“The two things I've always hated: Phonies and cowards. Before, I felt I was both, and I could never overcome that until I transitioned.”

In 1967, while she was stationed at the 4th Infantry

Division Headquarters of the US Army in Vietnam, Mia Yamamoto sent off an

application to UCLA Law School. In it, she stated that she was a poet, and that

she intended to support her poetry habit by practicing law. Just 24 years old,

Yamamoto had volunteered for the draft a year prior, thinking: “If I die in

battle, at least no one will ever know my secret. It'll never come back.”

The secret? That she was born into a boy's body and assigned a male

gender, but she knew she was supposed to be a girl.

A month later, Yamamoto received a letter of early acceptance from

UCLA addressed to “Michael,” the name she was then called.

She survived Vietnam, carrying her secret still. In 1968, she flew

out of Cam Ranh Bay and landed back in the US to join the incoming class of law

students at UCLA. Today, she's a highly respected criminal defense attorney

with a long history of building multicultural, interracial coalitions to

advance social justice in Los Angeles. The week I sit down with her for of this

interview, Yamamoto is receiving a commendation at Equality California's annual

gala. The event coincides with her 71st birthday, but in November

she will also celebrate her “re-birthday,” marking nine years since

transitioning from Michael to Mia.

Yamamoto was born in a WWII internment camp in Poston, Arizona. After the war, the Yamamoto

family returned to California. “For Japanese-Americans coming out of the camps,

that tradition of racial exclusion was a very specific experience,” Yamamoto

says. Her father remained reticent about Poston his entire life, but her mother

told vivid stories about the forced incarceration of an entire community. One

of stories Yamamoto recalls her mother telling: “Dad was an attorney, and he

would go around camp saying, 'I read the Constitution, they can't do this to

us. You can't put people in jail just because of their race.' ” With an ironic

smile, Yamamoto says, “Of course he was wrong. Race matters, and it still

matters today, as it did back then.”

Yamamoto grew up with four brothers and one sister. The family

settled in east Los Angeles after the war, and she remembers resenting her

older brothers, “bullies and gangsters” who fought viciously with each other

and then turned their violent games on the younger children. “I learned to

fight back,” she says. “What I lacked in size and strength, I made up for in

ferocity. But my identity was becoming more and more divergent from my body.”

When she was in her teens, Yamamoto read about Christine Jorgensen, the first publicly out transgender woman in

the US. “I remember thinking, there's another person in the world who's just

like me,” she says. Excited, Yamamoto showed the newspaper clipping to her

mother, who immediately burst into tears. “I realized then, that feeling

uncomfortable with my gender was taboo.” From that moment, she learned to drive

those feelings underground. “You try to overcompensate, to prove to yourself

this is something you can overcome,” she says.

Music became a solace. She joined the glee club in high school, and

sang in her church choir. Years later, when Yamamoto starts working as a public

defender, she would be approached to join a country rock band as its lead

singer. “Playing music for people is the most joyful thing,” she says.

In her post-high school years, however, Yamamoto says she suffered

bouts of severe depression and entertained suicidal thoughts. She enrolled in

LA City College and got all Fs the first two semesters. In the back of her

mind, she thought of following in her father's footsteps and pursuing law, but

the possibility seemed out of reach. After flunking out of LACC, Yamamoto

worked in a grocery store full-time for a year.

She eventually returned to LACC, managed to raise her grades, and

transferred to Cal State Los Angeles. While she studied for a degree in

Government and English, she also fixated on finding information about gender

dysphoria. “I haunted the psychology section of the library, looking for case

studies,” she says. Her research at Cal State LA led her to the medical

libraries at UCLA and USC, desperate to find a cause and cure. Nothing she read

assuaged her mounting anxiety, which was “starting to feel like torture.”

After graduation, she enlisted in the army because she felt it was

her duty as a patriot. She says, “Now all these years later, it strikes me that

because of 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' the contributions of

closeted veterans are completely erased. Historically, there's no way to

resurrect it. The community will never get credit, because they were

theoretically excluded.” She adds, “But anyone who's been in the service can

tell you, there's tons of LGBT people, all over the place.”

Yamamoto's 1966 army portrait photo from basic training, D Battalion, 4th Company, 1st Platoon (D-4-1), 6th Army, Fort Ord, California.

After witnessing the brutality of Vietnam, Yamamoto felt adamant

about joining the anti-war movement when she returned stateside. She became

active in the fight for civil rights and self-determination for

African-Americans and all people of color. As a law student at UCLA, she

founded the organization that would later become the Asian Pacific Islander Law

Student Organization. Working in solidarity with the Black Law Students and La

Raza Law Students, Yamamoto demanded that the dean create an Asian-American

minority entry program, hire Asian-American faculty, and implement

Asian-American curricula.

Yamamoto's first job after UCLA was as a Staff Attorney for the

Legal Aid Foundation of Los Angeles. She says she had always known she would go

into public interest law, to empower the socially disenfranchised and the poor.

Growing up in east LA, Yamamoto saw “so much disparity between white people and

communities of color, in terms of income and access to opportunity,” she says.

After LAFLA, she moved to the Public Defender's Office.

Though her career was thriving, Yamamoto still floundered in a

personal struggle with gender dysphoria. She sought professional help, and her

therapist suggested that Yamamoto would in all likelihood transition to living

as a transgender woman in the future. Yamamoto fired him.

In 1984, Yamamoto left the Public Defender's Office, and entered

into private practice as a criminal defense attorney. Her legal work sometimes

brought Yamamoto into contact with transgender individuals who were fighting

prostitution and/or drug charges. Yamamoto couldn't help but to imagine herself

in the shoes of the sex workers she defended. “In each case, it represented a

choice I didn't make,” Yamamoto says. “The people I met had been severely

hardened by the experience.”

Los Angeles Pride Parade, 2012

After years in individual and group therapy, Yamamoto says she

finally realized: “I can't fight this. It's not subject to negotiation or

medication. It just is.” The revelation frightened her, because it meant her

first therapist was right. She had to make the choice, “because now it's either

do or die.”

For ten years, she delved into research on surgeons, and on other

transgender individuals around the world. She began talking to friends and

family about her decision to transition. Many in her circle were supportive,

but some family members balked. “I knew that my family had the largest

investment in me staying exactly the same,” she says. “But if they're realistic

about it, they can't really say it's been that much of a curse. I'm still doing

everything I did.” She pauses, choosing her words. “I still have a certain

amount of community respect.”

This community support surfaced after she informed her clients that

she was transitioning; not a single one left her side. She'd offered to help

them find a good lawyer to take her place, no hard feelings, but all of them

insisted on staying with Yamamoto. “I was floored,” she says. “I took a great

deal of strength from my clients' unwavering loyalty.”

She says, “The two things I've always hated: Phonies and cowards.

Before, I felt I was both, and I could never overcome that until I

transitioned.”

Yamamoto admits she doesn't write much poetry these days, but isn't

it a poet's job to tell the truth? One might say that Yamamoto is living her

poem.

Mia with her fiancee Kim (photo by Suzanne Hickman)