Arresting Change

The brief winter of our community’s discontent with the state Department of Licensing is finally over. We can all party like it’s 1999. For me, I can party that like that first day in 1987.

 

It was a rare sunny January morning in Seattle in 1987 and I felt pretty — at least on the inside of my 300-pound frame. It had been a few weeks since I confessed to a magistrate of the King County Municipal Court  and to my therapist that despite my still-foreboding five-o’clock shadow, my baritone voice, and my penchant for playing with computers — I was a creature of the opposite sex. A couple of years of Ingersoll support groups, several “beauty consultants,” and a class in the mystique of the feminine walk, had convinced me that I could correct a mistake of nature. Finally, the state of Washington had graded me with an “F” on my driver’s license — a definite upgrade from the “M” that had followed me from the day that doctors in a German hospital had wrongfully diagnosed me with what was once a terminal disease for infants and a gender designation that proved more threatening  in my adult life.

 

The ink on that “F” on my driver’s license was not yet dry on this January morning when I treated myself to a Saturday morning brunch at a tasty restaurant. The license change was like a photo of your grandkids that you insist on sharing with the world at a certain age. It is Pride, Mardi Gras, and “Survival of the Fittest” all at once. I was feeling great — I was dining alone — but I was on top of the world. A few glasses of orange juice and several cups of coffee later, I was on top of something else. The sign on the door said “ladies,” and armed with my official designation, I had nothing to fear but public wetness.

 

A few minutes after I paid for my meal, and was leaving the restaurant, a pair of Seattle’s finest approached me to tell me that they had been called to follow up on a complaint that “a man was in the ladies rest room.” Suddenly, I no longer felt pretty. 

 

I was shuddering, lacking in confidence, and beginning to fear impending incarceration. This was definitely the wrong day to wear my brand new Lane Bryant “Bend-Over” pants.   As I heard the words “Can I see your driver’s license?” I suddenly remembered. Thanks to the State of Washington, the folks at Ingersoll, and my life-long struggle, like that Army commercial, I AM all I can be.

I showed the officer my driver’s license. He carefully looked at the picture, grimaced, and held it up in the light as if he suspected it to be counterfeit. He handed it over to his partner, who was equally puzzled. One of the officers returned to the police car and began speaking to the dispatcher. A few minutes later, he came back and handed me back my new and improved license. “Have a nice day,” I heard him say under his breath. It would be two more years of living dangerously before surgery would make me whole. It took a while to get rid of the five-o’clock shadow and the 300-pound frame. It was two decades after that before I got around to changing my original birth certificate in Germany. 

 

But thanks to the merciful policy of the state of Washington back then — and finally again today — I continued to feel pretty.