Caramel's TGirls

Christine’s transsexual odyssey started when in 1985, she was living miserably as a man in a failing marriage. Estranged from her family and cast out by her “friends”, she faced ridicule and discrimination, spiraling into drug addiction and prostitution. She nearly lost her life many times, but eventually she got clean and sober and became a successful, confident and happy woman.  After twenty years as a corporate software engineer, an unsigned recording artist and a freelance journalist, Christine is now transitioning toward a full-time writing career. She’s now marketing her recently completed autobiography. My bio here pales in comparison to what awaits you in Christine’s upcoming book.  Visit Christine Beatty at MySpace for more details and stay tuned to Caramel’s TGirls for our upcoming interview.

Born in 1958, Christine grew up in an upper middle class neighborhood twenty miles south of San Francisco. Living as a boy named Chris, his parents divorced when he was nine, and he soon had to transfer out of the sanctuary of parochial school. He attended the majority of junior high in a public school where he learned what bullies were and how to run from them. He had to keep running in high school, which did little for his self-esteem. Just as bad for his confidence was his inability relate to “guy” stuff, like cars or sports, because she couldn’t care less about those things. Yet he didn’t play with Barbie dolls either. Chris didn’t know early on that he should have been a girl, but she knew he was a misfit.

As he aged, Chris grew even less certain of himself; never knowing how to act as a guy. He had no friends and few friendly acquaintances but never dated or went to dances or any other social events that so many teens look forward to. He’d have been lost were it not for the computer terminals in the library. Chris loved computer programming, was able to do it alone and it was the only thing that made him feel like a worthwhile person. Because he identified as a hippie, he hung with other outcasts and discovered alcohol and marijuana. After getting beaten up several times by bullies, he quit hanging with the party crowd. Other than the “Social Hell” aspect, the worst aspect of high school was mandatory Phys Ed. He hated it, especially undressing and showering in front of everybody, which he invented ways around. He was grateful to graduate a semester early, in January of 1976. Thus, “Hasta la vista, Teenage Hell!”

Three weeks after starting junior college he dropped out, as it was as much an ordeal as high school. He took a shop labor job making minimum wage at his father’s scaffolding company and moved in with a guy who worked in the same building. Though he could now afford it, he didn’t start getting stoned every day until after his first adult gay sexual affair. When Chris was fourteen, he “experimented” with another boy that ended in a week when they decided they weren’t that horny. Not long after his 18th birthday, his new roommate came onto him, a proposal he accepted the very next night. Within two weeks, he broke off the affair, consumed with guilt. Smoking pot all day cleared his conscience, so he became a functional pothead, able to do everything stoned. He made his first real friends with other hippie stoners and began dropping LSD and doing cocaine when he could afford it.

A months-old package from an Air Force recruiter suddenly made perfect sense as Chris had no real future and so much to prove, so he marched down to the recruiter’s office. What finally swayed him was the old GI Bill, chock full of benefits only pre-1977 enlistees could obtain. So he enlisted in the United States Air Force without really knowing what lay ahead of him. Chris was that desperate to escape his current life and try to find himself. In late February, he shipped out to Basic Training at Lackland AFB, Texas.

Marijuana had always eased his fears and made him feel like he fit in. Chris was thrilled to see so many other stoners in military tech school, a real peer group he fit into. His only insecurity was his heterosexual virginity, finally discarded in a Nevada brothel driving from Illinois to California, 56 nonstop hours. His heterosexuality was now confirmed, but a sad pattern emerged. The few times he had sex in the next five years was mostly with hookers because he couldn’t approach women and was not attracted to any guys he knew.

The worry about his timidity paled beside the mortification at developing an erotic fixation for women’s lingerie. In only four weeks it had progressed from merely fantasizing about it to actually wearing it. Towering guilt always followed his crossdressing binges and eventually compelled him to toss his forbidden collection of lingerie into a dumpster one evening at midnight. He’d fight off the urges for a few months (or few weeks), and then break down and buy a new ensemble. Only marijuana dulled his shame, so he needed it constantly. Amazingly, his pothead lifestyle never interfered with his job repairing the avionics of Air Force jets; black boxes that even trained chimpanzees could have successfully maintained.

Aside from daily drug use and crossdressing, Chris also started playing rock guitar and singing. In 1979, he befriended hippie musicians who would sometimes fill in on vocals. Chris was so highly self-conscious about his military haircut that he bought a wig so he’d look like he fit in with the band. Soon the wig became part of his crossdressing ritual. When he got his own private apartment off base, he carried his crossdressing to new levels and fantasized of turning into a girl. Chris had joined the Air Force partly to find his way, but by this time, he was more lost than ever.

In 1981, he received an honorable discharge only to bum around Phoenix, staying stoned and sometimes working for electrical contractors. He ended up homeless, broke and on food stamps. Chris finally escaped town when his Mom wired him money to come back and help her with her new house in San Francisco. So, Chris drove home to California to hopefully find what he’d failed to find in the military: himself.

Five months after returning to San Francisco, Chris took temporary work in the Tenderloin, an impoverished neighborhood rampant with drugs, crime and prostitution. One day he went into a bar to use the phone. He didn’t know it was a transgender bar — never even imagined such places existed — until he noticed an otherwise beautiful woman with a five o’clock shadow. Most of the girls there were at least as pretty, he thought. It both fascinated and unnerved him.

At a rock show two weeks later, Chris met and fell fast in love with his wife-to-be, Greta. The first time they went to bed, he held his breath and tearfully told her about his shameful kink. Chris assured Greta that he wanted to put it all behind him, and she said she still loved him. They got engaged to marry four months later. In August 1983 they moved into a one bedroom, and Chris started a Computer Science degree program at a junior college. He began to hope he might be “normal”.

Though Chris and Greta made love daily, to his dismay, he eventually returned to crossdressing. Chris earnestly vowed to quit, yet five months after married,  his urges deluged him. Hoping to find a cure, he checked out a book on gender issues, but it stated that crossdressing was harmless and incurable. Even worse was his obsession with that Tenderloin bar, the Spirit Club, and a strong urge to return there — dressed as a woman.

Finally, Chris confessed his preoccupation to Greta, who reluctantly agreed they needed to find out the truth and she helped with his makeup. His first outing in “drag” was not only comfortable, he found it incredibly gratifying when the bartender told me he was beautiful. Drunk and adventurous, Chris had sex with him, however it proved a complete zero for him. I wrote off the trip as a fluke. For two months, Chris thought he’d been cured until the 1984 Exotic-Erotic Halloween ball gave me him excuse to go out again. Marriage counseling ensued.

Chris reread that gender book, mostly the chapters on transsexuals, amazed to see his feelings so well described. He could no longer deny he wasn’t a “normal” guy and maybe not a guy at all. Soon he knew he had to leave Greta. In late May he moved to the Tenderloin, the “TL,” where rent was cheap and many transwomen lived, including one T-girl he fell for until she saw he was an addict. However, In the TL a whole new world opened up to me, a world of transsexual women. Not until four years and much misery later would Chris learn the Tenderloin wasn’t the only transwoman’s world.

A week before her 27th birthday, Christine moved to the dangerous squalor of the Tenderloin. She sought counseling at city-run clinic, where they refused her female hormones until six months. She felt she’d wasted so much life as a guy and couldn’t wait one minute longer. Her new best friend Misty, a TS beauty who tended bar at the Spirit Club, came to the rescue. She took Christine to her doctor, who injected her with a load of estrogen and wrote her a ‘script’ for hormone pills. With her journey in full swing she took a new name – Pamela.

Misty took on an older sister role, encouraging Pamela, passing along makeup secrets and other TS lore. She envied Misty’s lack of any facial hair, and had to start painful electrolysis. It was so slow she despaired it would take forever. Her greatest fear was that she’d never look good enough. At first, she went out as Pamela only at night and almost always to the Spirit Club where she could relax. The other main transwoman’s bar was the Black Rose, where the prettiest girls hung out and picked up tricks. Pamela always felt so ugly in there and thought she’d never be as pretty as they were.

Seldom did the world receive Pamela well. Total strangers mocked and cursed her and her few friends became former ones. Only her mom’s gay friend Damien encouraged her. He related his days in drag and, intriguingly, the men who paid for sex. His old friend Glinda ran an escort agency, Price Wars, and agreed to take Pamela on. It made total sense because she was always broke. More than that, it was her way of rebelling against the straight world that rejected her, and an easy means to explore her sexual orientation. However, since she didn’t pass as a woman, she became “A New Guy.”

As Pamela, sex with men was easy because she was really a woman inside. The extra income got her into a nice high-rise apartment, but when Glinda folded up the agency, Pamela had to take a cleaning job. She cleaned houses and had electrolysis during the day, took classes to complete her AA degree, and dabbled in hooking at the Spirit and even the Black Rose. When she attended school as Pamela, even some of her teachers openly smirked at her, which hurt more than the frequent verbal abuse on the street. Pamela’s grades suffered, but somehow she held on to finish the semester and graduate with honors.

Honors? So what? She would not transfer to a university and face continued hatred. She could no longer wait and needed to live as a woman full time. She’d would go crazy if she didn’t! She had no money anyway and had to take a full time job. Yet after four months of satisfied customers the housecleaning company, in “liberal” San Francisco, they would not permit her to work as a woman. Pamela vowed to herself she’d never go back to being a guy; not even part time. So she made a conscious decision to pursue the “World’s Oldest Profession”.

For two weeks, braving assault and arrest, Pamela worked the bar and street but made very little money. Another transwoman related her success working an ad in an adult paper, so she placed a listing with her new working name, “Crystal.” After a few dates, the  expenses were covered, so she set aside the extra cash and vowed not to squander it on drugs. With hours of spare time, Crystal threw herself into guitar and vocal practice, wishing she’d meet other musicians who would accept her, unlike her former “friends” who’d turned their backs.

A week later, she met the TS rocker Suzette, who fast moved in and joined Crystal in her business. Crystal bought a photo ad for the two of them that soon helped average $1000 monthly. They formed an all-transsexual rock band with her bass player friend Nola who partied and rehearsed with them while they waited for johns. Annoyingly, Pamela’s my new roomie usually blew all her money before paying rent and became a crackhead. She was even worse when on Angel Dust, a drug Pamela came to love immediately. That PCP dust anesthetized Pamela to the hatred aimed at her on the street and eased her tortured self doubt. Then one of her friends taught her how to smoke heroin — a drug she’d sworn she’d never do — which whittled away at her nest egg. Finally, Pamela had to boot Suzette out.

Hooking lost its thrill each passing month, but what choice had did Pamela have other than resuming to manhood? Other than the not-so-easy money, its only appeal was the steady stream of compliments from her customers; gushing praise that helped offset the verbal abuse from total strangers. Yet these egos strokes were but a fleeting pleasure; her deepening friendship with Nola buoyed her spirits. Nola’s occasional shot of heroin worried Pamela at first, but since she clearly wasn’t a junkie and because Pamela had fallen in love with Nola, she shrugged it off.

With Pamela’s solo ad as “Beautiful Crystal” she enjoyed upswings interspersed with deep slumps. Then one night, a trick chose Nola over her, which she took as an indictment against her beauty, her femininity, her very worthiness as a human being. Choking on a fat wad of self-loathing, she locked herself in the bathroom and attempted to shoot up. The next day, they scored some more heroin and Nola showed her how to “fix” myself properly. She thought she’d found GOD.

A week after her heroin habit grew fat, Pamela’s prostitution earnings went over a cliff. She periodically considered killing herself the way normal girls consider going on a diet. Should she just give up and become a guy again? Stopping female hormones wrought agonizing depression atop the fears that she had betrayed her true self. A PCP episode in September landed her back in Psych Emergency, but not before she’d sheared her beautiful long hair to the roots. Only Nola’s love gave her a reason to live, which she planned to do as her husband. As a male, he’d get placed into a computer job and they would live happily ever after.

The new life as a Chris started off with high hopes. Nola had stuck by him despite his chemically psychotic rampage and they moved in together on a slightly better block — the hookers way outnumbered the crack and heroin dealers on the block — and he snagged a loan to attend a tech school that would place him in his first computer programming job. Everything seemed to be heading in the right direction and then things started going terribly wrong, one after the other.

When he left “Crystal” behind and became Chris the Guy, he had killed off the best part of the person. She’d never known self-hatred like that before. Had it not been for Nola’s feelings, Chris just might have actually killed himself, but instead he chose Suicide on the Installment Plan — a little bit every day — although the San Francisco Police Department nearly did it for him all at once at about 2:00 AM, December 9th. He began 1987 wearing County Orange and then things fast went downhill from there.

The first month in the VA rehab was like being let out of prison. Chris hadn’t been clean and sober that long since high school, not even in Basic Training or jail. But his hope for a “normal” life was fleeting; without drugs to surpress them, those transsexual feelings flooded back. The macho atmosphere of the VA was no place to confess the womanhood, so Chris wrote what eventually became his autobiography. He also romanticized heroin and suicide as alternatives to the guaranteed rejection and other pain of a transsexual woman’s life.

So, how did he handle re-transition? How did he handle living as a woman and dealing with all the hatred and surviving without prostitution and enduring the pain of electrolysis removing his beard? How did he take the steps of transition now that he knew what not to do this time? How did he handle the double burden of facing the world as a transsexual woman and as an addict who no longer tackled life’s problems with drugs after doing nothing but his whole adult life? That’s something he will leave to his book.

Kicked out of rehab, the only afforbable rent was in the Tenderloin. Still on state disability, Chris got a bus discount (“MUNI Looney”) card, and ate at a church homeless dining room for a bit. He resumed part time data entry for his stepfather (only this time he wasn’t shooting up in the bathroom). He began electrolysis and female hormones and got a replacement transit card to reflect his changing appearance. For most of April he was a clean and sober bartender, until he finally got hired to a real computer programming job — as a guy, for the moment.

The big question was: would they fire him when he asked to work as Christine?

Bridging the two worlds on the Tenderloin and the corporate office, while secretly undergoing his medical transition proved an even bigger challenge than surviving as a transsexual junkie whore. When he started my new computer programming job (as a guy named “Chris”) he spent every other moment as Christine. If the next three years of his life had been reduced to checklist if might have looked like this.

1. Work my ass off and make my bosses and coworkers love me.

2. Attend 12 Step sobriety meetings, work my recovery program and earn my one-year sobriety medallion.

3. Take female hormones and finish electrolysis of my face and torso.

4. Attend formal gender counseling need for sex change surgery.

5. Have my doctor sign the DMV form to change my gender to “F”.

6. Attend the office Halloween party dressed as Christine to pave the way for going full-time.

7. Don’t do drugs to ease my fear while the divisional vice president and my manager decide whether or not to fire me.

8. Save every penny I can for Sex Reassignment Surgery (SRS).

9. Spend $4000 on sub-auxiliary size ‘C’ breast implants because my boobs haven’t grown big enough in eighteen months.

Staying clean and sober was Christine’s first priority in 1989, She wrote for those in Twelve Step fellowships and soon branched out to other communities. The next year, she started speaking on gender panels in front of college students and caregiver seminars. She then began accepting guest slots on TV and radio talk shows and took those opportunities to put forward trans issues in a more diplomatic and winning manner. From 1991 to 1993, she spoke on local and national talk shows, including Montel Williams in 1993. As cable access and Internet radio gained popularity, she later accepted those invitations as well.

As San Francisco is a hotbed of transgender activism, Christine threw herself into the thick of it, testifying at City Hall meetings and reaching out to San Francisco Supervisors, especially Mark Leno and Terrence Hallinan. In 1992, sheheld a seat on the board of the Tenderloin AIDS Resource Center. In 1993, she attended a summit for the multi-agency Community Substance Abuse Services to improve staff education about transgender people, and produced am educational pamphlet for CSAS staffers. In 1994, she was appointed to Supervisor Hallinan’s Task Force on Prostitution. As a journalist I covered the persecution of the city’s largest transgender bar over a five year period and testified on its owners’ behalf at police and City Hall hearings.

Christine most passionately placed her activism in her former band Glamazon. Given the male-dominated and macho nature of rock, she sought to be an example of a transsexual woman who dared to venture into that boy’s club, and to use her visibility as a soapbox.

At the 2001 Trans Unity event the Los Angeles County Transgender Task Force presented her with a “MTF of the Year” award for her work in Glamazon. Two years later, she worked with the Transgender Task Force and was one of the organizers of the 2003 Transgender Day of Remembrance March and candlelight vigil.

To this day, Christine looks for opportunities to speak out, raise awareness and help build bridges between members of the LGBT community and between us (transgendereds) and mainstream society.

Visit Christine Beatty at MySpace.