Joanne Carroll "acted" her way through two marriages, fatherhood and the Air Force.

Straining to blend in, she hunted and fished, worked in the rodeo business in Montana, and posed for pictures with politicians including Dan Quayle and Bob Dole.

Finally, she decided "I'm not going to die with a man's name on my tombstone." She buried the male name and identity attached at birth and transitioned to the woman who had always lived inside.

She still hadn't discovered her highest purpose in life. Once she did, it would impact transgender people, and churches, across central Pennsylvania.

Changing times



Transgender people have new reasons to feel optimistic. President Obama mentioned transgender people in his recent State of the Union Address, naming them among the persecuted people - such as political prisoners, religious minorities and women - that Americans respect and defend.



Finally, there are transgender celebrities, and positive portrayals of transgender people in mainstream entertainment. In Pennsylvania, a transgender woman, Dr. Rachel Levine, awaits confirmation as physician general.

In the Harrisburg area, one of the nation's largest gatherings of transgender people, the Keystone Conference, will take place from Wednesday through Sunday this week.

Still, transgender people - there are hundreds in central Pennsylvania - face major obstacles to social acceptance, getting a good job and finding a church. They are at high risk of getting evicted, being attacked or murdered, and committing suicide.



Joanne Carroll, 74, is a transgender female, having been labeled male at birth. As president of TransCentralPA, she's a leader in the push for acceptance and rights for transgender people.

One of her great hopes is to live in a society where, when people learn someone is transgender, they think, "So what?"

Carroll moved to central Pennsylvania 14 years ago, the start of living openly as a woman. Before that, she lived in Montana, where she wore the standard cowboy boots and hat, and was president of a company that put on rodeos.

A painful childhood

Her parents called her John. By age 5, she noticed the things expected of a boy didn't match what she felt inside.



Her family lived in Calgary, in the province of Alberta, Canada. On Christmas morning at her aunt's house, she wore ankle-high boots, a vest and bow tie. Unwrapping a train set and toy cannons, she felt disappointed. She liked the toy dishes given to her girl cousins. Her family didn't know what to make of her. "I can remember asking for a doll and getting a teddy bear, and that teddy bear became my doll," she says.



Her best friends were girls, and they played separately from the boys. When she was 7, her family moved to St. Paul, Minn. At school the boys called her "sissy." She was regularly chased and beaten up. "I pretty much stayed with my mom or stayed in the yard, because I didn't want to get hurt," she says.

Her father sold men's clothing. Her family went to church. This was the 1940s and early 1950s, and sexuality wasn't mentioned. Her father tried to teach her sports and boxing. She was small and clumsy and had no athletic ambition. She liked cooking, baking and canning.

Over time, she concluded the things she felt inside were wrong. At night, she prayed for God to make her a girl or make the feelings so away. Eventually, she asked why she was made to suffer, and began to lose faith.

After a childhood of being taunted and bullied, she went into denial, and suppressed her feminine feelings. In high school, she fell in with a group of hard young men, dressing and acting the part of 1950s-era punk. "I learned to be a good actor," she says.

Marriages, children



Good acting and denial sustained her for many years.

After a brief time in college, she joined the Air Force, serving in special operations and becoming a master sergeant. She married at 21 and fathered two children.

Her first marriage was ending as she retired from the Air Force after 20 years. Nearing 40, her turmoil took her to a psychologist who could provide little help. She was beginning to grasp it was unnatural for her to live as a man.

But then she met another woman and was overcome by "a final wave of denial." She fell back into thinking it was matter of finding the right spouse. They married and adopted a girl.

During the 1990s, they lived in Montana. Carroll wore cowboy boots and a cowboy hat, and traded stories about hunting trips. She was active in local Republican politics, posing for pictures with Quayle and Dole. She ran a company that put on rodeos and bull-riding competitions.

One day her inner conflict brought her to the brink of suicide, she says. The next day, she took her .38 special and .357 Magnum to a pawn shop.

In the late 1990s, it became clear to her she must live as woman. She told her spouse, leading to the end of their 17-year marriage.

Finally, the transition

In 1952, George William Jorgensen Jr. went to Denmark, where new medical procedures were available. He was a young man from a blue-collar family in the Bronx and a World War II veteran. Christine Jorgensen returned to the United States. She became a national news story.

Joanne Carroll was 12. The news gave her a "glimmer of hope," and put her on a decades-long search for information.

In pre-Internet times, information about transgender people was scarce. Carroll's Air Force career took her many places. Everywhere, she went to a local library, searching for information about transgender people, trying to understand herself and what to do.

In the 1990s, she became an early user of the Internet, which has increasingly connected transgender people with information and other transgender people.

Carroll began taking hormones and transitioned to life as a woman in the late 1990s.

'My daughter spoils me'



In 2001, she moved to the midstate. She worked at hotels, rising from night auditor to general manager, telling only a few people she is trans.

Her mother came to live with her, and they were happy years. Carroll was caregiver during her mother's final 15 months. "One of the great thrills of my life was when my mother would tell people 'my daughter spoils me,'" she says.

Carroll believes all transgender people have one thing in common: At an early age, they realized the way they felt about themselves didn't match the gender assigned at birth.

Beyond that, she stresses she is not "typical" of transgender women - no transgender person is - just as no male or female is typical of their gender.

While living as a man, Carroll says, she wasn't sexually attracted to men. She has never had sex with a man, and has had one "romantic" relationship with a man.

A passionate advocate

In 1999, Carroll had a religious re-awakening, realizing for years she had blamed God for her turmoil, when the solution was to "get out of my own way."

She's a member of First Reformed Church of Christ in Lancaster. Early on, she told the pastor she is transgender. They discussed when she would tell the rest of the congregation. Last September, Carroll stood up at a church picnic.

"I was embraced by just about everyone there," says Carroll, who recently was elected vice president of the church's leadership team.

As an advocate for transgender people, Carroll wants to let them know there are congregations willing to embrace them. She regularly speaks at conferences about how Christians should view the lesbian-gay-bisexual-transexual community, and serves as a resource for churches trying to become inclusive. She has realized it's her purpose in life. "I was born transgender to tell other transgender people that God loves them," she says.

Janet Boyd Weidler, interim pastor at First Reformed Church of Christ, says Carroll "is loved and appreciated, as we hope everyone is loved and appreciated for who God made them to be. ... I think she has helped our church understand."

Yet Christians as a whole "have a long way to go" toward full acceptance of transgender people, Boyd Weidler says.

She calls it "tragic" that some churches and even parents reject transgender people, and considers it "a matter of life and death."

Acceptance in fits and starts



"Some of us have been lucky," Carroll says.

She has good relationships with her three daughters. Harrisburg, according to Carroll, "is a pretty trans-friendly community."

TransCentralPA is one of the nation's leading organizations for transgender people, and expects to draw about 500 people to its five-day Keystone Conference this week at the Sheraton Harrisburg Hershey Hotel. Transgender men and women from many states will attend. Some are fully open. Some choose to be open only for the conference, using it as a weekend refuge.

Still, Carroll is pained by the steady reports of murders of transgender people - the shocking brutality of some attacks signal an explosive hatred - and suicides such as that of Leelah Alcorn, a transgender Ohio teen. Leelah, who was born Joshua, threw herself in front of a tractor trailer on an interstate in the middle of the night. Her suicide note explains she felt unloved by her devoutly Christian parents, and pleads for families not to reject transgender children.

Carroll is involved with a newly formed group of midstate teens who believe they are transgender or might be.

She has faith that as people meet and come to know transgender people, and learn of their struggle and how early it began, and how it was unchanged by prayer or denial or an often-hostile world, they feel empathy, and their hearts change.

"If you have any love at all for people, I don't see how that can't have an impact," she says.