A Bucharest Christmas

Summer and fall in Bucharest were brilliant in their sunlit days and blue skies.  From May until December, what precipitation there was fell at night or during the workday.  As little as three weeks ago I was riding my bicycle to and from work.  We were beginning to wonder, where is winter?

Then there was a week of fog.  Everything was shrouded in mist.  Temperatures dropped, and a drizzle turned to light snow.  Winter came, and now it is Christmas Eve.

This is my second Christmas in Bucharest.  A year ago it did not feel like Christmas, embroiled as I was in a legal battle that seemed without end.  I put up no decorations of my own and made no Christmas plans.  Then one day I came home from work, opened my door, and stopped short.  My apartment had been decorated!  There were Christmas wreaths, candles, ornaments, and Merry Christmas signs.  It was all the doing of my Bucharest friend K*, soon to be my best friend and one of the most significant people ever to appear in my life.  Unbeknownst  to me, she had gotten a key to my apartment and had decorated it along with her housekeeper without any hint to me.

A year ago I could never have guessed that this year I would be the happiest I have ever been in my 57 years.  This year I did my own decorating, putting up a small Christmas tree for the first time since joining the Foreign Service.  There are presents received and presents to give under the tree, and I am making the rounds from one buffet or dinner to another.  Santa Claus came to Embassy Bucharest on Friday, and I gave him the biggest of hugs.  This year Santa has given me what I secretly prayed for on Christmas Eve nights 50 years ago:  my womanhood.

I am far, far from the first person to walk this transition road, and much of what I write is familiar or even dull to those who have gone down this path long before me.  Yet for me all the milestones, even the small ones, are bright and new, each a shiny ornament for the season. 

My Childhood Christmas Creche (circa 1962)

One ornament came two weeks ago during the fog when I asked M* for a ride home.  "Of course," she said, "and then we'll go together to the book club." "What book club?" I asked.  She seemed surprised I knew nothing about it.  Later in the day I asked my friend N*, and she too reacted with surprise.  "Well of course you're coming, aren't you?"  With two such insistent requests in one afternoon about a group I had never heard of, I had to go and find out.

Mom and Dad's Christmas Village

It turns out that the International Book Club that has existed in Bucharest for years and years is known more informally as the Ladies Night Out Club.  Fourteen women, many from outside the Embassy and whom I had never met, gathered that evening, each bringing a dinner dish or dessert.  (I happened to have some chicken tetrazzini I had cooked the previous day, so I didn't have to embarrass myself by coming empty handed.)  Over wine and dinner, everyone talked about this month's reading, Galileo's Daughter, before digressing into general conversation about the lot of women then and through all times.  For me it was a magical evening that rivaled the Marine Ball.  "I can't believe I'm really sitting here," I thought as I pinched myself.  I had been accepted and was as much a part of the group as anyone there.

Then there was the Sunday afternoon when N*, who describes herself as a beauty school dropout, taught me the finer points of handling a blow dryer and brushes.  Other Embassy friends have been giving me makeup, hair preparations, and beauty advice.

Earlier this week one of my Embassy girlfriends came up to me and asked where I had bought my boots.  "Mine are worn out, and I love yours!" she said.  Another friend came up to ask where I had bought my skirt suit.  Then there was the handsome man, recently arrived in Bucharest, whom I met at a sweets and chocolate get-together last weekend.  When he heard we would both be part of a group that is going to a Christmas Day buffet, he said, "That's another good reason for me to go!"  I nearly blushed.

Santa has been good to me in smaller, practical things as well.  Much sooner than I expected, I received my new tourist passport this week, and just yesterday I received my new diplomatic ID from the Romanian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  Indeed, it is a wonderful life.

Bucharest at Christmas reminds me of small town America.  Christmas lights hang over all major streets, and the markets are full of wonderful smells as people rush home with their last minute shopping.  Men carry Christmas trees, and women carry wreaths and holly.

It is a very, very Merry Christmas in Bucharest this year.  To my family and friends and to all who have found their way to these notes, may your Christmas be as merry as mine, full of warmth, love, and happiness.  And to those who find themselves down and hopeless, know that this is how I felt just one year ago.  If that is where you find yourself, may you have your own K* in your life who brings you cheer and hope in spite of yourself.

I'll see you all again in 2012. 

After the Ball

Two weeks ago I wrote about the excitement of transition day at our Embassy in Bucharest and the glamor of the Marine Ball.  "OK," you say, "We believe the excitement and glamor part, but what about real life?  How has it been?"

The answer can be summed up in one beautiful word:  normal.  It's been absolutely, wonderfully normal.  I get up a few minutes earlier, true, to be as well groomed as I can before walking to the bus stop and waiting for my bus, just another professional woman on her way to work.  I walk through the Embassy gate, and the marine on duty greets me, "Good Morning, Ma'am."  I make my way to my office, greeting and being greeted as I go.  "Good morning, Robyn," I hear again and again.

I go through my day as always, but now with a smile and a much lighter step.  I had avoided our cafeteria and other public spaces for months, but now I break for lunch at noon or 12:30, grab the sandwich I brought from home, and down to the lunch room I go.  It's been wonderful to talk with so many of my colleagues who until two weeks ago hardly knew me.

First Day at Work

A member of our local staff with whom I work closely told me how stunned he had been by my announcement.  He said he went home that night with a heavy weight on his mind and told his wife, "My boss is becoming a woman."  She turned around, looked at him, and said, "So what?"  From that moment, he said, he realized that I was still the same person who had been evolving before his eyes without him knowing it.  Not once has he failed to call me Robyn, not once has he used the wrong personal pronoun by mistake.  I had been so worried about losing him, and now, realizing how wrong I had been in this worry, I want to hug him each time I go to speak with him.

 

Our HR office took a new photo of me for the Embassy registry, and I have a new badge with my new name.   My name has been changed in all directories and in the computer systems.  A colleague from Ankara with whom I worked long-distance for several days wrote a letter to my manager, telling him how grateful he was "to Robyn for her assistance in solving a problem that had plagued us for days."

Woman in a Red Hat

I spent last Saturday with good friends and bought a new hat.  I've been to an art reception this week and to Thanksgiving dinner at the Ambassador's residence, where I sat next to a Peace Corps volunteer who had been to Central Asia.  We talked about the never-ending water issues in that part of the world while stuffing ourselves with those deliciously awful foods that could size me out of the wardrobe I bought just two months ago.

Now my kitchen is filled with Thanksgiving aromas as I prepare for my own celebration with a number of local friends on Saturday.  I think back to the Transgender Day of Remembrance observance that I participated in a week ago at ACCEPT, the Romanian LGBT advocacy organization.  As troubled as my own life has been, I am one of the lucky ones.  I am alive!  I have more to give thanks for this year than ever before, for in this year, with the help and love of friends, family, and co-workers, I have become myself not just in the secret recesses of my own hopes and imagination but in the real day-to-day life that we all live.  Transition can happen even in the fifth decade of life, even in the State Department, and even at an overseas Embassy.  Life is normal, just as it should be, for the first time.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Robyn sends a hug from Bucharest.

The Big Day: A Letter to My Sister

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 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!

Before the Ball

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.

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

The Odd Joys of International Travel while in Transition

I just spent two weeks in Maine with my sisters.  For the first time, we were together as four sisters, not three sisters and a brother.  One of the chief orders of business other than talking and eating plenty of Maine seafood was to outfit me with an expanded professional wardrobe for the fast approaching time when I will end my double life and will begin coming to work as Robyn.  My sisters were my fashion committee, and we devoted the rainy afternoons to this task.  We had a marvelous time.

What I want to write about here, however, is not the vacation as such but the unexpected, nicely odd experiences I had flying between Romania and the U.S.  Since I still have my guy passports, both diplomatic and tourist, I purposely dressed in drab, unisex travel clothes.  I expected no problems, but I was wrong.

Photo from my Passport

It began in Amsterdam, where I needed to change flights and had to go through security again.  Something  triggered  the detection scanners, and the security agents indicated they would need to pat me down.  They were speaking between themselves in Dutch while I waited, but I caught enough words to understand that they were uncertain whether I was a man or a woman and whether a female or male agent should have the honors.  Surprised, I interrupted in English, explained that I am a transsexual in transition, and told the male agent it was OK to proceed.  When he was finished, he said, "Thank you, ma'am."

On the flight to the U.S., it was ma'am the entire time from the cabin crew.  I was thrilled to be taken as female even when I was purposely trying not to, but I began to worry about passport control in the U.S.  Sure enough, the young officer at passport control in Detroit was confused when he looked first at me and then at the passport.  He clearly needed help.  When he started asking the usual questions, I said that I worked at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest and was coming home to the U.S. for vacation and to start a legal name change.  "Oh," he said, "what will you be changing your name to?"  "Robyn," I replied, and he then held out the passport, pointing to the M for sex.  "Will this be changing?"  When I replied "yes," he smiled and sent me on my way.

Photo from Embassy ID:  "The Mad Scientist"

After two days in Washington, I flew up to Maine on a domestic flight.  Again in guy mode, I thought better of showing my passport as an ID.  I had in my suitcase a recent ID badge from the Embassy that at least shows me with long hair, my mad scientist look.  That did the trick.  There were no quizzical glances or questions.

Arriving in Maine was a different matter.  Ironically, I had begun exploring whether there was still a chance I could yet walk the transition road in this lifetime when I was in Maine during the summer of 2010.  It all started there, but my neighbors in rural Burlington were about the only people left in my universe who did not know I had begun transition.  I had asked my neighbors Frank and Kelli if they could pick me up at the airport, but when I got off the plane I instead saw a stranger holding a sign with my name.  This turned out to be Fred, another neighbor from down the road whom Frank and Kelli had commissioned.  I waved, but he took no notice.  I had to walk right up to him and tell him I was the person he was looking for.  Clearly I was not quite the guy he was expecting.  We had an awkward 45 minute drive from Bangor to Burlington.

After throwing my suitcase into my cabin -- the only home I have today in the U.S. -- I walked next door to see my neighbors.  Kelli gave me a hug and invited me in to dinner.  As polite as ever, both Kelli and Frank looked at me strangely as though an elephant had walked into the room with me.  Over the course of dinner I worked my way around to the subject of my appearance.  Choosing my words carefully, I explained what is going on.  To my relief, Frank's response was, "Doesn't change the way I think of you."  Within days Kelli was complimenting me on my new clothes. 

I had had some fears about "coming out" in rural Maine, but to my relief I was wrong.  Maine is a state of yankee conservatism.  The credo is still "I might not agree with the way you are living your life but will defend to the death your right to live it that way."  My handyman Ritchie told me I was just adding color to Burlington's already colorful citizenry.

Somewhat wiser, I kept my mad scientist Embassy ID in my pocket for the return to Romania.  At airport check-in, all security checks, and finally at passport control in Bucharest, I presented my passport along with the ID, explaining that the ID photo is more current.  It worked.  I had no unusual incidents. 

A Rainy Afternoon in Bar Harbor

I should have no such odd experiences when I next travel outside Romania.  While in Maine, I went to my attorney to start the legal name change.  By the time I travel to the U.S. again next summer, I will have new passports with correct name and gender.  The charade will be at an end.

On the flight from Baltimore to Detroit, a young Lebanese woman who sat next to me with her 13-month old son struck up a conversation from which it was immediately clear she had taken me as female.  We talked child care and the difficulty of traveling with family.  I got out the vacation photos of me with my son and with my sisters.  As we looked at them, I heard the voice of the stewardess.  "Can I offer you anything to drink, ma'am?"  Wonderful, simply wonderful.



The Timeless Beauty of Fall in Maine



A Bushel and a Peck and Up Around the NEC

It's called the New Embassy Compound, the NEC for short.  It's pronounced like neck.  Carting many bushels and pecks worth of computers, servers, switches, and other boxes of computer stuff took over my life at the end of August.  The U.S. Embassy closed its old location in downtown Bucharest on September 9 and reopened at the NEC in the Baneasa suburb on September 12.  As anyone who has ever moved computer networks for a large organization can tell you, our work was only beginning on September 12.  Only now, at the end of our second week at the NEC, is life beginning to return to normal.  In the course of three weeks, I worked a week of overtime.

For any of my Romanian readers who have seen the NEC and think it an ugly eyesore, a prison compound, or a mini-Pentagon, all I can say is none of us were involved in the architectural design.  There are lots of things we, who work at the Embassy, would have done differently if anyone had asked us.  On the other side of the coin, the old Embassy on Tudor Arghezi street was in a historic building that was beautiful on the outside but decaying, almost decrepit on the inside.  Having a new, modern building to work in is a blessing no matter what its architectural merits.

The best news for me today is that tonight I fly to the U.S. for two weeks of vacation and a reunion with my sisters in Maine.  This will be my first vacation in a year, and I am ready!

So where did I leave my story?  In the retrospective I had just survived my disastrous, abortive coming-out summer of 1990.  Today, in the year 2011, I am less than three months away from beginning the Real Life Experience of coming to the workplace and living my live full-time as Robyn.  While in Maine, I will begin my legal name change through the Maine courts.

There is much still to tell both old and new, but having stolen today's opening lines from Frank Loesser's show tune, I will steal my closing from Pushkin.  At the end of Chapter 3 of Eugene Onegin, just as Onegin appears in the lane, striding towards Tatyana after reading the letter in which she professes her undying love, Pushkin breaks the action -- he wrote and published Eugene Onegin in installments -- writing:

Сегодня, милые друзья,
Пересказать не в силах я;
Мне должно после долгой речи
И погулять и отдохнуть:
Докончу после как-нибудь.

My friends, I need to pause a spell,
And walk, and breathe, before I tell
A story that still wants completing;
I need to rest from all this rhyme:
I'll end my tale some other time.

See you all in October!

On Finding and Losing a Boyfriend in Seven Days

It was only a Facebook romance.  It wasn't even that really, just a fleeting flirtation, but it left me moved and wondering.  In just seven days, if only in the realm of virtual reality, I found and lost my first boyfriend.

I always thought I was asexual.   In the bedroom I dreamed of the female role, but that was so impossible and fantastic that I could and would not allow my mind to dwell there.  In these later years, to those very few who knew about my gender questioning and who asked, I would answer that I'm a lesbian in a male body.  That's what I said to my very dear friend E****a, who built such hopes around the U.S. diplomat in a suit and tie in attendance on the Ambassador.  By the mid-2000s I had learned the lesson that I needed to say this up front to anyone looking to me for intimacy.  Otherwise it was the elephant in the room that no one talked about but that took up all the space.  It was the elephant that destroyed a marriage.

But this week, when an attorney at Whitman Walker Clinic asked me about my sexual orientation, I was speechless.  She was helping with a support letter for my new passport and was just asking routine intake questions.  "Straight, gay, bi?" she asked.  My usual answer was no longer the right one.  I replied, "I don't know."  In truth, I don't know anymore.

You see, several weeks back A*i started writing to me on Facebook.  I've never met him in person, and at first I thought he was a friend of a friend of one of my Romanian friends or perhaps someone associated with ACCEPT, the Romanian LGBT rights organization.  They were just chatty notes at first, but by last week we were calling each other "honey" and "sweetie."  He asked if I could come to visit him in his seaside city.  I answered that no, it's much too early for that, but added that who knows, perhaps sometime next year?  I'm too old and wise to expect anything from a Facebook friendship, but something was stirring in me that I had never permitted myself to feel before.  I **could** see myself, feel myself on his arm, strolling along the seaside.  I **could** imagine myself in his embrace.  It wasn't fantastic anymore.  I'm in transition!  This could happen, if not today, then someday!

I'm sure my good friend Shannon is smiling as she reads this.  I look to her as my older, wiser sister who walked this transition road several years ago.  When I gave her my lesbian in a man's body story last winter, she told me not to close the door on anything.  "Things can change when your on HRT," she said.  "You don't know where you will end up."

Last night we "chatted" again.  A*i's note was waiting for me when I got home from a long day of packing up the Embassy for our more.  I saw he was off-line, but I dashed of a "Hi!" before heading to the shower.  When I got back to the screen later, his note to me was, "I bet you were in the shower."  I felt a tingle.

But I already knew something I had not known a week ago.  A*i and I have no mutual Facebook friends or association through ACCEPT.  How we ended up as friends on Facebook, I really don't know.  I also knew he had never read this blog.  You see, his country, which is neither Romania nor the U.S., had never shown up in the audience statistics.  It finally dawned on me.  "He doesn't know!  He saw my photograph and liked it, but he doesn't know!"

So last night I asked him to read this blog.  "You need to know my full story.  I don't want to deceive you!"  We said goodnight, sending hugs and kisses.  Before I logged off for the night, I checked the statistics again.  There was a single hit from his country.  "He is reading it now," I thought, "and that's the end of it."  Then I cried.  I had found and lost my first boyfriend in just seven days.

Dear A*i, if you happen to read this, no matter what you now think, know that you made a fellow human feel good about herself in a way she never thought could happen.  Hugs to you, honey.  May you find the love you are searching for.

Tears for a Colonel

I've already written about becoming more wistful, misty-eyed since beginning HRT in June, but I had not experienced the torrent of uncontrollable tears that I have heard others describe.  That changed today.

This morning I had a beautiful waking dream.  It must have been 1970 or 1971, and in my dream I woke in the basement family room of my oldest sister's house in Oxon Hill, MD.  I was on one of her orange couches, where I always slept when we came to visit.  My nephew, then scarcely ten years old came bouncing into the room, and I thought he looked so funny in his plastic frame glasses.  (That's the pot calling the kettle black, as I also wore large plastic frame glasses back then.)  Then my brother-in-law breezed in, running to grab something from the back, followed by my sister.  I felt so wonderful that I both laughed and cried to think what wonderful times those were even if I was not able to talk to anyone about my deepest troubles.

I woke fully to find myself in my bed here in Bucharest, happily sobbing uncontrollably and not able to stop.  I would just get the tears to slow, and then I would think of my nephew again as he was in those days and as the fine man he has become.  Again I was reaching for the Kleenex.

My nephew is a full army colonel today with his own family and young children.  He has not said so to me directly, but I don't think he fully approves of these changes in his uncle.  That's OK.  I remember how he cried at my wedding in 1982, and my own tears start again.

By the time the floodgates closed, I had a large pile of Kleenex on the floor.  I got up, dressed, and went for an easy early morning bike ride around the Bucharest Sea.

Now, as I write these words, my eyes again become misty.  This is for you, nephew, tears for a colonel.