Old Clothes and Transgender DADT

Last September we set the date for my workplace transition at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest.  With November 10 fixed in the calendar, I expanded my new professional wardrobe, packing the old one into boxes as pant-suits, skirt-suits, dresses and pullovers took their place in my closets and drawers.  The two large boxes with my old business suits, dress shirts, and ties sat forlornly in my back room.  What was I going to do with them?

If I had been in the US, I would have donated everything to Goodwill or similar charitable thrift organization.  In Romania I didn't know what I would do.  I didn't want to throw everything away.  To whom should I give it?  My housekeeper who cleans and cooks for me once a week took a few things for her father, but the boxes were still full in my back room at the start of January.

This week my old clothes finally found a good cause.  A Scottish ex-pat friend put me in touch with another Brit in Bucharest who has been active in charitable work.  As of Wednesday evening, my old clothes have started their journey to a new life in northeastern Romania, the scene of severe flooding that left thousands homeless in 2010.  Another tie with the past has been cut as I move forward.  I poured a glass of red wine and toasted the past, smiling towards the future.

Signing Factura Using New Dip ID

It has been a beautiful weekend in Bucharest.  Friday night dinner with embassy friends who supported my transition through hard times last year was a warm way to begin.  Today I rendezvoused near the Arc de Triomphe with one of my new friends, PA, a young Peace Corps volunteer from Michigan.  Many embassies have a beautiful tradition of inviting Peace Corps volunteers and those on academic exchanges to Thanksgiving dinner.  I was one such lucky recipient of Thanksgiving warmth in frigid Leningrad in 1987, spending an evening with other students and academics as a guest of the Consul General.  Last year I was on the other side of the table, so to speak, as I mixed with Peace Corps volunteers at the Ambassador's Thanksgiving dinner.  That's where PA and I met, and dinner conversation led to a promise that "Of course, we must get together again!"

Arc de Triomphe in Summer

My transition has been very visible to family, friends, the entire staff of Embassy Bucharest, friends at other embassies around the world, and to old colleagues at CSC/NASA.  I transitioned in this way on purpose for support, self-protection, and, most importantly, to leave no friend behind.  I wanted anyone who had ever been important in my life to hear this from my own lips in my own words.  Writing these notes from my perch in Romania has been my way of continuing the conversation with friends who are time zones and continents away.

One of the greatest joys of the two months since November 10 has been meeting new friends who know nothing about my background, nothing about my transition.  It has been wonderful to meet and talk without having to trot out my entire story, just to have conversations that are normal.

Do you sense where this is leading?  Like others, I am having to work out for myself how much I tell and when.  I'm starting to think of this as the inwardly directed, transgender version of DADT, "If you don't ask, I won't tell."  At age 57 I have a history and can't sweep my prior life under the carpet.  I already am hitting this mark with PA.  When we met on Thanksgiving, I inquired how long she would be in Romania.  Through January was the answer.  In my mind I thought, "Great!  We can be friends for two months without my having to lead off with a there's something you should know conversation."  

Peasant Village Museum (early autumn)

Today, however, as we walked through the Peasant Village Museum at Herastrau Park, PA told me her time in Romania has been extended into the spring.  She lives not a ten minute walk from me in a sparse apartment in which the oven is not working and where the electricity is more off than on.  Remembering what it was like to live in a dorm in Leningrad in 1987-88, I immediately blurted, "Come on over and visit me for some home cooking."

"Oh sh*t," I thought after I said this.  "I'm going to have to tell her."  The photo of me standing next to my son at his high school graduation is not to be hidden away.  By that time we were sitting out of the cold in a small Lebanese cafe.  "Do I tell her straight out now?"  Perhaps it was self-centered, but I held back.  "Please let us just be normal girlfriends for a little longer."

Yes, sigh, by next time I will have to explain.  From what I can tell of PA, she will be surprised but readily accepting.  It's just that I'm tired of having to be accepted all the time.  I'd much rather just be.  Given that I am living through the greatest miracle of my life, I know that this is one wish too far, one that borders on ingratitude.  I doubt that I am alone in that feeling, the wish of wanting to just be.  I'm learning another lesson, one that others have had to face after progressing into their new lives.

But as we hugged each other goodbye, I could not help from thinking how wonderful it was, just being for those few minutes longer.

Of Friends, Mammograms, and Van Gogh

It's the first post-holiday weekend in Bucharest.  The weather is blustery, rainy, and cold but not cold enough for snow.  It's the perfect weather for long talks, visits with friends, writing, and just curling up on the couch with a book and a glass of wine.  Although born in New York and having lived most of my life in the mid-Atlantic, I love the northern latitudes even with their winter unpredictability and grayness.

Devoting as much time as I have to retrospective jottings has been important to maintaining touch with family and friends.  One of the fun things about working for the Foreign Service is that one gets to travel and live overseas.  I learn new languages, live in new countries, and make new friends, but maintaining close relations with those one has left behind in the US is hard even for those of us with normal lives.  Imagine what it is like to come out as a transsexual in transition to family and friends when there is an ocean, a continent or two, and many time zones in-between.  Although I did as much as I could in person on three visits to the US last year, I started writing these notes as a way to explain more fully what had been hidden for decades to those who thought they knew me well.  The most gratifying part of writing has been that it has worked.  My son and sisters have become closer, and many friends have rallied around in ways I never expected.  Thus the retrospectives, some of them difficult to write, have their place.

But not all friends have Internet, and not all have followed.  One friend whom I have known since 1978 has drifted further and further away, and after a phone conversation on Thursday evening, I believe she is gone for good.  Like me, AJ was a misfit.  I met her through a friend while in graduate school.  She was pretty much a street person just a year or two older than me who had a hard time getting along with anyone.  I took her in and for months she had her bed roll on my floor in New Haven, Connecticut.  Then she disappeared and did not turn up again until the late 1980s.  She had joined the Hare Krishna and lived in their Baltimore temple.  At least she lived there until she was unceremoniously shown the door and ended up on my doorstep again.  Thus it has been ever since.  We talk by phone, sometimes frequently and then sometimes not at all for a year or two.  From time to time she would turn up at my doorstep in need of help, and I would always provide.  She was one of the first to learn of my being transgender in 1990, and she was one of the few who did not reject me.  The last time I saw her was in 2007.

Sigh.  AJ does not have Internet access and has no idea what I look like today other than for a photograph I sent her a few months ago.  For the past year and a half she has been adamant in trying to dissuade me from transition, asking me to forget my physical body and live in the spiritual world.  She could accept that I am transgender as long as I did nothing physical about it, a reaction that is unfortunately all too common.  On Thursday I told her I would be going for a mammogram the next day, and this finally brought home to her just how far I have gone down this road.  She had stumbled over my name for months, but somehow the mammogram hit her harder than a legal name change, a new passport, and an evolving voice.  Our conversation ended with her saying she did not think she could accept me any longer.  The following morning I awoke to a critical, painful voice mail message.  What had been a dialog has devolved into something much uglier, almost abusive.  A friendship has ended.

One side of me is guiltily happy that I will no longer have to try to convince or persuade, let along help AJ out of a difficult bind in future misadventures.  Another side sheds a tear for losing a relationship of 33 years duration, a voice that was there in my own difficult times.

The losing and gaining of friends is well known to everyone who has walked this road before me.  It's part of the process, as I already knew from my failed attempt to come out in 1990.  The happier side is that many other old friends have become closer, and to new friends in Romania I am and have always been Robyn.  

Lipscani Street Scene

Venturing out under gray skies this morning, I headed to Van Gogh in the Lipscani district for brunch with a friend.  Lipscani is Bucharest's old town, a pedestrian area of small shops and cafes in the city center.  Van Gogh is a favorite gathering place for many of my friends here, and it has also become one of mine.  It's a warm and cozy place to get out of the cold on blustery days.

I first met my friend SL at ACCEPT, the Romanian national LGBT rights association, several months ago, and we had been trying to get together ever since.  Today we swapped stories of growing up transgender in the US and growing up gay in Romania in the Communist period.  To me, every LGBT person I have met in Romania is a hero, and that is all the more so for those who grew up before the overthrow of Ceausescu.  My own timidity in the face of social conservatism in the US in the 1960s and 70s looks like petty cowardice in comparison to what LGBT people had to endure here.

After brunch we walked for a bit in Lipscani before going our separate ways.  I had a smile on my face, the blustery day seemingly that much brighter for good company.

Oh yes, I nearly forgot to say that the mammogram was negative.  Despite being between thin and normal weight most of my life, I've always had breasts that were at least A cup or somewhat larger.  I should have been having mammograms for years, but no doctor in the US ever referred me even after I would casually mention that one of my sisters had been treated for breast cancer.  When the Romanian doctor at the Sanador Clinic told me, "Ms. McCutcheon, everything is normal," I breathed a sigh of relief.

This has been my weekend in Bucharest, a weekend of friends lost and friends gained, a mammogram, and Van Gogh.  May this winter day find you all surrounded by a warm, loving glow.