My First Anniversary

Tomorrow, November 10, marks one year since the workplace announcement of my full-time transition to living as a woman.  Like many who have had a similar life experience, I now think of November 10 as more of a birthday than my real birthday.

I've written through the year of how my life has changed.  What had seemed impossible has become reality, so much so that I can scarcely remember how it felt to be me before November 10, 2011. When I look at old photos, I know intellectually that the person in them was me, but I can hardly believe it.  What is normal is who I am today.  The reflection that greets me each morning is my own.  Could there ever have been a different one?

The mechanics certainly have become easier.  The morning quick change after riding my bicycle to work takes only slightly longer than it did back then.  Applying makeup is now as much a ritual as my use of a razor must once have been.

Along with this one year anniversary comes a sadness, as with it comes the realization that my time in Romania will come to an end in little more than six months.  Surprisingly, it was good news earlier this week that brought this home to me.  On Monday I learned of my onward, post-Washington assignment that will begin in the fall of 2014.  It will be in Astana, Kazakhstan, and carries responsibilities that will have me traveling throughout Central Asia.  It is a position that has long been of interest to me.

The sadness came over me when I saw Oana that evening.  Suddenly the tears started to flow, and they kept flowing.  "I can't believe I am going to leave you," is what I sobbed through the tears.  As I thought of others to whom I have become very close in Romania, the tears came ever faster.  As any reader of this web journal knows, I found it difficult to leave my previous posts in Moscow and in Tashkent, but here I already have a much deeper sense of impending loss.  The reasoning side of my brain has switched off; now I am all feeling.  Many of the friends I will be leaving are far more than that.  Some have become family.  How can it be that I will leave?  Yet I know that I will.  My eyes become moist again as I write these lines.

But tomorrow I celebrate!  Indeed, I started celebrating earlier this week at the Embassy's election night event.  Through a long evening and into the morning hours we talked and waited for the results to start coming in.  When they did, I knew that the policies that allow my very existence would continue.  What an amazing time to be alive!

I can think of no better way to mark this one year anniversary than to repeat below the letter that I wrote to my sister Mary one year ago.  Am I still as excited each day as I was when I wrote that letter?  I have the answer to that in one simple word:  absolutely.  

* * * * * * * * * *

11/12/2011

Hi Mary,

Your good thoughts and energy got me through a long sleepless night from Wednesday to Thursday, so worried I was that after all these years, the biggest day of my life might not happen.  After three strikes -- college in the 1970s, 1990, and again in 2000-02 -- could this all be just a dream from which I would wake to find it was all a mirage?

It was only when I parked my bicycle in the Embassy parking lot on Thursday morning that the fog and worries vanished.  I turned on my cell phone and saw the one word that I still needed from one key person to let the day's events unfold.  That word was the simplest, shortest, happiest word I have ever seen:  YES.

Mary, it was the happiest day of my life.  The manager of the section I work in handled the announcement so beautifully at the special staff meeting he had called for 10am.  He opened by saying that today's meeting wasn't really to talk about work but to discuss the new management policy that had come out last week in which gender identity had been added to the anti-discrimination statement.  He asked if anyone had any idea what gender identity meant, what it meant to be transgender.  Our local staff just shrugged their shoulders, and he proceeded to give a short but good explanation.  He continued that all eyes were on Embassy Bucharest this day, as ours is the first U.S. Embassy we know of at which an American staff member had declared himself or herself to be transgender.  Then he paused and added, "She is sitting in this room.  I would like to introduce you all to Robyn."

I spoke for a good half hour.  Jaws dropped, and there were looks of incredulity on many faces when I began.  By the time I had finished, the expressions had changed to compassion, and I could see a tear or two.  People from whom I had never expected it told me how brave I was, and there were many handshakes and hugs.

I had set my e-mail announcement to all Embassy staff to be sent automatically at 10:30am, and thus by the time we walked out of our staff meeting at 11am, everyone knew.  We have a weekly Embassy newsletter, and it appeared at 2pm.  Whenever someone arrives or departs from our Bucharest family, there is a "welcome" or a "farewell."  This week it said, "Farewell Robert," and right next to it were the words "Welcome Robyn."

I did no work for the rest of the day as I was deluged by congratulatory e-mails.  I couldn't walk the halls without someone stopping me and expressing support.  I received personal e-mails from the highest levels that I could not have imagined the day before.  All day long the words were, "Welcome Robyn!"

I continued to walk and dance on air all Friday and Saturday.  I had the first professional pedicure and manicure of my life, somewhat amusingly having to invent a tale to explain why my feet have so many callouses.

Next I went to the hairdresser.  Andrea and I have been working towards this day for nearly six months.  I was with her for three hours as she colored, highlighted, and styled.  I put on my glasses and looked at myself in the mirror when she was done.  My own reflection took my breath away.  For the first time in my life I felt and looked beautiful!

The big celebration, the event at which I came out into society, was the annual Marine Ball on Saturday night.  The same handsome, brave marines who day in, day out, had greeted me with the words "Good Morning, Sir!" now stood in a receiving line in their dress uniforms and greeted me, "Good Evening, Ma'am!" as they presented me a with rose.

At the Ball

Mary, I drank champagne and danced like I had never danced before.  I felt like Natasha Rostova in War in Peace who goes to her first ball.  At age 57 my dreams -- the dreams of any 13-year-old girl -- were coming true.  I danced and twirled and floated in my gown and high heels.  How I want to learn to dance for real now!

Oh, Mary, how good it is to be alive!  After all the years, the decades of hiding and pain, I'm me.  I'm no longer an artificial construct living for others.  I've been a Foreign Service Officer for seven years now, serving and representing my country to the best of my ability, but never have I been so proud to represent the United States as I am this day.  I am living proof of how far we have come as a diverse, accepting society in my lifetime.

Now it's a quiet Sunday.  I look at the rose from last night's ball and know it's not a dream.  Tonight there is no need to frizz up my hair and take off the polish.  I don't need go back to looking like the "mad scientist."  Tomorrow it is I, Robyn, who goes to work.

What a wonderful, magical time to be alive!

Love,

Robyn 

************

You can find my announcement letter to Embassy staff as well as the "farewell/welcome" notice in our Embassy newsletter at the following links --

• Transition Announcement Letter
• Dacian Dispatch Farewell and Welcome

Love Is but a Song We Sing: A Message of Peace and Love to Friends

A week ago I had the great good fortune of finding myself at the European Transgender Participation Symposium in Dordrecht, the Netherlands (www.etp-symposium.eu).  Two weeks prior I received a phone call out the blue from David Pollard of Amsterdam-based Workplace Pride asking if I could be part of a panel on International Employment Experiences.  I owe it to Richard Kohler, Policy Director for Transgender Europe (TGEU), for giving David the nudge.

I don't know the exact count, but there were at least fifty successful transgender men and women who had converged on this historic university town for the event.  The Dutch Government along with well-known international corporations such as IBM and Accenture gave financial support and sent out high-level officials to voice their support for transgender inclusion in the workplace.  My own panel session included very successful women from Accenture and the logistics firm TNT, and moderator Richard Kohler adeptly drew out of us what had worked and not worked for each of us in our transition and post-transition workplace experiences.

Suffice it to say that Dordrecht was a heady experience.  The prime organizer, Transgender Netwerk Nederland and its chairperson Carolien van de Lagemaaat had produced what in my book was a chart topper.  It ended with publication of the Declaration of Dordrecht, a ten-point call to action for full inclusion of transgender people in the workplace.

Time and again over the past year I have marveled at the circumstances that have frequently placed me at the front of the room, so to speak, when it comes to talking about my transition experience.  As regular readers of this journal know, I fully expected in 2010 that this road would lead to unemployment and an early retirement in my home state of Maine.  I expected I would eke out an existence on what little savings were left to me after expensive divorce and post-divorce litigation.  Instead, I received a major award last spring and now find myself being invited to speak at conferences and symposiums.

I tell my friends in Romania and Moldova that if I had transitioned in the US rather than in Romania, I would be the one sitting at the back of the room at events such as the Dordrecht symposium, doing all I could to learn from the experience of successful transgender people.  To a great extent, what has happened with me happens to all Foreign Service Officers serving overseas.  We are for the most part average people who just happen to be in a career that brushes us broadly with the title diplomat.  Our jobs within the embassies or missions where we serve may be quite modest, but outside embassy walls, many look upon us with a respect and awe that we know in our hearts is largely undeserved and has accrued to us only through circumstance.

Just such circumstance has placed me in an unexpected position with my Romanian and Moldovan friends in the transgender community.  It was many months after my workplace transition a year ago that it dawned on me that unintentionally or not, I had become a symbol.  The fact that an American diplomat had transitioned gender right here in Bucharest was big news for a disenfranchised group that faces discrimination on a par with what I might have expected in the US fifty years ago.  When you come down to it, transgender people worldwide historically have been loss leaders, not chart toppers.  We have some of the highest suicide and unemployment rates of any minority group.  Thus anyone who succeeds even modestly becomes a symbol of hope to others.

When I arrived in Bucharest two years ago, I found little by way of an organized transgender community.  So it was that I started hosting a transgender open house at my Bucharest home on the third Friday of each month.  I reasoned that if there is no support group such as the Washington, DC, Metro Area Gender Identity Connection (MAGIC-DC) in Bucharest, I would just have to start my own.  I had no goal other than to establish a safe place where transgender people, especially those early in transition, could come and be themselves without constraint.  It took some months for the idea to catch hold, but by last spring, 3rd Friday @ Robyn's had taken root.

Over the summer a small group of Romanian friends decided it was time for something more than 3F@Robyn's.  Instead of meeting at my apartment, the community now meets on the third Friday of the month at the Bucharest headquarters of ACCEPT, the national Romanian LGBT rights organization.  A bi-national umbrella organization appeared, Transgender Advocacy Organization Romania-Moldova (TAORM [formerly StepbyStep_TS]), uniting local transgender groups in Bucharest, Chisinau, Cluj, Arad, and elsewhere.  When I was in Dordrecht last week, I took every opportunity I could to tell people that TAORM had delegated me in an honorary capacity to inform the symposium of the new organization's existence.  Indeed, I was honored to spread the news.

TAORM has had growing pains.  Like any new organization, it suffers from little funding and divergent viewpoints, but I have great hopes.  TAORM has the potential of doing for Romania and Moldova what the National Center for Transgender Equality (NCTE) does in the US:  advocacy at the national level.  At the same time, local groups such as the one in Bucharest provide the type of support on a personal level that I found at MAGIC-DC.

I have just a few words of advice to offer my Romanian and Moldovan friends in my capacity as the Big American Sister --

• Respect each other.  If we don't respect each other, who will?
• Help each other.  If we don't help each other, who will?
• Exercise the democratic gift of negotiation and compromise.  That's what democracy and diplomacy are all about.  As Churchill said, democracy is the worst system there is except for all the other forms that have been tried.
• Hang together as much as divergent viewpoints will allow.  If you don't, you may prove the old American adage that those who don't hang together today are likely to hang separately tomorrow . . . from the gallows.
• It's amazing how much can be accomplished if no one cares who gets the credit.

Work together in that spirit, and in a few years time I will expect to be invited back to Romania for a symposium such as the one I just attended in Dordrecht.  I will sit in the back of the auditorium this time, where I will listen in chart-topping awe to the stories of successful Romanian and Moldovan transgender men and women who changed their world and the attitudes of the society around them.  Romanian and Moldovan government officials will speak to those assembled and tell of what they are doing to end homophobia and transphobia.  Managers of corporations will speak about what they have done to include transgender people in the workplace.

Is this an impossible dream?  I think not.  Just listen and remember . . .

You hold the key to love and fear

all in your trembling hand.

Just one key unlocks them both.

It's there at your command.