She had to excuse herself. To vomit. Again. For the fifth time during a phone conversation approaching 10 hours in length.

“An explosion of everything” is how, four years later, she’d describe this discussion with a friend, a heart-emptying conversation that began late one day and didn’t end until early the next, which might seem like an awfully long time but is just an instant, really, in the context of giving someone their life.

This was what she had longed to hear, this confirmation that it was OK to pursue what she had silently wished for every year while growing up, on her birthday, just before blowing out the candles.

This was what she had longed for someone else to hear, this plea for understanding, for something as simple as acceptance of a situation so complex that it bore straight through her soul and into her very DNA.

And then suddenly … it was OK. OK to chase her dreams, her freedom, chase herself, to stare down the confusion, anxiety and twisted emotion until forcing all that baggage to blink. It was OK because she was talking to someone who, unbeknownst to her until this call, already had taken the strides she so desperately desired to take, the terrifying steps toward a place that promised, of all things, comfort.

Maybe that explained the purging, the ridding of whatever it was that had been collecting inside her all those years. A cleansing? Maybe. She’s still not sure of that.

But she knew what she needed to do now. It was time, no matter how much it might pain the girl with whom she was living, how much confusion and anxiety it might cause the people closest to her, how tightly it might twist their emotions.

She didn’t want to hurt anyone, honest. But she knew what she felt wrenching inside her gut and that was hurt, too.

So, it was time, all right, at age 19, to be born; time to start her life – nearly two decades after his life had begun.

Breaking free

Yes, this is a sports story. Chloe Anderson is an athlete, a transgender athlete, at Santa Ana College, where she plays women’s volleyball with thoughts of possibly moving on to a bigger school after next season.

But it isn’t a story about sports. It’s about so much more, those traditional white lines and out-of-bounds markers way too confining. And this story is, on top of everything else, a celebration of breaking free.

An open mind and a willing heart will help going forward, as will the realization that things might become a little unpleasant because, as Chloe would want you to know, journeys like hers can be turbulent ones.

But the bumps and rough spots will be worth it because of what’s waiting at the end – all the growth and fulfillment, all the satisfaction and triumph. That’s what the people who love Chloe would want you to know.

There’s a lesson in here, too, something to be learned in the education of a young woman; a young woman who isn’t starring in a television show based on someone else’s idea of reality or looking at us from the cover of Vanity Fair.

She’s our neighbor. She’s one of us, breaking free right here in Orange County, in Irvine, where so much of life is viewed through conservative eyes.

One more thing: Who doesn’t love a story with an ending that feels good, simply feels right? And here is Chloe’s mother, Catherine, speaking today:

“I’m relieved that Chloe is the person she wants to be. I’m so happy for her, so proud of her. There are no doubts in my mind about this being the right thing for Chloe to do.”

Picked on

So let’s go back then, to the child born and raised a boy but with someone else – with a little girl – always yearning inside. She was the one who liked wearing the princess dresses and preferred playing with girls. She was the one picked on and beaten up, never understanding why, until, one day, she realized that, no matter what she was feeling inside, she was a little boy, and that was going to be a problem. For her and for others.

Most of the friends she can remember through middle school were girls. When playing online games, she’d always make her avatar female. The arrival of puberty – every boy’s most certain step toward manhood – shattered her heart.

She found herself disconnecting, isolating, turning her friends into strangers, continually looking inside because inside was the one place she could always find herself.

She tried to share her feelings with her parents, but those conversations crumbled too quickly, too easily, devoured by the clumsy combination of an awkward, largely unspoken topic and a relationship tangled with emotional investment.

So close can be too close. Why is it, exactly, that the more intimate the subject the tougher that subject is to discuss with those to whom we’re most intimate? And nothing can be more intimate than the essence of someone’s being.

So at a time when kids should be blooming, Chloe wanted nothing more than to remain hidden inside the bud, anonymity the next best thing to security and much better than identity. At least the identity Chloe had been assigned by nature.

Her life at Irvine High wasn’t any easier. Or any happier. She was depressed, drained of motivation and dreamed away hours at her computer, the Internet not so much a place to be faceless but rather to wear whatever face she chose, even one framed in flowing blond hair. “Huddled in a cave” is how Chloe characterizes that existence now.

Love for volleyball

She did discover she had a love for volleyball, that the game could double as her escape. She also found that, though expressing her feelings seemed so difficult, she could sing, her talents landing her in the high school choir and eventually, in 2009, performing with the group at Carnegie Hall.

This wasn’t going to be easy, though, so of course she had been presented with the most masculine of all vocal gifts. She was a bass and typically the deepest voice in any group she joined, a voice she could drag so low that, for a musical production of “Star Wars,” Chloe sang the part of Darth Vader.

Academically, she struggled, fought disinterest and usually lost and routinely bowed to the sort of apathy that, after two hours of sweaty volleyball practice, she wouldn’t even bother showering. By the end, she was no longer eligible to play for Irvine and barely managed to graduate.

At home, her struggles continued. One day, Catherine had found some of her clothes in Chloe’s room, an uneasy discovery the two of them talked about but never, until years later, actually discussed, even during the therapy sessions when both would sit quietly wishing the topic would come up. So close. Too close.

Maybe it was the confusion or depression then. Or just curiosity, as someone who describes herself as asexual, having never had a traditional dating relationship. But after repeatedly turning inside, Chloe reached out, to a girl.

Six months before turning 18, when she finally planned to speak up and make everyone hear her, really listen to her plans of starting the hormone treatments that would free her from this silent struggle, she instead began dating Zoe. “Try to be a guy for me” was Zoe’s request, and Chloe admits the attraction was mutual.

But so much of her life remained wrapped in uncertainty and fear. Reject the gender you were presented by God, the gender your parents gave you and who knows what sort of rejection might ricochet back? Trying to find something as significant as her true identity, the last thing she wanted to lose was something as significant as her only family.

Bolt from nowhere

She had confided in a few close friends. Even this new girlfriend knew, but Zoe persuaded Chloe to put everything on hold, move with her to Texas and somehow they’d make it all work.

Yet, the more Chloe tried to be someone she wasn’t, the more she understood she had no choice but to be the person she was, the person she had been all along.

Then came the phone conversation – the 10-hour enlightening, empowering bolt from nowhere – the one that ended with Chloe feeling the adrenaline surging, providing the final push to release what had been squirming inside for far too long.

“I know this sounds weird,” she says today, “but before that moment, I don’t feel like I lived.”

She told her mother on the car ride home from the airport after returning from Texas. Catherine cried, asked what could be done to fix the problem and wondered why her second-born child didn’t want to be with her, ultimately, in heaven.

She told her father, William, during another car ride, and he said little, although the bright crimson flooding his face said plenty.

Chloe’s older brother, Ian, was saddened, the two speaking about the topic once and then not again for nearly a year. He was convinced Chloe was begging for an unnecessarily difficult life. Her response: “I was beaten up a lot as a kid. I can do it again.”

They call the process transitioning, but it’s wrong to think the process is a transition of only one. There’s a lot of transitioning that must be done, so what followed was counseling, therapy and searching – for answers and of souls – for Chloe and her family.

Hormones kick in

She saw an endocrinologist, who told Chloe she’d have to dress, act and live like a woman for a month, just to be sure, before they could begin tampering with the science inside her body. A month? That was easy for someone who had been aching to live that way for 19 years.

She’d have to pay for most of this herself, so Chloe delivered flowers, tutored kids and stocked the shelves at an Old Navy in the middle of the night.

Soon, the hormones started doing their thing, Chloe’s levels of testosterone and estrogen rushing in opposite directions and converging in a place that could send her emotions raging, at no time worse than when someone called her “him.”

Six months into hormone treatments, Chloe noticed her vertical leap disappearing, her body lagging behind her mind – just slightly, then a half-second, then a full second – when moving on the volleyball court. Someone who once could dunk a basketball strained to reach the rim.

A basic serve would result in her arm muscles searing. She was short of breath, slow to recover from workouts and nagged by little injuries, all of which would have been frustrating enough if she wasn’t also attempting to cope with asthma.

“People who say male-to-female trans athletes have a physical advantage have never taken hormones,” says Chloe, who remains on a regimen of four estrogen pills and one testosterone-blocking pill a day. “It’s one thing to learn about it in biology class but another thing to live it.”

Through the pain and frustration, volleyball remained her must, a necessary diversion for someone longing to be freer than she ever had been, a body in jarring evolution clinging to something familiar.

To quiet her mind, she began writing poetry, putting her dreams into words and making a chaotic, confusing life finally find its rhythm. Slowly, certainly the verses began to flow.

“This is my child,” Catherine says. “You can’t not listen to your child. I had to really work at listening to her. It took me a while. I was in a denial mode. This wasn’t who Chloe was born as. This was coming from deep inside her. I started to understand that.”

New driver’s license

Chloe had her driver’s license and Social Security card changed, went into her school records and had those changed, as well, each a monumental act even if only turning an “M” into an “F.” Armed with an affidavit from her endocrinologist, she updated her birth certificate, the document used by the California Community College Athletic Association to determine a student’s gender.

Catherine began encouraging her to dress more like a girl, to spend more time on her hair. The two of them, mother and daughter, started clothes shopping together. The most trivial of moments – a salesperson at Macy’s asking Chloe and one of her friends, “Girls, are you finding everything OK?” – took on untold meaning.

She was alive now, is alive now, a real person, a person with purpose and direction, the sort that resulted in Chloe finishing her first full year at Santa Ana with a B in French and A’s everywhere else, including a final grade of 114 percent in biology.

Formerly huddled in that cave, she holds out her arms today and says that never in her life has she been so tan. This, even as she’s enrolled in summer school and pursuing three honors programs.

She has a list of goals actually written out, this girl who might not have even made it through high school had her parents not forced her, every morning, to get out of bed and go. Next up: climb a mountain at least 14,000 feet high. Hey, when your feet have felt the valley floor, who wouldn’t want to press their soles into the earth at the peak?

“Once you get to know Chloe, it doesn’t matter what she was,” says Jennifer Lopez, one of Chloe’s teammates at Santa Ana. “If you focus too much on what she used to be, you’re missing out on a very good person and very good friend.”

Life-changing talk

Chloe loves history and culture and wants to be a teacher someday, fitting for someone whose journey down a path still largely unfamiliar can serve as an education. So taken by Greek mythology is Chloe that she gave herself the middle name Psyche.

She picked Chloe, too, in part because of its Greek origins. Roughly translated, the name means bloom or, better still, blooming, that bud busted open and a glorious flower shining through.

“I know she has more passion for things now,” longtime friend Alexa Heitzenrader says. “I just see more happiness and positivity and light coming from her. The farther she’s transitioned, the happier she has become.”

And it all turned on that phone conversation, a life-changing, life-giving discussion over Skype that began only because Chloe and her friend, Emily, were forced to sit through a server reset as they were playing an online game.

It all turned because Emily, the first transgender person Chloe ever met, even though she didn’t know Emily’s male-to-female past until that night, months after their relationship had begun, was there to share her story.

It all turned because Chloe, suddenly shown a purpose, an example that what she desired was indeed possible, finally discovered in Emily someone whose ears were as open as her heart.

It all turned because of a conversation between online friends; friends who, to this day, still have never met in person.

Contact the writer: jmiller@ocregister.com