Washington state

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.