Oral History Program Alex Florence Interviewed by Sarah Singh and Lorrie Rands 7 & 21 September 2018 Oral History Program Weber State University Stewart Library Ogden, Utah Alex Florence Interviewed by Sarah Singh and Lorrie Rands 7 & 21 September 2018 Copyright © 2023 by Weber State University, Stewart Library iii 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: Florence, Alex, an oral history by Sarah Singh and Lorrie Rands, 7 & 21 September 2018, WSU Stewart Library Oral History Program, Special Collections & University Archives, Stewart Library, Weber State University, Ogden, UT. 1 Abstract: This is oral history interview with Alex Florence conducted on September 7 and 21, 2018 in the Stewart Library with Sarah Singh. Alex talks about being adopted, growing up in Utah, and coming to terms with his sexuality and eventual transition. He shares his time doing drag, the highs and lows of the transition process and his hopes for the future. Also present is Lorrie Rands. SS: It is September 7, 2018. This is Sarah Singh, and we are in the Stewart Library, interviewing Alex Florence about his life. Alex, welcome, thank you for agreeing to do this with us. Why don’t we go ahead and get started at the beginning? Tell us when and where you were born? AF: I was born December 4, 1979, in Mexico. My understanding, it was in Galeana, Chihuahua, Mexico. I was born there, and ended up coming up to the US about two months after I was born. There’s a lot of gray area, and it was not a super legal adoption that happened. My parents paid like three grand and a color TV for me, cause a color TV apparently back then was a big deal. Anyway, there was a group of polygamists down in that area, that are actually from Utah, and they trafficked kids over the border. I was part of that little trafficking, so they brought me over the border and brought me up to Utah, gave my parents a call and said, “Hey, remember that kid that you paid for and never got? The kid’s here now, do you still want her?” They were like, “Yeah, sure,” so they came and got me. Previously to getting me they had been given another child, a boy, who was born in January. All of a sudden, my parents became instant parents of almost twins, because we were only a month and six days apart. That’s the beginning of my life. 2 SS: So, growing up, was it just you and your brother? AF: Yeah, it was. My dad had been married two other times before, so he had eight other children. My dad’s older, he’s eighty-eight now, so when he got my brother and I, he was like fifty-one or something like that; he was an older dad. So it was just me, my brother, and my parents. We didn’t really have a lot of communication with my half brothers and sisters on my dad’s side at all, so I didn’t really know them, and they were so much older than I was. They were in their twenties already, some of them had their kids, and their kids are getting ready to have kids, so we didn’t really have a lot of communication at the time. SS: So you came up to Utah… AF: They dropped me off in Cedar City, Utah. That was where the lawyer that had this little side business of getting kids was located. SS: And then you grew up in? AF: I grew up in Layton. SS: Layton, that’s right. What was it like growing up in Layton? AF: It was fine, up until I got into elementary, and that was about the time I realized that skin wise, my brother and I were different. Everybody was like super-duper white, and we were not at the time, because we played outside a lot, so we were really dark. When we got into elementary, it was obvious to everyone else that we were a minority, and it wasn’t really told to us by our parents at all. My mom was very insecure about the adoption, for various reasons, mostly because it wasn’t super legal, but also I think she struggled with a lot of insecurities already, so we weren’t told about it, and it wasn’t really in my mind because I looked like 3 everybody else. You know, as a kid you're like, “I’d totally marry you.” I didn’t see anything other than possibly marrying my peers. When it was brought up to me on the playground when I was in first grade by someone, they asked me why I was so dark. They basically were like, “Why do you look like a brownie, and everyone else is so much whiter than you are?” I was like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know, am I weird now? I don’t know.” So I ran home and I was really upset about it, and I asked my mom. She said, “You’re just a special kid.” That sufficed. I was like six years old, I would be like, “Oh yay, I’m special.” But as time went on, and I was dealing with other things internally, with how I was feeling and how I was told to dress and things like that, it was obvious that I wasn’t really fitting into the very Caucasian culture of East Layton. I started feeling really, really different and kind of awkward. We grew up LDS, so at church they’d talk about the Book of Mormon and the Lamanites, the cursed people, and I was like, “Oh, am I cursed? I feel cursed already like for other things; am I more cursed now because of my skin?” It was kind of hard sometimes. There were definitely some struggles there. My brother didn’t really get it a lot, but growing up with females, they can be just cruel, and they will point out every difference that you have. LR: I know you don’t really know, but the city that you think you’re from in Mexico, was that one of the LDS settlements that they had? 4 AF: Yes, the LDS settlements that left from Utah and went down to Mexico. It was one of those, and I guess from what I’ve researched lately—because I’m trying to track connections of my adoption—it seems like there are three different Galeanas. There’s like Casa de Galeana, and then there’s another Galeana someplace else, so I’m trying to figure out which one I am from, because they both have settlements. LR: And what elementary school did you go to? AF: East Layton Elementary. It’s up by 89 actually. LR: I know where that is now. SS: So, growing up LDS, how was that for you? AF: As a kid, it was like, “Yay church,” but as a teenager, it was terrible. For me, I got into Young Women’s, and I didn’t feel like I fit in. I was super awkward, I was very much considered a tomboy, and those things were pointed out to me a lot, mostly from my own mother. Then internally, I pointed out how different I was to myself, like, “I don’t like wearing dresses, and I don’t like doing this and that, and I would prefer to play ball,” things like that. I just really struggled, enough to where I really hated going. I made the decision of, “Okay, do I go, do I not go? And if I go, I’m going to throw myself 100 percent into this, because it’s going to cure me of what I’m feeling. I’m going to throw myself into this as much as I can.” So I got really involved, and realized that there are other girls that are in Young Women’s that were just being left out, so I would try to befriend them and make a space for us because we weren’t popular, but we had each other. 5 I was really involved in the Young Women’s, the little presidencies they have within their groups, like Beehive President, then MIA Maid President, then Laurel President. I was really like, “Okay, if I put all of my faith into this church and into what they’re teaching, and they’re teaching that it’s not okay to have the feelings I’m having,” —which I was having feelings for females— “if I date and I get married, I’m going to be okay. God will save me, and I will get to the Celestial Kingdom.” So it was almost like I put on this façade, this mask, and acted really, really well. I was the best little churchgoer you’d ever meet, but internally I kind of felt like I was destroying something; I was destroying my own truth, and masking it with this culture, this religion, and as much as I wanted to believe it, and as much as I felt that I believed it, it was not doing me any good. SS: So, when did you start noticing that you were feeling different, that you had feelings towards females? AF: Yeah, I was in first grade and I had a student teacher. She was really cute and I just remember wanting to dress a certain way, like I had to wear these penny loafers, and I had to wear my pants a certain way. My mom tried to make me wear all these frilly things, but I was like, “No, I want to wear a t-shirt and a really nice wind jacket,” cause in my mind, that’s how I wanted to dress. Then I would make her little pictures and I would draw her little things and give them to her, and she was just really cute. I wish I could remember what her name was, but I think she was only there for a few months and then she left. I kind of felt really drawn, like, “She makes me have butterflies.” 6 Then when I was eight, my best friend, who lived down the street—we would play all the time and hang out—she was at my house one day, and in my mind, when you like somebody, you movie-kiss them. So, I movie-kissed her and she didn’t mind, she didn’t do anything, she was like, “Okay.” After that, I hung out with boys, and I wanted to be around the guys, but I didn’t really want to “like” the guys. When I got into second grade and third grade, the girls were giggly and, “He’s so cute.” I just kind of mimicked what they did, but I would think, “I really like his clothes. I really like how he’s dressing.” That was the first part of me being like, “I really like girls.” Gender-wise, though, that started probably when I was three or four; getting put into dresses and feeling really awkward like, “Did I do something wrong? I’m getting put into a dress, and my brother gets to wear pants to church and for pictures. What am I doing wrong?” Gender-wise, it was always just feeling like I was being shamed. That started really, really early, just feeling confused of the differences, how my brother was treated and how I was treated, like with the bathroom, or even hanging out with my dad. There were just always these boundaries that I had to stay within, if that makes sense. SS: Well yeah, ‘cause it was a different time; we’re talking the eighties, it was not something in mainstream culture. AF: No, not at all. SS: Just being a lesbian or gay was not a mainstream-discussed thing. AF: Right. Exactly. 7 SS: Okay. So, let’s switch back: you’re a teenager, which is always a hard part anyways, but you’re trying to fit into this mold. How was your life going forward as a teenager, trying to fit in? AF: As a teenager, obviously, you’re already awkward, you’re going through puberty. The things that stick out for me in those years is going through puberty and starting to have my period; it destroyed me. It was horrible. My mom made it this wonderful beautiful thing, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, am I gonna have to deal with this the rest of my life, because I feel like I shouldn’t be dealing with this. This doesn’t feel right to me.” Then starting to develop a chest I was like, “Okay, it’s small enough, and I can kind of wear big shirts and dress a certain way.” In school I would watch the guys, how they talked and walked, and I started trying to sit like them, and slouch like they were. I still retained a lot of female friends and did my best to keep, I guess what my teenage head said, a boundary of not liking them. It was hard, and when I think of it, I went through really bad depression and anxiety, and I didn’t know what that was at the time. I hated going to school for the social reason; I didn’t mind going to class, but socially, I just felt so out of place. The days I had gym, I was just like, “Oh, gosh, I have to be in a locker room with girls, and they’re changing in front of me. There’s a huge problem with this; I feel like this is wrong for me to watch females change.” So I would go into the bathroom stalls and I would change, and then just leave as quickly as possible. I found myself comparing myself to boys more than girls, as in how I looked, and that really messed with me. “What is my problem? I really should be 8 comparing myself to so-and-so, not to this guy over here, ‘cause I’m never going to look like him.” On top of dealing with all of that, I was dealing with a lot of anger with my adoption, because it had come out that I knew that I was adopted within my family. My mom, she used that as kind of a weapon, like, “I saved you from the streets of Mexico,” kind of thing. That made me really angry. “Why are you saying that? I’m a teenager and I’m a little angsty, but don’t throw that at me. That makes me feel worse and makes me feel like I was just some kind of a charity case that you just wanted to feel better about yourself.” I was going through anger with that, and in my junior high, it was Central Davis Junior High, I finally got into a mixed group of less Caucasian people. So now there were people that looked like me, but there was now the confusion of socially, what I am seeing is that I fit in with this group over here [gestures left], and I look like them, but I’ve been raised over here [gestures right] with all the very LDS church-going East Layton folk. Where am I supposed to fit in here? Over here [gestures left] I could dress as baggy, and now it’s the 90s, as I wanted, so the big shirts and the big pants and all that, but over here [gestures right] I was getting ridiculed for it. So I started inching towards here [gestures left], and these kids, unfortunately, were trying to be in a gang kind of thing, so I went through this period of time, which was maybe a year, of trying to hang out with these gang member kids, which didn’t resonate with me. “These kids are getting in trouble, they’re smoking, and they’re doing all this. I don’t want to get in trouble, and I’m not really about the smoking, but I want to hang out with 9 them because I look like them. Is that where I’m supposed to be?” That identity thing was just so confusing for me. I hung out with them for a period of time, but I just never felt like I fit in with them either. I just never felt I fit with anybody. That was about the time frame that I was like, “I got to make a decision if I’m going to be super-duper religious,” and so about ninth grade is when I was like, “Kay, I’m really going to throw myself in this religion, because I’m always going to have a place in the church. I’m going to find a place in the Church.” But even trying to do that, my soul was not resonating with anything I was doing. I don’t know if that answered your question. SS: So, you started dating? AF: Oh, dating. So junior high, I was like, “I’m going to go out with a lot of people, all these boys,” but for me to go out with them was more like, “I can hang out with them and watch them. If they want to hold my hand, well, okay, I’ll hold their hands.” It was a game for me; it was a very well-played game, which sounds like I’m crazy, but that’s how I just maneuvered through going steady or going out with guys. I would go out with like three different guys at the same time, and try to maneuver this situation. I could control something finally in my life, socially. So I did that for a while, because I couldn’t start dating till I was 16 ‘cause the LDS religion asks for that kind of thing. I did start dating when I was 16, and I got my first job at 16, at the Burger Bar in Layton. There were people that went to Northridge and people that went to Layton High, and that was basically the makeup of the teenage employees there. The girlfriends that I made there started dating the guys there, so I’m like, “I’ll start dating so we can all hang out.” 10 I started dating a particular guy named Dan, and he was a really nice guy, and luckily enough he went to Northridge. I went to Layton High, so when I started school the guys would ask me out, and I’d be like, “Well, I kind of have a boyfriend.” I could use that excuse, especially if I felt the guy at my school was looking to date me to be more than friends. You can go on a date with a friend that’s a guy, but if there was guys that were like, “I really like you,” it would make me feel real uncomfortable. So dating, I could easily maneuver through that because I had this “steady” boyfriend at Northridge. It was an awkward time, but I did what I was supposed to do. You were supposed to date, so I just did that. I dated Dan and once in a while I’d date some other guys from my school. But like if they tried to kiss me and stuff, I felt super-duper violated like, “That’s not what I want to do. I just want to hang out with you because I think you’re cool.” Usually because I liked the way he dressed, something like that. It was just really, really awkward, and somewhat violating to how I really felt. But I did date quite a bit, and other guys other than Dan, just because my mom was like, “You have to do this, this is what a good Mormon girl does. You date a lot of prospective mates.” I’m like, “Ugh. I’m only in high school and you’re talking about me getting married. That is not what I’m going for in my life.” So dating was just something I did. It was like autopilot. I feel like a lot of my teenage years was an autopilot type of deal. SS: Did you have any issues at school, ‘cause you said you dressed a little more on the masculine side than feminine. Did you deal with any issues or feel bullied, or 11 was it a little more accepted, because it was the 90s, where it was kind of that grunge look anyway? AF: I think by the time I got into ninth grade, or got into high school, I wanted to do something different. I wanted to fit in more; I really did, so I kept with the baggy pants, but I tried to get more feminine-looking shirts. I’m trying to remember, they were stretchier, I guess, and some of them had collars, so I felt good about that. It’s like a polo, but it showed more, that’s where I was kind of uncomfortable. So I don’t think I got bullied per se. If I did have a bully, it was my own mother. It was straight-up her. She hated how I dressed; even if I tried to dress more feminine, it was not right for her. It was like, “You look ugly today. Why do you have to look so ugly? Why do you have to do a ball cap, and why can’t you do your hair this way?” So she was my bully. I don’t feel like I really got bullied by other people in high school, and not really in church. If I wore a Levi skirt, which was the only thing I felt comfortable in, ‘cause it was the closest thing to Levis I could get, nobody really said anything as I got older. It was mostly her. SS: So you started dating a gentleman that went on his mission? AF: Yeah, that was Dan. I dated Dan from my sophomore year up until he left on his mission. We dated and he left on his mission the beginning of my senior year, and I was like, “Okay, I have a missionary out, I’m going to make this work.” So I get through my senior year, and I dated here and there a little bit, because again, that’s what you’re supposed to do. I really threw myself into more school activities, like show choir and things like that, just to keep a group of friends and guys around. In show choir, I was actually in the guys’ show choir, in their band, 12 so I could hang out with the guys, and know that it was safe to do that. I know that they weren’t looking at me like, “Let’s date,” more like, “Hey, you’re my buddy,” and that’s where I wanted to be. I graduated and Dan was still on his mission. I started at Weber State, down when they had the Davis Center by the Wal-Mart in Layton. I think it had to be a spring semester, I took a nutrition class and this is where my feelings could not be smashed down anymore. There was a girl in my class, she sat behind me and her name was Ali. She wore the ball cap and I could just tell she was somebody that I could connect with. I just watched her, more or less this whole time, but I had this huge crush on her. I still had this missionary out, and my closest friend at the time was in this class with me, and she was pretty LDS, so I didn’t want anybody to know I was having these feelings at all. I felt really lonely, like I couldn’t talk about how I was really feeling. So I started Dear John-ing my missionary, like, “Dear Dan, I just am feeling that this might not work out.” I don’t know why he just didn’t get it. I don’t know if he just didn’t read those letters, maybe he never received them, I really don’t know. Dan was out until that October, and Ali was in the spring semester class and my summer math class and I was like, “This is torture.” In my math class, she actually sat by me, and she said to me, we’re talking about tests or whatever, “Here’s my number, maybe we can get together and study.” For me I’m like, “Oh my gosh, my heart’s going to burst out of my chest, this is amazing.” This is the first time that I really felt like this for anybody. I gave her a call, and through our conversation, I told her, “I think that I have feelings for 13 girls, and I think you’re the only one that can understand.” She had never come out to me or anything, but she comes out to me, and so I tell her where I’m at. “I’m LDS, I have this missionary that just doesn’t get it, and I don’t want to write him and say, ‘Hey, I like girls,’ cause that would just cause a really big problem. I have my family, and specifically my mother, who is just controlling and it has to be a certain way. ‘You have to make me proud, and this is the only way you can do it.’” So we kind of talked through it, and then for some reason, I just kind of thought, “Okay, I can’t talk to her anymore, because this is becoming too real. I have to hide this portion of me for the rest of my life, cause my parents will hate me, and the Church is going to hate me. What if I hate myself because I lose everything that I’ve known my whole life?” So I stopped talking to her, and I’m like, “Dan’s coming home in a few months, I’m just going to make this work.” I end up changing jobs, and I go to work at this movie theater, and I meet this other guy. I’m like, “Maybe I’m supposed to marry this guy.” I’m trying to think of everything, and I don’t really tell Dan, cause he’s on his mission and it doesn’t really matter at this point. I start dating him, and he starts getting really serious cause he’s a lot older than I am. This is the first time I really have this make-out session with a dude, and we’re going to make out, and it is like the worst experience of my life for quite a few reasons. The one that sticks out in my mind though is that I feel like I’m doing something completely wrong, and I couldn’t figure out if I was doing it wrong because it wasn’t resonating with me, or because of my religious views at the 14 time. It just threw me for this huge loop, like, “I don’t even know how to handle this.” I was just in tears, just crying, thinking, “Oh my gosh, I have to repent for just everything that just happened.” I call my bishop, I go through all these lengths, and I talk to my bishop like, “Oh we made out.” The bishop’s like, “Okay, so… was it above the belt, below the belt? Help me understand.” I was like, “I don’t know, it was probably both,” cause I had no idea what sex really was; I didn’t know what making out really entailed. My bishop was like, “I think this is kind of just a normal experience.” I’m like, “Okay, I’m not going to go to Hell?” but I still just felt wrong, dirty, and I just couldn’t figure out why. I kept thinking of Ali; I just kept thinking of this girl. So I talked to this guy I’m dating and I’m like, “Listen, I met this person in one of my classes, this girl, and I can’t stop thinking of her, and I don’t know what I’m supposed to do.” He was very kind. He was like, “Well, do you think you like girls?” I’m like, “Yeah, I think I do.” He’s like, “That’s okay,” and he was just really kind about it. We broke up, and I’ve never heard from him again, but he was the first person that was very nice about the fact that I had different feelings. Cut to a few months later, Dan comes home, and it’s almost like I’m gearing up for my whole life. My whole life is going to start right now and I have to gear up for this. I put this act on again, this whole act of, “I’m so happy to see 15 you, I’m so excited for the rest of our lives, eternity,” you know. He’s home for maybe a month, and I am just feeling like this whole act just crashed and burned within that month. I’m feeling depressed, and I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know if I can have this for the rest of my life. How am I going to keep up with this? So we’re sitting in the car one night, it's November, and we’re talking, and I just looked at him and said, “Dan, I think I like girls.” He said, “Oh, we’ll deal with that later.” I’m like, “Oh, okay, we’ll deal with that later? That’s cool. I don’t know what that looks like, but that’s cool. Okay, the returned missionary, the priesthood holder, is telling me we’ll deal with this later, so that must mean this comes from God. I’m going to be fine.” My birthday is in December, so I knew he was going to ask me to marry him. December, and it’s like the first week, and we go on this special date. He takes me to dinner, we go to Temple Square, like all the good little Mormon couples do, and he gets on one knee, and I don’t remember what he said to me, but my answer was, “Sure,” just like that. He immediately decides he wants to call everybody he knows, and I go into this panic mode of, “I don’t want anybody to know I’m getting married. Maybe my parents, maybe Maren, my friend at the time, but I don’t want my ward to know. I’m not feeling proud about this.” He’s all excited to go tell his parents, and I tell my parents, cause they already knew. Oh, sorry, which reminds me: before I left for this date, my mom basically was like, “Dan’s going to ask you to marry him and you better say yes. Okay? You only get out of this house one of three ways, you get married, you go on a 16 mission, or you leave on bad terms.” So I said I’m gonna get married. I knew he was gonna do this, I was like, “Whatever.” So back to the story. I tell my parents and we go through the month of December. December was a really hard month in my family. My grandmother, who I was extremely close to, has a heart attack. So I’m emotionally just wrecked, like, “Oh my gosh I can’t lose my Grandma, she’s been my saving grace my whole entire life.” It was just really stressful, I was really depressed and I just couldn’t imagine my life being like this forever, with this guy who was a wonderful man, but I knew I couldn’t make him happy. I knew he wouldn’t make me feel happy. I didn’t want to have kids. I knew that from the beginning of my life, I never wanted to have children from me, ever. It just never sit right. I couldn’t think of what the wedding night was going to be like, and I just was like, “I can’t do this. I can’t destroy his life, because I will destroy his life completely.” So I called him up, and I was like, “Listen, I think I just need some time. I just am dealing with my grandma, and I’m just needing time to figure some things out.” He was crushed, for obvious reasons. He’s put his whole life into a possible life of ours, all of these hopes and dreams. So he says, “I’m going to the temple and pray about it.” I said, “Okay, that’s cool, do that, do you.” Anyways, he did that, and at this point, I was like, “I have to tell my friend Maren,” because she was the closest friend that I had at that time. I just told her, “I’m having these feelings, and 17 I don’t know if I can go through this marriage. I’m not sure what to do, it’s on hold.” She was like, “Okay,” and I think she knew that I was in distress, but I don’t know if she really knew how to handle it. My grandma had come to live with us for a while after getting out of the hospital, so we took turns taking care of her on Sunday, and instead of going to church, we had to make sure somebody was home. So it was my turn to be home on that Sunday, so I slept in, and I woke up, and I was just like, “I can’t do this. I don’t want to live this life.” I thought, “Grandma’s here, I know she has a lot of medications upstairs. There has to be a way to end this.” Not being alive, nobody would ever know what I ever felt, I wouldn’t have to go through that hurt. I thought, “Well, maybe I’ll go upstairs and see.” I didn’t really know what suicidal thoughts were at the time, I just knew I didn’t want to live, and I didn’t know what that looked like, but I knew there were pills upstairs, and that would have to do something to me. So I started going up the stairs and the phone rings, and I’m like, “Who’s calling at this time?” So I pick up the phone and it’s Maren. She’s like, “Hey I know you’re home from church today. When your parents come home, do you want to go to this meeting with me? I’m going to go to this Sundance thing.” I was like, “I don’t know.” She said, “I’m just going to come over and hang out with you.” She didn’t live far from me. She was just a couple of streets away, so she came down and sat with me. 18 I was like, “Well, I guess that plan didn’t work today.” My parents come home, and I somehow talked my mom into letting me go on a Sunday, ‘cause she was very strict on what you do on Sundays. She lets me go, and we go to this meeting, and I’m surrounded by so many different people: not LDS people, not religious people, people from this industry that I never knew. I just kind of felt like, “Okay, this is kind of cool. I wonder if I can get really involved.” I was just trying to find something to be involved with. We leave the meeting, and I am like, “Maren, I need to tell you what’s going on.” So we go to Andy Adams Park, and I just spill everything, like, “This is how I’ve been feeling. Do you remember Ali in our class? I don’t know what I’m going to do. I’m just so lost.” It was probably only the third time in my life that I really exploded with a lot of anger at that point, and for Maren, I think, it was really jarring, like, “Oh my gosh, there is really a big problem.” So she takes me to her dad. “Can you give a priesthood blessing, give some kind of comfort, whatever it looks like?” So he did, he gave me a blessing, and I remember feeling like what he was saying was what to do. “There’s a plan set for you, but you know what it is.” I was like, “I do,” so I called Dan up and I said, “I can’t do this, I’m not going to do this at all.” He was very angry, very upset. So we broke off the engagement. He called me up a few weeks later and he said, “I went to the temple, and I was prompted that I’m supposed to marry you.” 19 I was like, “No, I don’t think so. As much as I think you want to believe that, I don’t think so.” I told my mom, and she was kind of like, “Okay, well maybe it will happen.” She wasn’t really mad; in her mind, she thought it was just like, “Oh, it's gonna happen. They’re gonna get married.” So that time period until May was kind of blurry for me. I think I kind of just lived, I did what I needed to do. I went to work, I came home and I was trying to deal with the feelings of liking females. The whole gender thing at that point was just clear over here, I was dealing with this first. I got back in contact with Ali like, “So, I got engaged, I broke it off, like, trying to figure this out. I just need a friend, how do I make this work?” She’s like, “Well, I’m actually moving back to New York, where I’m from.” I was like “Damn, that’s cool, whatever.” But I had met another girl at this Sundance thing, and so I reached out to her cause she had told me just straight-up, she was gay. So I reached out to her, and I was like, “Hey, I really need some help. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing. What does this look like? Guide me.” So May comes along, and May was supposed to be the timeframe that I was getting married, like May 27. I was at home, and my mom was just in a really bad mood, and I knew why. She had all these hopes and dreams for her little girl, “She’s going to make me a proud mom,” that kind of thing. We kind of got in a quarrel, I don’t even know what it was about anymore, but she did mention like, “You were supposed to be married today.” 20 I said, “I know, but I don’t think marriage is something for me; I don’t think it’s something I’m going to do in my life.” She was like, “What are you trying to tell me? That you’re a lesbian?” I was like, “Yes, yes, I am, actually.” I just said it. We were in this little bedroom/den area, and she pushed me and was like, “Get out of my house, I don’t ever want to talk to you again.” She slammed the door, and I started crying. I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is horrible.” So I just leave, I drive around for like four hours, I think. I went over to Maren’s house, and I was like, “Well, she told me to stay away, to get out of her house, but I gotta go home cause I don’t have anything.” So I go home, and my dad’s there, and I was so scared for my dad to find out, cause my dad and I had just started having a pretty good relationship. Karen, my mom, she didn’t really like me around my dad, me or my brother. I think it was a lot of jealousy, like, “I want to be the favorite parent,” kind of thing. They had their own struggles in their marriage, and I think that played into it. So I see my dad as I’m driving up, and I’m like, “Oh my gosh, I don’t know how this is gonna go.” I get out of my car, and I immediately start crying, like, “Dad I’m really sorry.” He’s like, “It’s okay. I kind of wondered when you were twelve, when you played softball. I saw you interact with the girls and I thought, ‘I kind of think that she likes girls.’” 21 I was like, “Why didn’t you tell me this! It would have made it so much easier on me.” The next thing he was like, “You wanna go get some food?” I was like, “Okay.” Was the only conversation we’re having about this. That was probably his way of just handling it, and that’s just my dad. So we went out and got food, and didn’t really talk about it, but he talked my mom into letting me stay. It just made it a really different type of a hostile environment, cause my home life wasn’t super easy at all. My mom was not super nice anyways to me, so it just kind of created a different hostility, to where if we were sitting around the table for dinner, and I’d be like, “Hey can you pass me the salt?” She would give it to my brother and be like, “Pass it to your sister,” like I didn’t exist in her mind anymore at all. I was like, “Well, I need to move out, and I guess I’ll be leaving on bad terms, cause that’s the only way I’m going to be able to do this.” At that point, Ali had contacted me again. “Hey, I’m moving back, I think to Utah.” I was like, “Okay.” I can’t really remember how it started, but we started having this long-distance relationship. I flew out there a couple of times, and came back, and she’s like, “I’m moving back,” and I said, “Oh great, cause I need to move out of my parents’ house.” In my mind that’s what you did; you moved in with the person you’re dating, and that was my only saving grace at that time. So she moves back, and I slowly start packing things, cause I’m essentially running away from home in a sense, because the control where I lived was very 22 controlling on me, and even my brother, just differently. So I slowly packed some things and got these little totes and hid them away. It was actually the day before Mother’s Day, so this was a year timeframe, the following year. I packed my car and I called my dad on a Friday, and I said, “Listen, I’m moving out of the house, just so you know, but I’m not telling Mom. I’m not going to be home tonight.” He said, “Where are you going?” I said, “A friend, her name is Ali, she’s from New York, but she lives here, she’s in the military, and she’s just a really good friend.” I didn’t want to say I had a girlfriend, I didn’t know how that would go over. So I left and moved in with Ali, and I saw my mom two days later at Mother’s Day dinner. She was a wreck, she was upset, and I couldn’t figure out why she was upset. I think it was more like control, like she lost control of me, more so than, “Oh my child’s left the nest.” I apologized for leaving, “I’m sorry for leaving, I just needed to live my life,” because I felt guilty and shame for leaving, because that’s not what a good child would have done. So that's the dating and then the almost-marriage and then what happened after that. SS: How did your brother react to you coming out? AF: Brandon, he has Asperger’s, so he had a mentality still as a teenager at that point. It didn’t hit him emotionally by any sense of the imagination; he just didn’t understand why I had to leave. I didn’t find out till probably just five or six years ago, that when I did leave, he was told by our mom that I didn’t want to be there anymore, I didn’t love him anymore, and I didn’t want to take care of him 23 anymore. Essentially, I was put in charge of my brother at a very young age to parent him. So that was our relationship, it was not sibling, it was very much a parent-child relationship with him. That’s what he was told. It didn’t hit him till he actually told me five years ago when he said, “Well, this is what Mom told me, and it really hurt my feelings. Is that what happened?” I said, “No, that’s not what happened at all.” So he didn’t have any emotional response to the fact that I came out. He did a little bit about me moving out, and he did treat me differently, like he was a little bit more offish. He used to be really huggy and stuff and that really ended. I didn’t understand at that time why, but Karen probably said something, and I just didn’t know what it was. I didn’t want to ask, because I couldn’t handle it at that point. His emotional response to all of that didn’t happen for a while. It was just like, “Whatever.” SS: So, how long did you live with Ali? AF: I lived with Ali for about two and a half years. It was a really rough go, because I wasn’t mature enough to handle that type of relationship. I had a lot of anger. I was just angry, I was still confused, and I was trying to have what I saw as an adult relationship. She was probably six years older than I was, so it kind of became, what I saw, as another parent-child relationship. She was parenting me on how to be an adult, and I was reacting sometimes angry about it. Like, “Why are you trying to tell me what to do?” All of a sudden, I have to work full-time, I have two jobs and I’m trying to go to school, cause that was full time for me. It was really hard. I felt I couldn’t hang out with my own friends, and I could only 24 hang out with her and her friends. It was just a really hard time. She did teach me a lot about being an adult, but she had her own controlling ways as well, so I felt that I was going from one household that was controlling to another, in one sense. In another sense, it could have just been my perception of how relationships were supposed to be; any type of relationship, really. But it was really hard, and I think I put her through some hard times. She was in the military, and about this time is when 9/11 happened. She was activated military, and that made me angry, cause all of a sudden, I felt that I was abandoned. I think I was pretty bratty then. So she was activated, so she was gone a lot, and then she got deployed. At that point I was like, “Well, I’m just going to rebel,” and I ended up cheating on her. She ended up obviously finding out, and I felt horrible, but it was my way of justifying how terrible I was feeling about my own self, how confused and how angry I was. It just gave it a physical form. That made it really hard on our relationship, and we ended up breaking up. I ended up going with the person that I cheated on with her, and that was seven years of learning experience right there. A horrible learning experience. I wouldn’t change it, but it was a terrible time. SS: We’re talking early 2000s. What was the LGBTQ community you’re seeing here in Northern Utah? AF: It was hard to find. I had a couple of friends that had come out, and the only scene that we knew of was the clubbing scene. There was like Club Access that would let eighteen and nineteen-year old’s in, so I would club when I could. I didn’t really find any help whatsoever. Anything that I tried to find was online, and 25 that wasn’t super at all. It wasn’t really helpful as in, “This how my life is going to be,” kind of a thing. There wasn’t really much that I had access to at all, not till later in my twenties, when I found a little group that met here at Weber State, but I still felt that I didn’t really fit in at that point either. There wasn’t much here in Northern Utah that I could find out at all. SS: So when did you find out about the drag kings? AF: Ali and I were no longer together, and I was in between break ups with… her name was Kindy, and I went clubbing with one of my friends from Burger Bar. We weren’t working there anymore at the time, and she was like, “I want to go to a club.” I was like, “I know this gay club,” so we go to this gay club. It wasn’t Club Access, it had changed hands at that point to something else. We were there, and I was 23 or 24 at the time. I was just at the bar, I got a drink, and I was already pretty drunk already. I was just hanging around one of the pool tables, and this lady comes up to me, and just starts kind of chatting me up. She was trying to sell this calendar, and I was kind of confused, and that’s when Sean came up and said, “This is what we’re doing, are you female or male?” In my mind, I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is awesome, somebody just asked me where I fit in gender-wise.” I said, “Well, I’m female.” He said, “Well, there’s this thing called the drag kings, and there’s this competition called Closet Ball that’s happening in a few weeks. I think you’d be a really good contestant.” 26 I was like, “Okay, well that sounds good.” I didn’t know what it really looked like at all. So we exchanged numbers, and I ended up doing this competition. I met back at this club, on a Sunday night, and they proceeded to tell me, “Bring something that might be girly.” I said, “I have nothing girly that I can dress in, but I have this other clothing.” They said, “Well bring some of your other clothes, and we’ll find you a dress.” I said, “I’ll have to be put into a dress? That’ll be horrible.” So I go down and meet Sean, and I fill out this application to be in this pageant. It’s a pageant that the drag community had, and there was also an organization called the Royal Court and Spike that held these pageants and had these title holders and stuff like that. I didn’t know there was anything like that. So I fill out this application, and you have to think of this drag name, if you are going to be a drag king, and I said, “I can pick my own boy name?” All of a sudden, all these feelings that had been put down for so long are starting to flood back. I had kind of dealt with my sexual orientation, I was still trying to deal with being okay with that, but now the gender thing is now bubbling up. So I’m like, “I don’t know.” Some Drag Queen randomly is like, “You should call yourself Drake.” I said, “I’ll call myself Drake. That sounds very manly, I’ll take that.” So I write Drake on there. I think there were three different phases of this competition. The first one was Closet Ball, and initially it’s going from looking very one gender to another; 27 like how well can you pass for the opposite gender, basically. So they put me in this dress, and my hair was short at the time so they kind of did it more feminine, put some earrings on me that were feminine, put on some makeup, had me walk out on the stage and do a little circle. Then they were going to put me in male drag, and I was like, “Oh man, I’m super excited for this.” Sean takes me back to the dressing room, and I put on a t-shirt and some jeans, and I have a leather jacket or vest or something that he wanted me to wear, and they do my hair in a faux hawk, but it was a lot longer at the time, and then start to put on facial hair. I can’t really see any of this happen, but they had this stencil, and they had stage gum or something; they use it on the stage to put hair on or wigs. Then in this little bottle they had hair from somebody's haircut, and I was like, “This is interesting.” So they put all this stuff on: the gum to make the sideburns, and then gum here to make a goatee, but more of a beard. Then they filled it in with the stencil and made it darker with the mascara. He turns me around, and I was like, “Oh my gosh, like that is how I’ve always felt like I should look, this is amazing.” I was on cloud nine, I couldn’t even believe it. So I go out, walk again, and I end up winning the competition and get some title like “Closet Ball King” or whatever. I don’t know what any of that means, but I was like, “I don’t even care, because I look like a dude, and I feel like a dude.” They had bound my chest with like an ace bandage, so I was as flat as I could get, but for me that was amazing because I had been wearing two or three sports bras to get flat, but one ace bandage and it was like boom, you look 28 like you have pecs! That’s how I first became involved and figured out what a drag king was. SS: Well, it’s interesting because drag kings aren’t as well-known as drag queens are. AF: Yeah, cause there’s not so much that goes into it. Drag queen, it’s very flamboyant, and there’s dresses and there’s gowns and jeweler, but drag kings, you can have some of that, but it's just not as well-known at all. Though there was a drag king troupe in Salt Lake that was getting well known at that time, mostly because of the Royal Court. SS: So did you remain active in the Royal Court drag king scene? AF: Yeah, I did, for a long, long time. From that time on, I held a pageant title, which means you put on a fundraiser for the Court. With the help of a lot of people, I had some kind of a drag show, people came and performed. I tried out for the drag king troupe, and made it, so then they had their own kind of little organization where they did their own fundraising for different things. Our home bar was the Paper Moon, down off 3300 South in Salt Lake. We held all of our shows that we would put on down there, and it was basically just drag shows all the time, but we raised money here and there for different things. I stayed very, very active, and that’s where I met Eli, who was part of the drag kings. At the time, I didn’t really understand what they were talking about, but he was transitioning. I was like, “I don’t know, what is that?” Eli kind of explained it to me, and I was like, “Oh crap. That’s how I feel, and I don’t know how to handle that. Now you put a name to how I feel, and now I need to process 29 that. “I didn’t want to process that, because I’ve already come out, I’ve already tried to identify myself as a lesbian, and now this. So I tried to hide from it, and like, “I’m not going to deal with this, I’m going to do drag on the weekends and it’s going to make me feel good about myself, just the weekends.” Eli ended up transitioning more and more and then stepped away from the kings, and I continued to do these shows and got more involved with the Royal Court of the Golden Spike. I got some top ten title, which is more of a working title within their organization, so you put on more shows, you’re very active in all of their shows. As time went on, I just couldn’t do the weekend. Sunday would come, and I’d be like, “I have to take off Drake, and I have to unbind myself.” It just started weighing very heavy on me. That’s where I was trying to figure out gender-wise what I was going to do. In the midst of all that, I was now working for my dad at his company, and he wasn’t really a bully, but he tried to say as a boss, “I need you to dress differently. I need you to look different.” That was really hurting my feelings, like, “This is just how I feel. This is what is comfortable to me: my short hair.” He was like, “Well, what if I gave you a raise if you grew out your hair?” I was like, “Okay.” I really needed that raise. So there was that, and now I felt a little bit bullied by my own dad, because he was introducing me to his business partners, and cause he was of that older generation, he didn’t know how to explain how I looked. He wanted to mold me into what he could explain at that time. I was dealing with that, and in my mind, trying to handle gender was 30 not going to happen, mostly because of my personal life. I was working for my dad, and I’ve already made a huge problem within my own immediate family with my mom, and I just can’t think about this anymore, I just don’t want to think about it. My dad had gone to his brother, my uncle, and was for some reason telling him about how I look like a high school teenage boy—cause I looked really young when I was in my twenties, I did look like a high schooler—and how he hated it. My uncle’s wife, who had married into the family I think when I was twelve, was like, “Well, maybe your daughter feels like a boy, maybe that’s why this is happening.” My dad’s like, “No, no, she’s already a lesbian.” I got this random phone call from uncle and he’s like, “Me and Dee want you to come over and have dinner with us.” I was like, “Okay.” I think I was about 26 at the time, and this was very out-of-the-norm for them to call me, cause I didn’t really have a relationship with my dad’s side of the family at all. I knew my Uncle Lee and my Aunt Dee, and they had always been kind to me when I had seen them, but I didn’t really have an established relationship with them. I go over, and we have spaghetti dinner, and I’m like, “This is very weird.” They’re asking me things like, “How’s work going?” kind of trying to understand my life, and I was just happy to have an adult who was a family member that I could talk to openly about what was going on in my life. 31 We get done with dinner and go sit down on the couch, and Dee says, “I just want to talk to you about something that your dad talked about to your uncle Lee.” She proceeded to say how Dad was complaining about how I looked and dressed and how I acted a little bit. She said, “So I’m just wondering, is it just ‘cause you feel comfortable that way?” I said, “Yeah, I do.” She said, “I want to tell you a story about my dad. You never met him because he had passed on, but his name was Dick, and I was his only child. I had to take care of him later in his life for quite a few reasons. My dad, Dick, was actually my mother.” I’m like, “What does that mean? What do you mean?” She’s like, “Dick,” I can’t remember what Dick’s previous name was, “got pregnant with me, so was a female, and transitioned in the forties. They were from Logan. The only thing I remember about it is my mom had a roommate, and they left for a while. I don’t know how long it was, but it felt like a long time, and I went and lived with my aunt. Then they came back and this roommate said to me, ‘So, your mom is now going to be your dad, and his name is Dick. I’ll be your mom now. As people in Logan found out and things, my aunt got beat up a lot, and harassed, and they ended up having to move someplace else in Utah.” Dee said she was very angry about this whole situation and ended up running away from home, and much later in life, got back in contact with her father, and started to understand more about what he went through and what he was feeling, as somebody in his twenties at the time when he transitioned. She 32 started telling me about how the reason she had to take care of her dad at his older age is because he had to go to the doctor’s a lot, and she had to explain all the time about what was going on; that he was born female, but now was male, and he had gone through testosterone. Dee said, “I’m just wondering, is that how you feel?” I was like, “Oh, no, no, I just do drag on the weekends, but that’s about it.” I was really trying to downplay, because I did not want to even accept it within myself. I knew it was a struggle, but I was not going to accept it. I’ve already accepted my sexual orientation and I really don’t want to have to do this too. I kind of downplayed it. “No, no, but that’s really interesting. It’s great that you took care of your dad.” My aunt ended up talking to my dad and said, “You just need to leave your kid alone about how she’s dressing, because it’s going to hurt her, and we don’t know what it’s going to look like later on. Just leave her alone.” So he let me be with how I dressed, but the long hair thing, growing out my hair, had to happen. I ended up growing my hair out to about your length, right here, but I wore ball caps all the time. He wanted me to grow my hair out, but he didn’t say I couldn’t wear hats. I wore hats a lot, but it just really played on me emotionally, on my soul. It was just really hard. I was with Kindy at the time and I mentioned to her just, “What if you were dating somebody that felt like they were male?” She said, “I’m a lesbian, I would never date anybody that felt that way. That’s just weird, and you better not feel like that.” 33 I said “Okay, I’m not going to mention that again.” Our relationship was already very abusive, and she was very physical with me, so I didn’t want to create any more problems. I just kind of let it ride for quite a few years, and tried not to think about it, and just got involved in the Court, and tried to allow that to be sufficient for me. SS: When did you finally decide you were going to deal with it? AF: So I finally decided on my thirtieth birthday. I had broken up with Kindy, and I was dating somebody named Sandy; she was actually at that thing in Ogden. She’s my best friend now. I was with her, and I had mentioned to her early in our relationship, like, “I think that this is how I feel. I feel more masculine than I do feminine. I don’t know what that's going to look like and I don’t know how I feel about it, but I want to know how you feel about it.” She had been married to a man prior to getting with me. She was fine with that, and we didn’t really talk about it. About a year and a half, almost, into our relationship, it was my birthday, and I just remember having this big party. I was just thinking, “Kay, I’m thirty. I feel old, and I don’t know if I can grow old in this body. I don’t know if I can grow old acting like a lesbian. I can like girls, but I don’t think I can look like a female. As much as I look masculine, I still have very feminine qualities. I have a really big chest, and I can only do so much with that during the day, and I don’t like getting called by my birth name, it’s just not resonating with me. I cannot think of myself getting older like this.” 34 That started a year of quietly researching, not letting anybody know, and I didn’t let Sandy know I was doing it for probably six months. I was trying to find anything on Google, like “What’s the process of this, what do people go through?” It wasn’t really great stuff I found, it was very disheartening mostly, of these horrible stories of somebody transitioning and then just getting beat up or killed, or how a lot of people had to go to Thailand. I’m like, “Why are they going to Thailand?” Now I understand. It was mostly trans women that go to Thailand. There’s not really a lot of resources for a person that wants to transition to male out there. I did come across a YouTube guy. His name was Aiden, and he was very new to his transition, and he seemed more positive than anybody else I had come across. I would stay up nights, watching his videos that he had over and over and thinking, “Okay, can I do this? I have a full-time job, I’m working at Hill Air Force Base as a contractor. Can I really change my name? Can I really try to change my gender on my birth certificate?” I’m pretty much turning my whole world upside down, on top of turning my partner’s world upside down. Like, “Can I do this to her?” I start talking to Sandy more about it like, “Listen, I kind of feel like I need to do something, and so from what I’ve researched, you start testosterone, you get top surgery, and from there you decide what you want to do. You can get bottom surgery if you want, but I want to change my name, my pronouns need to change, I just can’t hear these things anymore.” 35 She was pretty understanding like, “Okay, well, how much is this gonna be. Are you gonna lose your job, are we gonna lose the house?” I’m like, “I don’t know. I have no idea what this is going to look like.” We talked about it here and there and I was like, “Please keep this just between us, because I don’t want your family to know, I don’t want my family to know right now.” October comes around, and I’m just really depressed again. I’m just in this in-between in my life; I’m at this crossroads of, “What am I going to do?” My friend Bugs, who was in the kings with me years and years before, just out of the blue contacts me and says, “Hey, just checking in on ya, how are you doing?” We have a conversation and he’s like, “By the way, I want you to know, I’m going by Michael now, but you can still call me Bugs. I’m transitioning.” I was like, “Really? I’ve kind of been feeling like this too, can you tell me what you’ve done?” He’s like, “Yeah, I was able to get my hands on some testosterone, I took some shots, and I just started telling people I wanted to go by Michael or Bugs.” I was like, “Is it really that easy?” He’s like, “Yeah! I found somebody here in Utah that will do top surgery, so they will take off your chest.” I was like, “Okay, that resonates really well with me. I think that’s my biggest problem, that I have a chest, that I can’t hide it. Can you give me their name?” 36 He was like, “Yeah, but if you want to get into a consultation, they’re free, but they take months.” I was like, “That’s okay.” I have a light at the end of this tunnel, I think. He gives me the name, and I stay up all night. It’s the night before Halloween, and I’m thinking all night long, like, “Should I make this phone call? This could be the start of something I can’t really go back from.” I go to work, and I text Sandy and I’m like, “I talked to Bugs last night and he told me about this surgeon, and I think this maybe will solve how I feel. I think this is gonna be what’s gonna do it.” She said, “Then why don’t you call?” So I call, and I’m like, “I’d like to get in for your free consultation, because I’m wanting to get top surgery.” The lady was like, “Okay, well, let me see what I have available. Oh, we’ve just had a cancellation. I can get you in on Friday.” I was like, “Okay, yeah, let’s do that.” So I call Sandy and I’m like, “Oh my gosh. We’re going in on Friday, can you get the day off?” She’s like, “Yeah, I can.” So we go to this consultation, and this doctor, Dr. Luikenaar, she’s up at the University of Utah. She’s just friendly and she says, “Well, I started doing this, I’ve only done twelve up to this point. This is what it looks like. Usually, I have people come in who’ve already started testosterone, I prefer that. Where are you with that?” 37 I was like, “I haven’t started testosterone, but I don’t know if this is something I want to do, to be honest with you.” She said, “Okay, are you seeing a counselor, ‘cause I have to have letters from your counselor.” I said, “I have started counseling, but it’s about something else. If this is something I need to bring up, I’m happy to ask her about it.” She tells me everything she needs, and I was like, “Okay.” They take pictures, she tells me how the surgery goes, and I’m just like, “I’m going to get rid of these lumps that are not part of me.” I’m just excited. She leaves the room and I look at Sandy and I’m like, “How are we going to afford this? Insurance doesn’t take care of this.” Sandy said, “We’ll make it work.” I’m like, “Okay.” Her assistant comes in and says, “It’s 6000 dollars. We can take cash or check. We also go through Mountain America, and they help us with loans, if you need a loan. We can get you in on December 14th.” I was like, “I don’t know.” Sandy’s like, “Put him down. Let’s do this.” I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is going to happen.” I go to my counselor and I’m like, “Listen, we’ve been talking about my childhood and how horrible it was, and my brother, and what’s going on with him, and I kind of mentioned this gender thing here and there, but not really anything we talked about. This is what I want to do. Would you support me in this?” 38 She said, “Yeah, I think you know what you want. I’m not going to question that, and as long as we’ve been meeting, you seem stable. I don’t know anything about it though, but I’ll try to educate myself on it.” I said, “Okay, I guess I need a letter stating that we’ve talked about it, and that you would suggest this kind of treatment.” She’s like, “Okay.” It was a few weeks, and she looked into gender dysphoria, and as we talked she said, “Yeah, I think you have gender dysphoria, and I think this is what the diagnosis needs to be.” She writes me a letter and I get it to Doctor Luikenaar. I have no idea how I’m going to pay for this; no idea. I start mentioning it to people, my group of friends in Salt Lake who are all part of the Royal Court. They’re like, “Well, you’ve done a lot for the community by doing shows and raising money, so why don’t we just do that for you?” I was like, “Really?” They were like, “Yeah.” So we ended up having a show, and I can’t remember what it was called, I think it was something very inappropriate. We do a show, and I’m like, “Nobody’s going to show up, they’re not going to understand,” but people showed up. They ended up raising over a thousand dollars that night for me to put towards the surgery, and I was just elated. I am like, “Oh my gosh, this is supposed to happen. Things are lining up. They have never lined up like this for me in my life.” We go home from this show, I am excited, and I go to sleep. I wake up the next morning, it’s a Saturday, and I look at my cell phone. My phone had been 39 blowing up all night and I had left it on silent. It’s my parents’ house, my brother calling me, my aunt calling me, and I’m like what is going on. So I listen to like the one voicemail and its like, “Weston,” who is a cousin of mine, who I was extremely close to, “he’s in the hospital, and you need to get down here now.” I’m like, “Oh my gosh.” Now my cloud nine is kind of like, “So maybe this is God’s way of telling me I shouldn’t do this.” That’s coming into my head. I go to the hospital. My cousin Weston’s in a coma, they don’t know what’s going on. So for four or five days I sit there, “Is he going to wake up?” They’re fairly certain he’s brain dead, they don’t know what’s going to happen. I’m thinking now we’re into December, and I’m supposed to be getting this surgery. My aunt makes the decision to take my cousin off life support. He gets taken off life support and he passes away within a day or so. Now I'm emotionally trying to handle his death, but I’m also trying to emotionally handle my family; my aunt and my cousin, this was her little brother, and my own parents, ‘cause my role in my family was, “You take care of everybody. When everybody is emotionally freaking out, you are the strong one, you’re super matter-of-fact, and you’re just going to help.” So I pull myself, again, into that situation, and that role, and helped with the funeral, getting everything set up, and talked at the funeral. Finally, I’m emotionally exhausted. We buried him on December 9th, and I’m like, “Okay, so is this God’s way of telling me I’m doing something wrong, ‘cause now the second most important person in my life is gone.” 40 I talked to Sandy and I’m like, “I just don’t know what to do.” I really pondered it a lot, for quite a few days, and I thought, “If in the heaven I was told about, people can look down on you and see what you’re doing, why wouldn’t Weston be proud of me if I lived what my truth is? If he’s in Heaven, and he knows everything, and he knows how people really feel, he already knows how I really feel. My grandma who already passed away knows how I really feel. Wouldn’t I be lying if I didn’t do this? I’m going to go through the surgery.” December 14, 2011, I went through the surgery, and it was amazing. I woke up in the operating room after the surgery, and I was thanking all the nurses like I had won an Academy Award. “Thank you for being here and you’re amazing. Good job guys.” I finally felt like a weight lifted off my body, but literally, there was a weight lifted off my body, and I felt that this is a door open. A door has opened for me and I can go either way. I can transition completely medically, or I can just stay here and find some type of peace. Recovering from that surgery was a lot harder than I anticipated. They told me that I need at least six weeks off to kind of heal and I was like, “I only get a week off from work, so I gotta go back.” I got the surgery; a week later, I got my tubes pulled out and was back to work the next day. Luckily, it happened about the same time Christmas was going to happen, so I had an extra day off as well. I went back to work for a day, it was terribly painful, then I had the weekend. Christmas landed, I think, on a Wednesday, so I worked two more days, and had Christmas off. Christmas I was like, “I have to see my family, and I have not told them: my mom’s side of my family, or my dad, or anybody, that I had this 41 surgery, other than my cousin Jason, who I told when Weston died.” He’s ten years older than I am. Oh, I forgot to tell this part. I had told them this is what I’m doing and they said, “You know, we didn’t buy a tree at the festival of trees.” They usually bought a tree at the festival, but they said this year for some reason they didn’t. They were like, “So we want to help you.” They gave me two thousand dollars for the surgery, which was amazing, and really helped out. So they knew that I had gone through the surgery, but nobody else did. I had to see everybody on Christmas and I said, “I can’t hug anybody, cause it’ll hurt.” I tried to wear something that wasn’t obvious that all of a sudden, I was super flat, ‘cause I was really flat. I had lost quite a bit of weight from the surgery, not feeling like eating and all this kind of stuff, so I had shrunk. Of course, my dad, he hugs me, and I’m like, “Augh,” trying not to react. He pulls back, and I can kind of see the wheels turning, but he didn’t say anything to me. Nobody really said anything, and I was like “Whoo, good. Okay, great.” So I go back to work in January, and people at work had known that I had gone for surgery, but didn’t really know what kind of surgery it was. A couple of the ladies knew, because I felt safe enough to tell them what was going on, but none of the dudes knew at all, and my bosses didn’t really know. That’s kind of where it all began in that time frame. SS: Alright, so let’s stop there. Can I ask you one question before you stop? Do you mind telling us what your given name was? 42 AF: No, not at all. So my birth name was Heather Shannon Florence. Changing the name was a little difficult, but that’s what it was. I know, right? Weird. Part Two: September 21, 2018 LR: Today is September 21, 2018. We are back with Alex Florence, we’re in the Stewart Library, and we’re just going to continue the interview we started two weeks ago. When we stopped, you were talking about just finishing the top surgery, and getting comfortable, going to your family Christmas party. Getting hugged, that made me hurt for you. Something that you had mentioned as you were proceeding and going through the change, that a lot of the lesbian community was kind of upset at you for, I’m not quite sure why. But could you try to explain or help me understand that a little bit? AF: Yeah, so I had a lot of lesbian friends, I think I still do, it just took them a minute. When I told them that I was going to transition, for them it was like a kind of a panic. “You’re giving every butch lesbian an expectation that they want to transition.” So if you’re a butch lesbian, I think you typically dress more masculine, your hair is more masculine, and you tend to have more masculine characteristics, socially, as in liking cars and that kind of stuff. So they don’t really understand, and I don’t know that they question it or anything like that, but they feel like it puts an expectation on them, that that’s the journey they’re supposed to go on. Does that make sense? LR: It actually does. AF: Yeah, and that’s not necessarily true at all. I know a lot of lesbians who are very, very butch and they are very comfortable in their bodies, and that’s good. I was 43 not comfortable in my body, so there was a difference. But yeah, there is a lot of the lesbian community that struggles with trans men sometimes, but the more I got through transition and the more that my acquaintances and friends saw that my confidence level was boosted from it, they started to understand more; that it’s an individual thing, it’s not necessarily a collective, “everyone should feel like this” kind of thing. Does that make sense? LR: Yeah that makes perfect sense, and I think I understand. AF: Yeah, it’s hard for me to understand the thinking sometimes too, because it is such an individual thing. But I think really they felt that, “We love being female, and all those feelings,” and I’m glad that they feel like that. They don’t have to question anything, they’ve only questioned their orientation, where for other lesbians who decide to go one the journey that I have, to transition and become male, there’s a lot more questioning. I didn’t feel like labeling myself as a lesbian ever felt right to me. I never felt like that was really the label I wanted. It just didn’t ever resonate with me, while for them it does. Does that make sense? LR: It does, especially with what you were talking about last time. It actually makes a lot of sense, it really fits into your story, that thought. So if you want to just pick up literally from where you left off. There’s just something about your story that is compelling, and I’d love for you to just keep going, and if I have a question, I’ll throw it out. AF: Please do ask, because sometimes it gets… LR: Don’t worry, I will. 44 AF: Okay. So we left off at Christmas and getting hugged. I just had top surgery, and I was really nervous, because I didn’t tell any of my family about it. So I didn’t say anything to my family, the only one that knew about it was my cousin Jason, because he had helped with some of the finances of it. Christmas came and went, and I headed back to work. At work, I hadn’t really told anybody except for a few really close female friends. I think it was my second or third day back. We had a meeting and I was kind of walking gingerly because I hurt pretty good. I had a couple of coworkers ask me, “What did you have done? We heard you had surgery.” I was like, “Oh, I don’t really want to talk about it.” So we were coming out of the meeting, and a female coworker who I felt she was safe asked me what I had, and I was like, “Oh, I had top surgery,” so I kind of explained to her what that was. She was like, “Oh, well. Did you have anything done down here?” and made this gesture in front of everyone. I was like, “Oh my gosh, that was really expressive, and brought attention to me. I cannot believe she just asked me that. I don’t even know how to answer, or what to do.” I was like, “No, no I didn’t.” She was like “Oh, okay.” She went off, and at that very moment was the first time I really thought, “Is this what I’m going to be dealing with the rest of my life, if I transition? People asking me about surgeries and about a lot of personal things? I don’t know if I can do this. That’s a lot to take on.” I kind of really had to think, “How am I going to deal with this? What am I going to do? How am I going 45 to respond that is not going to be negative, or sounding like I’m angry or anything like that.” So I thought about that for quite a long time, and that was really the first time I had something like that brought to my attention. So I just kind of went along and was healing from that surgery, which for me, was probably three months. It was painful, and I had a lot of burning sensations in my chest, and I was just really uncomfortable for a long time. As I was healing, I kind of started going into a really… I don’t know if it was a dark place, it was just a place where I really need a lot of solitude, and I really needed to kind of be alone. I started pulling away from my girlfriend at the time, and from other people because I didn’t want to be faced with questions. I didn’t know how to answer them because I didn’t know what my next step was. I wasn’t on testosterone, and I didn’t know if I wanted to be. So months kind of went by, and having top surgery, I felt good in my clothing, and I felt like things fit finally the way they should. But there’s still something missing, there’s just something still missing. Now that I have a flat chest, and I’m wanting to present as more male, my voice isn’t doing that, I still have a very soft baby face. There’re all these things, and I just need to finally figure out what this next step is going to be. I was pretty depressed, and I think I was depressed from healing and how long it took me to heal, and from, “What am I doing, what is this going to look like for my job, and my family and my girlfriend, my relationships?” 46 So I was watching Glee one night, and they had actually started a storyline about a transgender woman named Unique. So she was in the storyline of Glee, and for some reason, I don’t even know, but I was like, “Okay, well, so she’s in high school and she’s wanting to dress as female, and she makes it look just fabulous. She is flawless in how she feels and how she looks, and her confidence in who she is. I just need to feel that confident. I need to be confident in who I am.” So for some reason that just kind of turned on another light switch of, “You need to see what testosterone is about. You have control of how you react to it. You really do.” So I called up my friend Ray who I had met the past November at a gender conference, and he was already about a year into transition. I said “Hey, I think I want to look into testosterone. Who is your doctor?” He said, “Well my doctor isn’t practicing here anymore, but I hear there’s another doctor named Dr. Luikenaar who is just beginning.” So I find out where she’s at, and I call the office, and I say “I’m looking to possibly start testosterone, and I hear Dr. Luikenaar takes care of that kind of stuff.” At the time she was working for the U of U hospital, and they’re like “Well, she is an OB/GYN, but she does take out patients.” So I make an appointment, and I see her in May. It was May 30th that I went to see her, and it was 2012. It was just very simple, she just asked me a few questions; she was very knowledgeable in transgender health and I was very impressed by her. She was very kind, and basically told me, “You’re going to 47 start testosterone. Some people it works in their body within a few months, and you might go through some anger, you might do this that, the other.” I’m like, “Okay, let’s just do this.” So she gave me my first shot, and I remember feeling kind of weird that day, like “Something’s in my body and I don’t know how to react to it.” I felt a lot of adrenaline too, and I think that was just because it was something new. It could have been the testosterone as well. So I started testosterone in 2012, and that was like going through puberty. It truly was. So I’m almost 32 years old doing puberty again. Now I’m like, “Okay, my voice is going to start dropping at some point, so I need to start telling some people.” So I decided to tell my work. It was that summer, I think it was like June or July, and I take my supervisor aside at a picnic that we were having for the summer and I say, “I really need to talk to you about something.” She said, “Okay, do we need to go back to the office for this?” I said, “Yeah, that would be great.” So we go back to the office, and the CEO of the company comes with us, and I’ve known him for quite a few years; he worked with my father in a partnership with their businesses. So I’m really scared, because he knows my dad, I haven’t really told my dad anything, and I’m thinking, “I don’t know how this is going to look.” So we go and sit down, and I said, “So I’m transgender, and this is what that means, and in December when I took time off, I had top surgery, and 48 this is what that means, and I just started testosterone, so my voice is going to start dropping, and I’m planning on changing my name.” For them, their response was, “Okay, well how can we help you with this?” I said, “Really, I don’t want to lose my job, that’s all I care about. I don't want to lose my job, and I’m afraid I might because I work on base.” They say, “No, no, we want to support you 110%. What is it that you need us to do for you?” I said, “I don’t even know, I just don’t want to lose my job.” The CEO had a discussion with me about testosterone, mentoring me about what’s going to happen, and I’m like, “That’s great, I really need this talk.” My supervisor at the time, she said, “Okay, well, when we have a conversation with the government bosses, we’ll all sit down together and talk about it and let them know what it is going to look like.” They asked me at the time, “Do you know what you want to change your name to?” I said, “Well, I’m up in the air about a couple of different names, but I’ll let you know.” I didn’t know how to do that, but just the fact they were behind me, that meant so much to me. That was extremely important and I think it was a very big moment in my life; it was like the more that I told the truth, and the more that I was authentic about my journey, the more that I would find positive in the reactions of people. I would look for that positive, and I would always hope for that positive. So that went really well. 49 Actually, it was June, because the next week was my dad’s birthday, and I had to tell him. The following week I went out to lunch with my dad and I said, “Dad, I gotta tell you something.” Mind you, he was in his eighties, right, and he said, “Okay.” I said, “Well, I’ve always felt like I was a boy. I’ve always felt like I was a guy, and I came out as lesbian because I like girls, but I’ve decided to transition, which means I’m going from being female to male, and this is what it looks like. In December I had this surgery.” He said, “You know, I heard something about this.” I said, “What?” He said, “Yeah, Rene,” who was the CEO, “kind of told me that you had had this surgery. You never told me what was going on, but when I hugged you at Christmas, I could tell something was different.” Okay, parents always know, apparently. I said, “Yeah, that’s what it was. I started testosterone, and I want to change my name, and this is what I’m looking at changing it to. I’m not sure if I want it to be Alex or if I want it to be Shane, but I’m going to change my name, and I would really like it if you could try to start using that with me, and changing my pronouns.” So we have this great discussion, and he was just like, “Well, you’re my son now, okay.” That was that. Within a few days he emailed his side of the family, like my half-sisters on his side, and he said, “So you had a sister named Heather, but now your sister is your brother and is either going to be Alex or 50 Shane. So I just want you guys to know, and I support him completely and I want him to be happy.” It was just so flawless for him. I don’t know how my dad really handled it internally, but he has mentioned a few times that, for him, seeing that my confidence level has risen and that I just seem to feel more comfortable, he could tell that this is who I was meant to be. He has also mentioned that my childhood now makes complete sense to him, because I would go around saying things like, “But I’m a boy,” or trying to pee standing up. He said, “It makes sense to me now, I get it.” I said, “Okay, that also validates how I felt then when I was little, that you saw and I was feeling it, and now it all comes together for both of us.” During that time as well, I decided which name to go with. I decided obviously on Alex, because I had remembered during junior high as I was sitting in class, you doodle, and you think of other things besides what’s going on in class. I would think about, if I could change my name, what would it be? So I would write out ‘Alex’ all the time on notebooks and things like that, so Alex just resonated with me. I went to my boss and I said, “This is what I want to be called at work. Obviously, it’s not going to be legal, but I just want to try to implement it so I can get it going there.” We sat down with the bosses, and I let my government supervisor know, “This is what I’m doing, this is how I feel, and I want to be called Alex.” 51 She said, “Okay, let’s all have a meeting,” so they gathered everybody together and basically was like, “We are going to call Heather ‘Alex’ now, and the pronouns are going to change from ‘she’ to ‘he’.” I explained what I was trying to do with my journey, and almost all the females were like, “Okay,” but most of the males were like, “Ehhhh, I don’t get it.” I said, “Okay, that’s fine. I’ll explain it as they come to me or ask me questions.” I ended up starting to get some pushback from the guys that I worked with, just because they don’t get it. I mean, I’ve noticed in the male world, that there’s certain aspects of men: they don’t really understand compassion, and unless it’s a very logical explanation of change, it’s very hard for them to get it, because emotionally, it’s not something that they learn. They don’t ever learn about emotions typically, especially in the older generation. So they tried to be okay with it; the name was good, they got the name. That was pretty flawless. The pronouns were what was really difficult for a lot of people. I decided, instead of being angry about it and yelling, “Just get it right!” I would say, “Well, you owe me a Diet Coke. Every time you accidentally say ‘she’ just bring me a Diet Coke”. It’s cool. Maybe something will happen. I got a lot of Diet Coke for about a year through that whole thing. It became kind of funny, and it became humorous in not a negative way. People started calling out other people. “You owe Alex a Diet Coke now, you just accidentally said she.” It didn’t make it awkward, it just kind of made it fun for everybody. I was there for about another year at that place, and in that time I was able to get my name and gender changed legally. I got a bunch of paperwork to fill out 52 for the legal portion of it, and there was only a name change type of document. I don’t know who made it, or where it came from, but somebody was able to put some legal jargon into the name change thing that basically said, “Along with the name change, this person has gone through the surgeries, this that and the other, and will legally now change their gender to…” whatever you put on the form. So it was embedded into this document, which I thought was probably a good thing, because I don’t know what a judge is going to look at, but if it’s embedded, yeah, I think it’s going to serve me well. So with all the legal documentation, I got a letter from my counselor stating that I had gone through counseling, and that I do know what my name wants to be, and my gender. Then I got a doctor’s note from Dr. Luikenaar stating I was on testosterone, and a doctor’s note from my surgeon, stating that I had had a gender reassignment surgery. With all of that, I went down to Davis County, I think it was their courthouse or whatever in Farmington, and at the time, it was 350 dollars to change the name. LR: Oh goodness gracious. AF: It was a lot of money. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot to mention I also got a hysterectomy within that year. I waited to get my name change, because I knew that insurance will pay for my hysterectomy if I was still a female. So I had my hysterectomy in March, and I changed my name in May. LR: That was smart. AF: Yeah, I was thinking about that. I was like, “I’m probably going to do that.” I had had basically two gender reassignment surgeries that would be counted to 53 transition to male. So I turned in the paperwork, paid the $350, and got a court date to meet with the judge. I went in May, and I had no idea what I was walking into, because I’ve never been to court before. I didn’t know if he was going to ask me questions, I had no idea. It was like the longest three minutes of my entire life, because it probably lasted about that long. I went in, he was at his bench, and he was reading through everything, and he asked me, “You’re so-and-so?” “Yeah.” “You want to change your name to Alex?” “Uh-huh.” He asked me if I had a letter from the state, because you have to submit a letter stating that they did a background check to make sure you’re not a criminal or a sex offender before you can change your name. I had brought that with me, because I had forgotten it when I turned in my paperwork. I handed that to him, and he kept flipping through, and then he went stamp, sign, and stamp. I’m like, “Is that really all? Do I ask him about the gender thing? I asked him, “I was just wondering, are you okay with the whole gender change thing in there?” He flips to the page and he says, “Well, I don’t really understand or know about this, but it looks like you have all the documentation that you would need, so yeah, I’m fine with it.” “Okay.” He says, “Kay, we’re good.” 54 I walk out just like, “Wow, that was so much easier than I thought it would be.” I go over to the clerk, or whoever, and she gives me copies of it, and says, “This is what you need to do.” I’m like, “Okay, great, that’s awesome.” It was three minutes, and it was like a little Christmas miracle. I didn’t think it would go like that. So my next step was to go change my birth certificate, because in Utah. you can change your birth certificate and your gender—well at least at that time you could. LR: So you actually changed it on your birth certificate? AF: Yeah. I don’t know what time it was, it was probably the afternoon, and Sandy and I decided that we’re just going to do it now. So we run down to Salt Lake, to the vital records, and I go up, and again, I don’t even know how to go about this. I hand my court order, and I say, “I’m here to change my birth certificate.” They say, “Okay,” so I give them my ID that still has ‘Heather’ on it and say, “This is what I want it changed to.” I go and sit, and we’re waiting and we’re waiting, and I’m like, “This is taking a long time.” Keep waiting, and I finally get called back up and they say, “We can’t find your birth certificate.” I say, “That’s weird, because I have a copy of it at home.” They said, “We’ll see if the delayed birth certificates have a copy.” I say, “Okay.” So I wait and I wait and I wait, and now I’m getting nervous. Finally a lady, and I think it was a supervisor, calls me up, and she says, “So we found your birth certificate, but the problem is that we think it’s been tampered with. Do you have any naturalization papers?” I say, “I don’t know what that means.” 55 She says, “Well, it looks as though your birth certificate at one point said you were born in Mexico, but somebody changed it to show you were born in Utah. So we need your naturalization papers to get you over to the naturalization people.” I say, “I don’t know what you’re talking about. My birth certificate at home says something different.” She then says, “Well, it seems as though your sister has the same problem.” I say, “I’m not sure what birth certificate you just looked up.” She says, “Well Brandon Florence.” I say, “Okay, that’s my brother. I’m Heather Florence, and I’m trying to change my birth certificate to say Alex Florence and my gender to have male on it.” “Oh, well then your brother’s going to need to come in and talk to us too, because his birth certificate was tampered with.” I say, “Why are we opening up the sealed record?” She says, “We have a court order.” I say, “No, no, no. The court order was just for you to change my birth certificate, not anything else.” She says, “Well now that we opened it, we have a problem. You contact your parents to see if they have your naturalization papers.” I say, “What does that mean?” 56 She says, “It means that you aren’t here legally. You need to have a naturalization paper.” Now I’m panicking, I don’t have any of that, and I look at her, and I’m like, “I work for the government. Do you not think they would have seen this if it was a problem”? “Well, we’ve opened it, so now we have to figure this out.” I say, “I don’t even know. What are you going to do to me?” She says, “If you don’t have your naturalization papers, you’ll go over to the office, and depending on how they decide to take care of it, you might get deported.” I say, “Does this sound like I know Spanish? I don’t.” I’m in a complete panic, and in my brain, if I had just not even done this, this would not be a problem. What did I just do to myself? I remember feeling like, “Is this the punishment from God?” ‘cause now all the religion stuff’s coming back at me. I turn to Sandy and I say, “I don’t even know what to do.” She says, “Where’s your birth certificate at?” I say, “It’s at home, and I’m trying to figure out what I’m going to do.” So I tell them, “I gotta call my dad. I don’t know what to do about this situation.” They say, “Well, we’ll keep the court order and give us a call tomorrow.” I say, “Okay.” So I get in the car, and call my dad, and I just start crying. My dad’s in the car with my mom and I’m like, “Dad, I tried to change my name, and they opened my sealed records, and Brandon’s, and now they’re telling me I 57 need naturalization papers. Do I have that? I don’t know, they want to deport me, I think?” He’s silent, and I guess my mom could hear me, and she was just angry ‘cause she doesn’t really know what’s going on either. I haven’t told her, because the relationship wasn’t really awesome. In the background I hear, “What are you doing? This is all your fault,” just screaming. “Well, that’s your own fault, and if they deport you, good.” I’m crying, and my dad says, “Let me make a few phone calls, and I’ll call you right back.” I say, “Okay.” I drive back home and I’m just like, “What did I do? What is this going to look like?” So my dad makes a few phone calls, and I honestly don’t know who he called, but he calls me that night and says, “Okay, I have someone that’s going to call tomorrow to try to figure this out with vital records.” I say, “Okay.” So it’s almost a week that I wait, because I don’t know what’s going to go on. I get a phone call from my dad while I’m at work and he said, “Okay, so I talked to the lady who’s the supervisor there. I talked to her supervisor and I said, ‘Listen, this wasn’t a court order for you to open anything, it was just for one thing.’ I basically told them that I have legal representation for you if needed. We need to make this right, because what she did was not right.” A few hours later I get a phone call from her and she says, “Your birth certificate is ready for you to come down and get it whenever you can.” 58 I thought, “Okay, that’s interesting.” So I take time off of work, I go down there, and she apologizes. “I’m sorry I opened this up. I should not have done that, and here is your new birth certificate. We have sealed your old birth certificate so nobody can ever get to it.” I say, “Oh, good. I’m not going to get deported.” She gives me a new birth certificate, and it says Alex Stanley Florence on it, and it shows that I’m male. I get a few copies of it, and from there I went to the DMV up here in Farmington, and I don’t know how this is going to look. I have my court order, my birth certificate, and now I’m trying to change my license. So I go in and explain to the person at the counter, “I’d like to get a new license to say this.” She was confused, like, “Okay. I’m not sure how to go about this.” I said, “Oh dear. Is this going to open up another can of worms?” She said, “I’m going to go talk to my supervisor.” Her supervisor comes out, and he says, “To switch, we do this and this and this,” and he looks at me and says, “Congratulations.” I say, “Thank you, thank you very much.” So I get a new license, and okay, this is awesome. I’m not deported, I have a new license and a new birth certificate. I’m on a roll. The next day I go to work, and I call my supervisor, and I said, “Okay, so legally now I’m male, which means I have to start using the male bathroom at work, and I need a new CAT card,” which is a new ID for work. “I don’t know how to go about this.” 59 The supervisor just says, “Well, let me get in touch with DEERS and see what we need to do.” I said, “I need to talk to my government supervisor, cause now I got to use the male bathroom.” So I go talk to her, and she knows what’s going on, and I say, “Now it’s legal, so now I need to use the men’s bathroom. I don’t know how we want to implement this or what we want to do.” So she gets another supervisor, the male supervisor, and says, “This is what Alex needs to do.” He says, “Okay, just start using it. If we have any backlash, then we’ll take care of it.” I say, “Okay.” I hadn’t used a male bathroom by myself. Usually I had a wingman with me; Ray would be with me in public and I’d go use it, kind of like a little kid using the bathroom. So the instruction is keep your head down, and don’t really look at anybody in the male bathroom. I’m like, “This is so weird.” So I go to the men’s bathroom at work, and there’s only one stall, and I just felt really awkward, but I use it. A few weeks go on, and finally one of the guys says something and he’s not super happy about it. They end up having this huge meeting, and I wasn’t involved in the meeting, but there were a lot of questions that were asked that I found out later like, “Okay, if Alex is transitioned, does that mean he’s gay now?” The supervisor says, “No, no, it doesn’t mean he’s gay. He’s not gay, he’s a male now.” “Well yeah, but he was gay before, so isn’t he gay now?” 60 “No, no he’s not gay, he has a girlfriend.” “Oh, well, okay, so then he’s not gay?” “No, he’s not gay.” Their biggest concern was that all of the sudden I like men, and that I would be in this male bathroom with them, checking them out. Like wow, you’re a little too confident in yourselves. LR: That is blowing my mind. AF: It was so crazy, I wondered, “You guys think I’m gay?” Whatever. So the chief comes into this meeting, and she’s brand new. She’s the chief over the whole organization, and again I didn’t find this out till later by my supervisor, but she basically came in and said, “Listen, if you guys are uncomfortable with Alex using the male bathroom here, then you go someplace else. He doesn’t have to. He’s fine. You use the other bathrooms if that is your problem with him.” They said, “Oh, really? You want us to go to another room when it’s just one guy?” She said, “Yeah, you go use a different bathroom if you are so upset about this. Go to a different building, whatever you need to do.” After that, they didn’t really bitch about it, they were just completely okay. I guess they thought I all of a sudden liked dudes. Like whatever, that’s cool. LR: What a huge change. AF: A big misunderstanding I guess, transitioning, which—I guess sometimes, that does happen. Like some guys like me, who transition and who dated women, sometimes they transition and they do start dating men. It could be because at the time before they felt that dating women made them feel more masculine, and 61 as they got more comfortable with themselves they’re like, “I like men, exclusively.” For me, that didn’t change, but I do know some guys that have changed. LR: The way you’re describing it makes sense. AF: I guess if you didn’t feel comfortable within your own body, how could you feel comfortable dating the gender that you want to be? LR: That makes sense. AF: Anyway, so the CAT card thing. They didn’t really know how to go about it, other than, “We need documentation.” So I took all my documentation over to the card place, and now it’s military people, and I’m thinking, “Oh my gosh, I don’t even know how this is going to work.” In my mind I just hope I get a female, because they take it so much better, and I did. I got a female, so I just gave her all the paperwork and said, “I just need it to say Alex S. Florence on my card, and if there’s any place in the computer program that states gender, I really need that changed to male.” She said, “Okay, well, let me see what I can do.” It took some time, she had to make some phone calls, because this is the first time from their understanding that anybody had transitioned while on base. They made some phone calls, and again, it just kind of seemed to work out. They said, “Well, they have all the documentation we need legally, birth certificate saying this now, and it said this before, so make the change.” 62 They made the change, I got my CAT card, and I said, “Okay, what else do I need to do?” I had clearance at the time, so they had to call J-Pass and had to change that. J-Pass, they said, “All the documentation, okay, that’s fine.” LR: Did you have to go through another security— AF: No, because they had everything, and it showed my birth name, and now they could show, with my birth name, the legal documentation that changed to another name, so it was just very smooth. I thought, “Yeah, this is really cool. I feel like this is the path that I’m supposed to be on.” All of that just kind of worked out. Within that time as well, I was really involved in the Royal Court, the non-profit organization, and I had decided to run as a co-president for it, amongst everything else I was trying to deal with. I thought this would be a great idea too! Just put myself in the spotlight. I was elected to be the co-president for that year, and I was the first transgender co-president they had within the organization, across the United States. I didn’t realize how much pressure that would put on me, because all of a sudden, oh crap, I feel like a poster boy of transition. Not only am I trying to go through puberty and transition within myself and just with a small group of people, now I feel like everybody’s watching me go through transition and puberty, which is like being back in junior high. I don’t know how I got through that year, but I remember just feeling that I was able to put on a show when I needed to. “This is me, how you doing,” shake some hands, kiss some babies, whatever I needed to do. But when I was alone, I was really just very introverted and just had a lot of things going through my head: what is my future 63 going to look like, everything seems to be going good now, but why, and it could change, and just all of these anxieties. Anxieties of like, I don’t even know what it’s like to be male. What kind of male am I going to be? I’m never going to be an alpha male, I’m five foot-nothing. My voice is now changed, but I couldn’t tell. Even now I can’t tell how deep it is, because in my head I hear my voice before, and I can’t really tell where my tone is. That took a long time to figure out, I’m still trying to figure it out. I couldn’t figure out how I sounded, like do I sound at least masculine enough? I also lost my ability to sing, and that was really sad for me, because I loved singing. I couldn’t hear my pitch, I didn’t know where I was supposed to be at anymore. For me at least, I’m kind of mourning these things that I didn’t realize I would. I thought transitioning was going to fix so many things in my life, and it did; it fixed so many great things and gave me confidence, but there were these little things that I started to realize that I started losing. I slowly began feeling like I began to lose the ability to have emotions, and I think that’s part of testosterone, because all of a sudden, I couldn’t cry. I could see a Hallmark commercial before and just be a puddle, and then I could see a Hallmark commercial and be like, whatever. Something could happen where I would normally have an emotion of crying, but what was happening was that I was getting annoyed and irritated more easily. I was wondering, “What is going on? This is not who I am. Why am I feeling like this?” For probably a good six months, I just felt angry. I felt like the Hulk, right? I felt like Bruce Banner most of the time, but something like that could just get me raging with anger. I never did 64 anything to anybody, or Hulked out on them or whatever, but inside I felt like I could just come unglued. It was so strong, and I thought, “Oh my gosh, is this what rage is? Like steroid rage? Because that’s what I feel like it is. What am I going to do about this? How do I control this?” I became even more secluded from people, because I didn’t want it to ever come out on anybody, and I had to really think about my reactions and how I was going to sound to people when I talked to them, or reacted if I started feeling irritated. So along with the voice change, I couldn’t tell when I sounded serious or mean or agitated or if people could tell I was joking. There’s so many things, and I don’t know how to navigate this. I feel like a complete hot mess right now. But slowly, I learned that the agitation and things like that, it was puberty, it was testosterone, it didn’t mean that that was who I was. It just meant that I needed to learn how to react how I used to. At that moment, I realized, “Okay, everything that I learned, being socialized as a female, and emotions like compassion, sympathy, and empathy, I can bring back into my world, into my thinking, into my reaction as a male. Because I’m the only person that can define my own masculinity. Nobody else can. Even though society says this is what a male is, that doesn’t mean that I need to fit into that same box. I can be my own man.” Once I decided that, and started implementing these wonderful traits that I had as a female, the anger that I was feeling, the irritation that I was feeling, ended up actually being more of an internal thing against myself, rather than what was going on around me. That started to wean off, and I was beginning to learn how to control anger and things like that, and become more compassionate 65 to myself. Because it’s a journey. This is going to be my journey for the rest of my life. Transition isn’t an event, it’s a process, right. Once I learned that about myself, I learned that with everybody else around me, too, it’s a process. Everybody, no matter how long it’s been since I’ve talked to them, they will go through that process at some point. Those people that are surrounding me now are going through that same process with me, and that’s okay. There’s no reason to be upset or angry, ‘cause I felt really alone for a long time, like nobody understands me, the whole angsty teenage thing, I literally felt like that. But I was able to start seeing the light again of, “You’re not alone, everybody’s going through this with you.” It took me probably a couple of years to actually get through all of those emotions. But with the emotions and all the inside stuff, nothing was really happening on the outside for me. I wasn’t getting facial hair, my voice had dropped, but nothing else was really going on, and I was wondering, “What is the problem with me?” Dr. Luikenaar said, “I don’t know why this isn’t working.” We kept trying different types of testosterone, it went from the shots to this little tablet that dissolved under my tongue, to creams, to all these things, trying to figure out why I was not transitioning on the outside. Anyways, it took them about three and a half years, I think, to figure out that the thyroid problem that I had prior to transition was actually an autoimmune disease that I had been living with my whole life, and it was creating an adrenal failure, as well as the inability to have a puberty again. Your thyroid gland tells your pituitary gland to start puberty. For 66 my whole life, I had always looked extremely young, and I just thought it was my ethnicity or whatever. Come to find out, it was because I had this autoimmune disease, and also why I was small, because there was a good chance I could have been taller. Once we figured out it was an autoimmune disease, I got put on the right medication, and within a month and a half I started growing facial hair. My voice did drop a little bit more, and for probably another six months, I saw this huge transformation in my body. Women hold their fat in different places than men do, so all of a sudden, I remember one day I was putting on pants or something, and I looked down at my knee, and I thought, “My leg looks completely different. I can see my knees, guys, this is totally weird.” My hips started really aching really bad, because they had been a little bit wider, and my hips had started going back in. It was painful, it hurt. I noticed my arms started changing, and up here started changing. All of a sudden, I started getting a buddha belly, and I thought, “What’s going on?” It was just part of going through this puberty. I went from teenage puberty to older man puberty, kind of, ‘cause guys transform as they get older. In your thirties, guys start to get the buddha and stuff, and I was like, “Son of a gun, how do I get rid of this, I don’t even know?” All of a sudden, I started getting bigger up here, and it wasn’t like I was getting fat, it was like muscle was just growing. I had a lot of aches and pains, and I wondered, “What is going on?” My body was really changing a lot, and that created a different type of dysphoria for me that I didn’t think I would have. I went from feeling dysphoric because I had breasts and all this stuff, to feeling dysphoric of, “Am I fat now?” 67 All of a sudden I’m gaining all this weight. I went from being 113 pounds to like 130 pounds, and thought, “Is this how I’m supposed to look?” In my brain, I’m supposed to be small, but in my head I’m concerned. “What did I just do? Is this what testosterone does? ‘Cause now I’m getting thick. It’s not fat, it’s thick. Right?” Even to this day, I still struggle a little bit, because in my brain I still think in a way of, “If you’re a certain weight, you’re fat, ‘cause in the female world, if you gain some weight, it’s not a good thing. In the guy world, if you gain some weight, that’s a good thing ‘cause that means you got muscle. It takes me a lot to process the fact that if I gain a couple of pounds, it’s probably not going to be fat, ‘cause I’ve been working out at the gym. It’s going to be muscle. I have to be okay with that. I have to be okay that my shirts are going to fit differently, because my shoulders are going to be bigger, and all these different things that I didn’t realize would come, again, with transition. It’s just been quite a learning experience. There has been sadness and stuff like that that came with it, but it taught me a lot of just how men and women’s bodies are so different, and it’s so strange to me. That’s been interesting right there for sure, trying to figure that out. I’m going through all the physical changes now, I’m working, and I started seeing the differences in how men and women are treated at work. I had a project that I did for quite a few years as female, and my cubie mate, Scott, did a different project. Guys would come in and would start talking to Scott about whatever it was and Scott would say, “This is not my project, this is her project.” Then they would 68 come talk to me, and talk to me completely different than they’d talk to Scott, almost like, “Do you understand that?” I would say, “I get it, I totally get it.” But that’s how I was used to being treated. As I started transitioning, the voice dropped, the hair came on my face, and I presented more male. Guys would come in, and now my cubie mate was somebody different, it was a female. They would come in, and come right to me, and start talking to me. I’m like, “Guys, that’s not my project, that’s so-and-so’s project. You need to talk to her about it.” Then I heard how they talked to her. I thought, “This is bullshit!” Seriously, just because they haven’t seen me for a year or more, because I had transferred my project to her and was on a different project, so nothing has changed. I’m still the same person, I just look different and sound different now, but because you assume that I had been male my whole life, you treat me completely different. It started to irritate me, and it started to make me feel this guilt that my co-workers who are female get treated so crappy, and they get bypassed so much when there are so many brilliant ideas that come out of their mouths. They multitask like a boss, and these guys over here can barely handle their one project they have. All of a sudden, I’m over here doing a couple of projects but I’m getting the, “Good job, you’re doing such a great job,” all the time because all of a sudden I’m male? That’s just ridiculous. I started seeing this inequality that was happening, and I thought, “Okay, what do I do about that? Is there something I can do now as a male in this society?” I started to think, “Well, 69 maybe if I call it out, say something about it. ‘Guys, don’t talk to her like that.’” I started doing that, and guys would get irritated about it. “This is just how we talk.” “No it’s not, you talk to me totally different than you do to her.” In meetings, when one of my female coworkers would have this great idea, nobody would say anything about it, so they started coming to me. “Hey, can you mention this in a meeting?” “Okay.” So I mentioned it in the meeting, and people would say, “Alex, that’s such a great idea.” “Actually, that’s so-and-so’s idea. She just wanted me to mention it to you guys, so that you would hear it.” Slowly, within that setting of work, because I started calling things out, people in higher positions started seeing that this kind of thing does happen. I’d say, “Yeah, it does, and it’s so irritating to me. It makes me so angry.” I never want to forget where I came from, and that shift is something that I’m just not comfortable with; I don’t think I ever will be in my entire life. I don’t think it’s right, and I hope that the more I’m in different workplaces, the more I can change the view of how we treat gender differently. Anyways, where was I? So that shift happened, and you get to a point in your transition where the physical changes stop, and emotionally I think you kind of figure it out. I started getting there about the time I was 34, 35, and at that point, the relationship that I was in with Sandy, we had decided to end it because transition was very hard on both of us. She had to redefine where she stood 70 while I was redefining myself. It did take quite a toll, but I grew up more with her in this relationship and we’re best friends now. I look at her as like a sibling, because I did so much growing up in such a short amount of time with her. I was getting into my manhood, right, figuring that whole thing out, and Sandy really made a huge impact in my life. She was there, her family was there for me during all of this. My dad was there, but my mom, she had basically written me off. She had told my cousin that she would rather have me dead than to have me become a guy. That was really hurtful. I didn’t really know how to process that other than just being angry, and just keeping that anger to keep that distance from her. Anyways, Sandy and I had mutually decided, but we still lived in the same household because we had bought the house together. Within that time, I had been asked to kind of give a little ‘Trans 101’ at the University of Utah for a conference named Sunstone. I went up there, and that’s where I met my wife now. She was there with one of her good friends, and when we first met we were just kind of trying to figure out each other. When she first met me, she thought I was a gay guy, which honestly, that happens all the time. People think I’m gay all the time, which I’m cool with. But we started talking, and it took about four or five months to think, “Okay, I kind of like you. I think there might be something,” and she felt the same way. But she was living in California at the time, so it was trying to figure that whole thing out, which obviously, we did. But for her, being married to somebody who is transgender has been a journey. She’s been married to a cisgender man for twenty something years and 71 they had four kids. The dynamic that comes with me is different because, being socialized as female, I have a lot of female friends from my childhood. For her, that’s so different, because in the male world and the Mormon male world, you just don’t do that. Guys don’t have female friends. The only reason you have female friends is probably because you’re doing something with them even though I’m not that kind of guy. For her, that has been difficult. She’s worked through that, realizing that I can’t diminish or be ashamed of this female energy that I still hold onto, because that’s one part of me that she loves. But with this female energy, and my male energy, it’s something that I like to share. I like to have females feel comfortable with me as a male, because there’s a lot of females that have had such bad experiences with other men that they’re afraid to have friends that are male. I want females to always feel comfortable around me. I never want them to feel like I’m a creeper or that I’m there for one thing. I want you to feel comfortable, I want you to know I understand you, and my wife loves that part about me. For her, me being transgender is a journey, even though she met me while I was already transitioned. There just comes a point in your transition where you’re just doing things like this, or talking that keeps me grounded, because it constantly reminds me of where I did come from. I don’t forget those things. AC: It was interesting how you said a lot of your female coworkers would multitask, and the male coworkers not so much. I was wondering—do you think that’s maybe a product of expectations in the female world? 72 AF: Yeah. Females are expected to juggle a lot of things. I know when I was growing up I felt the same way. Growing up as female and as Mormon, you’re told to juggle a lot of things. Make sure that your house is good, your kids are good, your husband’s good, and you’re getting all the stuff done. But you never take time for yourself. I can multitask pretty well, only because that’s how I was brought up. Men are not brought up to do that whatsoever. If they do, it’s very overwhelming for them, and they just get angry. At least that’s what I’ve experienced with males in my world. AC: Is being overwhelmed and having a hard time multitasking a product of testosterone, or is that a mindset? AF: I think it’s just a mindset. I think men have the capability to do that if they were brought up that way. I know men that can, because they’ve had sisters and single moms, so they learn different things. If they have a dad who is the alpha male, those guys get taught so differently than men who are more sensitive and things, like cisgender men who are more sensitive and aren’t all that kind of stuff. They’re just different guys. Most of my male friends that I have—which is few in the straight world, ‘cause most of my friends are gay men, because they’re more sensitive and all that kind of stuff—but the straight friends that I do have, their parents and father tended to be more sensitive than other guys. So I think it really has to do with how they’re brought up. I have step kids now and four of them are males. I try to really bring in that sensitivity that it’s okay to feel, it’s okay to cry, it’s okay to have feelings, and it’s okay to express and to communicate how you’re feeling. I want to make sure they know that’s okay, 73 because I really honestly think our world would be so much better if men had the ability to interact the same way that females do. LR: Wow. The one thing I have noticed throughout all of this is something that you have repeatedly said about finding your truth. The last time, I actually wrote down a question that I thought would be a great ending question. Basically, when were you finally able to be honest with yourself? Or is it still something you’re working on? AF: I think it’s still something that I’m working on. I think that souls all have a different reason for being in this human experience. As much as I’ve gone through with my soul and my physical body, I think that my soul has a lot more to learn, and as much as I am authentic and living my truth in this world, socially and all that kind of stuff, I feel like there’s still more that I need to do or learn. Just had that feeling, and my truth is my truth, and my journey is that. But it’s a never-ending journey. It’s a continuation, and it will continue on to whatever my soul goes into or my next possible life. I just want to make sure that whatever I take when I leave this earth is all positive and that I didn’t just make a change for me, but that my change could help other people. I want to make sure that I do. LR: Well, it sounds to me in listening to your story, especially as you have made the transition, that you’re trying to be a catalyst for change, especially in the workplace. AF: Yeah. I definitely try to. I’m not as loud and proud about it, like some people are. I do it my way. I prefer to do it on a one-on-one basis, or just small groups, because I don’t think I’m very good at huge group settings. I think that more 74 interpersonal communication has a bigger effect on change than anything, I guess. LR: I’m going to ask a final question, because I thought of one that’s even better than the one I just asked. If you were to sit in a room full of teenagers who are struggling with the things you struggled with growing up, what would you say to them? What would your advice be to them, knowing your entire journey, where you were, and where you are? What would you want them to know, to help them get to where you are within themselves? AF: That’s a loaded question. LR: I’m sorry about that. AF: No, it’s okay. That’s a loaded question because I think every individual needs to hear something different. I don’t think there is anything I could say specifically in one phrase… but I think what’s important for those kids is to see physically, that there’s somebody who’s been where they are, but has successfully gotten to a better place, and that all of that hurt and pain and turmoil is just learning. You have a choice of how you’re going to react to it, whether it’s negative or positive, and if you take the positive road it will always bring you success, even with the obstacles that lay in front of you. I guess that’s the only thing I can think of. LR: That’s actually really great. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we turn off the camera? AF: I don’t think so. LR: Okay. Thank you.