You can reach Jake at: jacob.hale at huey.csun.edu

June 6, 1995

Dear Mom,

It's taken me an awfully long time, but I've finally figured out one of the central problems in my life, a problem that has negatively affected our relationship and has also affected family dynamics negatively.

My continuous memory starts on my third birthday, which was a great day, except for the pain and embarrassment I caused myself by throwing sand in my eyes! Still, I remember a number of times during my third year when I hurt you when you tried to do nice things for me that I rejected. I'm thinking of things almost any other little girl would have loved and appreciated, such as curling my hair, making pretty clothes for me, and trying to interest me in helping in the kitchen. Even at that age, I did things I would hide from you, afraid of disapproval or afraid of hurting you (I'm not sure which), things I didn't understand and things you wouldn't have understood, such as making a paste out of sand and water so I could have stubble, five o'clock shadow, on my face like Dad sometimes had when he came home after working long shifts. There was nothing in our culture, no information available to any of us, that would have helped any of us understand my behavior or feelings. But I knew, somehow, that it was forbidden, taboo, so I hid it, thus creating distance between us.

I remember physically fighting with you and Grandma [name snipped] at age 4 when you two were giving me a home perm. I remember sitting on Friday nights in the family room at the [name], with you and my older girl cousins and sometimes Auntie [name], Auntie [name], and Grandma, all working on my hair so it would have pretty curls for Sabbath. To me, this felt like torture; at the time, and for many years afterwards, I blamed you for subjecting me to it. Now I realize that you were doing something that, as I said before, almost any other little girl would have appreciated, that certainly my female cousins liked. There was no way any of us could have anticipated that I would feel otherwise; there was no way I could have communicated feeling otherwise.

Starting kindergarten was difficult for me. Partly, I loved it: it was a lot of fun to be in the company of so many other children, and it felt terribly adult (liberating and responsible and trusted) to be able to walk part of the way home from school by myself to meet you and [little brother's name], looking so cute in his stroller, at the bottom of that short hill. And it was fun learning some of the things we learned in school. But I also remember hating it, in a way, and pretending to be sick as often as I thought I could get away with it, rubbing my forehead against my blanket so I would feel feverish. This was because kindergarten was the first time in my life that I had to wear a dress everyday, that I had to stand in the girls' line, that I was told to do activities with the girls. Until college, I always had a deep ambivalence toward school: liking the learning, liking the sports, liking the company of my age mates, and hating the gender-segregation and the heavy inculcation of gender roles.

I can't say how it is that by age 3 I already knew that speaking about gender discomfort was taboo -- and that's not a taboo unique to our home or to Seventh-day Adventists. It is culture-wide. I do remember certain incidents later that really brought that taboo home to me. I remember one downtown shopping trip with [names of family friends]; I must have been 6 or 7. At one point, we were in the boys' department at Frederick & Nelson's, looking for clothes for the boys. I picked up a pair of boys' jockey shorts from a rack, brought them over to where you and Mrs. [name] and the sales clerk were standing, and declared, "This is the kind of underwear I want." You and Mrs. [name] blanched, and the clerk said, "Honey, those are for little boys." You and Mrs. name] stayed [white as ghosts, standing rigid, not saying a word or moving a muscle. I knew from this reaction that I had done something so bad as to be unspeakable. So I quietly put that pair of shorts back on its rack. I don't remember a word having ever been spoken about this, not that day, not later. The fact that nothing was said communicated volumes to me.

My gender discomfort has been more pronounced at various times in my life. Starting school, as I mentioned, was one really bad time. The second terrible couple of years were when I was 9 and 10. I imagine this was partly due to the stress of moving across the country to an Army base during the escalation of the Viet Nam war and the stress of Dad being in the war, and I imagine it was partly because of the onset of my puberty. Remember at Fort Knox when I tried to go by boys' names, first 'Karl' then 'Joe', but no one would use them? Remember when I was sent to the school psychologist, who promised me confidentiality but telephoned you even before I got home from school that same day and told you that I'd expressed discomfort at our religion? Well, she lied to me (about confidentiality), but she told you the truth, at least part of it. I had indeed told her that I wished my parents had a 'normal' religion (I then thought of Lutherans, Methodists, and Presbyterians as 'normal'), but I think I was focusing my feelings of being different onto the most obvious, concrete, tangible, difference between me and my age mates. I had also told her that I hated the war, I didn't want my father to go to it. And I had also told her that I hated the way the teachers expected me to be like the girls, to play their games, not to get dirty, not to be good in math, not to be rowdy, and that I thought it was unfair that when I equally rowdy as the boys I'd get in more trouble than they would. And I had also told her that I hated having acne on my forehead because the other children teased me about having 'chicken pox', and said that soon I wouldn't be able to play sports anymore. And that it made me angry that no one respected me enough to call me by the name I wanted to be called by. I don't know if she told you any of that.

When we moved back to Seattle, things stayed hard for me. In addition to the obvious stress caused by the war and Dad's being in it, by the disruption of the move, our having no furniture, that awful bout of chicken pox [brother's name] had, the tension between you and Grandma [name], that was the year my period started and that I grew breasts. I have never hated more anything that my body has done! That kidney infection I had at 19, which landed me in the hospital, was better. That time my spinal fluid began leaking, a week after surgery at age 15, was better. Of course, I already knew about menstruation when I first began bleeding; you had told me and I had understood to some extent. (To some extent: I've always had trouble remembering how female reproduction works or remembering technical terms associated with female reproductive organs or breasts; even to this day, I cannot remember the word for the colored skin around the nipple on female humans.) But when I first started bleeding, I thought I was hemorrhaging and was at risk of dying. The idea that I was menstruating didn't occur to me, because the idea that I could or would grow up to be a woman did not occur to me.

When I had that severe depression in Texas, the same theme was replaying. I never really understood what caused that depression until a few months ago, yet I've known all along that my explanations for it were awfully flimsy. Given the values with which I was raised, values of career and accomplishment and adult responsibility, I saw my job at Texas A&M as my first 'real job'. And I saw having my first real job as signaling that now I had to grow up. In many ways, I'd had, and have had since then, a protracted adolescence as an overgrown kid; notice the gender-neutral terms in which I've expressed this to myself for many years. Hence, my financial irresponsibility, my inability to attend to matters of personal business, my flakiness, my frequent inability to relate as an adult, with an adult's distance from childhood emotional structures and dynamics, to family members. In Texas, I thought I had to grow up, become an adult, and of course what that meant to me, without explicitly conceptualizing it this way because it seemed the only possibility, is that I had to grow up to be an adult woman. That, I simply could not do; suicide was a better alternative for me. Prozac got me past the worst of the suicidal thoughts and feelings, and masked the underlying reason for the depression -- which I was not ready to face, and which I doubt any therapists in College Station were equipped to handle.

After moving to Los Angeles, I tried being a lesbian as a way to express my deeply felt masculinity. No wonder my relationships with lesbian women haven't worked out! Well, that's not the only reason, but even had there not been other problems, different ones in each case, my gender feelings would have prevented all but perhaps one of those relationships from working. I studied how-to-be-a-lesbian as if I were studying for the most detailed, difficult examination of my life. Yet as I became more masculine in appearance and behavior, I found increasingly that, while other lesbians saw me as 'butch', I didn't feel much similarity of sensibility around other butch lesbians. Not that I don't like some of them and count some as my friends, for I do. But I didn't feel that we were alike, and I was continually catching other people by surprise by doing or saying things that they didn't expect a butch lesbian to do or say.

The six months from September to March have been, in some ways, the hardest in my life. In September, I saw a listing in a local lesbian magazine for a Los Angeles Gender Center open house "for Los Angeles' transsexual, transgender, and cross-dressing communities." Immediately I knew I had to go; that if I didn't, it would only be fear that kept me away. I studied the wording carefully, and decided that I guessed I counted as cross-dressed so it was all right for me to go. I was so terrified that I could barely drive to Westwood for the event. Once there, however, I met a number of friendly, interesting people, some of whom I now count as friends. During those six months, I was in constant turmoil: looking at my options from every angle, so confused that often I couldn't speak coherently, having difficulty sleeping, feeling incredible pain from my inner struggles as well as from the pressure other people put on me as they tried to influence my own decision about my own gender. I can't accurately describe how awful these months were. But when I woke up on the morning of March 15 knowing, with no doubt whatsoever, that I'm crossing over, that I'm transitioning female-to-male, I felt more peaceful than I can ever remember having felt before in my life. I knew in that moment of awakening that transitioning is my only chance at having a life that is livable, and having finally realized that, and realized that I can have a livable adult life, brought me a feeling of incredible calm, a feeling of finally being at peace with myself.

Since then, although I been worried and afraid at times, those negative feelings have been about other people's possible reactions to my decision or realization (it feels like some of both, so I can't decide which word to use). That feeling of peacefulness at a place that's my core has not left me. I've gotten into therapy, come up with a timetable for transitioning, 'come out' at work (to uniformly positive reactions, which amazes me and makes me very happy), and started hormone reassignment therapy. In July I will be changing my name legally to Carl Jacob Hale, though I will go by 'Jacob' and 'Jake'; I use both, depending on my mood. I will be changing my name and sex on my driver's license on my birthday; coincidentally, it's this year that it expires. Before the start of the fall semester, I will change the rest of my documentation, including that at work. Any operations are a long way in the future.

Mom, I know this is hard for you, and will continue to be so for a long time. Please believe me: if there were some way I could spare you this and have a livable existence, I would. In fact, I had a dream a few nights ago, after having fallen asleep contemplating writing this letter, in which you and I were alone in a house. You were upstairs taking a bubble bath and I was downstairs in the living room. Some evil people, with guns and knives, tried to break in. I ran all around, quickly blocking doors with furniture, trying to board up the windows, trying to keep them out -- like in some horror movie where the humans are trying to keep out the ghouls. Eventually, I failed, they broke in. They were heading toward the staircase, and I was trying to prevent them from getting upstairs to you. I fought them off successfully for awhile, but then was lying slashed and bleeding at the bottom of the stairs as they ran upstairs to get to you. That's when I awoke, knowing that my transition is not something from which I can protect you.

I wanted to send you this letter and give you a few days to digest it before we talk on the phone, so that we could both be a little more clear-headed than we would be if I, in a state of panic, told you this directly on the phone. I'll call you in a few days.

Mom, I want you to know that I love you very much. There's no blame in this, no fault to find with you, with Dad, or with me. There are a lot of different theories about the etiology of transsexualism. Most of the theories which locate the cause in childhood development are very sexist, laying the blame on the mother. These theories are wrong from the very beginning, in their sexist assumptions about how parents are supposed to behave toward their children and toward each other. One thing, however, that all the etiologic theories agree on is that gender identity is formed very early, by the age of 3 or so, and is at that point irreversible. That certainly seems to be true in my case, looking back on my memories. In any case, etiology is really beside the main points, which are that I am for the first time in my life at peace with myself and looking forward to the future, and that I love you very much.

love,
Jacob

P.S. Because I want you to know that I'm receiving excellent professional care, I've enclosed copies of the letters from my therapist and the psychiatrist with whom I consulted, recommending me for hormone reassignment therapy, as well as that psychiatrist's curriculum vitae.

Copyright by the author.

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