Monday November 13, 2007

A hero of mine, poet and musician, Jim Morrison, once said that the self-interview is the essence of creativity. “[It] gives you the chance to try and eliminate all of those space fillers…you should try to be explicit, accurate, to the point…no bullshit.”

So here I sit in front of my computer as I try to write a biography of myself, a song plays in the background and my dog Zoë sits sleeping on my lap. My memories and history swirl throughout my head from that cold, early morning on the last day of the 1970s until tonight. The question is where to start? What is ultimately important? What do you want to know? What do I need to share? After all twenty-eight years is a lot to digest in a few minutes and a few pages.

If it's a question of what's important, perhaps it as easy as why you came to this website in the first place, and that is for my writings.I consider myself to be a very driven and imaginitive writer.Although Emily is my first novel, I have endeavored to write other novels. In both of my previous attempts I gave up not long after starting. The stories just simply ran out of gas. Emily nearly suffered a similar fate as I entered my senior year of college. Swamped with homework, project finals, part-time employment, and the editorship of the college in newspaper, in addition to being a new parent, my writing projects were shelved as I tried to cope with the demands needed of me.

When I graduated from Mount Mercy College in the summer of 2005, I found myself with plenty of free time to write, and utilizing the full writing skills that came with a degree in journalism, I continued writing Emily in earnest.

But it was not free time that stoked my quest to write this book, but something more fundamental. Emily is a story that is close to my heart because the main character is a transgendered teenager, and it was difficult, if not impossible, to write about Emily without digging into my own past.

So we come to the second reason that has brought many you here tonight, and that is I am a male-to-female transsexual. To be sure it's not a term that I delight in. It's not to say that I'm not proud of myself, or in who I am or what I have achieved, but rather I don't identify as a transsexual. I didn't even learn of the term until I was in my late teens, but I am and have always identified as a woman.

In many ways, I am the anti-stereotype of what most people think a transsexual should be. In grade school I wasn't the sissy boy that didn't fit in. I wasn't the loaner kid who had no friends or the boy that got beat up everyday. On the opposite side of the coin, I wasn't the guy who tried to hide his secret pain by being a hyper-masculine ladies man. In many ways I created my own life as best I could. I was a government document. I showed the world what I wanted them to see and blacked out what I never wanted them to see.

My family life was perhaps one of the closest things you could call to normal, if there is any foundation to such a word. (Republicans like to use the word traditional.) My father was a parochial-school teacher, my mother a piano teacher and later worked for the same insurance company I now find myself employed with. I've heard it said or suggested that male-to-female transsexuals never had a close male role model in their lives. I can say without a doubt that is not true, at least for my own life. All of my life my father and I have been really close. He was the man who taught me karate when I was a teenager, he took me to concerts and to this day we share a deep love of rock and heavy metal music. More than anything I remember those nights we spent playing Goldeneye or Wrestlemania 2000 on my N64 and just talking about whatever happened to be important in our lives.

So many people like to look for blame or look for a reason as to why I am the way I am. But there is no cause, it is just the way I am. It is just the way God made me. Ever since I was a child I felt…disconnected. I knew I was boy but something always felt off. When I was nine, I was at last able to put all the puzzle pieces in place, I knew I was meant to be a girl, but that was also a problem. You see my family moved a lot when I was young, every few years my dad would take a new teaching job in another school district and we would uproot our lives and go. For two years after we moved to Iowa I was just sort of alone. I had a couple friends but I still felt adrift and out of place in my new school. When I was nine I entered forth grade, and using a combination of my wicked sense of humor and tapping into my general rebelliousness, I began to make a lot of friends. I knew the consequence of being labeled a sissy-boy. I had witnessed first hand what had happened to a couple of boys who did not fit in. I wasn't about to throw away all that I had achieved, so I continued to build on the reputation I had earned while secretly wishing at night that God would send an angel to correct the mistake of my birth.

So on and on it went, year after year, I was unable to bring myself to face the reality I knew to be true. Even when I was fifteen and my parents caught me borrowing my mother's and sister's clothing I could not bring myself to say the simple words, “I need to be a girl.” To be sure fear played an important role in keeping my mouth shut. Iowa in 1995 was hardly a beacon of tolerance, especially given the small town I lived in and the Catholic high school that I attended. Worse still, you know how the media often portrays an unrealistic definition of femininity to young girls, it is even worse for young transsexual women. In all my young years I never once remembered seeing a positive image of a male-to-female transsexual. It was all the tranny trash on Jerry Springer or the drag queens on Dateline , but never a real transsexual woman with a boring job and a mortgage. So when Springer is all you have to go on for a definition of what a transsexual is you try to make your life better by not being that at all.

Not that I didn't find myself plenty of ways to stay distracted, more than anything I wanted to get through college and obtain a degree to give myself the ability to earn a living. I had my longtime friends and just before my senior year of high school I met Beth, the woman who would become my wife.

We dated and married, yet I still felt empty inside. I had what so many people in life long for and that was a partner and spouse who loved them. Yet I couldn't shake the sadness that I was missing my life. The years went by, I had told Beth that I liked to cross-dress, heavily omitting the parts about wanting to be a woman. I thought, “hey second place is better than nothing, right?”

Four years into our marriage we were blessed with the birth of a beautiful baby boy, whom Beth named Steven after her father. Steven was everything I wanted in life. Ever since I was a child I had dreamed of having children of my own. His life filled me with joy. Everyday there was something new as I watched him grow from a premature baby into a walking, talking toddler. Shortly after he was born I remember thinking, “I'll never transition now, I don't need to. I have Steven to take care of.”

I was wrong.

As the days neared towards graduation I felt myself began to circle the drain emotionally. I had accomplished everything that I set out to accomplished. College degree, wife and child soon hopefully a good paying job, but there was something else missing. I hadn't been true to myself and it was starting to bring me down. Everyday that dawned I lamented the fact that I couldn't be honest with myself and be the woman I knew myself to be. The memory of ten-years earlier replayed in my mind almost hourly as I kicked myself for not being able to tell my father the truth.

I fell into a cycle of depression and I began to drink. I lost my job and it was almost impossible to stay awake during the day. That summer after graduation I told my parents that I wanted to transition. They encouraged me to try to work through my depression and work with Beth on our marriage before any drastic changes.

It didn't work.

Everyday I woke I was consumed with sadness, so much so that I contemplated ending my life. There were train tracks running a mile or so by our house. I thought of just walking down there and waiting. Waiting for one of those big diesel engines to come along and Splat! No more pain, no more sorrow. But I didn't go. I had a son and at the very least it was my duty to help raise him. But the misery continued. Every day. Every night. I remember the day it changed. I was watching Steven while Beth was out with her mother, I was so sad and it was so hard to play with Steven. I remember thinking, “Fuck it. Life shouldn't be like this. I should be able to play with my one-year-old son without being miserable.” That day was the day I decided to transition.

Beth had always said that if ever was going to live as a woman that would be the end of our marriage and in early 2006 she filed for divorce. All things considered, she was very amicable. We worked everything out for custody and property without the need of lawyers or the courts. Towards the end she said she still loved me, but couldn't be with a woman.

She was being honest. It was my time to be honest.

I've managed to put my life back together. I got a good job, a new home and I began living my life as a woman. I watched my son getting bigger and bigger every week. We enjoy our time together. He is a rambunctious squirt, who loves to bounce. He calls me Dee Dee.

At last after countless revisions I finished Emily. I've written in other places that writing this novel was an exercise in psychology. That's not to say that I wrote a book that was basically my life story with just the names change. Rather I had to use my feelings and experiences to craft a new and imaginative world. Emily and her family are unique characters and at no time could you read it and say that's Dana or her family.

I suppose in a way Emily is my legacy. My revolution. I wrote a very human story telling the truth of what it is like for a family to have a transgendered child and the joys and challenges that comes with it. It is also stark rebuke to the Jerry Springer shows that reinforce those negative stereotypes. Finally, it is also a very political novel. One of my favorite novels of all time is 1984, a dystopian novel against totalitarianism. A few years ago I remember thinking that fundamentalists were working overtime to try to turn this country into a theocracy. That's what this novel takes a stand against, religious fundamentalism that breeds hatred and ignorance. It is a stunning rebuke of the Bush Administration and their failed policies that distort and diminish the Constitution.

Did I mention I have a degree in political science also?

From here I can't say where things are going to go. There is so much more in this life that needs to be written. It is my goal in life to make a living as a novelist, but it is also my goal to be the best Dee Dee I can be to my son. I look forward to the time we spend together and I love watching him just grow up. As for the past, for tonight I will leave much of it unwritten. There is a lot of it, old friendships, lost jobs and wasted time that is, well just filler now. Perhaps some other night I will revisit it, write it and let it out. But for tonight it's time to just let it be. I am only looking forward to tomorrow and the story left to write.

Until tomorrow,

~Dana De Young