SCHUYLKILL HAVEN — While the Great American Bathroom Wars rage, a longtime borough resident, well acquainted with the matter at the core of the controversy, questions the motives of some activists.

"It's a circus," Diane Lee Morgan, 72, born Dale Lee, said. "I don't want to be in a circus. I want to be in the future. I am human. I want respect. I give respect."

Living as a woman since 1973, Diane said she believes that some parties claiming grievances may be looking for money or fame, while politicians are quick to jump on the bandwagon believing slogans of "I support transgender rights" will win them votes. Moreover, identifying as a political conservative — a registered Republican who voted for Ted Cruz in the primary — Morgan dismisses the Obama administration's May 13 advisory to the nation's schools on transgender rights "illegal" as in unconstitutional.

Morgan said that she believes someone genuinely striving to live as the opposite sex, or who has completed the physical transition, as she has, would go unnoticed in a restroom.

"They are blowing it out of proportion," she said. "If a person looks like what they are pretending to be — so to speak — there shouldn't be a problem."

As for girls being exposed to male anatomy in public changing areas, she said, "It's inappropriate. I am not in favor of a boy showing himself in a girls' locker room."

However, a transitioning person should be able to cover up with a towel or use a private stall, she said.

"Until Obama, no one made a big deal out of it," she said.

On the other hand, Morgan said she thinks the fears are unfounded that sexual predators will use the open bathroom policies for cover as a pervert. Prompted by conflicting claims swirling around the news networks and internet, she said that she thought her own story might provide some perspective.

Terminology

Diane distinguishes between transgender and transsexual, an exactitude many reject.

While "transgender" is used generically for anyone identifying with the opposite sex, Diane prefers the older label "transsexual" for those undergoing a transition culminating in sex re-assignment surgery. Diane, whose name has been legally changed and has the sex on her birth and Social Security records and driver's license, regards herself as fully a woman and no longer a transsexual.

It was a transition that started at age 5, completed only in 2012.

Starts at a young age

Dale Lee Morgan was born March 10, 1944, in Allentown, to Robert and Vivien Miller, unmarried although having the same last name. He was the fourth child of Vivien, who subsequently married George Morgan, Dale's stepfather whose last name he took.

From age 5, Dale felt he was a girl.

"You know at 4, 5, 6 years old," Diane said.

Dale was repelled by his male anatomy and liked to dress up in women's clothing, being reprimanded two or three times when he was caught. At 12, a psychologist diagnosed gender dysphoria — called gender identity disorder at the time — something his mother and stepfather did not accept.

Attending Louis E. Dieruff High School, Allentown, he was in the band, choir, glee club and drama. While working at Sears, he bought a guitar for $110 and taught himself to play. His favorite musicians were Jimi Hendrix and Fats Domino, but he didn't care for Elvis. He loved Motown, because "it had a lot of feeling," and The Beatles, who were "so innovative."

Although he enjoyed music and was an average student, teachers and family often called him "stupid" and he left school in December 1962 without graduating.

A ‘quirk'

"I always lived straight, except for one brief period," Diane said, explaining that Dale wasn't completely sure at first what was amiss with him.

In fact, partly to prove his maleness and partly to preempt the draft, he joined the Coast Guard in 1963, scoring a 97 on the entrance exam — Diane flies a Coast Guard flag and the Stars and Stripes on her front porch. Dale went to radio school in Connecticut and was assigned to the cutter Rockaway. Honorably discharged early in 1965, Dale earned a GED and married.

"At that time, I thought I was a transvestite," Diane said, calling it "my personality quirk," something Dale explained to his fiancee, Judy, before their marriage that year.

The couple had three children. While Dale Lee Jr. died at age 2 of a viral infection, Tracy, 51, and Bryan, 44, have given Diane six grandchildren and seven great-grandchildren.

"The truly rewarding part of the marriage was the children," Diane said.

Dale studied computer programming at Lehigh Carbon Community College. An intelligence test he took at the time showed a 137 IQ — putting the lie to the "stupid" appellation, although he didn't finish the studies.

Yet, the "quirk" proved too much and the marriage broke up in 1972. Thinking he might be a homosexual, Dale lived with a man for six months, and Judy divorced him. He concluded he was not a homosexual and, the following year, he began to live as a woman.

Wanting to keep his initials, Dale chose the name Diane. She went to Dr. Charles Renninger, Allentown, who provided hormone injections causing breast growth and wore a wig.

"I never got harassed or picked on," Diane recalled, except for a few times before she no longer needed the wig to look feminine. "I guess at 5-foot-8, I was a little imposing."

Business and transition

In 1975, Diane met Ann, a lesbian, and the couple married in 1976 before a magistrate as man and wife.

They remained together until Anne's death in April 2015, in what Diane said was a celibate marriage of convenience and not always happy.

It was more of a business partnership as the couple set up as Morgan & Morgan Alarm Systems, using the electronic know-how acquired in the service and studying computers, as well as a natural knack.

"I can convert anything to anything. No one ever told me boys do this and girls do that," Diane said.

Ann did the office work for the business. The couple moved to Schuylkill Haven in 1988.

Music continued to play a role in Diane's life, which included stints in several bands over the years, most recently Just Ducky in Hazleton.

In 2009, Ann began to suffer kidney failure, requiring dialysis.

In 2012, the Morgans sold their business and Diane took out a home equity loan to pay for sex reassignment surgery, which she had put off for years due to the expense. The operation, not covered by insurance, cost $18,500, and was performed at Lower Bucks Hospital by Dr. Christine McGinn.

"I'm glad I went through it. It is the best thing I ever did for myself, outside of having my kids," Diane said.

Ann did not go with Diane for the surgery, nor was she supportive of it. In April 2015, as Diane was taking Ann for dialysis, she collapsed and died in Diane's arms outside their home.

Controversy

Dale doubted he was a boy, but Diane has no doubts about being a woman. Society is divided on the matter, and even in the medical establishment, some have spoken against the use of surgery to treat gender dysphoria, although they are a minority.

During transgenderism's sudden transformation into a civil rights movement, a notable voice of dissent has been Dr. Paul R. McHugh, professor of psychiatry at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

In 1979, when he was chairman of the Department of Psychiatry, he ended reassignment surgery at the hospital, which had started there in the 1960s. Writing in a much publicized June 12, 2014, Op-Ed in the Wall Street Journal, McHugh reaffirmed that transgenderism is a "disorder," comparable to anorexia and bulimia, for which surgery is not the appropriate treatment.

He said that Johns Hopkins studied the long-term results of the surgery and found patients' subsequent psycho-social adjustments were no better than those who did not have the surgery. Moreover, research shows a higher suicide rate among the post-operative transsexual.

Similar criticism has been raised in Canada. In 2013, Dr. Joseph Berger, a psychiatrist in Toronto, delivered a statement to the Canadian House of Commons Standing Committee on Justice and Human Rights as it considered a bill to outlaw discrimination based on gender identity.

A Distinguished Life Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and a Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, Berger's opinion is similar to McHugh's.

Diane finds the critics "annoying" but said they do not anger or enrage her.

"I know what is and what is not me," Diane said.

"If anything gets close to angering me, it's the IRS," she joked.

The etiology of transgenderism remains elusive, as the phenomenon is too complex to pinpoint a single cause or accurately tally a cluster of them.

Diane puts much stock in theories focusing on the brain as a source, citing studies suggesting the hypothalamus of transgender males, while in the womb, did not differentiate as male along with the rest of the body.

"It's physiological, not psychological," she affirmed.

Diane's argument against her sex determining XY chromosomes is more of a stretch.

Having taken female hormones for so many years, she muses, "maybe they have changed my DNA."

Moreover, she must still take hormones, although injections are long in the past and she only needs 1.5 milligrams of Ogen every day. Diane regards it as equivalent to a vitamin supplement.

Looking ahead

Diane blames the Johns Hopkins decision to drop the surgeries on suicides. However, she said that is something that can be prevented by better preparing patients for life after surgery.

"If you have something positive, and look ahead, you will never think of suicide," she said.

That is what she has been doing, looking through various online dating services and enrolling in Penn State to study for a degree in psychology. She hopes to open a joint psychology office with friend Yvonne Zukosky, a pharmacologist. Diane wishes to specialize in gender disorders.

Meanwhile, she wants to make herself available to help those going through what she went through.

While her stepfather called her "crazy," Diane said she was never physically abused during her upbringing. That is not always the case, and Diane fears for "the child beaten half to death" or the adult transgender stabbed to death for "being different."

bsmith@republicanherald.com