.
That would lead to all kindsof problems with my parents.
It was 1960s in high school,like other, other guys.
I, I really liked the cheerleaders.
Different reasons.
Yeah.
Different reasons.
(09:22):
I wanted to be one of them.
You didn't want to be out on thatfootball field or the basketball
court or, you know, hard driving.
That kind of thing?
No, that was one of the things that, uh,upset my father when I was younger was he
wanted me to play little league baseball.
The uniforms were hot and scratchy.
I don't know what they were made ofin those days, but they were very
(09:45):
itchy and it was hot and The fieldwas not necessarily the nicest.
There was lots of dirt anddust and everything else.
And I was terrified ofgetting hit by the ball.
So I just didn't want to go.
There was always an argument and Iwas threatened with being punished
if I didn't go, so I would go andI was horrible at hitting the ball.
(10:06):
I just didn't want to be there.
You had those feminine feelings, notthe testosterone, the male feelings.
Exactly.
I would at times just be with the guys.
I would play football,touch football after school.
My reward for having done that was Igot punished for breaking my glasses.
(10:27):
You couldn't win.
I couldn't win.
So, I just didn't feellike I fit in anywhere.
And that feeling did nothing but persist.
Did you have any friends yourage when you were in high
school or college or anything?
I did have a few guy friends.
Girls were off limits even thoughI felt would probably be more
(10:48):
comfortable with them, but they wereoff limits because I had the secret
to hide and that was the end of that.
So social life was very limited.
I had a few close friendsthat I would do things with.
One of the things that I always triedto do was do things that might please
my, my father and parents, especially.
So, I was particularly goodat doing carpentry work.
(11:13):
I learned that from my father, soI would do things around the house
I would do do various projects inthe yard, things like that, didn't
enjoy it didn't particularly like it.
But I just did what I hadto do to survive and get by.
I can say in all honesty from around10 or 11, anxiety, depression, fear,
(11:36):
were very common feelings on a dailybasis for anyone that thinks that
this is a choice that I chose this,or I thought about it and just.
That I just decided thatI was a girl that's wrong.
This is not a choice and it nevergoes away from the moment you
(11:56):
wake up in the morning to the timeyou go to sleep at night and then
it's probably even in your dreams.
I had been told by the psychiatristor actually he told my parents
never really talked to me.
It was the 1950s.
Of course, kids shouldbe seen and not heard.
Yeah, and kids should follow this whole.
(12:18):
Routine this box thatthe boys should be in.
Right?
Exactly.
Yeah, it was the girl'sbox and the boy's box.
Neither are ideal because whatI've what I've since learned as a
result of my transition and havingtalked with a large number of women.
(12:38):
Now, more as a equal or beingaccepted as one of the women
being socialized as female.
It has its own inherent problems.
I resisted a lot of my male socialization,did it grudgingly, but I did it because
it was the check boxes that I had tocheck off to prove that I was on the
(12:59):
straight and narrow going forward.
None of this, you're, noneof this stuff, I'm a girl.
I Got drawn into all the malesocialization by parents, by school,
and even in my early 20s as I startedto branch out and begin to find a
career and my work and everything else,I was just going through the motions
(13:23):
and checking the boxes just to fit in.
And carrying that, that weightof that secret and of the society
that expected you to be somebodydifferent and you weren't.
Exactly.
Wow.
So difficult, Wendy.
It's a horrible way to live and that'sone of the things that I impress on
parents is, I know you don't understand.
(13:45):
My own parents didn't understandand didn't have the means to even
comprehend how this could be possible.
And I know that parents today don'treally have an understanding of it.
One of the first things they jumpinto is, what did I do to cause this?
Oh, so you had those kind of feelings.
No, that's what parents,parents think that.
(14:07):
Okay.
Yeah.
Okay.
What did I do to cause this?
It's nothing you did.
Nothing any parent did.
This is how, this is how I was born.
This is how your child was born.
Things get wired in the brain.
During the second trimester of birth.
In my case, my brain went female.
My body went male.
(14:28):
Later on in my life.
In 2017 when I had surgery at NYUMedical Center with Dr. Blue Bond, I
was joking around with all the peoplethat I knew at uh, uh, one of the bars
I went to frequently for happy hour.
And I used to go there not to drink somuch as to have conversations with people.
(14:50):
And it was largely a gay bar.
The guys would ask me.
How can you do that?
You're going for that surgery.
Yeah, I'm getting mybirth defect corrected.
That's all.
And they were pretty proud of theirmale parts, so they didn't want to
think about getting rid of them, right?
The number of guys that would grab theircrotch and say, how can you do that?
(15:17):
But you never felt that waspart of you, it sounds like.
Exactly.
As a young kid, before I even came out tomy parents, I would go to bed at night.
We, I was raised in the Methodistchurch, went to church every Sunday,
went to Sunday school, went to MethodistYouth Fellowship, all of that stuff.
At night when I'd go to bed, partof my prayer was Gee, I'd love to
(15:38):
wake up tomorrow morning as a girland my closet filled with pretty
clothes and everything would be fine.
But that never happened.
Of course.
Not until you were 67.
Exactly.
I went through high school.
I really didn't want togo to college at the time.
(16:00):
I didn't know what Iwanted to do with my life.
I was In severe anxiety anddepression over all of this.
And of course I couldn'ttalk to my parents about it.
There was no one to talk to.
I couldn't talk to a friend or anyone.
It was your friends had no idea.
None.
Okay.
None.
And even at age 67, when I startedtelling people that knew me.
(16:24):
They were mind blown, not a clue, but theother way that it affected me throughout
my life, I was told by the psychiatrist ata young age, once he has a career, he has
a wife, he has a house, he has a family,he'll forget all about being a girl.
I don't think that happened, kidding.
(16:46):
No, not even close.
But in 1970, I was graduatingfrom college, I had forced myself
to go to an all men's college.
Thanks.
That was my last majoreffort to try to fit in.
It's kind of like the whole immersion.
(17:08):
Your version of immersion therapy, huh?
Yeah, it didn't work.
No, I don't think thatstuff does work, does it?
No, it doesn't.
I got to a point where I justcouldn't stand it anymore.
Talk about life changes.
Well, here I am.
I'm graduating.
I'm going to be out on my own.
Now what?
(17:28):
I had decided that there was no wayin hell I was going to go on through
the rest of my life like this.
I found a psychiatrist who agreedto work with me and help me.
I actually, I, I was living inan apartment in an old section of
the city connected in New York.
I had friends in town and Ihad a few friends on campus.
(17:52):
That was pretty much it.
So the psychiatrist wanted me tostart coming out to people around
town because it definitely wouldn'tbe good walking onto campus as
a girl at that point in time.
Not in the 70s.
So this was before you foundyour last psychiatrist, right?
This was Oh yeah.
This was in the 70s.
(18:13):
Okay.
This was in the 70s.
He had me coming out to neighbors,so I went through my apartment
building, introducing myselfas Wendy to my neighbors.
I introduced myself tosome of my local friends.
Jeff came in from Ireland every summerto work at the local hospital, and I was
friends with Suzanne, his girlfriend.
(18:35):
And when I came out to them, Jeffcouldn't get over how great I looked.
Suzanne offered to help me and wasvery supportive and all of this.
And I'm going, Yay, this is great.
None of my neighbors cared.
So you didn't get anadverse reaction from them?
No adverse reactions whatsoever.
(18:55):
Wow.
Guess when I got that?
And it was devastating.
When my psychiatrist took me toa quarterly meeting of a group
of psychiatrists, they met everyquarter in the hospital and
Schenectady in a conference room.
And I'm sitting there talkingwith this group, there's probably
15 to 20 of them in the, in theroom, all MDs, all psychiatrists.
(19:20):
And were you dressed as a womanor were you dressed as a man?
I went as my male facsimile.
At that point, I still wasn't up todoing publicly, especially if I was
going to go anywhere near campus.
I was in there, I was talking forabout no more than five minutes.
And one of the psychiatrists standsup announces that he's done for today.
(19:45):
I'll see you all next quarter.
Looks at me and says, you're a freak.
You should move to New York City andturn tricks like the rest of them.
Holy cow.
That was a New York psychiatrist.
By the way, to put this into context,one of the other things that in New York
State or New York City at that time, Iwould be arrested, fined, put in jail
(20:11):
for appearing in public as a woman.
Wow.
That was the norm then, evenin a state like New York.
And that's why in 1969, everyone wentcrazy at Stonewall because they were
tired, especially the drag queens andthe, what was called then the transsexual
people were tired of getting harassedby the New York City So they were
(20:34):
arresting people, putting them in jail.
Yeah.
Good grief.
That was common.
And that's why the drag queens andthe transsexuals in those days, when
Stonewall started, they were amongthe first to start throwing bricks.
That's how bad it was for them.
So Stonewall was a riot was a yep,that was a bar in uh, Greenwich Village
(20:55):
part of Manhattan and 19 somewhere of1969 Stonewall riots went on for days.
Historically, it's largely known asa gay riot, but it really wasn't the
gay guys that threw the first bricks.
The drag queens.
(21:15):
Did that make any difference?
What, what was the outcome of thator the impact of that of Stonewall?
Yeah.
I mean, did it make any difference?
It started the whole gay movement andthat was the beginning of it actually
starting at that point in time.
Oh, the first pride, I think,was the next year a pride parade.
(21:36):
Oh, but though the nowadays, it'slike corporate sponsorship with
floats, all that kind of stuff.
Back in those days, itwas a protest march.
Oh, okay.
It had a whole different vibe.
And did people get arrested?
During that?
I don't know.
During the parades.
Yeah.
(21:56):
It was very common for people to getarrested, but at least it got it visible.
It started stirring things up.
Right.
After that psychiatrist told me thatI was a freak, my next session with
my psychiatrist was when I found outmy medical diagnosis as of 1970 and
(22:17):
before was a psychological conditionwith no treatment and no cure.
Having started, I didn't know that.
Keep in mind too, this is back inthe days when there's no internet.
I even went through My college libraryand several other university libraries
(22:38):
looking for information on this.
There really, really wasn't muchinformation out there to be gathered.
I had no idea how many otherpeople, if any, felt like I did.
I felt all alone.
So you didn't have any interactionwith other transsexuals?
I didn't even know that there wereany around or how to meet or what
(23:01):
there was just no connectivity there.
And it was something that was soagainst the norms, which is where
people are trying to push us back tonow, it's such a horrible way to live.
You totally closet it.
Lock the way and you have tohide fear and the anxiety and the
(23:23):
depression are just overwhelming.
Well, I'm feeling like there's no oneelse, but you, nobody can understand
what's going on to get that kind ofreaction from medical professionals.
I mean, not just your parents whoaren't medically educated, but.
From medical doctors, right?
So horrible to you.
(23:43):
Exactly.
I had, uh, when I was busy comingout to people, one of the guys from
campus actually knocked on my apartmentdoor one day, one of the things
that I would do, I lived in my ownapartment, so I would get dressed as me.
And I would sit there and I wasworking on papers at the time.
So I would sit there at mydesk with my typewriter.
(24:06):
Yes, a typewriter.
Oh, I remember those.
Oh God, it wasn't even anIBM Selectric typewriter.
Was it even electric?
I started on a standard manual typewriter.
Exactly.
Yeah.
So I was sitting there typingand, uh, I hear this knock
(24:27):
at the door and I go, Okay.
Well, normally I would just play quietand let them go away, but I hadn't had
this experience at the hospital yet.
I hadn't found out that I was apsychological condition with no cure.
I looked out through the littlepeephole, and it was, uh, one
of my acquaintances, Jerry.
(24:48):
I figured, okay, well, this would bethe first person from campus I've let
into my little world, and I let him in.
He was mind blown.
He looked at me and go,wow, you look amazing.
Uh, I think you look better as a girl.
So that's because I am a girl.
That's exactly it.
(25:10):
He looks at me and hegoes, okay, I get it.
I said, yeah, this is my secret.
This is what I've beenhiding the entire time.
You've known me for the last four years.
And he looks at me and hegoes, well, guess what?
I'm gay.
That's my secret.
Wow, we had such a conversation.
That whole incident in the hospital,the post wrap up, my uh, psychiatrist
(25:34):
had made me come out to my parents,which of course didn't go well either.
I told him that and so that totally endedmy 1970 effort to transition and be me.
I figured out that uh, thedoctor wasn't that far off.
In those days, I had two choices, moveto San Francisco or move to Manhattan.
(26:00):
In either place, I would live underground,no longer part of society in any
way, shape or form, no real careerpossibilities in the normal sense of the
word, everything that people in society.
would normally expect to haveas options, they vanished
(26:22):
from me if I went that route.
Since 2015, especially when I gotonline, 2015 was when I discovered
that there was a transgender community.
I didn't know that.
That many years later, what I had foundout and I've, I've kind of put two and
two together recently, that person,Jerry, that I told you about Lynn,
(26:45):
he reached out to me and he wantedme to come to Woodstock, New York.
It was in 1970, 71, calledand said, I'm in Woodstock.
I've told a bunch of friends aboutyou and they want to meet you.
Wow.
Uh huh.
I told them about my uh, experiencewith the doctors in the hospital
(27:08):
and all of that and that I was doneand thank you very much, but no.
This past summer when I was staying inan extended stay, one of my friends,
Linda, she said, Wendy, you haveto watch this movie, Casa Susana.
It was a PBS film documenting 1962,the transgender cross-dressing
(27:32):
community of 1962, New York.
It was a place wherepeople met for weekends.
They would cross dress, or there werealso transsexuals that would go there.
And it was a place where like-mindedpeople could be together safely,
enjoy some time together without.
(27:54):
Any worries about anything bad happening,and you had no idea about that.
No idea that any of that was going on.
And my suspicion is, is that myfriend Jerry wanted to introduce
me to some of these people,and that was a path not taken.
Yeah, let me interrupt your storyfor just a minute to explain to me
(28:16):
and to our audience the differencebetween transsexual and crossdressers,
because I educate people and you'rethe one that the authority here.
Okay.
The transgender community iskind of a social construct,
which includes a lot of diverse.
People, they're all gendervariant and gender is a continuum.
(28:41):
It is a variation.
There is no man or no woman whois 100 percent on either extreme.
Everyone kind of falls somewherein that big middle area.
Some women might have some traitsthat are inherently masculine and Some
(29:01):
men might have some traits that areinherently feminine, and they just
sort of blend into everyday life.
As I said earlier, my brain went femalein the second trimester of birth.
That process can affect us differentlydepending on the degree of that change.
(29:22):
I just was affected to the pointwhere I knew I had to be a woman.
I knew I had to grow up, be a woman.
And that was what I was, whereassome people are not affected net
that to that degree, they're verysatisfied with their male lives, but.
(29:42):
There are times when theyjust want to feel feminine.
They'll dress in feminine clothes,they'll have makeovers done, they'll
wear nice wigs, or if they Have longhair or hair that they can style.
They'll have it styled and theymight go away from family and friends
and all of that for a long weekendlike Friday, Saturday, Sunday type
(30:07):
and go someplace where there's agathering of people and they'll
cross dress for the entire weekend.
That's very common and cross dressersare by and far, by and large, the largest
group within the transgender community.
There are subgroups in there, then there'slifestyles in there and all of that,
(30:28):
but by and large, they're men who, atleast for that time that they're dressed,
identify as female and feel feminine,but they're all too Happy to go right
back to their male lives and continue on.
Now, some of those people, largelya fairly small percentage of
(30:48):
those people, will actually go onto transition and become women.
Just basically, it's a startingpoint for some people to move on.
The transgender spectrum startson one extreme with non binary.
People who don't subscribe to anygender, they may present themselves
androgynously with no evidence ofbeing male or female in appearance.
(31:13):
Then there are those who are whatI call gender fluid, who are able.
That basically, in a very short periodof time, I even had a friend who was able
to do this in her car, changing out of adress and heels into a suit and tie and go
into a business meeting, close some deals.
(31:35):
Get back in her car, changeout of the suit and tie.
She had practiced voice, soher voice could go up or down
depending on the situation.
Back into her dress and heels and offshe goes and go to lunch, whatever,
perfectly happy doing that change over,you know, three, four or five times a day.
Wow.
But no desire to, to physically changesurgery or hormones or that type of thing.
(32:01):
In her particular case, Iwould say there is a desire.
It's just not the right time.
Oh, okay.
Some people put it offfor, uh, career reasons.
Some people put it off for family reasons.
I, for one, couldn't do that.
From 1970
until the late 1970s,I never cross dressed.
(32:25):
I never did anything like that.
It hurt too much to take everything off.
So I was always amazed at somebody whocould be so gender fluid, both with their
identity and with their presentation.
It was amazing.
You were hanging on to this secret.
You talk about the anxiety and thefear and the depression and everything.
How do you compare your situation to hers?
(32:47):
Where she's changing outfitsthree or four or five times a day.
Was she more free with that?
Did she not care that people knew?
What was it that was differentabout her or the same?
Well, I, I met her about six monthsafter I became Wendy full time.
Okay.
I would say the thing that was mostdifferent was she had started doing
(33:11):
this when she lived in New York City.
She worked on Wall Street and would gohome to her upper east side apartment,
get into a dress and go to a club inNew York called Lucky Chance, which
was a club that was run mainly bytranssexuals or transgender women.
(33:31):
Again, something I didn't know existed.
So she had an outlet, she had peopleshe could be herself with, where
you didn't really have that kindof an outlet or group of people.
Or a community, like you're saying.
Exactly.
So in 1974, I started mycareer in the tech field.
(33:52):
From that, I decided, okay, I've beentold all my life, check these boxes off,
you'll forget all about being a girl.
Yeah, okay.
So I got married.
Oh yeah, right.
Like that was gonna cure it.
Exactly.
I got married, we had two kids, wehad a house, and I had my career.
(34:13):
By 1978, I was miserable.
It didn't work, big surprise.
When you had even more stuff that youhad to hide from, you know, not only
was it just you, yourself, but thenyour career, your wife, your kids.
All, everything you werecarrying, it seems like you were
(34:34):
carrying all of that in addition.
Exactly.
Poor stuff piled on.
Let's just keep piling it on, huh?
Yep.
Piling it on.
Didn't fix what was broken to begin with
but it wasn't broken to begin with.
It was just not lined up.
Yeah.
Not, uh, the, the alignment ofwho I am was not aligned with
(34:57):
my outer body and my being.
Yeah, you weren't broken.
It was the situation that was broken.
Exactly.
Our audience needs to understand thatthat is a key piece of what you're
telling us that you weren't broken.
It was that birth defectyou talked about, right?
Because of all the socialnorms, social constraints, my
(35:19):
personal lack of any knowledge orawareness of what else was around.
I don't know how much that would havemade a difference because in my travels
around the internet since 2015, I'vetalked to quite a number of other people
who said to me things like, wow, I thoughtof just doing the same thing, but there
(35:39):
was no way I was going to do that becauseof the way society was at the time.
I would have to give up everythingthat I had ever worked for.
These were people who considered it intheir thirties, forties and fifties.
1978, I was asleep at night.
My wife woke me up, what's going on?
(36:00):
'cause I had been talking in my sleepabout being a woman that, all that
stress, all that repression, all thatanxiety was popping out at night.
Mm-hmm . And she didn't know, youhadn't talked to her about that?
No.
Just to be clear for the audience,, that's one of the things that I felt
(36:23):
guilty about from 1978 until 2015.
of having never told her how I reallyfelt about myself before we were married.
Uh, when she woke me up thatnight, I told her all about me.
and how I felt and how we got to here.
I expected to be divorced by morning.
(36:44):
I woke up the following morning andshe said to me, well, we're going to
stay together as long as you don'tpursue or do anything about this.
Okay.
More repression, huh?
Uh huh.
Well, at the time I said, okay, Ididn't even ask why I didn't go into
(37:07):
it because I knew on the other side, Ihad no options other than what I knew
from 1970 and in a short eight yearperiod, I'm sure society hasn't changed.
Yeah, I went along with it.
And it was a few days later, she askedme, maybe it might help you a little
bit to relieve some of the pressure ifyou bought some clothes and dressed.
(37:33):
Oh, I took her up on it.
I could only do it in the house.
I could only do it afterthe kids were asleep.
I could only do it at nighttime.
And that was it.
And I couldn't tell anybody about it.
So again, it's a big dark secret.
Did that help?
Or was it even just morestuff you had to pile on?
(37:54):
Oh, Lynn, you're so perceptive.
It's more stuff I piled on.
Yeah.
Uh huh.
It didn't help.
Taking everything off late at night,early in the morning, whenever, taking
everything off was nothing more thana reminder of what I couldn't be.
Yeah.
I didn't cross dress ordo anything like that.
(38:18):
I didn't even look anything up online whenwe got to the years when we had internet.
I never bothered to look or see anything.
Total repression.
The toll that it must have taken onyou and, and just even on your body, I
mean, mentally, physically, emotionally,that kind of toll, Wendy, I just can't
(38:40):
even imagine how you carried all that.
What a strong, courageous woman you are.
Thank you.
Well, what I've, what I learned throughthat whole experience and what I
learned on the other side of that washow powerful our minds really are.
All that fear, anxiety, and now shameand guilt because I'm married with,
(39:06):
with married kids and everything.
I mean, How more stuck can youget in a life that wasn't mine to
begin with, that I didn't want.
It was just a very difficult thing to gothrough, but what I did learn from that is
that my mind was actually making me sick.
(39:31):
Ooh.
At 39, I was diagnosed as type 2 diabetic.
My blood work was horrible withcholesterol and triglycerides and all
kinds of other stuff going on with me.
And I was quite overweight.
I didn't care what I looked like.
I didn't Care about anything like that.
(39:53):
I had, there were times when I hadto wear a suit and tie to go to work.
I didn't care how I looked in that.
So there was no stylish suits.
No.
And even when my wife at the timewould drag me off to a department
store to go shopping for newclothes because mine were just.
Worn out completely.
And I could care less Lynn.
(40:15):
I could care.
Yeah.
She would drag me into thedepartment store and show me this.
You'd look nice in this blah, blah, blah.
And the other one go, okay.
And she'd look at me and she'd go,you don't really want to be here.
No, you want to be over there.
The woman's department.
Yeah.
(40:36):
That was what I was afraid of.
Stop that.
Okay.
All through the 80s, I did my bestto repress this and deal with it.
Yeah, I smoked a lot of pot.
I drank a lot of beers.
All of that seemed to helpwith the repression and stuff.
Early 90s, she had suggested that Isee a therapist and a psychiatrist.
(41:01):
Basically, I found out that if you go intoa psychiatrist and you tell them about
your anxieties and your depressions andall that fun stuff, you don't really need
a legitimate underlying cause for it.
Just make up something.
Which is drugs, right?
I needed drugs for anxiety,depression, and all of that.
(41:22):
What a concept, right?
Here, just medicate yourself.
Exactly.
And as long as long as you'rewilling to come back for
appointments, you keep getting them.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
So that's going to fix it.
Yeah, well, I was living in afog through the 90s, through the
early 2000s and right up to 2015.
(41:44):
I had seen various psychiatrists andgiven all kinds of cocktails of stuff.
Now I can safely say,
I am so grateful to my male facsimile,my male representative as you were.
I'm so grateful to him for not makingme a drug addict and alcoholic.
(42:05):
And the worst thing he did was get meon a bunch of psych meds, cocktails.
Like I said, you were astrong woman inside there.
My career in tech was a really good thing,especially the last 15 to 20 years where
I was a consultant and would go into a.
(42:26):
Corporation and develop a system for them.
I would put together applications forwhat they needed to run their business.
These were largely globalcorporations that I worked for.
I loved being in contract.
It was so much betterthan being an employee.
When you could do what you were good atand make a difference in a different way.
(42:48):
But it sounds like you were making ahuge difference to these corporations.
Yes.
What I was doing and the workI was doing was very detailed.
I had imposter syndrome goinginto it because up until 1992,
I had never been on a PC.
Okay.
I worked for digital.
They weren't PCs.
(43:08):
Yeah.
No.
I'd never been on a PC.
I'd never been on windows.
I had never had anyexperience with any of that.
So I taught myself and I taught myself.
Programming and Visual Basic.
I taught myself in Microsoft's,uh, web development programming.
And I taught myself, uh, howto build and design databases.
(43:30):
And I was really good at it.
How did that feel?
Did you feel like you were reallyaccomplishing something there?
I did.
Yes.
Yeah.
See, that's one of the things.
And the reason I'm going into this isthat's one of the things that people like
me need is a distraction, something Ican immerse myself in every day from the
(43:53):
time I wake up to the time I go to sleepto try and prevent those thoughts about
who I really am from coming into mind.
Okay.
So this was, was.
Taking your brain and making itdo something else, something else.
And then there's the satisfactionof teaching yourself those things.
(44:15):
Most people just.
Especially our age, andyou and I are close in age.
Most people our age just kind offreak out if they can't figure
out just the tiniest little thing.
Exactly.
I hope there was some pride in whatyou were doing, you know, satisfaction.
I actually made more moneydoing that than I ever did as an
employee, and I enjoyed it more.
(44:36):
I didn't have to play office politics.
I actually dealt with directors and vicepresident level type people, most of
the time it was fascinating and wherethe imposter syndrome came in was I was
self taught when I got into, uh, one ofmy contracts, there were like 60 other
(44:57):
contract people, they're all like me.
Working under contract.
And I started, uh, well,where did you learn this?
Oh, I taught myself.
I found out everybody taught themselves.
Very few people went to school for this.
Oh, they didn't have a littlecertificate from Microsoft or
something that said, Oh, you mightget something like I had one of those.
(45:22):
But you taught yourself.
Yeah, exactly.
But I found out that was more commonplace.
In fact, some of the better developer,better developers were people who
were self taught because like me.
I had bookshelves just filled.
I was a great customer ofAmazon books, all tech books.
(45:44):
Yeah.
Immerse yourself in the books,learn new stuff and go to work.
Wow.
That distraction.
So did that relieve some of theangst, some of the depression?
It did.
It did.
And a lot of the time I was workingfrom home, so I could even just sit
(46:04):
there and I wasn't cross dressingor doing anything like that.
And that never even cameinto mind as an option.
I was working from home andjust totally immersed in it.
Then at nighttime, when I would just be.
Kind of winding down andrelaxing and things like that.
I had my music.
I was into audio and video equipment.
(46:26):
I had surround sound before it was evenpopular and crank it up the concert hall
level and just immerse myself into itjust to get away from the inner thoughts.
Just as an example of how this neverleaves you, one of my contracts had
me working at a law firm in CenterCity, Philadelphia, and there was a
(46:48):
little park next to the building Iwas in, and I would go there and eat
outside, especially in the springtimeand all, and I'd see women walking by.
I had to go in.
Seeing them triggered me.
That's how I should be.
I knew I didn't, couldn'tdo cross dressing.
I knew I wasn't any of the otherparts of the transgender community.
(47:11):
There is a part of the transgendercommunity that is considered
in 20th century terms thetranssexual part of the community.
These are people like myself who havealways known they were different from
an earlier age, could be anywhere fromthe single digits into the teens, but
(47:32):
somewhere along there, they would figureout there was something different.
We either transition toliving full time as women.
Some of us choose to just do the hormonetherapy because what I found out in
2014, late 2014, in one of my darkperiods, everything had changed in 2012.
(47:54):
Now keep in mind, 1970,I would be arrested.
I was called a freak.
I was told that there was no cure.
and no treatment possible.
Forget it, you're on your own.
2012, uh uh.
2012, it became a condition you'reborn with, treatable by therapy,
hormone replacement therapy,and any necessary surgeries.
(48:18):
That's huge.
Big change, huh?
Big change.
World Professional Associationfor Transgender Health.
WPATH.
I think that was their version7 of their transgender health
guides to the medical community.
I think that was the version, ifI'm not mistaken, that caused the
(48:40):
medical community to agree andchange their diagnostic codes.
Oh, okay.
Then they have to retrain the doctors.
Think you were a freak.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, they're probably gone now.
When I found that out, my wife andI had been married for 40 years.
(49:01):
Actually, for, I spent 45 years repressingand not knowing what was going on, if
anything, in the way of my diagnosisor how people were living or whatever.
It was, uh, quite eye openingbecause I said I was in a dark place.
Suicidal ideation is notsomething that is uncommon.
(49:24):
It's not uncommon inthe transgender world.
It's not uncommon in the LGBT world.
People that feel alone and not acceptedare very likely to have suicidal ideation.
That's a reality.
I was there big time.
67 years old, never lived aday in my life the way I knew I
(49:48):
was or how I, I did look it up.
I found out everythinghad changed that day.
It was late in the afternoon.
I went upstairs to my wifewho was in our family room.
And I said, remember whatwe talked about in 1978?
It never left.
It's back.
And now I found out.
It's changed.
(50:08):
I'm going to start therapy.
I don't know where this will go,but I'm going to find a therapist.
That was in late 2014.
I spent the rest of 2014looking for therapists.
I did find one.
I wrote to clinics, emails.
Here's my story.
Is there anyone in your clinicthat would be interested in
(50:29):
helping me or working with me?
One of the ones I wrote to came back,she came back to me and she said, I'm
presenting it at our staff meeting and shegoes, I'll send your email to all of them.
and see if anyone's of interest.
Well, two were interestedand I picked Stephanie.
Something about her vibe from her picture,her eyes in her picture, and the profile
(50:53):
thing that she wrote up in her brochure.
I picked her January of 2015.
I went to therapy for the first time.
You just knew she was the one, didn't you?
Well, I wasn't sure at thatpoint, but I was very nervous.
I walked in.
Now, keep in mind, Lynn, she'sthe first person I've talked to
openly about this since 1970.
(51:15):
My wife and I didn't even reallyhave a long open conversation.
I just told her how I felt, what I'd beenthrough, et cetera, and left it at that.
That was the end.
Forty five years of just hangingon to that and not Feeling like
you could share in depth anything,anybody, any of that stuff.
Exactly.
(51:36):
Wow.
So what was that likewhen you met with her?
Oh my God, Lynn, it was an extendedsession because it was an intro session.
Uh, first session.
I sat there and poured my guts out.
It just felt so incredible to beable to freely talk to another
human being about what was goingon in my head and how I felt and
(51:58):
what I felt about who I really was.
And at the same time, I talked about howguilty I felt, the shame that I felt,
and how difficult it was to just get by.
This was probably the most, oneof the most powerful moments
up to that point in my life.
I'm standing up, I'm getting ready toleave the office, and Stephanie's sitting
(52:23):
there with my file folder on her lap.
She looks up at me and shegoes, what's your name?
Without even thinking, Ijust snapped back, Wendy.
My joy, amazement,everything was like, wow.
She crossed out my male facsimile'sname, wrote Wendy on my file folder,
(52:46):
and from that day forward, I was Wendy.
How amazing.
To have that, the quickest shift.
Uh huh.
To be acknowledged bysomeone just like that.
Exactly.
And she was the first person in myentire 67 year life to actually accept
me for who I am, what I am withoutany burden or need to understand.
(53:14):
I've got tears in my eyes now.
Oh, that's amazing.
Only a matter of A month and a halfearlier, I was going to end it all.
And now here she is totallyaccepting me for who I am.
Wendy, you have shared so much withus today and I'm just delighted
with everything we've talked about.
(53:35):
So let's talk a little bitabout your coaching program
and how people can contact you.
Okay.
Well, the best way to contact me,especially if you're tired of people
not hearing you, not believing you, uh,need someone to talk to about abuse,
trauma, people not understanding you,please reach out to me, meetwendycole.
(54:00):
com.
Find something to geton my calendar there.
and talk with me.
And if you're not quite ready forthat conversation yet, subscribe to my
newsletter, at least until you're ready.
And that way I can continueto support you from afar.
Whatever life change you'regoing through, I can help you
(54:20):
with and that's meet wendycole.
com and thank you to ouraudience for tuning in today.
I'm Lynn Murphy, your host andfounder of Women Who Push The Limits.
We've had such a conversation todaywith Wendy Cole, who is definitely.
A woman who pushes thelimits in so many ways.
Wendy, thank you for sharing with us.
(54:40):
For those of you who are listeningtoday, if you enjoyed this, please
subscribe to our channel, give us arating, leave a review, share this with
others and join our Facebook group.
There's a Facebook group forwomen who push the limits.
Look for that and join inour inspiring conversations.
Thank you for joining us today.
Stay safe, stay happy, and rememberour motto, find your voice.
(55:03):
Speak your truth and change the world.
I'm Lynne Murphy.
We'll see you next time.
Next time on Demystifying the TransgenderJourney Be yourself and blend in.
I don't like the word passing.
That's a big word in the community even.
No, it's not passing.
I refer to it as blending in.
Just blending into societyas any other woman.
(55:26):
Thank you for joining us todayon this episode of Demystifying
the Transgender Journey.
Remember to subscribe so youdon't miss a single episode
of our fascinating interviews.
You can also find more information onour website, thetransgenderjourney.
com.
So until next time, staycurious and stay kind.
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