Back in 1997, when I arrived in Wyoming, I didn't know the phrase "going stealth." That's the current (somewhat contentious) term in the trans community for when someone passes full time and tries to mask or even deny that they are transgender.
Even though I didn't use that phrase, "going stealth" was exactly what I was doing. At that moment, the most important thing for me was to present myself as a man, end of story. I wanted to know that people would look at me, work beside me, live with me, and know me as nothing but a man.
Why? I still can't explain why I had such a drive to do this. It seems to me, now, a move full of hubris and (perhaps like much of hubris) underpinned by insecurity and self-doubt. It also, oddly, seems kind of logical. I had spent my whole childhood thinking (knowing) I was a boy while everyone around me told me I wasn't... now I could finally turn the tables and insist I was a boy (and see if anyone disagreed).
So there I was. In Wyoming. In this picture, taken a day before my nineteenth birthday, I am in the big lodge in Yellowstone National Park near Old Faithful. My amazing boss had surprised me with an overnight road trip through the Park as a birthday present. He's taking the picture... and when I look at the image now, I recall that I was excited, scared, nervous, wondering what my boss saw through the viewfinder. Wondering what the other people in the lodge noticed. Was anyone looking at my chest? Was I actually passing?
This isn't true for every trans person, but for me, trying to go stealth just increased my anxiety. I thought and worried more about perception and discovery.
But I made it through that road trip, even sharing a hotel room with my boss. I made it through the whole summer at the ranger station without anyone finding out that I was trans. (This is a very different reality than the fiction I create in my forthcoming novel, Continental Divide.) More on life at the ranger station in future posts.
So let me look at this photo one more time and try to see beyond the stealth... I see me. Young. Happy. Looking like a guy. Or enough like a guy. I passed. I did it. I proved whatever it was that I set out to prove... and I think I discovered in the process that what felt so important, so necessary, was really not about showing the world that I was a guy, or could live as a man without anyone questioning, but was to prove it to myself... and then set it aside, dust off my hands, and set to the (much more difficult task) of figuring out how I really wanted to live.