This piece was originally written in 1994 from all appearances. I’ve tried to keep my editing to a minimum.
I had two therapists locally (Kurt, my individual therapist has recently retired) [Now deceased-ed]. Both of my therapists happened to be gay men...largely because when I was looking for a therapist, I was looking for someone who would accept me for who I was at the moment and not have a predetermined agenda, and I asked a lesbian friend of mine for a recommendation. She gave me Ralph's name, and Ralph suggested that Kurt had more experience. Both of these men are general psychologists, not gender specialists. Kurt was familiar with the SOC, but did not feel bound by them (so, for example, I started hormones 3 weeks, not 3 months, after seeing him, at his suggestion). The important thing, as far as I was concerned, was that they helped me find out who I was and helped me deal with some problems that I had in dealing with my life. To a large extent we have to determine whether or not we are transsexual ourselves...I have real difficulty when I see or hear that someone has been diagnosed as transsexual by someone else. There is nothing that can be measured or tested for to determine if we are or are not transsexual. It is a feeling deep inside...a knowledge of ourselves that comes from a lot of inner examination... that makes the determination. I had a therapist who fortunately didn't buy into all of the buzz words that so-called gender therapists look for when they are determining whether someone is a candidate for surgery. He just wanted me to be me...the best "me" I could be. As it so happens, both of my therapists were also gay males. I would have preferred a woman therapist, but then I'm in Arkansas. My reasoning about looking for a gay or lesbian therapist initially was that they would understand the stigma society attaches to people who are out of the mainstream. As it turned out, Kurt had treated 2 transsexual patients before (in 18 years of being a therapist) and Ralph had a friend who was transsexual, so they weren't completely in the dark. During the time I was meeting with them, Kurt had 5 other transsexual patients and Ralph's Gay and Lesbian therapy group became a Gay, Lesbian and Transgender therapy group, as about 15-20 other transpeople attended at one time or another (2/3 of which were male-to female). Ralph also owns a theater where he recently produced Kate Bornstein's "Hidden: a gender," which starred one of my friends in the role of Kate.
When I approached Kurt and asked him to be my therapist, I told him that I didn't need him to decide I was transsexual. I was perfectly capable of deciding that for myself and already had. I needed him to help me sort out the baggage of being the child of an alcoholic, being in an abusive, codependent marriage for 24 years, handling the rejection and ostracism I was subjected to in my community, etc. I went to Ralph's group because of the fact that I was now going to be a lesbian and I needed to learn "the life." As far as I am concerned, both of them did tremendously effective work.
When I was first talking to my therapist, I described my life as really being sort of a movie (as I put it at the time, a B-movie with bad acting). Everything that was happening to me was filtered through that screen. When things happened to me or I did things, I always had to ask the "director" and the "writer" what I was supposed to do. The result was that I was always a day late and a dollar short with my responses and therefore most often didn't make them. Acting at a once-removed (or even sometimes as a twice-removed) position from the sensory input from the world outside put me at a distinct disadvantage when trying to communicate my feelings (or anything else, for that matter) with others. The problem was that the "actor" in the movie was not the "me" I thought should be interacting with reality but a personality constructed with the sole purpose of keeping the "me" that I *knew* I was from being apparent to anyone else. I thought I had to do this...that it was required for me to be accepted by my family and my friends. The movie people are gone now. I've learned how to communicate with the world in "real time." I still have a bit of a problem with the fact that I generally speak in paragraphs, which many (if not most) people are not capable of following extensively (and I also have the problem of incorporating parentheticals…like this one).