The First Time I Died: A Transgender Girl's Lessons in Death

"End? No, the journey doesn't end here."

J.R.R. Tolkien

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I was around three the first time I died. Fortunately, I was witty enough to think my way out of it before it was time for my parents to pick me up from Pre-School. Despite being raised Roman Catholic, I was enrolled in a Protestant Evangelical Pre-School, called "Sunshine." It was there I learned some things about singing, napping, climbing up stairs, and even got my first kiss. The girl had pulled me aside while we were make-believing in the kitchen play set and surprised me with a small peck. I think I spilled my imaginary cup of tea all over the freshly vacuumed carpet. I remember being confused but not upset. I did get confused and upset when I got in trouble for it. The surprise and the adult response was another lesson I received at this Pre-School: openly trusting what people do or say can lead to confusing problems, especially when I have thoughts to the otherwise.

Another confusing problem occurred to me when I was driving home from Pre-School down Park Street, under the canopy of old trees that seemed to be a staple of my hometown, and we were about to cross the tracks to the north side of town. "I don't want Jesus in my heart," I told my mom. She asked me to explain why I say that. "Because I think that would give me a heart attack or something." She laughed. She was confused and asked me to explain. But I was confused too. "The school told me that to be a good person, I need to invite Jesus into my heart," I reported. "But even if he could fit in all those tubes and things, I don't think my blood could get through with a man in my heart." My imagination flashed with all the damage a tiny human could do trying to make a home, sleeping, working, and trying to prepare meals inside a kid's cardiovascular system. I asked her if that meant I was a bad person, because I didn't want a miniature Jesus to give me cardiac arrest. She told me I was a good kid and a bright kid. Then she told me that I could be friends with Jesus even if he didn't live in my heart. I thought that was a sensible compromise.

The sense of doubt in the adults of my Pre-School came in handy when it came time for me to die. They had arranged a trip for us to tour the Wheaton College Billy Graham Center. The first half of the trip was okay. I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and watched a video about Humpty Dumpty. Humpty Dumpty was an egg who fell off a wall and broke but he was able to be put back together. I wasn't a huge fan of the film but then again I tend to not appreciate C-rated horror films as this seemed to me to be. After this, the Pre-School teachers broke us up into groups. About five or seven at a time, we would walk through a door into a dark room. As far as I could see, no one was coming out again after they entered. Then it was my group's turn. Our teacher walked us through the door which shut behind us. I could feel the walls which were covered in some sort of dark carpet but otherwise the room was totally dark and quiet. Then our teacher told us, "you are dead. You have died." I immediately began to panic. Death hadn't hurt but I was very sad to not see my mom or my dogs or my siblings or my dad or my house again. I didn't know anyone who had died and so I felt very alone, despite being dead with a bunch of other three and four year olds.

I stood grieving my own death for about a minute before a door on the other side of the room opened, revealing a brightly lit chamber. Walking through the dark hallway into the light, I was surrounded by a bunch of other dead kids, all standing in a high room painted with bright blue sky and clouds. There was a railing, presumably to keep us from falling back to earth. I wanted to see if I could see Wheaton and maybe my home below us, so I went over to the railing. Looking down, I saw a mirror reflecting my face back at me. Scanning along the other side of the railing, I took in the effect of the mirrors reflecting the lights and the sky to make it seem as though they went on forever. At this point, I deduced that I probably was not dead. 

I think I began to cry. My teacher tried to comfort me by saying something about how we are in heaven, pointing to all the walls and lights. I did not have the presence of mind to tell her how this was a pretty boring looking heaven. I was too busy crying and holding my arms across my body. She then told me that I really wasn't dead, it was just a museum. I wanted to tell her that I had figured that out on my own and that I wasn't crying because I thought I was dead (that experience had mostly come with a sense of guilt at abandoning my family) but rather because of how enraged I was that I had been lied to again. As in the case of the the girl who kissed me while we were playing in the toy kitchen, make-believe is fine and good but you should explain the game to the people you're playing with before you start or make significant changes. I wasn't ready to be some girl's wife, girlfriend, or whatever she thought I was in her imagination. Likewise, while these adults were eager to get Jesus into my heart or get me into Jesus's sky palace, I wish the Jesus they were presenting to me was less eager to see me dead. That said, as the Humpty Dumpty film had already warned me, these adults seemed to like horror films way more than I do. All I wanted was to vacuum the rug, make some imaginary tea and take a nap without being assaulted or killed by my playmates. Is that so hard?

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Transgender and Childhood: Sympathizing with Stefonknee Wolscht

"It's a fresh start...
I'm living life like I couldn't"

Stephanie Wolscht

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Sister // Cister

I am sitting in the Glenbard West auditorium in Glen, Ellyn Illinois waiting for my sister to take the stage with the rest of her ballet class. I am eight years old. She is six. My sister has been practicing for weeks after kindergarten with a class of other young girls. The routines are basic - bending the knee, pointing the feet, small jumps (hops). The most difficult task for children at this stage seems to be coordination. The whole group must remember the moves, or be able to know enough to closely follow the teacher as she mirrors the positions off to the side, and execute them as a set. This involves working together over many nights to become comfortable with the other girls, be able to read and anticipate the other girls' movements, and work together as a cohesive group. Even if the leaps aren't very high (they are hops) and the poses are not perfectly straight lines, the overall effect of seven to nine girls moving in sequence to the music is fun and adorable. Beyond excellence in fine arts, the real goal of the dance class is to learn what it means to work as a group - and being able to perform the role of sweet girls in pink and black tights sufficiently for an auditorium of shutter-bug parents. Each used enough film to permit sending a copy to all friends and family who will feign interest (Note: growing up in the late 1980's we were decades away from the instant point-n-click digital phone cameras that make filming my own daughters much cheaper and more exact). All in all, between the group-building and performance, my sister and these girls were being indoctrinated into white, middle-class midwestern girlhood. And my sister looked damn cute doing it.

Listening to the violins and cellos launch the young ballerinas into a routine of circles, leaps, and bended knees, I remember a distant sadness tinged with frustration. I desired to be up there with my sister. This was not simply an attraction to the art-form and the pretty pixie-like outfits that accompanied it, but the fellowship with the other girls. Yet for my identification, traits, and desires I was assigned male at birth. So much of my life could have been different except for the trajectory that one final syllable of a three word sentence from a doctor ("It's a boy") that directed me for two decades. Had the medical professional clairvoyance to utter "girl" at the end or the radical pragmatism not to reduce the complex mental, emotional, sexual, hormonal, social system of gender down to a few misleading aspects of my biology my life could have turned out much differently. Certainly, if the field had been the same or leveled between my sister and me, I would have been down there with her on stage, dancing my little ballerina heart out. That however was not the way things happened then and there. As part of the educational and socializing process of making me into a proper boy, I had been daily drawn away from female friends and activities and oriented towards games with boys. While decidedly geeky boys, a few with feminine or queer flourishes of their own, the culture and community I was paired with kept the dance shoes and leaps at a distance from me. The closest I was ever brought was these old, knitted wool seats over metal frames that gave me a clear view of my sister and the education she was receiving.

Ironically, my sister eventually quit ballet. As we grew up and each learned to assert our own desires and disgusts, my sister increasingly threw away the pink and the frilly, while I coveted them even in their going. I didn't begrudge her discarding ballet or the other normative accouterment of girlhood, although I was sad to learn that she did so out of pressure from her friends. They were hers to do with what she would. Yet in ways neither of us had complete control over how we were and would become women. Don't get me wrong, some of it she was able to own and enjoy. Other parts she would reclaim later in life. She can tart it up with the best of us now that we are adults and be a real knock out. She can also knock you out with a right hook to the face if you call her that in the wrong tone. (Note: despite being younger, my cute but stone-cold tough sister looked out for me a lot growing up and still does today). All things considered, for myself, I simply envied her ability to say "No" to ballet; even as we are never offered a full choice. There were parts of girl culture I may not have wanted either, especially its compulsory surrender and subjugation to the power and privilege the boys were being prepared to inherit from the reigning forms of patriarchy.  Those I would not wish on any girl. Yet I desired the choice, the liberty, the power of refusing a thing that was offered. I wanted the offer to come as though this too were my birthright, as if the sisterhood welcomed me as own of its own. Without such doors being opened and young trans girls invited inside, it can and did take years for me to knock on those gates on my own - and where I found them barred against me to push, pry, and break down the barricades - and claim the womanhood (along with the assorted dance shoes and lessons) that I was not offered.

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The Loss of Stephanie Wolscht

"She said stop being trans or leave. So that - to me - stop being trans was not something I could do," says Stefonknee Wolscht as part of the Transgender Project film series. "I was trans before me married. I was a trans parent for twenty-three years. It floored me. It scared me. Because I didn't know how to not be trans." At the age of forty-six, Wolscht came out as a trans woman to her family, a wife and seven children. After her wife's rejection of her, she became alienated from her family of many years, a loss anti-transgender media blames on her decision to transition. In fact, while Wolscht experienced homelessness as well as joblessness because of being transgender, the press continues to publish stories of her life, painting her as a villain: Transgender father Stefonknee Wolschtt (52) leaves family to live life as six-year-old girl. As a result, Wolscht moved forward, making changes to her life on the basis that she would never be accepted by her current family. "It's a fresh start," says Wolscht. "I can't deny that I was married. I cant deny I have children. But I've moved forward. I have gone back to be a child.... I just live my life like I couldn't when I was in school." She now has new adopted parents and sister. At first she lived as eight-years-old until her younger sister wanted to be the older sibling. At her sister's request, she now lives as a six-year-old. In addition to her new family life, Wolscht also works a snow-plow and helps raise awareness about the diversity of ways and reasons to transition gender. She remains a practicing Catholic as well as a transgender advocate. In particular, she pushes what she calls, "play therapy." "No medication, no suicide thoughts," claims Wolscht. "And I just get to play." As part of the Transgender Project, Wolscht's story furthers its goal to archive and reflect, "the broad diversity that exists within the trans community itself." Rather than trying to judge and stratify the different people and ways to be trans, the Transgender Project shares and celebrates lives from across Canada as as the personal, particular stories they are.

Despite and because of the counter-normative aspects of Wolstch's story, there are reasons to sympathize with and defend her story. Her narrative came to me through a friend who wanted my opinion on an article, "Fifty-Two Year Old Man Living As Six-Year Old Girl. Seriously." First, it should be observed that in this relatively short article references as it's only scholarly authority Dr. Paul McHugh, a former psychiatrist-in-chief at John Hopkins Hospital, one of the only professional psychiatrists in the academy that out right opposes "transgenderism" as a mental disease to be fixed. Dr. McHugh's anti-transgender theories have been debunked by decades of scholarship and professional health organizations, including: The American Medical Association, the American Psychological Association, the American College of Obstetrics and Gynecology, the American Psychiatric Society, the American Public Health Association, and the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. Yet nearly every time an article or group wishes to demonize a transgender person they trot him out as their source. That sets up this article from the onset as an attack against the transgender justice movement by pulling out members of the transgender community that may be considered less palatable as a way of painting the whole community. We saw similar attacks happening simply when transgender was used as an analogy in the discussion of a "trans racial" person. Before saying anything else, we must ask the question: why do we need to give an opinion about this person? What is to be gained by judging, condemning, or promoting this person's story? The age and the gender matter do not seem automatically related. The subculture of living as a different age has many members although it is rather taboo still to the public. 

Where I see transgender and transitioning age intersecting is evident in her story: that society had already turned its back on her, she was already marginalized, already queer, so what is to be gained by playing by society's rules? "I'm gender queer, I'm queer... I'm queer," Wolscht stutters in her interview, acknowledging the many ways that she diverges away from normative rules of gender, sexuality, and maturity. Indeed, Wolstch's story shows how culture tells us that there are only a few acceptable ways to be normal but nearly infinite ways to be different, so why not revel in that freedom that comes with being an outcast? Dealing with the absences and failures of our childhood during adulthood is something we all experience in our own ways. For the trans community this is often goes beyond those of non-transgender people. One important issue that I believe her story brings to the forefront is that because many trans people are not able to transition until later in life, many of us are denied the childhoods of our cisters and cis-brothers. People are more aware of the effects of transition on our future trajectories but not enough consider the lived experiences that transitioning has on our pasts. I've had close friends looking through pictures of us all together in high-school, point to me pre-transition and ask, "Who is that?" Others tell me, "I keep thinking that is your brother, not you!" I bring this up to substantiate my empathy for a trans woman who has decided to live out the girlhood she was denied as a child. For her this is not necessarily a regression, more like a do-over or an example of living one's lifetime non-linearly. "There are days I forget my past," claims Wolscht. "I can actually go a week without even thinking about what was before."  Again, how many of us watch movies, buy classic games, eat foods, or go places that we did as a child or were denied as a child as a form of revisiting and taking ownership of our childhood.

We don't know how Stefonknee Wolscht's story ends. 

As of the time of this post, she is currently missing.

She was last seen on December 6th, 2015. 

We pray and hope for her safety.

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Once Again from the Beginning

I am in the Glenbard West auditorium waiting for a new class of ballet students to take the stage. I am eighteen and working the sound and light board earning money as a theater technician for the school. I press a button on the light board to bring up the next program in the cue. The stage shifts from moody blues and purples to a friendly pink and yellow. A whole change in emotion and experience with a simple click of a button. If only life and gender were so simple. Stepping out of the booth, I pad down the steps of the balcony overlooking the stage and floor seating below. Dim pink lights spill over the performers and paints my face. The music is so sweet I can feel it in my teeth. The high notes are spiking the sound system causing the compressors to kick in momentarily and equalize the volume. I take note to lower the levels on the mixing board. Before I head back up, I observe the performers and audience. There are a few more boys on stage. A few more dads in the audience too. But had any of those boys (or fathers for that matter) said, "I'm actually a girl," that would be a sissone en avent too far. This was a time and place where you would hear, "It's okay to be gay!" spoken in public by the same people who in private would say, "did you hear that Tim and Jill's daughter is a lesbian? I feel so sorry for them." As far as I recall, I never heard the word "transgender" spoken aloud in my town. Even in PRISM, our "gay-straight alliance" (a phrase which more or less accurately described a group that for most of my years consisted of one open gay man and a bunch of "straight" friends from theater - most of whom would come out or transition in college), we would use the term LGBT without ever stating aloud what the T represented. No, as far as Glen Ellyn was willing to admit and accept, there were no open and proud trans kids in its school. At some point, I turned back to the lighting and sound booth to make this a great show for for all those trans kids who were and weren't yet welcomed; plus their cisters and brothers too.

It wasn't until years later, in college, that I finally signed myself up for ballet courses. I was a couple years into my public transition. My friends and roommates knew I had started taking lessons but few of them knew my history with dance. They saw black tights and new shoes. I saw a new chance to own my life. No, I wasn't claiming or trying to be eight - or six - years old. But I was finally giving myself something I hadn't been offered as a child. I was giving myself permission to dance. I had also given myself permission to go further. After all, ballet is never simply about the dancing. Over my years in college, I came out as a woman, and as transgender. Transitioning to bring my life and body back in line took work, coming in many forms and stages. I don't need to go through them here and now. Importantly, once again, most my friends were women; many of them dancers. Because I transitioned later, as a young woman, my friends and I did not share the same kind of girlhood, that time had passed. One possible exception became evident when I came out to my sister, however. By another uncanny twist of personality, at the same time that I was in college becoming a ballerina, my sister was in high school, adopting to wearing a black leather jacket and working with the technical theater kids in the sound and lighting booth. This would be a profession and a look she would keep and add modify (with buzzed hair and nose-ring) into her twenties as she pursues work in the film industry. She can also be sweet and pretty as hell. When I came out to her, told her I was transitioning, she laughed. Not at me but at herself. "Oh, I'm sorry," she said. "growing up I just always said you were one pair of tits away from being my sister. Now I feel bad." Don't, I told her as we hugged. She was right. It was a wisdom and truth she derived from our experiences together from when I first held her in my arms as a newborn until we held each other in my college apartment. We had a different childhood but we were always there for each other, in our own ways, as sister and cister. That's something I'd never want to change.

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Read more diverse stories

from the Transgender Project

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