Author Noelle Howey with her father, Christine, who transitioned to female over 20 years ago. Photo courtesy of Noelle Howey.

If you passed my dad on the street today, you might not notice her. She’d likely be wearing one of her tasteful flowing tunics, black slacks, loafers with excellent arch support, and her wavy brown wig, which allows just a touch of her grey hair to peek out at the temples. At 69, she jokes, she is a typical older woman — virtually invisible.

But I think she has never looked more beautiful: She is a transgender woman completely at home in her own skin.

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It hasn’t always been this way. As a male, my father never looked, well, right. Growing up in the 1950s as Dick (I know, you can’t make this stuff up), my father looked perpetually ill at ease in his plaid shirts and Carhartt dungarees. In his teen years, he was often morose, a smooth, baby-faced boy forced into button-down shirts and prom tuxes. The only photo in which he looks truly happy and relaxed? He is in Florida, on vacation, at the age of 12, wearing shorts with the cuffs tightly rolled up — just like a girl.

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That moment of pure contentment wouldn’t come again for a long time. My father got married, had a child (me), and became a hard-driving, hard-drinking advertising creative director with a secret identity — truly the Don Draper of the 1980s. For some time, he was the very picture of a successful middle-aged jerk: He wore Risky Business sunglasses, rocked a comb-over, slapped on too much aftershave, and piloted a red sports car in which he swore, loudly and often, at other drivers. He passed for a man so well that no one could have possibly guessed he lay awake at night dreaming of being a woman.

The author, at 16, with her dad, one year into his transition process. Photo courtesy of Noelle Howey.

But the accumulated pressure of all those years of pretending to be someone he wasn’t wore him down. He was diagnosed with a heart condition. He was a borderline alcoholic. And so at age 41, he came out to me as a cross-dresser. (My mother had known about his predilection almost since they met back in high school, but that’s another story.) When I was 14, he moved out of the house and began to experiment.

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It didn’t take long before my dad became painfully aware that wearing angora sweaters around his new apartment or to the occasional cross-dresser clambake wasn’t going to cut it. My dad didn’t want to simply dress like a woman, he explained to my mother and me, he wanted to become one.

And so the transition began: His appearance began to morph, bit by bit, week by week. Once, during one of our requisite divorced-dad-and-daughter outings to a burger joint, I noticed his fingernails were long, and shaped into perfect half-moons. Then he got a toupee. His face became progressively softer, courtesy of electrolysis. His voice started climbing ever higher. One day, as we ate burgers yet again, he wore — I swear to God — lime-green pedal pushers.

Honestly, I was mortified. OK, granted, I was a teenager, and therefore tended to find my parents mortifying no matter what they were doing. But in this case, I wasn’t alone: I can’t count how many waitresses we confounded during this time, who fumbled over whether to say “ma’am” or “sir” on their visits to our table. My father was leaving the straitjacket of his maleness behind, but wasn’t settled into a new female identity. For a time, he was somewhere on the continuum between the two, and that threw a lot of people off — me included.

The author as a teen with her father, a year before he will come out as transgender. Photo courtesy of Noelle Howey.

Few things unsettle most Americans more than gender ambiguity. We want to label people as men or women, and become distraught when we can’t instantly do so. After all, how many salacious tabloid covers have you seen speculating on Bruce Jenner’s slow transformation? Exactly.

Yes, the transitional period was awkward. But that’s not a bad thing. The awkwardness opened a real conversation between my dad and me for the first time. Since day one, I’d found my father alienating. He was that coldly distant figure in the living-room armchair, a tumbler of vodka on the rocks in one hand, TV remote in the other. However, once his transition began, he became a fully dimensional person, someone just as confused and vulnerable as me. As a teen girl, I was in a transition to womanhood, too — trying on different versions of myself, experimenting with what it meant to be female. One month, I’d try to pull off a vintagey indie-girl look, channeling Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink. The next, I’d try for Tortured Poet, Naughty Cheerleader, or Wide-Eyed Ingenue.

In fact, if anyone thinks that only transgender people look a little strange while they’re finding themselves, they should take another gander at your average teenager. Nothing my dad ever did looked half as bizarre as the day I decided to cut geometric shapes out of my stirrup pants, pair them with a fishnet mesh blouse, toss on bracelets made out of the tops of six-pack rings, and streak my hair with Colorific neon hair mousse (which turned into electric-blue dandruff by fourth period).

Christine Howey with her granddaughter. Photo courtesy of Noelle Howey.

Technically, my father’s transition period ended in 1990 when she came out as Christine to her extended family and friends. By then, no one was confused about which gender she was. With a wardrobe of stylish dresses, heels and handbags — not to mention legs for miles — she finally read to everyone else as the woman she had always been.

But she wasn’t really done changing. She kept transforming, exploring, finding new facets of her identity, as we all do. Back then, she was uber-girly, with a voice that could veer dangerously into Minnie Mouse territory. Her dearest goal was to leave her male self behind in the rearview mirror.

Over time, that mellowed. Like many cisgender (non-trans) women, as she got older, she became less anxious to prove her femininity. Goodbye to the heels, the dresses, the copious foundation and eyeliner. Hello to comfy pants and “Breaking Bad” t-shirts. Hello to ChapStick. By the time my kids met her, as Grandma, she was far removed from the woman who’d once worn a tiara in a transgender beauty pageant.

When she liberated herself from the strictures of her new gender, in some ways it freed her to make yet another transition — perhaps the most profound one of all. A few years ago, she began telling her story onstage, as a poet and a playwright. And this spring, she will make her professional debut in a one-woman show, “Exact Change,” in her home (and my hometown), of Cleveland, Ohio. In the show, she talks about all her incarnations, both female and male. And she does something that she never could have imagined, back in the day. She takes off her wig.

And when I see her without it, she looks so much to me like that person, caught between genders, who I really got to know so many years ago — the person who opened up to me and let me know her, and the woman who ultimately became the father I’d always wanted.

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