Stephen Thorne

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]

“That 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, city 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.”

Gorney, C. (September 1994). Stephen Thorne.

page updated 27 December 2010