Every so often I’ve been asked whether I believe in reincarnation. Sometimes the questioner delves deeper, before I’ve even answered the first question, to ask whether I was a woman in any past life. I will admit to having experienced one very uncanny (yet disappointingly ungendered) feeling when I first visited Berlin, Germany in 2014; it felt very much like I had been there before but not in this life. That anomaly aside, I have no particular reason to suppose that reincarnation is plausible. Still, I’m attracted to the question as it relates to my (current) life, including identifying what aspects from my own personal history might cohere over the years as identity. Is it even possible to draw together many past chapters of one’s life under one recognizable and persistent sense of personhood? Is this a search for one’s soul?
Metaphysical or theological musings aside, the construction and discovery of personal identity is at the heart of being me—and through that identity convincing the world that I am who I assert myself to be, in whatever gender feels self-ish. Life is never static; the knowledge that those fifty to seventy-five trillion cells that together constitute Chloe have differing life spans and are variously replaced (or not) as we age leaves the biological question of a residual or consistent identity unclear. Perhaps I should be comforted to know that brain cells do typically last a lifetime, and arguably the intellect is where my identity resides. Or is it? That brain-body divide is no longer persuasive for me; I feel a very reassuring new sense of oneness with my now female body and I hold a conviction that the totality of Chloe has never been more integrated. Perhaps claiming that present wholeness is casting the historical person who was known as Stephen into an odd and ambiguous space of incoherence: Who and what was Stephen as a small child, a teenager, a young adult, or as a middle-aged person? Where was Chloe all that time? There are no clean and simple answers, but there are patterns that emerge.
Upon reflection, my life and its many patterns do seem to subdivide more or less neatly into ten “past lives.” These are more clearly defined in my evolving career pursuits, and although the Stephen-Chloe question wasn’t always in evidence, these ten past lives can be very briefly summarized in the following set of recollections:
Infancy and Childhood
I was a relatively carefree youngster, the middle of five children, with loving parents and a secure and stable family life. Yes, we moved every two to three years, as military families often do, but since I was surrounded by other military families this transient life seemed normal. My dad was away fighting in the Korean War for two years early in my life, but otherwise he was almost always nearby, and we were a tight and caring family. We had our own traditions and adventures, deep ties to my dad’s family in southeastern Ohio, and nearly as strong ties to my mother’s family in and around Clearwater, Florida. I have some memories of very early life in New Orleans (where my father was a Marine Corps recruiting officer), but it wasn’t until I was in second grade in Southern California that I first sensed that I was not much like my brothers, and that my mom was my more comfortable role model. No one seemed to mind. I remember being very close to my mother throughout these early years, and also taking a special interest in helping care for my baby sister Barb (ten years younger than me) once she appeared on the scene. With a very busy mother and a house full of children, taking on the responsibility of mother’s helper to care for my sister felt like a real calling.
Military School
The security and relative tranquility of my life was rudely and dramatically changed in eighth grade, when the family moved to Wisconsin for my dad’s own renegotiation of his life as a retired colonel. He softened the separation from his Marine Corps career by being employed, at his first post-military job as Commandant of Cadets at a military academy. There he continued to wear his uniform and to hold firmly to his identity as a senior Marine Corps officer. While he worked at the academy, my brother George and I were cadets based in the halls of residence (“barracks”) of the academy. We were rarely able to see our family. These two years were a perplexing time of deep unhappiness for me, as I struggled to make sense of the hyper-masculine environment and the attendant loneliness and separation from my family. I remember a sense of profound disconnect from all around me at that academy, made worse by knowing that my parents, younger brother, and younger sister lived only a short distance away on the edge of the campus. I was expected to “man up” and live in the barracks.
High School and College
Almost as quickly and dramatically as my world had been reconfigured to a teenage, Spartan military ethos—artificially separated from girls, women, family, and pets—I was whisked away from the military academy as my family relocated to the small New York State college town of Potsdam. There I was placed in a public high school, where I was free to rediscover myself among the integrated company of boys and girls. This new freedom became a time for experimentation, growing my hair long, wearing Day-Glo bright pineapple shirts with matching bright socks, only to later foreswear such garish colors to instead adopt a subdued, pale-green, Mandarin collar shirt. (It made me look sophisticated and exotic, I thought.) Thankfully the family was all back together again (excluding my two older brothers who were off at universities in Ohio and Wisconsin), and I was again in close proximity to my mom and my sister. I finally had an academic environment where I could—and did—flourish, in my own quiet way. While I sensed that I was in a different place than any of my male or female friends, I immersed myself in art, sewing, German and Latin classes, and in copious reading. Even when I went off to college, my anchor was that family home in Potsdam.
I did try once again to win my father’s respect and to prove myself in a masculine world by signing up for the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) at Rochester, but the clash between being an art student (which I adored) and wearing that Army cadet uniform at the height of campus protests against the Vietnam War was unbearable. My ROTC career lasted only two weeks.
England and Oregon
I seized the opportunity offered to me by Syracuse University to do my last year as an exchange student at the Architectural Association School of Architecture at Bedford Square in London. I learned more about politics, polemics, Marxism, single-malt whiskey, the proclivity of English motorcycles to drip oil, illegal house-sitting (squatting), and being self-sufficient than I ever learned about architecture at that school. Yet it was a place to mature and become more worldly, and to take advantage of what London, as a great world city, could offer. And England taught me what it meant to be an American—a lesson that is perhaps only accessible from the perspective of a foreign shore. In no time at all I was an earnest convert in the ranks of international student Anglophiles on a tight budget, reveling in the sing-along Christmas carols at the Albert Hall, watching the Royal Shakespeare Company perform at the student rate of twenty-five pence, avoiding London Underground fares by jumping turnstiles, window shopping along Oxford Street, and developing a taste for a cheap pint of English bitter beer. The year went by but I stayed on, working as an apprentice architect. I had reason to stay; in London I met a beautiful young Englishwoman and surprised myself by falling almost as much in love with her family—her caring and interesting parents Julia and Donald and their pet dog Amber—as I did with her. Melanie’s family home in the English countryside became my second home, and I gravitated toward her mother as she shared with me some of the domestic insights of a woman who was a consummate homemaker and a good citizen of the village, a woman who had never baked a cake (or anything) from a mix. In relatively short order I enticed my family to cross the pond for a very traditional English wedding, all the while Melanie’s mother marveled at how much I wanted to be a part of designing and preparing the wedding, which she ascribed to my being foreign. Once married, my young wife and I then moved to Oregon where she completed her studies, but being in Oregon always felt like being a long way removed from any place I could call home. Oregon was a rugged and wild place, and as a newlywed it reinforced my efforts at being “the guy”—although I still felt a persistent affinity for the women in my life. Three rainy years were enough, however; we were young and reckless, and Oregon felt painfully provincial. There was a whole world out there, and Africa beckoned.
Africa and Architecture
A single Swahili class can lead to unexpected outcomes. At Syracuse University I needed another language credit, and their East African Studies program offered a course in Kiswahili. I signed up for reasons never really all that clear to me, but it left its mark. After studying Swahili, Kenya felt like a real place, and a tantalizing one. A few years after studying that language, and at my urging, my wife and I saved all our money, put our modest worldly possessions and camping gear into our rebuilt, 1965 VW Beetle we’d named Henry, and drove and camped all the way through freezing February weather from Oregon to Florida. From there we flew off to Kenya with our paltry savings. I reveled in the scale and audacity of the personal challenge, willing myself in manly fashion to make it a success, while being inexcusably insensitive to my wife’s very reasonable desire for a modicum of security. At least my British professional qualifications made finding an architectural job in that former British colony relatively easy, and in no time I was well on the way to reinventing myself as the next Denys Finch Hatton.10 This was a form of manliness that appealed to me, tough but refined. I became president of the American chamber of commerce in Nairobi, went on a camel safari, acquired an African grey parrot named Kasuku (who subsequently remained my dear companion for thirty-three years), and drove a sturdy, short-wheelbase, dark-green, 1969 FJ40 Land Cruiser across terrain of the extreme ruggedness for which such cars were made. I gave my weekends over to windsurfing, mountaineering, horse riding, or technical rock climbing. My marriage began to unravel, but I pushed myself until it all—marriage, job, intrepid Africanist persona, self-respect—suddenly slipped away. The safari-suited, manly Stephen persona was emptied by that collapse, but in retrospect it was inevitable. Keeping up that façade had come at a very high cost to my wholeness.
Washington, DC, and International Development
There was no denying a sense of tail-between-my-legs defeat as I retreated back to live a normal American life. While comforted in the international city of Washington by the company of other former American expatriates who had been in Africa, I was newly single and I needed to engage with the world on new terms. I took up jazz dancing, which soon became an obsession, although one that I disclosed to very few people. Being in a dance leotard moving to music among mostly women dancers was a radical departure for me, but became a foundation for my future growth. I dated a few women, with relationships that always left me feeling like the relationship was more about finding myself in them than creating any bonds of intimacy—which in retrospect was probably accurate. When I met Christine, however, everything changed; she was beautiful across so many dimensions, a soul-searcher on a journey, and someone who felt instantly like a trusted and fascinating companion. We shared a deep spiritual bond that was nurtured by our Quaker community, and we became fast friends—indeed, the best friend I had ever found. In time that friendship grew into a closer intimacy and eventually marriage.
Africa and Town Planning
Still I pushed myself, and in so doing pushed Christine. To her discomfort we packed up our lives and our three-month-old baby Ian and headed off to Durban, South Africa just at the start of Mandela’s presidency. I delighted in my work as a planner, but I held tight to my commitment to be home every evening. While being a parent was profoundly fulfilling for me, I was at best an uninspired and often self-absorbed husband, as the rising inner turmoil of living the wrong life became progressively more apparent. While I dearly loved my son and my wife, I simply didn’t like myself. I couldn’t figure out why, although it was there in Durban that I began to really connect directly with the deep discomfort of being male. I knew after three years that staying any longer in South Africa would be insupportable, and we headed home to the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC.
Maryland, Doctoral Studies, and International Development Ethics
Before I even left Durban, I had applied and been accepted at the University of Maryland where the School of Public Policy was then co-located with the Institute of Philosophy and Public Policy. This meant I was immersing myself in an environment rich with eloquent, morally-reflective thinkers and speakers. I loved being back in the academic world, learning to apply the metrics of values and principles to the most daunting challenges of international development. After graduation I started teaching in the evenings and summers as an adjunct professor, which was a delight that I continue to this day. My family was thriving and Christine and I were doing better, until the glow wore off from the doctorate. Then the reservoir of unresolved identity issues was no longer containable, and was soon to overwhelm us both.
Fulbright Professor in Uganda
I’m not entirely sure what possessed me, but in 2004 in my fourth year of being gainfully employed in Washington, DC, at an international development firm playfully situated on a small flotilla of houseboats near the Tidal Basin, I submitted an application to the State Department to become a Fulbright Senior Scholar. Specifically, I proposed that I be based at the Department of Philosophy at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Perhaps I felt that I had little to lose by applying since I wasn’t an academic and my chances of being chosen were consequently unlikely, but in due course I was indeed offered that opportunity. Our son Ian was a fifth grader, and our daughter just in kindergarten, but the year turned out to be fabulous for them both even if Audrey only remembers the essentials. It was also my first time serving as a full-time academic, doing research and teaching ethics courses to Ugandan graduate students. Our accommodation on the campus was modest, but we managed to buy a ten-year-old Toyota Land Cruiser Prado wagon in excellent condition, and we made the most of every weekend by taking “safaris” to many rugged parts of Uganda. We also took one longer trip across the border into the game reserves of western Kenya, which was an adventure replete with getting seriously lost, driving for hours with a local man who graciously volunteered to guide us. He directed us off the gravel road and up a dry riverbed through nearly impenetrable bush, but he got us safely to our destination. The Land Cruiser was tested to its limit, as was its driver (me), but in the pleasant comfort of retrospect it was all great fun.
In addition to my teaching, while at Makerere University I gathered all the materials and research notes that I would need to complete my first book, Reclaiming Value in International Development, which was published in 2008. By that time my transition had begun, and the book that had begun to be written by an author named Stephen was published under my new name.
Gender Transition and International Human Rights
From 2006 onward, my life has been consumed with the project of becoming self-ish. Claiming Chloe is a gender transition process that will inevitably continue to characterize whatever years I have before me. Each day is qualitatively so much richer, and I am so incomparably more at peace than before my transition, even if I am now confronting a life ahead with very few economic resources to sustain me. But I am me; I am left to marvel that all of this has even been possible—especially since I retain such close bonds with my two children, Ian and Audrey, and my ex-wife Christine, who remains my closest friend.
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10. As Wikipedia states: “The Hon. Denys George Finch Hatton was an aristocratic biggame hunter and the lover of Baroness Karen Blixen, a Danish noblewoman who wrote about him in her autobiographical book Out of Africa, first published in 1937.” Robert Redford played an Americanized version of his role in the movie Out of Africa, which was filmed while I lived in Kenya.