* * * * *

                Katelynn wasn't my first transgendered friend

My first real experience with transsexuality happened in late 1999. I flew up
to Boston [1] to visit G & E, a couple I knew in college (said trip was also
the impetus for the name of this journal, but that's another story) and one
evening, both G & E approached with perhaps the four most dreaded words in
our language: “We have to talk.”

The “talk,” as it turned out, was G coming out to me as a transsexual. At the
time, G had just started undergoing hormone treatment and counseling so G
still looked pretty much like I always knew G, so it was a bit of a shock to
find a friend of mine who've I known for (at that time) seven years was no
longer a “he” but a “she.”

At the end of the revelation, G asked if I had any questions.

I thought for a few moments. I've always been a “live and let live” type of
guy and as long as what you do doesn't hurt anyone and everyone involved is
of legal age and consents, so be it. If G feels better as a woman than a man,
okay. I didn't feel it was my place to ask why, and having just started, the
when was still a ways off. Their Bostonian friends were cool with this. In
the end, I asked the only question that I felt I could ask: “So, are you
changing your name?” (answer: no. G kept her birth name; and I still
sometimes think of G as “he”—old habits die hard. Katelynn [2] I have always
thought of as a “she” but it was easier since I've only known her as a “she”)


I also thought, Cool! Two women who are legally married!

[1] http://www.cityofboston.gov/
[2] http://indigochildkate.livejournal.com/

Email author at [email protected]