Dana Beyer
Executive Director, Gender Rights Maryland
10 Years After
Posted: 01/08/2013 5:52 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dana-beyer/10-tears-after_b_2422301.htmlThis is my 10th piece on The Huffington Post, and it's appropriate that I'm composing it for the 10th anniversary of my living an authentic life. I don't normally write here about anything of a deeply personal nature, so I hope you'll bear with me.
The bare facts are that I flew into San Francisco on Jan. 6 with my male ID, entered the hospital on Jan. 8 as Dana, and never looked back. The only personal accommodation I had to make was for the return flight home, when I tucked my hair under a baseball cap and boarded the plane in jeans and a loose shirt to avoid the increased attention being paid to identification in the years immediately after 9/11.
I had a friend who taught me that the social aspect of gender transition proceeds in stages and evolves, over a 10-year period, into what many would call a semblance of normalcy. At the time I had no idea if she was correct, but, having plunged headlong into the dark over the cliff of gender difference, I was determined to succeed. I had no conception whatsoever of how my life would look in a year, let alone in 10 (psychiatrists used to ask me, "If you had your druthers, what would life be like for you in five years?"), but I was determined that I would neither fail nor get stuck in transition, as so many unfortunately do. I knew there would be loss, maybe even tragic and crippling loss, but as the mantra goes, failure was not an option. Having come close to suicide, failure was simply an unacceptable outcome.
