Old worries of an 18 year old teenage girl: Getting drafted

[Lisa_K]

Preface: I wrote this last Saturday night after a night on the town while a little intoxicated and admittedly a little high but decided it was stupid and never actually posted it. After thinking about it for a while I decided I would because the voices and experiences of growing up as a trans youth in the 1960's and early 70's are rarely if ever heard because we technically didn't exist back then at least as far as the all-mighty medical establishment was concerned because they really hadn't yet figured out that kids could even be trans. I'm now 63 and a half years old. Stories from trans kids of my generation about those times are also rare because I think few of us survived to tell our tales so in some ways I feel a bit of an obligation to share my history and perspective just so others will know how at least one person somehow managed to navigate through this madness even if my experiences are particularly unique thanks to my parents and are hardly even relevant in today's world or with the majority of this community.

As teenagers are wont to do, I worried about a lot of things growing up and nothing about my life had ever been normal so understandably, I had a lot of concerns. I had been seeing therapists, counselors, psychologists and psychiatrists from the time I was 10 and one of the biggest fears I lived with for a long time was if I really opened up to them with what I knew in my heart and soul to be true, that I would be ripped away from my parents and put in an institution for being crazy as that's how I perceived myself to be so I basically stonewalled the doctors until I was 17 even though I couldn't have been more obviously gender incongruent and even though my folks and I had come to an understanding when I was 15 about where I was headed. By then though, my parents had already figured out this was a foregone conclusion and were understanding and even if it didn't make any sense, living as the thing I was made even less sense so they were helpful and not things I was worried about. What I was really afraid of was something else standing in my way that would keep me from reaching my goal or forcing me to be a boy and I imagined every possible road block.

This was one of them...

__________________________________________

I should know better than to write and post at 5:00 in morning after spending the evening imbibing at the corner pub and being up all night and this is probably going to ramble like mad but what the heck? Something flashed through my mind tonight when I got home inspired by a conversation I was having earlier with a couple of guys about the Vietnam war that many of the people here much younger than me may only know from their history books? It made me remember one of my greatest but probably most unfounded fears of the era about having to deal with Selective Service Bureau i.e. The Draft Board.

Having always been seen as gender atypical in personality and appearance as a child and never fitting into the world except problematically, without really understanding what was happening I officially started down the road to being a girl as a 15 year old in 1970 when conscription was in full swing but that was certainly the last thing on my mind. Fighting with my folks over looks and pushing boundaries, trying to not get kicked out of school or quit and trying to make it home without someone trying to kill me again were more important things to me at the time. With my parent's consent, I started HRT at 17 in 1972 during  the summer before my senior year of high school which was considered risky and experimental for someone as young as me at the time but fortunately by then, the draft was winding down but it was still something I really worried about as some other hideously embarrassing thing I might have to deal with some day as if my daily life wasn't complicated enough?

The story told in the classic song Alice's Restaurant
by Arlo Guthrie that we listened to every Thanksgiving as a weird family tradition and a few old war movies I had watched planted visions in my mind of my number coming up and having to show up at the draft board, undress and stand half naked with a bunch of guys while you were examined and categorized and put through the whole routine. The thought of having my almost waist length blonde hair buzzed off into a crewcut reminded me only of the horrors of the last traumatic time that was done to me in the 2nd grade. Those old movies and such always made a point of showing new recruits getting their heads shaved and I would have rather died than ever go through that. Thinking about this gave me nightmares and the older I got and closer to the age I had to register for the draft, the more it added to my already over the top anxiety about being seen as and treated like a girl everywhere except at school where I was just a freakish anomaly that may as well have been radioactive or from another planet. Ah, such good times!

I turned 18 right at the very beginning of 1973 and as is still is the law today transitioned or not, anyone AMAB is required to register with Selective Service when turning 18 and knowing that graduation, changing my name and going "full time" was just a short six months away, it was so hard to fill out the forms and do anything that so blatantly confirmed that I was indeed male. It was depressing and I was so over the whole thing by then. When I got my draft card back in the mail, I cried and my mom cried with me but fortunately, the draft ended completely just several months later and I never really gave it another thought going on to live the rest of my life as your regular gal until a random bar conversation tonight over a couple of pints or three sparked my memory about this period in my life.

Those times in general were so difficult for me and this whole worry about getting called in and having to go through some kind of evaluation was probably not truly the concern I thought it was. After all, I was still in high school which made me totally safe unless things escalated again and one look at me or the first words out of my mouth and they'd have stamped me 4F right off the bat and sent me on my way  but the whole indignity of having to deal with even ever showing up and having to sit on the Alice's Restaurant's "Group W" bench with all the rejects, mother rapers, father rapers and literers terrified me. It all seems silly to me now but I needlessly worried about a lot of things back then. As with all the other hurdles I faced that seemed insurmountable and like things I could never do, I kept suicide in my back pocket as a way out rather than ever having to deal with this. I was a pretty messed up kid but I was determined to make life work for me on my terms even if that meant ending it. I'm still here so things worked out?

Thank goodness that other than the registering requirement, getting drafted isn't a problem and one less thing for trans youth of today to fret over unless the world goes totally batsnip crazy crazier. Controversial as it seems to be for some, I am also happy that in these modern times, trans youth are even a recognized phenomenon which was not the case when I was a but a wee lass and just thought to be super gay and broken. <edit to clarify... thought to be by doctors. My parents unconditionally loved and accepted me the way I was, whatever that was and did their best to protect me and help me keep my head on straight through some really troubling times.>

Thanks for letting me bore you all with a little snippet from the wayback machine with something that worried me greatly when I was a trans teen. I am not "out" in the real world so stories like this one are something I can only share here with you folks so I hope all is forgiven for my often times wordy posts?

Following up for those that may not know how things did turn out for me, I finished the public part of transition immediately after graduating high school in 1973 and was so happy to put that turmoil and trauma behind me and to never have had to live as a man. I blended seamlessly into the world and into the woodwork as they used to say, went on to have surgery several years later at 22 in 1977 and have had an undoubtedly blessed but very normal and average life that was more than anyone or even I ever expected was possible.

[KathyLauren]

Lisa, thank you for sharing that flashback on your earlier life.  I am only three months older than you, so I remember those times well.  I was safe in Canada, so I never had your concerns over the draft.  What a horrible thought that must have been to contemplate!

I congratulate you for having had the clarity to transition way back then.  And now, I am crying, feeling sorry for myself that it took me another 40+ years to 'get it'.   

[Lisa_K]

Lisa, thank you for sharing that flashback on your earlier life.  I am only three months older than you, so I remember those times well.  I was safe in Canada, so I never had your concerns over the draft.  What a horrible thought that must have been to contemplate!

I congratulate you for having had the clarity to transition way back then.  And now, I am crying, feeling sorry for myself that it took me another 40+ years to 'get it'. 

Thank you for your comments but don't cry, Kathy. Even someone like me wishes or thinks about what it would have been like to transition earlier in life. If I could have done so in 1965 after a really ugly 4th grade, I can only imagine how much less difficult things would have been for me during my remaining school years? Being trans more or less robbed me of a normal childhood and consumed me during and those formative adolescent years that so often set the tone for the rest of your life and as much as I don't want to victimize myself or make excuses, there are still some undesirable facets of my personality and emotional makeup stemming back to those times and some of the things I went through that I've never really dealt with well.

Think about what you did during those 40 years it took to get things figured out. You probably had a higher education, built a career and raised a family which are things because I was so screwed up that even as a pre-teen I knew weren't going to be a part of my future because all I wanted was a way out of my boy's body and all the social things that went along with that which were so completely incompatible with who I knew myself to be.

And please don't think there was any degree of "clarity" involved in my "transition" or that I somehow had my head together enough to even pretend to understand what was going on. No one understood what was going on but all I did know, had always known and was sure of was that I was not a boy in spite of all the obvious evidence to the contrary. I wasn't sure if I was some kind of mistake from one of the gods or just some grand cosmic accident but I knew who and what I was and it was impossible for me to hide, repress or sublimate who that was so naturally, that made me different and obvious but I didn't care, I knew of no other way to be. Things were all pretty messy.

There were no words or concepts to understand any of this or a way I explain it to others. It was just something I was blindly and organically driven toward ever more so with each passing year. Entering my teens, I had no idea what anything meant but I knew what I didn't like and that was being male and known as a boy and I did everything I could to stay away from all that as far as possible. Around this time was when my parents started talking to me about being gay and that it was okay if I was. Heck, none of us including myself knew anything about trans so gay was just how my feminine personality and girlish ways were perceived even if I did understand why I was that way.

There was never really any great coming out moment for me. I had always been out but it wasn't until I was 15 that I sat my parents down and really got on the same page with them about where I was headed in life. Even then when I told them I could not live as a boy and had no intention of ever being a man, we had no idea what this meant or what to do about it. They were more relieved that I'd finally come to them with this in my own words and were in agreement rather than surprised or shocked as they said they had always known how I was different and who I genuinely was.

This was 1970 and it wasn't that people that changed sex were unheard of, but it just never clicked that I was one of them because nobody had ever heard of kids having problems like this. Maybe my parents knew what was going on but I didn't. There was no clarity. All I knew was I'd grown up to be a girl and even once I moved beyond androgyny and was routinely being publicly affirmed as a girl, I still didn't know what exactly was going on.

Through my 16th year, things seriously deteriorated for me emotionally as my fortunately late puberty began to finally kick in. I was horrified, depressed, withdrawn, isolated, very dark and suicidal and I knew I was really in trouble. I'd been talking to stupid and clueless doctors since I was 10 that never did anything but make things worse so when my folks told/forced me to see someone new they had found, I was skeptical and reluctant but had reached the end of my rope and needed to do something or I knew wasn't going to make it.

Truly, I didn't know what anything meant or why things were the way they were until I was 17 and finally met this doctor who understood almost immediately what my situation was. He gave me and my family the words to explain all this and to have some understanding of it and only then was there any sort of clarity or concrete sense of direction of what I needed to do.

Until this time, there was no plan and things were chaotic, unfocused, confusing and logic defying. It was all so very messy so thinking me getting from point A to point B involved clarity or me just having my stuff together enough to figure out things early in life would be a mistake. Things just happened without me really realizing it which sounds pretty stupid even though I was a bright kid.

The point of all this is sometimes for those whose awareness of all this comes later in life, there tends to be a leaning to somewhat idealize the lives of those of us did deal with this outwardly as young people that may even think we had it easy and were lucky. In many respects, undoubtedly there were advantages but we still carry the same baggage forward in our lives and even though the further away from it, the less important it seems to be, we carry it for a long time so it's a tradeoff.

My own feelings though are when this affects you so deeply as a young child and a teenager while your mind and brain are not yet fully developed enough to think with adult maturity and experience or understand what you're feeling that the impact and influence of being trans can be equally if not more significant than for those that can wait until later in life to address these things. Kids can be horribly brutal and mean to one another as I'm sure anyone that was bullied or beaten up for being different probably knows. My secondary point is that it is never easy to be trans regardless of how old you are and being early or late each has its own benefits and drawbacks. I never established a male life or identity and being a girl just came natural to me and not really something I did. Imagining the difficulties and challenges of having an established life and then going through transition seems almost unfathomable to me and more courageous than anything I've ever done. I don't know how you even do it?

Dang! I can ramble like a madwoman even when I haven't been drinking. Sorry.

[MaryT]

The experiences and feelings you share are both fascinating and of historical importance.  The differing experiences of trans people (and cis people) in different times and places will always be of interest to many people.

[KathyLauren]

I know we shouldn't envy others, because we cannot know their struggles.  Thank you for filling me in on yours.  None of us has had an easy time of it.

all I did know, had always known and was sure of was that I was not a boy in spite of all the obvious evidence to the contrary.

That's what I was getting at by "clarity".  I had no @#$% idea.  I knew I wasn't all right, but I had no idea what the problem was.  They told me I was a boy, and I believed them, in spite of the evidence that I now see clearly with 20/20 hindsight.

But in spite of my whining and feeling sorry for myself, in reality I wouldn't change a thing in my life.  It all got me here, which is a darned good place to be.  I have done some interesting things that I couldn't have done if I had transitioned at a younger age.  I married an amazing woman, who, when the going got tough, supported me through my transition.  I don't honestly know if I could have done it on my own.

Having a family was never one of those things, though.  Like you, I always knew that that was not something that was not going to happen for me.

So, yes, we all have suffering in our pasts.  I honour yours, as well as my own.

[annaleaver]

That's incredibly inspiring to read, I know I wouldn't cope if I had to be drafted x

[Danielle M]

I am a few years younger than you and I remember worrying about being drafted.  My mother really worried about this.  I also remember the draft lottery and student deferments.  Luckily American involvement in the Vietnam war was winding down by the time I turned 18. I went straight to college after high school so maybe I could have gotten a student deferment. I just wish I could have transitioned in high school like you did instead of being in the process now.  I get real depressed about missing my best years.  I am on 3 different antidepressants because of this.  I also would have a better chance at passing if I had done it earlier.

[Lisa_K]

Thanks to everyone that has managed to make their way through my TL;DR posts and to those that have commented.

Even after I was diagnosed with transsexualism (the term gender dysphoria hadn't been coined yet), started hormones, graduated and got all my ID's changed, I was still alone in the forest so to speak and felt there was nobody else like me on the entire planet. <afterthought: I still feel like that> I had spent most of my sophomore year and all of my junior and senior years of high school basically on house arrest, lockdown or grounded depending on how you looked at it because my folks were incredibly paranoid I was going to be murdered. Without being overly dramatic about the whole thing, an assault by a group of homophobic boys when I was 15 had come pretty close. I ended up in the hospital and was out of school a month while recovering so their fears about my safety weren't totally unfounded. The only place I was allowed to go by myself was to school and I wasn't even allowed to walk to and from after that happened which only added to my anxiety, depression and my own paranoia.

Throughout my life I had always been randomly misgendered by strangers and by the 4th or 5th grade when my hair got long enough to become a real problem with the schools and a huge hassle for my parents to deal with, it was only what clothes I was wearing that gave people any indication if I was a boy or a girl unless I talked, laughed, moved, walked or sat or breathed. Honestly, I don't know what it was other than just a vibe or energy that drew so much unwanted attention and comments even from strangers? You have no idea how many times someone told my mom how much her daughter (me) looked like her. We even turned this into a family inside joke and my mom and step-dad took great delight in teasing me about everything.

By junior high (7th grade) and a little more freedom to express myself how I wanted, I had learned to perfectly balance my androgyny which did not go over well with the school or my redneck hick town. I was sent home my first day because my hair was against their dress code and I missed the first week of school while my parents got a lawyer and threatened to sue. Once that was sorted out in my favor, I was officially expelled my first or second day back for fighting a gym coach that tried to force me into the boy's changing room and showers.

This prompted a renewed fury of visits to the shrinks "helpful" mental health "professionals". I was really sick of all this talking to doctors business but at least I got letters and special exemptions were made, the most significant of which to me was avoiding the whole boy's PE locker room and shower thing. I was never privy to what reasons were given but I really didn't care.

Before I even started high school, my parents had preemptively met a couple times with the administration hoping to avoid trouble but again, I have no idea what was discussed. My folks playfully teased me that this was to warn them I was coming as they always managed to find a lot of humor in my otherness which generally was their way of helping me feel better about myself and not quite so weird.

At 15 I had hair halfway down my back, pierced ears, shaved legs, plucked brows and was wearing as much makeup as I could get away with which wasn't much but boys simply didn't do any of this kind of stuff in 1970, at least not in my neck 'o the woods. By 16 and away from school, it was rare to be mistaken for a boy and then after I started hormones, it became virtually impossible to pass as one. I couldn't have been happier about all this.

As you might guess though, coming across to others the way I did made getting up and going to school everyday where I was known by a boy's name was really the hardest thing I had ever done in my life. I hated it and wanted more than anything than to just drop out and homeschooling wasn't an option back then. My folks weren't going to kick me out for being trans which wasn't a problem for them but they really put their foot down about graduating and even threatened to withdraw my HRT if I didn't so I was faced with little choice.

Even if I had been drafted, there was no way I would have ever been accepted but even the thought of it scared me silly. With all that was going on for me and how up in the air and how uncertain things seemed, it was hard to not obsess over stuff needlessly. Maybe you can see why I was a little bit neurotic?

[pamelatransuk]

Hello Lisa

I have read this thread and some of your previous posts with great interest. I can appreciate the extremely unhappy life you had at school as did I primarily due to not fitting in.

Obviously sex changes the term then used, did happen but they were very rare and either not covered seriously by the media and usually unfortunately sensationalized.

You clearly had very understanding and compassionate parents and eventually you found the correct doctor which was so relieving and rewarding.

Purely by coincidence I am the same age as you (born 1955). I always wished to have been born a girl but buried and suppressed till I could take the GD no longer and finally sought professional help in 2017 with therapy and then HRT. I fully expect to transition publicly in 2019.

Hugs

Pamela