Stephanie
Thorne recently realised a lifelong dream: To
become the man she always felt she was. Now as
Stephan Thorne, he's finding that his journey
has just begun.
After she had told the police chief, and
after she had told her captain, and after the
reporters had begun banging on the station doors
and calling every five minutes for comment, San
Francisco police sergeant Stephanie Ann Thorne
reported to work one Thursday afternoon last May
and readied herself for the announcement to the
4:00 watch. She wore her standard sergeant's
uniform: blue pants, blue shirt, polished black
shoes, seven-pointed star over the left breast.
She waited while the officers about to commence
the 4:00 pm to 2:00 am swing shift had their
standard daily briefing.
Then she got up, faced the dozen uniformed
officers standing in the small room before her,
and cleared her throat.
"I don't know how many
of you know what's going on," she said. "But I
want to tell you why the press is here."
She told it to them steadily, standing as she
spoke, in the same item-by-item order she had
used when she told it to the San Francisco chief
of police. She said she was a transsexual,
female-to-male. She said she would be
"transitioning" - that was the word she used -
on the job. She said that within a few weeks'
time she would leave work temporarily, long
enough to undergo sex-reassignment surgery: and
that when she came back, as a man, she would
resume her duties - his duties - as a San
Francisco police sergeant.
When she was finished there was an extremely
thick silence in the room. Stephanie Thorne
relaxed, just a little, considering the
expressions on the faces before her: The other
officers looked wary, but no one had snickered
or turned away. They looked compassionate,
actually, and when the questions began it was
protocol they wanted to understand first: What
were they supposed to call her, or him, once the
surgery was done? "Call me Steve," said Sergeant
Thorne.
Transitioning. Such a calm turn of phrase,
academic and cool, suggesting not a sudden
one-two transformation but a slow controlled
slide from one thing to another; the
dictionary's opening words of definition are
"movement, passage, or change." And here at his
kitchen table is Sergeant Stephan Andrew Thorne,
a 39-year-old police officer with broad
shoulders and clipped blond hair and
tortoiseshell glasses and a parrot tattoo on his
upper right arm - transitioning. Part-way there.
The hormones take a long time to completely kick
in, and the surgeries are not over yet. Watching
him is still wondrously disorienting. She can
show up nicely prepared, the medical literature
underlined and the biographical material all
digested, and it is still wondrously
disorienting: you still study him, listening,
hunting for clues.
His proportions look male, sort of: He's
stocky, bigger than he wants to be (he's losing
weight), thick around the middle, ring in his
left ear. His hands and feet look female -
there's still some delicacy in the contours,
although the backs of his fingers have sprouted
soft, dark hair, like the hair that is
thickening up the length of his legs. His voice
is low and slightly raspy. His chest is broad
and flat under his sleeveless T-shirt. He has a
feminine way of moving his fingers when he
talks, and a masculine way of setting his weight
on both feet and jamming a hand into his picket
when he answer the telephone. His face is
smooth-skinned, open, friendly, faintly soft;
the rounded line of his jaw maybe, or the
crinkle of his kind hazel eyes.
You know those optical-illusion pictures -
the black vase that becomes white columns that
become a black vase? That's what it's like
watching Stephen Thorne. It's impossible not to
grab at reference points. He startles even
himself, feeling old ground lurch away; some
weeks earlier he put in a call to the San
Francisco Human Rights Commission and had a
brief and breathtaking interchange with the
efficient gay man on the other end of the
telephone. "He said, 'I'd like to ask you some
statistical question, general data,'" Thorne
recalls. "He said, 'Your race?' I said, 'White'.
He said, 'Your age?' I said, '39', He said,
'Your sex?' I paused and I said, 'Male', He
said, 'Your sexual orientation?' I paused
again." And now Thorne begins to laugh,
mimicking his own astonished stammer: "I said,
'Het- het - heterosexual.' And I said, 'Oh my
God. I'm a white heterosexual male. I've become
one of them.'"
For 24 years, from the time Stephanie Thorne
was old enough to have some dim understanding of
what these roles might men, she - we will bow
here to a nearly insurmountable confusion of
pronouns - lived her life as a lesbian, a
radical-feminist lesbian at that. She was raised
in Lincoln, Nebraska, the younger of two
daughters of a single mother, and she was told
many years later than early on there were small
hints, dropped and ignored, like the doctor who
looked at her as a baby and said jokingly,
noticing her big barrel chest, 'This kid should
have been a boy!'
She refused to wear dresses; when she was
baptised as a child, she ripped off the
baptismal dress the instant the ceremony was
over and reappeared, relieved, in blue jeans and
cowboy boots. She played football with the boys.
She had beloved family friends who always called
her Mike. She bowed, miserably, to the dress
code at school, but she would put pants on under
the obligatory skirts. When she walked into the
girls' bathrooms, she was sometimes scolded and
shooed out at once; people assumed she was a boy
looking for trouble.
Gym class was particularly excruciating.
Thorne says - snapping on those old,
standard-issue bloomer uniforms, the 1960s gym
suits that most girls hated just because they
looked stupid, felt to Thorne like a humiliation
almost beyond endurance.
"When I read stories
now of boys being make to wear dresses for
punishment, I think, Oh, I know how that kid
felt." Thorne says, "I felt as a kid that I
should have been a boy. I knew that physically I
was not a boy - I had the anatomy of a girl, and
I had my family and school telling me I was a
girl - but I just felt that I should have been a
boy. In stories and movies I never identified
with the female, always the male."
She knew from the earliest stirrings of
sexual feelings that she was attracted to women,
but there was no open gay life in Lincoln, and
the only clues Stephanie had about what was
making her different came from watching an
effeminate gay male friend of her older
sister's. When Stephanie came across a book
describing lesbian bars, she went immediately to
her sister's friend and confided, for the first
time, that if there really was a sub-culture
where conventional notions of male and female
had been upended this way, she needed a guide to
show her the way in.
"I told him that I was
like he was," Thorne says. "I swear, I could
feel a physical weight just lift. And he laughed
and said, 'Well, I thought so.'"
Her sister's friend took her to the gay bars
in Omaha, an hour's drive away, and by the time
Stephanie was a junior in high school she had
settle into a rebellious life as a strongly
male-identified lesbian. She found a few
girlfriends. She got in trouble at school for
tacking up information about gay gatherings in
Lincoln. She told her mother (who took it rather
calmly, as Thorne recalls). She endured the full
passage through puberty, appalled by breasts and
menstruation, convinced that her own body was
betraying her. She began dressing in drag
sometimes, with a fake moustache and a snappy
man's blazer and her blonde hair cut in one of
those androgynous, clean-cut-pop-singer
shags.
Was she already what the modern psychiatric
textbooks would call a transsexual? "A
persistent discomfort and sense of
inappropriateness about one's assigned sex" is
the opening definition of transsexualism in
DSM-III-R, the American Psychiatric
Association's 1987 manual of mental disorders,
which proceeds in more detail: "Invariably there
is the wish to live as a member of the other
sex… People with this disorder usually
complain that they are uncomfortable wearing the
clothes of their assigned sex…These people
often find their genital repugnant, which may
lead to persistent requests for sex reassignment
by hormonal and surgical means…The
estimated prevalence is one per 30,000 for males
and one per 100,000 for females…"
Much of this described the young Stephanie,
certainly (although he prevalence figures may
now be out of date - some clinics that undertake
these surgeries now report an equal number of
male and female patients), and through the gay
bars she knew enough about the "hormonal and
surgical means" to understand the more dramatic
steps that a desperate person could take. But
for a long time she wasn't desperate. Lesbian
culture had suitable niches for a young woman
with strongly masculine inclinations, and when
Stephanie was introduced to the women's
movement, she began to believe that perhaps what
she had wanted all along was not to be a man,
but to act like a man - and that feminism was
helping redefine the notion of acting like a
man.
"I experienced very
profound feminist, or womanist, pride at that
point," Thorne says. "My thoughts were: If I am
out as a lesbian and I use feminism, my
understanding is that I should be able to walk
in anywhere and demand a job, whatever that job
is, that men have typically held - and that
maybe this will satisfy me."
For two decades that was how she lived, both
in Nebraska and then in California, where she
moved in 1979. She found both love in lesbian
relationships and work in conventionally macho
jobs - she spent five years as a gas-pipeline
maintenance worker before turning to police
work, first in the affluent northern California
city of Palo Alto and then in San Francisco,
where she was hired in 1984. Stephanie was a
well-respected police officer who earned her
promotions; she was open about her sexual
orientation, comfortable in her police district,
and chosen president of the Women Officers
Network. It wasn't until a few years ago, Thorne
says, that it became impossible to avoid the
fact that something was deeply wrong - that she
was becoming more and more unhappy, withdrawn
and socially uncomfortable.
"I began to feel
disconnected," Thorne says. "I described it to
my therapist as feeling veiled. I said, 'It's as
if there are all these veils in front of me, and
I just want to pull them all away so that I can
touch people, and when I touch them, I can feel
them."
She didn't know what it was. She knew that
she had spent many years treading what she saw
as a careful line in the lesbian community, that
it was all right to act masculine in an uppity,
in-your-face way, but that it was not all right
to act too masculine, to really begin passing
for a man. And after many months of therapy,
Stephanie found herself weeping one night with
the woman she had been seeing - weeping so
uncontrollably that she believed something
profoundly important was happening to her.
"It was an epiphany,"
Thorne says. "I realised that I should have been
male. Absolutely crystal clear for me was the
realisation that I was grieving for the fact
that I was not a man."
Now, finally, Stephanie Thorne began learning
in detail the definition of transsexualism and
the medical options available to a person
unshakably convinced that he or she is in a body
that doesn't match the psyche. "I didn't know if
I was transsexual," Thorne says. "But I began to
believe I might be." She joined a local support
group of FTMs, which is the insiders' acronym
for Female-to-Males, and in the regular meetings
Stephanie began debriefing the men she saw
around her - for all of them were in some stage
of living their lives as men. She peppered them
with question: What were the surgeries like?
What were the dangers of hormones? What was it
like finding lovers?
The
answers were complex, even in that small group,
and nationally they are more complex still. The
standard course of treatment for a transsexual
comes in several stages: extensive therapy, to
make sure the person is genuinely suffering from
what doctors sometimes call gender dysphoria,
followed by regular hormone injections, followed
- if the person decides to proceed - by
surgeries. The hormones alone are powerful
business. A female changing to a male takes
testosterone, an injection every couple of
weeks; and the effects, many of which are
irreversible, can be dramatic: The voice
deepens, facial hair sprouts, the menses stop,
muscle mass increases, the clitoris enlarges,
and if there's a family history of baldness, the
hairline recedes.
James Green, a Bay Area writer who edits a
newsletter for female-to-male transsexuals, says
many transsexuals are so convincingly altered by
the steady intake of hormones that they dress
and live as males without ever undergoing the
full course of the surgeries.
"I would say probably
75 percent of the people who are now living as
men have not had the genital reconstruction and
may not ever have it," says Green, who did
undergo the female-to-male genital surgery in
1990, two years after he began taking hormones.
"But, to a man, they want breast
reconstruction."
What that means, for a female-to-male, is
breast removal - a double mastectomy,
essentially the procedure that cancer patients
sometimes undergo, except that the chest wall is
left intact. The removal and subsequent
reconstruction can cost as much as $7,000, a sum
rarely picked up by insurance companies. When it
is complete, there is of course the lower half
to consider, and here the options are both more
expensive and problematic: Surgeons can
construct a penis, but the patient has to make
what might be called a choice between good form
and good function. An undersized but sexually
responsive penis can be fashioned from the
existing female genital tissue; a normal-sized
penis can be built through more elaborate
surgeries, with skin or muscle grafted from
other parts of the body and fashioned into a
tube, but the bigger penis will not have natural
erections (there are stiffening inserts
available) and may not have much sexual
sensation.
It was a great deal for Stephanie Thorne to
take in, and for a while she wrestled with her
own increasingly complicated feelings. The more
she learned about it, the more convinced she was
that she had finally found the right definition
of herself. But the idea of surgery stopped her,
especially the breast removal, and she worried
aloud about it with her FTM support group:
Wasn't this self-mutilation, even for a person
who had never felt comfortable with breasts in
the first place?
"Their response was -
Decide what's right for you," Thorne says, "But
what they also expressed was: You will probably
not continue to feel that way."
They were right. Thorne had her first
testosterone injection in December 1993, and
within a month the changes had begun in her
voice - his voice, it now seemed appropriate to
say, for it was deepening so rapidly that Thorne
was being addressed on the telephone as "sir".
She told her colleagues at work that she had a
cold. Her hair was thickening, growing where it
never had; the shape of her legs was changing;
the extra weight on her body was rearranging
itself from her hips and thighs up to her
midsection. She was beginning the passage, and
as she began confiding in the people closest to
her - her sister, her mother, a few women
officers - an uneasy and intensely curious eye
was fixed upon her, as though she was
undertaking a simultaneous betrayal and amazing
infiltration into enemy lines. "One of the women
officers said something like, you know, Are you
going to become an asshole now?" says Thorne; he
is chuckling as he says it, but the plaintive
meaning is clear to anybody who's ever felt
frustrated and mystified by the opposite
sex.
"And I said, 'No, no -
friends are asking me that all the time, and I
promise not to do that. I won't become an
asshole."
But something was happening inside, and it
broadsided even Stephanie Thorne, who after all
had never been a woman of conventional bearing
or feminine trappings. "Increased libido" is the
dry physicians' term for one of the sex
characteristics brought on by testosterone, and
as Thorne continued taking the hormone shots she
found herself, on occasion, acting perilously
like somebody she might have called a sexist
clod six months earlier. She had always been
physically attracted to women, but she had never
behaved like this:
"I was being shown into
an office, and the woman who was showing me in
had a low-cut top on. And I found I had to
consciously, wilfully pull my eyes up - and I
had a thought, an instantaneous thought that
came to mind."
Thorne clears his throat, embarrassed, trying
to think of a polite way to put this. "My first
thought was Gimme some of that!" It was so
startling as to be almost comic, he says, but it
happen again, as Thorne found herself - all
right, himself - staring transfixed at a woman
in tight pants sashaying away on television.
"And I was a die-hard feminist," Thorne says.
Stephanie Thorne had mostly dismissed the idea
that testosterone alone could so swiftly rest a
person's moral and sexual inner clock, but
Stephan Thorne was beginning to believe it. It
struck him that he was feeling altogether like
an adolescent boy, that the hormones were
pushing him through a second puberty, but one
that felt far more pleasant than the first.
And just as the men in the support group had
predicted, he lost all uncertainty about taking
off the breasts; as a woman, Stephanie had never
liked breasts very much, but as a man he found
them ridiculous, as though he had odd mounds of
flesh growing out of his arm. That was when he
took out a loan - Thorne prefers not to say now
much - and scheduled what he saw as the first of
the surgical procedures that were going to fit
together his outside and inside selves.
He had to make his decision about work, too:
Stephanie had loved being a police officer, and
it bothered the emerging Stephan that
transsexuals often left their old lives entirely
behind when they made their change. But it was
hard to fathom announcing a sex change as a
uniformed cop.
"I was fearful about
what this would mean, "he says. "I was afraid I
might be fired. I was afraid that if I wasn't
fired I might lose my backup in a dangerous
situation. I was afraid that my life at work
might be so unacceptable that I'd have to
leave."
A news story from Nebraska helped set his
resolve. He had been visiting Lincoln when he
heard about a woman who had been living as a
male and was raped by two local boys after her
identity was exposed; several days later, after
the police were slow to respond to the attack,
the rapists came back and shot the transsexual
and two of her friends. [Editors' Note:
Brandon Teena, 1994 - "Boys Don't Cry"
Movie]
"hat crystallized the
need to come out," Thorne says. "I decided to
approach my life and my situation with my usual
direction and candour - "Well, this is what I
am, so I'm going to be it."
At least on paper, Thorne learned, citTy law
protected his job - San Francisco had just
included, in the discrimination-protection
categories for people in city and country jobs,
"gender identity". And after some careful
planning - he saw, for instance, that he could
avoid using both the men's and women's bathrooms
by using the special handicapped bathroom
downstairs - he decided to make his
announcements. He told the chief of police
first, and then the newly appointed captain at
the station where Thorne worked; then, because
he knew somebody would get wind of it sooner or
later, he held a small press conference at
police headquarters so that Thorne and the
police chief could explain together what was
about to happen.
Even in a city with San Francisco's
reputation for taking nearly everything in
stride, this was a new one. 'S.F. Cop Plans Sex
Change Surgery' read the headlines in the San
Francisco Chronicle, and the news story itself
suggested some of the mutterings that Thorne's
announcement inspired: "The officers have this
perception that this is going to make San
Francisco the laughingstock of the country,"
read a quote from someone identified only as a
'law enforcement official'. But the station
captain, Michael Dower, was impressed both by
Stephanie Thorne's preparations and the calm
she-changing-to-he showed as Thorne explained
the situation to colleagues.
"I thought it was
terrific," Dower says. "Sergeant Thorne is
obviously very tough and has a lot of
self-confidence. He's been through a lot in his
life. And his expectations, I think, are
reasonable. He knows there are going to be ups
and downs with this, but he's not going to run
from anything - he loves his profession, he's
got a lot of years vested in police work, and I
respect him for his decision. I know there are
still officers who are having problems with
this, but my feeling is, the longer Sergeant
Thorne is back in the workplace, it will
work."
That it will work - that he will be fully
accepted as a man, both by his colleagues and by
people on the street - is now clear to Stephen
Thorne, and he says he admires the efforts some
of the station personnel are making already.
"I'll get telephone
calls, and they'll say, 'Yeah, she's right
here.'" Thorne says, "And they'll hand me the
phone and say, 'He! Sorry, I will get this
right.'"
His appearance will keep changing as he
continues with the hormones, and he intends to
finish out the surgeries; he has determined
already that he wants the metoidioplasty, the
procedure that results in a smaller but more
sexually responsive penis. Since insurance won't
pay for genital reconstruction, that will have
to wait for a while, which frustrates
Thorne.
"Believe me, this is
not frivolous - people don't go through this
unless they have to," he says.
And his vision of a romantic life in the
months ahead is still something of a mystery to
him; he's still feeling his way from one week to
the next, waiting to see what new thing wells up
inside to take him by surprise.
People keep asking him: Will he marry? Will
his dates be straight women now? Will he spend a
few years as a cute randy bachelor with a parrot
tattoo?
"I am just living from
event to event, and it is so overwhelming that
it's really hard for me to project," Thorne
says. "It has been a lifelong desire for me to
have a long-term, committed relationship, and I
believe that desire will still be there. On the
other hand, I'm an adolescent. I'm going through
puberty again. And as men mature - so I will
mature. This is an incredibly journey, and I am
thoroughly enjoying it. I am not rushing through
it."
He regards with great seriousness too, the
promise he made to the anxious woman officer
friend who peered at him for signs of incipient
male thickheadedness. His own sister, who
accepted the transsexualism news with great
equanimity ("I started hemming and hawing, and
she said, "What's wrong? You're going to change,
aren't you?'"), has been saddened by the
disappearance of the woman she grew up with.
"She has viewed me as
an ally and a confidante, and I think that, in
the past, that has had to do with both of us
being women," Thorne says. "We have long,
intimate phone conversations, and when I visit
we stay up talking, watching movies, laughing,
looking through catalogues - that's very
important to us."
His sister wants to know, of course, whether
Stephan Thorne will be able to talk as long and
watch as many movies and have as much fun with
the catalogues.
"Her experience with
men has been that many of them are not
particularly talkative," says Thorne, and
he has been trying to reassure both her and
himself.
He has heard transsexuals talk about
psychically killing off the wrong-gender person
they used to be, and he has no intention of
doing that: He liked the woman that was
Stephanie Thorne, likes her still, and wants her
to remain part of him, even as he evolves so
completely into Stephan Thorne that no one will
look at him with any confusion.
"The basic human being
is not going to change," he says. "The external
is going to change, and there are going to be
the internal changes as well, but my spirit and
my soul will be the same - and I will always
love my sister, and she will always be my
sister. And recently I told her that I will
always be her sister, and I told my mother that
I will always be her daughter - even as I am a
brother and a son."
