This morning in group, there were several topics of discussion. Though it does have two social workers at the helm, the meeting is informal; people can bring up whatever they want. Donna Jean doesn’t always love the topics group members pick — the conversation can get too manly, in the worst way, for her taste, when it turns to how many "gooks" someone or other killed in ’68. (“I’m like, ‘Guys. You need to get past that.’”) But she is open, patient, and compassionate with essentially everyone she meets, whether outside a support group’s safe space or in it.



She’s very aware that she doesn’t have many of the problems others in the group do. She’s already worked through her war issues in therapy. She and her second wife got divorced when she transitioned, but they’ve made their friendly peace, and what living family she’s still got accepts her. She has a new partner, a woman named Lizzie Jenkins. They’re both retired. Donna Jean’s extremely busy and active in the community via Louisiana Trans Advocates, an organization she helped found that runs support groups, which she and Lizzie personally lead in New Orleans and Baton Rouge and attend events for all over the state. She also speaks to university classes because she and Lizzie like to spread awareness and combat stigma. Plus, they really like the way that they can, from the front of the room, see all the college men in the seats unconsciously put their hands over their junk when the discussion turns to sex reassignment surgery.

When it happens, DJ and Lizzie point out to the boys that they’re doing it. Then the boys spread their arms back out, draping them all over the backs of the chairs around them, reclaiming their full, rightful male space.

Donna Jean is the happiest she’s ever been. She often hums cheery tunes to herself as she walks around town. At this point, for her, pretty much the main difficulty of being a trans woman is being precisely that: a woman.

“You automatically lose 40 IQ points in people’s eyes” when you go from presenting as a man to presenting as a woman, she says. Donna Jean identifies just being a woman as for her “the worst thing about being trans” (though when she says this in front of Lizzie, who is also trans, Lizzie interjects: “Aside from losing your job and your family and bankrupting yourself to pay for surgery”). “It’s like being a foreigner,” Donna Jean says. “People talk to you like you don’t speak English. Louder, and slower.” Donna Jean realized she was truly a woman in the world’s eyes the day she went out to her car to refill the windshield-washing fluid and the moment she popped the hood, three men magically appeared. Realizing that the only way these heroes would accept that the little lady knew how to fill her own fucking washing fluid was to tell them that she had for many decades had a penis, she felt no choice but to pretend to be grateful.

Don’t even talk to her about what happens when she goes to the mechanic. Or tries to open doors for herself. Even Caroline, the blonde with the matching blue eyes and nails, was stunned by the level and amount of condescension she is now subject to, though before her transition she had witnessed already that life as a woman was no picnic — when she was in service, the military wasn’t just for boys anymore, and some of the women alongside her were harassed, and badgered, and called names. It broke her feminist heart then, but she knew it was dangerous for her to say something and draw attention to herself that way. Still, having seen the difference gender makes was different than knowing it, the way she experiences it every day now, the lack of respect, the low standards, how everything — everything — but everything — is overexplained to her all the time.

“This socialization is so hard,” Donna Jean says, “because women are not respected. I had to revoke my white-guy card. When you’re a man, everything is easy, even if you’re an idiot.” She had to learn the hard way that when you’re a woman, even if you’re not an idiot, you are treated like one. She does point out two perks of modern womanhood that she’s noticed, though. One is that if you’re alone at the grocery store and you smile at another woman’s baby, the woman won’t look at you sideways and put herself between you and her offspring, and might even hand the infant right to you.

The other is that aviator sunglasses are in for ladies now. So Donna Jean can wear her old shades like back in the Air Force days and look as badass but as simultaneously femme as she pleases.

But not all trans women are nearly so lucky as to have to deal with only (only!) regular female problems. Often, they have trans problems on top of female problems. Like, for example, Caroline.

Today in group, the veterans spent some time talking about religion. Donna Jean doesn’t have any conflicts on this front as a Unitarian Universalist, where the only rules (as she describes them) are “breathe, be ethical, don’t be an asshole” and where there are both other trans members of the congregation and a trans minister. But Caroline is a born-again Christian, and she talked about that again in the session today. Her wife of 21 years was the one who brought her into the evangelical fold, partly as an effort to allay the gender “issues” they’d discussed since their second date. (They’d had to discuss them then, that early in their relationship; then-male-presenting Caroline had not anticipated things getting to the point of clothes coming off on that date, and had been underdressing that night.) In 2009, she started taking hormones in secret. In the ensuing years between then and when she had GCS — gender confirmation surgery; that’s her preferred term, over SRS — in January 2013, Caroline’s wife took her to counseling with their pastor, who was convinced she could be fixed with more manly activities, more focus on her marriage and family, and god.

Caroline is no longer welcome in her church. Or in her house — she and her wife are divorced now. Caroline is utterly heartbroken over it (“I love her,” she says of her ex), and in addition to her spouse and her church, she lost her children, only one of whom recently started talking to her again. And her military job. And with it, her pension.

Caroline had served 18 years of a 20-year National Guard career when she was discharged for being trans. At the time, she was in the midst of getting processed for an honorable medical discharge due to post-traumatic stress disorder. In 2004, she crewed Black Hawks in Iraq for a year. She transported spectacular amounts of cash — entire Black Hawks packed with cash — through the air while people lobbed bullets, missiles, and rocks at her from the ground. Her unit transferred Saddam Hussein from American to Iraqi custody in a helicopter. Then a few months after she got back home, in 2005, Hurricane Katrina hit her state, and the National Guard was deployed. “It was really cool rescuing people rather than killing people,” she says. But it was really hard to see New Orleans like that. It had also been hard to see an American convoy on the ground in Iraq under attack one time, when she says she watched from the air, unable to get in there and offer support because of the VIP Caroline’s crew was transporting on board.

One of the few POWs of that war, Matthew Maupin, was captured that day. Later, he was executed.

In 2007, Caroline was diagnosed with PTSD. It was too severe, the National Guard said, for her to deploy again. In 2011, she hit a deer with her car, and she came completely undone. Her nightmares were constant, debilitating. It was while her paperwork for medical discharge was being processed that the Army noticed a little something else in her medical chart: She was transitioning.

Transgender people are not allowed to serve in the United States military. There was a hearing. The VA doctors said that Caroline had PTSD, for real, that it was bad and had gotten worse over time. In her dreams, mortars fell constantly on her in Mosul. Or, she hit the deer with her car, but when she got out and circled around the front, it wasn’t the deer that lay there dying, but Matthew Maupin. Caroline’s lawyer argued that since the Army broke her, the Army was responsible for her, trans or not. The Army counsel aggressively questioned the validity, much less severity, of any ongoing PTSD problem. In 2014, she was given a general discharge with the code of "moral or professional dereliction." (She still gets VA benefits because the National Guard discharged her after her Iraq deployment, as is common when switching jobs or contracts; that honorable discharge makes her eligible for VA care.)

Now she struggles. She loved serving. Today before lunch, in group, Caroline talked a lot. Today maybe especially, she is struggling, because four National Guardsmen died in a Black Hawk crash a couple weeks ago and that was her unit, her guys. Earlier this week she went to one of their funerals, and at lunch she continues talking about how it was “awkward as hell.” Everyone there had “never met Caroline.” They’d seen her only dressed as a man named Rob — Zombie Rob, Caroline calls him, for the way he had to tune out and shut down and present this shell of a person the people around him wanted him to be.

Despite that. Despite all the struggles. Being Caroline is still better than being Zombie Rob. Even though Caroline is terrified that she will not be able to find someone to love her. As beautiful and talented as she is, almost everyone who loved her as Rob has bailed.

Her company where she holds a civilian job as a medical imaging specialist stood by her, the only people aside from her doctors at the VA. By accepting and helping her become who she was — that’s why she says the latter saved her life. “I was gonna die anyway,” she says, referencing a deeply suicidal period she went through as Zombie Rob. “So,” even though she’s struggling, “this is all bonus.”



