I was born in Southern California in the dead of winter of 1978

Written by Rose Kincade
Age: 37
Bloomington, Indiana
MtF Transwoman.

I was born in Southern California in the dead of winter of 1978 and given the mane John after my father’s older brother that he looked up to. As I grew up I wanted to play with toys that were meant for girls and in kindergarten I made friends with girls rather than boys, but my dad always insisted I be a boy, make friends with boys and learn to enjoy boy toys, so I tried to do just that.

I have heard that if you hear something enough, even tell yourself enough times that you begin to believe it yourself. Growing up my dad reinforced his ideas of me being a boy by taking me to his work (being a deiseal mechanic) to try and get me to like it. My sister who wanted to go always felt left out while I felt as though I was being tortured. I did not like getting dirty and hated my time working on trucks.

When I was 11 or 12 I started keeping a dream diary because I thought my dreams would answer questions I had. I noticed that I was female in many of my dreams and wondered why. It was also about this time that I knew that I wanted to one day give birth to my children but my body was changing in the wrong direction. I can remember sitting on my bed for hours at a time meditating, trying to force my body to be female. I would pray every night to wake up with a female body. I would even try hard to see my body physically change in my mind’s eye but nothing I did ever did anything, at least nothing I could see in the mirror.

I remember my parents bring home a movie called ‘Switch’ to watch with us. At the end of the movie I can remember how my dad talked about gays and lesbians being products of Satan and how they were all going to be going to hell when they died. I wanted to know about guys becoming women but did not know how to ask, but I saved the embarrassment of asking by my youngest sister. I still remember the words that flowed out of my dad’s mouth very clearly, “Those people are worse than gays, when they die their souls will be destroyed for destroying their bodies.”

For the next several years I forced myself to be male in every way possible, I suppressed any and all emotions, I went shooting with male friends, I road bikes in sporting events, and I even got mad that I was not growing facial hair. All of this in an attempt to force myself to be a man. But in 2001 all of these wants and desires came back in full force. I wanted children, I wanted to give birth to them and I could not see any way in making it happen.

I had been kicked out of our church because I was not what they wanted me to be, so I had been looking into other religions and none of them felt right, none of them had the answers I was looking for. At least until I came across a Wicca group that said they could help me. I had gone to several meetings and was very happy with what I was seeing. They practiced spells and showed me a few books and I felt confident that they could help be a woman, so I asked them for their help in that.

I was told it was not an issue and that they had just the spell for it but it was going to take some time for the preparations. As the night grew closer I was very excited that I would soon be a woman, at least until I got a phone call from someone I had made friends with in the group. He told me that the group was planning on killing me. He walked me through the plan of them leading me into the alter room and having me dress in women’s clothing, how they would lay me on the alter and do so chanting and then stab me through the heart.

I decided not to tell anyone again and decided it would be best to try and be the man everyone wanted me to be. I built and raced cars, went hunting with my brother-in-law and went fishing on a regular basis, none of which I really enjoyed. I continued like this for many years until my youngest sister suddenly died just ten days after giving birth to her third child.

I remember the day very clearly. I had gotten up that morning and was getting ready to go to work. My grandfather came walking up the hallway and told me that my mom had just called and told him someone had died. I asked him how had died and he told me she only said “She is died.” And that is all she could get out. I asked if I could go with him to see what was going on and was told to come on. We got to my little sisters house and found cops had blocked the street off and there was an ambulance in front of the house. We were allowed to drive up there and found it that the one had died was my baby sister.

I asked if anyone had told her husband and was told no one had been able to get through to him. I called the numbers I had and was getting the same thing and decided to call the company directly. When they answered the phone I asked if James was there and was told he was on delivery. I told them there was an emergency at his house and he needed to be get there ASAP to help out. I then called the place my mom and I both worked and told them neither of us going to be coming in do to my little sister having just been found dead in her home. The manager I was talking to asked me “are you sure neither of you can come in to work today?” This upset me and I snapped back “my little sister was just f*** found dead in her bed, no there is no f*** way either of us are coming in the next few days at least.”

A bunch more things happened over the next several hours and I pretended that I did not need to cry. I knew I was coming close to just fully braking down and walked away from finding a secluded place. I let myself breakdown for several minutes before forcing myself to pick myself up again and go back for the support of the rest of them. For the next few weeks everything was about my brother-in-law until I went back to work. It was at this time I met the mother of my baby girl who decided to abandon us just three months after she was born.

I spent the next six years focusing on this special little girl making sure she had everything she needed doing everything I could for her. I even moved to another city to get a job that provided housing for families and their family. It was here in the early part of 2012 that I had sudden depression leading to suicidal thoughts. I was directed to a therapist who talked with me for several months to try and find out what might have happened to cause this. We found out that I had feelings of never being accepted by my dad, and that I had issues for being so old when I finally had my daughter. But the real breakthrough came when I told him how I have always dreamed of being a woman, being a mother, and giving birth to my children.

From there he told me he knew that I had some choices to make, to either keep living as a guy suppressing my feelings or to accept them and work with them. He told me that people like had a name, transgender, and that there were many different levels or degrees to being transgender. I thought about all of this for several weeks and did lots of research on the subject discovering many things. I found websites dedicated to transwomen, stories that depicted men and women changing, forcibly and voluntarily, into the opposite gender. I learned the differences between what sex is and what gender is, and what most of the medical field seems to feel about trans people.

Now knowing that most of what I really wanted was not available to transwomen but I could make myself at least feel more comfortable being myself I decided to transition. I was sent to a doctor who had to do a bunch of blood work as well as a full physical. I was told that before I would be allowed to start HRT I had to tell my friends and family and explain what I was about to do and he was giving me until the end of the year or he would not sign off on me getting my HRT.

I told everyone else before I went to my parents. My mom told me that she had thought I was gay but had never once guessed I was transgender. The hardest one to tell was my father, mostly from the fear from all the stories I read about others fathers disowning them, beating them or worse. We were on the city to city transit bus when I decided to tell him. I explained how the feelings had been around for a long time and how this would help me feel more comfortable as a person. After I finished talking to him and he was able to think about what I had told him he did something that totally shocked me, he told me that if he had the money he would pay for my transition.

That December I was given my letter to be able to start HRT and by that spring I was one hundred percent full time. Most of the people around me accepted me with no problems including some that had started out hating me when I first moved to the town. However some tried very hard to cause problems. There was a guy a few miles away who called Child Protective Services, or CPS, on me and filled complaints against me. A case worker came to my house and sat with me to find out what was going on. He explained to me what was reported and why he was there and I explained who reported it and why. Because I was able to not only identify my accuser and his motive behind it, and because there was nothing wrong in my house, the law required the case to be closed as malicious and unsubstantiated.

The incident that caused me the most issue was a few months later when a guy came in to the store I was working at to buy beer after the 2am cutoff for the state. This was not unusual in any means by the fact that many people try this on a regular basis. What made this night so much worse was this was a guy I had never seen before but he knew not only about me but my parents who lived a few miles away and my daughter who happened to be at work with me that night and was hiding in the office as part of the request of my manager for her being allowed to be there that night. After I refused to sell him any beer he tried to beat me and told me he was going to go after my daughter and parents next. I called the police and my parents and told them what had just happened and within 20 minutes both were there and I knew I had to find a safer place to go.

Not knowing what I was going to find I asked my parents to take care of my baby while I went to find a safer place and soon found myself across the country in a city in Indiana. My hair was now long enough that I did not need the wigs to have long hair and soon I had a job and a place to live as a woman. Very few people knew my birth name and the only reason they did know was because of legal reasons. I was fighting to get enough income to be able to buy a house for my daughter and I when the company I was working closed. All the work I had put into making a life here was practically gone. With the exception to my name change I was back to square one, the same place I was when I first moved so far from my family. I was soon able to find a new job who does not know my other than a select few I know well enough and trust.

My endocrinologist signed the papers I needed to get my gender markers changed on my driver’s license and birth certificate just a few weeks ago now. I still want to have Gender Conforming Surgery as well as Facial Feminization Surgery and Vocal Feminization Surgery. I have decided on doctors for each based on quality, price and experience with the exception for FFS.

For GCS I have chosen a doctor in Thailand, Dr. Suporn, who has a one-step operation that gives one all the outward parts of a woman over the traditional two-step operation used by most. I am told by many of his past patients that he is able to leave one with a lot of sensation and some even have said they can still ejaculate. I know to some this sounds just wrong but for me many cis-women who have orgasmed with and without ejaculation said it feels better when they ejaculate.

For my VFS I have chosen Dr. Spiegel here in the US. He has developed a technique that seems to be able to work all the around the spectrum, and tends to leave no visible scars. I have talked with one of his patients and she sounds great, beyond that I am still waiting to hear back if anyone else is willing to talk to me.

Finding a doctor for FFS is proving to be hard. There are so many doctors out there with their own techniques, with their own successes and failures that it is proving hard to find one I really like. Dr. Spiegel has a technique I want for my forehead and eyes while Dr. Suporn has one I like for the lower jaw. However I have yet to find one that has one I like for the nose. I want my nose to be shaved so it is not as long and tall. I know what I want and I can see it in my mind’s eye but every time I try to draw it on my computer or on paper it comes out wrong.

Anyway, this is where I am today. I am 1700 miles away from my daughter and have not seen her since her birthday last year. I can’t afford to bring her home and I can’t afford to have the surgeries I want and need for myself. I am fighting very hard to fix my life, I have returned to school to go after my PhD to find a way to make it possible for trans men and women to be able to have a surgery to be able to have children as their real gender rather than as the one they were assigned at birth.

Thank you for reading and please note that this is an abridged version of my autobiography. There is a lot of information omitted here to try and keep this short. Again thank you for reading.
~Rose Kincade