3

Enforcing the law

The Houston County Sheriff’s Office is in a building that looks like many government buildings in central Georgia: squat, square and in the middle of a huge parcel of flat, grassy land. At the center of it, usually, is Cullen Talton, now 85 years old. Talton has served as the sheriff of Houston County since 1973, longer than any other person has been sheriff in Georgia. An elected official, he has often run for re-election unchallenged, because to challenge him, you’d have to prove you could do his job better than he did.

Most people in Houston County seem to agree that he does a damn good job. He made big changes early on, hiring the department’s first black chief deputy in the mid-’70s and setting a high standard for his officers’ interactions with the community.

Lately, Talton has been uncharacteristically absent from the sheriff’s office. Since his wife of 68 years, his sweetheart from their days at Warner Robins High School, has become ill he has rarely left her side.

Just south of Macon, Houston County contains three cities. At the north end is Warner Robins and its Air Force base, which today employs nearly 25,000 people. Nearby is tiny Centerville, and on the western side of the county, just off I-75, is Perry. Each of these towns has its own police department; the Houston County sheriff’s jurisdiction is everything else.

On a map of the county, the roads look less linear than they feel in a car. It’s not unusual to drive for miles without seeing another vehicle. Halfway between Perry and Warner Robins, a hand-painted yard sign declares, “Real Heroes! Police Military Firemen EMTs. Teach Your Kids.” Once, I lost count of the churches between Anna’s house and my Airbnb 2.6 miles away.

Anna began working at the Sheriff’s Office in 2006. Six years later, she was promoted to the Criminal Investigations Division. In 2014, she led the investigation of a homicide that resulted in the conviction of Devasko Lewis, a trucking company owner who had hired a guy to kill a former business partner. Even now, her eyes shine as she talks about the six-hour interview with the triggerman that ultimately yielded a confession, the way his lips trembled and his gaze shifted when he was on the cusp of admitting the crime.

It was her biggest case yet, and everything about it was what she loved most about police work. The job is not all thrills, though. The next case she was assigned was the theft of a pine straw bale off a truck.

On her lunch break, we go to Martin’s Bar-B-Q, across a bland, busy street from Warner Robins Air Force Base, for what she says is the best smoked brisket in town. I put my bag in a wooden booth and order at the counter. When I return, I find my bag across the table and Anna sitting in its place. “I stole your spot,” she says apologetically. “Cops don’t like to have their backs to the door.”

She stumbled into a criminal justice major at Auburn University after discovering a forestry degree required her to be good at math, which she was not. At the time, she also loved the unambiguously butch identity the major allowed her to adopt. The buzz cut and swagger made it easier to hide the possibility she was anything but a real man, even if she occasionally bought something in the women’s department at the mall.

Her first law enforcement job was at the Harris County Jail, followed by a job in the Columbus Police Department, where there was plenty of work for an eager rookie. She got engaged, then broke it off — but not before convincing her fiancée to help her try on makeup.

You’ve got some issues, the woman told her.

In 2001, she fell for a woman from Perry. They married, and in 2004, Anna’s wife got pregnant.

Anna had always wanted to be a parent, but her wife’s pregnancy made her seethe. To her own disbelief, she found herself jealous that her wife was the one who got to carry the child. The senselessness of her feelings shocked her.

She channeled her conflicted feelings into long-distance cycling and took extra jobs to supplement her modest police officer’s salary. Desperate for clarity, she searched online for words to describe herself. She wasn’t a cross-dresser — women’s clothing offered her no sexual gratification. Then she came across “transsexual” — in 2004 it was the word commonly used to describe a person whose gender identity did not correspond to their sex assigned at birth.

Oh, crap, she remembers thinking when she read the definition. That’s me.

She learned about gender dysphoria — the sense of discomfort at being in a body that didn’t match the way she felt inside — and the use of hormone therapy to achieve gender transition. As her son’s birth neared, new knowledge and old pain combusted in a way that Anna still feels guilty about. Just days before her wife was to give birth, Anna confessed that she believed she should have been born a woman and she wanted to start hormones to transition.

After their son was born, the couple struggled to make their marriage work in light of Anna’s revelation. And they moved to Houston County, where Anna began working at the Sheriff’s Office.

It was during that difficult time when Anna’s brother visited her. They had grown close during her years in boarding school and had been roommates for several years at Auburn University. During a drive around the county, Anna confided in him about her struggles with gender identity and desire to undergo transition. He encouraged her to tell their parents. She said she would when she was ready. Meanwhile, don’t spill the beans, she told him.

But he did. Her brother’s betrayal cut deep. Her parents insisted on a family meeting with a therapist in Atlanta. Anna felt vindicated when the therapist chastised her brother — when she tells this story, Anna makes a decidedly non-fraternal gesture with both hands — but she wishes he would have just apologized. Her family declined to be interviewed for this story.

Divorced in 2010, Anna blamed herself for the dissolution of her family. If she could just stop herself from wanting to be a woman, she thought, her troubles would evaporate. Again she threw herself into long-distance cycling. In July 2014, while riding on a straightaway near her home, she was hit from behind by an inattentive driver. She suffered a concussion, fractures of her C6 vertebra and her collarbone, and injuries to her right shoulder. She was out of work for a month. It took a year before she was fully rehabilitated.

People kept telling her she was lucky to be alive — and while she understood what they meant, she found herself wishing the accident had killed her.

“I was depressed,” she says.

Besides, to be alive meant to be reminded that, as a therapist once told her, gender dysphoria would never go away. The only way out was transition.

And transition — well, that was something she could hardly imagine. It was whimsy to think she could keep a law enforcement job as an out transgender woman, she thought. And her family had already demonstrated their disapproval. How would it affect her son? What about people at the grocery store? What about everyone else she had ever known?

The simplicity of being dead felt preferable to admitting to herself, her loved ones and her bosses that transition was what she really needed. And she knew there was something wrong with that.

In summer 2016, Anna looked up an old crush from her camp days, a woman who lived in Tennessee. They struck up a long-distance romance for a while that helped embolden Anna to finally start hormone treatments. She began that fall, and a few months later, sitting at home alone one night, Anna felt something strange: happiness. She was on the right path, she realized — and while it meant there would be rough terrain ahead, it was a path.

She curled up on the floor of her bedroom and cried tears of relief.