Transgender in Tennessee: Former Green Beret transitions to a woman

Five decades is a long time to hide who you are from the world, but Robin Patty did it with precision.

The lingerie under her Army fatigues was thin and obscured, never including an item that might stand out, like a bra. The storage unit containing her more feminine possessions, like dresses and wigs, was located miles away from the military base. And the hotel where she stayed when she wanted to put on her makeup was always secluded.

On the outside, she maintained the expected persona — a rugged man with thick arms in full camouflage who posed for photos toting a gun and grasping the neck of a recently claimed buck.

In truth, only part of it was a facade.

Patty is an avid hunter who can take down a deer with a handgun. She is an engine-tinkering Jeep enthusiast. And she is a former Green Beret who jumped out of Army planes training for U.S. Special Forces operations.

But the exterior is changing.

At 53 years old, Patty is in the middle of the surgical transition process — facial and sexual reconstruction — that will bring her closer to the person she always has been inside.

A woman.

Fright and fight

You can see the happiness in her face. Hazel eyes highlighted by lightly applied mascara and framed by neatly tweezed eyebrows that cover her newly shaped brow bones. Cheeks barely blushed. Naturally pink lips, plumped and shaped into an unpretentious smile. It all gives her a subtle glow that reflects the physical change she now undergoes.

Here, living in Murfreesboro and working as volunteer emergency service HAM radio operator, she is so far removed from the aggrandizement that greeted the Olympic gold medalist and reality TV star previously known as Bruce Jenner, who recently came out as a woman at age 65 and took the name Caitlyn.

And yet those glossy magazine covers and 24-hour news-cycle commentary impact Patty — in ways both good and bad.

As a transgender woman, already she is among the most marginalized in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer community. Rejection and hostility command the reactions of many who don't understand a person whose gender expression — whose internal sense of being male or female — does not conform to the sex assigned at birth.

That's what makes Jenner an important figure. She has sparked conversation, and with it comes hope from the local transgender community that more people will move beyond fear.

But Jenner's celebrity status — the money and the fame — also colors the story in an unrealistic way. She is not the everyday member of the transgender community. Not the discriminately unemployed woman who lives down the street. Not the alienated man you see in the grocery store.

Those in Tennessee have a different struggle — both legal and emotional — and the only way to understand is to hear their voices.

Reflecting on her transition, Patty remarks that she is one of the fortunate ones. Support and acceptance, for the most part, radiate around her. But, achieving that peace has not been easy. There were times when leaving her house dressed as a woman brought unmitigated fright and a constant internal fight: man or woman?

Transgender soldier

As a boy, Patty wanted to be one of three things: a pirate, a cowboy or a soldier. The last seemed the most accessible.

So, at age 14, she joined the Civil Air Patrol, which she describes as the boy scouts for the military, and two years later she piloted her first flight, launching her career path.

By that time she already spent years envying the dresses her younger sister wore to church and sneaking into her mother's closet to try on — and occasionally abscond with — undergarments. Patty's mom, Anna, noticed the missing pairs of panties, but she didn't know which of her three children was taking them — and she didn't pry.

What Anna Patty saw in her son was a maturing boy who preferred to play pretend with guns instead of Legos or Lincoln Logs and whose "suave" personality got him dates with pretty girls. To Patty's sister, Christine Snider, her then-brother was "a protector," always there to defend. A guy, Snider says, made to pursue a "very manly profession" in the military.

Some transgender people describe a moment when they understood the dichotomy inside and out, but there was nothing like that for Patty, nothing that shouted: "You are trans." She just knew, she says, that something was "wrong."

So she straddled two worlds, which included two marriages, some time in rehab and a deepening military career that began in the 82nd Airborne and led to the special forces, where soldiers trained to kill Osama Bin Laden. As long as she was occupied — training or deployed — Patty says she could keep the female part of her suppressed, but when she had spare time she spent a lot of it dressed, in obscurity, as a woman.

"I was literally fighting with myself internally about who I was," Patty says. "And it was both painful, and I felt like, for lack of a better term, that I was tearing myself apart."

Dangers

There came, then, two fear-inducing, life-altering occurrences — one in which trepidation threaded among the most mundane moments of her life, and the other that included some very actual dangers, and a horrific accident. The accident came first.

In November 1992, during a HALO training jump, a tree limb snagged Patty's cut-away and disconnected the main parachute from her harness. Patty, then a member of the 5th Special Forces, careened to the ground, broke her back in three places, her right hip and some ribs, and punctured her left lung. For almost a month she was in and out of the Intensive Care Unit at Vanderbilt, and then she spent five months of rehab at the Memphis VA in a spinal cord unit that specializes in teaching the newly injured how to live.

Today, with the lower limb paralysis that left her in a wheelchair, even just transferring in and out of a vehicle is hard work. But, Patty's sister says, "She doesn't let things stop her. You tell her: 'You can't do it,' and she's like, 'Watch me.' "

But, in truth, there were distinct times when Patty was petrified of being watched.

Patty first went out in public dressed as a woman at the Southern Comfort Conference in Atlanta in 2009. The event, which is one of the largest gatherings of transgender people in the country, was eye-opening for her. She had no idea there were so many others like her. It was then that she knew something had to change.

It came in little ways at first. The content of her closet transitioned from men's clothes to mostly women's. She began covertly watching other women, trying to get pictures so she could learn how to dress, wear her makeup or style her hair.

Then, in January of 2013, she decided to see a therapist to "find out what was wrong" and how to change it. She didn't know what to expect, and she didn't show up dressed as a woman for quite some time.

She feared a child in the grocery store yelling to his mom, "Hey, why's that guy in a dress?" She worried about the watching eyes of neighbors — would she be made fun of, become the "scary, weird person" no one wanted to be around? Even going through the drive-thru at Starbucks was a threat. Dressed as a woman, but with the distinct voice of a man, she dreaded being discovered at the window.

But she isn't afraid anymore.

Accepting herself

Patty began her transition last year, on her 53rd birthday.

For sometime, she had been growing out her hair. She also pierced her other ear. Then, one night, her stepmother simply acknowledged the change: "Are you transitioning?"

That opened the door. Patty told her mother the next day and then her sister, at lunch at Famous Anthony's. Both reacted with genuine surprise. "I didn't have a clue," Snider, Patty's sister, says. "But I love her to death, and nothing is ever going to change that."

Not everyone in Patty's life have been as accepting as these three women — who each, in her own way, also still struggle to understand. Patty's dad hasn't fully adopted the new pronouns. And one of Patty's closest friends, her hunting buddy, has completely walked away. That hurts. But, she acknowledges, she remains lucky. Many people not only lose their friends, but family support as well.

"Not all of them support my decision, but they accept it and, in turn, accept me for who I am and not who they want me to be," Patty says.

And, in a physical sense, who she is becomes more clear every day. She had facial feminization surgery in April, traveling to Pennsylvania where well-known plastic surgeon Dr. Christine McGinn — a former U.S. Navy pilot who transitioned as a transgender woman — reshaped Patty's brow bones, nose and lips. With the help of a speech therapist, Patty has learned to speak like a woman — something no amount of estrogen hormones can make happen. And, because there are currently no sexual reassignment surgeons in the Nashville area, later this year, Patty will return to McGinn to have surgery — top and bottom — that will make the transition complete.

The best part, for Patty, is freedom. No longer does she have to compartmentalize her life. She doesn't have to live in two genders, making sure that everything relating to her female side was hidden when anyone came over. All of the conflict that she'd felt for her entire life is gone.

Now, she is just one person living her life on my own terms. And, really, she's the same person she's always been.

She still loves looking through the gun sites of black steel and fixing up fast vehicles. Wearing dresses in public, putting on a pair of earrings and applying eye shadow hasn't changed that.

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.

In their own words

"All we want to do is survive. We want to have an ordinary life. We want to have kids, and a Labrador retriever and a two-door car with a van. We want that. We want careers just like everyone else. We're not freaks. We're not its. We're not monsters. We're not beasts. We're humans at the end of the day, and I will fight to my last breath to let people know that we are." ~ LaSaia Wade, 28-year-old transgender woman from Nashville and executive director of the Tennessee Transgender Justice Project.

"Transitioning is not done on a whim, it takes courage to step out into the world and say I am different, but it is who I am and it makes me happy." ~ Shaun Arroyo, 49-year-old transgender man from Nashville who medically transitioned at age 45 and is now board chair of Tennessee Vals.

"I learned to fake it. More importantly, I learned that I didn't matter. I learned not to trust my own instincts. I learned that at the center I was just wrong. I learned to push people away and to live in isolation. Hearing the jokes and seeing the harmful stereotypes of transgender people in TV and movies honestly didn't help me develop a positive picture of myself either. ... Since beginning to finally embrace myself and transition, for the first time in my adult life I'm beginning to have happy days." ~ Emma Frye, 44-year-old transgender woman in East Tennessee.

"Originally, the thought of having anyone know that I was trans was my biggest fear. I just wanted to live my life as a woman, but I think that I can do more now to educate people and let them know that we're not on the weird fringe of life by living openly as a trans-woman. We're just normal people that were born with the wrong body." ~ Robin Patty, 53, a transgender woman from Murfreesboro, who began her transition last year on her 53rd birthday.

"Publicly identifying as transgender is still very physically dangerous. At the heart of that hatred is a lack of understanding. The more these conversations take place, the more hope we have that it will help people move beyond anger and fear and hatred. It helps people understand, and that leads more acceptance." ~ Marisa Richmond, Nashville transgender woman and first president of the Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition.

"It's confusing. It's very confusing. So we don't understand it, but he was a good son, and he'll be a good daughter. And he's still the one I go to when I want advice." ~ Anna Patty, mother to Robin Patty, who learned less than a year ago that her 53-year-old child was transitioning as a transgender woman.

"In the media I hear a lot of stories from other transgender people who talk about how they knew ever since they could first remember, but I'd rather be honest and say that while I had a lot of girly qualities when I was a young kid — my best friend was a neighbor girl, and I like playing with girls' toys — I never really thought strongly about gender until my teenage years, when puberty made me realize how much being male wasn't for me." ~ Lauren Croney, 24-year-old from Murfreesboro.

"Despite my name having been changed for over a decade, my mother keeps saying the wrong name. To them, I am the family disgrace, and so they lie about me and my life to make themselves feel better. But despite all this, I am happy. I have love, a beautiful and wonderful daughter, loads of friends, and an interesting life, far removed from that painful moment (in 2001) with the handgun when I wanted to die." ~ Heather O'Malley, 46-year-old transgender woman from Murfreesboro.

"I am very proud of her to have the strength and the courage to do this. To be 53 years old and suddenly decide to do this — that takes courage. She's strong, and I think she will know how to handle it." ~ Christine Snider, Robin Patty's younger sister.

Tennessee transgender community faces challenges

When those in the transgender community come out, choosing to publicly express what they feel inside, so often they are shunned. Even today, as society moves more generally toward acceptance, there is a great deal of physical violence against transgender men and women.

In November, Gilbert "Gizzy" Fowler was shot to death outside a vacant home in North Nashville. And national media reports showing a rash of murders at the beginning of this year, with nearly a dozen people known as part of the transgender community killed in the U.S. through May.

Transgender rights activists can become impassioned, pointing to the need for structural social, policy and law changes that protect trans people from discrimination and harassment, and more frequent, respectful mainstream media attention.

Just how respectful the coverage of Caitlyn Jenner has been can be questioned.

Jon Stewart, host of "The Daily Show" on Comedy Central, criticized the sexist tone of the coverage, which focused so much on Jenner's feminine look and shape that it completely undercut the accomplishments once associated with his maleness.

Much more criticism came with ESPN's decision to present Jenner with the Arthur Ashe Courage Award at the upcoming ESPYS. Bob Costas, renowned television sportscaster, called it "crass exploitation" during a radio interview on The Dan Patrick Show. Costas did not seem to take issue with Jenner's transition to a woman but with her ties to sports — she won the Olympic decathlon as Bruce Jenner in 1976. That was a long time ago.

Many others did question the awards relation to Jenner becoming a woman: Did she really deserve a trophy for transitioning. Was it courageous?

Those who move so publicly into any truth that doesn't fit the mold face major challenges, especially here in Tennessee.

An example: The state has punished hate crimes based on sexual orientation since 2001, but the law does not include hate crimes based on gender identity. And a birth certificate statute, passed by the Tennessee state legislature in 1977, prohibits the state from altering the sex on birth certificates for transgender people.

Of all the legislative issues, from Robin Patty's perspective, the number one issue is birth certificates. Can you imagine, she says, what it would be like if you lost or had your picture IDs destroyed and had to go through the whole process again, proving who you were with a birth certificate that contained the wrong gender and name?

Patty, a North Carolina native, doesn't have to face that. After sex reassignment surgery this fall, she'll get an entirely new North Carolina birth certificate issued with her new name and gender.

And though she doesn't have the money that Jenner has, she does have enough to cover therapy, surgery, hair removal and the other things that might come up. Her surgeries alone cost $65,000. There are many who don't have that.

In the past, when she'd look in the mirror, she never recognized the person that she saw. Now, her reflection shows the person that she always knew was there.

"Now, I just look forward to living as one person," she says. "Not having to hide the part of me that I'd manage to suppress for so many years."

Reach Jessica Bliss at 615-259-8253 and on Twitter @jlbliss.

Resources

• Tennessee Transgender Support : A group based in Nashville for those who fall within the transgender spectrum and are seeking information and connections. https://www.facebook.com/pages/Tennessee-Transgender-Support/107524875933089?sk=info

• The Tennessee Vals : A social support organization that helps educate about and promote the interests of the transgender community in Tennessee. http://www.tvals.org/

• Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition : The Tennessee Transgender Political Coalition is an organization designed to educate and advocate on behalf of transgender-related legislation at the federal, state and local levels. https://www.facebook.com/tntpc

• Middle Tennessee Trans Men: Support group for transgender men who may be transitioning or questioning http://www.outcentral.org/resources/middle-tennessee-trans-men#.VYZWm_lViko

• Out Central: Nashville organization that works to connect, empower and build a positive space for greater Nashville's diverse lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender community. http://www.outcentral.org/