Fitting Into Their Own Skin

Lynda Bengtsson realized there were some drawbacks to a successful transition the day she had an automobile accident. She could see quite clearly what damage had been done to her car, but the CHP officer on the scene dismissed her opinions. “He treated me like a second-class citizen,” she says, “like it was impossible that I would understand anything about cars.”

Very frustrating for a former Marine who has rebuilt more than one engine. But it was just one of many revelations she had during her first year as a woman.

“I [had been] a white male, at the top of the totem pole,” says Bengtsson, 34, who lives in Eagle Rock. “I had no social issues, no perception of prejudice, I could do what I want, walk down any street. As a woman, it’s very different. There are ATMs I would never go to now. I do feel much more vulnerable.”

She is, however, happier than she’s ever been in her life, and blessed with the kind of support from colleagues, family and friends that she never dreamed of during the years she tried to pretend she could live her life as a man. “I keep waiting for someone to have the reaction I was so afraid of,” she says. “And it really hasn’t happened.”

For many of the hundreds of transgender men and women in the Los Angeles area, recent social and medical changes have lightened the burden of living outside the mainstream. Bengtsson found support where she assumed she would meet rejection; Mike Hernandez, a lawyer who transitioned from female to male 10 years ago, has watched the emergence of a true community with increasing hope and serenity; and for Mona Rios and Boe Randal, parents of a 10-year old daughter, the discovery that they were not alone has profoundly changed their lives.

Throughout history, there have been men who lived as women and women who lived as men, but it wasn’t until 1952 that the well-publicized “sex change operation” of Christine Jorgenson brought the concept of transsexualism into the American consciousness. For subsequent decades, transsexuals were considered shocking figures--at best, mentally conflicted; at worst, morally corrupt.

But in the last 10 years, as treatment of gender dysphoria has evolved, the once closeted and isolated population of transsexuals in this country has become more open and unified. In the wake of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, this newly dubbed “transgender” community has grown in number, diversity and social presence. Brought together by the Internet and emboldened by alliances with the gay and lesbian community and their own increasing numbers, transgender people are forcing society to reconsider, once again, its definition of gender, sex and civil rights.

“They’re following a fairly standard arc,” says USC adjunct professor Vern Bullough, a historian who has written many books on sexuality. “First, people come out, break the silence, then they overcome their own differences and unite, then they demand their rights and acceptance from the mainstream. The transgender community is now becoming united and very visible for the first time ever.”

For historians and activists, the narrative of the transgender experience is a chronicle of social change; for Bengtsson, Hernandez, Rios and Randall, it is simply the way life occurred.

Since childhood, Bengtsson had known she was not really a boy. The only son in a family of four children, she had waited patiently for something to happen that would make her feel different from her sisters, and that something never came.

“It’s impossible to explain,” she says, “like trying to describe the color blue to a blind person. When my eyes were closed, I was this one person, and then I would open them, and there was this other person instead.”

Although they had no words to explain it, Bengtsson’s family also knew something was wrong. “When Dave hit puberty, something happened,” says Holly LeMasters, Bengtsson’s older sister. “He just seemed so unhappy; something was just off.”

The family, she says, was completely shocked by Bengtsson’s decision to join the Marines. “It was so not him,” she says.

“I was running from myself, from my family,” Bengtsson says. “I was looking for a place to get lost, to fit in.”

On leave after boot camp, Bengtsson seemed even more distant than before. “It was like no one was there,” LeMasters says. “And after that we hardly ever heard from him. For years.”

Bengtsson spent almost 12 years trying to will herself into being male, drawing on the discipline and order of the armed forces to quell her true feelings. As she approached 30, however, she realized that this was not a permanent answer. Her research had transcended episodes of “Donahue,” and she knew all about hormone treatments and sexual reassignment surgery. She also knew she wasn’t going to be able to do either in the Marine Corps.

“It’s really too bad,” she says, “because in a lot of ways, the Marines would be the perfect place to transition. Because really you are not judged on how you look or sound, but on how you perform.”

Just as she had made her decision, she was offered a job as a juvenile probation officer in Orange County. Although this might not be the ideal setting for transition either, it offered her a salary that would pay for hormone treatments and allow her to begin saving for the surgery.

After a year of leading a double life, as David during the week and Lynda on the weekends, she began taking hormones in 1999. She was still living publicly as a man, and as the hormones began softening her features, changing her shape, life as a probation officer got a little complicated.

“Way before any of my colleagues noticed, I had kids picking up on me,” she says. “I started getting the ‘ma’am-sirs.’ You know, ‘yes, ma’am, I mean sir, I mean ma’am.’ The first time it happened I freaked out. I mean, I had this kid up against a wall and I was dressing him down pretty good. I still don’t know how he knew. Maybe it was because my hair was getting long, or maybe,” she adds, laughing, “it was just all that female energy.”

It is hard to imagine Bengtsson pinning anyone against a wall--she is not a big woman, with a gentle manner and a soft, light voice that rises and falls with her restless gesturing hands. She feared she would have to leave her job to take her transition any further, but her Employment Assistance Program representative asked only how much time off she thought she would need.

Around the same time, her parents paid her a surprise visit. Although her sisters were aware of her transition, her parents were not. Greeting them as David, Bengtsson finally asked her mother how she would feel about having another daughter. “They were both very concerned, and my Dad, my Dad,” she repeats a little more softly, “he only wanted to know if there was anything he could do to help.”

When Bengtsson went home for the following Thanksgiving, she went home as Lynda. “We were all very nervous,” says LeMaster.

When Lynda first walked in the door, LeMaster says, “it was very weird. But Lynda seemed so much more present than Dave had ever been. Much more real and happy. Soon it was like ‘Oh, hello, there you are after all.’ ”

Their mother is having the hardest time adjusting, LeMaster says. She still calls Lynda “Dave” sometimes and agonizes over what to tell extended family members or Lynda’s high school friends. But there is no rejection or condemnation.

“I keep reminding Lynda that although she’s had her whole life to deal with this, we’ve had less then two years,” says LeMaster. “For me, it’s like a reincarnation, like Dave died and Lynda was born. And it’s amazing how different they are--Lynda is so much more open and articulate. Even her handwriting is better.”

Although her family stood by her, many of her buddies from the Marines have not spoken to her since she told them of her new life. And as her transition proceeded, some of her colleagues in the probation department were clearly uncomfortable. So when a job as a systems technician opened up in another county office, she took it.

“I really miss working with the kids,” she says. “Maybe someday I’ll go back.”

The cost of the transition process is Lynda’s biggest worry right now. She is still saving for sexual reassignment surgery, which costs more than $10,000, and it’s slow going, since none of her other transition-related medical expenses, including the hormones, which cost several hundred dollars a month, are covered by insurance, a fact Bengtsson finds infuriating.

“I don’t know if I could have done this without the support of family and friends,” Bengtsson says. “Sometimes I think I should have done this 10 years sooner. But then, it wouldn’t have been like this 10 years ago.”

Former Daughter’s Beard Is a Symbol

Mike Hernandez’s father hates the beard. Not because it grows from the chin of the person he once called daughter; after 10 years, he and his wife have long since accepted Martha’s decision to live as Mike. “You’re a grown-up, you’re a lawyer, you always made good decisions before” were his words at the time.

But the beard is another thing. Long, dark and luxurious, it is a lovely beard, but every time Mike visits, his father threatens it with the garden shears. The Hernandez family is Cuban, and although they’ve lived in the United States for almost 40 years, the sight of a man with a Castro-esque beard still has a rather dramatic effect. “It’s a problem for many Cubans,” Hernandez says.

For the beard’s owner, it is also a symbol--of masculinity. It is also an attempt, he jokes, to compensate for the lack of hair on his head. “One of the drawbacks of testosterone,” he says. “If you’ve got the bald gene, it all goes south.”

That hair loss is an issue marks a decided shift in Hernandez’s life. For many who transition from female to male, baldness, like facial hair, is considered a blessing, especially in the early years after transition. After a decade of life as a man, however, Hernandez says, his gender identity is no longer constantly on his mind. “Whole days, weeks go by without me thinking about it,” he says. “Now I tend to brood about other issues, like aging.”

Yet the one time the 39-year-old Woodland Hills litigation attorney shaved off his beard, the aging issue took on a whole different twist.

“He came to work looking like a 17-year-old boy,” says Darcy Mullen, an attorney who works with Hernandez. “I laughed so hard, and I told him that he had to immediately grow it back. I was concerned that he wouldn’t be taken seriously by defense counsel and the court.”

Mullen met Hernandez in 1992, and although she did not for a moment doubt he was a man, she says that when she shook his hand and looked into his eyes, she felt that something about him was “soft.” The two hit it off immediately and began working together. Mullen discovered they had a mutual acquaintance who had recently transitioned from female to male. It dawned on Mullen that something similar might account for the softness she had felt.

“I asked him if he was also transitioning,” she says. “His response was mostly of surprise. I apparently was one of the only--if not the only--people to question his gender.”

Disclosure is a lifelong issue for any transgender person. At worst, it may damage or end a relationship; at best it requires a conversation full of explanation and edification. Hernandez has been with his partner, who is also female-to-male, for nine years, so he hasn’t had to have “the big conversation” that precedes a sexual relationships with non-transgender people. And he doesn’t feel obligated to open up to every acquaintance and co-worker. But, he says, “if you get intimate with someone, at some point you have to have a chat.”

He has had that chat so many times that it has begun to bore him, although he knows that telling the truth, over and over again, is the only way the transgender community can dispel the myths that surround it.

“For folks who are used to black and white, this is disconcerting,” he says. “Just as many people didn’t think women could be pilots or lawyers. Any time you shake up a system, there is turmoil. Internal and external turmoil.”

His story, he says, is not the standard transsexual tale in that he does not remember longing to be a boy as a child. He was, however, a very masculine girl and then a very masculine woman. He tried to be straight and failed miserably, he says. Working as an attorney in San Francisco, he decided he was gay and lived as a lesbian for five or six years but never really felt like he fit in. Then, at a gay and lesbian conference in Portland, he heard a female-to-male speaker at a workshop. “My stomach just hit the floor,” he says.

Back home in San Francisco, Hernandez began hanging out at female-to-male support groups, meeting transsexuals and cross dressers and other masculine women. “I was afraid lesbians wouldn’t accept me [if I transitioned]. And I didn’t know if I could do it. I hadn’t been socialized as a man.”

In the end, though, his concerns did not matter. “This is what I had to do,” he says. “The conference had been in October; I started taking hormones in March.”

His lover agreed to keep an open mind, but after six months, the relationship ended. “Not surprising, since she is a lesbian and I was now identifying as a man.”

Hernandez continued to work as a woman until during one trial the judge was clearly quite confused. “She kept asking who I was again until finally she figured it out. But even then, she thought I was going from a man to a woman. So the next day, I grabbed a friend and went shopping for some suits.”

The firms he worked with, he says, were very accommodating; one lawyer even pointed out that Mike was much nicer than Martha. “And I think she’s right. As a woman, I was very angry. Now I’m much more at peace with myself.”

He also sees that many of the stereotypes regarding social expectations are true. “People now do assume I understand auto repair,” he says, “and the hardest thing has been was realizing that I can’t tell [a stranger] how beautiful their kids are, because I’m a man and so might be a threat.”

On the other hand, wardrobe issues are simplified. “My clothes last forever now,” he says. “And my shoes, man, it really is scandalous how much better men’s stuff is than women’s.”

An Instant Bond Between the Couple

As a couple, Mona Rios and Boe Randal have lived one of the most dramatic transgender stories possible--a man who became a woman married to a woman who became a man. Within the marriage, each has been the husband, each has been the wife. Neither of them uses those terms however; they prefer the word “spouse.”

When discussing their 30-year relationship, even they sometimes get confused. But like many couples, they vividly remember the moment they met.

Rios, then 14, had recently arrived in Los Angeles, leaving what she calls a dysfunctional family situation in Northern California to live with one of her mother’s ex-boyfriends. Randal and his family were neighbors in the Hollywood apartment building. “I remember he walked into my room just as I was putting on my makeup and he just stood there,” Rios says, “and stared.”

In that moment, the two discovered a deep and enduring bond. Both had been dressing, and living, as the opposite sex since they were very young. When they first met, Boe’s name was Karen Ann, and Mona’s was William John.

Although they did not become a couple until much later, for the next 20 years, they were more than friends, they were family. They hung out together, ran around together, partied together. For Rios, especially, Randal was always a safe haven, the one person who never required an explanation, the one person who understood. One horrible night, Rios remembers, she had “my ‘Crying Game’ moment.” A new boyfriend, became enraged and tried to kill her when he discovered her anatomy was not female. She fled to Randal’s apartment, naked, for protection.

So when she entered her 30s and decided that she really needed to settle down, she turned to her closest friend to see if somehow they could fashion a “normal” life, as a couple.

At the time, Rios, who was taking female hormones, thought of herself as a feminine gay man, and Randal considered himself a lesbian. But they decided to give it a shot.

“It seemed like the natural thing to do,” says Randal.

“We loved each other,” says Rios. “We still do.”

They got married, and four months later, Randal was pregnant, which was a bit of a shock; he had never had the desire to parent a child, much less carry one. Rios, on the other hand, was ecstatic. In an effort to conform to their new roles, they joined a church where cross-dressing was not acceptable. So Rios stopped taking hormones, put away her dresses and donned a suit--”I had to learn to walk in boys’ shoes; I had never worn them,” she says--and Randal struggled into his first skirt, his first pair of heels.

“Oh, man, I hated it,” he says now, laughing. “And it was awful, I felt like everyone was staring at me.”

“They were staring at you,” Rios says. “You looked like a football player in those dresses. And he was so rebellious. He would not do any of the things around the house a woman is supposed to do.”

“I’d never done them,” Randal says, holding his hands up, palms out. “I tried it for eight months. And then I said, forget it. I gave my purses to her.”

He went back to his big T-shirts, his baggy jeans.

When their daughter, Elizabeth, was born, it became clear that the parental roles were not going to follow conventional rules either. Rios, although then still making a go of it as a male, felt all the maternal urges that Randal did not.

“I’m definitely more of a father,” Randal says.

Although Rios continued for a while to present herself as a male, she still cross-dressed in private, and after a few years, she began taking hormones again and dressing pretty much full time. To the world, they look like an average family--Rios is slender and lithe enough to be a dancer, her dark hair pulled back from a heart-shaped face, and Randal is wide-eyed, wide-shouldered and boyishly friendly. But from the time 10-year-old Elizabeth was small, her parents have been completely open about their biological history and their choices.

“I would rather deal with it now,” says Rios, “than have her grow up and hate us for lying to her or hiding things.”

Until about two years ago, they believed that there was no one out there like them. They did not realize that the word “transgender” even existed. Although they knew of transsexual women, the ones they had seen on television did not seem to speak for, or to, either Rios or Randal. And they didn’t know a transsexual man was even possible. Then one day while on the Internet, Rios discovered several transgender Web sites; a while later, Randal saw a couple of advertisements for female-to-male support groups in a local free newspaper. “I’m reading these things and thinking, ‘Hey, that’s me,’ ” he says.

“It was just such a relief,” says Rios, “you know, to find other people like us, to know, oh that’s who we are.”

Since then they have embraced their new lives. They’ve had their names changed on their driver’s licenses and transitioned at work, where neither one encountered any real problems. The bathroom issue that baffles so many employers was not an obstacle--at the manufacturing plant where Rios works on the assembly line, there is only one lavatory, and Randal has long used the men’s room at his IBM office. “I never have any trouble there,” he says. “Back when I was trying to be a girl, I would walk into the women’s room, and women would yell.”

Both are planning to have chest surgery in the near future, although neither has immediate plans for genital surgery.

Their daughter, they say, has adjusted to their new identities. “She knows who had her,” says Randal. “But she usually calls me Boe, or Dad.”

“I told her I would always be her father,” says Rios, “and she sometimes calls me Dad, but when we’re in public, she calls me Mom. I tell her not to worry about what other people think. I don’t any more. You have to be who you are.”