Brownwood is a little town right at the heart of Texas. I passed through it recently with three of my college students, en route from a conference to our homes on the border. We decided to stop at Schlotzsky’s, and pretty soon the students were making themselves at home, chatting in Spanish and filling the space with their laughter.
Experience in those parts has made me sensitive. I became aware that we were attracting side-eye from the patronage. It was fine, I just side-eyed them back. But that’s the moment my students decided to see if they could find my Twitter account.
“Guys,” I said, “wait until the car. Trust me on this.”
They waited. They found my account by the time we were out of the parking lot, and they knew I was trans by the time we were on the highway. It was hard to miss: Online, my trans-ness had emerged very publicly through a defiant essay I’d written for the Texas Observer. In my private life, I was taking it slow. The students were curious, of course, but respectful, and most kind. The kids are going to be alright, which gave me some comfort. These days I need all I can get.
My students mostly live in Eagle Pass and Del Rio, right on the Rio Grande, in the armpit of Texas. I live in Uvalde. Everyone knows where that is. I’m originally from San Antonio. While I was being born there one April afternoon, a sniper shot up the Fiesta parade downtown, killing two people and injuring 50. That story was told over my cradle. I recalled it when I was deciding what my new, true name would be. Here in Texas, the spring is full of promise, and also sometimes death.
The university that employs me has its main campus hundreds of miles to the west of where I live, in Alpine. The lonely asphalt line that takes me there was the setting of ”No Country for Old Men.” I can imagine a lot of things happening along it, but I never imagined I’d come out to myself as I drove it last fall. A series of events had begun loosening the makeshift masculinity that had shielded me from the truth. Piece by piece, the armor fell off as the yuccas and sotols whizzed by, and by the time I left Alpine the next day, I knew I had to transition or die.
It would take a while to explain just what had brought this about, and I don’t think I’ll do that here. But simply put, I am and have always been a trans woman, and nothing I can do will ever alter that fact. I can either go along with it, and live, or deny it, and not live.
For a long time, I’d been working on an exit plan, just part of my grim daily game with death, a way of coping with my self-loathing. But one night, as I gave an exam in Eagle Pass, I journaled:
I think I may actually kill myself. Just the old calculus: would I do more harm by sticking around than by leaving? It’s evening up, I think. I could just run the truck off the road and hit a pole or something. Not leave a note, just end it. Just so I’m reasonably certain of dying. It would suck not to say goodbye to the kids, though.
I’m afraid I’ve permanently fractured my marriage. It’s like if I had an affair or something, except that this isn’t something I’ve done, it’s what I am. It’s what I’ve been all along, of course, and all these years I’ve been terrified of detection.
Death, yeah, maybe the best for all around. I’m not getting over this. And they’re not going to want me around. This way they could at least remember me fondly and move on.
But a new thought occurred to me as I drove off from a checkpoint that night. Maybe my cost-benefit analysis had missed something. Maybe it would be worse for my family for me to die, though leaving behind the memory of a parent’s love and a superficial but intact masculinity, than it would be for them to go on living with all my faults and complications.
You see, all my life I’ve been shielding the world from myself. But what if I just stopped doing that? What if I was honest about what I am, even though I risked their resentment for dragging them down this hard road? It’s not as though I was doing such a terrific job playing the silent martyr anyway: The unending pressure had taken a toll on all my relationships and on my own health.
It wasn’t a bolt out of the blue when I came out to my wife, but it wasn’t exactly expected, either. In my self-denial, I’d done a lot of masking, so things didn’t go well for us at first. But as my wife and I worked through those first weeks, she began to tell me that our marriage had never been so harmonious. Something fundamental had changed in me and in our relationship, and it was a good thing. I was present to her and to my kids in a way I never had been. I began exercising and eating more healthily. I stopped drinking to the point of stupefaction every night. We were suddenly, unexpectedly, happy. All because I admitted to myself that I was trans and began making plans to transition.
After Thanksgiving, we left our kids with my parents and spent a couple of nights in downtown San Antonio. My wife asked question after question about my hidden life, which stretched back to my earliest memories, long secreted away even from myself. Now, as we set it out in the daylight and examined it from all sides, a way forward began to open. I knew that my wife accepted me, though what that meant for us was unclear.
As night closed in, we found ourselves at the St. Mary’s Street bridge over the Riverwalk, where people were gathering to watch the annual boat parade. We leaned against the railing and looked out. The Christmas lights came on, strings of rainbows descending from cypress branches. People cheered and my wife stepped back and took a picture of me. I told her that it was a picture of a moment I was happy. The first float emerged from under our feet.
I came out to my daughter on a warm day in spring. She’s a no-nonsense redhead who wants to become a public defender and likes wearing her Joe Biden shirt to her tiny rural school. We got coffees from the Uvalde Starbucks, which is in the Tractor Supply parking lot, then descended a drainage trough to the park. We sat on a bench and I told her about myself.
She was quiet for a moment, then looked at me and said, “I can’t tell you who you are. You have to tell me who you are. I believe you are who you say you are. I love you, and you’ll always be my dad.” We talked for a long time.
The following morning I came out to my teenage son, my oldest, on a drive south through farmland and brush country. Unsurprisingly, he was less than thrilled. I explained that I’d considered waiting until he was out of the house before coming out but that I’d decided against it for two reasons. First, I thought he’d be hurt to learn as an adult that I’d considered him unable to handle the truth. Second, I was afraid that if I came out after he was gone we’d be strangers to one another. This way, maybe, maybe, we could get to know one another anew, and I could be the parent I’d always been meant to be. Maybe.
As for my youngest daughter, well, she’s growing up in a different world even from her two siblings, even here in the armpit of Texas. Her best friend has two moms, as she pointed out when I came out to her. She shrugged off my revelation and we went back to making a cheetah diorama.
As the assault on trans rights in Texas mounted, I became convinced that I needed to speak out. My wife told me I should write an essay and I did, publicly coming out in the process. So with one grand gesture, the bandage came off. Friend after friend found out. News is spreading at my university. I’m slowly coming out to the world. I’m slowly becoming myself.
Coming out as trans in a small town is not ideal. After I shaved my beard, people I didn’t know saw me at the supermarket and ran to my wife to tell her that they’d seen me, shaved, at the supermarket. The unending questions we’re faced with during the drip-drip-drip of changes sometimes seems unbearable.
But I find myself more conscious now of death than even during my years of suicidal mind games. I measure my life, calculating the time I have left on this earth and projecting how each decision I make will affect its quality. Every day is precious, each a jewel in a lapidary mosaic. Even the bad days.
My family can’t easily flee Uvalde or Texas, escape the people who hate people like me. Nor do we want to. What will happen to us? Will it be worth it? Perhaps that’s not a thing to find out, but a decision to make.
Spring has hit Texas. People are stopping on the roadsides to take pictures with bluebonnets. It makes me think of this country song, “Red and Rio Grande,” by Doug Supernaw:
As I travel down that blue bonnet highway
I’m thankful I was born a lucky man
And I know that I will live and die my own way
Somewhere between the Red and Rio Grande
That’s the Texas I grew up in, and that’s the Texas I love. I’m not giving it up without a fight.
If you or someone you know needs help, dial 988 or call 1-800-273-8255 for the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. You can also get support via text by visiting suicidepreventionlifeline.org/chat. Additionally, you can find local mental health and crisis resources at dontcallthepolice.com. Outside of the U.S., please visit the International Association for Suicide Prevention.
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