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As a child, Marc felt comfortable being a little boy but, as he grew toward adolescence, his body began to seem confusing to him and wrong. He began to hate it.

Once he evolved beyond the initial strife of puberty, Marc’s scruffy beard and his penchant for mountaineering and cross-country running bolstered his public image as a man in the world of men. But by the time he reached his early twenties, Marc had come to understand that there was a gap between his inner experience and his physical appearance. He saw himself as a female pretending to be male, a woman in a man’s body.

Marc felt at home and happiest in nature where he didn’t worry or even think about what gender he was, or wasn’t. In his unisex hiking duds -- tan field pants, a purple turtleneck shirt, and an old pair of Nikes -- he climbed summits like a mountain goat, skirted ledges fearlessly. He was funny and full of life, free of the requirement to prove he was a man. But once back in his city home, the rainy metropolis of Seattle, he was again at odds with the body he inhabited. He had to think constantly about how to navigate the world as a man. He had to be mindful, on guard.

Early in his marriage, Marc began to wear women’s clothing at home, as a way to ameliorate the tension he felt. Even though Marc downplayed the reasons for his cross-dressing, his wife didn’t like it.  But she tolerated it because their relationship was going so well, and Marc’s donning skirts on occasion seemed to make him happy. He eventually talked with her about feeling like a woman and being conflicted about his maleness. Isabel was concerned about his distress but felt helpless to change it. They truly loved each other and loved the children they were raising together. But this problem seemed to be taking up more and more of Marc’s attention.

Marc’s only respite was his early morning routine, when he could wrap his slender frame in feminine clothing and things would make sense, if only for a moment. Wearing skirts and dresses was not a sexual fetish. It meant his outer appearance fit his experience of himself. Even so, seeing his image in the bedroom mirror, he felt hopeless and pathetic and trapped.

He knew cross-dressing was considered aberrant behavior. Yet he also knew that he wanted to spend more time, not less, wearing women’s clothing. He decided to look for a therapist.

***

Marc went to the Ingersoll Gender Center, a project of the Seattle LGBT Community Center. The Ingersoll Center is one of about twenty community organizations in the United States that serve people with gender identity issues. 

A counselor there referred him to a therapist in her mid-forties who had worked with people who were born male but who identified emotionally and psychologically as female -- transsexual women -- including those who had taken steps to alter their bodies to become women.

When he first walked into the psychologist’s office, he felt intimidated by her seemingly perfect femininity, her lovely outfit, her soft, delicate features, her long blonde hair twisted into a bun. Marc was nervous about what she would think of him, a furry-faced, long-limbed man who secretly wore women’s clothing.

But she listened and understood. It was a great relief to find someone he could talk with, who wouldn’t be personally affected by his disclosures. She was kind, knowledgeable, and helped him understand his growing despair. She explained that he had gender dysphoria and that he was experiencing the typical emotions of a person with this conflict. She encouraged him to find an outlet for his feelings and to make social connections with others like him. Her strongest message: Don’t try to bury your emotions; find ways to express them.

Christmas 1996, Marc, Isabel, and their then three-year-old daughter, Chelsea, had flown to Florida to join Marc’s mother, brother and sister-in-law for the holidays.. Marc had pierced his ears and wore earrings for the first time in front of his mom and brother.  They already considered him “a bit of a goof,” so they didn’t find this especially odd. They were all sitting around a festively decorated dinner table when Marc’s sister-in-law turned to Marc’s daughter and said, “That’s a really pretty dress you have on, Chelsea.”

“Thank you,” she responded.

“Do you like to wear pretty dresses on special occasions?” the young woman continued.      

“Oh, yes I do!” Chelsea answered. And, without a second thought, added, “Just like Daddy!”

“Oh, yeah?” Marc’s brother asked, loudly, across the table to which Marc responded, “Well, YEAH!” and set everyone off laughing.

Marc had told his mother that he was cross-dressing at home, but his brother and sister-in-law knew nothing about it. The dinner conversation continued, and the fragments of this tiny bomb were left behind, unexamined. Marc’s mother was tense, however, and later said quietly to her son, “Well, what’d you expect?”

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