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Dallas Denny



Down But Not Quite Out at the Ross Fireproof Hotel:

Class Issues in the Transgender Community

By Dallas Denny

It's 1968, and I'm living in the Ross Fireproof Hotel in downtown Nashville. The Ross is on the corner of Third and Union, just behind the Ryman Auditorium, the home of the Grand Ole Opry. World Famous Printer's Alley, as it is billed, runs past the back door. A psychedelic night spot called the Electric Circus is on the opposite side of the Alley; on Friday and Saturday nights, the parking lot of the Ross is illuminated by strobe lights, and the country music from the Opry is overpowered by acid rock and British Invasion music.

One block down the hill is Broadway; it is filled with tourists and the occasional Joe Buck cowboy, guitar case in hand and awestruck look on his face, who has come from Oklahoma or Texas courtesy of Continental Trailways to make his fortune in the country music bidness. I wander into Ernest Tubb's Record Shop and the trinket shops, but at age 19, I'm too young to get into Tootsie's Orchid Lounge or any of the other Lower Broadway watering holes. Even though I look twenty-one when I'm in full face, I'm afraid someone will call the police when I can't produce ID. I know what will happen then. It's the South, after all. I'll go to jail, where I'll be attacked by the inmates, or maybe I'll be raped by the police and will never get to the jail. And maybe I will "hang myself," maybe with the help of a half-dozen deputies. And who will care if I go to jail, or if I am made someone's sex toy, or if I am made dead? Certainly not my parents, who have banned me from their home, and who won't even speak to me about my gender issue. Certainly not my employer-- I'm but a busboy, after all, and will be easy to replace. Certainly not the management of the Ross, which is concerned only that I pay them eight dollars a week for my room and cause them no trouble. Certainly not the burned-out old men who haunt the lobby of the Ross and watch me with unreadable eyes when I pass them, and certainly not the younger men who whistle and call to me on the street and try to entice me into their cars, but don't know the secret I keep between my legs.

I know I'm not the only Queen in Nashville, but where could the others be hiding? They're nowhere to be seen on the seedy downtown streets. Maybe they're in the bars-- but I can't get into the bars. Once, driven to desperation by the strains of the Kinks' "Lola" wafting through the night air and into my room at the Ross, I try to get in the Circus, but the little old lady in the cage out front says, "I'm sorry Dear, but you must prove that you're twenty-one." I've tried the gay bars repeatedly, and am told each time, "No drag, honey. Put on your boy clothes and maybe we'll let you in." I know that if I dressed as a boy, they will be more likely to look the other way on the ID thing, but I have no interest in putting on my boy clothes. It's bad enough to have to put them on in order to go to work.

I am in desperate need of meeting someone else like me, and particularly in finding someone who knows the drill, who can tell me what I need to do, someone who will say something like, "Girlfriend, we got to get you some hormones." Despite the ease with which I pass, I know my body is becoming more masculine every day. I can feel my girlhood slipping away from me, and I don't know how to stop it, how to move from a part-time life at the Ross to a full-time existence somewhere else. I don't know how to make the woman in me a reality. All I can do is to mark time at the Ross.

Ah, the Ross! Built in the early part of the century, four once-proud stories of red brick, designed not to burn, and now, like the old men in the lobby, just biding its time until the end. I live in a cubicle in the basement, where I pee in the sink rather than go to the filthy toilet down the hall. The maid gave up trying to clean the room months ago. There's a cot and a dresser and nothing else except a hanging space which is crammed with dresses and blouses and skirts. Stacked under the bed and in the corners of the room are my reading materials-- Cycletoons magazines, Ian Fleming's James Bond, Ross MacDonald's Lew Archer, science fiction by Robert A. Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, comic books, the sort of thing a young boy/girl reads.

To get to my room in the basement, I have to run the gamut of old men. They sit in the lobby all day long, smoking and chewing tobacco and watching the black-and-white portable television which sits crookedly on a chair. Having nothing better to do, they fix me with watery eyes whenever I go in and out.

No women are allowed in the Ross, so when I am in women's clothes, I use the back door instead of going through the lobby, closing the door so that it looks locked, but isn't. Sometimes, when I return, the clerk has pulled the door to and I can't get in. If I'm lucky, I'll be able to come in through the side door and avoid the old men in the lobby, or sometimes I can get in by knocking on the window of the man who borrows money from me every Friday and pays it back every Monday. He opens the door for me. If I'm not lucky, I'll have to go in through the front door and sail by the desk clerk and the old men in my miniskirt and fall, wondering if they'll recognize me, and what the hell they'll do to me if they do.

Much of my life, about sixty hours a week, is spent at Shoney's, where I hose down the parking lot and bus tables for $1.10 an hour. From two to five in the afternoons, I get to wash dishes, as if that were an honor and a privilege. Becoming a cook is a distant goal; anything else in male mode, and any job at all as a woman, is beyond my reach. I work six days, about ten hours a day. On my day off, and often, after work, I go, dressed, up the hill from the Ross to Church Street, where I window shop and make occasional small purchases of cosmetics or jewelry or clothing at the big three department stores: Cain-Sloan, Castner-Knott, and Harveys. Even during the day, men follow me, come on to me. It's worse at night, when they call to me from their cars as I walk along Union to the Greyhound station. I want to go with some of them, but I'm terrified of what will happen if I do. And so I don't-- at least not yet.

I've gradually gotten used to the idea that I pass easily as a girl, that the attention from men comes because I am a good-looking young woman. The realization has come hard, for my mother, when she first saw me dressed at age 15, hissed, "You don't look like a woman! Get out of those clothes this minute!" Surely, I'm fooling myself. My mother is right, I tell myself. I don't really look like a girl. But when I go into the wig salon at Harvey's and the saleslady helps me take off my fall so that I can try on a wig, and I start sweating and hyperventilating and feeling panicked because it's the first time anyone has seen me in face with my own hair-- the hair I must keep shorn in order to keep my crummy job-- she does not think for an instant that I am other than what I seem-- a seventeen-year-old girl with a boy's haircut. "Is something wrong, Honey? Do you want a drink of water?" I know she thinks I'm on drugs, but it's only adrenaline. The drugs won't come for a couple of years.

* * *

It's February, 1992. I'm in San Antonio for the Texas "T" Party. I've come at considerable personal expense, having flown in from Atlanta. I can't afford this; I'm able to be here only because a friend is allowing me to share his hotel room, rent-free, and because Cynthia and Linda Phillips, the event's sponsors, have been good enough to waive my fees.

At the moment, I'm attending a banquet, eating the standard hotel fare of rubber chicken and gummy vegetables. I'm in awe of my surrealistic surroundings. All around me are crossdressers wearing designer knock-off gowns with pounds of sequins, tall heels, elaborate wigs, jewelry, rumbling voices, thick makeup, jewelry that cost hundreds of dollars. I'm in a thirty-dollar outfit that I picked up on sale at the mall, at the rack at the back of the store that is the last stop before the dumpster, in flat shoes which are worn at the heel, wearing my own hair, no stockings, no bra, and very little makeup. I feel like someone's shabby cousin, plain in the middle of all this ostentation.

I remind myself that I am present in order to publicize AEGIS, an organization I have formed to provide information about transsexualism, and steel myself to listen to speeches by people I am in the same room with only because we share a gender issue. Under other circumstances, we would not know each other, for we have very little in common. I rent; they own. My car is twenty years old; theirs (both of them) are leased. They have cellular phones, beepers. They have wives and maybe mistresses; I have a lover (sometimes). They have IBMs and Macintoshes; I'm still using my Commodore 64. They have children; I decided to forego children because of my gender issue, and now, being post-op, am unable to either sire or bear offspring. They voted for Reagan and Bush; I refuse to vote because it damn well doesn't matter which one of the sumbitches is elected. They work for great corporations and spend their days in competitive, masculine environments; I have a low-paying civil service job, in which I am challenged to think up ways to help my developmentally disabled clients. And most of all, they are men, and I am a woman.

At least, that's what I assume at first-- that these rough-looking, rough-sounding creatures in dresses are men. But as the dinner progresses, something strange happens. Despite typically male secondary sex characteristics-- despite the big hands and feet, prominent noses, and rumbling voices, my prejudices begin to crumble and I slowly begin to realize that the others at my table are not really any different than I am. Inside most of them, there is a woman desperately trying to get out.

In terms of dealing with their gender issues, my tablemates are relative novices; in relation to them, I feel like a grizzled pro. I listen as they talk about minor accomplishments in crossdressing: their first time out, getting called ma'am in public-- victories which have been behind me for twenty-five years. They speak in anguished tones about things I have not experienced: the effects of decades of testosterone on their bodies, making it difficult to pass; their feelings of powerlessness to change their situations; their responsibilities to their children and wives; the golden handcuffs of their careers.

By the time dinner is over, I have begun to overcome my prejudice. I find myself surrounded by women, rather than crossdressed men.

* * *

I stick my head out of the door of the Ross to see if the coast is clear. My hair is swept into a fall, and I am wearing a purple mini-skirt and something I just discovered at Woolworth-- pantyhose, freeing me forever from garters and girdles. Unfortunately, the desk clerk, who has become suspicious about always finding the back door unlocked on Mondays, and who has come down to the basement to check it, sees me. "What are you doing here?" he asks threateningly.

"I live here," I tell him. He refuses to believe me, and scurries off to find a higher authority.

In a panic, I tear off my clothes and scrub my face with a wet washrag (yes, standing over that sink), kicking my drag under the bed. When there is a knock on my door three minutes later, I am in boy mode, in jeans and pullover shirt. The desk clerk has the hotel manager in tow. "Where's the woman?"

"What woman?" I ask innocently.

"We know you had a woman in here." The clerk looks suspiciously about the tiny room to see where I might have hidden her.

I take a deep breath. It's my first coming out. "There was no woman. It was me."

They don't believe me, tell me that I have broken the Ross' no-woman rule and must leave. In tears, I call my parents and beg them to let me come back home. They say no and hang up on me. I call them back. This time they say yes.

* * *

It's 1978, and, for the present, I am just one of the girls at the Gunga Den on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. As I stand outside the doorway, talking, a tourist gawks at me. I grin and put my hands to my crotch and make jerking-off movements at him. Later, I blow a sailor for money and learn the first lesson of prostitution: money up front.

* * *

It's 1991. I listen to the blonde in the bar complain about not being able to afford sex reassignment surgery. She is wearing a leather outfit that is to die for; it must have cost hundreds of dollars. They're not working clothes, but trolling-for-men clothes, for she is a hairdresser, and not a sex worker. She was my hairdresser until I found I could go elsewhere and get for eight dollars the same cut it was costing me forty for at her shop; after all, so they say, the only difference between a good haircut and a bad one is about two weeks. She chain smokes cigarettes as she blames everyone but herself for her preoperative status. When she pays before leaving in her shiny black Acura, her bar tab is twenty-seven dollars. I continue to nurse the drink I've had since nine o'clock. When I leave, I slide tenderly behind the wheel of my rattletrap 1977 Chevy Nova; I'm still more than a little tender from my own surgery.

* * *

It's 1979. Courtesy of an illicitly-obtained social security card, I am working as a Kelly Girl. This time out, I'm in the English department at Fisk University, where I am a pawn in a tug-of-war between a secretary and the Chair of the English department. The secretary claims she has requisitioned the Kelly Girl, and so owns her time; and the Chair claims I am her own. I spend the morning arranging files and learning how to play the numbers with the secretary; in the afternoon, I type letters for the Chair, who glares at me whenever she walks by my desk. I wonder if she has read me, or if she is just angry at having her authority usurped.

My beard has come in thick and dark, and is difficult to conceal, not at all like it was in the old days, when dressing took no effort. I touch-up my face every five minutes. Surely she knows! If only there were someone to talk to.... But the Nashville clubs are still not letting me in dressed, and I still have met no other transsexuals. Even the Electric Circus is gone, having evolved into George Jones' Possum Holler. My face is raw from shaving, and the wig is hot on my head. I feel like an imposter, a fake. I feel my womanhood slipping away from me, like I felt it slipping away from me at the Ross, and once again, I don't know what to do about it.

* * *

It's now 1980, and my career as a Kelly Girl is over. I have gone to work, in male mode, as a protective services worker. I spend my days trying to help families who have been accused of abusing, neglecting, or exploiting children. It's a frustrating job. It's Friday afternoon, and I'm depressed because I was just told by Dr. Embree McKee of the Gender Identity Clinic at Vanderbilt University that the program will not help me to feminize myself. I will not, he tells me, be offered surgery or given hormones. The reasons are that I am not dysfunctional enough in the male role (I have a honest-to-God job, after all; what real transsexual could hold down such a position?), and that I am sexually more interested in females than in males. In other words, I am not transsexual by their criteria: I am simply not screwed up enough, or interested enough in men. Later, as I think about what he said, I realize that he has told me exactly what I must do: if Vanderbilt will not give me hormones, then hormones must be what I need; perhaps they are the missing piece of the puzzle!

Within six months, still not knowing another transsexual person to ask for advice, I have studied up on hormones in the medical library, selected a brand and a dosage from the Physician's Desk Reference, and forged a prescription on a blank stolen from my doctor's office.

* * *

I'm treating Miss Charlotte to a meal for her birthday. Looking fabulous, if artificial with her ridiculous, pumped-up cheekbones, and with two Cape Cods inside her, she is reading me for my stand against injected silicones. I hear a litany of her friends who, she tells me, have not experienced problems, and whose lives, like hers, have been enhanced by silicone. She makes the very valid point that she knew the risks before her first injection. Miss Charlotte makes it clear that she is interested in the present, and not what she will look like when she is fifty. She conveniently forgets those times she has called me at four a.m., drunk and in tears, because her life is going nowhere. She also forgets, or maybe has never noticed, that I am fast approaching the half-century mark.

Miss Charlotte's cheekbones are more prominent than even those of her contemporaries, for her boyfriend hit her, the silicone shifted, and the trannie who injects her gave her more on both sides to even things out. She cannot suck dicks for very long, she tells me after her third Cape Cod, for it makes her jaw ache. I wonder if this will qualify as a work-related disability. Her chin is unbelievably long, like that of the Wicked Witch of the West, the result of botched silicone work; she has complained to me before that she is unhappy with it and wishes she hadn't done it, but she isn't mentioning that now, as she extols the virtues of silicone.

Miss Charlotte has had no electrolysis, is on hormones only sporadically, and is perpetually unwilling to leave the gay mecca of Midtown Atlanta for unknown territory-- even for a dinner at a nice restaurant in the 'burbs-- for despite her cheekbones and plastic bosom, she does not pass. She will never pass. But she looks great, which is of paramount importance to her. It's a class difference, I realize. I would not do to my body what she has done to hers, but then I'm not in her shoes. My position in society is anchored by my mind, hers by her body. I can look sloppy or fat, and usually do, without undue consequence; for Miss Charlotte, it would mean ruination, loss of her meager income, which is derived from occasional drag shows and less infrequent tricks. For her, the benefit of instant curves from silicone more than outweigh the risks.

If Miss Charlotte has taught me an important lesson, she has a lesson yet to learn herself. Blessed with youth and a reasonably small skeleton, she disparages those less physically fortunate. In particular she is on the case of Brenda, a middle-aged transsexual she has met in the bars. Brenda works as a cabbie, crossliving full-time. Charlotte make it clear that she considers Brenda a man, a transvestite, whereas she, Miss Charlotte, is a woman. She doesn't understand why Brenda has chosen to live as a woman, and listens, but doesn't really hear me, when I suggest that the same sorts of feelings which drive her motivate Brenda as well.

* * *

If my life has been a balancing act between the male body I was born with and my need and desire to be a woman, it has also been a balancing act between lifestyles. I've never made enough money to live comfortably. Where others have spent money on vacations, clothing, jewelry, homes, automobiles, alcohol, drugs, their 401K accounts, and fine restaurants, I have been forced to be creative in order to get things which would ordinarily be out of reach to someone with my limited income. By working full-time at $330 a month and by taking advantage of a loan program which let me register for classes and pay back the loan at the end of the term, I managed to go to college, one shaky semester at a time. By getting an assistantship which paid $150 a month, I was able to go to graduate school. By driving motorcycles or old cars and often working on them myself, I have managed to maintain mobility (my current vehicle is a 35-year-old Dodge Polara with push button transmission and is quite fabulous, thank you). Through the years, I've lived at various times in garages, unfinished basements, attics, mobile homes, with friends, with relatives, and in group homes (as staff; shame on you for thinking otherwise) and in communal living situations. In the male role, I was unable and unwilling to dress and wear my hair and otherwise behave in ways which were acceptable to North Amerikan korporate kulture. This limited my earning potential and caused me to miss out on, among other things, better paying jobs, retirement plans, marriage, fathering children, a home in the suburbs with a spouse and 2.5 cars, trips to the Caribbean, and charge cards and other trappings of American urban middle-class life. But I've also been able to avoid having to rely on prostitution (although I dabbled around the fringes during my brief fling in New Orleans), drug and alcohol dependency (although I have dallied with alcohol and practically every drug known to science, I have done so as part of my generally experimental approach to life, and not in search of a substance which will insulate me from the world), and I have managed (sometimes just barely) to keep myself from being physically, mentally, or emotionally harmed or exploited by others, whether they be family, predators on the streets, lovers, or medical professionals to whom I have turned for help with my gender issue.

My betwixt and between financial status has helped me see the full panorama of transgender behaviors, for I have commingled with and to some measure understand both the affluent and the disadvantaged. I know transsexual people who have managed to hold onto their jobs during transition, and transsexual people who have walked away from their old lives to forge new ones, losing everything they own and everyone they love. I know those whose middle-class lives fell apart when they started to deal with their gender issues, and who now live in reduced circumstances; some of them have been forced to turn to sex work. And I know those who, like Miss Charlotte, who have never had and never will have a middle-class life, who have wound up on the streets because they were courageous enough to deal with their gender issues at an early age.

In their youth, transgendered people have a terrible choice: they can be true to themselves, for which they will be at grave risk for becoming homeless; or they can keep others happy by stifling their innermost selves. The choice they make will determine the path they walk through life: marginalized, rejected, harassed by others, forced into low-paying jobs, but able to be themselves; or comfortably middle-class, with all the privileges pertaining thereto, but having to keep the closet door firmly closed. Neither choice is satisfactory; either decision has grave consequences. Who could be blamed for waling either of these roads?

Yet I have seen arrogance and misunderstanding from both sides: on the one hand, the attempts made by middle-class persons to distance themselves from those less financially fortunate than themselves, and the willingness to ignore human misery while buying yet another designer outfit; and on the other hand, the tendency of many people on the street to lay all of their troubles on a society which rejects them, while taking none of the blame for their indulgences and excesses. I have seen those who transition in their forties envy the beauty and naturalness of those who transitioned early, and those who transitioned in their twenties envy the money and accomplishments of those who transitioned later in life.

When I was a protective services worker, girls of thirteen or fourteen in the housing projects would deliberately get pregnant so they could get out of their mothers' houses and get their own AFDC check and so establish a home for themselves. It was an adaptive thing for them to do, although my co-workers never realized and would never have admitted it if they had. These young women had no other vision; their life experiences had not led them to realize or expect that there are other ways to get through this vale of tears than living in the projects on welfare. The middle-class upbringing of the social workers gave them a different perspective-- one of empowerment and privilege, which left them unable to understand why, under the circumstances, pregnancy was a good choice for those young women; they were simply unable, and perhaps unwilling, to comprehend why the cycle of poverty perpetuated itself.

I also, I might add, saw people improve their situations by sheer force of personality and courage. I have no explanation for why this happens, except that sometimes exceptional people are able to see beyond their upbringing and circumstances and construct their lives accordingly. This works for the downwardly mobile, as well as the upwardly. Some people simply seem to be less constrained by their upbringing and social class than others.

But only a minority have the ability to take other perspectives. Few who have lived middle-class lives have any conception of how a lifetime of limited vistas can stifle initiative and creativity; how life in a public housing project can leave people unable to see beyond their meager horizons; how not snitching on others can hold far more value than being honest; how it is difficult to be prompt for an appointment when you have no car and the bus may or may not go there and you may or may not have clothes to wear or facilities in which to make yourself presentable beforehand; how going on foot to the part of town where the interview is held may get you harassed or picked up by the police, or run over by a car as you make your way along highways with no provisions for pedestrians; how systematic repression from the authorities destroys self-image; how peer-pressure and a lack of sense of self-worth can lead to drug and alcohol abuse; how initiative can be punished, and apathy rewarded; how sexual or physical abuse can leave a person scarred and self-destructive; how depression can make an individual unable to function. Those who transition late in life don't see that those who have confronted their gender issues at an early age can be punished for that decision, forced into lifestyles and circumstances they did not necessarily choose and most likely did not want, but have done their best to adjust to in a society which makes it difficult for transgendered people to get work. And most unfortunately, they don't see that had they themselves been less dishonest about who they were, they would have been very likely to have gone down a similar road.

When one is young and on the street, it's easy to look at someone in their forties with scorn because they seem awkward in their clothes, because they have lost their hair and must wear a wig, because they are not banjee, not "real." It's a bit harder to see the pain that has been carried inside all those years, and the damage it has done to the psyche-- damage which, even if it is different in form, is every bit as real as that suffered by people on the street. It's also easy to see those at gender conventions and think them fabulously wealthy, when in truth it may be their one big fling of a lifetime, a one-week excursion into femininity or masculinity which has been paid for by working as corporate drones in a presentation which they despise. It's easy to forget that money squandered on alcohol and drugs can just as easily be spent to pay the cost of a gender convention. It's easy to resent those who have homes and families, who have male privilege (or for that matter, female privilege, which is certainly more lucrative than transgender privilege), and not realize that it is privilege that was never wanted but which was forced onto them because their lives and bodies trapped them into their present roles. It's easy to forget that those who have middle-class jobs pay enormous taxes which fund programs like food stamps, public housing, welfare, Medicaid and Medicare, and other social programs, and frequently give voluntarily to charities, to boot. And it's easy to forget that the question of whether those with middle-class backgrounds owe anything to those without such backgrounds is not a given, but a matter of hot debate in this society.

In the seventies, clinicians who worked with male-to-female transsexuals divided them into two types: primary and secondary. Primary transsexuals were held to be younger, more inherently feminine, more histrionic, less reliable than secondary transsexuals. Secondary transsexuals were older, more prone to depression, and were considered less likely to pass or make a viable adjustment in the feminine role. The subtext to this was of course that primary transsexuals were considered the "real" transsexuals, because they passed better, because they were in the life.

I beg to differ with this clinical distinction. I don't think there are two different types of male-to-female transsexuals, or broadening the focus, transgendered people; I think there are only those who, at the fork in the road, have made different choices, and who have been shaped by those choices. Some come to terms with their gender issues sooner, some later. Some opt to transition early and face the risks and pain associated with that decision, and some opt to maintain their social relationships by remaining in the male role. Often, the choices are made for them, by the circumstances of their lives, or by happenstance. I know my own life has been influenced by chance.

My first decision point came while I was living at the Ross. The Nashville bars kept me out of the clubs, and I never saw another transsexual on the street. When I was thrown out of the Ross, I had to choose between going on the street and returning home. I might have risked life on the street anyway, had I realized that hormones would feminize my body, or had I met even one other transgendered person to act as my drag mom-- but that didn't happen. I had a vague notion that hormones were part of the process, but no idea of how essential they were, about what they could and would do, or how to get them. I didn't manage to figure it out on my own, and there was no one to tell me. I saw only that my body was masculinizing, and that until I found out the missing secret that would make my body become more feminine, life on the street would consist of battles slowly lost to male pattern baldness and increased facial hair. My sense of self-preservation moved me back into the male role, even though I desperately wanted to live as a woman.

My second decision point came after I was turned down by the gender program at Vanderbilt University, a good ten years after I had left the Ross. I still was not allowed in the Nashville gay bars, and still had not met any other transgendered persons, but I had learned what I needed to do to alter my body; I changed my life when I put that first self-prescribed hormone pill in my mouth in 1980. This time, my sense of self-preservation moved me away from and eventually out of the male role, even at the price of making myself a criminal by forging my own prescription for hormones.

But here's the rub-- had I come from the projects instead of an upwardly-mobile lower middle-class background, I would not have had the latitude to make the choices that I did. I would not have had to go in search of other queens on the downtown streets; I would have been raised with full knowledge of who and where they were. They would have been my relatives, friends, and neighbors. Had I been abused as a child rather than loved, I would not have had the instinct of self-preservation or the sense of self-sufficiency necessary to stop myself from climbing into the car of the first man who propositioned me. And I would not have had a family which could or would have taken me back when I got thrown out of the Ross, or the good fortune of having even a crummy job as a busboy. But on the other hand, had my middle-class upbringing "taken," I would have been an obedient little boy at home and would never have had the opportunity to explore my femininity as I did at the Ross; and, after being told by the doctors at Vanderbilt that I was not transsexual, I would have believed them and thrown myself into life as a man and wound up wearing beaded gowns and a ton of makeup with the rest of the "crossdressers" at the "T" Party.

* * *

The Ross Hotel is long gone now, replaced by a tower of glass and steel. Along with it went a bit of my history, my days of being only one step away from having nowhere to go. I'll never know what life on the street is truly like, for I have always had either an eight-dollar-a-week room and a dollar twenty-five job to insulate me from it, or the hopes that I could talk my parents into letting me come home when things turned sour. And I'll never know what it's like to grow to middle age as a man, since I didn't allow that to happen. But I've been close to having both outcomes, which explains why I'm writing this essay.

I view the differences between the two sides of the community as due much more to class and upbringing than to any difference in intensity or type of transgender feelings. It's senseless to attribute our unfortunate situations to being more legitimate ("real") than someone else, or to claim those less fortunate than we are "dysfunctional," when the real difference has to do with background, income, and class values; identification with heterosexual or gay/lesbian/bi communities; and racial issues, which, as we all well know, permeate every aspect of our lives.

If you're hoping for a great ending to this essay, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. I don't have a magical solution for bringing two very separate communities together in harmony. It may not even be possible. People like Miss Charlotte have little interest in sitting in a circle of chairs at a support group meeting, and many middle-class people are not inclined to hang out in the bars where Miss Charlotte spends her considerable free time downing Cape Cods. But certainly, members of both communities can stop attacking one another and begin to work on ridding themselves of their prejudices and misconceptions. We can develop forums which appeal to all of us; Atlanta's Southern Comfort conference, which turns no transgendered person away because of lack of money, comes to mind, as does the annual ball of ETVC, a San Francisco support group, and the Transgender and Transexual Health Conference of New York City's Gay & Lesbian Community Center. Those of us who are male-to-female must learn to listen to female-to-male transsexuals, who have their own class issues, which I have not managed to address in this essay. And we must all work together on issues of common interest: HIV/AIDS; fighting employment discrimination, hate crimes, and transphobia; working together to battle the unfortunately named Religious Right and to gain access to insurance coverage and quality medical care and freedom from job discrimination; helping each other overcome shame and guilt about being transgendered-- and hopefully, partying together to celebrate the special gift with which we are all blessed-- being transgressively gendered.

# # #

Biographical Sketch

Dallas Denny

Dallas Denny is an out transsexual woman and former resident of the Ross Hotel. She is founder of Atlanta Gender Explorations, a support group for those exploring nontraditional gender roles, and founder and Executive Director of the American Educational Gender Information Service, a nonprofit clearinghouse for information about transgender and transsexual issues. She is publisher of Chrysalis: The Journal of Transgressive Gender Identities. She holds a master's degree from the University of Tennessee and is a Licensed Psychological Examiner with twenty-five years of experience as a mental health professional. Her books Gender Dysphoria: A Guide to Research and Identity Management in Transsexualism were published in 1994. Her edited text, Current Concepts in Transgender Identity: Towards a New Synthesis was published in 1998. Dallas is a prolific writer of essays, fiction, poetry, and songs.

Dallas is a senior advisor to Mayor Bill Campbell of Atlanta on Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Affairs, and is

Secretary of the Board of Directors of Atlanta Pride.

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