Becoming Jacob
With a little help from friends—and a budding Internet fan base—a twenty-year-old woman from Queens becomes a man.
By Angela Melamud
http://narrative.ly/2012/10/becoming-jacob/ (http://narrative.ly/2012/10/becoming-jacob/)
Afterward, during lunch at an uncle's house nearby, the baby's eighteen-year-old cousin, Vanessa Rose Centrone, a college freshman, asked for her mother's permission to change her own name.
Cathy Centrone, a 54-year-old elementary school aid, looked at her daughter, and said, "You can change what I gave you, which is your name. But you can't change how God made you."
Jacob Centrone, now 20, and more than a year into the physical process of reassigning his gender, scoffs at his former name.
"Vanessa Rose," he says, shaking his head. "It was the girliest." Jacob is five-foot-three and has short-cropped brown hair, a chinstrap beard that frames his angular jaw, and big blue eyes that peek through a pair of black rectangular glasses. Though he can be anxious and fidgety, Jacob's confidence grows the longer you're around him.