She makes it seem almost simple. When the time came for her to become a woman, Sandi broke down the process into small segments, then went about solving her problem step by daunting step. Though she's still sorting out her emotional evolution, she speaks of her feelings in a straightforward style. Her gender was a problem; she has found a solution.
Sandi aspires to become a pioneering woman in a man's world. At work, she hopes to maintain a feminine presence in a male-heavy field. Off the job she hopes to pursue a "career" as a national figure in what she calls the "gender community."
If it paid better--if it paid at all--Sandi would like nothing better than to become a professional transsexual. She is proud to spread the word about her newfound womanhood to college sociology classes. She edits a local newsletter for the "community" that regularly features prominent photographs of her smiling face. But because of her ex-wife and their young kids, and because of potential damage to her hard-earned professional status, Sandi agreed to speak to New Times about her life only on the condition that almost every specific detail of it be blurred. She would allow neither the name of her employer nor a specific description of her work to appear in print. She discouraged New Times from interviewing her ex-wife, children or co-workers. While entertaining the possibility of an eventual appearance on a national television talk show, she would not allow her photograph to be taken for this article. Sandi Smith is not her real name. "I really view the surgery as being a cosmetic thing," Sandi said before she left for surgery. "People ask me, `How could you do something like this? How could you go there and have them surgically remove and modify things?' Obviously they're not re-creating all the organs, but they are creating the external appearance. A lot of people I've talked to say that it does give you a lot of satisfaction knowing you are complete externally. Internally, you're in about the same condition as someone who's had a hysterectomy.
"I want to have surgery as soon as possible, because I feel that after that point then I can actively be the woman that I feel I am inside. I am a woman, I know that." DAN SMITH GREW UP in Syracuse, New York, a carpenter's only son and the oldest of five kids. When his parents split while he was in his mid-teens, Dan briefly became the head of the household. He left home at eighteen to attend college in upstate New York.
After two years, Dan began to shop around for a place to finish his degree. "One song changed my life," Smith says. "It kind of made a decision for me at one point. It was called `California Sun.' I liked that song so much, I thought, `I'm going to do that. I'm going out there.' Three schools would accept all of Dan's transfer credits. He picked the one with the highest mean temperature and moved to Tempe. "It was a temporary thing at first," Smith says. "I wasn't planning on staying here. I just wanted to get the four-year degree."
Smith today describes those years at Arizona State University in the late Sixties as "a real party." Still, he managed a B average and met his future wife. "I guess you could say I had the normal number of girlfriends, both in high school and college," he says. "Maybe a little more than normal, I don't know. I had both male and female pals, more female pals than males. Not as steadies or anything, but I always enjoyed relating to females. I felt very close to women. I could relate to women."
After college, Smith went to work for a small electronics firm and got married. By 1974, Dan was on a career track at a much larger firm, and he and his wife had begun to make babies. "Obviously, I tried to be male," Smith says. "I tried very hard in that role, and I did all the normal male things, like cutting wood and doing all the heavy work and being the breadwinner and bringing home the paycheck. But socially and emotionally I was not comfortable in that environment. "I was the authoritarian figure in the family. I didn't like that. I didn't like being the one who got things done, so to speak. I saw myself emulating my own father, and I didn't like that, but I felt that that was the way it was supposed to be. The husband, the wife, the children. That it's put together to be the perfect environment for the children. Everything revolved around the children, and at times I felt that their needs came over the parents' needs." By the early Eighties, Dan had distinguished himself at work, publishing several professional papers and registering his name on a few technical patents. Meanwhile, a profound dissatisfaction was eating away at his marriage. "I was becoming, oh, I guess you could say, a bitch," Smith says. "Bitch is a good word. I couldn't deal with the slightest problems. Everything was getting to me." Because of the anger, Smith felt himself slipping away from his family. "It got to the point where I felt that I was on the outside," Smith says. "They were there, and I was on the other side of the fence. I couldn't deal with the day-to-day activities, even.
"I saw what was happening, but I couldn't do anything about it. At that point--this was about 1983--I thought, `I have to get out of here, I'm ruining their life and I'm ruining my life and it's going to get worse if I keep this up.' I was torn apart inside. It was to the point where suicide had become a very good alternative for me."
The Smiths began to see a marriage counselor, a step that Smith today says sparked his first tentative efforts at examining his gender identity. "My spouse and I, at the time, we weren't communicating," Smith says. "We didn't have a good male-female relationship. The biological aspects of it were never very satisfying. As time went on, my sexual desire waned tremendously. I didn't have a strong desire to be active sexually as a male. It bothered me because I felt that I wasn't providing my spouse with a satisfactory sex life. I didn't feel comfortable performing as a male. There was obviously some satisfaction. You'd have an orgasm. But I felt, I don't know, I really needed, I wanted, to experience it as a woman."
DAN SMITH had his first "trans-gender desires" at age eleven or twelve. The urges grew stronger when he moved away from home to attend college. "I didn't know that anyone else felt like this," Smith says. "I had heard about Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards. Those are the only two names that I knew at that point. They were transsexuals, and I figured I'm not a transsexual. That name doesn't fit. I had these desires, but I didn't equate those with being transsexual. "I had very strong desires to be a woman. I felt cheated that I was in the wrong body. I didn't think that the body I had was bad, but I desired to have a different body. A lot of people say, `I was born in the wrong body.' To a point I think you can customize your body. And I really feel that your gender--and this is a very important thing to me--is between your ears. It's in your head, it's what you feel like, and the physicalness of your body is a different subject. It's on a different plane than what you feel."
MOST MEN WHO CHANGE themselves into women follow a lengthy series of clinical requirements. First they must pass a battery of psychological tests designed to detect emotional instability and schizophrenia. Then begins at least a year of hormone therapy and accompanying psychotherapy in the care of a psychologist or psychiatrist. Most transsexuals--practically all of them male-to-female--live for at least a year full-time as women before reputable surgeons will even consider the knife. To alter one's genitals is a demanding (and expensive) dream to realize.
"You have to be pretty together to get to that point," says JoAnn Richi, a Scottsdale psychologist and one of the few local therapists who handle gender transformation. "Eighty percent of the people I see never get that far. They're in and out of therapy, they're on and off hormones, they just don't have it together enough to say, `This is my goal, and within five years I'm going to change my sex.'
"It is a phenomenal goal, if you think about it. They have to have tremendous presence of mind to plot this out and actually get there."
began a relationship with another woman. At the same time--and with the encouragement of his new "significant other"--he began to experiment, in private, with cross-dressing. "Initially, all I wanted to do was explore this," Smith says. "I wanted to find out what I needed, where my gender position was on the continuum."
Once a bearded, business-suited pipe-smoker, Dan began to neutralize his public appearance. "At some point, I don't remember exactly, I started doing things like going to Smitty's on Saturdays or something, alone," Smith says. "And this was at the point I was very androgynous. I had my hair all frizzed out, a really big Afro."
One such experiment ended in disaster. Dan was on a drive one evening with his companion when he was "spotted" by a carful of teen-agers. "It was a very traumatic experience," Smith says. "I was driving, and they were yelling and screaming and waving their arms and calling me all sorts of names, vulgarities and such. And I got real irritated. I was very angry at them, but I could see their point, being confused by what I was doing and why I was doing it. I just looked real strange to them. I didn't appear very well at all. Basically, I looked like a guy in a dress, and an overweight one at that."
Undaunted, Smith moved forward on his search for a gender identity. The next step was hormone therapy, which, among other things, would cause his breasts to grow and his muscle tone to change. At about the same time, he and his companion split up.
Most men who make the trans- gender journey drop from sight and re-emerge in their new identity in a different setting. But Dan Smith had a thriving career and a family to support.
"What I've done is considered extremely radical," Smith says. "Very few people that I know of have succeeded in transitioning while staying in the same place. The norm is that you quit and move to another city and start out as a Jack-in-the-Box cashier. And when you go to that other place and you start over again, you have no history. You have no references. What can you do? "I had certain responsibilities, financial responsibilities to myself and to others. I was not one to renege on a responsibility. It would have been so much easier to leave."
Dan began to become Sandi. Friends at work would tell Sandi later that her transition advanced like clockwork, that he revealed a new character trait every two weeks for about a year. "Until I made the complete transition at work, some of the people weren't quite ever sure what was going on," Sandi says. "After some of the signs started to appear, like hormonal changes, then I think it became more apparent to people. There were a lot of women in the organization, and I did continue to relate to some of them. They accepted me. Still, it was on a peer basis. It was, `I've known you for a long time so I guess you're okay no matter what you do.' That type of stuff. "Other people just didn't know how to deal with me. They couldn't figure out why I looked so strange. Then they started to really drift away. They just all went away. It was like I was in solitary confinement. "I wasn't hurt. I tried to put myself in their place. I tried to look at what they were seeing. The person they had known, some of them for fifteen years, all of a sudden was so different, so foreign in appearance."
Sandi chose other women at work as her role models. She needed to present as much of a businesslike appearance as was possible during the transformation, every step of which her co-workers would be able to witness. There were more than a few discouraging moments.
"During the transition, I was getting catcalls in the parking lot," Sandi says. "I was hearing rumors indirectly that people couldn't deal with me, that I was really overstepping my grounds. Comments like that. `You just don't do that in this environment.' None of those people ever confronted me. My reaction to the catcalls was anger, an `I'll show you!' attitude. I think I was wrong for feeling that way. "But I had to educate every single person that I had dealt with for fifteen years. That was the mountain I had in front of me, and I started breaking it down into small little edifices, climbing one at a time. By dividing it into little pieces and spending as much time as was necessary with each of those pieces, to regain the comfort factor, to give them some insight, to give them a sense that I am a stable person, that I haven't flipped out, that was my goal."
Sandi's approach wasn't to preach, scold or shock; her goal was to become the picture of feminine professionalism. The big adjustment, in Sandi's eyes, was the one her co-workers had to make.
MDBO
"I haven't completed the job, either," she says. "There are some people that can't deal with me to the point where I am transparent to them. They won't acknowledge that I'm a person. Those people are very few, now. People that haven't seen me for a long time, obviously, are tremendously shocked at first."
Sandi is most proud of maintaining her professional standing throughout the transition. That a skittish manager didn't jettison her at some point during the process is just short of amazing. And also an indication of Sandi's value to her company. "When I went in to my immediate superior just before I made the transition from androgynous to completely feminine, I told him what I was going to do," Sandi says. "His comment to me was, `We're paying you for what you can do, not how you appear.' And that was really the bottom line with my superiors. They recognized the fact that I was very good at the type of things they had given me to do, and as long as I provided them with the performance they required, they would--as far as they could without sticking their neck out--back me."
EARLY IN HER TRANSITION, Sandi began electrolysis. (The cost to totally "clear" a patient's face of beard growth typically runs upward of $10,000.) Dan's business suits and pipe collection went into storage, and Sandi began to assemble an all-new wardrobe.
Slightly more than two years after beginning her physical transformation, Sandi says she's becoming satisfied with her outward appearance. She doesn't wear a wig, preferring instead to style her own soft, straight hair into a medium-length, all-businesslike style. Her nails are long and painted red. Though not fat, she might be described as full-figured. Her voice tone is quite like the voice of Dustin Hoffman's cross-dressing character in the movie Tootsie. When Sandi finds something amusing, she tilts her head to the side just a little bit and gives out a girlish giggle. In every kind of social setting, she passes as a woman. "What you're looking at is what I feel a woman should have, as far as traits and feelings, as best I can do right now," Sandi says. "I have a lot of defects, but I don't feel that I can accomplish a lot more as far as appearance. You can try a lot harder and you won't get much farther. I don't think there's too much to change. I'd like to take about ten pounds off and have a face-lift, but that's typical, too. "The things I'm doing now you see happen with the women in any environment. They change from time to time, too." THE MOST SIGNIFICANT SINGLE feature of Sandi's north Scottsdale condo is a pool table, one of the few holdover hobbies from her Dan days. Dan's electronics workbench still occupies a prominent place in one of the back bedrooms, but Sandi's nail polish bottles take up most of the counter space. Two bunk beds fill another back room, for when the kids visit. Sandi has acquired a fresh set of hobbies. Dan's interests were woodworking, electronics and photography. Sandi's been getting into writing, music and dancing. Almost even-up, Sandi has traded "traditional" male pursuits for a batch of "traditional" female activities. The activity she's most ardent about is her burgeoning role as a national figure in the "gender community." She frequently travels to conventions and meetings across the country to "network" with others like her, and has begun to cultivate a reputation as a featured speaker at such gatherings. Locally, Sandi has assumed a leadership role. She edits a monthly newsletter for a local support group called A Rose, an organization she almost single-handedly keeps up and running. Sandi loves writing, and her newsletter, produced on a home computer, usually contains at least one lengthy, self-revelatory story under her byline and photograph. She regularly ends the monthly messages with her personal motto: "Go for It!"
Sandi's first published poem was included in the January issue of A Rose News: "She and I"
She came into my life
I did not understand. Her presence was warm and nice
A smile, a helping hand.
We are so much the same
I did not think it right. I long to say her name
She said she'd stay the night. Our time together's brief
The clock it will not stop.
Late summer's last new leaf
For time one cannot shop.
We conjured up this life
Our fate is not so sure.
Relations cut as by a knife, We know there is no cure. So let's live out this fate
And deal another round. Since I've traveled through the gate
She's a pleasure now I've found.
SANDI CARRIES IN HER PURSE a small picture of Dan, which she keeps to answer the inevitable "What were you like as a man?" (Sandi never refers to "Dan." She instead refers to him as "my previous role" or "that other person.") Before her operation, Sandi also carried a business-card-sized statement, signed by her psychiatrist, explaining that she was a preoperative transsexual. Sandi travels often for business or to attend gender-community conventions across the country, and she carries the disclaimer for "security" reasons. "Very few people who have not had surgery will attempt to do any type of traveling," she says. "They're afraid something will happen. You always hear horror stories, and it's something you have to have contingency plans for. What if I'm in Alabama or something and my car breaks down on a back road and a county sheriff pulls me over?"
And, yes, she does like to date. When Sandi looks into her future, she sees a lasting relationship with someone special. "I would really like to find someone who accepts me for what I am and what I will be and share my life with that person," she says. "Not necessarily marriage or anything. I do want to share my life with someone, and that person could be male or female. I feel that I can relate to both males and females, so that's something that I am able to admit now.
"The whole concept of relating to a man would be very difficult to handle back three or four years ago, but my attitudes about males have totally changed. I've had some very satisfying experiences, and I'm looking forward to more, too."
For the record, Sandi's idea of a great date is dancing the night away in a nightclub. "I don't dance as much as some people," she says. "When I go out I'll have a dozen dances in an evening. If I get too energetic, too worked up, I get all sweaty, and I don't like that. I really enjoy slow dancing, I just have a problem with leading. When I really get drifting away, and if the guy's not leading, sometimes unconsciously I'll start leading. I've been told a couple of times, `You're leading.' Then I'll say, `You're following.'
"It's very satisfying to be accepted in a nightclub as a woman, which is one of the most difficult tests you can pass, because you're really under scrutiny. The only thing that's more difficult than that is when you get picked up and you go out and you neck later. "I found I was very comfortable with it. I didn't feel gay at all. That was one of the milestones, some of the final nails in the coffin, so to speak, for my other role. I didn't know how I would feel, but it felt good. I liked it. I feel uncomfortable talking about it, because I think it's a very personal thing. I know that I'm accepted that way, and I hope in the future, in the near future, that I will be able to go the whole route, the distance. But it's very difficult to `turn off.' You start thinking to yourself, `I'm not this kind of a girl. Literally.'"
SANDI SAYS LIVING as a woman has taught her so much about the games people play. A visit to the auto shop showed her what it's like to be patronized. Partly because of experiences like that, she calls herself a feminist. "Society thinks women are ignorant," she says. "That drives me up the wall. I guess I could say that I want a fair shake. As a male, I was never negative on feminist ideals. I felt all the time that all of our brains were created equal. But there are certain areas in our society that are gender-cast in certain ways. I'm going to try my darnedest to bring about a sense of an equalization. But I won't burn my bra, because I just got it."
SANDI'S DESIRE to see her transformation through to its surgical finale seemingly is bucking the current trend among transsexuals. According to one local therapist, gender-altering surgery on males, often described as essentially an "inversion" of tissue, is becoming less of a popular option among those in the "community."
"We're seeing less and less surgery," says Jackie Davison, a Paradise Valley psychologist. "More and more people are just assuming the role that they feel is the proper one, especially in the younger ones. They don't make the whole shift. "People are very happy that they can stay just the same between their legs yet assume a different social role. I think there's more acceptance of being bisexual and gay. We just don't have to be just heterosexual anymore." Still, Sandi's recent romantic encounters with men, coupled with a growing confidence in her life as a woman, prompted her to accelerate her date with the surgeon.
One of the last emotional barriers that stood between Sandi and the operation was the ultimate fate of Dan. During the transition, a transsexual's friends and lovers often follow the clinical model of grieving, starting with denial and leading, in some cases, to acceptance. On Death and Dying by Elisabeth Kubler-Ross is recommended reading for a transsexual's family. "Up until the point when you're admitted to the hospital, it's all pretty much reversible," Sandi says. "You haven't really burned the bridges yet. But they're not bridges anymore for me. I know for a fact that surgery is a very imminent thing. It's a very scary thing, too, a very scary thing. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to give blood.
"It's also the death, the final death, of that other person. You don't go back. I still have some internal feelings that that person isn't quite gone. Nothing specific, but it's like--what's the best way to describe it?--there's some tissue that has to be removed or changed that belonged to that other person. I want to get rid of that last incongruity.
"I really have come to believe that I have been this way all my life. This is natural for me. If it wasn't natural, I wouldn't have fallen into it so easily. I was born with a birth defect, and it's going to be corrected." Sandi changed her gender without changing her job or residence.
If it paid better--if it paid at all--Sandi would like nothing better than to become a professional transsexual.
"Obviously, I tried to be male," Smith says.
Once a bearded, business-suited pipe-smoker, Dan began to neutralize his public appearance.
"Basically, I looked like a guy in a dress, and an overweight one at that."
"The norm is that you quit and move to another city and start out as a Jack-in-the-Box cashier."
"During the transition, I was getting catcalls in the parking lot."
When Sandi finds something amusing, she tilts her head to the side just a little bit and gives out a girlish giggle.
"You start thinking to yourself, `I'm not this kind of a girl. Literally.'
