Squirrel Cage (32 page)

I soon
move
d
into the spare room. I cleaned it up nice and purchased a
cheap
twin
sized mattress
to sleep on. I was doing very well. My spirits were generally good and I was working through the misery I had caused and felt.
It would take years to get through it. I took little steps and a lot of time to heal the wounds.

Trish hauled me up to the Santa Monica group session every week. We
sat
in a large circle and
shared experiences with others like us
.
Dr. Jayne Thomas
monitored the sessions
. Dr. Thomas was well known in the area and served to counsel several movies and TV specials on the topic of gender dysphoria and related issues.
The group sessions were of great interest. I could see how the dysphoria affected a number of individuals.
The session was free. All you had to do was show up.

I was admonished several times before I made my trip to California that there was a religion of transsexualism. I was told that groups of people would get together and talk each other into making the transition; to talk each other into castration.

Dennis had this discussion with me once.
I pondered the how preposterous this must be.
“Dennis” I said, “let’s suppose that I forced you to wear a dress and hauled you to one of these meetings every week.
Tell me just how many meetings do you think it would take before you were willing to have your penis cut off?”

--S
ting –Snip—Sting—Snip—Tug—Snip—

Are you uncomfortable yet?

I made my point.
Yes, there is a culture of self help.
It exists. But to infer that the self help process can induce an individual to play the role of the opposite sex for a full year, embarrass himself and his whole family, financially bankrupt himself, and then castrate himself goes beyond disbelief.
The fact is,
self-help
groups are so needed because often times, it is the only support some of us can find.

I met a varied group of people and individuals while attending this group.
One was making a documentary. She had major surgery on her face.
A university project chronicled her progress for a year.
She didn’t finish her transition during the project.
Some thought this a failure. I considered it a staggering success.

Sometimes our life journey takes detours. Sometimes we can change our vision. Some of us can go back. It is for this reason the standards of care were created. During my transition, the standards required the individual to live full time as a woman in the workplace for one year.
Think of this.
Think of what it would take to work and live in the opposite gender while all around you
other people
know what is going on for a full year. Could you do it? Would a self help group help
convince
you to do it? That year is a valuable experience. It is difficult for everyone I have ever known.
Even with full support from everyone around you, it is a very demanding project at best.

After the group meeting we would adjourn to a local restaurant. It too was a learning experience.
I could often glean little tidbits that were otherwise unavailable in the group session.
These were things that I learned about other people.
I wanted to know how they viewed life. I wanted to know their thought processes. I was interested in their work and their outside interests. Cindi was her own kind of shrink. Cindi needed data to feed
Squirrel
.

The net result was that I learned about people. You learn the most about our species when you can observe people at their lowest, at their worst when times are tough. The human spirit is resilient and can rebound from so many tragedies. When they rise from the ashes, you can learn from their experiences. What motivated them? What did they do on their own? What was their support structure? What ultimately solved their problem? I learned so much about people, more than I could in a classroom environment.
This was the human experience. Dysphoria was the base cause for these anguishing problems.
But the truths apply to a wide variety of problems associated with depression and self worth.

I learned to listen.
This became a valuable skill that I would use for the remainder of my life. And finally, I truly
tried to learn
compassion and charity. The true lessons I had learned in my youth rang true.

I had the opportunity to get to know Dr. Thomas in a few social situations outside of the
self-help
group.
We talked about cars and kids. She acknowledged my help in the support group.
She told me that I had a unique experience to draw from in human understanding. She liked my spunkiness and drive.
She ultimately would prepare one of the three letters of recommendation I would need for reassignment surgery.

*****

One night, Clark Sedgewick appeared at the “front” door and knocked. No one ever came to this door. Everyone always would come through the garage door. They would call Trish from the gate of the condo unit and be
buzzed
in. Clark was standing there at the door and Trish answered.

“Is Cindi here?” asked Clark.

I was on the couch.
It was impossible to ignore him. He could see me and I could see him.

“Do you know this guy Cindi?” asked Trish.

“Yea, he was one of my missionary friends in
my old life,
Trish.”

“Can I please talk to Cindi?” queried Clark.

“Do you want to talk to this guy?” asked Trish.

“Yes” I said. I didn’t know why Clark was here. I knew how he had gotten the address.
I also knew that his family lived in the area. He was probably visiting and had offered to look me up.

“Can we go out for a bite?” asked Clark.

“Sure, let me grab my bag” I said.

“You should really call that a purse Cindi” said
Squirrel

“You know that I really prefer “bag”,
Squirrel
,” I said to myself.

We sat across the table at a Denny’s or some such place. In the Anaheim area there
are
thousands of them supporting the tourist industry for Disneyland. I had been wearing a peach tank top and jeans when Clark showed up.
I didn’t change
.

“Wow” said
Clark
.

“Huh?”

“Did you get those done?”

“Yup.”

“I guess they aren’t coming out then are they?”

“Nope.”

“Well then, I’ve asked,” he said.

We then talked about some of the good old times and had a few laughs. I told him about what I had said to the plastic surgeon. “…Doctor, I want a B.
I want to blend in, not stick out.
And I mean this literally” I finished the story.
It wasn’t all that funny but he thought that it was a hoot.

He then started telling me how his life was unraveling.
He could not control his voyeurism fetish.
He loved to watch girls undress.

“Are your subjects willing participants Clark?”

“They are now” said Clark.

“Clark, please, please, if you ever find yourself wanting to peep on unknowing women, give me a call okay?” I pleaded with him. I didn’t want him to get arrested. I also felt helpless to help him. I knew the power of a drive that could not be beat.
In my case, I could only harness it and direct it some. It would drive me to completion. And then hopefully everything would help me live a more normal life.

“You obviously know how to find me,” I said as I gave him a big grin and winked.

“Y
ea, I can always look you up,”
he said as he made the quotation marks with two fingers of each hand. We both knew exactly what we were talking about. The source had been Charlene. No one else would ever divulge where I lived.

He dropped me off at Trish’s. He gave me a bear hug and said “Take care Cindi. I hope that I’ll see you sometime.”

“Yea, just drop in any time Clark,” I said as I embraced my good friend.
I secretly hoped that he could resolve his problems and save his marriage. But where such things were concerned, who was I
to give advice
?

*****

As Christmas time came, I became melancholy. This would be the first time that I would not have my children near me for Christmas. It would not be the last. My mother sent me a care package. One of the contents was a small plastic tree from Kmart. It was only about a foot tall and was completely decorated and strung with lights. It was my little Christmas tree from my Mom and I found a place to display it proudly.
It was our only decoration. I’d use the little tree for the next several years wherever I went. It’s strange how some little thing can come to mean so much. I kept it for many years after and only discarded it recently. The poor little thing was literally ragged from use.

I interviewed with a head hunter. He covered my work history and asked many of the standard questions.
He then used a device that I would later learn to use in my interview technique on both sides of the table.
He asked “I sense something wrong, is there something that you’d like to tell me about?”

He was fishing as I later decided. I made the mistake of telling him about my transition. I knew that this resource was a total loss. He asked me to rely on him only and not to go to anyone else. I told him that I would but I did not. I’m glad that I did not. He did nothing for me. Two months later, he told me that I should look elsewhere. I read him right. He fished and I told him about
my secret. I learned
to
rely on
my instincts
more than ever before
.

I went to numerous interviews over the next several weeks. None of them panned out. There just wasn’t that much going on in the LA area for high tech jobs.
I had been sending resumes to bay area companies as well.
I did fly up a couple of times for interviews.
My biggest problem was that I actually preferred a job in an engineering role. My previous 5 years experience was in marketing.
It was hard to go back.
Engineers didn’t trust people from marketing
management
. There was a natural chasm between the two “types” of people. It was kind of ironic to see the equivalent of discrimination from engineering folks.
I had some problems with references as well. Mine weren’t very good. I only had a couple of people that I had worked with that I could trust.

I finally found what I was looking for, a wart on the fine city of San Gabriel.
This little company had once been growing and thriving until the president and owner passed it on to his son to manage. Daddy had
purchased a degree for his son at a major university. Yes, he purchased a degree. All he had to do was go listen to a lecture once a week for a couple of years.

His son had lost money every year for the
previous
15 years and he had precious little time to pull it profitable before the bank stepped in and seized the property.

The place was a true dive.
They were looking for a Marketing Product Manager and I filled the bill.
They hadn’t been able to find anyone with qualifications that would work there.
It was a dump, they had good insurance that would cover my kids and did not exclude gender reassignment surgery and their specialty was outside my areas of technical expertise. This was perfect.
The engineering and marketing world
can be very
small.
I knew that these characters would likely find out about me here with the problems involved insuring my kids. And it was clear that they would know when I filed forms for my reassignment. Since they had no connections to real high tech, my secret would
hopefully
die on the vine
down the road
.
They interviewed me and liked me.

They asked me to come back for two interviews.
One was with a shrink. I place psychiatrists and psychologists in one category. That category is “Professional”.
The others are “shrinks”. These are those who have sold out to corporate interests, religious interests, and the like. When you are a scientist you rely on observation, cause and effect, testing and results. If you do not rely on empirical data, by definition, you are not a scientist. When doctors cease to rely on the data and turn to something like religion or corporate profit to define their science, they cease to satisfy the very code which they represent.
Well, that’s how I see it.

So, I sat down with their corporate Dr. Shrink. There had been a suicide out on the production floor a few months earlier and every new employee would now be screened. I had asked what changes they were taking in management style and company procedure. It never occurred to the management to review their own management style. They clearly thought that their procedures were fine. This little piece of data warned me to be careful. Still, I knew what I wanted. I would work hard for these people whether they appreciated it or not. And when I was done, I could move back into the technical areas with which I was most familiar.