The beginnings of my gender transition affected more than my full-time employer. I was also on the adjunct faculty of three universities in the Washington, DC, area, usually teaching one course per term, alternating between the three campuses. For the fall term of 2008 I was teaching a graduate course at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland, and in the late summer I had already coordinated with them on transition arrangements. The School of Public Policy was helpful and very supportive, and their matter-of-fact acceptance enabled me to begin that fall term teaching en femme, even though it was a few weeks before I went one hundred percent into Chloe mode in the remaining components of my life. The first class of that term was on September 4, but I was delayed in Florida caring for my elderly father, so my dear friend Bobby agreed to teach that first class. Bobby and I had both been in senior management positions from 2003 to 2005 at an international development and foreign assistance organization whose offices were located on a flotilla of house boats in the Potomac River, not far from Washington’s famous Tidal Basin. I would come to work closely with him again from 2012 to 2013 when we were both vice presidents at my last employer, and he remains among my dearest of friends.
Bobby had met me as Chloe for the first time in August of 2008, at a lunch at a Greek restaurant in the Dupont Circle area of Washington, DC. Before going full-time in Chloe mode, I’d made selective excursions in the anonymous urban world of Washington, starting with drives in the car and graduating to travelling on the metro system. No one paid me any notice at all, much to my relief and delight. I took considerable pleasure in simply seeing my feminine reflection in the metro car’s windows, and in the anonymity of being just another woman. Through such adventures, my confidence in engaging with the world as my authentic self was increasing by the day. Still, meeting Bobby at that summer lunch was a very big step for me. I needn’t have been anxious; Bobby is a true mensch. He rose to greet me with a hug at the restaurant, and throughout the lunch he was unfailingly warm, gentlemanly, supportive, and bursting with amiable curiosity. It felt wonderful!
Later, after substitute teaching that first class for me at the University of Maryland in College Park, Bobby related to me how nervous he’d been that he would mistakenly refer to me as “he” or as “Stephen” when speaking to my new students. He made himself a large sign on a sheet of paper that had the words “Chloe” and “she” written on it, and placed it where he could see it but the students could not. He doesn’t recall making a single gender mistake, but he admitted that he was perhaps more focused on not making such mistakes than on the topic he was teaching.
For so many transgender women, the existence of a voice in the masculine register feels like the most insurmountable obstacle. Unlike the testosterone-induced voice changes that provide transgender men with persuasively masculine voices, being on estrogen makes no impact whatsoever on transgender women’s vocal cords. They’ve already been stretched to male resonance from decades of testosterone, and overcoming this requires learning to pitch one’s voice upwards in what is termed “forward resonance” and “modified intonation.” To me it felt like I was talking into my sinus cavities, but it began to make a difference after many hours invested in voice therapy lessons. I started these lessons initially in June of 2008 at the Speech and Hearing Center at George Washington University. Compared to almost any other transition expense, at fifty dollars per session this was a relatively affordable program. A very pleasant and professional graduate student named Melissa worked directly with me, overseen every so often by Linda, a speech-language pathologist and clinical supervisor. Under their combined tutelage my initial progress was modest at best, but the two important takeaways had little to do with feminizing my voice. First, I was fascinated to overhear Linda discussing me with Melissa, and referring to me using feminine pronouns. That was the first time in my life I’d earned the S; all at once I was “she.”
Both before and throughout my transition, I was bedeviled by anxiety about whether I would “pass.” Would I be woman enough? While hardly a suitably dramatic setting for a momentous and triumphant achievement, my true test came in June 2008 when I entered a woman’s toilet room for the first time, there at the Speech and Hearing Center. Perhaps bolstered by the apparently unselfconscious choice of feminine pronouns employed by my speech therapists, and humbly aware of the growing urgency of a call of nature, I pushed the door open into the women’s restroom, dreading the possibility that a woman might be in that room. My worst fears were realized; an elderly lady was just washing her hands. For me the moment of awkwardness seemed to stretch on for minutes, but thankfully the anxiety belonged only to me. She barely looked at me. I had unwittingly placed my validation at the feet of this unknown woman, yet in being so inconspicuous I had “passed.” No trumpets sounded, no certificates were issued, and no new coins were minted to commemorate this event. I didn’t know whether to feel comforted or embarrassed, but fortunately I had other matters to attend to.
Impatient for better voice results faster, and knowing that my job entailed extensive public speaking, I sought a new voice therapist. I was fortunate to find my way to a remarkable woman, Tish Moody. Tish had coached opera singers, was able to describe speech techniques that made sense, and had the distinct benefit of having worked extensively with transgender women. She is also a caring and supportive person, and under her guidance and through some very intensive work on my own, I began to make reasonably good progress. I can remember practicing on an old cassette tape recorder on my drive in to work each day and back home afterward, replaying my recordings over and over and over to hear if I was progressing. It probably wasn’t the safest thing to do while driving, but it was one of the only spaces where I had relative privacy to vocalize to my heart’s content, as loudly as I dared. Thanks to that practice, and with the kindly but demanding tuition of Tish, I was soon ready to tackle that first class.
My first teaching experience came on September 11, and I showed up early after carefully dressing and adjusting my wig (while waiting for my own hair to grow out). I looked reasonably good, but my biggest concern was still my voice. These classes each went for two and a half hours, so sustaining my voice in a higher register and projecting that voice (unam-plified) out to a class of twenty students over that extended time period was going to be a challenge. Staying safely sheltered behind the teacher’s podium wasn’t an option either; I needed to be as close to the students as I could be, so that they could hear me.
Somehow that first evening went by with no embarrassing moments or gasps of incredulity among the students. As became a common experience in so many later encounters, I never quite knew whether people accepted me as simply Chloe, or accepted me as a transgender woman named Chloe. In either interpretation, what mattered was that they accepted me, and each class thereafter became progressively easier. No one was ever scandalized! If my voice occasionally sounded curiously low or uneven, the twenty grad students either failed to notice or were too polite to remark on it. In time I hit my stride, and haven’t had a single disconcerting voice moment since while teaching. I taught all the classes that followed being poignantly aware that I was defining the success of my own gender transition—very much a work in progress at that time—as being about convincing other people that I was not a transitioning transgen-der person. The unfortunate slang expression, “passing,” makes it appear that we are getting away with something fictitious or insincere instead of achieving a threshold of acceptance that allows us the space we need to get on with our lives in the gender we know ourselves to be.
Both of the other universities with whom I was affiliated were also wonderfully supportive when I informed each of my transition, which occurred at the same time that I let my full-time employer know. Administrator (and now Assistant Dean) Leslie Evertz, of what was then the Georgetown University Public Policy Institute (now the McCourt School of Public Policy—where I still teach periodically), in particular wrote back almost immediately with very kind words and reassurances that they would do all in their power to be as supportive as they could. The School for Advanced International Studies of the Johns Hopkins University was similarly responsive.
On the heels of having been fired at the job where I transitioned, and despite the receptivity in my world of adjunct teaching, I needed a fulltime job. The next few months were very unsettling as I struggled to find work. Adjunct teaching would pay only a few of my bills, but every one of my many applications for full-time job openings was unsuccessful. I hadn’t anticipated there would be such resistance to hiring a transgender woman, but I was forced to conclude that this attribute was probably the primary cause of my poor job-search results. Given my well-developed technical skills and extensive global experience, I should have been a formidable candidate—had I not been transgender.