Wolsey’s Perspective Now:
I decided to medically transition at the age of 40. I had already been married for 20 years, and had a rather significantly open life to begin with. Because I was so old when I decided to transition, I had a lot of documented life behind me.
In the transgender community, there are a significant number of people that transition, move to a new city, and never disclose they are transgender. If they can blend in, they just do. Others transition, and ask the people around them to just not talk about the past at all. I think this is easier when you are young, and don’t have a spouse, and a long public history.
The reason there are so many transgender folks that do this is not to be tricky or to fool people. It’s because it’s safer. It’s because then your job interviewer won’t find out and refuse to hire you based on that. It’s because violence is such a concern to so many transgender people.
Disclosure is a pretty hot topic in the transgender community. We have pressure from other people that we should have to disclose at all times because they need to know how to treat us. As if just treating us like the men and women, (and non-binary humans) isn’t enough. The issue of disclosure is a really divisive topic amongst transgender people, their allies and everyone else.
This is used against transgender women a lot. There is this idea that a transgender woman is just a man dressed up in a skirt that she is trying to trick men into sleeping with her. It’s the basis of the gay panic defense, where a man who has sex with a transgender woman then murders her and claims he didn’t know. This is still a legal defense for murder in a lot of states.
My feelings on disclosure are not all or nothing. A one-night tryst? No. I wouldn’t disclose. A full relationship? Yes, definitely. I don’t want to have anything to do with a significant other that can’t handle that I am transgender. It’s not like I haven’t lived this, because I talked about gender and identity pretty much my whole life. I just didn’t have the terminology until much later to identify as transgender.
Me, personally? I’m not good at secrets. I don’t want to live my life with a large demarcation of before transition and after transition, where everything before is shushed up. I don’t want to have to calculate every detail of my life into before and after.
I was married 20 years at that point, but same sex marriage was only legal for a year or so. I would have had to say we’d “been together for 20 years and recently married?” That doesn’t seem right.
I would have had to ignore my history as a nurse for close to a decade because all my contacts from that period didn’t know I had transitioned and thought the Wolsey they knew was a woman.
I am not sure I want to cut so many of my life experiences out, or edit them to fit the narrative that I am a cisgendered man, because I’m not. Living as a woman for 40 years gives me a rather unique perspective for a man.
I know what women go through. I know the risks they face. I know the injustices that occur. In many ways, I am far more aware now. Before I transitioned, I thought every human being that had to ride the bus risked being pestered by gross men all the time. As it turns out, if you look male, that doesn’t happen. You get totally left alone. Nobody tries to talk to you and nobody tells you to smile if you have an irritated look on your face.
I know that women’s clothing is expensive and never has pockets. I know which brands of make-up are worth spending on and which drug store brands will do OK in a pinch. I know about the sorry state of women’s clothing sizing in the US. I’ve had to look for a size 12 in the mall and been told that they don’t carry sizes that big.
I don’t want to pretend I don’t know about these things. I lived for 40 years like this, and those experiences are a part of me. Those experiences have shaped who I am. They fuel my frustration at the everyday sexism that permeates our culture.
There is also nothing wrong with me, or any other person that transitions, and I refuse to act like this is a deep dark secret that needs keeping. I’m a perfectly normal expression of humanity. I see it as no different than someone that had a broken leg and needed a cast. I had a problem and I fixed it.
I could walk through life acting like this is a terrible stigma, or that I carry a disease like cancer, but I just don’t feel that way. I am just a man that happened to be born looking like a really cute little girl. Society might have issues with that, but I still have a hard time wrapping my head around why this is such a big deal to so many people, because it shouldn’t be.
The last reason I don’t want to hide my past is that I am pretty sure people are assholes to populations they have never met. My being out in the open gives the people I run across a baseline. Once they meet me, when they hear about another bathroom bill, or sensationalistic hate-filled story about transgender folks, they will see me in their mind’s eye.
With all the risks that transgender people face, I guess I think of myself as being in a very good position. I am a white man, so that helps. Even before I came out as transgender, my life experiences taught me to fight. I am capable of continuing the fight. I have support from friends and family.
I see it happen a lot these days. Folks that meet me, who have never met a transgender person before, come to me with stories about how they saw the latest transgender injustice on the news and how they’d never before considered it. Now they are angry that it’s happening.
When they hear about another transgender person, they think of me. I’m the guy they found to be an OK person and not the scary media sensation that they thought trans people were. It means my being out about being transgender, helps those transgender people that come along behind me. It’s political.
I feel in some ways, it’s my duty to use my good position, to be out of the closet. If my being open about what I am helps someone else, then good. If it shows people that I am not a deep dark secret, then great.
I don’t want to hide my previous womanly life. I don’t think I should have to. I certainly don’t want my husband and family to hide decades of their life with me. I just don’t want to cut 40 years out of my life. That means, for me, the right choice is to be open about who and what I am.
Chapter Eight:
The Witch Hunt
I believe that one day the world will judge the witch-hunt against homosexuals just as harshly as it judges the Spanish Inquisition and the Holocaust.
—Mae West
From the Accidentally Gay Blog: Society frustration and YouTube Let’s Plays
Posted on March 28, 2015
It has been a rough few weeks. Work is more trying on my ethical/professional mores then I had expected. My mom had a heart attack, dad is ill, and birthdays are everywhere. Finally, our cat Marmalade passed away last week unexpectedly, so life has been a bit hard edged.
This week a situation came up that is something cool, but revealed a big problem. It revolves around my video game Let’s Play channel. I host an LP channel and I talk about my husband a lot. I talk about our same sex marriage and I am proud of him. I am very proud of the LGBTQ scene.
My husband got offered some video game keys to a game being designed on Steam by his coworker’s husband. The coworker volunteered to have the game studio possibly promo my Let’s Plays and retweet them. It is a cool opportunity. I have never cared for making money on YouTube, but I do like having people watch the videos, so this would be great.
The problem is Wolsey is 100% stealth at work. It is not an open-minded place, and the last thing I need is the coworker or her husband realizing that Wolsey is trans. Not that he really cares, but it makes his job harder. It could also make future jobs hard. The last thing in the world I want is him to be outed accidentally.
The problem is the channel started over three years ago and has over 1,000 videos that I put up from about a year and a half before he transitioned. I talk about “my wife” in the first 5-600 videos constantly. I can’t risk outing him either now or in the future.
I looked at the channel, I might be able to either ma
ke private or delete 600+ videos, but I can’t be sure I will miss a video that might out him. Let us be honest, I am not going to watch 1000+ videos, each being 15-30 minutes long, to check.
I could just delete all of my videos and start over, but part of me doesn’t want to destroy what I have here, so I am going to have to start over with my channel.
I hate the fact that society is so horrible to trans people specifically, and in general, that LGBTQ or other minorities have to deal with this crap.
Oh, and by no means do I hold Wolsey at fault for this. I know he feels horrible about it, and I have spent the last hour reassuring him that it’s not his fault. To be honest, it doesn’t bother me too much to do this. I love him and I could give a shit about “followers.” I will just start over and have fun with it. It will give me the opportunity to rebrand the channel and maybe change up how I do things.
At least I have one complete series of videos available to put up that are new and I know make no references to his past.
I LOVE YOU WOLSEY and this is not your fault at all.
Lucky’s Perspective Now:
Wolsey had been in transition for about 18 months, with the last 15 months on testosterone. He could reasonably disappear into the crowd and not get clocked. Even with this, the last several months had been rough. Even with that, Wolsey and I had been doing great between us.
Physically he was healthy, the testosterone was working with no side effects. Our relationship was that much stronger and his doctor appointments were coming along great. This is what was keeping my anxiety from getting too stressed due to the other issues in our lives.
The one thing about Wolsey’s transition that had me worried was his job prospects. He had struggled through several interviews and was clocked in more than one. I was so upset because I would watch him come home depressed, occasionally believing he wouldn’t ever find a job as an accountant/auditor. There was nothing I could do for him and it just ground at me daily to watch it.
We talked about it for a long time, and decided to scrub our social media presence. We both decided instead of going through several years’ social media posts to try to scrub references to Wolsey that might out him, that we would just delete all of our old accounts and started fresh on all areas. I followed suit, with the only exception being my two YouTube channels on which I host videos. One was an educational channel and the other was my video game channel. The educational channel has no reference to Wolsey at any time, so that was never an issue. The video game Let’s Play channel was obscure with only 200 subscribers and I was using a handle that no one knew, so it wasn’t a risk.
Eventually Wolsey was hired by a law firm, and seemed to be accepted as male. Things were going pretty well and my anxiety had subsided. That is until the famous bathroom incident where Wolsey asked the janitor who followed him into the bathroom if the janitor wanted to hold his penis while he peed.
Now, I broke out into peals of laughter when he told me. I could only imagine the look on his face when he gets angry, followed by the actions he undoubtedly learned from my father. When in danger, push your way through and show no fear. I was also proud of him because he had handled things well from my perspective. I realized most of society probably wouldn’t consider it acceptable, but evidently it worked and he was able to not only get the guy to back down, but the guy thought they were friends after that.
My anxiety lessened slightly, he was working at the job and things were going fairly well. I was happy that he was on good terms with his coworkers. One of his coworkers was married to a video game designer that was working on a new video game. In that conversation Wolsey mentioned I had a video game Let’s Play channel.
My video game Let’s Play channel was a YouTube channel that recorded me playing the game, along with my talking, swearing and reacting to it. The channel had about 200 subscribers at that time, very small for a YouTube channel, but it was a hobby and I enjoyed it. In fact, I had just hit the thousandth video I had uploaded. I hadn’t made money, but it was always enjoyable to play video games, and entertain others.
Wolsey’s coworker heard about my channel and was excited. She talked to her husband and they told Wolsey they wanted me to do a video game review of the new game. This would be great for me, as it would be promoted by the video game developer, thus promoting my channel as well. I was pretty damn excited, that is until I realized we had a problem. Wolsey’s coworker did not know of Wolsey’s history and transition.
The problem was I like to talk about Wolsey in my videos. In a lot of videos there would be a clip of him at the end or images that would pop up. I had already incorporated Wolsey’s transition into my channel as well, showing pictures of his change, and the first almost two years of the channel’s uploads (more than 600 videos) had images of him before the transition. I couldn’t be sure which videos had him in them without watching them, and 1,000 videos at 15 or more minutes each meant way too much time to do it.
The funny part is I am very pro-LGTBQ on the channel, and that wasn’t a worry. His coworker knew he was married to a guy, so the same-sex marriage had not been an issue. However, with the response he got from the janitor earlier in the year, we were worried about risking it. I wasn’t sure how his other coworkers would react if it came up that he was transgender. The even riskier part we had just talked about was that if his employer knew he was transgender, when he applied somewhere else for a job the manager was petty enough that she would mention that to anyone who called for references. I didn’t want him to be outed by anyone without it being on his terms.
One of my options was to delete all of the videos. It would be simple, easy and I seriously considered it. However, I realized that it really bothered me to destroy that much creative content that I had made. I was torn. I didn’t want to out Wolsey over a YouTube channel, but I didn’t want to lose what I had done. That is when it came to me. I could just walk away from the channel. I would just leave it up for people, and maybe even come back later and point them to the new channel. That is what I did. I walked away from all my subscribers, the channel and the benefits I had with a channel that I had enjoyed and started a brand-new channel, https://www. youtube. com/ c/SecondStringGeneral
Wolsey was upset that I was doing this. He felt so bad that I was giving up the channel. It really was clear to me that I had to walk away one way or the other. There is no way I wanted to endanger his job or social prospects. Wolsey told his coworker my channel went down but I would be happy to review the game on my new channel. His coworker accepted that and the rest is history.
Two years later I don’t have the same number of subscribers, but I do have another 1,000 videos up and things are going great. It was worth it.
The most uncomfortable thing about this was the apologies I still occasionally get from Wolsey. Even to this day he is unhappy I had to do that, and each time I have to reassure him that it wasn’t even a question for me.
There is nothing I wouldn’t do for him; this was a small thing in the end.
Wolsey’s Perspective:
When I graduated with my accounting degree in 2014, the situation in my area of the country wasn’t exactly the best for getting hired. Add to that, I had been on testosterone for less than a year, and while my voice had dropped low and gravelly, my face was still a bit feminine.
I had been to countless interviews and it was a mixed bag on whether they had clocked me as transgender or not. Add to that, I had to beg my friends and fellow students to be references for me, because my previous jobs were filled with people that would have given me glowing references until they found I’d transitioned.
Being transgender while job hunting? Not something you want to do. I experimented with openly disclosing and ignoring everything while acting as if I was the burly cisgendered, Y chromosome man that everyone expected.
What it came down to was a series of truly demoralizing interviews and my own increasing desperation for a paying job in the field I had taken so many student loans
out in order to get educated in.
I once drove an hour and a half to a job interview. The office manager portion went swimmingly well. The actual supervisor portion... not so much. The man walked into the office, looked me up and down and didn’t even sit. He refused to shake my hand, and when I asked if he wanted to hear about my experience, he said no with disgust.
There was also the temp service recruiter that could not get enough of me on the phone, but when I walked in the door, did a double take. She ripped my resume apart, told me I wasn’t worth hiring in the first place and that I wouldn’t ever get a position in my field because they don’t hire people like me.
So, when I got the call from a recruiter for a temp agency job in a law firm that specialized in foreclosures, I jumped on it. It was certainly not my dream job, and I have some very political opinions about that kind of business. However, getting a paycheck negates political opinions and rent has to be paid.
It all started out somewhat dicey. I would say I was being read as male by about 90% of my office population. In a giant accounting floor, that meant it was bound to be obvious to some people that I was transgender.
I didn’t initially outright admit it, but one of the gals was talking trash about her friend. She was pissed off because her friend was marrying a transgender man and that trans men were just women, right?
I told her no and that I was transgender. She looked completely shocked. Apparently, she was one of the 90% of folks that didn’t question my masculinity. I think this is because I was a “gay guy” to her.
Then, in a completely predictable fashion, she told me she’d known all along.
Acidentally Gay Page 9