The Pink Fog plays such an important part in a transgender person’s evolution. Once you have experienced it, you never really forget it. It is a feeling you have never experienced but have always known. For lack of a better description, it just feels right. The closest word I can find is contentment. You may not know what it is but you recognize it when you feel it. I guess you always know you are transgender, but it takes time to peel back the layers and accept what you find inside.
I practiced for hours putting on my face and taking it off. I would shave so close that my face stung or more often than not bleed. However, the more I practiced the more my female side came out. I slowly saw a woman emerge. I started out looking like a guy wearing makeup and ended up looking like a young woman. I guess this is the point where my pretending ended and reality set in. As a child I always pretended I was a princess, but finally I could see the princess for real and it was no longer pretend—I was free, I could see the person who I felt I was. The pink fog stayed around a long time. It varied in density from time to time but never really cleared out.
The pink fog was here to stay. I stayed with the support group for two and a half years. The last year I was president. I wanted more from the group than to just sit around and talk about how we got to that point, so I started to talk some of the girls into going out to some local gay bars after the meeting. As with most small groups if you start leading, before long you are the nominated the leader . I didn’t actively pursue being the president; it just kind of ended up that way. I had some good friends in the group, but they were group friends. The secretive nature of this group made it difficult to be friends outside of it. I only saw some of the members in their female personas and would never have recognized them as anything other than women. There was a woman who was a mechanic: she was in her late twenties and she was transitioning. She had come out at work and was even living full time. We younger girls hung around her when she came to meetings; we all had a million questions to ask her. This continued until one day when the man showed up. Nobody knew who this person was—as it turned out, it was the mechanic. She was quite attractive as a man and had a very pretty face. That night she had informed the group she had to end her transition because she was going to lose her daughter if she did not. She looked devastated. We never formally heard from her again, but about six months later, there was a rumor that she had killed herself.
It was in the early 90s. My son was going on two years old, and my wife was expecting our second son. I felt a great deal of empathy towards the girl who had to end her transition, because the thought of not seeing my own children was too frightening. I could feel a strain coming in my marriage as well. My wife knew where I was going every month, making sure she was never around on that day. I encouraged her to come to a support group for spouses, but she would not hear of it. She is the type of individual who prefers not to talk about or understand things that make her feel uncomfortable.
I graduated from college a month before my second son was born. It was in the early 90s and jobs were hard to find. I did manage to find a job as a computer information systems manager at a manufacturing plant in southern Illinois. It was in the middle of nowhere: the largest town within 30 miles had a population of 11,000 people. I referred to people who lived there as “children of the corn” because many of them were farmers and most had never been exposed to life outside the county. I needed the work, so my wife and I packed up the small amount of stuff we had and the two boys and headed to Illinois to start a new life.
Wanting to make my marriage work, I took the opportunity to purge. Instead of packing my female stuff, I threw it all away—well, almost all. I kept one outfit, kind of like a security blanket. I said goodbye to the group and left. The internet was not really even established yet, so unless you wrote letters or made phone calls, you could not stay in touch with anyone. I was determined to start over and be a man, a Father, for my children.
The pink fog never goes away; it may thin from time to time but always comes back. For the first couple of years I managed to keep busy. It was demanding job, but the work was engaging. There was not a lot to do in the town were we lived, and we could not afford cable television at first, so PBS became our favorite channel because it was our only channel. This forced my wife and I to spend a lot of time together. We hated the area but we were closer now because we counted on each other for entertainment and company. This really helped keep the fog away, but when she went back to Michigan to regularly see her family, I always took the opportunity to wear something feminine. This seemed to work for me—for a while anyway. Dressing occasionally was enough to take the edge off and keep things tolerable. At that point, I thought I could live this way forever. A little pink fog was OK with me.
Three years of living in an isolated community became difficult. The children of the corn were not mean to outsiders, but if you were not born there, you never became part of the community. I moved back to Michigan and got a new job. I kept my mind busy by going to the university, working on my MBA at night. The trouble with moving back to Michigan was that I knew I would not be able to get a driver’s license. My macular degeneration had gotten to the point that I could no longer read street signs. With no transportation and no way to get around, my personal life deteriorated to only family events.
The next seven years were terrible, from an internal perspective. My children were doing well; we had a nice house in the suburbs. We even got a dog. For most people this would have been a pretty good life, but it was hell for me. I could not drive because of my deteriorating vision, and unfortunately I made too much money so my wife never thought she needed to work. So here I was trapped. It was like being under house arrest. I could not do anything without being with someone. I could not go to support groups; I would have to have my wife take me. I could not ever dress. I was locked up at home.
The only redeeming feature I had is twice a week I got to go to class at Central Michigan University. I guess that is what made it so easy to go to school because the alternative was prison. My wife absolutely refused to move to any place that had decent public transportation. I was a prisoner in my own house, and I never committed a crime. I was losing hope. Life was just passing me by and I could not get out and enjoy it. Hope was fading and so was my desire to live.
By this time I had managed to acquire a few degrees that ranged from electronics engineering to an MBA. My education allowed my career to flourish and soon my family went from appreciating the lifestyle I provided to expecting it. As my career flourished, my vision floundered. The worse my vision got, the harder it was to do my job. I finally became desperate and made a choice. I was either going to live or I was going to end it. Since I decided to commit suicide, I figured I had nothing left to lose. Per the saying “Go Big or Go Home,” I went for Big. I knew I would never be able to afford to transition working for someone else, so I took a big risk and started a software business—by choosing to transition, I chose Life, and I plan to enjoy every day I have.
I started my own business. What made this risky for me is I was giving up a very good job with a stable income. There is nothing like jumping out of the pan into the fire. Starting a new business can be exciting until the honeymoon period is over and the reality of not getting a paycheck sets in. I had an office in the basement and that is where I spent the next six months of my life, if you want to call it that. I was alone amongst people. I got lucky and soon my business started to grow roots and I was asked to give presentations and workshops. I finally got a furlough from my dungeon. I had always joked that if I robbed a bank, I would at least be locked up with other people and would not even have to work.
I did my best to block being transgender out of my mind. Since I did not get a chance to dress, I did not care how I looked. Food is wonderful if you do not care. I could eat, drink, and even smoke as much as I wanted. Over a decade, I put on 100 pounds from a size 32 waist to a snug 44 inch waist. I was fat and out of shape. It did not matter. The pink fog ne
ver goes away: no matter how much you look in the mirror, you still want to see a woman.
In the spring of 2007, everything came to a head. Maybe it was the midlife crisis where you begin to realize your mortality and wonder what life is all about, but for me it turned out to be Amazon.com. I was looking for a book, and while Googling “Floating Point Address,” made an entry error—Google returned sites for “Floating Point Dresses,” including “prom dresses” on Amazon.com.
I was curious so I clicked on it. The first was the Pink “Princess” halter dress with an empire waistline. It was beautiful, and it came in size 3x. I must have gone back to that site eight different times looking at the dress over and over. Each time I did, the pink fog got thicker and thicker, until it clouded my judgment and I ordered the dress. The pink fog was back, but the difference was this time I did not want to fight it. I just let it role in and it felt good, too good.
The dress came in the next couple of days. Of course, I was concerned that I might be discovered by my wife, that I was buying women’s clothes again, or that my children might have questions about the package. UPS was a regular at my front door because I had to order everything for my business, and the package got delivered undetected. I had to wait until nobody was home to be able to try on the dress. I could hardly wait and was close to being giddy with excitement. I slipped it on, tied the halter, reached behind, grabbed the zipper firmly, and gave it tug.
The zipper moved about an inch then would not budge further. I had gotten so fat that a 3x would not fit. When I was twenty; I was wearing a 14-16. That instant I started dieting. I vowed to lose weight. This time the pink fog was not clouding my judgment; it was giving me determination. I was determined to lose weight. My goal was to lose one pound a week for a year. The pink fog was a motivator, and every time I thought of eating, I would think of that dress.
I started dieting in late March; I really cut down on my calorie intake, and increased my calories burned by walking. I walked every morning and eventually got up to walking three miles a day at a pace of four miles an hour. I was so out of shape. The pounds really started to drop off. I was averaging ten pounds a month. By May of that year I could zip the dress all the way up. It was tight but I managed to zip it. The second I got that dress zipped my head became clouded with pink!
If I could lose this much, maybe I could lose more. It was an incredible feeling when I could get that dress zipped. I vowed never to be heavy again. I changed not only how much I ate but what I ate as well. I went from possible one salad a month to one a day. My diet went from buffalo chicken wings to a Caesar chicken salad. I look back now and think that this was the first time the pink fog had been a driving force. I am sure everyone feels good about themselves when they lose weight and look better, but it was deeper than this for me. Deep inside I was feeling a strong pull, but stronger than before. It was different from what I felt twenty years earlier.
Twenty years before, there was this high degree of excitement that went along with the new-found self and freedom. Each discovery was exciting. This was not that—the feelings were somehow deeper or stronger. I was not discovering things all over; this was more of a relief and acceptance. Anybody who is dealing with a problem—drugs, alcohol, work—is taught that accepting the fact that you are an addict is the first step. Knowing and acknowledging the problem and accepting it are different. I guess I was emotionally mature enough and confident in who I was so that I could truly embrace being transgender for the first time.
The pink fog was still there, but instead of worrying about what it might be concealing and what might be revealed to me next, I found it quite calming and reassuring. I began to feel contentment in a way I had never felt before. From this point on, I counted on the pink fog to carry me through the roughest eighteen months of my life. During those months the fog never waned.
February 28, 2008 is unofficially when my transition began. The formal transition did not start until November 15 of that same year. In January I came out to a good friend of mine, Linda, I had known for a while. She was the kind of friend whom you just click with from day one. We had met at a workshop where I was a presenter and had emailed each other almost every day since then. We were both at a conference in Chicago, and I had confided in her earlier about being transgender; now she wanted to meet me—the person I had been hiding from the world.
It was on a cold Thursday afternoon in downtown Chicago when Stephanie Anne Timmer presented herself to the world. I had come with a friend who was seriously sick. We were going to share a room, but I did not want to catch what he had, so I decided to stay in Linda’s room. She had two beds and two bathrooms. It took me three hours to get ready. I still had trouble hiding my beard, and I was bleeding in several spots where I tried to shave extra close. I was nervous because I had never come out to anyone who was not transgender or was part of a group. I was complaining that my jeans were too big, so Linda gave me a pair she had just gotten to see if they would fit. They did, and I never gave them back—I had never fit into a size twelve before.
Wearing the new jeans I finished getting ready. Linda quietly watched, being very supportive and giving me a few pointers as I went. Finally it was time to put on the wig. I was so nervous I put the wig on backwards. It was a great ice breaker; we still laugh about how hard I tried to put my face on straight, but ended up putting my hair on backwards.
That afternoon the both of us walked through the lobby of the Marriott and out onto the busy Chicago street. Stephanie Anne Timmer was alive and exposed to the world. I remember walking down the freezing sidewalk to the art museum. The wind was brisk as it blew through my red hair. We spent the next couple of days sightseeing and shopping. We even got our ears pierced.
Linda and I continued to go out and explore the world together. We often attended the same conferences for work, so we had many chances to see each other and experience life in a whole new way. When I was younger, I had always gone to gay bars when I dressed, because they were safe and accepting. We went everywhere and rarely to the gay bars.
Everywhere we went we had a great time. People treated me very well: other than the occasional derogatory “sir” instead of “madam,” I did not have any trouble. The thing that helps the most about going out in public in your early transition is dressing to fit in and not to attract attention. As much fun as it is to wear something flattering, do not. Wear something nondescript.
There were three distinct moments when the fog became extremely thick. The thickest point I can remember occurred on January 13. I was presenting in Miami and when I was done, I had to fly to Boston, where I was going to have my first surgery. I had never flown as Stephanie before this point, and before I went through an irreversible surgery, I need to make certain that I was ready. I figured that if I did not have the courage to fly as Stephanie I was not ready for surgery.
Tuesday morning I got up a 3:30 to make sure I had time to get ready. A million things were running though my head. It was winter—I had a lot of trouble with delays and cancelations the previous winter. What would I do if I got stranded and my beard grew through my makeup? I got ready and tried my best to get the makeup just right—hard when you are blind, but I think I did OK. With macular degeneration it is like looking through a par of very dirty glasses. – nothing is clear I was ready about an hour before I had to leave, so I fussed about the room and watched Anderson Cooper 360 until my shuttle came.
The wig I was wearing was made out of human hair, but I could never get the cap to fit snugly. It was forever coming loose; I repeatedly had to go into the restroom to pull it down again. The shuttle came and I boarded as gracefully as I could. Sweat began to trickle down my back in the warm Miami morning; nerves did not help much, either. My confidence was climbing as we reached the airport. The shuttle driver got out and opened the door for me. As he was getting my luggage out of the back of the van, I put my foot down on the step. The step had a grid that a heel could get stuck in, and mine did. I made a spectacular
entrance at the Miami Airport. Because my wig never fit well, I instinctively reached for it to hold it on my head. That only left one had to brace my fall. My wig did not come off, but I lost my pride and what little confidence I had.
I picked myself up and went to the restroom to get cleaned up. The sweat now more from nerves than from heat had made my makeup run just a bit. I repaired the damage the best I could and then went through security. This was after 9/11 and I had a male ID, but apparently it does not matter as long as the name on the ID matches the ticket. I went through security without a problem.
I made it all the way to Boston without delay or problem. I met my friend Linda at the airport and road with her to the Courtyard by Marriot near the University of Boston Medical center. Successfully completing my maiden voyage I felt great, but it did not produce much fog which was a good thing. The feeling I got when I landed in Boston, besides relief, was confidence. I was absolutely sure that the surgery was what I wanted. It was just what I needed to feel before surgery.
The next morning we got up and went for my consultation with Dr. Spiegel, my plastic surgeon. I had paid up front so there was little paperwork. We just sat in a crowded waiting room until an orderly called us back. I was met by Ivy, Dr Spiegel’s assistant, who talked to me a bit about the process, and where to go in the morning. She did a great job of easing my fears. Dr. Spiegel came in soon after and looked at my face to suggest what other surgeries would be helpful to give me a more feminine appearance. He took the time to explain the difference between a male face and a female face. The male forehead is more pronounced whereas a female forehead is flatter. Men have a more pronounced jaw and a squarer jaw line, and often develop a bump on their noses whereas women do not. The nose surgery is called a rhinoplasty—only the male rhino develops a horn on the nose. The doctor could show me on my picture what it would look like if I had those surgeries. He was very reassuring and really put me at ease. Still no pink fog, just a bit of apprehension.
The Great Elephant Ride Page 6