Oral History Program Zane Bates Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 August 2021-14 April 2022 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Zane Bates Interviewed by Lorrie Rands 26 August 2021-14 April 2022 Copyright © 2024 by Weber State University, Stewart Library Mission Statement The Oral History Program of the Stewart Library was created to preserve the institutional history of Weber State University and the Davis, Ogden and Weber County communities. By conducting carefully researched, recorded, and transcribed interviews, the Oral History Program creates archival oral histories intended for the widest possible use. Interviews are conducted with the goal of eliciting from each participant a full and accurate account of events. The interviews are transcribed, edited for accuracy and clarity, and reviewed by the interviewees (as available), who are encouraged to augment or correct their spoken words. The reviewed and corrected transcripts are indexed, printed, and bound with photographs and illustrative materials as available. The working files, original recording, and archival copies are housed in the University Archives. Project Description Queering the Archives oral history project is a series of oral histories from the LGBTQ+ communities of Weber, Davis and Morgan Counties of Northern Utah. Each interview is a life interview, documenting the interviewee’s unique experiences growing up queer. ____________________________________ Oral history is a method of collecting historical information through recorded interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical record. Because it is primary material, oral history is not intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account. It reflects personal opinion offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is partisan, deeply involved, and irreplaceable. ____________________________________ Rights Management This work is the property of the Weber State University, Stewart Library Oral History Program. It may be used freely by individuals for research, teaching and personal use as long as this statement of availability is included in the text. It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows: Bates, Zane, an oral history by Lorrie Rands, 26 August 2021-14 April 2022, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives (SCUA), Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. iii Abstract: The following is an oral history interview with Zane Bates, conducted as a series of seven interviews spanning from August 26, 2021 to April 14, 2022 by Lorrie Rands and Marina Kenner. Also present during the final interview is Kyle Jackson. Zane speaks about their gender and sexuality journey over different periods of their life. They also share the stories of the queer people in their life and the forms their advocacy has taken. Note: Names other than the interviewee’s have been replaced for privacy purposes. This interview contains discussion of sexual assault and suicide. LR: Today is August 26, 2021. We are in a Zoom call with Zane Bates doing a life interview for the LGBTQ+ stories at the Stewart Library, Weber State University. I am Lorrie Rands conducting the interview, and Marina Kenner is here helping to conduct the interview. Thank you, Zane, so much for your willingness. Just to start off, I want to share my gender and sexual orientation. I am straight and my pronouns are she/her. I'm not used to saying that, but I'm realizing how important it is. Marina, do you want to? MK: Yeah. I am also straight, and I also identify as she/her. LR: Awesome. So, my first question, Zane, is how do you identify relating to your gender and sexual orientation? ZB: I identify as non-binary transmasculine and my pronouns are they/them/he/him. It just depends on whoever's talking to me and their comfort level. My sexuality is, I don't know, I guess bisexual. So I guess that's the Q—I'm questioning. LR: Okay. Well, I appreciate your candor. With that in mind, let's go ahead and start with when and where you were born. ZB: I was born in 1982 in Fort Gordon, Georgia on the army base. My dad was in the military. LR: Okay, and do you know how long you stayed there in Georgia? 1 ZB: My parents didn't stay together very long, they were young. They divorced when I was an infant or very young, and my mother came back to Utah, so I was raised here. LR: Okay, we're out in Utah. Did you spend most of your time here? ZB: I was raised between Davis County and Weber County. I lived with my mother for most of my childhood. My father lived in Weber County, my mother lived in Davis County, and my childhood was kind of a struggle, so I sometimes would go live with my dad and sometimes I'd live with my mom. Just this kind of back-and-forth between Weber and Davis, and I eventually graduated from Ben Lomond High School. LR: Going back to your elementary years, did you just have one elementary school, or did you move between elementaries? ZB: I counted it up and K-12, I've been to 14 different schools. LR: That's a lot. Was there one elementary school that you were at the longest? ZB: I don't remember the names, but I know that I lived in Bountiful when I was in kindergarten. We lived in Clinton when I was in first grade and I went to Sunset Elementary. Then they realized that I was in the wrong school because I was walking way too far to Sunset Elementary, and we realized that we were just a couple blocks away from Clinton Elementary. So for second and third grade, I went to Clinton Elementary. I was in a foster home for part of third grade and part of fourth grade, but I went back to live with my mom and finished third grade in Clinton Elementary, and then I ended up back in a foster home. For probably a quarter of fourth grade, I went to the school by my foster home, Whitesides Elementary. Then I went to go live with my dad. How old are you in fourth grade, like 10, 11? LR: Nine. 2 ZB: So on my 10th birthday, literally like the day before I turned 10, I went to go live with my dad. That's when I transferred to Weber County and lived in Weber County for the first time. I started at Mountain View Elementary and finished fourth grade, and then I did fifth grade at Mountain View Elementary. Then I went back to go live with my mother and did sixth grade at Layton Elementary. So there's all the elementary schools. LR: Wow. I know as a kid that you don't really understand what's happening, but as you look back on it now, how do you think that instability affected how you grew up? ZB: My mother was an only child, and her parents were in England when my second sibling was born. She didn't have a lot of support, you know; no aunts and uncles, no cousins. I was the oldest child, and my mother had a brain tumor on her pituitary gland that affected a whole lot of everything and kind of created a textbook codependence in my case. A lot of times, that instability was my own choosing. But it was a ‘the grass is always greener on the other side’ kind of situation because at my mother's house, I was in a position where my mom just kept having more kids, and I was kind of in a parental role even though I was a child. Those boundaries were never established from the beginning. My mother was just very neglectful and not really capable of parenting, and when my grandparents did finally come back from England and started helping, they were working full-time. I mean, they helped as much as they could, and their presence really did benefit my upbringing. I was a straight-A student. In spite of all the bouncing around because my home life sucks so much, school was where I shined. That's where I could make the adults give me the attention and the pats on the head and everything, and so in spite of all that instability, educationally, I still did really well in school. Socially is where it affected me, because I didn't have the opportunity to build relationships with people—and there was no reason to because there was always going to be 3 that disconnect. I was always coming and going, and I don't have those lifelong relationships, really. But it's had some positive influences. For instance, I know how it feels to be in 14 different schools growing up, and because of that, I have been adamant in ensuring that my children have this stability that I did not because I know what instability feels like. Every single one of my children has started at the same elementary school and they have gone all the way. My son is in high school from feeder to feeder to feeder, so he's been exposed to the same set of kids. But my kids have a different problem, which is that their friends move away and they have that sadness of missing others. I think that everything that we're exposed to builds resilience, and it contributes to development of certain parts of our mind and certain parts of our abilities. I didn't really have to deal with other people moving away because I was the one leaving. I didn't have to deal with missing somebody that I had a great relationship with because I never developed those types of relationships to begin with. My children are dealing with types of losses that I can’t empathize with. A lot of my experiences give me the opportunity to empathize with others. I mean, I have struggles and things that I have to try harder at, but honestly, because I have all these weaknesses in social skills and social connection, I'm obsessed with society and culture and people and human behavior. I pay a whole lot more attention and I'm a watcher. Now it's actually kind of guided my interests and my career goals, and I mean, that's what I'm going to school for. I’m combining my Bachelor of Integrated Science for anthropology, sociology and neuroscience. I'm really excited to get going on researching and learning everything there is to know about people. LR: I'm wondering if, in your elementary years, you have a favorite memory? ZB: I have a favorite teacher. 4 LR: Who was your favorite teacher? ZB: In Mountain View Elementary, my fourth-grade teacher, Mrs. Johansson. She was really, really tall and really positive and loud and super [claps hands] clap-happy and very motivational and celebrated everything. I absolutely love her. LR: That's awesome. Thank you for that. Like I said at the beginning, if you don't want to answer any questions, please feel free not to. During this time in elementary school, did you ever feel like you didn't quite belong in your peer group, that you weren't quite the same as your friends? ZB: I look back and I kind of laugh because my elementary school years weren't so bad because anatomically, I did fit in, and it was fine living with my mother. I didn't really know it, but I was allowed to be a quote-unquote ‘tomboy’. I kept my hair pretty short. I didn't like hair on my neck. I hated dresses—as soon as I was old enough to be like, “Nah,” I always just wore what I wanted to wear. I was flat-chested, so quite often I would walk around without a shirt and pretend I was a boy and it was fine. Just in a pair of shorts; my brother and I looked exactly the same, so it was no big deal. I played outside with a pack of boys and we were rough and tough and we climbed trees and we rode bikes and got dirty and it was fine. I did not feel different in regards to that. But I was sexually abused when I was seven, so that portion of things caused me to feel different, just because I was exposed to things that other people weren't. This monster gets awakened inside of you, and you can't put it back to sleep once you know, you know? LR: Yeah, I do. ZB: That portion of things definitely affected my life in a negative way, but as far as my gender in elementary school, I was fine. LR: Okay. Let's move into junior high. That's only three years, so how many junior highs did you attend? 5 ZB: I went to two. LR: Okay, that's actually pretty good. Again, favorite memory from junior high? ZB: I won the Fairfield Junior High Science Fair and qualified for regionals, and I worked really hard on it. I'm a science nerd, and I think that was very motivational for me because I worked really hard on it and I did my research and wrote everything out. To get good scores was really rewarding, and I think that that was probably my trigger of, “Hey, you're really good at science and research and all that observation stuff. This is your thing.” I've been turned on ever since. LR: Awesome. Was there a favorite teacher that inspired that? ZB: No, I don't remember any of my teachers. LR: Okay. Junior high tends to be a time where everyone struggles. How did you fit in and how did you deal with your junior high years? ZB: Not so well. Junior high is usually three years. In Weber County, after fifth grade, you go to middle school for sixth, seventh and eighth. In Davis County, you stay in elementary school for sixth grade and you go to junior high for seventh, eighth and ninth. After fifth grade, I jumped over to my mother's house and did sixth grade and was the big man on campus for another year. I did seventh grade at Fairfield Junior High, and I was bullied the whole year by my ‘friends’ from the whole summer. That was really hard. I'm not a hundred percent sure exactly when I started, but I remember the first time I picked up a cigarette was a cigarette butt that my dad flicked when I was 10. I remember in sixth grade; I was already smoking at least a cigarette or two daily. In seventh grade, I got suspended from school for smoking, so my friend crowd that I ended up falling into was kind of that kind of group of kids. The outcasts, the rebels: those were the ones that accepted me. Mostly a group of guys; there might have been a couple girls, but that's pretty much who I hung with. I 6 mean, I really got along with everybody, but as far as hanging out, I had dirty secrets. Smoking was one of them, and that was that. When I was at my mother's house, she was so sick all the time and she parented from her bed a lot. Pretty much I was the parent—and I don't know how to parent, especially in junior high, right, when you're 14. There wasn't a lot of supervision and there was too much flexibility, and I still did really well in school. It was almost like I had this double life: when I was at school, I was thriving and I was doing really well, and these teachers thought I was just this amazing kid. So of course, when I get suspended from school for smoking, everybody's shocked. Then there's the outside-of-school life, which is just this completely different person. When I lived at my dad's house, my father was a lot more structured and disciplined. I think that's why I went back and forth a lot because that discipline was hard for me—but actually, the discipline was good for me, and when I look at my parenting tactics, I usually rebel against the things my mother did and pull from a lot of the things my father did. When I went back to live with my father, there was a lot of great structure that was involved at my father's. There were four kids, but we all had designated chores and designated responsibilities and it rotated. It didn't matter what your gender was, everybody took a turn doing the dishes. Everybody took a turn cleaning the bathroom. Everybody took a turn on rotating laundry. Everybody took a turn. But at my mother's house, everything was on me because I was the oldest and it was just Mom. That was the cause of the whole bouncing back and forth was I’d get in trouble, and so I'm like, “I'm out of here,” and go back to Mom's. But that overwhelming environment was just as bad. My mother was really abusive, but looking back, I understand and I get it because I was a medical assistant and CNA, and I've learned a lot about traumatic brain injuries and how everything affects the 7 brain and your behavior and your mood. I understand that she took a lot of her discomfort and her issues out on me, but that really weighs on you. In my dad's house, I really, really shined. I got lots of awards at school and this, that and the other was great. But my gender was rigid. My dad called me a ‘girly-girl’. At my mom's house, I was allowed to go by my preferred name, Becca. I was born Chandi Rebecca Bates. My father chose my first name. Chandi, short for Chandler. He's in love with that name. He's got this long old blurb about how he chose that name, and he goes on and he tells it in the most beautiful, mystifying way. But I hate that name. I always have, and it's really associated with a lot of trauma. I've gone by Becca my entire life, and eventually, Beck. My father never could take a grasp on that. He always just insisted, “No. Your name is Chandi.” Pronouns weren't really a thing back then, but in that structured environment, there was also this insistence of, “You have certain roles.” My stepmom would insist that the females were to wait on the males. The boys were allowed to do certain boy things and the girls were expected to sit inside and quilt. I always hated that because I wanted to be outside. Outside is my place, and so that was always uncomfortable. That was a part of the issue of being at my dad's house is that at my mom's, I had the freedom to be my boyish self. Being a boyish girl was fine, but at my dad's, I wasn't allowed to be so boyish and I wasn't allowed to do the boy things. I was never invited to go hunting, but the boys could go even though they were younger than me. Those restrictions and limitations were very trying. The older I got, the more restrictive the gender roles and expectations got. LR: Thank you for sharing. I'm going to turn it over to Marina to start asking questions about high school. MK: How many high schools did you attend? 8 ZB: All right, so I started my 10th grade year at Ben Lomond High School, but then I went to go live with my mother. I went to Clearfield High School for a couple of months; then we moved to Eugene, Oregon, and I started at Thurston High School. Then we moved again to Springfield, Oregon, where I started Springfield High School. There was a really big incident with my mother, and it was kind of the final straw. I had just turned 16 and we were getting settled into our house. My little sister was like one-and-a-half, two years old, maybe. I was pretty much the primary caregiver of my little sister and going to high school. I had a lot of resentment about it ‘cause my mom had four kids by now. It was me and my brother who was two, almost three years younger than me. He's ADHD, autistic, and very highmaintenance; he was in self-contained classrooms growing up in special ED. I'm not saying there's anything wrong; he’s a very functional adult. I think if he had had better parenting, he probably would have had a better functioning childhood, but it kind of just contributed to the chaos at home. My next brother is nine years younger than me, so he was just cute but little. My youngest sister is 14-and-a-half-years younger than me, so it was my responsibility to feed her and get her ready in the morning. I just had all these responsibilities for her cleaning up her messes and cleaning her room and making sure that she had what she needed and putting her to bed at night and everything. That was really stressful, just being 16 and it was like I was already a parent; then still trying to be a kid and not really having very good social skills to begin with. I had just got my room set up the way I wanted it to. We just were just settling in and my little sister was in my room touching my things and I kind of yelled at her, you know, just, “Get out of here.” My mother came in and yelled at me for yelling at her. I told my mom, “Well, why don't you take care of your kid, watch your kid, supervise your kid? Be a parent. Why don't you be a mom? Do your job.” I 9 talked back; I finally just told her what the heck I thought after all these years. I'm finally like, ‘“Quit having kids for me. I'm sick of being a parent. I want to be a kid. Just stop.” She lost her mind and had a fit, and she tore up my room that I had just spent days setting up perfectly. She ripped all my dad's pictures off the walls— some of them I have to this day. They're ripped in places and taped together. She just tore everything up, of course, smacking me around at the same time. As she was walking out, I took a hat and out of anger, I just chucked it at her with all my might. She made a comment about “How dare you hit your mother?” and left the room and took my sister with her. I sat there in the mess and I was appalled because I struck my mother in anger. So I packed up a wagon with my most prized possessions and I went to the house of a lady that I had been babysitting her kids. I stayed there for a couple of weeks and kept going to school, and they got a hold of my dad. Got on a Greyhound bus at 16 years old and rode my happy self back to Utah. I stayed with my dad till a week before I turned 18, and I stayed at Ben Lomond High School for the rest of my high school years. That was the line; I felt like I got pushed over the edge. [To Lorrie] By the way, this awesome flag behind me with the black and the purple and the white and the yellow—don't know if you recognize it, but that's the non-binary flag. LR: I couldn't remember which one it was. ZB: Trying to represent, I hung it up just for this interview. LR: That's nice. MK: I like it. LR: Do you mind if I ask a question, Marina? MK: Go for it. 10 LR: What year did you graduate? ZB: 2001. LR: 2001. During that time was the Columbine High School shooting. How did that affect you going to high school? ZB: Funny story. Before Columbine happened, there was actually a shooting at Thurston High School right before I started there, so there was already this sombering feeling—I don't know if that's the right word, but it sounds like maybe it is—because that school had already experienced that. I can't really think back as to how I felt back then about Columbine with what I know now, without placing my current thoughts, feelings, knowledge and all of that in with it, because I've learned a lot about psychology since then. I'm not saying that going in and shooting a whole bunch of people is okay in any way, shape, or form because it's not. The horror that it causes and the terror that it causes for everybody else, that's awful. My mind goes to… I'm always thinking about cause and effect. I somewhat empathize with the shooters, because my brain thinks about what brought them to this point. I have a terrible, incredibly huge problem with the insanity plea in the criminal justice system, and the reason why is, who in their right mind would do these crimes to begin with? You can't be in your right mind. So I feel like crime and behaviors like that come from somewhere. To me, some people internalize pain and some people externalize pain. I don't know. That's a really complicated question, because I wasn't afraid of shooters or people coming in and shooting. I was more afraid of my brain; went more towards, “We need to treat people better so that we don't push them over the edge.” That's where my mind was, I think, is to see what bullying does. I can't have that conversation with people because I always get put in my place and told that's called ‘victim-blaming.’ 11 I'm like, “But the shooter is a victim too.” I feel like they were victimized long before they acted out, and that's an unpopular opinion. I guess it is just that sometimes people don't pay attention until you act out, and I'm just saying—I haven't acted out towards others, I usually implode. Does that make sense? LR: Yeah, it does. And I appreciate the answer. Sorry, Marina. MK: Oh no, you're good, that was a good question. It helps lead me to something I was trying to figure out how to phrase. With going to different high schools, did you feel any sort of cultural changes? Or what was the culture like in some of the different ones? Were there similarities? Differences? ZB: Oh wow. Big cultural differences. Elementary school? Not so much. Junior high culture changes because there were different income levels between Weber County and Davis County. At Fairfield Junior High, definitely a lot more snobbish crowd, and a lot of those kids were a lot better-funded, so their clothes were nicer, their stuff was nicer. They were able to participate in more extracurricular activities. The extracurricular activities cost more. There was less programs to help people who didn't have access. Ogden, they have a lot more access and accessibility. I really loved Ben Lomond High School and I had a lot of pride in Ben Lomond High School. There were two stints that I lived in Clearfield with my mother, where part of the time I went to Clearfield High School. I hated it so much because they were just so uptight, and I really didn't make any friends at Clearfield High School. I remember being there for two months and I had a nose ring and they made me take it out; that's all I remember. I stuck to myself, I ate alone, I didn't make any friends. I don't remember any of the teachers—I don't remember very much of anything, but it was only two months. 12 I liked the Ben Lomond culture. As a matter of fact, when I lived with my dad, we lived in Ben Lomond boundaries, and because I had been to so many schools, I started at Ben Lomond. I was adamant that I was going to stay at Ben Lomond and graduate. We moved, and we were in Ogden High boundaries, and I begged my dad. I was like, “I want to go to Ben Lomond.” So we got a variance and I stayed at Ben Lomond, and I took the UTA bus every morning to Ben Lomond. I think that culturally, I just wanted to stick with Ben Lomond, and I felt like I fit in there. I didn't fit in with any one specific clique. I wasn't that kind of person. You know how some people just are completely 100% absorbed into their clique and they just do everything together—they spend all of their breaks in school together and they spend their off time together and they go do things together? That was not me; I was never a part of any of those cliques in any of those ways. Rather, I was more like a hoverer, and I fit in with the nerds because I was really smart and got good grades, but not so much that we were always together. Just enough to know everybody in that group; they knew me and I could mingle with them. So I pretty much just had mingling status with all the groups. I got along with mostly everybody. My high school years were actually probably really good. I think those were the good old days. Honestly, it's because I signed up for a lot of extracurriculars. I got a taste of as many things as I possibly could. I was in ROTC. I loved ROTC. That was probably my most memorable thing: every single school that I went to, I was always in ROTC, so that was the consistency. I had a full-time job. I worked at Del Taco. Actually, I've been working since I was 14 years old. I started as a busser at Stagecoach, because back then you didn't have to be so old. You could wash dishes and it was no big deal. I was a pearl diver for years, so I was a busser until I was old enough to get a real job. My mission was just to stay out of the house as 13 much as possible, so I was gone from like six AM until nine or 10 o'clock at night. To me, those were the golden years because I finally had freedom. The culture was that I created my own culture because it really depended on which group you were hanging out with. I got along with the skaters, the punks. The entire time I was in Ben Lomond, I had a boyfriend. But the different schools definitely had different cultures; Thurston High School was definitely depressed because they were still recovering from a shooting. Springfield High School, a different culture, you know. It actually was pretty hippie. I didn't really have a problem with that—everybody was white, but it was a laid-back, really cool kind of white, not like any kind of white people I'd ever experienced in my life. Completely different than Utah white, if that makes any sense at all. I'm not LDS, and I've been raised like Southern Baptists. Being raised not LDS in an LDS-dominated state is actually its own struggle, so moving somewhere where all of a sudden you're not the minority was interesting. As a matter of fact, I have spent a lot of my adult life dreaming about going back to Oregon because I like the culture there. I mean, I don't know how it is now. It's been, what, twentysomething years? But I felt like I liked the culture in Oregon just because of how embracing everybody is and loving. We accept everybody, it's non-judgmental. Here you have to worry about what everybody thinks and what they're thinking and saying behind your back. I think that's the difference between Davis County, Weber County, too. Maybe it's just the difference between guys and girls—no offense, ladies. But I just got along with males and females differently because guys, when they have a problem with you, they're like, “I got a problem with you, this is what it is.” Then we kind of just spit it out. Versus with females, a long time later, all of a sudden, you're just getting some kind of drama because it's something you said or did and you 14 have no idea and you're just confused. I really just didn't understand all that stuff. Just didn't work with my brain. I'm like, “All right, cool, let's go hang out now.” I hate the whole “Are you mad at me? Are you mad at me?” That's just too stressful. So there's actually the culture between genders, stereotyping—and, by the way, not all females fit into both, because it's a spectrum. MK: Did getting outside of that snippety Utah atmosphere affect your exploration of sexuality at all in high school? ZB: No, I wouldn't say so. My exploration of sexuality started way before getting outside of Utah. Remember, I mentioned I was in foster homes because I was sexually abused, and my mother was in love with the person who sexually abused me, and her brain was messed up. Rather than parenting me, she used to get us older two kids up at like one, two o'clock in the morning and go hang out at Denny's or Crucible of Art. She used to tell everybody that I was her sister. When her man— A.K.A my younger brother's dad—molested me, her brain processed it as ‘her best friend stole her man.’ That's how she treated me because of it. A lot of negativity came from that; she called me a lot of horrible names growing up, and that's part of the reason that I couldn't handle my first name. When I hear my birth name it kind of triggers like these echoes of awful names like ‘whore’ and ‘hussy’ and ‘tramp’, just things that a mother should not be calling their seven, eight, nine-year-old daughter. But I was very mature. I had to grow up really fast, and that also messed with her brain. I can understand; I have a 13-year-old who's been, you know, 40 years older than she is. She's an old soul, and so it's hard to wrap your brain around it sometimes, that they’re your child and you have to keep pushing them down. “Don't worry about grown-up stuff.” So I get it. But being in foster homes, obviously children of sexual abuse kind of end up with sexual behaviors. Then there's also just natural exploration, which I spent a lot 15 of my life feeling guilty and dirty and ashamed of a lot of my sexual behaviors growing up, because I was demonized and stigmatized for my behaviors. I didn't learn until just a couple of years ago that a lot of my behaviors are just natural childhood discovery, exploration. It really didn't even have anything to do with my molestation, it had to do with natural development. But while I was in foster homes, I'm pretty sure I was, you know, nine or ten, third and fourth grade. There were a pair of girls in that foster home. We would play house and I would pretend that I was the dad and we used to get under the blanket, me and the girls, and just explore sexually. So I was already exploring with females at that age. Growing up, when I played house, the girls were always adamant about being the mom. Everybody fought over being the mom, and I'm not really aggressive about a position, so I was like, “Okay, I'll be the dad.” Growing up in my mother's house, I was always the dad anyway; it was my job. Every once in a while, my mother would pull rank and be like, “I'm the mom.” Going back to exploring my sexuality, in my younger days, I seemed to be more obsessed with the female body in regards to looking at things, and I was shamed and shunned for those behaviors. Fast forward into that when I was living at my dad's. That was part of the things that I was getting in trouble for at my dad's house. I had a stepbrother that was a couple of years younger than me and he had also been sexually abused. He and I used to, I don't know, mess around, I guess. That continued up until middle school. I got in a lot of trouble at school or at home for it and was chastised and shamed and all those things. So that was pretty crappy. MK: You mentioned that you were in the ROTC and you loved it. Share some experiences or memories of that in high school. 16 ZB: When I first started high school, I was in dance. I love music and I love movement, so I did dance and I did some performing arts kind of stuff. I got really discouraged because my parents were ridiculous—my dad wouldn't come to my performances because he was afraid my mother would show up, and my mother wouldn't come because she didn't want to run into my dad, so I had no support. It sucked, so I quit performing arts. Plus, I didn't really get along with all the girls. That was a problem. There was drama and it didn't work out for me. Most kids start ROTC their freshman year and whatnot, but my junior year I started ROTC at Clearfield High and I thrived in it. I did so well. I got Cadet of the Year that year. When you get Cadet of the Year, you get promoted to an officer for the next year. I love drill and ceremony. Oh my gosh, I loved it. I joined almost everything they had. I tried the same routine. They've got to compete in Vegas and compete like all over this state and join drill team, rifle team, and color guard presenting the flag. Oh lord, I just joined everything. I was just all things ROTC. That's where I found my people. I liked the instructors, I liked the military aspect of things, just the straightforward, rigid discipline. My brain is a lot more black and white, and so that whole “this is how it is” instead of questioning and wondering… Expectations were very straightforward, and I absolutely just thrived on that. I loved it. Military recruiters, one of their favorite places to go is high schools. Most branches you can actually join the military when you're 17. My junior year, right before I turned 17—I remember it was October—there was a get-out-of-class-free card called ‘Take the ASVAB.’ My friends were doing it, and we got to get out of class and go hang out and have an excuse to not be in class. So I just went and took this test, like, “Whatever. I mean, just get out of class free, right?” They even bribed us: if you go take this test to get out of class, you got some kind of card 17 where you could go get free food from somewhere. I think it was Little Caesars or something where you could get a free pizza. I mean, score, double score, right? So I took this test and didn't even care. A month later, all of November—I'm supposed to turn 17 at the end of November—I've got recruiters just going crazy at my door because my ASVAB scores are off the charts and everybody wants me. That was like a really awesome feeling. All these recruiters are just knocking on my door, and I hated Utah, and I wanted to get out of Utah, and I'm like, “This is my get-out-of Utah-free pass.” They have this deal, it's called split option. What you do is you join the reserves, and then the summer between your junior and senior year of high school, you go to boot camp. Then you come back home, you finish your senior year of high school, you drill with your unit every month, and then after you graduate, you ship off to your job training school and continue on with your reserves. After I had made Cadet of the Year, I'm supposed to get promoted to officer. Well, the instructors, they're all army dudes, so we've got like a Sergeant Major, we've got a Sergeant First Class, we have an officer, a major. They're all retired military, and they're all making predictions about me and they're saying, "You know, most of the time when we have cadets come back from boot camp, they come back with this know-it-all attitude and really piss everybody off and just cause problems. It just doesn't work out very well.” So I kind of took that as a challenge. Usually, when people don't believe in me, I really do well; that's kind of my thing. Go ahead, tell me I'm not going to do well just so I can show you up. Boot camp was like the time of my life. I loved it, it was... I have never been to summer camp in my life, and so for me, this was summer camp. I loved it. Oh my gosh, it's just awesome. As a matter of fact, when I got back from basic training for the U.S. Army Reserves, I loved it so much that I changed my contract to active 18 duty. So that meant that as soon as I graduate high school, rather than shipping off to training and then just resuming my reserve contract, I would ship off to active duty. I was stoked. I had huge plans. I was like, “I'm going to be a warrant officer. I'm going to fly a helicopter,” like, oh man, I was on top of the world. My senior year of high school was the bomb. I came back, totally showed up ROTC. I shined; I got promoted to a captain. I became a platoon leader as well as a first and second lieutenant. I did a great job leading my company in drill and ceremony, won awards for Best Company, Best Drill Company, best everything. Everybody loved me, it was great. I was becoming popular in the ROTC world because I was—for lack of a better word—a badass. I got a lot of kudos from the instructors and I had a lot of pride and patriotism and all that. It was great. I finished all my credits. I did AP classes, English, and I was pretty much done with high school by the end of the second trimester. The last part of high school, I went to school just for social, to hang out with my friends or at ROTC most of the time. About a week before I turned 18—so this is like November of 2000—I was having a lot of struggles with my dad. He was just very controlling, and in my mind I was like, "Look, I just went to boot camp, and if I'm old enough to die for my country, I'm old enough to make my own decisions. You're way too controlling." So a week before I was 18, I moved out of my dad's house and I moved in with a friend. I still finished high school and I graduated with honors, part of the National Honor Society. I was named in Who's Who of America's High School Honor Students. I graduated with a 3.76 or something like that. I think my whole high school career, I got like one C or something like that; everything else was A's. I'm telling you, those are my good old days. Does that answer your question? 19 MK: Yup, that answered my question. I think that's a good launching point into your military career. ZB: Instead of launching into my military career, can I just back up a little bit and expand a titch on signing up for the military and how that affected my gender? LR: Oh yeah, that's important. ZB: Up until now, my gender was not a huge problem, but this is when my gender started becoming an issue. Even in ROTC, they issued skirts, but I could still choose pants. I can still shoot the weapons. I could still do drill and ceremony. I could still be a commander. I could still do anything the boys could do and it was fine. When I joined the military—remember, I told you my ASVAB scores were fantastic, and the ASVAB is broken down into a whole bunch of different areas. One of the sections that I scored really high in was field artillery, and I wanted to be a combat engineer really bad. But they wouldn't let me, guess why? LR: Because you're a girl. Sorry, I'm interjecting. ZB: Yeah. Well, I'm going to say it's because I didn't have a penis when I was born, because I'm not going to say I'm a girl because I identify as a person. I don't really identify as a boy or a girl. If somebody were to ask me, like, "What's your gender?" I would say, "Neither." "Are you a boy or girl?" "Neither and/or both; all of the above. Why does it matter?" Up until then, being a girl didn't really matter. That was a point in history where I started realizing that society looked at males and females in a different way and that they were going to put me in a box. I really started to struggle because I didn't like being put in a box, because up until then, I could be anywhere on that spectrum I wanted to be. I was free to wear the clothes I wanted to and express myself and my gender pretty close to however I wanted to. I mean, my dad didn't 20 really let me cut my hair, which I hated. But even that got to a point where I just took over and then just dealt with his wrath, you know? But the military is what really forced me into that female category because there was only two boxes. You were either male or you were female, and there was a designated set of circumstances that applied to each category. Not only did the Department of Defense treat you differently, but also the culture and the structure and the environment of the military taught you differently, and that's something that I would definitely like to expand on. But joining the military was a huge turning point in how society and culture affected my gender and understanding, or it becoming an issue. I have the [air quotes] ‘diagnosis’ of gender dysphoria, and I have that in air quotes on purpose because to me, that is comparable to homosexuality being a part of the DSM. In the diagnosis manual that the world uses to diagnose psychiatric conditions back in, I don't know, the 70s or 80s or maybe younger—I don't have my notes in front of me—homosexuality was considered a mental health issue. Eventually, that has been ironed out to be understood that it's not. For me, gender dysphoria, I don't feel like it should be classified as a psychiatric condition. Now, obviously I'm not a doctor, and obviously I struggle with some of my body parts, but it has more to do with society's reaction and behavior towards me and my body and accepting me for who I am or judging me; downloading a file of expectations based on their interpretation of what my gender is. I feel like it's a societal condition. If society put less stress and stereotyping and stigmatizing towards gender and transgender and towards any of that and just let people be, I think that there would be less issues. For instance, I don't like my breasts, and I wear a binder to compress them because I don't want the outside world to know that I have breasts because I want them to see the masculine side of me. Honestly, I wish that I could just walk around freely and it didn't matter, because part of my 21 issue is when somebody thinks that I'm female, they download a whole encyclopedia of expectations, stereotypes, all kinds of different roles. When a family learns that a baby girl is on the way, they all of a sudden have all of these dreams and hopes and wishes for this specific baby girl versus a baby boy. When you meet a man, you talk to them differently versus when you meet a female, and the way people treat a female versus the way they treat a male. Just knowing somebody's gender changes how you talk to them, how you treat them, how you think about them. When you read a newspaper article, if it includes their gender, all of a sudden, you're making judgments about them. If it says a man beat a woman, all of a sudden, you're empathizing with the woman and that man is an awful person. If it says a woman beat a man, all of a sudden, you're like, “Well, what did that man do?” But if it's a person beat a person, now you're having more neutral thoughts about what happened between these people. That's where I'm going, is that gender really plays a role in our judgments about people. I think that we just need to normalize through society that gender is a spectrum and having expectations on gender based on what their anatomy is the problem. If we just remove those expectations, then the dysphoria that's associated with anatomical body parts also dissipates. That's my theory. LR: That's really cool. I'm glad you shared that, thank you. If you guys want to keep going, I’m Okay with that, but I have to walk away. I’m really struggling to focus. ZB: Rescheduling is fine; we’ve already been together for a couple of hours, so tabling it for a bit is fine. I’m pretty talkative and it’s hard for me. LR: Zane, thank you for your willingness to reschedule and continue the conversation. I’m going to stop the recording now. Part 2: September 13, 2021 22 LR: Today is the 13th of September, 2021. Zane, I’m literally just going to turn it back to you. We got to the point where you had graduated from high school and were transitioning into active-duty military, so if you’ll start talking about that, that would be great. ZB: Yeah, when I joined the military, I was actually reserves. But when I got back from boot camp the summer between junior and senior year, I loved the military so much [that] I was like, “This is what I’m going to do with my life.” So I went back to MEPs and I said, "I want to change to active duty." A month before I turned 18, I switched the plan to active duty, and I got to pick my MOS and I felt really cool. I picked Explosive Ordnance Disposal, the Army's bomb squad, that's what I was going to train for, and I was really excited. I scored a 70 on the ASVAB. You only need like a 30 to pass; the highest you can get on the ASVAB is 99. An average is between 35 and 70. Seventy is high average, so that means that I scored higher than 70 percent of all people who are the same age and gender who took the test on the same day that I did. Had I been born male, my test scores were high enough that I could have done any jobs in the military. I really wanted to be a combat engineer. My scores were high, especially in field artillery. They do all kinds of weird math problems where they change around your ASVAB scores because they test you in all these different areas. My ASVAB score for field artillery was like 117, which is good—like a job score—but I couldn't work in that field because I was born female. That was really disappointing, because that's where I wanted to go. When I went to active duty, I signed up for military all over again—because that's what it is, signing your life away and signing your signature and getting really good at signing it. EOD was a good way to settle for not being able to go into combat engineering because I still get to go blow things 23 up. That sounded really exciting, explosive. There were a lot of high standards in getting into Explosive Ordnance Disposal, so I was super stoked and excited. In June, I shipped off for the military. Explosive Ordnance Disposal is—or was back then—a secondary M.O.S, Military Occupational Specialty. In order to be good to go for EOD—which is 55D [pronounced delta] in the army—you had to have 55B [pronounced bravo] first, which is ammunition specialist. So I had to go to the ammo school first, and then I could go to the EOD school. Funny enough, they shipped me off in June 2001 and I ended up back at Fort Jackson, South Carolina, which is where I went to boot camp. I was waiting on my security clearance, so I ended up as a holdover in South Carolina for probably two months, till around August of 2001. I didn't have a job yet; I hadn't finished my training or anything, so they kind of just put me to work as a drill corporal. I got to do inprocessing for all the new soldiers that were coming in and were headed to basic training and that was pretty fun. I made some friends I'm still friends with and I was really motivated. After a couple of months, I got shipped off to Redstone Arsenal in Alabama. That's where I did my ammunition training. It was a pretty good experience; I was the distinguished Honor grad, which means that I scored higher than everybody else in my entire training class. I pretty much got 100 percent on every test there was and I had the highest grade out of everybody. I'm kind of proud of that. I don't really brag much, but I feel like maybe this is the place. LR: Yeah, this is the place. ZB: Because of my ROTC experience, I got to join active duty as an E3, so I was a PFC. I already had some rank on my collar, which obviously made me feel pretty good because I already outranked all the basic training soldiers. I had money in my pocket that I had no idea what to do with because what 18-year-old makes that much money? I thought that was a lot of money back then. I was at 55B School. 24 When you're going through your training, you do all the book work, and then you start doing a lot of the field work. There's a whole lot of shooting and that's great, because I’m pretty good with weapons too. I could never get 100 percent on the weapons stuff; I always had to miss one. I could never get 40 out of 40. It was always like 38 or 39. So I couldn't get that expert, but I could get sharpshooter training or sharpshooter badge. The second-to-last week of AIT—which is Advanced Individual Training, where you focus on your military specialty—is filled with training exercises where you wrap everything together. That's where they put everything that you learned and you pretend like you're in a war. You set up camp and you go out and you do your job as you would if you were in wartime. Our field training exercise was supposed to take a whole week, then the last week is packing up and getting ready, out-processing and graduation. We were only on day three of the field training. Then, all of a sudden, they didn't tell us anything, they just pulled us all in from the field. Some of the Department of Defense civilian employees supporting our training—government and Redstone arsenal, veterans themselves a lot of times—were kind of in a hush. There was a somber feeling about everything. I was really young, 18 years old, and I didn't really understand, but somebody had said something about the World Trade Center. I didn't even know what the World Trade Center was. I remember it was after the second tower got hit, but I don't think the Pentagon got hit yet. We were all still in our full battle rattle, which means we had all our gear on us: we had our gas masks, we had our weapons, we had full camouflage. They pulled us in from the field and put us all on guard duty. They had us all lined up all around the edges of the base, and I remember one of the civilians says something about, "Y'all are going to war." 25 I didn't understand what a World Trade Center was, I didn't understand the significance; they just said somebody flew a plane into the World Trade Center, and I really just did not understand why that meant war. I spent the whole rest of that week on guard duty. As we're rotating out of the field or out of guard duty, I finally got to watch some news. Something changed in my brain and I started becoming obsessed with news. Every moment of downtime, my face was glued to the news. I started to talk to my peers, and people started getting their orders. But I had different orders because my training trajectory was that after I finished 55B School, I needed to move on to 55D School for more training. Every time somebody's orders would come down, I was kind of marked safe because my next place was Eglin Air Force Base, Florida for EOD school. But a lot of my friends that we've just been training with for 10 weeks were headed to Fort Bragg—which is an infantry division—or Fort Knox, Kentucky, or Germany, which is even closer to Iraq or Afghanistan; they're talking about terrorists. Things were starting to get real and a lot of us were kind of really terrified because a lot of us were like 18 years old. The recruiters, they don't talk about this. Something that still gets me to this day is people talk about, “You know what you signed up for.” I say, "When I was 17 years old and I was a junior in high school." I turned 17 on November 26, and by December 3rd, I was at the MEPs station signing my life away. I was 17 years old in bootcamp. ‘You know what you signed up for?’ To this day, I'm like, “Are you kidding me?” They promise you college tuition. I came from poverty; I didn't know how I was going to pay for college. They promised the GI Bill, they promised huge education packages; a lot of people got laptops and huge spenddowns. All you had to do is make it through training, and all of a sudden, you've got ten thousand dollars in your bank account. They were bribing 26 us, and they tell us that we know what we signed up for, like, wow. It was like we were holding hands going, "Where are we going?" You talk about being brave: it's one thing when you're training, crawling on your belly with live rounds flying over your head. They're training your reflexes away, really trying to train you to act without thinking because if you stop to think, that's too long. You have to act on impulse without thinking about your own life. I think that's when some of my obsessive behaviors started kicking in. It wasn't so much the whole “Oh my gosh, we're going to war,” it was like some of my friends that were getting sent overseas, they had really young children at home. I learned the hard reality that when you join the military, you literally have to give guardianship of your children to somebody else. You have to sign your children to somebody else. There were parents that were in training with us, and they had to give their kids away to somebody else because the military owned them now. They owned us. We were government property. If we allowed ourselves to get sunburns, we could get an Article 15 for not protecting government property. I actually got an Article 15 while I was in training for getting a tattoo and for cutting my hair too short because I looked like a male. They needed to be able to distinguish between males and females. I just didn't like having to keep my hair up above my collar because it was awful; it was hot and it hurt with the Kevlar helmet on. So September 11th, I was in training, and I think that harsh reality of what I signed up for hit me. LR: Sounds like it. So did you end up going to the 55D training in Florida? ZB: Yeah. 55D, it's a male-dominated field. Obviously, you've got to have pretty high test scores—80 percent is passing, so if you get 79 or less, that's an F. You can't fail your tests because that's life or death. You could kill somebody, a whole bunch of somebodies, so you really need to know what you're doing. You've also got to like the idea of explosives, so back then, it was probably about 80 percent male. 27 EOD school was all Department of Defense, so we had Marines and Navy and Army and Air Force. We all trained together. Everybody already had an M.O.S, so some of the people that were training had been in the military for 20 years, some people had been in for five, some people were newer like me, a lot of us. There was a wide range of ages and experience levels, and a lot of people were reclassing, getting a new job. Pretty much most of us were reclassing because we all had to at least have 55B first, ammunitions, because that's kind of like the base education. This is where my story gets difficult. LR: Okay. Share what you're comfortable with sharing. ZB: Well, the reason why it's complicated is because I had big plans. I wanted to be a warrant officer; I wanted to be a 20-year. I loved the military. I loved serving my country and was very patriotic. I was really proud of what I was doing, but I made some mistakes. I was 18, I was raised in Utah. The military was my first bit of freedom, and it was also a major culture shock, because there's Utah and then there's the rest of the world. I was very sheltered here. I mean, I had drank alcohol a few times in my life before leaving in the military, but it was just low-point, like three-point Utah beer. I thought I knew my limits, but when you go out into the rest of the world, it's not three-point beer, but I didn't really realize that. A few beers everywhere else is not the same as a few beers here, and I didn't really understand that. Growing up here, I mostly have got away with being a tomboy and having my hair short and dress how I wanted to. I didn't really get along with females very well, except I have a couple of friends that are more masculine females. People like me I could get along with, but otherwise not much. I've just got on with guys; I'd rather play in the mud. I like trucks and four wheelin' and camping and all that. I like to be outdoors and I like cars and stereotypical boy stuff. When I was in Florida, I tried to 28 be one of the guys, but I was still trying to find myself. I made some mistakes and I drank alcohol, and obviously, I didn't know my limit. In October of 2001, I was hanging out with a group of guys on the beach. I think there were maybe two other females, but they had hooked up with some guys, and in the military it's like a ‘don't ask, don't tell’ kind of thing about your sexual orientation. I was into girls, but you ain't really supposed to talk about that; nobody's really supposed to know about that. I wasn't really interested in guys. I mean, I was interested in the guys as being the guys; I didn't want to be with guys. Does that make sense? We had been drinking, and I thought we were just hanging out and cutting up, just bullshitting, having fun and being stupid. I don't know if things got out of hand, but we were wrestling. I wrestled with my brothers forever. I mean, that's how we love—when I come home on leave, that's the first thing my brothers and I would do. We wouldn't even say hello, we just: “You, me, backyard.” We'd go in the backyard, roll around in the grass a bit, come back muddy and maybe a little bit of blood and some grass stains. Then, you know, it's, “Hey, how you doing?" and some hugs. It was good, that whole Simba/Nala thing of, “Can you take me yet?” "Nope. I'm still stronger than you." My brother's just coming in his age, and that's how we love. But I was under the influence and the wrestling with the guys somehow turned. I ended up getting pinned down and my clothes got tore off and a whole bunch of guys just took their turn forcing themselves on me. Then they left me there in the sand with sand everywhere and it hurt. I kind of blacked out a lot of the incident itself; I think the most memorable part of it was collecting myself and getting me home. I remember exactly what I was wearing, it's crazy. My jeans were somehow wet from the water and sandy, and I was trying to get them on, and it was like my skin was raw from the sand. My whole body hurt so bad. I’d lost my ID as 29 well; I couldn't find my wallet; I didn't have a phone, because this is like 2001; I didn't have any money. It was like four o'clock in the morning, and I remember I was on the beach behind the Crab Shack, a restaurant, and everything was closed. I remembered finding my way up there. I remember there was this person there, and they gave me a quarter to call a cab. I call the cab thinking, “Well, if I can get them to take me back to Eglin Air Force Base, then maybe I can somehow get on base,” but I didn't have my military ID. I was stuck between a rock and a hard place, but the cab driver could tell I been through some hell, and so he didn't charge me for the fare. I didn't tell them what happened. I made up this big, stupid lie about how I lost my ID because I didn't want to get in trouble for underage drinking. I just figured it was all my fault. Through this big ordeal about trying to get my ID and trying to get back on base, I had to wake up my first Sergeant and have him come down and say, “Yeah, that's my soldier,” so I could get back on base on the weekend. He was pretty pissed at me. I just kind of shut down and dropped my head in shame. So between September 11th and that right there, those two things were really traumatic to me. Something shifted in my brain. I didn't really know the names of the people who did it to me. Not all of them were in the EOD school, because Eglin Air Force Base is huge. Our soldiers just know each other and, I mean, I didn't necessarily know all of them. They were in civilian clothes, which is way different than uniform. I didn't know them or recognize them, but every once in a while I might hear their voice. I started failing tests. If you fail a test, you have to go before a review board and they talk about, “Hey, what's going on? What can we do better?” and then you have to start that cycle over again and relearn. So I recycled once and I got through that cycle. Then when I moved out in the field again, now everybody's in their different levels or whatever. 30 I would hear somebody talk, and I hadn't dealt with it. I hadn't tried. It was all my fault: learn from it, move on, don't drink with strangers, don't go to parties, stay away from the beach. I try to just suck it up and drive on, but every once in a while, I hear somebody talk [and] I would just not feel safe. I didn't feel safe around men and I didn't feel safe around people, and then my world just kept getting smaller. I realized that I needed to have protection; I needed to conform. I decided that I was bisexual. I had boyfriends in high school because that was what was expected. I was always attracted to females, but you have to date guys because that's what's expected. I thought if I had a boyfriend, I would be safe from other things. But my brain couldn't feel safe. I failed another test, and this time when I went before the review board, I gave up. They asked me what's going on; I lied to them and I told him that I was afraid of explosives. It's like the biggest, worst lie I've ever told, that I'm afraid of explosives. Now I only get to play with them on the Fourth of July and they're little. I quit EOD School because I was afraid, and it wasn't because I was afraid of explosives, it was because I was afraid of men. I had put in some request, and I was hoping that I would just get shipped somewhere stateside, maybe close to home. I requested Colorado or California or Oregon—somewhere in the West—and I got Korea. That was hard because I hadn't dealt with anything, and now I got shipped far, far away. Now, in order to talk to my family, I had to buy calling cards and all kinds of stuff. I think the military really drove a wedge between my family because you had to keep your conversations really short. I mean, they were never going to call me. They didn't have a way to get ahold of me; I had to call them. I quit, like, the coolest job ever. I'm really disappointed about the EOD school: something I was really proud of doing and going into, and I quit it. But I had 55, so I was ammunition, and so I went to Korea and I worked as ammunition. I got 31 promoted to E4 specialist because I did a lot of concurrent enrollment classes. Back then, you would get a little book and do it on paper—I was going to say online, but that's not what it was. It was like through the mail. LR: Correspondence course. ZB: Yeah, that's what it was, correspondence. I took correspondence courses and got promoted to E4, but I was still really struggling with my head and mental health. I started cutting. That was kind of crazy. My mental health was not so healthy. I hadn't dealt with that at all and I was really struggling. Of course, I had a female roommate, and now I had no respect for myself. Seemed like drinking was what you did. Military, if you don't have to work the next day, that's what you do: you drink. You can call on the phone and order a bowl of fried rice, a pack of smokes, the calling card, and a bottle of soju. Soju is like fermented rice and it’s potent. You can drink it and mix it with anything, and you can't taste it at all, and then all of a sudden you stand up and blackout. Oh my gosh, the military totally enabled you to just be a drunk. There's the walk of shame every Friday and Saturday night. Even the Chow Hall would enable our drunkenness because they would have burgers on Friday and Saturday night at 10 PM to try to motivate us to come in the gates on time. You just have all these soldiers dragging their ass in. They really just encouraged us to be drunks, I swear. Alcoholism was a thing—not a very healthy coping mechanism, by the way, but once you take that uniform out, we just go. That was the only thing to do there: as soon as you go off post, all you can do is go shopping or get drunk at the clubs. The streets are lined with clubs; there's just clubs everywhere, and the legal drinking age in Korea is 19, I think, and it's not like they ever asked you how old you were. So drinking was a big thing. LR How long were you in Korea? 32 ZB: I lost my mind when I was in Korea because I hadn't dealt with anything and I kind of spiraled out of control. I had gotten engaged to an awesome guy when I was at Eglin Air Force Base, but then when I got shipped off to Korea, he just moved on, I guess. So I thought I was engaged while I was in Korea and then I found out. But I was struggling with my own thing, and I got a medical discharge. I chaptered out of the military from Korea. I lost my security clearance, and as part of getting a TopSecret security clearance is that they go and they interview anybody who's ever known you for, like, a decade. Because I was only 18, it meant they were interviewing my parents. Well, my dad went on and on and on about my mother. My mother was really abusive, and I had run away from her house when I was a kid. When I was in the right environment, I was thriving well, but when I was at my mother's, I was being abused. Of course, I didn't want to be in that situation, but I was a runaway and the military really frowns on that. My father kind of made me out to be like this mental case. They pulled my top-secret security clearance and then they decided to tell me that I couldn't work in the ammo office anymore. I was pretty much just on extra duty and doing yard work because I wasn't allowed in my office anymore, and I didn't deserve that. That was kind of the straw that broke the camel's back because now all of a sudden, I'm in trouble because I was a runaway like a decade before that, from ages 9 to 12. When you add October of 2001 plus losing my security clearance—and now they're telling me that I'm not worthy of my job—I fell apart. I wanted to be a warrant officer; I wanted to be EOD like I deserved; I was smart enough. I wanted to serve my country, and now I'm cutting grass and picking up rocks and pulling weeds, doing guard duty. All hell broke loose in Korea, too, because it was the FIFA Cup and we were still a Threatcon Delta because of September 11th. Now I'm just on guard duty all 33 the damn time with monsoons. I'm watching the river rise like, “This is my job now. This is what I'm doing, guard duty. That's all I'm worth.” My brain is worth so much more than that, and I just lost it. I got chaptered out. All that guard duty and all that equipment hauling and all that, it just put me on grunt work, you know: “Carry this, lift this, move this. Go help the supply sergeant.” It really messed up my back and my body and my neck. All the PT, I would run, run, run, run, run. I have a connective tissue disorder and it hurts terribly. I didn't know back then what was happening, but I would call it ‘blow out my knee’, but now we know that I was dislocating my knee or subluxating my knees. My arches fell from running and I would tell them, “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts.” They'd be like “Drink water. There's nothing on the images. You're a hypochondriac. You're malingering. You're just trying to get out of doing your work. You're trying to get out of PT.” I'm like, “It hurts to run, it hurts.” They just kept saying, “Pain is weakness leaving the body. You just need to do more PT. You need to strengthen yourself. You need to work harder. You're just a whiner.” I'm like, “It hurts, it hurts, it hurts, pain, pain, pain, pain.” They were like, “You're just weak.” Later, the VA wouldn't own anything on my body because there wasn't any documentation. Why? Because the military would always just send me away. “There's no problem.” It wouldn't take me seriously when I would go in and say, "This hurts.” So I would go to sick for these aches and pains in my feet and my knees and my shoulders and my neck, and it wouldn't take me seriously. Now we know better, right? 34 I got out of the military October 31st of 2002. I got an honorable discharge. My service was honorable; I was a good soldier. It's not what I planned. I wanted to be an expert in my field and be a warrant officer, I wanted to retire, I wanted to be a lifer: I had different plans. I really did, but I still hadn't talked to anybody about what happened in October of 2001, hadn't processed it yet. I just kept it because it was in my head. It was all my fault, and I shouldn't have put myself in that situation. It was my fault. I kind of just let people dictate how things were gonna to go in my life for the next while. I had got diagnosed with PTSD and I tried to work on my mental health but struggled. I met CA, the person that I married, in Korea. He left Korea a while before I did, and I was very naive and vulnerable and had no idea that he had a whole family stateside. This is shocking. A lot of people think TDY—Temporary Duty Travel—means Temporary Divorce for a Year, and everybody switched everybody around there. As a matter of fact, a man or woman being faithful to their spouses back then, those are actually the weird minority, unfortunately, and that breaks my heart. I really hope it's not like that anymore, but 20 years ago it was. Sad. I did come back to Utah, and it’s like the next chapter of my life. CA, my person that I married, he lives in Texas. He got stationed at Texas; he was still in the Army. I married a man because it was not acceptable to be with women, and I would be with women on the down-low with the permission of my husband kind-ofthing. But my husband cheated on me and I knew it. Got our marriage license on a Friday, and he lied to me and told me he had to go do some field training for that weekend. We're supposed to get married that Monday, but I was really sure that he was up to something, so just postponed it till that Tuesday. We married in the justice and peace. I found out on Wednesday that he had actually been in Houston with another woman. I really just got married because I felt like that's what you're 35 supposed to do, and I wanted somebody to love me. Parents weren't really doing their job; I guess I just didn't feel loved and I was really desperate to feel loved. Felt like getting married was the only way to do that. CA was a Puerto Rican from New York. My dad said that Puerto Ricans from New York beat their wives. I said, “No, no, Dad. He loves me, that's not how it is.” I'll be damned if my dad wasn't right. I don't know if all Puerto Ricans from New York beat their wives, but this one did. He was very dominant and a lot bigger than me and was very aggressive. I don't know how many times I woke up in the middle of the night and he was raping me. I got really submissive with him for a long time. He had a son that was four when he and his first wife TA got married. Matter of fact, I told you he was married; we got together, I just didn't know. When he got stateside, the military moved his family from New York to Texas, and then when I got stateside, I found out he has a family and I was like, "What the hell?" He's like, “Well, she was supposed to file paperwork. I didn't know she didn't do it.” I was like, “Oh.” I guess I just believed all his lies; I was really gullible. There's a lot of drama between him and TA, and so I guess his mission was that he wanted to get them out of New York. That was the whole reason he joined the military, so he let them live in the on-base housing and he and I got an apartment and whatnot. My stepson JC is kind of why I stayed in the marriage so long. TA picked up and got on a Greyhound and went back to New York. He filed the divorce paperwork with her and then had her served, and she kind of just thought that all she had to do is not sign it and that would work. Well, the 30 days went through and then they were divorced. He put in the paperwork that he had full custody of their little boy, and because she didn't read the paperwork and didn't understand any of it, he got everything that he put in the divorce paperwork. 36 In my mind, I feel like we just kidnapped that kid and we took him back to Texas. We drove up to New York and took the little babe and came back to Texas. I became an instant parent at 19, right. I put everything into being that kid's parent. That's probably why I stayed is ‘cause CA was pretty awful. I stayed for a long time. I was in Texas from 19. I used my VA home loan benefits to buy a house, and so we bought a house, and there was a lot of drama and trauma associated with that marriage. CA was always cheating and I really struggled with boundaries. I guess I kind of just figured that's the kind of relationship we had, so I cheated too. We had sexual relationships with other women together, because that's the only way he would allow it. One woman actually moved in with us for a while, and it was supposed to be a relationship where we're all involved. It was permission-based with boundaries, but CA would go behind my back and just be with her, and it was really a toxic situation. That's another thing that kind of contributes to a lot of things that went wrong in our cheating history. I couldn't get pregnant, and I really, really, really wanted my own child, and we went through infertility treatments together. I also suffered from a lot of chronic pain in my 20s. I had a doctor that would take me seriously, but I was on a lot of opiates and I really didn't like those. I was really scared about addiction back then. The treatments didn’t work and I was getting a lot of mental health work, and that's when I got diagnosed with PTSD. Originally, the VA gave me 30 percent serviceconnected compensation, and my therapist was like, “No. You've got PTSD, this is service connected. You need to tell them what happened.” The VA investigation obviously lined up with EOD school and when I started failing school and when I quit the school. "Okay, yeah, you didn't report it, but we can see where everything shifted." It was supported by the evidence and how my 37 mental health kind of spirals, so they raised my compensation, which is 70 percent service connected. I did start getting a little bit of that VA money. I worked a lot, and I went to school on and off in Texas, but I was also a parent, and I really dove into that. I took that job seriously. I did everything I could to be a really good mom for that kid. I love him. He's 23 now, and he still calls me Ma. He's cute because he's this fluffy Puerto Rican with a Bronx accent and I'm Ma. CA and I were married for like 10 years, but we were estranged for quite a few chunks of that. CA's ex-wife, TA and I became pretty good friends. She respected the fact that I was a good parent to our child. I always sent her pictures; I always made JC sit down and write her letters and send her pictures and drawings and everything. I kept her involved. I always got on CA about how he talked to her because he was so mean. I did my best. When their grandparent was passing away—she was like the matriarch of their family—we drove to New York so that JC could pay his respects and I was like the only white person in the room. A lot of people gave me some crap about, "Who the hell is this person?" and the woman on her deathbed shut everybody down and was like, "You will respect her. She got this child out of the projects. She took good care of that child, and you will respect her." So there was some respect. TA and I got a pretty good relationship, and somehow, eventually CA talked TA into sending us her other child, who's older than JC. JC was biologically CA's child, but AM is about three or four years older than JC, and CA was the assumed father by AM. CA was not her father, but AM didn't know that. Does that make sense? LR: Yeah. ZB: AM was always like, "How come you didn't take me? Why does JC have the better life?" CA eventually talked TA into giving us temporary guardianship of AM, on the pretense that TA was going to move down to Texas to be closer to her son and start 38 a new life and get out of New York, because New York is just the projects and Texas is a better life. Then I was a parent of these two kids, and that's why I call it like my first life. I had these two kids and I was just hardcore mom. I just really did it all. They were my kids, so I really loved them a lot. AM never really called me Mom. She called me Becca and I was fine, like I still loved her. AM and I don't really have a relationship because it was kind of short-lived, but I mean, I love her and care about her and I wish her well. But JC and I talk. Eventually, over time, TA finally did come to Texas, and she brought her significant other and her youngest child at the time, so that was 2005. So now, CA, his ex-wife and her man come and move into my house. They pretty much took over my house, because now it's her and her three children, it's not me and my kids—which I mean my step-kids. It's her and her family in my house, and now I feel like I got knocked out. CA went to truck driver training, and TA and I kind of really hit it off. CA and I had had a really bad marriage, and TA and I started really getting along. CA was out of the picture, and I was sure that wherever he was at the truck driver school, that he was cheating because, I mean, he's been cheating the whole time. I didn't trust him. TA called me the ‘next b-word’, and I always called her the ‘ex b-word’. So he always had the next-b and the ex-b, and he always had what we called backburner b-words. There were times when I was the back-burner b, and sometimes I was the front-burner b. That's just how he treated women, always, and so there was always another woman that he was talking to on the phone, telling her about how awful his life was and blah-blah-blah. Lots of drama. He strung people along and led them to believe terrible things about whoever he was with, and he just was living triple lives. 39 So TA and I were talking, and she was telling me all about everything that he was telling her and leading her on about while I was in Korea and while she was in Texas the first time. All these pictures are coming to light. I had gone through infertility treatment and gotten a laparoscopy for endometriosis. All the way up until now, I had been trying to conceive and I couldn't. TA and I had gotten to talking and we had become like, really good friends. She told me that her man got her pregnant the first time they ever did anything. I was like, "Oh, I wish. That was nice." Whatever, I don't know what's wrong. I think there's something wrong with CA because I've gone through all the treatments and like my doctor says things should be good now. Somehow some kind of decision was made that we were going to try, the three of us, and I got pregnant. He's 15 now, by the way. I had also been sleeping around at that time. I'm not proud of it, but I didn't have boundaries and I didn't have the ability to say no and I didn't really care about my marriage this time. He was abusive, and the only reason that I had stuck around that long is because I cared about those kids, and now their mom was here. I had no obligation to them. I felt like part of the reason I didn't want to leave is because I didn't trust CA to take care of them, and now their mom was here. I didn't care, if that makes any sense; just didn't care. CA got back and I straight-up told him and TA and MA. They totally denied it. Essentially, nothing ever happened. I was like "Okay, whatever,” but I just told CA, "It's not your kid." So I left my house, I left my life, I left everything. I left Texas, and I came back to Utah. CA's got a boyfriend or girlfriend—whatever—in Texas, but I was here in Utah for the first time since I had left, since I had graduated high school. I was furious. My mother was still raising kids, and I'm like 15 years older than my youngest sister; my dad was still raising my youngest brother and actually had moved to Texas. So my brother was in Texas, my mother was here, and I was 40 pregnant and alone. I had some emotional problems and hadn't dealt with a lot of things, and I'd never been pregnant before. My mother was the same person she'd always been. I just thought things were going to be better, but I really had no support here. Eventually CA and I were talking on the phone and like, I guess we were trying to fix our marriage. He was telling me how awful his girlfriend was. I don't even know, I guess I became the Back Burner Bitch again, and I don't know how I let that happen. He drove to Utah and he picked me up—I was like six months pregnant—and we drove back to Texas. Got back to Texas; TA had picked up again and went back to New York. But CA couldn't support us, and so we were staying at his friend's house, living on their couch ‘cause we couldn't keep the power on at my house, 2108 Caprice Drive. We lived by Fort Hood. I never forget that. It was my house; my VA home loan was tied up in that house, but we're sleeping on somebody else's couch. I have a home in my name, my house, and we had no electricity. You can't live in Texas with no electricity, you need air conditioning. The only money that we had was my VA. I was like 70 percent at that time, so I was getting a monthly check, and now I'm paying his car payment. So many things have gone wrong; I'm trying to skip things that are not important. People taking advantage, like somebody borrowed my brand new car a year before and never brought it back. 2005 Nissan Pathfinder. The police wouldn't even take a report because they're like, "You gave them the keys, it's not theft. You gave that permission to take it." I didn't have a police report to give to the insurance, so I literally have like a $25,000 charge off on my credit. You know what I mean? So I couldn't even get a car. I'm 100% dependent on CA, but I'm paying for his car payment because that car's in my name too. 41 My whole life went to hell in 2005. TA took over my house. When I got pregnant, I lost my job. I had an amazing job: I was a contractor on Fort Hood, working for L-3 Communications. I was making like $13 an hour back then, like, that was pretty damn good. As you know, I didn't have a degree. I was just a veteran and everything was going good. I got two cars in my name, and now I'm like 100% living on somebody's couch: pregnant, barefoot. I had nothing and couldn't even live in the house, and I had nothing for the baby, and he was coming. It was soon. CA had gotten kicked out of the army by now. He had a dishonorable discharge, so he can't get hired anywhere. Kind of a whole ‘nother story, but won't go into it, cause that's his history. Because of his dishonorable discharge, he doesn't have veterans’ benefits. Dishonorable discharge, really, that's like having a felony. It’s a nasty stain. LR: Yeah, it really is. I hate to interrupt, but I'm struggling, and I want to do my job well, but I can't when I feel like this. ZB: I just looked at the clock. I'm a storyteller. I never had anybody actually listen to these things. LR: If you're okay, I'm going to stop recording. Part 3: October 11, 2021 LR: It is October 11, 2021, and we are with Zane again continuing our oral history interview. Let's just jump right back in. You have returned to Texas with your husband at the time, awaiting the birth of your oldest, so let's kind of pick up from there. You explained the reasoning: why you went back even though you knew you shouldn't. It's hard to explain, but I understand that reasoning area. ZB: What else do you do? LR: How long did you stay with him before you finally had enough? 42 ZB: I'm excited to tell you. This is a getting-out-of-there story. I was obsessed with genetics back then, and I really described what my son was going to turn out like physically. I colored coloring book pictures; I had an idea of Punnett square and how it was going to work out, I knew he would have my light eyes and light hair. It was uncomfortable having a pregnancy and not knowing who the father was, and I was really ashamed of that. I really, really was. But I knew what the baby was going to look like. He was mine, I wanted to be a parent and I wanted kids more than anything else. I remember actually telling a friend named Janette that if I ever had a kid, I would just take them and go because I planned on raising my children alone. I felt I could do better by myself than with somebody else. I really wanted to be a parent with a focus of doing a better job than my mother did, than my parents did, and it was kind of like a do-over. I actually, selfishly, wanted to have unconditional love. I'm going to be honest about that, that's a big reason why I had children. That's my selfish reason. I just wanted to be loved without judgment. Anyway, the countdown happened. I made friends with the woman that lived in the house, I can’t even remember her name. I’m terrible with names. She was a stepmom, and her husband—MI—had four boys, and she had one boy, and it was kind of a crazy nuthouse. Then CA and I had my stepson, JC. Good Lord, Texas is hot even in April. It’s cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon, and I didn't have any clothes that fit me. MI was ginormous. I still have his shirt, it's like a 3X shirt, and that actually fit me just right because my belly was like this giant enormous basketball. I don’t remember much, I just remember MI and his spam shirt and all them damned kids. He had a lot of snakes and mice. He was raising mice in his garage, and I think that's when I got into reptiles, so he got me to that, and I actually raised snakes for quite a while after DO was older. I remember that being an influence on my life. 43 I think that when I was pregnant with DO, because it increases your inflammation, I think that was like the major big flare of pain. I look back on my life and I used to think that everything I went through physically was normal, but I learned over time that a lot of the things that I physically just accepted as facts of life were really early onset and don't usually happen to you until your 50s or 60s or 70s, and I'd had ‘em since I was like a teenager, pretty much since puberty. All the aches and pains and arthritis and everything I'd had, I just thought it was normal. My pregnancy was near the end. It was so miserable and painful, and sleeping on my couch was awful, like, oh my Lord, our house was empty and we had a lot of stuff boxed up. CA was really big on, "I earn this money, I want to enjoy it." At the house there was a big box of all the things that CA spent his money on to enjoy: video games and movies, an Xbox or PlayStation or whatever. Oh God, thousands of dollars or whatever. I was always focused on, “We need to pay the bills.” We had different priorities because when I grew up, we were on housing and welfare and my mom always needed help from her parents to take care of things. I was always kind of ashamed of that, and I always wanted to just be able to take care of stuff. A lot of mine and CA's relationship was a struggle to make ends meet, trying to cut corners and try to make things happen. He was from New York, Bronx, and I was from Utah; both low-income, like I was white housing welfare projects and he was in New York City projects, but we were both in the projects. You know what I mean? Like just different kinds of same. It's weird and complicated. We didn't know how to budget or do any of that stuff, so when DO got here, we decided that we had to skip a car payment so that we could buy a car seat. He didn't have a crib and I really didn't have anything for him. I had a bunch of stuff for 44 him in Utah, but when I packed up the car, I had to make the decision of, what could I take and what did I leave? I didn't know any better. I was still pretty young; I was just 23 and a half. LR: Let me just ask you, when was DO born? ZB: Cinco de Mayo, 5/5/06. He was a week earlier than they planned on, 6 pounds, 12 ounces. I did it all without any epidural or drugs or anything because I didn't think I'd be able to have a baby. CA was the only person there, and he was not very supportive. I had gone through a lot of reproductive treatments to enable my body to conceive DO, you know. It has a lot to do with my obsession with genetics. I have theories and they’re unpopular opinions, really, and I feel like a lot of times I want to author those opinions, and I know that they'll cause controversy. I haven't taken the time to write them down, and I feel like taking the time to write them is actually a necessary evil. A lot of people say that every child that's conceived is as God intended, and genetically, my body tried to prevent me from conceiving children. I really love my kids, I do. But my unpopular opinion that I have is that genetically, if babies who are conceived are meant to be here, then people who can't conceive without like medical interventions, does that mean that they weren't meant to have babies, according to God? I mean, that's kind of an unpopular opinion, right, because from an evolutionary standpoint, my genetics—I passed on all of these diseases that are miserable by the time they're my age or younger. From an evolutionary standpoint, I should not have passed on my genetics. But we use science to intervene and should we have? Everybody says that abortion is wrong, it's a big deal. I created a child that's already miserable in some aspects because of these things, and she's only 13. I wouldn't do that to my worst enemy. Sometimes I wish somebody could just spend an hour just so that they could try to be innovative on how to solve some 45 problems for me or empathize for just a minute. But that's all. I would never wish this on anybody's life. I did everything I could to try to change my infertility because I wanted a baby so bad, and we medically intervened. I went through a lot of treatments, first trying to treat endometriosis; oh, Lord, that was awful. They went in and surgically cleared my tubes to enable me to conceive DO. I think the treatment really put a wedge in my marriage because I totally lost my sex drive, and CA used it as an excuse to have a threesome relationship. Sorry, I’m all over the place. It’s because I didn’t take my ADHD meds. LR: It’s okay, I’ll help you stay on track. So what led to you leaving CA? ZB: DO was born, I was at the hospital alone, whatever, that was a sucky situation. Being pregnant, not knowing who the dad was, was really scary and sad and anxiety-driven. So when the baby came out and he looked exactly like who he looked like, CA left the hospital and I was alone for the rest of time. That was quite the experience. He picked me up from the hospital. He did not want to tell JC that he was not the father. He didn't want to tell anybody that he was not the father, but he didn't want anybody around us to recognize. Remember, I told you that TA and CH were living with us, and so they knew what their kids looked like, and DO was spittin’ image, just a whole lot lighterskinned, of his big brother, but he had my eyes. TA and CH were already split town, and CA did not want the neighbors to know, so he got this plan to just get the hell out of Dodge. CA, JC, the baby, and I moved to Woodland, Texas, which is right outside of Houston. He was going to school to be some kind of mechanic, and he had a side job of working at Jiffy Lube. I was home taking care of the kids, and I was getting veterans benefits, and I would spend all my veterans benefits on 46 making sure that all the bills were paid. That was what I did, because that was my priority. We had gotten robbed while I was in the hospital, but we had homeowners’ insurance. I filed an insurance claim because that's what you do. The people that we were living with got evicted from their house because they didn't pay their bills; that's the kind of people they were. They were CA's friends, and I didn't have boundaries or whatever, so rather than charge them the price of rent, we charged them the price of our house payment; no deposit, no nothing, just let them move into our house while we were in Houston. It was a pretty sweet deal, you know: $514 a month in 2006 for a four-bedroom, two-bathroom house, 2000 square feet with like a quarter acre yard in Texas. Most houses around there were going for like $1,300 to $1,600 a month. They'd send us a check every month, and I would pretty much just use that to pay the house payment. I was all about paying the bills, so I paid the bills with my money and then I tried real hard to take care of the kids' needs too. I don't know how else we paid for things, but CA was going to school and I was talking to my family a lot on the phone and just being a mom. Really, I was in it for the kids. I took care, but now I had different priorities. I love JC, and that's really why I wanted to come back. I love that kid, I really do. Oh my gosh, he's my heart. I really accepted him as the only kid I'd ever have because I couldn't make babies. LR: What you're saying is you stayed with CA because of JC. So when you finally left, were you able to take JC with you? Or did JC stay with CA? ZB: That makes me really sad, I really had to leave him in that. A lot of people talked me into leaving. It was more like I was telling them that I was going to leave, and I planned everything out really good because I got an upgrade in my VA disability 47 compensation. They raised it from 30% to 70% because they recognized that I had PTSD for some stuff and they recognized how it is affecting my life. Also, I was really meticulous about keeping track of everything that we had at the house. Well, that insurance paperwork from the robbery required all of that meticulous information, but CA didn't want to deal with all that nonsense because it was a pain in the ass, and so I didn't tell him that I followed through with all that damn pain-in-the-ass nonsense. So I got two really big lump sum checks close to the same time, and I planned it all out, and I mailed myself a whole bunch of stuff back to Utah. I got plane tickets for myself and DO and my cat and a couple of army duffel bags and a stroller—my grandma mailed me this ginormous box that had a Cadillac of a stroller that hauled all kinds of baby everything. I'm so grateful, I had it for years—and I got the hell out of Dodge. The number one reason I left is because as much as I love JC and I couldn't take him with me, I really hoped that someday I could influence that. He would at least remember what I did while I was there, and he was like eight when I left. I was there for three years in his life; he turned five right after we got him and he was eight when I left. I left because I didn't want DO to grow up thinking it was okay to act like that, treat people like CA did. It wasn’t about me anymore. LR: That makes sense. When you moved back to Utah, where did you move to? ZB: So growing up, I had a good friend. Her name was LT, and she had a boyfriend, TF, and their brother, JU; they all had this house that they'd lived in for years and owned. It was big and there was lots of room, so DO and I got a room there and we called it Apartment B. I had an address at Apartment B and I mailed myself a bunch of stuff. I had a lot of my stuff in the garage in my house, all my military mementos and a lot of my life mementos from my childhood, just a lot of life there in the garage. The people that were in my house, they were pregnant and they had five or 48 six kids now the baby was there. I just didn't have the heart to make them leave and take my house back. My VA loan was tied up in that. Yeah, that was me not having boundaries. LR: So, are you saying that you moved in with this friend? ZB: I moved in with LE. MI and them, they wrote me a few postdated checks for the house. I just needed to pay the mortgage rate, that's all that mattered. I just needed to keep the house right. They had my house and I was here in Utah and I lived with LE for a few months. I got a car, I had plenty of money. DO slept in a laundry basket for most of his three months with CA, and the only thing he had was a car seat and a stroller. I didn't get caught, but I literally had to shoplift diapers because I had a dish towel around his butt because I didn't have diapers. I spent all my money on the bills because CA had to spend his money on whatever, and he was wining and dining other people while I was home taking care of his kids. He was complaining about me like I was the babysitter, and that's really messed up. That's another reason why I left: I was paying the bills for the house and I was stealing diapers and I wasn't being respected. That's why I had boundaries; that was me putting my foot down. It wasn't just the abuse, it was the neglect. It was wrong. As much as I love JC, it wasn't okay to be that back-burner bitch. I needed to have that boundary, I needed to take care of myself and my son, and so I moved on. My brother ZA, he had an apartment in Syracuse an hour on Antelope Drive, and it was a two-bedroom, like five hundred dollars a month. I could totally afford that with my veterans’ compensation because I was getting a little over a thousand dollars a month for me and a little for the dependent bonus. I got into the apartment in Syracuse ‘cause ZA let me take over his lease and his deposit or whatever. The landlord, Roger, was really awesome. He's like, "All right, cool, that's neat. Thanks 49 for doing that.” Bless his heart. ZA's ADHD and I highly suspect autistic, but he's a great guy. His house was atrociously nasty, so I had to call in a crew to help me get it together and clean it. That was kind of my deposit to the cause and it was well worth it. That was in November of 2006, and that was a good thing. It was me getting on my feet and starting over. That was my new beginning, just me and my son. I got my first job. I was proud of myself, you know, because when I was with CA, I did some daycare stuff and did that home hustle. I knew I had skills with that because I had had licensure and certifications. I knew what I was doing. So I went over to a daycare down the street, Tender Years, and was like, "Hey, I know my stuff. You should hire me because it's going to make you guys look good." I just smiled and walked in and told them. It was funny because somebody was standing in as a director while the director was on leave, and so I was like, "You're going to get a pat on the back if you hire me." She did, and it went well and I got a job in January, and because I was in daycare, then DO got to go to daycare. That was kind of a win-win. It took my minimum wage $7.25 an hour down to like $5 an hour because infants are $2 an hour surcharge. I was making five-something an hour, but it was fine because I could pay the rent already with my VA. The VA was kind of like my significant other, which was nice because in the society that we live in, it's kind of a sexist society where you kind of really have to be married to get by. That kind of ties to this LGBTQ+ or even being a woman in America—or anywhere, really. You have to have a significant other and you have to partner up to get by or be a part of a village that takes care of each [other]. Do you see what I'm saying? If you're not a part of a community, then you struggle a lot. 50 My family—my mother, especially—she told me that she would help me when I got here. That's part of the reason I came back to Utah specifically rather than going anywhere else. But then when I got a job or tried to look for other jobs that weren't daycare, she wouldn't help me. She said "No. I said I'll help you if you go to school." She kind of backtracked on my own stuff, and that's fine because she was still the same person she'd always been. I want to touch on the income a lot because with the people that gave me the postdated checks, the checks bounced, and they started complaining about how I, as a landlord, didn't fix the air conditioner. I'm like, “I'm sorry, I just left my spouse and I let you have my house. You're literally paying a mortgage only, and I can only afford to pay my rent. I don't know how to be a single parent.” It was really complicated. In January, when I got my job, things started to go a lot better because now I have this two-income thing. I can say ‘no, thank you’ to food stamps and buy my own food with my own money and hold my head up high and pay all my bills and say that I'm standing on my own two feet, even though I'm just making minimum wage. The reason why is because I'm getting VA compensation equivalent to having another person in the house, because they're compensating for the fact that emotionally, I'm not stable enough to have relationships with others. Or I can't choose the right kind of people, or I don't have the right kind of boundaries or whatever it is to be able to maintain those relationships and have that income contribution in my life. That's a reflection when I look back on it. That is the privilege that I had in comparison to so many other people in this country or world that I got from the V.A. because of the trauma that I've endured. I'm grateful for it, and I appreciate it, and I'm humbled by it. But I'm angry about it. Does that make sense? LR: Yeah, it does. 51 ZB: It’s the only reason I got by and the only reason that I was able to stay off of housing and provide a stable home environment for my children throughout their entire childhood. I could stay in the lowest income area of Davis County and not have to move to Ogden. I never wanted to live in Ogden because of the way people treated my gender, and I didn't want people to treat my children the way I was treated. I was really scared to raise my kids in Ogden-area type places, and I wanted to be in Davis County, and Davis County was the cheapest I could afford, Syracuse. LR: How long did you stay in Syracuse? ZB: I lived in Syracuse until after my second child was almost one. LR: Okay, so let me ask you this: did you stay in that same apartment the whole time? ZB: No, I moved around until my son was five. I had four moves, actually, so I had instability, but I shacked up with a few things, and then I've been here in this house for the last seven years. The last 15 years, I've tried to make it happen, but I haven't gone under. Thankfully, I’ve been able to afford Davis County and not had to move to Ogden the entire time I raised my kids. LR: Yeah, I hear what you're saying. So in the five years between DO being born and his fifth birthday, you had a second child. ZB: I did. LR: When was she born? ZB: EV was born in 2006, and I was stable at Tender Years all the way through that. I had a complicated pregnancy with her, I was on bed rest for the last month. Hindsight is it was Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome; it really complicates pregnancy, and pregnancy complicates Ehlers-Danlos. Connective tissue is affected by estrogen and progesterone cycles and relaxin, and you get relaxin hormones to allow your uterus to expand and your organs to shift in your cervix to open up and your hips to 52 spread. It doesn't just happen in those joints and ligaments, it happens in your whole body. When your body doesn't do it right like mine, like you really get loose. Instead of just being loose, I was like—I visualize those toys that suction cup to the table, and then when you release, it just flip-flops down. I was so unstable. I was on bed rest for the last month, and Tender Years really did work with me to allow me to do some work from home. They allowed me to send DO to daycare for like $2 an hour and keep me on the rolls as an employee, and they worked it out because I couldn't take care of DO. That was part of my bed rest; I was only supposed to get up to go to the bathroom because getting my heart rate up got my blood pressure up and it was a problem. The doctor, he was threatening to assign somebody to duct tape me to the couch. LR: Are you doing this all alone? Do you have roommates? ZB: Throughout time, I always have somebody staying on my couch. I was a nice person. Somebody needed something, and I was always in the quid pro quo. I've always kind of lived by the motto of ‘be who you needed.’ Does that make sense? Sometimes there's people that just find themselves in difficult situations and they need somebody to be there. In my mind, I actually needed somebody too because back then, I didn't understand what it was, but I needed somebody to help me coparent and help manage the household. I couldn't do it all by myself. Even though I couldn't have a partner, I needed somebody to help me manage the household portion of things. LR: That makes sense. You have your two kids, you're living in Davis County. ZB: I'll just tell you about the couple moves real quick. I applied for housing when I first got to Utah, and you know how the waiting list thing goes. My house in Texas went to foreclosure because the jerk stopped paying and their checks bounced and I was 53 a bad landlord. CA wasn't going to do anything about it, so I lost my house and that went against me, and I lost my veteran's benefit of VA home loan guarantee. I came upon some kind of rehabilitation thing I could move into. I think it was called Lakeview Heights on Antelope Drive in Layton, which is literally just down the street from where I lived in Syracuse because all those cities are on the same street. So I moved down the street to Lakeview Heights, and I lived there for a bit, but I really hated it because it reminded me of my childhood. There's a bunch of different kinds of people that live in those kinds of situations, and I'm not going to stereotype, but some people are working so much that their kids aren't supervised and so they just run amok. Then there's other people that just don't necessarily have the skills to parent at a level that is needed or understand how much supervision or guidance their children need, and don't know how to intervene appropriately. Their children just control and run the household and the kids are out of control, and I get really frustrated with the type of influences that my kids were being exposed to. It's not all of them, because there were plenty of good kids and nice great neighbors, but on the other hand, there were a lot of people that just didn't care about themselves or personal growth or ignorance or ethnocentrism or biases. To me, as soon as I became a parent, it was like when you get a job; you're supposed to learn everything there is to know about the job when you get hired because you get onboarding and you get trained in it, but that's not the end of it. You have to stay current in your job. Every year, you have to get like so many hours of continuing education units so that you are up with the times. When I was parenting with CA, I look back and there was a lot of abuse, and I don't approve of the kind of parent that I was or the kind of parenting that was modeled to me. I don't approve of the kind of parenting that I had as a kid. When I 54 go through life, I don't necessarily know everything that's right to do, but I definitely can acknowledge everything that I've experienced that I know for certain is wrong. Now, everything else, I have to learn by listening to others, and I think that's what your mission is. That's what I've been working on, is expanding my mind and learning that different is not wrong. I'm leveling up with parenting. I let CA back into my life a couple of times, and I did that when I was at Lakeview Heights. Once again, I was on the phone and I was lonely; my roommate had moved out and now I was parenting two kids by myself. He was calling me, talking about how much of a pain-in-the-whatever this woman was, and he was doing the same thing he did when he was living with TA, just saying how they were roommates and she was awful and this, that, and the other. My dumbass loaded two kids up in the car and drove to Texas because him and that woman broke up. I picked up CA and JC and I drove ‘em back to Utah all on my dime and got a U-Haul trailer. I just did it all because I was in love with JC, my little boy, and I was trying to save him. I had worked on myself a lot in therapy, and I had dove into self-help books and I had become a better parent. I hadn't raised a hand on my kids, I was learning. I knew for 100% sure that DO was ADHD; he bounced off the walls and you had to deal with him in a completely different way. I learned how to slow my own brain down and get down to his level on my knees and look him eye-to-eye and listen to him and try to understand his language when he wasn't even speaking. My daughter, she didn't talk at all. All I had to do is make sure I was in the same room and give her my attention and just listen and communicate—even though they weren't speaking—and I learned to baby sign. I just completely changed everything about parenting that was different than what we did with JC and CA. 55 But I brought CA back into my life and I tried to let CA be Dad to my kids. I wanted to be Mom to JC again, and I just wanted to be a happy family all over again. I worked so hard on myself and CA was just like, "Yeah, yeah, me too." We were in some agreements on the phone, and that woman was just an evil person and it was going to be great, right? He was just my dream come true, and I didn't realize that I was a back-burner bitch again. I just didn't see; I was just so naïve, and dammit, I was so lonely. I have worked so hard on improving myself and my mental health and becoming the ideal partner for somebody. I had been alone and celibate, actually, so EV, although she was created, the only reason why she was created was because of my celibacy. EV was created because I was traumatized by men. When I went through that period of allowing whomever, whenever to just have their way with me, I did some of that when I first got back to Utah. I made a big mistake and I slept with somebody, even though I had alarms go off in my brain that told me that he was a pedophile, and I didn't alert the mom of somebody. Instead, I told the child and the man that their behavior looked suspicious and that they should stop doing what they were doing. I should have, and I knew at the time, that I should have said something to the mom instead of them, and I knew better, and I slept with that guy. Then that man had the SWAT team come and raid his house because apparently, he had moved state-to-state and had all kinds of whatever. I was right. I pinned it, and I could have saved her and I was right, damn it. After that, I went into a recluse of not doing anything, but up until that time, I was still having that let everybody have their way with me. Fast forward, CA moves in. He was there with me for three months. He did the same shit, different day. He was on the phone with another woman while I was being his way; I was just a pit stop. The good news is he left me, and when he abused me that time, I didn't take his shit. The first time he put his hands on me, I 56 called the police on him and I told him to get the f out. He was arrested for three counts of domestic violence in front of three children. He broke a bunch of stuff and had a temper tantrum, and the police took him out. He went to jail and had to pay restitution. For the first time, there was a victim's statement and then an arrest, and I did what I was supposed to do. Damnit, it was the right thing. I'm so proud. There was a case and it followed through, and so there was a victim statement. Victim advocacy, they did my divorce and it took a bit, but I was finally divorced of him. When he left, he left JC with me, and so I had some time to have JC with me when JC was nine, and that was nice. When JC was 10, that was the last time I saw JC. A little bit after that my brother, DI, moved in with me, and I really hated living in that housing environment. I didn't care about having the $600 a month rent, and so I moved in with my [other] brother. We shacked up, split $1000 a month rent and split the utilities. We shared a four-bedroom house, and we moved my sister SH, and she was pregnant. I had DO and EV, and they were two years apart, and then my brother DI had his son, DA, who was also the same age as EV, just two months younger than her. Then my sister SH had a son, AS, that was six months older than EV. We all shacked up in this house. LR: I just have a quick question before we stop. What year is this that you moved in with your siblings? 2008? ZB: I want to say it was close to 2010. LR: Okay, that makes more sense because you had EV in 2008. ZB: Yeah. LR: She was two years old. So 2010, this is where I want to pick up when we come back. I'm really glad that we got to the point of CA out of your life. You can actually hear the empowerment that gave you as you're talking. 57 ZB: Oh yeah, I'm proud. Damn straight, I did that for my kids. The second reason why he was gone is because the first realization was like, I didn't want DO to grow up thinking it was okay to treat people like that. But then when I had EV, I was like, "I don't want EV growing up thinking it's okay to be treated like that." That was that second aha, like, “Oh no, this is not okay.” I couldn't teach CA to treat the kids different; he wasn't having it and I wasn't having it either. I really wanted to be that parent for JC, and CA just wasn't on board. I did disrupt things because I had JC for a bit, and instead of sending JC back to his dad, guess what? I had him, so I sent him back where he needed to go. He went back to Mom. LR: Oh, good for you. ZB: They fight a fair bit, though, but that's between them. I don't know what happened to that. LR: Okay, I’m going to stop recording now. Part 4: March 29, 2022 LR: Today is March 29, 2022 and we are meeting again with Zane. Thank you again for your willingness to share, it means a lot to me. Let’s pick up where we left off. Basically, it's 2010. You're sharing the four-bedroom house with your siblings. You are finally done with CA—at least that's where we left off, at that place. What I'd like to do today is get into where you begin to live your true, authentic self, because I think we're up to that point. ZB: Yeah. You had asked about some specifics of my Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and how it affects my life, or just my chronic disabilities. I had kind of conjured up my best quick throw-together for that. 2010 is where it really started hitting and going south because I was playing with my toddlers and I ended up hyperextending my neck. They treated me for hyperextension, and it should have gotten better, but it didn't. After months of 58 suffering in pain, I started getting shooting pains down my arms every time I would drink out of a cup, and I couldn't move my neck and hurt really bad. So I went to the VA again and they did an MRI and they found spinal stenosis. I was in my 20s, I was young, and so I was researching it and I was like, “Okay, what’s spinal stenosis? This is like an old-age disease.” Then I see, “There's an early-onset age group. That must be me.” I look and I'm like, “Oh, that's people in their 40s and I'm in my late 20s. I have an old-age disease already. That sucks." Spinal stenosis is the narrowing of the canals that allow the nerves to leave your spine in the bones. Really, what it's from is from arthritis where it grinds, and then there's rebuilding from it because your bones regenerate, right? When it rebuilds, it builds on more. It's like bone scars. It put pressure on my nerves, and so just lots of pain. Starting back then, I started dealing with lots of pain in my neck and that progressed continually. It affected all aspects of my life: my ability to take care of my kids, my ability to work, and it continually just kept getting worse. My spine is collapsing on itself up in my neck and my upper thoracic and then now also in my lower back. I have osteoarthritis all up in my back. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome is a connective tissue disorder. I didn't get the genetic coding for how to use collagen, so even if I have collagen in my body, my genes don't have the recipe, so they don't know how to use it effectively. Connective tissue is literally the binding agent that holds everything together. It's your skin, it's in your blood vessels, it's in your joints, it's in your ligaments, it's in your tendons, it's in your eyes, it's in your muscles; it's everywhere. It's like the glue that holds everything together. If you visualize a jello salad, right, think of the jello mold not setting right. Now, instead of the particles of the jello salad being positioned accurately, it's just a big ole [blows raspberry]. Regular people are held 59 together by rubber bands where they expand and contract. I have bubble gum, so they get stretched out and then they flop. Since that time while I was in the military, progressively, my knees, my ankles, my joints, my feet went flat. That was probably the first thing that went was my feet. I lost my arches, and you can just imagine how that can affect everything, like your whole entire body. My joints, they subluxate at will for fun. I sleep on my side and my shoulder will subluxate, my ribs subluxate. The reason why that matters is because it affects a lot of my body problems, like with my dysmorphia as well. Progressively since 2010, my body has just been falling apart. My tendons, the ligaments that hold your organs together in place—my bladder, my bowel, my uterus—they all prolapsed, fell out. I had to have some of them surgically removed, some of them surgically placed. That's just what they could see, right? It's affected every aspect of my life because my shoulders shift out, and because I don't like my chest, I roll my shoulders forward to try to hide them. My physical therapist wants me to roll my shoulders back, but I can't do that because I've got these things in play. I don't feel like sticking my chest out or bringing attention to it at all, but I'm causing lots of problems in my back because I can't hold my shoulders up. I don't know if it's mind over matter or matter over mind, but my shoulders being rolled forward is making my arms useless, so it sucks. That's caused something called thoracic outlet syndrome, where the blood vessels and nerves that go out to my arms, they're getting cut off. There's kinks in them and whatnot, and my arms are very weak; I get muscle failure. I can't raise my arms above my head very well or use them. I could fold two towels and they're done. I have home health aides that come to my house three times a week to help me with my activities of daily living. There's valves in our blood vessels, right, that keep our blood from back flowing, but because I have bubble gum for connective 60 tissue, they're flopped. My blood pools in my feet, so it doesn't pump up to my head, and my resting heart rate is like 100. I have orthostatic tachycardia, so if I bend over or if I get up too fast, the blood doesn't get to my head fast enough, and I pass out. The blood also can't pump through my arms, and so my arms, they don't work very well. That's called POTS—Postural Orthostatic Tachycardia Syndrome—and that's associated with the Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome. They call it the trifecta because usually if you have one, you could probably have all three. The third one is Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, which just pretty much means I'm allergic to everything. In a nutshell, like that's the easiest way to just describe those three things and how they affect my day-to-day life. All right, back to 2010. I finished up schooling and got my medical assisting, which I believe that we were probably talking about. That's what I was working on. I couldn't find a job because everybody wanted me to have experience, and so I hurried up and got my CNA. Then I did get a medical assistant-ing job, and that was great, I loved it. It was really awesome. I felt like I was somebody for once because I had a little degree. I got my little associate's degree and those were my first classes I took at Weber State and life started kind of picking up a little bit. Let's see, my sister had a baby, and this is significant because that baby was born December 18th of 2010. He didn't have a father, and I pretty much just told her that I'm his dad. Lo and behold, we would never realize that actually became true. I got goosebumps a little bit. Shortly after that, our lease was up and we left. We kind of parted our ways and I moved on and I got my own place. I had my two kids, and I was on my own. I thought maybe I should start dating again, and I was really scared of dating just because I wanted to keep my kids safe and I wanted to be safe and I wanted to be smart. Because of the things I've been through with CA and because of the 61 things that I've been through for myself with sexual traumas and my childhood, I was really determined to make sure I kept my kids safe. I didn't date in person for a long time. I'd like to talk to people on the internet, and so I did that for a while. I talked to this person for probably about seven months online and felt like I had a good idea of who he was, and so I started dating him in person for probably another four or five months before I even let him know where I lived or brought him around my kids. He seemed like a pretty decent person; he was really, really, really smart. He shall be unnamed because he's a nobody. It was another mistake, a huge one, because of the things that I had gone through in my life. I had what I call an overactive alarm system; I was still worried about people, but I dismissed a lot of my alarm system things for trauma. “You're just overthinking things,” or “You're just accusing everybody,” or “Stop thinking that everybody's a predator.” Plus, here I am; I have my five-year-old son and my threeyear-old daughter and I'm head-over-heels in love with this man. I mean, he even waited almost a year for sex. That's got to be a big deal, right? He's got to respect me majorly. He was grooming us, but I didn't know that. He threw a lot of fits about me being around other people or bringing people in our homes. I ended up moving him in with us because I thought he was my happily ever after. I mean, I invested a year into getting to know him before I even brought him into my life or around my kids. I thought we were good. He had a job for decades and they had a major layoff, and I felt bad, so I moved him in. I made a mistake, and I trusted him way too much, and I didn't trust my own gut. I kept dismissing my gut because he was getting along with my kids and I didn't know what an appropriate father-daughter relationship looked like. 62 My children didn't have a dad, and I wanted that for them. My son had started kindergarten, and up until then, it was fine. I could be all of their parents and it was fine. I never had intended for them to have two parents. I thought I could be their everything and they would be fine. But school taught them that families are a mom and a dad and kids, so now my son's coming home like, "Where's my dad? Why don't I have a dad? We're supposed to have a dad in this family." All of a sudden, they don't have what they are always supposed to have. Now I'm like, "Oh shit, I'm supposed to get that for you." He's starting to ask for a dad for Christmas, and now I'm feeling like I'm failing him because he feels like he's without something, and so I put somebody in that role. He really took to my daughter, and as much as it was concerning to me, I was like, “Okay, you're just being jealous.” I chalked it up as I was being jealous of the relationship that they were building, or maybe it was that I was being jealous of her having a father figure that I didn't have. But my alarms were saying, "Oh, they're getting too close. He's giving her too much attention." But I just kept going, "No, you're being jealous." He wasn't working and I was working full-time as a CNA doing home health. My son was going to school and my daughter was not, and so he would stay home with my daughter while I went to work. I go do some shifts that I could pretty much just pop in and out because they were just driving around all over the place. One day, I came home early in the morning and my daughter was in bed with him and she didn't have any pants on. I freaked out and I was talking to her. She's like three and I was talking to her and it seemed like she was starting to tell me something, and then he kind of opened the bedroom door and was like, "Don't you start telling no lies." Then she shut down. 63 After the panic attack, I took her to Child Protective Services and I was like, "Hey, I think something happened or something's going on and I don't know what it is. She won't tell me.” I sat down with them and they were like, "If the child’s saying nothing happened, there's nothing to investigate." I'm like, "Okay, but you guys are professionals. Can you interview her and just make sure?" They're like, "There's nothing to investigate. We're not going to open anything." I'm like, "Okay. I guess it was just my crazy alarm system being inaccurate again." I did not let him babysit my kids anymore. I put them in daycare and decided I would at least stop feeling like that. I let him in the house, and I was pregnant with my youngest. I was supposed to be on Depo; I don't know why it didn't work. I had my son in 2013 and he looks 100% exactly like him. Anyway, about that time when my son was born, the only reason that person was a part of our lives anymore was for my son. We had broken up, we got back together a couple of times, but ultimately he was only around because I didn't want to have another child that didn't have a dad. I had created the two with the intention of raising them myself, they're mine, but I was two-for-two with them asking me like, "Where's my dad? I'm supposed to have one ‘cause school taught me.” So I felt like I had to keep this person in our lives, or at least in BL’s life, but I kind of kept him at arm's length. He only spent time with BL, not my other kids. I made sure of it. I didn't leave them with him. One day on Father's Day, I tried to tell him, "Hey, I want to leave BL with you. I'm going to take the kids and we're going to go with my mom," who is my adopted 64 mom. She's the mom I chose. We were going to take her husband's ashes out to the lake to put his ashes in the lake, so I was going to take the kids. I asked him to look after BL and he looks me in the face. He's like, "I didn't want that kid. I told you to get an abortion. You wanted him. You grew him. He's your kid." I was like, "Oh, well, thank you very much, because the only reason that you were here is for him, and since you don’t want him, goodbye." That was the end of him. It was kind of a relief because we were together for four years, and for the first two years, he pushed everybody out of my life. He had a fit every time I had anybody around. EV's biological father, WI, is my good friend that I've known since I was 15. My adopted mom—she's identified as my mom since I was in my 20s, even before my daughter came along—is his mom. While so-and-so and I were together, he had a big fit any time any of those people came around or if I did anything with them. He was huge about that. When BL was born, WI brought over a case of diapers from my mom, and this dude had a huge fit about it. That's how much now I look back and I realize that was all grooming. He was trying to keep all of our support out of our lives. It's just really shitty that I didn't realize. But when that happened, I was able to just say ‘peace out’ because the second two years of our experience together, I was like, “I'll do what I want, I'll be with who I want, and I'll spend time with who I want.” I wasn't really in a relationship with him. He was just around to be BL’s dad. When he drew that line, I was like, "Oh, well, that's good, because you can go now." That was the end of that. My daughter started exhibiting behaviors that I was really concerned about, like classic textbook, ‘I've been molested’ behaviors. She didn't have boundaries with men. She was climbing all up in their laps and just being all over them and also started having some sexual behaviors with some of her cousins. I was really 65 concerned and it was giving me flashbacks from my childhood and my traumas. I'm like, “Something happened to her.” I'd always check in with my kids, like, "Has anybody ever touched you?” She was always like, "No, no, no." I put her in therapy anyway, and I just pretty much just told the therapist, "Look, we're going to treat her for it, even though she's never admitted it, because I really think something happened." But I couldn't get her to admit anything. After him I didn't recover mentally, and I immediately jumped into another not-so-great relationship with somebody just for the fun of it. It was not self-care, it was just convenience. Because it was somebody that I trusted, my world got really, really, really, really small. It was, “I trust you and I've known you for 20 years, and so you I could trust you to be in my bed.” It wasn't about love anymore. It was, “I have to keep my circle tight.” The only people that I can have in my space are people that I know, and even those people, I was always constantly watching. I was afraid to leave anybody with my kids, or my kids with anybody. One night, I came home from work and my daughter's shoes were in my bathroom, in my room, on the floor. I'm like, "What the hell?" I go downstairs, it's like 11 o'clock, and I pull her out of bed and I have the same conversation I've had with her like 150,000 times. "Has anybody ever? Have you ever?" Finally, she's like, "Yes." I'm like, "Okay, who?" I'm trying to be calm, breezing through it. Then she tells me what happened all those years ago when she was three years old and I was right and I walked in on it. Apparently, that day was the only time it happened and I stopped it. 66 I put her back to bed. She was in tears, begging me to just let her go to bed, and I'm like, “Okay.” My wounds just ripped open. I felt like a failure as a parent because I didn't protect my child. I felt like a failure as a person because here I had all these alarm systems that were going off and I was ignoring them. But then like, what do you do? Here I am supposed to be her protector, but I felt like a failure in every way. I was grateful that it wasn't the person that I cared about, but I decided I didn't want anybody in my space, and so I pushed him out too. That's my best friend. I'm not going to deadname her because at the time she was a male, but we just decided that we weren't in a relationship for the right reasons. She was a ‘he’ back then, but her name is Eve, and she transitioned two years before I did. It's really funny because my best friend and I swapped genders and wardrobes, so that's pretty awesome. My adoptive mom, we both claim her as our mom, so that's kind of funny to my poor mom sitting here trying to keep our names and gender straight. We've kind of put her through hell on that, but she's doing a really good job with that. She's really supportive. We put that bastard in prison. He did his prison time. My baby boy is eight years old now, and he has no clue why his father—or his sperm donor, I should say—isn’t in the picture. It kills me to think that someday we're probably going to have to have that conversation. I think the worst part of all of this trauma is that history repeated itself. See? I was molested by my mother's boyfriend, also known as my baby brother's father. The same thing happened. I look at the dynamics between my brother and I—I asked him a lot if he holds anything against me, that he grew up without his father. His father's been in prison for like his whole life. He doesn't hold anything against me, so I mean, that's fine, right? LR: Zane, can we stop for a second? ZB: Yeah. 67 LR: Okay. I'm having a hard time. Part 5: March 30, 2022 LR: All right, it is March 30, 2022, and we are continuing our life story of Zane. Go ahead and just pick up where we left off yesterday. ZB: I don't know if I mentioned it yesterday, but today is one year and one day legally as Zane Bekayci Bates. I got to tell you, it's kind of annoying. Even though I've been legally Zane Bekayci Bates for one year and one day, I still have to constantly connect the dots to my birth name over and over again. I've chosen not to use the word ‘deadname’ anymore because I realize how offensive it is to my parents and I don't want to be hurtful, so I use birth name because it's fair. It's a compromise, I guess. But anyway, everywhere that I try to take care of business—even if it has nothing to do with my past—I still have to include aliases, and that's one of them, and it fucking pisses me off. But anyway, moving on back to where we were yesterday. We were living in the current house that we live in now, so we're somewhere around 2015. My brother from my mother's side, MIC, and my sister in law, KY, lived here with his son from another woman, DAM. My daughter was having behaviors with him and I immediately got her into therapy. Like I said yesterday, I recognized it from my childhood. My dad always called it the ‘children's antics’, if you recall. That was really stressful and triggering for me, and so it really amped up that those behaviors, really kind of changed the dynamics of their childhood. It sucks because they couldn't share blankets; they couldn't make blanket forts. They couldn't hide behind the bushes, even if it was innocent and they were just playing hide-andseek, because we had to keep an eye on them and supervise them and make sure that they weren't doing things that they shouldn't be up to. That was really, really 68 stressful. But I got her into therapy; I told my sister and brother that they needed to get my nephew into therapy. We get started on the criminal investigation. They take a while, they find him because he disappears. LR: This is your youngest’s father, correct? ZB: We're going to call him Sperm Donor, because he's nobody. He gave him some good genetics. He's a pretty damn smart kid. That's the one I'll give guardianship to when I get old and senile. LR: Okay, I just wanted to clarify. ZB: During that, I contacted a group called BACA, Bikers Against Child Abuse, and I got a lot of support from them. That big old mob of bikers showed up at our house and gave all the kids vests with their honorary biker names. I think we can definitely use my daughter's bike name; her name was Snakebite. All the kids got little biker names, and they had little biker vests, and the bikers would come out and take them all for a ride. That was pretty damn cool. LR: How did you find BACA? Did someone introduce you to them or a website? ZB: That's a very good question, and I don't remember exactly who did, but somebody specifically did tell me, “Get ahold of BACA.” So I looked them up. LR: I think that's kind of an important thing to know, how you looked them up. ZB: It was important because they were a really great support through a lot of family traumas. In my mind, somebody is reading my interview, and if they’re having a problem with childhood sexual trauma, they should be able to be connected with BACA because BACA and Mama Dragons are amazing supports for this type of journey. Do you see what I'm saying? You should absolutely be, and they're both nonprofits. That's why I can shout out a blurb for them. 69 LR: Okay. During this time, you're living in this house with your brother and his wife and your brother's kid. You're beginning this process of the criminal investigation. Talk about what you're doing for yourself, how you're helping your mental health at this time. ZB: That's a really good question. Every October, I cyclically would get pretty damn depressed just because that was when my trauma was, and so I was already down in December. I learned the truth about EV's molestation a day before my birthday. Now, that time of year, kind of shitty. It did trigger my PTSD. The problem was that the person that I was molested by had the same exact first name as the person who molested my daughter, and that killed me because when I started dating him, I already had trouble with his name. He went by the first three letters of his name, so it was different, but I already had troubles. History was repeating itself, and I was like, "Wow!" so I put myself in therapy. I had been in therapy and I had worked through my military sexual trauma when I was in my 20s, and I had been through copious amounts of training, but that’s a story for another time. Like you said, my brother and sister-in-law are living here with their son. My sister-in-law KY gets pregnant almost immediately, and she had my baby niece in 2015. I ended up with my sister's kids. You remember when I lived in Layton with my brother and my sister who had the boy, and then she was pregnant and she had the baby? Over that five-year period, that sister had gone from man to man to thing to thing and a whole bunch of situations and a whole bunch of couches, and she eventually got married to a man named DIO. He was a truck driver. I'm like 95% sure that my sister also has Ehlers-Danlos syndrome, and it's a chronic pain condition; it hurts like hell. My privilege is that I'm a veteran, so I have medical coverage. I can go to the doctor, I have mental health coverage. Ever since 70 I was 18 years old and was in the military, I have never been without medical coverage. All I have to do is show up, make appointments, do the work. My sister, on the other hand, ended up in the foster system because of her own sexual traumas, and that's not my business to tell, but we lost track of each other when she was 10 years old. I didn't see her again until around the time that my oldest nephew was two, and then she moved in with us and had that baby, and then she had a hard life, and then she got married, and then she had another child. Now she's up to three kids. Her and the guy that she married are separated and her kids are kind of all over the place with whoever will look after them. Sometimes they're split up, sometimes they're together; they're couch-to-couch. Every time there's a disagreement, she'll just move ‘em. She's not really supporting them. She's homeless. She's in her own crowd, doing her own thing. She's addicted to drugs. I know that she has mental health problems and pain problems, but she's been labeled a drug-seeker in the hospital ER system. She can't hold down a job for very long; she's going boyfriend-to-boyfriend; she's been victimized in all kinds of ways. I do empathize with her position and I don't blame her. She did the responsible thing to make sure her kids are taken care of, so there's that. One day I eventually put my foot down and I said, “You're done moving your kids around,” and I just kept ahold of them. I remember it was the Fourth of July about seven years ago or so. I had all three of her kids, but they never paid me child support or anything. Any time I ever had her kids, I just took care of them. That means I had my three kids and her three kids. I was taking care of six kids. The only way I was able to get through it is because KY, my sister-in-law, helped me. There's no way I could have done it alone. She's amazing, she's my hero. So I'm doing the best I can with all that, and it's the Fourth of July, and my daughter and my nephews and my oldest son are playing dress-up. They've all got 71 dresses on and they're all doing their hair all cute and just getting all fancy and whatnot. We're getting ready to go to the Fourth of July fireworks that are just down the street within walking distance. I warned everybody, "Hey, you guys got about 20 minutes till we go. If you're going dressed like that, then whatever. But if you don't want to go like that, you should probably change because we're getting ready to go. All right, everybody ready? Got your water bottles, got your such-and-such? Got your light? All right. Let's walk out." I got my posse. I think my niece might have been a baby then, so I've got my nephew from my brother and sister-in-law. We've got my sister's three kids from my dad’s side, and then I've got my three kids, and we're all rolling out to the Fourth of July fireworks. My son changed out of the dress, and my other nephew, my brother's son, because my brother was like, "Oh hell no, you can get your ass out of that shit." But my two nephews from my sister's side kept their dresses on and we went to the Fourth of July. While the kids were playing dress-up at home, I sent pictures to my sister of her boys in dresses, and I was like, "Look at this, they're playing dress-up, ain't they cute?" She was like, "Oh, look at that. That's fun." She was being supportive and I was like, “All right, this is cool,” because I'm totally supportive of people just expressing themselves however the hell they want. I grew up a tomboy and I dressed how I wanted to, and in my mind, it's all about equality, so if I can wear masculine clothes, then why can't a boy wear feminine clothes? It's the same thing in my mind, it's black and white. Why not? If I can wear pants, why can't they wear skirts? I don’t get it. It does not compute. 72 We have Fourth of July pictures out at the fireworks and the kids get their headbands on and their makeup and their dresses and whatnot. I send my sister and brother-in-law some more pictures and they flip the fuck out. I'm like, “Okay, what's wrong?” because I'm clueless. They're like, "You took them out in public like that?" I'm like, "What's the problem?" I was bumfuzzled. I seriously had no idea what the problem was. I did not understand why there was a difference between dressing up at home and going out in public in what you feel comfortable in. We fought about it over the phone, we fought about it in text messages back and forth for days. Finally, I said, "You know what? Come get your goddamn kids. Fuck this. I'm over here doing everything for them. You haven't given me a damn dime for ‘em. I've taken care of ‘em for months, paying for their daycare, getting up at the crack of dawn, getting six kids ready for school, getting them off and ready before I go to work. Pick them up after school. Feed them all dinner. Tuck them all in at night. Taking care of their nightmares, taking care of the bedwetting, take care of this, that, and the other. Are you serious right now? You're giving me drama. You have to give me a dime. You don't give me no support, and you're yelling at me about a goddamn dress. You've got to get off. Shut up. Just come get ‘em." So they did. They kept them away from me for a year, so they were together at that time. I'm sitting here fighting and crying because I haven't seen or heard from them, and I'm close to these kids because they're my babies. J, I cut his damn umbilical cord, like, that's my kid. I took care of my sister in her days of pregnancy, and I did the pregnancy photoshoot, and I held him every night on my chest while she went and had her "Oh my God, I'm so tired of being a mom” breaks. I put him to sleep every night before bed and I fed him and I warmed his bottles. That's my 73 baby. For months, until she was tired of being asked to get a job and pay rent, she thought it was enough to just pay with food stamps and buy food. She dipped out and moved in with some guy, and I didn't get to see him until he was a year old and she needed somebody to live with. A year later, I got people messaging me, telling me, “You need to go. You need to get the kids.” Random people that I've never even met messaging me on Messenger, Facebook, were like, "DIO and SH broke up. SH is out on the streets again. So-and-so's here, so-and-so's here, so-and-so's here.” The kids are about to be moved again. Oldest nephew's been in three different schools, and then he hasn't been in school for weeks, and I'm like, “Oh my God.” I go over and try to play nice with my sister so I can figure out where all the kids are, figure out if they're safe. Find out that my niece is staying at an active drug dealer's house, and my sister’s so flaked out she's wobbling and inching and she's talking so damn fast. Her stories just don't make no damn sense; she's just skipping around and talking about somebody victimized her, and I'm like, "Well, did you go to the cops?" She's like "I can't because there's a warrant." I'm like, “Oh my lord, we'll go to the hospital.” She's like, "I can’t, because this." I'm like, “Oh my Lord, what do you want to do? What do you want me to do?” She's like, "Well, so-and-so won’t let me see J. I'm like, "Well, why won't they let you see him?" I go find all the kids, and I find out that so-and-so is trying to keep the kids safe because you don't want SH around if she's high. I'm like, "Well, that's fair. You're doing a good job. Thank you.” That next year I might have done a little bit of manipulating here and there, but I collect all the kids again. I work on getting guardianship of them because every 74 time I gotten them before, I have printed a paper off of the internet that's temporary guardianship. It does enough to let me take them to the doctor or put them in school or put them on my case to get medical forms or something. But this time I'm like, “You know what? I'm stepping in and I'm making sure that this never happens again. I don't want them to bounce around. I want them to be okay.” So I'm going through the motions of getting guardianship. I know the father of the youngest little girl. I recently met the father of the oldest child because he has been interacting with the woman who had him. This is my oldest nephew that I met when he was two. The middle child, I don't know who the father is. At this time, actually, I've never met him. As of today, I eventually do find his name, but at that time I had no idea. Part of the guardianship process is that you need to get permission from the parents, or you have to legally terminate their rights. I go to the fathers that I know to ask permission for guardianship, and then I start thinking, “Well, you're her dad. Why don't you take care of her? You're in a relationship and she's a stay-at-home wife. Can you guys work something out? I have six, seven, eight kids in this household and you have your granddaughter that comes over sometimes. Help a person out here. Can we work this out somehow?” Around the time that I had to get permission from the fathers for guardianship, my brother and sister-in-law’s son who lived here with me was coercing my middle nephew that I was seeking guardianship of to give him oral sex. Obviously for me, I already have my kid in therapy, and I always want to make sure things are addressed. So I reported to a therapist, the therapist reports to Child Protective Services, Child Protective Services investigates it, and I did that every single time any behaviors like that happen in the household because I wanted to make sure that the dynamics of things were safe. 75 My brother that lives with me, his son has lived with me in one way or another his entire life, all the way up until he was eight years old, whether it was with his mother or his father. Either way, from the time she was pregnant with him all the way through his life, he lived with me all the way up until he was 8, and he's 10 now. This kid’s sexual behavior started with my daughter, and then that child continually sexually coerced every child that I brought into my home. In my attempt to protect that child from the world, that child sexually coerced my children and other children. I repeatedly demanded that my brother or sister-in-law or that child's mother get him mental help, and I've continually insisted that if he does not get help, he is going to grow up to have the same types of problems that the people who perpetrated me and my daughter have because that's how the cycle starts. Even when I went to court for my daughter's perpetrator, I empathized with him. His mom was a foster mom. I understand because I grew up in the foster system as well, and so I empathize with him being a child who had a bunch of troubled kids filtering through his home. I emphasized that I can understand that he quite possibly grew up in situations where he was exposed to things that were not healthy, and I emphasized that he needed intense mental health interventions, and that is how this cycle goes. I understand that. I didn't demand a 10, 20, 30-year sentence. I more wanted him to be removed from society long enough for intense mental health interventions and to have a big scarlet-letter warning that says that “This person's brain is not okay. Do not allow him to be alone around children,” so that any person that gets in a relationship with him knows that he's not safe to have with their kids. Does that make sense? I don't want him to be punished forever. I want him to be out. I empathize with that. 76 Now I see my nephew. I'm horrified at the fact that his parents are not doing what needs to be done to teach him the boundaries to help him grow up. I don't want to be right. I am horrified that I'm going to be right and I'm shaking at the thought that it's going to happen because I'm an emergency contact for him. I already get calls from the school of behaviors where he is being aggressive towards others in a sexual way. I'm like, “Oh my God, give this kid help.” Anyway, moving on from that child. LR: Zane, let me stop you for just a second. I'm finding that you're talking about everyone but you. ZB: Yup, because I have to put all these pieces together. It all becomes a big thing, and so when I put it together, it all comes together. Do you understand? LR: Kind of. From where I'm sitting, it's almost like you're avoiding talking about what we are here to talk about, which is you. ZB: My brain worries about these things, and these are the things that I'm dealing with. For me, going through these things and fighting for these kids and fighting for their rights and advocating for them, that is my journey. So it is about me, and the reason why it's about me is because I never thought for myself. I was always very passive for my own rights. For much of my life, I did not know that I could say no to sex, or I could say no to a man, or a company or an entity or a policy saying that something was not allowed. I didn't know that I could say no to somebody saying that they needed a place to stay. I didn't know that I could say no to demands. I didn't know that I could have boundaries. All of these things that were piled upon me and all these things that I put upon myself, these are me not having boundaries. All of these people that I brought into my life, it is my journey. It builds up and it builds up to me breaking down, and each of my burnouts is growth. I have to explain these tangents. 77 LR: I'm not trying to dissuade you from doing that. This is where I'm noticing your ADHD is getting the better of you. I hope I'm not being, what's the word I'm looking for? ZB: I have it all written down, and I'm moving. I really am. LR: I know you are. My words are not coming out the way I intend them. ZB: I'm a big-picture person. I have this big picture, and so there's each leg of it, and I have to build each leg so that the big picture comes together. Because for me, everything swarms around, but my Adderall is allowing me to put it all into columns. It doesn't all make sense for you right now because you're just seeing the columns, and you don't see how it becomes a part of the big picture. LR: Now I'm actually seeing that, because you just explained it in a way that makes sense to me. MK: I think we weren’t understanding the bigger picture, so your explanation helped us see right how we're getting to where we need to be. ZB: It’s the child advocate leg. If you notice, there's a theme, and it has to do with advocating. LR: Okay, which totally makes sense. I'm seeing that now. So you're working to protect these kids and bring them into a safe environment, trying to provide for them what was not provided to you in your house. ZB: The theme is to be who I needed. LR: One of my biggest questions that I keep writing down again and again is during all this time—because this is the time where you really start to figure out yourself. It sounds as though working with these kids, figuring out and advocating for them, has helped you. The more you learned about all of these kids, the more you learned about yourself. ZB: Exactly, and that's the theme that I'm trying to get with you. Each one of these legs, that's why they're all so important to my journey. 78 LR: Let's make a little bit of a compromise, okay? Because I'm struggling to keep up. I know it's your process, but instead of going into the immeasurable amount of detail that you're going into, try to paraphrase. Does that make sense? ZB: I guess. I did paraphrase because I just gave you 10 years of history on DAM. Now I don't have to tell you any more about that. I told you about DAM. I just explained my empathy with a child molester. My empathy with my concern about my nephew. My work on advocating for others. My concern about my brother and sister and their parenting problems. My relationship with my sister-in-law. LR: Now it's starting to make more sense. ZB: Also, there's another trigger for this event that I'm telling you at the beginning of DAM. It specifically affects the guardianship that I'm pursuing with my niece and nephew. I was literally about to check off that, and now I don't talk anymore about that because it fills it in. What happens is we have layers, and then they all just go together and it's one big picture. MK: Could you help us out by just explaining what the next few layers are going to be talking about? Just so we can keep track. I'm losing track of where you're at, and I don't want to. ZB: Let me tell you the outline a little bit. MK: Okay, that would be great. ZB: I'm pursuing guardianship of my sister's three kids, and I have to get permission from their fathers. This behavior that happens between my nephews is a catalyst that promotes those two fathers to take those kids from me, so I have one left. LR: Okay. Thank you, that actually helped a lot. ZB: They're judging me, and now they took my niece away and they took my nephew away, and they're telling me that I can't provide adequate supervision. I'm a bad person. This one that has my nephew is super LDS. I barely see my nephew after 79 he's 10 years old, and I haven't seen him barely monthly, maybe even less. I've had him for six months straight. Now this guy's like, “I'm upset now.” My niece’s dad takes her too; we continue to have a relationship, and we have been co-parenting my middle nephew for the last six years. He goes over there every other weekend. I pursue the guardianship of my middle nephew because there is not a dad involved. Child Protective Services was actually investigating my sister and was looking for the kids. They were looking to pull them, and the entire reason that I had taken the kids to begin with is because I didn't want them ending up in the foster care system. Been there, done that, didn't want them going that route. But once they realized that the kids were in my care, they were like, "All right, they're good. If SH ever comes back and tries to take them, then just let us know." I was like, "Okay". There was no case with the state, and so they weren't wards of the state. They weren't placed with me, I took them. When I went about my guardianship, the state wasn't involved, so it was all on me and kind of made it harder. I actually did end up getting my sister's signature, so I didn't have to fight her for it. She signed away her parental rights for J, so that worked out well. I didn't have to fight anybody. Then I just kind of took my documents and a whole bunch of paperwork to the courts and waited for a court date. We got our guardianship appointed to us, and so that was that. I mean, it took months of hunting people down and trying to get signatures and whatnot, but after that it was actually pretty easy with the courts because we had already had them for almost a year straight at that point. So that's the guardianship. It was pretty cut-and-dry. The reason why I say that that kind of screwed over is because had they been placed with me, then I would have been able to shift into a kinship adoption. I would have got support from the state and it would have been easy-peasy because they would have been placed with me. But because I pulled the kids before the 80 state got involved that much, it's all on me. Since then, I've been working on saving up for adoption because that's what the kid wants. My sister, we've heard from her maybe a handful of times in six years. She calls around her birthday and she's never asking about J. She's commented on a couple of my posts on Facebook. I have to file guardianship paperwork every year, just the status of the child and what doctors they've been to and all this stuff. I have to hunt her down to get the address of where she's at. My paperwork ends up being months late, so I finally ended up just getting permission from the court to just say, “Hey, it's at the courthouse if you want it,” because seriously, I don't even hear from her anymore. She always breaks her promises of saying, "Yeah, I'll be there," but she's not, and I empathize. Like I said before, I've had severe pain and mental health issues throughout my life, and I know that she's had a hard life, but she doesn't have the privileges that I do, and I understand that. So I told her, "I'll keep your baby safe. I got you. If and when you can get healthy and you can provide a healthy, stable environment for your children, then I will totally go to the courts and help you get your babies back. But you have to be able to prove that you're clean and you're stable, and you can financially provide for your kid and there's a healthy environment.” I also told my child, J, that we'll have a five-year window because they were like, "Will you adopt me?" I was like, "Let's give Mom five years. When you're 10, we'll look at it and see how things are going and see how you feel about it, and then we'll go from there." LR: Now you've provided a space that two of the boys are with other parents or guardians, and J is now with you. You're doing what you need to do with the courts to provide guardianship for him because your sister is almost completely out of the picture. 81 ZB: Yup, and I'm raising four children. LR: Okay. Hold on just one second. I have 20 minutes left. I can do this, but we have Monday too, so I'm not too concerned. ZB: I mean, I still have a good outline. LR: Which I love. I'm so glad that you do because this is super helpful. So go ahead, but I just want you to know I've only got 20 minutes. ZB: Okay well, that's really good then, because then that gives me time to get permission from the two people that are part of the journey. Today, I already talked about the court, our home, ending up with my sister's kids, the Fourth of July—that was a big deal. Then I started becoming an advocate and getting educated in LGBTQ issues because I wanted to be a good advocate for my nephew. MK: When did your nephew start coming out or showing or talking to you about being in the LGBTQ community? This is J, right? ZB: That is the person that I'm going to discuss today. It’s J’s gender journey. When J was five, that's when the Fourth of July thing happened and we had a big fallingout. Everybody talked about how I put her boys in dresses and I made them go out in public against their will, rather than me giving them choices and freedom. Then I didn't see him for a whole year, and then we went through the whole guardianship. The next part of the outline is J’s gender journey. Now J’s six years old. I have guardianship of them, and that means that I am 100% in charge of where they go to school, their medical decisions. I'm also in charge of where they spend their weekends and who they visit. That's significant because now their parents are not in charge, so that's kind of really a big deal. So I talk about how my daughter influences J’s gender journey. I talk about J’s stepdad. LR: Hold on. How did your daughter influence J? ZB: You're squirreling. You asked for an outline? 82 LR: Okay, this is my process. ZB: I have the outline right here, and that's a part of the outline you asked for. I'm telling the outline of J's gender journey. It’s about my daughter's pressures, their stepdad, and school support. Those are the things that I would be going over next. You asked for an outline. MK: She lost the picture. I'm still with you. I got you. LR: I'm getting to the point where I'm struggling to pay attention because I'm getting tired. That's why I said we have 15 minutes. ZB: How about we finish up right now and I talk about the outline for next time? Then you guys know how to be prepared and you have your questions ready. LR: That is a good idea, I really like that. ZB: Next time probably won't have any trauma. But I do need the outline. I'm sorry I'm long-winded, I'm a storyteller. MK: Once you explained what you were doing, it all made sense. I just needed to get on the same page as you. LR: Yes, it's clicking now for me and I'm realizing that. ZB: Now we get to talk about joining Mama Dragons in 2008, supporting J. Letting my child lead. J’s gender journey, my daughter and her influence. We're going to talk about stepdad’s journey and advocating. We'll talk about school support. Then that's J, sum it up. Okay, so my next headline. We'll talk about my best friend's journey. I was a support for them. This is the person I mentioned, I've known them for like 20 years and we pretty much swapped. I was supportive of them, and I went to their doctors appointments with them and listened to them complain about puberty. That's pretty much it for that. 83 At the end, we're going to talk about a client of mine that I felt I developed a very close relationship with. I was assigned specifically to him because I'm on the LGBTQ spectrum. I had not come out yet, but this person, at the time, identified as lesbian and needed somebody to take him out in the evening, or take him out to Pride, or take a Saturday night to go to the gentlemen's club, you know—just go do some adulting. That's a little bit more fun than most people are willing to do. So I stepped up to that role and I also ended up stepping into a role of helping him with his own gender journey. We'll talk about that, and then if we have time, that will enable us to literally transition to my transition. LR: Okay. Let's be realistic, this is probably going to take us at least two more sessions. ZB: I know, and that's why I'm telling you. I gave you the outline and I stopped there because there's no reason to keep going with the outline. MK: I appreciate the outline. LR: I do too. That is so helpful. Let's go ahead and stop recording. Part 6: April 4, 2022 LR: Today is April 4, 2022, and we are continuing our oral history interview with Zane. You were going to talk about J’s journey and Mama Dragons. ZB: We already kind of talked about how my little one—or my sister's little one, at the time—was experimenting with dresses and I had kind of advocated. I grew up as a tomboy and it was perfectly fine for me to wear boys’ clothes. To me, it didn't make a difference if a quote-unquote ‘boy’ wanted to wear feminine clothes. To me, it was all the same. I didn't see a difference, and that started a huge fight within my family, and I was ostracized. A lot of people were telling me that he was too young to know he was gay or he was too young to understand sexuality, and I didn't understand enough to argue, and so I had to educate myself. 84 I had mentioned that I was assigned to a person in my job, specifically to take that person to LGBTQ-friendly places. I had taken them to Pride Salt Lake City 2018, and Mama Dragons was there offering hugs, and I got a hug. Here I am, feeling like my family is against me, and they're calling me all kinds of names and telling me I'm disgusting because I'm supporting the sexuality of a six-year-old and I was like, "That's not the case, that's not what's going on," and I get this wonderful hug from this mama. This was the most comfortable and supportive hug I've ever gotten in my life, and it was from a stranger, and it didn't feel like a stranger. It felt full of love and support and acceptance, the most non-judgmental embrace I'd ever had in my life, other than from my own children. It was a very, very significant pivot point in my life. The hug was meaningful to me, like, “Thank you for this no-stringsattached, all-encompassing embrace that says that you accept everything about me.” And in that moment, one, I recognized how good it made me feel, and two, I recognized that I wanted to provide that hug for others. I wanted to be a Mama Dragon and give parent hugs. I heard something they said, you know: "Your parents don't support your LGBTQ status. Well, then I'm your mama now.” I started educating myself and learning of kids that were getting kicked out of their houses or losing their families or having their families turn their backs on them just for coming out of the closet or identifying as gay or lesbian or bisexual. I realized how big of a problem that really was. I started educating myself about the suicide rates just in Utah, and I was devastated. I learned about the history of Mama Dragons and that it was created here and developed here in Utah. A mother was having a conflict between her religious faith and her love and support for her own LGBTQ child, and she needed support. That was the kind of group that I definitely wanted to be a part of. It very much aligned with my values of wanting to support others and be that hug. 85 I made sure that I wrote down as much information as possible all over my arm because I didn't have anything to write on. I was adamant that I was going to be a part of that group. I don't remember very much else about that Pride other than that hug. That was my first Pride, 2018. As for J, I had mentioned that I had been maintaining contact with his stepfather, and he and I co-parented. He is about two decades older than me, so he's in a different generation and he has a different idea of what masculinity means and what it means to be a boy and what it means to be a girl. He was really, really rough and tough about, “You keep all that girly shit over there, and I don't want none of that shit here.” He was very adamant that if J ever wore his girly shirts or anything over to his dad's house, you would never see it again. It would just end up becoming his sister's clothes. It was very saddening, and so I spent a lot of time educating myself and advocating for J. I go back and forth between names because J has gone through quite a few names, and when I asked him about this oral history, I asked him what they wanted me to do or say about names or pronouns. They said, “Go through them all, use them all. It helps educate.” I was like, "You are an awesome kid.” The reason why J’s story is so relevant is because becoming a strong Mama Dragon for J and advocating for J and going through a journey with J over these past six years has given me the strength and knowledge and understanding and perspectives and support to finally, eventually, come out myself. Going through a gender journey with J is what brought me to my own journey. I had this aha moment where I was like, “If you can have this strength and this courage to stand up for your child, then you can have this confidence to hold your face and be who you are for yourself.” It was an epiphany. 86 But I do want to talk a little bit about J’s journey. There were some observations over those six years, and I'm really, really glad that as a parent, I was very cautious and I didn't jump all in. I really let J guide that journey. I still want to make sure that I was educated and I was making the right choices. We're going down uncharted territory. As a country, we haven't really navigated having children transition so early on. What does that look like? When J first started, you would ask J, “What's your favorite color?” It was like they wanted to say one thing, but then they would settle and tell you it was blue. You're like, "Okay, is that really what your favorite color is?" Finally, when they felt like it was safe to really own it, when they realized that we were going to accept anything they said, then it came out that actually their favorite color was pink. I was like, “Look, you can have pink as your favorite color,” and I bought him a shirt that said, “I make pink look good.” I was trying to help him understand that pink is not a girls’ color, and I started learning about the history of how the fashion industry is the one who decided that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. When I taught my child that, they were thrilled, like, "Yay! Pink’s not a girl color!" I had already not stuck to gender stereotypes myself. I was always big on saying, “No, we're not to sit here and go, ‘These roles are for women and these roles are for men.’” Everybody in my house does chores. Everybody in my house knows how to cook. My children, male or female, it doesn't matter. We all cook. We all do house chores. We all do yard work. There is no distinguishing marker that says if you're male or female, you have certain jobs. No, we all can do anything. My daughter wants to be a builder. It doesn't matter. 87 But when J started their gender journey, I noticed some things where it seemed like J swung the pendulum all female, and I started questioning, "Where is this coming from? Is it you, or is there some kind of outside influence?" I started noticing that J had a whisperer. My daughter was whispering in his ear, telling him, "Well, if you're a girl, you have to do this. If you're a girl, you have to dress like this. If you're a girl, you have to want this, you have to like this." When I started realizing what was happening, I nipped it in the bud immediately because I was like, "No, no, no. Even if J decides that they’re a girl, that's not how it works. You don't get to decide how J's gender is, period." I'm a little disappointed in myself because at the beginning, I was afraid for their safety, and I was afraid about how their peers would treat them, and so I forbid J from wearing dresses to school. I would only let them wear dresses at home or if they were just with me. I would say, “Okay, you can wear quote-unquote ‘girly’ shoes, or you could wear a ‘girly’ shirt,” but I was really afraid for them to wear dresses. I wanted them to be able to be physically big enough to defend themselves if anybody was physically trying to force their ideologies upon my child. That's really what it was; I was afraid for their safety. I told J for the longest time, "You can't wear those clothes to your dad's because he's going to say or do this, that, and the other." I started relaxing on it a bit after a couple of years because I realized that I didn't need to arm my child with the ability to be physically violent with others. I needed to arm my child with confidence and comebacks. My kid would come home angry and be like, "So-and-so said something about my shoes, or so-and-so said something about my shirt.” I was like, "Okay, well, how did that make you feel?" They were like, "Well, angry." 88 I'm like, "Why are you angry?" They're like, "Well, it was rude." I was like, "Okay, but their family told them that boys are supposed to be this way and girls are supposed to be this way and they don't know any different. Now is an opportunity to teach them that it's okay that people are different. Let's talk about different ways that we can teach people that we can be different and to accept each other. Maybe we could say, ‘These clothes make me happy, and you don't have to wear them, so why does it bother you?’ Or maybe they’ll say ‘Why are you wearing a girl's shirt?’ and you can say, ‘I'm wearing a shirt just like you're wearing a shirt. Why are you wearing shoes?’” We started practicing comebacks, and we started practicing confidence so that J could do the ‘I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you’ kind of thing. People's comments were less about what J was wearing and more about their upbringing, their biases, their perspectives on things, and it was on them. J and I went through months and months and months of role playing and talking it out and trying to put a positive spin on it as an opportunity to educate people. First, second, third grade, this kid's been in the same school with similar peers. The school, depending on what's going on in the state or the district or whatever, has gone back and forth on what their policies are as far as genderaffirming. I remember that their email and sign-in information was their full birth name, and we had gone through a few names. At first, J insisted that they were Jessica. Then we found out that that was a name that my daughter chose for them, and that they didn't really want to be Jessica; that was EV’s doing. Then we found out that J didn't really want to be a girl, they just like girls’ clothes, you know? So J, for a while there, we called him Junie. It was kind of a, ‘Sometimes I feel like a girl, 89 sometimes I feel like a boy,’ so we kind of switch between pronouns and use them fluidly, depending on what they were wearing. Each time that we would go into a social situation, whether it was a family gathering or a school event, in the car: “All right. Are you J today? Are you [birth name] right now? What name are we using? What pronouns are we using? Do you want me to introduce and advocate for you, or do you want to introduce yourself?” We would just go through that each time we were headed into a social situation, and I would let them lead. Sometimes they'd be like, “I'm J today. Will you please let everybody know I'm using they/them pronouns?” Sometimes like, “I'm [birth name].” We would just go into each situation like that, and it was just kind of depending on, I think, how many spoons they felt like using that day. How much did they want to fight and argue; how much did they want to educate; how important was it to them? I'm not sure what made them make the decision each time, but it just depended. I think that a lot of times my family stopped making remarks because I kept standing up for them and taking them into these spaces in their pretty dresses and headbands and makeup. I did everything I could to support them, and along the way, I just kept getting more and more confident because my Mama Dragon fierceness was like, “Go ahead, say something. I have educated myself beyond the brink. Go ahead and say something I've been waiting for.” My presence became so big and J's presence became so big that nobody wanted to bother us anymore. Even in their school, their friends, everybody accepted them. J wears hot rods and sparkles and unicorns and camouflage and mixes and juxtaposes it however they want. They've grown out their hair long and beautiful but shaved the sides, so if they pull it up, you can tell. But if it's down, 90 people say, "Oh, your daughter is beautiful." They love those comments. They say, "Oh, your son’s awesome." They love those comments, too. They play on the boys’ basketball team, the boys’ soccer team; it's fine. Over the years, they've settled into the name J, which is a gender-neutral compromise for them. They say that J stands for [birth name] or Jessica, and it's whatever they feel like it is for the day. J is their non-binary choice that they've gone with. The great news is that I got a message from the psychologist at the school one day and they were talking about some of J's behaviors because of course, they have a lot of abandonment issues and other things, dealing with the first five years of their life. I've had them in therapy for that, and I've also had them in therapy for this gender journey. The therapist is really good about checking in at the beginning of the appointments, like, "All right, what name are we using? What pronoun are we using?" But she's never pushing any gender onto them. It's always just checking in, like, "Hey, where are we with that? Do you have anything you need to talk about with that? Okay, moving on. What are we talking about today?" It's never been like, "All right, so let's address this gender thing," which I love and appreciate. When puberty started getting close, I started telling J, "This is what your body's going to do. Normally, these are some things that are optional, but I don't feel comfortable turning your body into a female body right now," just because over the last five years, we've gone through all of these different, “I want to be a girl. No, I want to be a boy. No, I'm not a boy or a girl,” kind of just going back and forth. So many different names and different identities that I was like, "I don't feel comfortable doing anything permanent like giving you estrogen, but I am comfortable sitting down and having a conversation and maybe discussing pausing puberty with hormone blockers. But I want to talk to the professionals first." And something interesting happened. 91 So now we get to pause about J and we'll talk about me. In December of 2019, I had been talking to somebody online, and he was the first transgender man I had ever seen or met in my entire life. I had been around plenty of transgender women, but not men. I don't know why. We were dating and I fell head over heels. He was my soul mate. Never in my life, ever, impulsively did anything, except for with LO. We were so similar and like-minded, and it was like looking in the mirror, but not the mirror that's always been looking back at me. I remember when he first told me that he was transgender, he told me a little bit about what that meant and what testosterone had done to his body. So I started on a Google frenzy, and the crazy thing is, at this time, I could not find any medical literature or scientific literature with pictures that would provide me with a scientific perspective of what testosterone would do to my body. I had this huge theory that testosterone would benefit my connective tissue disorder because I am fully aware that estrogens and pregnancy hormones have a relaxing effect on your connective tissue, and that's what allows your body to stretch and allows your ligaments and your insides to reorganize themselves to grow babies. When you're on your period, your endometrium tissue sheds, and the hormones that are excreted from your body don’t just go to your uterus. It's your whole body that receives those hormones. When I was on a female cycle, whether I had my uterus or not, I still had my ovaries and I still got that hormone cycle for about four days out of every month. For those days, I was extremely, extremely loose in my joints, and so I was a lot more prone to dislocate my knee or to subluxate or shift my hips out. My pain was a lot worse during that time of the month. Ehlers-Danlos syndrome affects women a whole lot worse than it affects men, and it's considered ‘rare,’ quote-unquote. Men don't feel it the way women do because they have testosterone, and it literally thickens and strengthens all of your 92 connective tissue. That's why all of their muscles are thicker, their connective tissue is thicker, their skin is thicker there and stronger. That's why women have more delicate skin, and it's softer and finer and prettier. As a matter of fact, trans women who transition, their skin get softer and finer and more delicate. My skin is actually thick now, my brow line has thickened, and my jawline has thickened. I study anthropology and I laugh because anthropologists have certain markers on the bones that they look at, and if they look at my pelvis, they'll see a female pelvis because I had puberty under female hormones, but I've since been exposed to male hormones and my skull has changed. There's also more changes that have happened from testosterone. I was right; it did help with my connective tissue disorder. I still suffer, but not nearly as much as I have. Back to LO. So I see this person and I’m trying to educate myself on what testosterone will do to my body. I can't find anything scientific at all, and I'm a scientist through and through, and I can't find anything. The only thing that I can find that's going to show me what testosterone will do to my body is porn. I just want to know, because he tells me that I'll get an enlarged clitoris, so that was the only thing that I could find to show me what it looks like. I also didn't want to be surprised or shocked because I was planning on eventually engaging sexually with this person. I wanted to know what I was getting myself into, but I literally could not find anything on the internet other than porn that would show me what an enlarged clitoris looked like. So I had to educate myself that way. Now you can find things because there's some transgender men who would put it up, but you have to be careful in how you word it. It's interesting. It was hard to find literature on top surgeries back then. Now it's blown up, you can find it even on TikTok, but before you just couldn't. Anyway, I jumped into this relationship with this transgender man. I fell headover-heels in love with him and I ignored any red flag there ever was, because he 93 was my soulmate. I knew it through and through. He's the first person I ever dated that I didn't live with during dating. We got engaged to get married quick—we were dating for three months and we got engaged, and then COVID hit, March 13th of 2020. We had planned a vacation to go to Cedar City to take the whole family, and then COVID hit and we're like, "Well, nobody's going to be in Cedar City. Let's go anyway," so we did. We got married on April Fool's Day because I fucking knew. I knew I was a fool. I guess that's a little bit of foreshadowing because he moved in with me when we got back from vacation. Everybody in my family fell in love with him, and he was like the male figure in the house because we hadn't had one. Everybody loved him all of a sudden. I was chopped liver, that's how much everybody loved LO. But the honeymoon phase wore off quick because COVID hit. Here we are homeschooling four kids and that was hell. I'm not cut out for that; I know that, I acknowledge that. But with LO's presence, I started realizing and recognizing that that's exactly what I wanted for me. I realized that I was transgender, at least non-binary or something. I wanted that testosterone because I theorized that it would help treat my Ehlers-Danlos syndrome. I wanted it because I wanted a masculinized body, I wanted a masculinized face, I wanted a beard. I have always been so infatuated with men's beards. I always look at them, not like, "Oh my God, you're so hot, I want you in my life." It was, "Oh my god, your beard is so gorgeous. I want that." I admire men, but not in a way that I'm attracted to them, in a way that I like that attractiveness for myself. I started meeting with my own gender therapist. I hate this: I got diagnosed— because it needs a diagnosis—with gender dysphoria in April or May of 2020, and I started testosterone in May of 2020. The first thing that happened was my voice dropped and I was like, "Wow." I started taking videos every couple of weeks, like, 94 “This is me, this is my gender journey,” and I was getting really excited about the changes. They started quick, and I was really grateful that LO was here with me because I was getting feelings in my body. I started getting bottom growth immediately, but the feelings and the sensations were insane. It would drop me to my knees and I was like, 'Oh my God, what is that?' LO could explain it to me, and that was great. But also, my sex drive was insanely grotesque. I was concerned and annoyed and disgusted with my sex drive, and I was so grateful that it was COVID and we were on lockdown and I was working from home and not having to be around people because everything that moved would stir some kind of sexual stimulation within me. I really, really, really had to hone that in. I remember thinking that I could empathize with the pubescent boy or the young man who hasn't been guided correctly because I had to guide these urges with everything I want my son to know as a man. My son and I were pretty much going through puberty together. We laugh at each other because he was 13 and I was 37-going-on-13 because my mind was always in the gutter and my voice was cracking. I couldn't say a sentence without cracking, and his was cracking, and we were just like, "Oh my God, you just cracked." I couldn't sing “Evanescence” anymore, and I was realizing that all of my octaves were off. I couldn't even sing for months. I remember I got into speech therapy and I told him, "I don't want to sound like a gay man, I hate it." I learned some things in speech therapy about the difference between how men and women speak. Women speak more from the throat and men speak more from their diaphragm. I learned that women end their sentences in an upper key and men kind of end their sentences on a down note. I tried to be more mindful of those two things specifically. 95 I started realizing that now that my voice was booming. I had to be careful in women's spaces, because now my loud expressive self was triggering to women. I had to be careful around talking to children and women, because now I wasn't that safe female person anymore. Now when I smiled at kids in the grocery aisle or in the checkout stand, their mommies were holding their kids closer, like, "Don't talk to my baby, you creepy man." I'm like, "I'm the same person I always have been. I love babies. Why are you hating me now?" Then I realized, “Okay, I get it. I understand.” But it kind of broke my heart a little bit. On the other side, it was like, “Wow, like people are finally listening to me and not looking at my chest when I talk. I'm not being objectified, this is nice.” I can have a conversation with somebody and they're actually hearing my words instead of going, "Oh my God, you're being so emotional." Then, "Wait a minute, now I'm finally being appreciated for what I have to say and bring to the table," instead of, "Oh, you're so dramatic." It's interesting that I'm bringing the same energy, the same thoughts, the same ideologies to the conversations, but now my thoughts and opinions are valid and relevant because my face is furry and my voice is deeper. It kind of angered me in a way, especially when it came to parenting, because I would get compliments and praise for being involved and engaged in my children's lives. Taking them to the park or taking them to get haircuts was all of a sudden, "Oh, that is so neat how you're involved," or "I just love seeing dads engaged with their kids." What? Do you tell moms these things? Because I never, ever, ever got any praise for busting my ass and constantly feeling like a failure, and now you're praising me for showing up. 96 Even from teachers, when I'm five minutes late for a parent-teacher conference and they're giving me praise for showing up. When I showed up five minutes late looking like a female, I was getting that tsk, tsk, tsk and the watchlooking and the ‘you're-not-respecting-my-time’ face. How come when I looked like a female, I got the judgmental eyes and the opinionated faces and comments about how I'm not toeing the line or not keeping up or not doing good enough? Now I look like a man and you're assuming I'm a man, and so now just showing up gets me praise. It pissed me off. It was patronizing. For me, I just want to scream in their face and say, "Why don't you praise the moms?" Dads can show up too, damnit, dads can be full-time parents. It angers me. I see two sides of this coin to where, yes, there is male privilege, but there's also female privilege where women are okay to be in a space with children and they're not guarded around each other. They're just automatically trusted. But as soon as you have a deep voice and furry hair, all of a sudden, you need to be vetted. Like, what? I'm the same person. But then there's this male privilege. LR: As you've been talking, I can see what you're talking about, the reality of never being praised as a mom for doing what moms are supposed to do. But having never seen it from the other side, it's interesting. ZB: That's a huge part of my journey is that moms are taken for granted. That was a lot of my dysphoria or dissatisfaction in my female body, all of that stress and perfection and everything that I put upon myself that I could never, ever, ever get to. But when I finally just said, "You know who you are, and you do the best you can, and it's fine," just letting that go was the biggest breath of fresh air there was. Every once in a while, I get these backass rude ‘compliments’, but they're not compliments because to me, it's patronizing. I've always been by my kids. I've always done everything that they've needed to the best of my ability and then some. 97 I've killed myself over and over to put them first, to do everything for them. Even self-care felt selfish. I have post-it notes all over my house that say ‘self-care is not selfish,’ and me transitioning is my self-care. I'm actually in an argument on one of my posts right now with my supposed long-time friend's husband because he's telling me that it seems like “I'm just so unstable right now” because I've “made this transition” and I'm “so vocal”. I'm like, "Actually, it's the opposite. I'm so comfortable and confident in my own skin that I'm ready to be vocal and loud and advocate for others. It may sound like I'm unhappy and uncomfortable, but I'm not. I'm just ready to be out there and loud and proud.” It's just interesting, people's perspectives, because they think I'm unhappy, but I'm not. I'm just ready to fight. I'm not unhappy, I'm an advocate. I've been unhappy for decades. Now I'm on fire. LR: I’m glad. You mentioned when you were talking about marrying LO earlier that it was a mistake. Are you comfortable elaborating on that? ZB: Yeah. LO helped me through the first part of my transition, but COVID kind of put a lot of stress on our family and LO. I didn't drink alcohol up until COVID hit, and LO had a five o'clock habit and started drinking every night. I picked up a new bad habit and that contributed to some of my behavior. LO and I, we kind of started arguing and bickering and fighting. I kind of spiraled out of control, and I didn't know what was wrong with me. I thought I was losing my mind and I got kind of suicidal and I hadn't been that way for 20 years. I'm like, "Oh my God, something's wrong with me." I thought it was the testosterone, and LO kept telling me that the testosterone was making me aggressive. I didn't think that was the case, but I tried to prove his points, and so I stopped taking my testosterone. That was a bad idea because that threw me into a hormonal tailspin. 98 I have dexterity problems in my hands; my fingers don't work very well, and so I have a home health aide or a nurse that comes and puts my meds into a box for me so I can take my meds for my chronic conditions. One of them, obviously, is antidepressants. My nurse had failed to put my antidepressants in my med box, and so hindsight showed me that I had not been taking my antidepressants for a week, and at that time, LO and I were bickering viciously, lots of arguing. I hadn't taken my testosterone for like two weeks, but I didn't tell anybody. I was just trying to prove a point that it wasn't the testosterone. I spiraled and the bickering was just intense, and so I told LO that I needed a break and that I wanted him to go to his mom's house for the night. He said, "If I go, I'm not coming back." I just needed a break. I thought I was taking care of my mental health and I needed a break. I didn't know at the time that I hadn't been taking my meds. I figured that out the next day. He left and he never came back. No call, no show, no nothing. I was ghosted and that was hard. After that, I put myself in the hospital. That was also really hard because they tested me for COVID and the test never came back for like a week after I went in the hospital, so the whole time I was in the hospital, I was quarantined for COVID. I wasn't allowed to participate in anything that was happening. I was there like Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, and I had to just stay in this room the whole time. It was awful. I literally said over and over, “I'm going insane in the frickin’ psych ward.” I was losing my mind and I didn't have any interaction with people other than for them to bring me my meds. I was in excruciating pain because of my Ehlers-Danlos, and I wasn't having my pain managed at all. I was suffering a lot. I got to the point that the only thing that was running through my head was that I wanted to bash my head on the floor. 99 I was like, "How is this mental health care? You're not helping me." So I put my mask on and I walked out there and I was like, "I want my clothes. I want to go home. I came here because of suicidal ideation, and I'm more suicidal in here. I need to be with my family. You're not helping me." They told me I had to go back to my room because I was exposing people to COVID. I'm like, “I'm not even here for COVID.” They're like, "Well, your COVID test hasn't come back yet. So you have to go back to your room." I was like, "Give me my clothes. I'm leaving." They try to tell me that I was pink-slipped, which I guess is an involuntary hold. I'm like, "No, I'm not. I brought myself here, which means I can check myself out. I'm leaving." They threatened to call security, they put me in a rubber room, they tried to restrain me and all this shit, and I just cried and cried and cried because I was in so much pain. I guess they were waiting on getting ahold of the VA to get my meds. I had already been in there over twenty-four hours with none of my prescribed medications that I take on a regular basis, so they weren't taking care of me. It was awful. I lost my mind. They finally gave me a shot of, I don't know, Ativan or something. They called it ‘chemically restrained’, but I actually felt better, and I could see clearly, and that was nice. I finally called my sister and asked her to bring me this book called Buddhist Boot Camp by Timber Hawkeye and I read it, and I got two tattoos because of it. One says ‘faith,’ and the other one says ‘gratitude.’ Faith, it's a spiritual perspective, and it's not so much saying I have a faith in God, but more the faith in the outcome. 100 Whatever will happen will happen, and it'll be okay. And I had gratitude. Find your gratitude and change your attitude, kind of thing. So in that room by myself with no psychiatric interventions at all—no group, no therapist, no nothing—I found myself and I pulled myself out of it. I had gratitude that I was in a corner room that was so big that I could pace, and that would take my mind off my pain enough to where it was satisfying. There was a hot shower where I could take as many showers as I wanted. I had this big, huge window that I could look out and I could watch the cars go by and I could look at my neighborhood and I could see the trees, and I could watch the people on the street. I found all my gratitude, and I started thinking about what LO brought to the picture. He showed me what was available for me and he got me through the hardest part of my transition. He helped me find my parent name, Mofa. He helped me come out to my kids and my most immediate family and say, "You know what, I'm not Mom anymore. I'm Mofa. I'm not Becca anymore, I'm Zane.” He helped me see what was on the other side for me, and I realized that he was not so much my soulmate as he was the reflection in the mirror that I had always longed to see. LO brought to my life exactly what I needed when I needed it. J brought to my life the strength and courage to advocate. All of that roleplaying that I did with J to help J be competent and to help J educate others, I didn't realize that I was building my own skills while I'm trying to learn how to teach my kids skills. I didn't realize I was building my own confidence while I'm trying to teach my kids to go out there without me and to stand tall and proud no matter what they're wearing. Building my own ability to advocate and say, “No, my pronouns are they/them,” because I was correcting others for my child. I built my own strength to stand up for myself and say, "No, my name is Zane," and not get upset or angry. It enabled me to build my own perspectives of forgiveness to others that it's a learning curve. 101 I'm not angry when people don't get my name or my pronouns right. I'm flexible and I'm forgiving and I don't cast people out of my life when they don't get it right. I'm not that kind of person where it's like, "These are my pronouns. Either you get it right, or you're out," because it's a learning curve. I even took the time getting J's name right, and I took time getting J's pronouns right. My son, when I was pregnant with him, he was ZA in my belly. But then when he went from sixth to seventh grade, he decided that he wanted to use his first name—a name that was given to him by my ex-husband, whom I hated. But you know what? It didn't matter, because that's who he was. He wasn't ZA anymore, he was DO. He wasn't the name that I gave him. He was the name that he chose, LGBTQ or not. He is who he is. Even when I look back on memories of the little one, my brain computes the old name. That tells me that I need to be forgiving and understanding with others when they mess up on my name, when they've known me for 30-something years as something else. I see people on Mama Dragons like, "My grandparents refuse to use my child's name, so we're just going to cut them out of our lives and never talk to them again." I'm like, "That is a huge mistake. Don't do that.” Even my father said, “You will always be my Chandi. You will always be my daughter,” and instead of telling them off and telling them I'll never talk to them again, I just decided I needed space. All of this reflection is happening in the hospital while I'm alone and I'm just finding what I'm grateful for. I came out of the hospital. Yeah, I was uncomfortable, and I was unhappy about that terrible hospital experience. Then when I get an $18,000 bill for nothing—all they did was give me my meds—it angers me, and it 102 tells me how overrated the medical system is, that they think that they deserve $18,000 for that room for the weekend. LR: Alright. I really want to stop there because I think it's the perfect place to stop for today. I love the way this went. This was so much more focused. I know we're figuring this out, and I'm so grateful that we are and that we're getting there. We’re going to stop recording. Part 7: April 14, 2022 MK: Today is April 14, 2022. I'm Marina Kenner; in the room with me is [Kyle] Jackson. We are continuing the interview with Zane Bates. Today, you wanted to talk to us about your advocacy and the person you were supporting as a CNA helper. ZB: Yeah. Since 2012, I have been working with special needs and developmentally disabled and autistic people and elderly people as a medical assistant and a CNA. I got into that space because my son is high-functioning autistic; very bright, but ADHD, like executive functioning struggles. The more I learned about my son, I definitely learned a lot more about myself. He's been in therapy since he was five years old. I signed him up for every program, every class, every funding. He's been on waiting lists for ABA therapy, waiting lists for DSPD; I've begged for case management so that they can help me walk through things. I was obsessed with neuroscience in the brain, and the more I studied him, the more I realized and recognized that he and I were like-minded, and the reason why I was able to work so well with these people was because even though they were non-verbal, I could just look at them and anticipate their needs. I was like the Whisperer. I was one of them. DO, my eldest, he's hard. He's a very difficult child, and I'm so glad because I have grown so much because of him. He and I have grown our emotional intelligence together. Every class that he's gone through, I have to go through the 103 parenting position of it. I don't know if you've ever taken any psychology classes or social work classes or anything, but so much about a person's behavior has to do with their environments. If you're in crisis, it has a lot to do with the clutter and the noise and the stress and the demand and if you're hungry or if you're tired. You have to really pay attention to what's going on around you and within you and around them and within them, and also recognize that there's so many unknowns that they don't know and we don't know and nobody knows and nobody can explain. There's not even science that's written down or documented for it yet. I just think about everything that goes on with me that took 20 years to figure out. My daughter had to get diagnosed because deja vu happened before they could even figure something out for me. I still go to doctors and say, “Hey, I want an answer for pain,” and they give me something completely off-the-wall that doesn't make sense. “No, thank you. I'll do something else.” I'm figuring out that people who experience things know a lot more than people who study it because if you don't go through it, you can only try to sympathize. You can't really empathize. My career path over the last decade took me from being a CNA, and I realized that I totally could not, would not, should not work in residential or institutional places because I had too much of a heart. I couldn't just run out on somebody when they just needed somebody to talk to, running call light to call light to call light. For me, I notice everything is wrong, and all I did was get stuck on everything that was wrong and it killed my heart. The Alzheimer's wing was so terribly bad, and I couldn't solve all the problems and fix everything, and I was just one person. It killed me. I could not do it. So I did home health for eight years. I would spend six days a week, two or three hours a day with the same person, one-on-one. Maybe they're wheelchairbound and you get them up out of bed every day. I'm the one that makes sure that 104 they get to the bathroom and handle their incontinence so that they don't have to wear diapers so that they feel like they've got some kind of dignity. Or I'm their brain to help them remember to do this, that, and the other and get through their routine. There are some people that I worked with for three, five, six years doing the same routine, six days a week for hours. I had more one-on-one time with these people than I did my own kids, and my heart was with them. I liked routine, so I didn't like to change things, and I couldn't take a day off because the industry and turnover rate was so bad that if I took time off to do something for me, my shift probably wouldn't get covered, no matter how much notice I gave them. My people wouldn't get taken care of, and it made me angry, and I would have shit fights about it. Everybody in the office was pissed at me because I was a PITA. I had a lot of anxiety. I didn't work well with my coworkers because I noticed everything that everybody did wrong, and I'm very critical. I sit here and I obsess about following the rules and doing things right and making sure that people are treated right, especially people who don't have a voice and can’t advocate for themselves. It bugs the shit out of me when people aren't treated right, especially people who don't have a voice or aren't listened to or are shut down or intimidated. That's kind of my career path. I became a direct support professional because people noticed me in the CNA world, and so then I ended up having a dual purpose. I was solicited repeatedly, like, "Hey, come work for us." I was like, "Okay, only if I work just this person, this many hours a week, these days of the week." "No, we can't do that.” “Okay, sorry, then I can't." Months later, "Come work for us. We'll do it any way you want." "All right. Only if you pay me this much." 105 "Okay, we'll have to see." Finances come on, and I ended up working for RISE Services. We will keep their name because that business is significant. They provide services for special needs people. They also have professional parents—foster families—and also support natural parents and families with kids with special needs to have an afterschool program and a day program. We're called direct support professionals. We can have one-on-one stuff or group settings. It just kind of takes care of whatever their individual needs are. One of my staffing positions was to work with an individual who identified as lesbian, and my objective with that individual was to take them to LGBTQ friendly spaces. [To Marina] I talked to them and I asked about how much information I could share, or if I could use their name or anything like that. I do have permission to share this portion of things. [To the camera] We went out to the gentlemen's club once a month, and we would plan to attend pride activities. Just go out and do adult things. I was their designated driver and things like that. As I mentioned, my first ever Pride was taking them, and that was exciting. I still hadn't transitioned at that time or anything like that, I was just being a support person. I had a wonderful time. I really, really struggled with getting paid to support them because we're so like-minded and we're so similar and we were close in age. When I hung out with them and took them places and whatnot, I just felt like friends. There's a very fine line between supporting somebody and being their support person and friendship. It was really, really hard to keep that line solid in place because I really resonated with this person and I worked with them for years. It was a big deal. Towards the end of 2019, this person that I was supporting, one day we went to Maverick and we're just getting a drink or something. This person holds up a 106 keychain, and they're like, "If I was born a boy, this is what my name should be. I should be John." I was like, "Are you serious?" He was like "Yeah, I'm John." I was like, “Are you telling me that you're a man? What are you telling me? Let's go talk.” So we sat in the car at Maverick and we had a nice talk. He came out to me and I was like, "You're saying you're trans?" He's like, "Yeah." I'm like, "Dude. You realize that legally, we have to support this. If you want us to call you John, if you want us to use he/him pronouns, if you want us to support you in this aspect of your life, we have to. I can't know this information and not help you go in this direction if that's what you want." Over the next couple of weeks like I just kept pumping up about the excitement of, “This is awesome. I'm so happy to know this about you.” I kind of reflected over the last couple years of working with him, how we used to talk about how we wish we didn't have our boobs because they’re such a waste of flesh. How we wish we could give them to somebody who actually wanted them, a transgender woman. Comments about, “Yeah, we're basically dudes.” It all just flashed back to me and I'm like, “Wow. It all makes sense. I totally see that. You've been going to Gentlemen's Club, been palling around as guys pretty much all along anyway. It just made sense.” Finally, I said, "Hey, you can take your time, however you want to do this." I asked his permission repeatedly, letting him lead the way and letting me know, like, "Do you want me to advocate for you? Do you want me to speak to administration? I recognize that your legal name is X, but we can put a preferred name on every 107 possible thing there is. I can help you advocate with your team, your caseworkers, your doctors, and everybody that works for you. I can help you make this happen if this is what you want." He's like, "All right, I'll think about it." He decided that he needed to talk to his mom first, because he's like, "If I tell anybody before I tell her, she's going to flip out." I was like, "All right, do you need help with that?" He's like, "Nah, I got this." So he came out to his mom on his own, and then I just kind of stood by him and was there as his cheerleader. One group at a time, during the day program, he'd just be like, "All right, everybody, I'm just letting you know I'm John now and you can use he/him pronouns." In each new space or each new place, he would just let everybody know, "Hey, I'm John now." RISE Services, all the staff and the other clients, they all took to it really well. I was amazed, like, “Wow, like, so supportive.” John was in a group home that RISE ran, the Serenity House. It was a women's group home; other disabled women live there, and even all the staff had to be female. I was kind of worried as John began to identify as a man. I reached out to the administration and I'm like, "What's going to happen to John's housing situation if he transitions legally?" They're like, "Okay, we'll deal with that if the time comes." All right, now we're into 2020 and COVID hits and John's decided he wants to legally change his name and gender. I don't know how that works or anything, and so I'm reaching out, trying to figure out how to make this happen. He's on Social Security and he's disabled, so his finances are very limited. I’m trying to find some kind of legal guidance. We somehow get connected to Just Law and this lawyer, Jessica, and she decides to guide us pro-bono. She sends us an email with 108 all of the steps that we need to take, all the papers, where we can find ‘em, everything we need to do. This is before the legislation has been passed in Utah that guides the courts on how to do name and gender marker changes, so we have to go through each of the name change paperwork and add the words ‘and gender marker change.’ We have to kind of create and make our own court documents so that it satisfies what we're trying to do. This is my first name change process, and I'm making it up as we go and just being guided by Jessica, the lawyer, through email. I'm pretending I'm a, what's the word? What's the person who does the lawyer paperwork stuff? MK: A paralegal. ZB: Paralegal, yeah. So I'm playing paralegal—just put on another hat that I've never wore before. I'm helping John prepare his papers and get it all ready and make appointments because there's lots of things that you need to take to court with you: going to the doctor and discussing these things, and getting into therapy and working on those things, and getting all of your ducks in a row, collecting all of the evidence that you need. Part of the requirements is living as your preferred gender for at least a year and using that name and things like that. John is transitioning into this world that he's always wanted to live in, and he said, “Part of the reason that I've waited until now is because I finally feel safe to come out because my grandfather's passed away. I just couldn't do it until now. I had to wait for him to go because he never would have allowed this." I'm like, "Okay, all right, that's fair. Let's get it done now." His 30th birthday was in September of 2020, and so our mission was to hurry up and try to get this done as much as possible before his 30th birthday. COVID slowed everything down, so it was hard, but I helped walk him through the whole process. 109 I was amazed at the support and embracing acceptance in RISE, and so along the way, I myself was also feeling comfortable and confident. All this stuff with LO was also happening at the same time, and so we look back at my story and I also started transitioning in 2020. I got on my testosterone in May of 2020. John and I, we're transitioning together. Now I'm familiar with how the paperwork is done, so I start creating, mine like, "Okay, I know how to do this. I don't need a lawyer. I can do it, too." The difference is, John's in Weber County and I'm in Davis County, so I'm having a lot of anxiety about all of the rumors. It's come down that a whole group of judges in Davis County have decided that they do not have the legal precedents to make court decisions on gender marker changes. So there's a big ol’ group of people that are in limbo, waiting on gender marker changes at the next court level. MK: District courts? ZB: Now people are waiting on the Supreme Court at state level. Usually it’s county court, district court, and now you have to level up to the next level. I had a lot of anxiety about filing my own papers because I heard a lot about the gender markers getting held up. I was helping John push his stuff through in Weber County, and I knew he was going to be good to go, but I was sitting here thinking, "Well, if I file my paperwork in Davis County and it gets denied or tabled, then I'm going to be stuck in court for a long time,” because you have to live in the county for 12 months and be a resident. So I start reaching out to other people who have successfully done it, and I'm having people go, "Okay, well, I'm not going to go on record in writing to tell you how to do this, but I'll have a private conversation with you." I'm having people say, "Look, your best bet is probably to get a PO box in Salt Lake County because the judges in Salt Lake County are just following the 110 name change rules and approving them." Or people are suggesting, "You need to talk to your friends and family in Salt Lake County and use their address." I changed all my paperwork to use my daughter’s address in Murray, she lives there part time. I was like, "Okay, well, she's my daughter, she's my blood. Part of me lives there.” But I have integrity and honesty, and I could not bring myself to testify that I had lived in Salt Lake County for at least a year. I redid my paperwork multiple times with different addresses and counties just because I tried to go by the advice. I even had a lawyer give me an unofficial, ‘I'm not your lawyer, I'm not your professional person, off-the-record’ advice that said, "Your best bet is probably to go through Salt Lake courts because you have a high likelihood of not getting what you want in Davis County." That's how big of a deal it was. So I held off filing my paperwork for quite a while and I revisioned multiple times. So obviously we're in 2020 and I'm in my transition. I grew a lot from all the education that I needed in order to support John in his transition and to help him with his executive functioning that he needed to get through to get all of those things. I did tell the LO story, and I spoke about August of 2020 when I ended up putting myself in the hospital. Then I had my amazing moment of growth, reading Timber Hawkeye’s Buddhist Boot Camp book. It changed my life in so many ways; from August to October I had a lot of growth. That brings us to October of 2020. I did as much as I could to help John progress with his gender journey. I had been teaching Safety Care at RISE Services, which is a method in crisis deescalation that all of the staff and professional parents and everybody need to know and practice. There's verbal and environmental prevention methods, there's in-themoment de-escalation methods, and then there's physical management methods. I became an instructor for that and I was a trainer for that for two and a half years. 111 I had been working for RISE for four years at this time. In October of 2020, the weekend before my four-year anniversary, I get a message from the director telling me that they'd like to see me on Monday in the office. I have a lot of anxiety, so my brain's just going on and on and on and on about, “What could this be about?” I don't really get write-ups or in trouble or anything, but I'm still constantly thinking, "What did I do? Did I do something wrong?" I finally settled on, “Okay, well, my four-year anniversary is coming up, so it's probably something to do with that, right? That's the only thing that makes sense because I haven't broken any rules, I haven't had any conflict with anything, anybody. That's got to be it.” So I show up on Monday, first week of October, and there's my immediate boss and then the director and then another person from H.R., and they're all in there. I'm like, "Whoa, what's going on?" They sit me down and they're like, "We got to talk about some stuff. You taught Safety Care last week and there were complaints against you." The first part of the complaint was that I overshared, and I made the training all about me, and that made people uncomfortable. I reflected on it for a minute and I'm like, "All right. I can see how that could be the interpretation of things." I owned it. When I taught Safety Care last Saturday, my ice breaker for the room was, “Has COVID brought anything positive into your life?” My answer was that I'm a part of the LGBTQ community, and I have learned that RISE Services as an employer is a very supportive community. That's all I said. I didn't say I'm transgender. But obviously, I had been in RISE for four years, and so these people had seen my transition. They watched it, they witnessed it, they saw me go from one to another. 112 I recognized that part of me making the training about myself is that for me, safety care was empathy training. Rather than teach people perspective of usversus-them, ‘they have these problems and this is how we manage them,’ I would shift the focus into, ‘well, everybody has something.’ On any given day, there are so many different contributing factors that affect our ability to manage our own emotions and their ability to manage their own. Being mindful of these things can help us all have a better outcome. These things that we're learning can be beneficial with our relationships and interactions with the public, our family, our siblings, our children, our spouses, the lady at the gas station, the man at the grocery store. Just having empathy and understanding that missing your meds, or having a bad day, or being in pain, or having anxiety, or missing breakfast, or being tired—all of these things can contribute to emotion regulation. A lot of times I would point out something I had done that had escalated somebody else, or made it harder for me to de-escalate the situation, or prevent something, or think clearly enough, or to keep myself from being offended when somebody said or did something. Because a lot of times, we engage in power struggles because we're trying to be right, or we're trying to stay focused on our mission instead of assessing what this person needs in that moment. So when I do my trainings, I try to be vulnerable and say, “Hey, this is the mistake I made in this moment when this person bit me, and I could have done this differently.” I kind of opened that space that if I own my mistakes, other people can feel comfortable with being vulnerable. Even if they're not verbal about it, they can at least mentally go, “Okay, I could have done this differently.” In the future, they can kind of think about how their actions affect others. The staff had to do these trainings every year, and sometimes when you do training with people who have been professional parents for 20 years, they just 113 want to come in, get the stamp that says, ‘I've been there,’ and get the heck out. I get that. Some people have egos, and I get that, too. Now, I've had two complaints against me the entire time I've worked at RISE Services, and they've been from the same exact couple. Two years prior, that same exact couple complained against me when I first started being a trainer, and they also complained against me this time. Now, I was more than willing to have a conversation and discuss my training approach and also to discuss my oversharing problems, because apparently, if you admit that you're a part of the LGBTQ community, it makes people uncomfortable and that's oversharing. I was not aware of that. I still don't understand how that's inappropriate because I didn't go into any detail. I didn't mention I was transgender, I didn't mention anything about my sexuality, I just said I feel comfortable and safe in this employment with this employer and this community. I don't know what I did wrong in oversharing because they didn't elaborate. The next part of the complaint against me is what baffles the hell out of me. I think it's just made up BS because somebody wanted to have some kind of legitimate complaint against me. First off, I'm ADHD and on the spectrum. I’m high energy, I have expression and for me, in my training, I'm really good with roleplays. So during these trainings, I'm going closer to the trainees and I'm popping in and out of scenarios, like, “Oh my gosh, you hit me,” and somewhat being dramatic. I’m doing it on purpose, because I feel like that shock factor is better in the classroom than it is in the moment when you're trying to figure out what to do. I have a stack of after-training surveys about how people appreciate my training approach and how it keeps them engaged. The time goes by so fast because it's not just bookwork and reading and talking and lectures. It's a great training experience. That's been the feedback I've received. 114 But their complaint was that I had ‘concerning, eruptive, disruptive behavior that was telltale signs of drug use.’ They pretty much described me as ‘spastic, unpredictably energetic, hyperactive, and concerning.’ They also describe me as ‘causing people anxiety’ and ‘an overall stressful situation.’ They describe me as a ‘tweaker’, and so an administration of people who have never met me decided that that was grounds for a drug test. I said, “Did you speak with my immediate supervisors who are familiar with my regular behavior, which is high energy and happiness? ‘Come on, let's go. Let's get better motivated. Yay!’ I kept trying to engage with other people. What is wrong with my personality? People have always liked my personality.” My immediate supervisors are like, “Well, now there's an investigation and a drug test is required.” Utah is a medical cannabis state, and I do have at least six qualifying medical conditions—fibromyalgia, autism, chronic pain, severe connective tissue disorders, I could go on and on and on. I have a medical cannabis card, and I use medical cannabis at night to relieve my pain or to help with insomnia and whatnot. So I said, “I was not under the influence of any illegal drugs during my training because if I used medical cannabis, I wouldn't be able to function or focus during training." Obviously, medical cannabis would not have those behaviors. I was identified as a tweaker-type person because of my natural personality, and they required a drug test because of my personality. They told me at the meeting that I could either choose not to take the drug test and lose my job, or they said I can provide them with my doctor's letter that explains my medical conditions and go do the drug test. I was like, "Oh, okay, so I'm safe. I'll just provide them with a doctor's letter. They'll do the drug test, and that's fine." So I went and did the drug test and I'm thinking my job is saved because I had 115 the letter, right? I was under the impression that the policies indicated that drug and alcohol use was not allowed on the job, and I did not use drugs and alcohol on the job, ever. I always did my job. When the drug test came back, they called me back in the office and informed me that because they receive federal funds from Medicaid and DSPD, their policies indicate that when the local, state, and federal laws do not align, they have to follow the strictest laws. Because marijuana is illegal on the federal level, they had to terminate me. So they fired me. I strongly believe that it had more to do with my LGBTQ status, and I think that I was targeted because of that, but I can't prove it. I've always done my job, and marijuana has never intervened or interrupted that, and I think that's really messed up. So they let me go and I fell into a pit of despair because I loved that job. That was my self-actualization in Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Not only did it pay the bills, but I had a soapbox to preach and teach others how to treat people. I had a position where I got to mentor others and engage with people and support others. I also had opportunities to learn about myself and also how to support my family. All of us in my home, we all have some kind of neurodiversity going on, and so learning to support special needs helps me run my house better. So losing that job really was hard on me. Throughout that job, I was repeatedly called an advocate. I used to get really pissed off about things, and so sometimes, my boss's boss would come in and check on her and be like, "Are you okay?" after I had gone in and vented to her about things that were wrong, and she's like, "Oh, no, I'm absolutely fine.” That's how expressive I was about things that were wrong. but my boss, bless her heart, she was amazing. She always called me an advocate, and I always thought I was a pain in the ass. But she just kept saying, 116 "You're such an advocate, you're such an advocate," and the squeaky wheel gets the grease. So even though the ending of my job wasn’t great, it was the best damn job I ever had. It gave me confidence and a voice and taught me that my voice has power and it taught me to be a squeaky wheel because you can make things happen when you're annoying. I remember a lot of times when I was working, because of my disabilities, I kept thinking, "I want to go back to school. How can I keep working, keep managing my household, and go back to school all at the same time? I don't know how to incorporate these things." It was like my job was holding me back because I couldn't see life beyond that job. I couldn't move out of the area; I couldn't bring myself to move on. It was almost like I would hit my ceiling there, but I couldn't move past that because I was so in love with the people I supported and I was so in love with my position. As my disabilities progressed, my employment adapted to me. I couldn't squat or bend or lift people anymore, so I just no longer worked with that population. I worked with people that I could use my voice and my mind and my brains, and so things just continually worked. So when I lost my job and I start looking for a job, I'm like, “I don't know what I can do.” I'm looking at all these job descriptions: “I can't do that. I can't do that. I can't do that. Oh, my gosh." I don't know what I can do. I feel like my only option is to go back to school because I can't use my body anymore. I need to use my brain. Unfortunately, I don't have the credentials to just jump into a position that is designed to just use your brain because most entry-level jobs are grunt work. You use your body, and my body is spent between being a CNA, being in the military, and my genetic problems. I need to transition into using my mind, but I don't know how to do that, and pay the bills, and take care of my family, and keep living where I am, and keep my car, and take care of four kids. My sister, KY, who we've been 117 living together for years and raising kids together, she's decided to move to Oregon, and so now I'm going to be on my own with that, too. I'm terrified of all the life changes that are just coming at me and hitting me. I don't know what happened, but the universe opened up and it spoke to me and everything aligned in October 2020. Within two weeks of losing my job, my head is spinning. What are we going to do? I fell into a pit of despair, I started drinking a lot. And then my veterans' disability, miraculously, as if it was intended by fate, came through and got increased from 70% service-connected to 100%. I had applied for that over a year prior, and so they had been investigating it, so there was a year of back pay that also came with that. All of a sudden, I just go look at my bank account to see how the hell I'm going to buy groceries, and there's like $15,000 in my bank account. I'm like, "What the hell is this?" I'm thinking, “It's a mistake, don't touch it.” I'm looking around all over the place and I figure out that it's from the VA, so I jump into the Department of Affairs, and then I realize what it is and I'm like, “Oh my God.” Now my monthly disability check is more than doubled, and it replaces my income that I was getting between my disability plus my monthly earned income. I'm like, “Oh my God, I don't have to get a job. I know how to survive off of this much money. I can pay my bills. I can do this.” And all of a sudden hope just jumped into my world. I said, "It's time to go to school. The universe is speaking to me." I'm so excited right now. Look, I get goose bumps, it's crazy. I get to go to school. I don't have to worry about managing my energy and my chronic disease, because between going to the doctor's all the time, and all the therapy, and all of the massage therapy, and all of the med management, and managing my children and their special needs and all of their appointments, and then going to school and homework and all of that—all of the things I couldn't figure out how to do, plus work. 118 Being able to just put everything aside and say, “Okay, I can just work on managing my family, myself, my home, and schoolwork. The bills are paid.” I took that $15,000 and I opened a savings account for each kid, and I put a couple grand in each one. I paid off one of my vehicles and I paid down on another one and I paid off all my debt. I paid like three months of rent, and I paid ahead on all my utilities. Everything was paid. I was like, “We are squared away.” I started looking at getting into school and that was huge. The universe said, “Zane, go to school.” All of that time at RISE, all of those times I kept advocating for people, and my passion for advocating for others, and how much I cared to make things right—I told myself, "I'm going to infiltrate this system, and I'm going to fix it." So I started looking into Weber State, and I applied for social work, and I got in. I got really hard and heavy and serious in Operation Get Back Into School. I started applying for vocational rehabilitation through the state and I started making appointments with Weber State advisors and getting prepared to get into school. When I met with the advisors, I was really stressed out because my email was still my married birth name. I was at least able to get my maiden name back because I had legal documentation that stated what my current legal name was, so they changed my email address to Chandi Bates. At least I had Bates, which was okay, but I still wasn't happy about that for a lot of reasons. So I started emailing people and asking if there was a way to have a preferred name. They put the preferred name of Zane in some spots in the system, but unfortunately, anybody and everybody that ever accessed my W-number had my birth name, and every appointment that I had to make with all my advisors, I had to use my Weber email, so it was all based on my birth name. Then I would have to introduce myself by my preferred name, and so that was kind of a struggle. 119 When I would ask them, "Hey, how can we do something about this?" I just kept getting brick-walled with, ‘policy this, software this, policy that.’ I was really frustrated because I was aware that other colleges and universities had systems and software already implemented where people could use their preferred names, and that their birth names were embedded deep in the administration to where only access was only available as needed. Like Salt Lake Community College—I had many friends that were able to do that, and even the University of Utah had policies and software in place that is protected. As a matter of fact, even my own children's elementary school had software where my child's birth name was on the administrative places, but they went by their initial of J. That was their email address, that was all their sign-in information, that was what was on their roster in class, that was what the teacher saw, that was what was in every program they were in. It was on their report card, it was on their letters home. The only place that their birth name was was on the administrative paperwork. I didn't understand why it couldn't be like that at Weber State. I talked to so many different administrative people, and eventually I was connected with Jayson Stokes. He empathized really well with me. He would call me and communicate with me. I also had an advocate from the VA that was also communicating with Weber State, trying to see what could be done. We were like, “Hello, this is really affecting gender dysphoria. This is really affecting mental health. It's a big issue.” At the time, Title IX, the protections for LGBTQ, were not in place. Those protections were not a legal statute because they had been paused from the Trump administration, so I didn't have those legal protections anymore or at that time. That kind of hurt, but eventually I was given a little bit of leeway. They changed my name in Canvas, so I was at least able to start school in January where my name in 120 canvas was Zane. That was a good start, but things still didn't align because if I had to do collaboration with any of my classmates, then my email still showed my birth name. That was really stressful. I had some really good professors; one taught Foundations of College Success. I decided to take that one just so I could ease back into college life and get an idea of how to be successful, you know? I had an amazing professor, Nancy Jarvis, and I messaged her on a Sunday. I was like, “I'm struggling with this assignment.” She's like, “Hey, let's have a Zoom meeting.” She met with me on a Sunday and we started out talking about the assignment, but really it boiled down to, I was freaking out about having to meet on Google Docs with my teammates and my email being there. I was like, “Oh my God, you just outed me to my classmates.” She realized that this wasn't a student academic problem, this was a student support problem. I came out to her because I felt safe having that conversation with her, and I'm like, "I'm transgender, and this is what my issue is, and this is what's going on with my name." She gave me special permission to use my personal Gmail. That was her compromise. I could at least breathe with her, I already felt comfortable with her. That was a little bit of a breath of fresh air, and she began to advocate for me. She's like, “You know what? All right, I'm going to make some calls.” She got a hold of Jason Stokes as well, and that's how she said something about how she was a part of some retention committee. I was telling her, “I'm on the verge of quitting. I can't do this. I can't sign into my math without [my] deadname. I'm struggling to check my email, I'm struggling to get on eWeber because I have to type out my birth name every single time. I'm 121 struggling to get on ALEKS. I'm struggling to do the things that I'm supposed to do.” It was just overwhelmingly triggering. I kept telling myself, "Zane, just grow up and do it. Push yourself. Why can't you just do it?" But it was all day, every day and all night, every night. I couldn't do my homework. I couldn't focus on what I was supposed to be doing because I would cry or I would just ignore it and dive into alcohol or just avoid and withdraw. I couldn't focus on what I was supposed to be doing because I was so hyper-focused on everything that was triggering. I was angry at myself for allowing it to control me like that. It was a crisis and I almost quit. Nancy said, "No, we have to do something. Something's got to change,” and so she started advocating for me. That's when I was put in touch with the mental health section of Weber State. I was directed to apply with them, and I was also connected with that awesome transgender support group. I participated with that for quite a while. I'd also been participating with a transgender support group with the VA, and it was very interesting being in those two different spaces because the social dynamics of the college group versus the social dynamics of the veterans group was completely different, like night and day. I was really thrilled to be in those two different spaces because they were different supports, and so that helped a little bit. But I still was not happy, and it definitely pushed me to get over my fears of engaging with the Davis County courts, and I just decided I had to go for it. In January of 2021, I sucked it up, I finished all my paperwork, I crossed my fingers. I knew that it was a lottery of what judge you get because you had a 25% chance of getting a judge that would approve it and a huge chance of getting a judge that wasn't going to get you what you want. I collected as much data and evidence as I could, and I reached out to the same lawyer that had guided us for John's, Jessica Couser, and I explained my situation to her. I said, “I'm about to file my paperwork 122 in Davis County. I'm a disabled veteran.” I'm filing it with a fee waiver even though I was over the income limit because I reached out and explained, “I just lost my job in 2020. I'm disabled, veteran, single parent, four kids.” I provided them with all of my bills, my lease, everything. They went ahead and approved the waiver anyway, so I didn't have to pay the $375 to file. Amazingly enough, I was assigned to the Honorable Judge Ronald Russell. I did some research on him. He had just barely been seated in Davis County in January of 2021. He was a brand-new district court appointee, and Jessica had decided to take my case pro bono because she saw an opportunity to educate the new justice. So I provided her with everything that I had already turned in, and she turned in some more supporting evidence, which was just guiding the judge on all of the laws and regulations already in place that would allow a judge to approve a gender marker change—and a name change, in my circumstances. My court hearing was scheduled for March 29 of 2021, and so I waited three months for that. In the meantime, I was still fighting with Weber State, a couple of weeks into the spring semester. I was a little bit passive; I was trying to be understanding. I spoke with an amazing general advisor, Nicholas Fehr. The original reason for sitting down with them and having the appointment was just to kind of talk about the semester and what's next. I sensed that he may be somehow associated with the LGBTQ community, and I felt safe being vulnerable with him. So I shared with him a lot of my frustrations with the school in regards to my name and a lot of my frustrations in regards to what I was dealing with, and he kind of got it. I told him I was kind of passive. I was like, “This thing angers me, and this thing frustrates me, and this is really stressful and hard. At least they changed my 123 name in Canvas, but I really hate this thing about my birth name and my email address. It's really killing me. Software, policies, I get it, it just really sucks.” He's like, "No. The policies need to change. The software needs to be updated. This is not acceptable. Don't sit back and just say it's okay, it's not okay. I've got your back. I'm your ally. This is a HIPAA violation." I was like, "You know what? You're right. Nobody else has Diabetes Dan or Schizophrenic Jane or ADHD Fred. Nobody else's email address outs their medical status. My email address literally tells everybody that I'm transgender. Gosh darn it, Nick. You're right. Title IX doesn't apply to me because it's not activated anymore, but HIPAA is still a damn law. I have a medical certification, and I know all about HIPAA. Why didn't I think of that? Thank you Nick Fehr, sir. I'll be back.” Jayson Stokes probably went to bed with my name on his mind because I started sending more emails and more emails. I don't even remember all their names, but I sure did bug people. I said, “My email shouldn't be this. You're outing me." I made up so many possible emails about how my medical information was being sent to anybody and everybody and it was not okay. I fought ‘em and I fought ‘em, and finally they said, "You know what? You're right." I won before my name was legally changed. My email address was changed to Zane Bates in January of 2021. Weber State gave me what I wanted. Now I was able to make my appointments at Starfish and I didn't have to out myself to every damn person. There was some kind of alignment in the system that if I needed to take a test somewhere, it had the birth name that was aligned with my damn ID, but Zane Bates was my email. That’s what needed to be done, because why does the email have to be my damn birth name? That's when I learned that there was a task force being created, and they were looking at it because I was telling them, "Your software is wrong. Get new software. Your policies are wrong. Make new policies." 124 I had another professor who was a really good ally. His name is Barrett Bonella, and he was my Intro to Social Work professor. In that class, I realized that I had a very rare opportunity to educate others, and I took that opportunity very seriously. So I met with Barrett and I said, "I don't want to dominate this class, but every chapter we go through applies to me." I kept meeting with him, going, "I don't want to talk too much, I'm worried about it." He goes, "Look, because of your age, because of your work experience, your parenting experiences, because of your life experiences, because of your veteran status, because of everything that you've been through versus most of the people in this class—fresh out of high school, haven't had a career, have not had kids yet—they don't have as much to contribute to the conversation because they haven't been there, done that. You're not dominating the conversation, you're adding to it. You're giving them points of reference to think about, and I promise you that your contributions are valuable. These students are going to have an experience in this class that many other classes and semesters will not have because you are in this class." It made me feel safe and it made me feel valuable as a contributor to that Intro to Social Work class. Both Professor Bonella and Professor Jarvis, I invited them to participate on that task force. Professor Bonella already participated in other boards—I'm not exactly sure the ones he was in, but for diversity and treating people right or whatever. Professor Jarvis was IT. So I was like, “You guys are perfect to be on that task force.” They both were like, “Heck yeah.” I got them connected with the person that I was speaking with, and so they all participated in that. I'd love to get an update to see how that's going. I know that a lot of people are able to use their preferred name on Canvas. I really hope that people are able to have their email addresses 125 use the preferred name without having to fight so hard. I really hope that that's a thing now, or that this software allows for it. Now we got to talk about social work, because I'm in this social work class. I'm going to school to learn how to be an advocate and to learn how to overcome my weaknesses because over time, my body has been degenerating and I've lost a lot of my strength physically. Now my mission is to overcome my executive functioning weaknesses so that I can shift my contribution to society. I'm going through the VA and I'm working with professionals to help overcome a lot of my executive functioning issues. My mission is, “Zane, you're going to have to challenge yourself, and you're going to get over it, and you have to work on this.” I'm motivated and I love helping people and I love taking care of people. This is what I want to do because the system of social work is broken and it needs to be fixed. I'm going through this class, and each chapter is just bringing me to my knees. It's just my empathy. I'm an empath, and I feel so deeply reading about these people and learning about these people and writing about these people and talking about these people and empathizing with these people. I've lived among these people and been these people, and now I'm speaking and discussing in spaces with people who are not these people. I'm realizing every chapter's about me, except for racism, and that chapter even breaks my heart. When we read the LGBTQ chapter, you're supposed to write about how you're going to check your own biases and set them aside so that you can serve the LGBTQ population from an unbiased perspective, as well as people with different religions or different cultural backgrounds or different races or different beliefs. I'm over here thinking, “I could absolutely support them. Heck, yeah. That's my people.” 126 But I'm starting to realize I would really have a problem with somebody who was transphobic or homophobic or a child molester or a rapist or a wife beater. So now I'm starting to realize, “Yeah, I could definitely support people of oppressed populations, but I don't think I can manage myself well enough on the other side of the table. What about when there's hate towards me?” I'm starting to realize that I have biases against people who have biases, and I don't know if I can manage myself. I'm starting to recognize that with my bleeding heart and my empathy, working in this field would kill me. All this red tape and rules and steps and loops and hoops, I couldn't do that because for me, I do what's right. It's not necessarily by the rules, it's by what's right, and sometimes the rules are not what's right. There's too much wrong with that system. I can't do it. Eventually, I'm taking a science class for one of my obligations to check off, and I take an Intro to Anthropology. And my mind is blown. I realized that I could either A, do what everybody else tells me I'm good at—social work—and pretty much put myself in an early grave, or B, I can change my major and focus on what my brain is always obsessing about on a regular basis without even trying, and use my advocating skills and my passion for helping others on a volunteer basis. That's where my social work missions will be because then I can decide what kind of volunteer work I want to do, who I want to volunteer with, what missions I want to support, how much time I want to put into it. So I start shifting my focus and I start looking into changing my degree. Now I'm working on a Bachelor of Integrated Studies combining anthropology, neuroscience, and biology. My brain is obsessed with predicting how human behavior is affecting natural selection and evolution and how our actions and behaviors in society are going to affect the future. Even in regards to climate 127 change and survival of the human race, I've got a lot of ideas and predictions and I keep being right. So we're going to change my degree. The last little skip is back to March of 2021. Obviously, Weber State wouldn't do a full name change, as you're aware, because you need to have legal documents that prove it so that they can change it in the system. But I did have that little win of getting my email address and I was over the world, and that is what enabled me to stay in school and get focused. I also learned that advocating for yourself is good, and so I started advocating like crazy. Voc rehab said I needed to be a full-time student in order to be in the program, and I was like, “Nope, I can't handle full-time student status.” Not only am I in school, but I'm also doing speech therapy through the VA so that I can help work on executive functioning, educating myself to enable me to be employed. I'm also going all-in on my mental health, at least 3 to 4 hours a week on mental health between groups, individual therapy, gender therapy. So I'm working on all of these things, working on my mental health and my physical health. That's at least another eight or more hours a week. That's practically a full-time job just managing all of that. So I advocate for myself. I get a letter from my doctor that says all of these other things are contributing to my employability as well. I'm really glad that I advocated for myself. I was also able to advocate to all of the different subscriptions that are required through Weber State because every time you have to sign up for whatever is required for each individual class, you got to use your Weber email. I was able to advocate for myself and be like, “Look, I'm not that person, I'm this person,” and they would change it. I learned that rules are bendable, you just have to advocate for yourself. I spent a lot of my life keeping my quote-unquote ‘weaknesses’ a secret because I was raised to believe that you're supposed to hide those and fake it till 128 you make it. But really, that's not how it should be done. You should face it so you can make it. I started recognizing that if I mentioned to the professionals, “Hey, I struggle with this,” there's a professional for that. I recently started teaching my children and recognizing myself that so much of my adulthood, I spent feeling like a failure because I was trying to be an entire village for myself and for my family. That was a level of perfectionalism [sic] that nobody can attain. Once you realize and recognize that you cannot wear every hat of a village and that you need a village to be a person—not to raise a child—then you can grow to be anybody that you want to be. I started recognizing, these are my strengths and these are my weaknesses, and I started spelling out places that I needed help and growth. I started to recognize that I don't have to wear this hat. There is another professional that can wear that hat and be in this village and be a part of the village, and that's okay. As a parent, as a person, it's not expected for me to be a lawyer, a fireman, a teacher, a janitor, a lunch lady. That's why there are so many different professional pathways, because not everybody is everything. That's okay, to not feel like you have to be a jack of all trades. Perfectionalism [sic] is an unrealistic goal. You aim high because you're going to miss 100% of the shots that you don't take. If you're always aiming to perfect it before you shoot, you won't get it, so just keep shooting and keep aiming. It doesn't matter if you hit it, because if you just wait until you're going to get that perfect shot, you're missing all the ones you could have made. It’s okay to just do what you're good at. That's what I'm focusing on, strengthening my strengths and accepting the things I'm not so good at and focusing on the things I am and outsourcing for the things that I need support on. Over the last 16 months, that's what I've been doing. I've been reaching out to the professionals to support our 129 family in the things that I'm not so great at, and I'm reaching out to help me grow in things that I can grow in. I go with the flow and I’m almost to March 29, 2021. My court hearing. Lots and lots of anxiety. I'm about to see a judge who I'm his very first gender marker change case, and I'm scared. Everything is waiting on this court date. I cannot move forward with anything. My brain is thinking, “We just got to get to this court date and it's all downhill.” All I can see is the top of this cliff, of that hearing. We just got to get the boulder to the top of this hill and then push it over and then—whoosh. We're done, it's golden. We just got to get there. March 29, 2021 gets there, and we have our meeting, and Jessica, my lawyer, introduces me to the judge. We pretty much just go through my petition line by line—this person was born as this name. This is their birthday. This is their preferred name. The judge introduced himself and chatted with me a little bit. He was amazingly respectful, and he was genuinely interested in the education. He allowed himself to be open-minded and to be educated, and Jessica did an amazing job presenting the information with him. He was extremely mindful of respecting my boundaries. He asked my preferred pronouns and he asked how to address me. He did not address me with my birth name at all. He used my preferred name the whole entire time, even though we weren't even officially there yet. He kind of just talked about what we were going to do and how we were going to do it. Then he banged his gavel and he said, "From this day forward, you are legally and officially Zane." He spelled out my middle name because I made it complicated, and he's like, “B-E-K-A-Y-Z-I Bates.” And that was that. Ding, ding, ding [mimicking bell]. It was legal. My gender marker was changed to male, and there were some extra indications that said that my birth certificate could be changed and they would issue 130 it as an original document rather than an amended document. In all actuality, I did not want my gender marker changed to male. I wanted my gender marker changed to X. I want my gender removed. I don't identify as male or female. I don't want to be in a box. But unfortunately, in the state of Utah, gender marker X, unless you're born intersex, is not very likely to get that. Also the licensing, they don't have a gender marker X, and most legal documents don't have a gender marker X option yet. Society is not ready for a non-binary option. My preferred pronouns are they/them or xe/xim/xer. But society's not really ready for that, so I allow he/him just because I don't want to fight with others. People who understand and get it, I tell them the preferred is they/them. It also had an extra addendum, because it was something I was concerned about, that my children's birth certificates could also be changed and issued as an original document. The ‘mother’ status could be changed to either a ‘father’ or ‘parent’. So I pushed that boulder up to the top of the mountain, and I was ready to just push it right over the top. But when I got up to the top, I realized that it was only going to get rolling a little bit, it was not all downhill. That was the beginning of a massive climb after climb after climb, and a whole bunch of boulders, pushing and rolling on a whole bunch of different mountains all at once. Now the hard work started. The name change was really just the first big victory, the catalyst that started all the hard work of driver's license, Social Security card, the VA, Weber State, IRS. The VA has so many different departments, and they don't talk to each other, so I literally had to provide documents for every single different department. I feel like this is probably a really good place for me to pause. MK: One question we had asked. Where did the name Zane come from? 131 ZB: When I was a teenager, I used to participate in a role-playing game called “The Camera”. It was a live-action vampire masquerade role-playing game. We used to create our own costumes and create our own characters. I didn't have the language to say ‘nonbinary,’ I didn't even know what nonbinary was, but I added a genderless character. They use they/them pronouns, but I didn't want to call them a boy or a girl. They were a genderless being—a Lycan, not a werewolf, but a were-being. Their name was Autumn Zane. It was an alter ego that I had a long time ago, and so I held on to that. And Bekayzi—my entire life since I was in seventh grade, I went by Becca or Bec. Rebecca was my middle name, and my parents informed me that if I had been born anatomically male, I would have been named Casey James. So I took Becca and Casey and I put them together and I spelled it funky, and I created the name Bekayzi. My middle child absolutely loves that name so much. They have informed me that they will be naming their child Bekayzi regardless of their gender because Bekazyi is a pretty damn cool name and it is now a family name. So that's where Zane and Bekayzi come from. Yeah, so I think any other questions I didn't cover would be good in the next meeting. MK: Okay, sounds good. I think we have a couple. ZB: One of the questions that they actually asked was about medical, male versus female, but I think that needs to be addressed in a different conversation. I pretty much covered Weber State stuff. Hopefully I've made things a little bit easier for current and future students. I hope that students are able to use their preferred name and have a preferred name for their email addresses. I know that sometimes they have to advocate for it, but I think that if they push forward, they should be able to. So that's a good thing. 132 I think that the next conversation would be about my volunteer spaces, my medical experiences, and my family response to my transition. Those are three things that will be covered in the next conversation, and that pretty much just would bring us to now. MK: Okay. Let’s stop recording. [Due to time and scheduling constraints, the interview ends here without further sessions.] 133