I am Living Me

By Clover, Age 36

Interviewed and Edited By Angela Wicke

Date of Interview: July 2023

Introduction

Hi, my name is Clover, and my pronouns are she/her. I’m a trans woman, furry, archer, and adventurer both virtually and in real life. I’m participating in the Permanence Project because I’m a passionate advocate of trans rights, a fighter who’s willing to use my voice to help other trans folx whenever I can.

Family Life and Upbringing

CW: Religion, parental abuse, homophobia, transphobia, transphobic slur

I was a Navy brat; my father was a sailor in the submarine force. He would be absent for three months at a time and then pick up a day job for three months on shore before disappearing again for three months, and so on. My family—my father, my mother, my three sisters, and me—moved around for much of my childhood. San Diego, Groton, Washington, Groton again. But when someone asks, I consider the place where I grew up to be Kenosha, WI. I arrived in first grade and spent my very formative elementary school years there. I still say ‘Wisconsin’ weird after all this time, with a Wisconsin Nixon accent. We were on Lake Michigan, close enough for me to regularly bike or walk down to the lake shore. I made lots of friends and generally thrived in the freedom of a vibrant small city. But between 6th and 7th grade we moved out to the middle of nowhere. Thirteen acres of land five miles outside of Larwill, Indiana, where our nearest neighbor was a pig farm a quarter mile away. That's where I died. There was no place to bike, no friends, and nothing to do. The place proceeded to completely destroy my soul, leaving me with no other choice but be the good little traumatized evangelical boy my parents wanted me to be.

Of my sisters, one was just younger than me and two were older. There were two separate groups of kids, basically, or rather two different divisions. The older couple and the younger couple, and there was a level bonding there. But then there was a separate one, between the girls and the only boy.

My dad said he was gonna raise me, that he was gonna make a man out of me. There were a lot of gender-based issues in my youth, largely because I was explicitly singled out for this treatment since I was the only boy. This led to my father abusing me, hazing me, all in the name of building character, or whatever the fuck conservative men beat their sons for. I don’t speak with him anymore.

He’s also the main reason my relationship with my mother soured. My mom loved how much of a cuddler I was, even as I got older. I was a very emotional child, one who wasn’t afraid to return to my mom for comfort. I had a very good relationship with my mother, until it became clear to me how indoctrinated she’s been by my father. She is the sweetest, most friendly, and most loving bigot. She is the kind of racist who believes saying that she’s not racist makes her not racist.

I don’t really want to go into the beliefs that I held when I lived with them. I’ll just say that I was not aware of the trans community or the potential to transition outside of pop culture mockery. While the Evangelical Church I was part of preached openly about the dangers that being gay had on traditional family values, they didn’t touch on being trans much. Not because they supported it, of course, but because ‘those trannies’ were so much worse: disgusting, irredeemable degenerates. People my dad very vocally talked down about and referred to as ‘it’ whenever they came up. I lapped it all up and spat it back out like a good little Christian soldier. Yes sir! I became a conservative little shit because that was the only way to be safe in my household.

Even now, when I’m in a much better place mentally, I still have reflexive thoughts that echo that conservative evangelical mindset. I have to be conscious and check myself to make sure that I am not looking at something from a conservative standpoint, because the indoctrination runs so deep.

Understanding Gender Identity

Coming to understand my identity is something that I'm actually still in progress on. The issue with understanding my identity is that I can only see it from where I am at any given point in my life, and so much of that process is just starting to explore and seeing how comfortable I feel in new places. It’s a constant experience of finding something that feels more right to you than where you are now, because you have absolutely no clue where you will end up and where you need to go. That process can be really fucking scary; you don’t know what will click with you until you try it. For example, I’m now starting to be a little bit more on the crunchy-all-natural-hippie-Earth-Mother-farmer’s-market side of things, which is something I never would’ve figured out when I still was so depressed and repressed. You can only feel what works for you if you can actually feel things.

One of the things that was an issue for me was just that I didn't think that it was possible for me to have what I wanted. I didn't even consider that I could pursue what I truly wanted because it was such an impossibility to me. I was looking longingly up at the third step, wishing and lamenting for a future that I never thought would happen. So much of my identity prior to last year had been based off of the thought, “I can live with this.” Like, “Okay, I will be a non-traditional man. I might be okay with being a bit of an effeminate guy.” Then, “No, I guess I'm gonna be a femboy.” Later, “I guess I could try being non-binary. That might be okay for me.” I was so scared of going so far that I become a girl because I couldn't do that. It’s like light switch toggles, where you can't put them in the middle because it's going to snap one way or the other. For the longest time, my gender identity was as close to ‘girl’ as it possibly could without crossing the line. I didn’t think I could live like that.

Early Exploration and Meeting My Husband

My first experimentation with being a girl was online, like with many folks of my era. I had a lot of issues exploring in real life, but being online gave me a safe alternative, if not a speedy one. Let me tell you what: the year 2004, with a 56k modem? No, thank you. It was much better in high school when we finally got DSL.

My most positive engagement with the trans and queer communities was through the furry fandom. There was nothing to do in Indiana, so I found my escape in role play forums that eventually led me to the furry fandom and my first exposure to queer ideas in a non-negative light. I was still a very conservative individual, but I was having my preconceptions challenged. I still rejected it, but I was being exposed and challenged, and that was a good start.

The characters I played were initially always all men, but after some time I started role-playing as a woman. It was for lewd reasons at first, but it also started getting me thinking, “What if?” That led to me to start choosing the female characters in role-playing games in more broad and varied ways, and in increasing frequency. This wasn’t just in video games like Morrowind, though. These forums were long form story posting, and so it really gave me the opportunity to start exploring feminine identities and see what clicked with me. I didn't realize that that's what I was doing, but looking back at my list of characters, it’s an interesting deconstruction for me to see how they evolved in complexity and variety from very basic tropes over time.

Yeah, it was actually through online role-playing that I met my husband. We meshed really well in a RP chat room, played together a lot, and then finally decided to meet in person. I drove down from Columbia City, IN through a blizzard to Dayton, OH to meet him at the Air Force Museum there. The second time that I went down to visit him, I had my first kiss. It was awkward as hell, in his front lawn and everything. But it's freaking adorable looking back.

He's my first real partner, unless you count the girl I met at a church lock-in night in high school that called me every day for two weeks before breaking up with me at her birthday party. That was the sum total of my dating experience prior to him.

By the time we were ready to be married, I’d actually come to acknowledge my identity enough that I started to transition socially. This was way back when, so much so that my husband hadn’t transitioned yet, so we got married as lesbians. I even made my own wedding skirt. Unfortunately, we don't have any pictures of the ceremony anymore because we couldn't let the physical photos be seen at the time, and the friend who took them vanished off the face of the earth, as friends from halfway across the country tend to do. It was also not a legal wedding; we couldn't legally get married without both of us losing our health insurance. We weren’t officially married until we moved to Connecticut, and then we just kind of stopped by a Justice of the Peace’s house as they were getting packed for vacation to get them to sign a couple of papers on a suitcase.

Instead of just trying to play female characters or presenting as female online, I tried to do stuff like the wedding and wearing skirts around the house to dip my toes into the transitioning waters. I kept trying, and trying to try, only to end up getting scalded by my self-loathing and fear each time. When I started getting bullied by other trans women online for transitioning, I stopped trying entirely for a long time.

Being Bullied from the Community

CW: Transphobia, bullying

I’ve had an easier time relating to the younger trans community than those of my and older generations. About ten to fifteen years ago, there was a significant amount of toxicity and bullying in the online trans community, so much that it still slightly colors my relationship with the trans community today. It was a trope we call ‘trans-lier than thou’, where trans girls undermine each other based on their relative femininity. “I’m more feminine than you,” “You’re failing to be feminine in this way, while I’m succeeding,” that kind of thing. Also, my husband was starting his own transition at the time, and there was a heavy stigma in those circles that anyone who dated a trans person was a chaser—even other trans people. The transfemme community was so different from the welcoming furry community I was a part of at the time, and it all felt so toxic and hostile that I stopped experimenting. I was bullied out of transitioning by other trans women.

I presented more masculine than my husband until he transitioned. When that happened, I started to think that maybe all I had to do was be more feminine than him. I identified stronger as a girl, but a combination of the bullying I experienced online and him transitioning made me think that maybe I didn’t have to be one to be happy. I just needed to be the feminine one in the relationship, which I couldn’t do when he was presenting as a woman. I told myself I was okay with it, but I wouldn’t figure out that I actually wasn't for a few more years.

Transitioning

I started HRT for the first time in 2016. I still hadn't accepted my trans identity or that I was female, but I had accepted that my identity was not male and that I didn’t want to grow into an old man. I was on hormones for about a year, but when I started to grow breasts, I panicked. I hid them as well as I could with tight shirts and such, but that panic on top of stress at work led me to stop taking hormones for a while.

Things settled down in 2019 when I started working at my current company. My life stabilized enough that I could think about myself, and I decided to start HRT again. This job was also when I went from presenting as a non-traditional man to femboy to non-binary. Then a trans friend of mine came to visit, which helped give me the confidence to go out in public as a woman for the first time on October 17th, 2020. I consider that to be my birthday, regardless of what it says on my license.

I’ve changed my grooming habits, like growing out my hair, but besides HRT the only other physical modification I’ve done is get an orchiectomy. For the foreseeable future, those are enough. This is a theoretical end state that I am okay with.

Discrimination and Fighting Back

CW: Transphobia, homophobia, threats of violence

We left Indiana for Connecticut when my husband started transitioning. That was the only reason; we had to flee Indiana for him to be able transition, for either of us to be able to live as ourselves. We are literally refugees in our own country. I could’ve lost my job for being married to my husband and our landlord could’ve evicted us on a whim at any time. All perfectly legal things to do in Indiana, so we moved to Connecticut, leaving behind nearly two-thirds of what we owned.

After moving to Connecticut, I got a job at a local car dealership. It was a stressful position on its own, but my coworkers were absolutely horrible to me. I was harassed mercilessly, called slurs, and someone even put graffiti in the bathroom of my deadname. When I took the complaints to HR, I was fired a week later. Excuse me, I was ‘laid off’ because my position no longer existed. At least not until a week later when they started hiring for it again. The thing is, if I would have fought, I would probably be a millionaire. I was too scared at the time to fight, and when I had the capacity to, the statute of limitations had expired.

That led me to my current position. I was on HRT at the time, but still in the closet about being trans. That said, I was still openly queer, and I had a coworker that was pretty vocal about his opinions. He was the kind of vocally opinionated conservative that just thinks that those sorts of topics are appropriate for office conversation, including his opinions of Chelsea Manning and Caitlyn Jenner. I couldn’t take it anymore and confronted him, saying “You need to stop talking about that because it’s going to get you in trouble with HR.” That was that, or so I thought. I didn’t make anything of the incident or report it.

Not long after, I was called into HR and learned that my coworker had been caught casually talking with another employee about my queerness and threatening violence against me. It was a hate crime, pure and simple, so much so that another employee had reported it. It was unfortunately something that was totally in character for him, so I knew at once that it was a big deal. I had a phone meeting with HR about the incident, because that’s what HR was for, right? I felt threatened and harassed, they're supposed to deal with it. But two weeks later, he was still sitting next to me at his desk, completely undisciplined. They’d barely even given him a slap on the wrist.

The president of my company then sent out an e-mail blast on harassment. It was just some PR thing that HR made him put out that was talking about how the company has zero tolerance for harassment. He also said that if HR couldn’t or wouldn’t help, send him an email directly and he would handle it. So, I reached out to the president of the company and directly told him like, “Hey, were you serious about that? Because here's this incident that I had.” He got me in touch with the chief legal counsel, and I had an hour-long meeting face to face with them. That got me a later, a six-hour meeting regarding the incident with the company’s top lawyers. I basically told them that I fully believed that there was systemic homophobia in HR and that they needed to audit HR itself to make sure that they are not doing slaps on the wrists when they should be firing employees. They said there's zero tolerance, yet I knew of so many instances that my friends had talked about of inappropriate situations at work that they can't get help with. I told them, “HR is going to get the company sued, big time. This is Connecticut. You can't be doing those things in Connecticut.”

I thought the meeting was very productive. At the end, I was put in touch with the soon-to-be head of the brand-new department of diversity, equity and inclusion, and she got me in touch with some other queer employees who were in the process of developing a queer advocacy group at our company. I helped them get it off the ground. I’m not really an organized individual, but I am a fighter. I was someone who was willing to go all the way to the president of the company to see change be made, and that earned me a spot in leadership of the new group. I’m currently trying to put together a committee of advocates who are willing to step up and say when something’s not right. It feels like I’m only good in the one place, like I won’t be going for any of the executive leadership roles in the group, but the place where I am is extremely important. Advocacy is the biggest part of what we need to be doing.

Transgender legislation has had a huge impact on my life, if for no other reason that it determined where it was safe for us to live. My husband and I are currently trying to help other people across the country move to Connecticut; we’ve successfully relocated eleven queer people here already. It all comes back to affirming transgender legislation, that’s why I love it here. Connecticut is the best state in America, because it has protections for us. You’re safe here, so put your neck out and the state will protect you. Very few states in this nation will. In a way, I’m daring my company to fire me for my advocacy work, because if I were fired, I would win that lawsuit. But I’m not really scared of any kind of retaliation from them, to be honest. I’ve already been through so fucking much.

Looking Forward

I came to an understanding recently that undermined a core of self-loathing that had been reinforced in me throughout my entire life. Basically, through a combination of self-reflection, spiritual exploration, and simple logic, I was able to finally prove to myself that I am not a bad person in a way that I cannot personally refute. It verges on the woo-woo, but it works for me. It was such a big breakthrough, and I’m still trying to pick up the pieces. It unraveled so much of my core self that I’m able to see myself clearly for the first time since I was ten; I can see the damage that was done to me, and more importantly, I can see the difference between what’s damaged and what isn’t, where before everything looked broken. It’s weird, and it’s hard. Being numb to the pain makes things easier, but now that my depression is gone, my life is worth living. I’m living my life as myself; I am living me. I don’t know who that is yet, but I’m going to find out.

To the Reader

I thought that there would be so much that I wouldn't be able to achieve by transitioning, or that I somehow wouldn't be successful in transitioning. There was so much fear that I wouldn't be successful and that was what ended up holding me back for so long. But the thing is, if you have transitioned, you are successful. That’s it. The only unsuccessful transition is the one you don’t do. We often hold ourselves back from taking those steps because we fear we won't be the best example of the gender we want to be, but there's no such thing as a proper example. Even in cis folks, there’s so much variety in behaviors, body types and expressions. I didn't think that I would ever be the right woman, but that never really mattered. For a woman like me, being a woman is enough. In that way, transitioning made my life worth living. It can for you, too.