Veteran Alison Roth discusses taking control of her life one step at a time, especially since she came out as trans in 2011. She is finding balance in her family life with her children as well as her professional life. While it’s been difficult, she is grateful for how her transition has gone and how those around her have responded.
“It was always something in the back of my head, and there was always something in the front of my head, saying, ‘No, no, no, you can’t be that because x, y, or z.’ It was just something that has always been there.”
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TRANSCRIPT
Interview conducted by John Keller and June Titus
New Brunswick, New Jersey
November 12, 2017
Transcription by Kirsten Brancheau
This is John Keller. I’m conducting an oral history interview at Rutgers University. It is November 12, 2017. I’m joined by June Titus. Our oral history interview subject today is–
Alison Roth.
Great. So, Alison, let’s start again from the beginning. Where were you born?
I was born in Annapolis, Maryland.
Did your parents ever tell you the “day you were born” stories?
Supposedly I was a month late. I’m not sure if that was actually true. Apparently the due date for me was July 26, I think, and I was born August 21. So I don’t know if the doctor was wrong or if it was true, but I was born August 21, coincidentally on my grandmother’s birthday, who was a twin, so I’m born on their birthday. Again, I was born in Annapolis, Maryland, so people always ask was my dad in the Navy because of the Naval academy, but no, we just happened to live there.
Was your family from there? Were they there a long time?
No, my mom was born in Tokyo, but she is not Japanese. My grandfather was stationed there during the Korean War, and my grandmother went along for the ride basically, and my mom was born there. My mom grew up in Scarsdale, New York, and that’s where she’s been the majority of their childhood. But she went to college in DC and met my dad there and they stayed in the area. My dad is originally from all over. He moved around but his last– so he was born in Detroit, lived in Miami, lived in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, I think, Baltimore, and that’s where he ended up and stayed in Maryland, and ended up in the Annapolis area.
What did your parents do?
My mom was a speech therapist. My dad, for a while, was going to be a clinical psychiatrist, not a clinical psychiatrist, I forget what the term was, but anyway, he was going to do research on brains and realized there was no career in it, so he switched over to pharmaceutical sales. Little different. So he worked as a pharmaceutical rep for a while in the DC area in Maryland. My mom has always been a speech therapist.
Do you have any siblings?
I have a younger brother. He’s a little over three years younger than me. He was also born in Annapolis.
Do you remember your family home as a kid growing up?
Yeah, well, we lived in this town called Arnold, Maryland, which is right outside of Annapolis. We lived in a townhouse, which was typical of the area. There’s a lot of these townhouse developments. It was big enough to be a full-size house, and it was just the four of us, so it was kind of big. When I was eight, so in 1985, we moved to Morris Plains, New Jersey, so that’s where my parents still live.
What was the reason for the move?
Job change for my dad.
Did he stay in pharmaceuticals?
No, well, he stayed in pharmaceuticals, went to government lobbying. Now he runs the organ procurement organization for New Jersey. And my mom’s still a speech therapist.
Do you remember what life was like in Annapolis as a kid– so you were there from the time you were born until you were about eight years old, and so you started school in Annapolis.
Yeah. The town, as far as I knew, was no different than any other town. With me being in Annapolis, there’s a lot of focus on boating and sailing and living on the water and things like that, so we’d go to the boat show or we’d rent a sailboat and go up one of the rivers. That, to me, was, like, a normal childhood. Get crabs. Being from Maryland, you’re born with a can of Old Bay in your hand. So Old Bay goes on everything and nobody says more and more about it. If it doesn’t have it then it looks a little weird. So other than that, it’s just typical, you just walk around. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there, typically in a little town, downtown, but as you spread out, it’s very different kind of feel than New Jersey. There’s also the Naval academy right there, so you get to see a lot of things that you don’t get to see everywhere else. There’s not as much military presence in other places, but there’s a ton down there. As a kid, we’d go to Navy football games, and we’d go watch the Blue Angels come fly, and walk around the academy, and see all the midshipmen in their uniforms, and things like that. Got to see a lot of that stuff as an impressionable little kid.
Do you remember starting school?
Yeah. I went to kindergarten in the public schools. I barely remember much of that from my childhood. Then my parents put me in a private school because the school system, the way that they handle the schools, everybody was in a large mass classroom with the teachers kind of on different walls, and it was just loud. I don’t want to say it was experimental teaching method, but it wasn’t a common teaching method, so they were trying, and I don’t think it’s like that anymore. They’ve definitely put up walls between the classrooms. Apparently I wasn’t getting anything out of it, and they just put me in a local private school to have a more typical school experience. I was there from first to part of third grade. When we moved up here, and then went to normal public schools here. The private school that I went to was a mix of kids, kids like me, coming from middle class, to the heir to the Procter & Gamble fortune went to school with me. It was a wide mix of kids.
Your New Jersey experience?
No, this was in Maryland. So that was a little different. Coming up here though, it was very typical, just a bunch of kids and classrooms, and just from the town we were in. I still keep in touch with a lot of them, which is nice.
Do you still keep in touch with any of your friends from childhood in Annapolis?
I honestly don’t remember them. There’s one or two that I used to play with a lot when I was a kid, when we were living in Maryland, and when we moved to Jersey I tried to maintain contact, and I think there was some time, I do remember a particular instance where I was at my grandmother’s house and we’d just moved up, and I happened to remember my friend’s phone number and I tried calling her, and my parents were, like, what are you doing? Why are you calling? You know, we were up in New York. I said, I don’t know. I wanted to talk to her. And I think that had an impact ‘cause I stopped wanting to call people. I never had too much contact with people from Maryland as much.
When you moved here, do you remember that change? Was it an impactful moment in terms of time for you? Or did it just kind of happen smoothly?
I found it to be pretty smooth. At least I remember it to be pretty smooth. There are a lot of kids in my neighborhood, so right from the beginning everybody was outside playing, and I went outside and played with them too. We all went to the same school and carpooled together and walked to school together and played sports together, and everything just came together real quickly.
Did you spend a lot of time with your brother at this time or was there too much of an age difference?
It was typical sibling rivalry type stuff. He’s almost three and a half years younger than me, so he was in a different school. At that point in our lives, we were really on different levels of what we were interested in and what we wanted to do and things like that.
What kinds of things were you interested in? Were you playing team sports?
Yeah, I played baseball and soccer. When I was in third grade, I started playing baseball and soccer. Most kids did. And then, as I aged out of Little League and soccer was getting very competitive, I started playing lacrosse. I didn’t do any winter sports because we would go skiing every weekend in Vermont, with my grandparents. So that would take out any other winter sport idea.
And were these the grandparents that were living in Scarsdale?
Yeah.
Were you close to them generally?
Yes. They were my mom’s parents. They were the ones who had a lot of impact on me. My grandmother, I was born on her birthday. They were big travelers, skied, and they were into art, and they were both artists, hobby artists.
What kinds of things did they do?
Painting and sculptures and drawings, things like that. My grandfather was really into abstract, modern art, and he would paint geometric shapes and things like that. Lots of color. They were both into abstract, but my grandmother did a lot more free-form type abstract as a sculptor.
Did you visit their home frequently?
Yes, once we moved here to New Jersey, we were able to drive to them quite often. You know, the holidays, things like that.
Were you close with your father’s parents?
Somewhat. Not really, though. My dad’s father died when I was four or five, so I never really got to know him very much. My dad’s mother died when I was eighteen, but she was suffering from Alzheimer’s for a long time before, and so we never really got to get to know her. The other piece was that she was a Holocaust survivor and had a lot of impact on her, so as a kid you don’t really understand why Grandma’s acting like that, but she was paranoid in some way about certain things, and the way she was with kids was not typical of other people around, at least in this country. She’s originally from Poland. Actually, both of them were from Poland. My dad’s father was pretty strict, but he was in the Polish army and the French underground during World War II. So he had a lot of baggage as well. Plus with all the moving around and everything, it was just difficult – I mean, I have a lot of good memories of being around them because they doted on me and my brother like crazy, but my parents had a hard time with them. It would strain the relationship. I can tell that they were not happy in certain cases to go with things that they did.
Where were they living?
They were living in Baltimore.
You said Morris Plains, right? So when you were around eight, you moved to Morris Plains. Were you in public schools throughout?
Yes, I was.
In the same Morris Plains school district, and then, so you talked about doing sports. Did you ever play an instrument?
I tried. Everybody in my middle school tried to play an instrument so I picked an instrument and did not take to it, and it wasn’t for me. I didn’t find any interest, so I just stopped.
What was your social life like at that time? Were most of your friends from activities that you were doing?
No, this was still back in the ‘80s, so you went outside, knocked on your neighbor’s door, hey, is Kevin here? You guys want to play baseball? Go to the neighbor’s yard and play baseball or play soccer at the neighbor’s, whatever. It was stuff you don’t hear about– None of it was really based around activities as much as it was just, hey, we’ve got free time. Let’s go do something.
So, when you moved to Morris Plains, you said you were living in a townhouse in Annapolis, but when you moved to Morris Plains–
It was just standalone.
Do you kind of remember the transition from elementary to middle school?
Morris Plains is a smallish town. I don’t know if you’re familiar with it at all. It’s essentially two square miles. There were forty to fifty kids in every grade in elementary school, and so you just basically stay with the same kids every year, and you get to middle school and it’s the same kids, because there’s no other towns coming around, so it’s only when you get to high school, after eighth grade, when you go into Morristown High School, and now you get all the towns and you get to meet other kids. But in Morris Plains, the transition from elementary school to middle school was just another school with the same kids. It’s more of, like, who’s in your homeroom class or who’s in your math class, but everybody knows everybody, so it’s not a big thing.
What was high school like?
High school was difficult.
How so?
That was a much bigger adjustment, going from walking or riding your bike to school to taking a bus to another town, with, instead of fifty kids in your grade, there were 400 or 300 or however many there were, and you don’t know everybody, and it’s a whole lot of new people. And it’s a new school and a new town and an area that you are not familiar with, so it’s a huge adjustment for a lot of people. Me and the kid who lived next door to me, we were the same age, and in eighth grade, we were both ahead in math than the rest of the school, so they would bus us to the high school in the morning to take math, and then bus us back to Morris Plains. So we were at least familiar, like, it wasn’t as huge of a jump. We would go to class and get on the bus and go back, but a lot of people, it was a huge adjustment. But I at least had this gradual adjustment. But again, it was, you know, you kind of huddled with the people you knew for a little while, and then you went to class, met everybody else, and then you started to make new friends. I actually enjoyed high school for the most part. I didn’t feel like it was the highlight of my life, like some people feel like their best time was in high school, but I enjoyed it.
Did you still play baseball?
No, no, I had stopped playing baseball. I was playing lacrosse and I skied and there were times when I was not thrilled about the older kids, or how things were going, but–
How so? What kind of things?
Oh, the typical hazing, I guess you could say, by the older kids to the younger kids.
Can you remember anything specific?
One year, I can’t remember if I was a freshman or a sophomore, I had a study hall for some reason. It was very unusual for somebody in my year to have a study hall, so I was the only one in the study hall; I guess it was an independent study. There was one kid who was either a grade or two ahead of me. I think he was just one grade ahead of me, and he would just constantly get in my face and make fun and tease, and it was just getting annoying. About halfway through the year, I think, I had enough, and I’m walking in class right by him to get to my desk and he says something or whatever or sticks his foot out to trip me, and I just hauled off and hit him as hard as I could. There was no teacher at that time, and everybody just stopped and looked, wide-eyed, and the kid just kind of was in shock that I did that, and went and sat down and he turned around, and the only thing I could think of was I just smiled at him every time he looked at me. I didn’t have a single problem with him after that for the rest of the year. And that at least gave me some confidence to know that I could at least stand up for myself if something happened, and I could deal with it. The majority of everything else happened within sports, the majority of the hazing, as is typical, and I think part of the fact that I was on these teams kept me away from the other hazing that happened in the school. So yeah, that was high school. That, and I think the fact that a lot of my classes, I was with a lot of the upperclassmen because I was placing out of the more mainstream subjects and going into the AP or senior level stuff before the other kids in my class, so I knew a lot of the upperclassmen from my classes.
Do you remember that period of time, going through puberty, that whole changeover, either late middle school or high school?
I think I was pretty late to puberty. Or it happened so slowly that I didn’t quite catch on. Honestly, I think I was still maturing even through college, like, I wasn’t actually through puberty. I wasn’t even shaving yet when I went to college. I hadn’t really started growing any facial hair, which was fine by me at the time, which was fine by me at the time. And nobody gave a damn. I wasn’t making a big thing out of it and nobody else was either. I think, with puberty, for me, when things did start happening, I noticed that it was happening, which put me more in line with my peers, and so I was, like, oh, okay, so I’m not going to get made fun of for this. This is what everybody else has going on, so I’m right there, and I don’t remember having that typical, oh my god, this is puberty; things are changing; oh my god. I think I was just taking one day at a time, not really thinking too much about it.
Were there any subjects that interested you?
In high school it was all math and science. I was the math and science nerd, essentially, or one of them. Thought I was going to be an engineer, and really wasn’t into the English and the writing and reading and things like that. So, yeah, I took a high school-level math class when I was in eighth grade, and I went on to take all the AP math classes that we had in high school, and I took a lot of the advanced placement science classes, and everybody knew me as that, and that’s how I kind of went around the school. It all seemed to come easy for me, so I kind of gravitated toward it. Anything that I had to put effort and work into it, I tended to shy away from it.
Did you have a tight network of friends or any best friends?
I had one or two best friends. I didn’t have, like, a huge group. I had and have a hard time really both keeping in touch with people and really forming an emotional bond with. I just never found that; I always wanted it but I always had a hard time with it. Some of the people that I was really good friends in high school with, I’m still friends with now and still keep in contact with, but we all have our own adult lives; we’re off doing whatever we’re doing, at least the ones around here, I still keep in contact with. But I never had that core group of friends that constantly hung out with. I didn’t have that experience as much.
Was college always something that was going to be part of your journey?
Yeah, I mean, as a kid, the thought of more school, you cringe, but in high school, you come to realize what college means. Yeah, college was always something that was going to happen.
And once you had that, was it always looking toward engineering?
It was. It was always going to be engineering. It was always going to be something, building and spatial and math related and, you know, whatever, until I got to college.
So what was the process, kind of choosing college?
It was, so which school has a good engineering program? Does it have mechanical engineering, ‘cause that’s where I wanted to end up, at least a decent mechanical engineering program. I had a list of about ten schools. Kind of ranked them in my head. Applied to the first one, early decision. And then got wait-listed for that one and then applied to all the rest. And just waited for the letters, acceptance, rejection, to come in. Then had to make a choice at some point. So I ended up getting into my first choice, and that was Cornell University. So I went up there to visit, fell in love with the place. It was rolling hills and trees and green, and just felt like home, so I was sold. It certainly didn’t hurt that it was also my grandmother’s alma mater, who I was born on the same day as. So that was sort of icing on the cake, but it did feel like I belonged there. So I was really happy when I finally got in. I went there, started taking all the math and engineering classes, and realized I hated it. Absolutely hated the math. I was just miserable. I took one writing class and fell in love with writing, and the next thing I know, I’m a philosophy major. So, yeah, things don’t always work out how you expect, but I loved all the philosophy classes, so I ended up taking a lot more classes that I was enjoying and less so about things that might be beneficial later on, partly because at that point, I was in ROTC, and I already knew I was going in the Navy. So, for me, I knew I was going to have a job, and they just needed a degree, and had I thought a little more about it, I might have put a little more effort in the math classes, just to get through it, get on to the stuff that I enjoyed, like the [unclear], things like that. But it was what it was, and it ended up being something that I actually enjoyed about school, going to class.
Throughout these decisions that you had to make at these times, were your parents always included as part of the conversation?
No, and they did not like that fact. Or least, my dad didn’t like that fact. He was very pushy on what my grades and going to school, and in the end, he wanted something better for me than what he had, and he wanted me to go into something that I could actually get a job from, and I already knew I had a job, so I didn’t think I had to worry about it as much. But in the end, he came around and very thrilled about me graduating college and going in the Navy and doing what I did there, so for him, it was just having to come to understand what it was, and what I wanted, and what I wanted to get out of it.
What was the desire or impetus to join the ROTC?
I wanted to be a pilot from the earliest memory that I have. I always loved airplanes and watching airplanes, and that was almost the sole focus of a lot of my interest from a very early age, and it just looked like fun, so that’s why I joined Navy ROTC, because they didn’t care what your major was as long as you could pass the test and learn it. If I wanted to go into the Air Force, I’d had to have kept my engineering degree, and they were very stingy about who they let become pilots.
Was the ROTC unit in Cornell?
It was on campus, part of Cornell. There weren’t many of us. I think, all totaled, there were about 100 of us total out of a school of 12,000 undergrads, so we were pretty small. But couldn’t miss us. Every Wednesday we were in uniform, walking around.
Did you have a romantic life at this point? Were you dating anyone?
Yeah, I dated a little in high school, but I was more enamored with the idea of dating somebody than actually dating somebody. But then again, in college, I really wasn’t trying to date anybody either, and I ended up dating somebody. Not the whole time. There were periods where I wasn’t. But freshman year I met somebody and had a party, so we started dating, and that ended at the end of the year for various reasons. Sophomore year, I didn’t date anybody. Junior year, I started dating somebody; I dated a friend of mine, and that ended because things started getting in the way and we weren’t putting in the effort to make it work, and neither of us, we both just wanted to remain friends, and it just worked that way. And then, it just kind of went something like that. I dated another girl. It just didn’t work out for whatever reason. Dated another girl, and it just didn’t work out. And then I met my ex-wife my senior year, and it just happened to be at a party. Then I saw her in class. We had the same class together, and we started dating, and the next thing you know, we’re dating long-distance when I go off to flight school and the Navy, and she’s back here in Jersey, and things were a little easier then. We both wanted a lot of the same things. Yeah, that was the essence of my dating life.
So you were in ROTC and you completed your degree in philosophy?
Yes, I did.
And then when you graduated, where did you get sent?
I got selected for pilot training. I went to flight school.
Where was that?
I had a couple months, three months, between graduation and starting flight school, so they put me with the Navy office, recruiting office, in downtown New York City for a little bit. So I did that for a little bit. Just kind of admin stuff, talk to potential recruits, tell them how awesome the Navy is, and you should do it; it’s so much fun; and I’m going to become a pilot; you should come too! And, you know, typical stuff. Did that for a couple months, went down to Pensacola to start flight school, and that was just classroom work, mostly. Did a little survival training, did a little swimming, you know, things like that. And then there was a joint program with the Air Force and the Navy, and they would send some Navy and Marine Corps students to the Air Force flight school, and some Air Force students to Navy flight school. So they sent me off to Enid, Oklahoma, to go to flight school. And that was a rude awakening from living out here in New Jersey to middle-of-nowhere Oklahoma. It’s a big difference, big difference. I was not prepared for what I saw, or what I didn’t see there. It’s a town where the most exciting thing that happened in the town in the year that I was there was an IHOP opening. So me and some of the other flight students would go to some of the bars that none of the locals went to because it was “too fancy,” and meanwhile, we were, like, it’s just a sports bar. We’re going to watch football. And nobody went there. But most of the time I spent flying or studying or whatever, so I didn’t have a whole ton of free time go do other things. So I was there for roughly six or seven months before we selected for what plane we were going to go fly. The plane that I ended up selecting, not by choice, kept me in flight school there for another six or seven months, and me and the Air Force did not get along. They have a very different mentality to the Navy. The Navy is a lot more adult program, where, “These are the things you can’t do; go get your work done.” The Air Force is: “This is what you do; this is when you do it; this is how you do it.” No deviating, and me and it did not get along very well. And they didn’t like dissent of any kind. One example is, I was on a check ride, which is a test flight, you know, an examination flight. And they grade your flying; they grade your manual to make sure you’ve done any of the updates, anything in there. My flying was good except for two things that I fully admit I did wrong, but they weren’t failable offenses. I just happened to land the plane a little short on the runway and a little hard, but I didn’t want to land too far, which would have failed me. Then I get back and I found out that I failed because my books were not in the right order and that I didn’t do the right thing updating them. And I told them I didn’t think it was fair because I didn’t break any rules and I didn’t make the changes to begin with; they were given to me that way. And the books were fine in my previous class when I was going through the beginning flight school, and at that point, I was labeled I had a bad attitude. Luckily, I at least had the wherewithal to at least shut the fuck up and deal with whatever was given to me and just not make any waves from thereon out, just go with the flow. Luckily, that was early, so I had the opportunity to change my path a little bit, but I still ended up going to fly the same plane, but I graduated and the whole works.
What was the plane you were flying?
It was a type of Boeing 707, so it was a big plane, like 757 size, just four engines. We were based out of Oklahoma City, and the mission that we had was strategic communications, and what that means is that we would either send or relay messages from senior military leadership to our nuclear forces, so the nuclear missiles, the submarines, the bombers, things like that. So we would fly out over the ocean, in the middle-of-nowhere ocean, far away from everybody and do our thing. Not exciting, but it was comfortable. We had beds, we had coffee makers, we had an oven, refrigerator, freezer. We had a bathroom on board. I didn’t get to land on an aircraft carrier, I didn’t get to go do loops or anything like that, and pull G’s and go fight and things. I still got to fly though.
How long was flight school? When did you finish flight school?
So I started flight school in September of 2001. Well, I started in Pensacola in July, the ground school, so the classroom stuff in July of 2000, and I got winged in October of 2001. So I was in for a little under a year and a half, and from there went on to do my outdoor survival school, POW school, more water survival, leadership training, and then went off to learn how to fly the plane that I got selected for. And all of that took about six months. And then, in May of 2002, I went to my operational unit, which was also based in Oklahoma City.
And then, how long were you there?
That tour was three years, so I left there in June, about 2005.
You left the military?
No, no, I left that tour. I left that assignment, got a new tour. So, as a pilot, going through ROTC, you have a pretty long commitment. My commitment was however long it took me to get my wings plus however many years based off of the type of the aircraft that I flew. So, because of the airplane that I flew, I only owed seven years after my wings. So I was still under my commitment when I left the unit. And that’s typical of aviation. A lot of people went off to be a flight school instructor, but I wanted to be in a master’s degree, and I wanted to move closer to civilization. So I got a staff job at the Naval academy, so I got my life to go full circle back to Annapolis. I got to work at the Naval academy, and the job that I did there primarily was managing the Naval academy’s summer training program. So all the students that went on summer training, unlike regular college, during the summers they have training activities that they have to do, so during summers I would make sure that everybody was scheduled for what they had to be scheduled for, and that meant dealing with internship programs and other military schools, and operational units that would take on these students during the summer and give them a shadowing experience. We called it a fleet cruise. And make sure that kids who needed summer school got summer school scheduled. And kids who needed athletics had time blocked off for their athletics, and the whole gamut. It was an actually very enjoyable job because I wasn’t getting deployed. I was home every night. I had time to go to grad school.
Did you do grad school at Annapolis?
No, Annapolis is purely undergrad, but I got an MBA at Johns Hopkins at night. So that’s what I’d do during free time. Most of the staff in the Naval Academy in my age group was going to school at night for one thing or another. They’re either going to school with me, getting an MBA, getting a master’s of public policy, getting an MBA at a different school, getting a master’s in whatever. Everybody was doing it, basically, so you’d say, “Oh, I’ve got class tonight;” they’d say, “Oh, where are you going?” It’s not like it’s, “Oh my god, you’re going to class.” There were enough people taking the same classes that, after work, basically, you could go to somebody’s office and work together on a project or study, but it took up a lot of time.
I assume your relationship continued throughout this period?
Yeah, we were married at that point. We got married in 2003. She had come out to Oklahoma to live with me, and then we got married. And then we moved to Annapolis together. I was telling Jean before, that’s when I lived in Odenton, Maryland, near the NSA. My ex was going to school to become a teacher. She was originally working in financial services, but she wanted to drop that and become a teacher, so she became a teacher while we were there as well. And then, about two years into that job, the Navy, in their infinite wisdom, decided they needed me to go to Iraq for a year. So I had about a month and a half to get everything settled and turned over with a replacement and go to training and everything to go to Iraq to support the Army. At the time, the Army was getting killed by radio controlled IEDs, and they didn’t know how it was happening and how to stop it and all this stuff. The Navy and Air Force did, so they sent us out to support them and train them, and essentially, in some cases, act as trainers, in some cases, act as consultants, and in some cases, act as project managers to manage their inventory of electronic equipment and maintain it, and in most cases, a combination of all three. That was my role. I was embedded with an Army unit southwest of Baghdad on the Euphrates River, and it was in a beautiful little area of Iraq colloquially known as the Triangle of Death. So when I heard that, I was not thrilled. I was, like, you know, crap. Unit that I got assigned to initially had three guys kidnapped during the night when they were out on patrol, which made huge headlines out here, and I’d heard about it when I got out there. At that point, things had calmed down because they had rounded up everybody that they could think of. But it was what it was. So I was there for a total of ten months, 300 days, and then came back, finished out my tour at the Naval Academy, finished my degree, and at that point, I said, I’ve had enough. The personnel people in the Navy said, well, if you want to stay, you can go to this ship over here or you can go back to Iraq if you want, or you can go to the Horn of Africa, or you can do this, and I said, no, none of those sound interesting or at all fun, and I’ve had enough. I’ve done my stuff. So I’m done. I got out. Unfortunately, it was at the depth of the recession at the time. Not a lot of jobs, even for people with a master’s degree. Luckily, the government was still hiring, and the government was still in need, so I got a job with the Navy doing project management with them at the Washington Navy Yard.
Was that your first choice?
No, it wasn’t even close. I wanted to be totally separate from the government. I wanted to be out, away from it as much as possible.
What do you think was the desire to completely remove yourself from it?
I had a bad taste in my mouth from it. That, and I wanted to be up here in the New York City area, and there’s not a whole lot of government up here, or military in general. So the idea of staying down in the DC area was not my ideal, but that’s where the jobs were at the time.
Your ex-wife was staying with you, kind of moving with you as you moved with each of these things?
Right.
And what was she doing at this time?
Well, she was a teacher when I was working at Annapolis. Right before I left the Navy, my oldest son was born. So when he was born, she stopped working and stayed home with him. So when I got this new job, she continued to stay home with my son. Then we had another kid, and the cycle continued. And then we had our third kid. So she’s just now getting back into the workforce as a teacher.
What was it like having kids?
Kids are a blessing and a curse. They are amazing and frustrating and so much fun and infuriating and annoying, but at the same time, you just want to squeeze them, and it totally changes your life, both good, bad, and otherwise. Before they’re born, you can never think of being able to love another person as much as you love yourself, and then they’re born, anything you do goes out the window, and they come first. It’s something that I don’t know if I’d ever not want to have kids.
How close in age are they?
Each of my kids are two years, four months apart. That’s coincidental. It’s, like, you want to have kids? Yeah, let’s try to have kids again. First one, pregnant with the first one, some point after that one, you want to have another one? Sure, oh, look, pregnant again. Same thing happened with the next one. You want to have another one? Sure, let’s go ahead. Year and a half, pregnant again. There was not a whole lot, it just happened that way. We were kind of thinking, oh, maybe we should have another kid. I’m ready. Are you ready? Okay, let’s go have another kid. Just have another kid. What do you want for dinner? Let’s go have another– we never had “the trouble” getting pregnant, so it was never had that kind of urgency or the stress.
At any point during this time, were you questioning your gender identity?
One of my earliest memories was questioning my gender identity. When I was a kid, I was watching TV. It was the US Open, tennis, when I was a kid. Must have been about five years old, and I was sitting on the floor in my parents’ room and watching the tennis, and they did a little thing on Renée Richards. And I said, so who’s that? I think my dad said something, or my mom, “Oh, she used to be a man.” My whole brain exploded. I was, like, what? And that planted the seed that it was possible. And then everything else, little snippets here and little things there, and there was always a curiosity.
Did you ever try to express yourself as a woman?
I experimented with cross dressing at the time. But it was one of those things where I was so very masculine outwardly at the time that it didn’t dawn on me that it didn’t have to be that way, that people say, oh, you’re a boy, and I say, okay, and I liked the same things that all the other boys liked, so why not? Just go with it. And then you hear the same stories or somebody born in the wrong body, kind of, it never kind of manifested that way in my head. And you only heard about trans women who were into guys, so if you were into girls at all, that didn’t fit within that box, so, okay, I must not be like that. It was always something in the back of my head, and there was always something in the front of my head, saying, no, no, no, you can’t be that because x, y, or z. It was just something that has always been there.
What was the point when it started coming from the back of your head to the front of your head?
So about 2011-ish, I heard a story about Kristin Beck. So she was a Navy Seal for 20-some-odd years. She’s in the public eye now. And there’s some CNN story about her transitioning, and after she retired, and that kind of gave the ball a little nudge to get it rolling, and I had started reading about her and her life and all this stuff. That’s when I started, over the next three years, I started learning more and more, and as I read one story that had this little piece of their personal story that kind of overlapped with my personal story, a break in the wall, or a rationalization or denials would come out. And then I’d read another story, and another piece would come out. And it got at some point, I had read, I can’t even remember how many, I was, like, keeping track of all the different, but I read something, I was sitting at work. At that point, I had already got my new job in New York City, so I was sitting at my desk in New York, and I was reading an article, eating lunch, and I went, oh my god, that’s me. It was somebody’s blog post, was what it was. My whole world started spinning, and I started having a panic attack and anxiety, and I was getting nauseous, and the whole wall of rationalization and denials came crumbling down, and I was, like, oh my god, oh my god, in my head I was saying oh my god over and over again. It was on a Thursday or Friday or something like that, and at that point, I couldn’t stop reading, I had to keep learning more and more, and I couldn’t take enough in. And I was having bad anxiety, and I couldn’t eat and I couldn’t sleep, and finally, on that Saturday, I said, I gotta tell my wife at that time, because this is not going to end well. If I pulled this from her, we’re totally not going to stay together. But maybe we could stay together. But if I tell her that I might be transgender and this is why, and I think I need to go see a therapist about it. And I’ll just never forget her reaction. She just sat there and went, okay, and that was it. That was her reaction at that point. I took her totally off guard. She was totally shocked and didn’t know how to process it, didn’t know how to deal with it. I didn’t know how to deal with it, but then she said, “We’ll deal with this together.” At that point, a lot of the anxiety– ’cause that was one of the biggest anxiety moments. So I started to look for a therapist to go to. Found one with IPG in Jersey City, and went there for a little bit. Helped me start to form a really good handle on it, and understand it.
Where were you living at this time?
Livingston. I started seeing this therapist, and at the time I thought, okay, I’ll give it a try, and it started to work, and then, whatever it was wasn’t working for me with her. Being a veteran, I said, you know what, this is getting expensive, and I’m not really feeling like I’m getting enough benefit out of it. Maybe I’ll just try going to the VA. Signed up for health care through the VA based on the amount of disability that I get. I was able to get free health care through the VA. I’ve been going to the VA since 2014 for all sorts of different things, but for therapy mostly, and I just needed someplace I could talk to, or at least had the experience of talking to veterans as well, as well as help me walk through– At that point, I didn’t need somebody specifically to typically say, “Oh, you’re transgender.” I needed somebody just specifically to help me work through specific issues I was having. At that point, I just basically thought, okay, I’m transgender; there’s no other way around it. So I didn’t feel I needed a strict gender therapist for that. Plus, I felt like I had a good rapport with the therapist at the VA, dealing with other things, so I just stuck with her. Over time, as I’ve gone through that process of “I think I may be” to “Definitely I am,” my ex had told me flat out, right from the beginning, “No, I’m not attracted to women. I’m totally straight. One hundred percent, and if you do this, I don’t think I can be married to you.” Which was crushing, from the beginning. At some point, I tried my best to say, “Well, maybe I’m not, and let’s make it work,” and I couldn’t even go, like, a day thinking I was– all it took was seeing one woman on the train and feeling jealous, and I was, like, “All right. I guess we’re gonna split up.” It was as crushing as it felt a good long time.
This was around 2014?
2015, we split up. We still haven’t finalized the divorce, but it’s just basically in the judge’s hands right now, to sign.
And how has the time been since you made that decision?
It’s been difficult. Both me going through the transition as well as me living apart and deal with being a parent apart and coming out at work and coming out to everybody and all that stuff. But I took it one small step at a time and was able to get through it without too much trouble.
Where do you work?
So right now I work for CIT Bank, and that’s in Livingston, NJ.
So you did the transition while working.
Yeah.
And how did that go?
I don’t think it could have gone any better. Knock on wood. It was shockingly good, to the point where I’m still waiting for something bad to happen. In 2013, I left my job in DC and got a job in New York City with JP Morgan. After about two and a half years there, I got laid off, but I’d already been looking for a job at that point. So I was out of a job for a total of about a month before I went to work again at CIT Bank. At that point, I had already been in therapy and already seeing a doctor, and after about a month, actually, working at CIT, I began hormone therapy. So all of this was going on; it’s been going on almost the whole time I’ve been at work. So there’s always been this gradual change in my appearance since day one until I finally came out. I’d only told, like, a couple people at work. One person who I was really good friends with, really quickly at work, I told her. She’s been my support system at work almost the whole time. And then I told a couple more people as it got closer, and then a couple more people as it got even closer, so there were about five or six people, just coworkers, who knew even before I told HR. Then one day, I’m, like, you know what, I think I’ve got to do it. I sat down with my ex, ’cause we’re still on decent terms, and I’m, like, when do you think is a decent time to come out ’cause once I come out, we’re telling the kids and everything; we’re not holding it back from anybody. So we came up with an idea to come out during summer when the kids are at camp, and my ex actually works at the camp during the summers, and just in a way that they’re able to– so it’s not like this huge change, like not just starting school and this and just trying to keep it at least smaller. So I belong to a few different groups on Facebook that are trans related and posted the question. “So, thinking about telling my kids around this time. What should I tell HR?” They go, “You should go now! Like, tomorrow.” So I was, like, okay. And this was months in advance. I was going to tell the kids in July. This was March, February sometime. I’d made an appointment with my HR rep, went in, and told her, and she was, like, “Okay. What do I need to do?” I said, “I don’t know. You’re the HR person. What do you need to do?” She was, like, “I don’t know. This has never happened here before. So I’m going to have to talk to some of my superiors in HR. We’ll figure something out.” I’m, like, “Okay. Sounds good.” And then she went, “I’m so excited for you.” I’m, like, “Whoa. This is going too good.” Like I said, that went amazingly well, and it hasn’t kind of shifted off that attitude. And I ended up telling my boss and my boss’s boss, and they’re, like, “Okay, what do you need?” And I was really shocked about telling my boss because he’s this very staunch Catholic, also a Navy veteran. Very conservative. But, like, when I told him, he was, like, “All right. What do you need?” And I was, like, “Okay.” “Do you have any questions?” “Nope.” “Okay, I guess I’ll tell HR to talk to you.” I don’t work that far below the chief risk officer in the bank, and HR told him, and he’s, like, “Great. What can I do to help?” So, it happened very smoothly, and then I came out, showed up to work as me, and some of the women in the office took me out to lunch, which was really nice. It’s been four months now, so far, and nobody really makes a big thing out of it, or anything out of it. People still treat me the way they treat me.
How big is the company?
It’s not huge. Maybe, like, 5,000 people.
Did they have any sort of policy going into it?
None. I mean, New Jersey, because of state law, has a nondiscrimination law, and the company itself says it will not discriminate based off of gender identity. But there was no transition policy. Like I said, nobody had done it before. I was a test case.
So do you know if they’ve created one since then?
I don’t. The company is not the most proactive in a lot of these things. You know, people start coming out and transitioning, they’ll make a policy, but, like, when I was at JP Morgan, there was an actual transition policy, how to transition at work, with steps. You know, that’s the way they did things, but that is a massive corporation. We’re a much smaller bank, and a much smaller company in general. I know that there are a few LGBT people, gay and otherwise, but, like I said, I was the first person that transitioned that anybody in HR even knew about. So we bought a bank out in California, so there might have been one or two from California, but nobody knew, so, like I said, I was kind of a test case.
So the job transition happened around July. And then, were you able to have the conversation with your family?
Yeah, it all happened right around the same time. So I took a few days off to get things settled, and then my ex and I sat my kids down and we told them, and that did not go as well as coming out at work. They did not know how to react. My oldest, who is on the autism spectrum, is very, very reluctant to change, and he was hit the hardest. He was very, very sad. Well, part of it was they didn’t know what was going to happen. They didn’t know what that meant. So when I told them I was going to be a girl now, they went, “No, don’t leave us!” I said, “No, no, I’m not changing at all.” Like, they looked at me; they went, “What?” And I was, like, “No, this is it. What you see is what you get.” I was wearing a T-shirt and shorts, because it was the summer, and I’m, like, “I’m already dressed as I am.” And they went, “What? I don’t understand. Don’t change.” I’m, like, “I’m already changed. You didn’t realize,” and I had to show them, like, they’d come up with another question, and I was, like, “No, no, it’s not happening like that.” “Oh.” Then they’d start crying again. “But what about this?” “No, no, no. It’s not like that. This is it. It’s already done.”
How old are they?
Right now, my oldest is nine, middle one is six, and the youngest is four. At the time they were eight, six, and four. After about an hour, where they all calmed down, let it sink in, and my youngest, he was, like, “I’m just going to jump on you now.” And so he jumps on me. So he was, like, “Okay.” But I’ve heard a lot of little kids are like that. It’s not that different. My middle one took a little longer, but he’s okay with it. He’s a much more introspective kind of kid, so a lot of his thinking was happening without asking a lot of questions. He was still trying to process it internally before he asked any questions. But my oldest, it was just question after question after question. He’s always asking questions, which is amazing that he’s still thinking about these things.
Do you want to share any of these questions, or what kind of questions?
A lot of them are little kid questions, like, “So, can you have a baby now?” “No, I can’t have a baby now.” “Do you still have your penis?” “Ah, that’s not really something I want to talk to you about.” “Are you going to have surgery?” “Maybe.” You know, things like that.
He wants to know the details?
Yeah, and then, “So what are you going to wear tomorrow?” “Well, I might wear a dress.” “I don’t want you to wear a dress.” “Okay, but it’s not up to you. If I want to wear one, I’m going to wear one.” “I know, but I don’t want you to.” “Okay, well, when it’s your birthday, I can ask you what you want me to wear, but for now, I’m going to wear what I want to wear.” Those are the kind of things that– and it’s only been four months, but he’s starting to really come around. They use the right pronouns. They correct each other and my ex, which is cool. But for the most part, they act like they’re little kids. The hardest thing is trying to come up with a way to describe who I am to them and who they are to me. I’m not their mom; I’m not their other mom; not the tall mom; and I don’t want them to call me Dad and have everybody kind of cock their head and all eyes on me, and so I’ve had to explain that when we’re going out in public and you say things like that, and I go into the women’s bathroom, people are going to look funny, and some people don’t like that. And they’re, like, “Oh, right.” When my youngest was a baby and he couldn’t say “Daddy,” he used to call me “Daya” because he could say that, and he was trying to say Daddy, and it was just coming out Daya, so that’s what my kids call me, so it stays within the family but it’s still sort of Dad, but when we’re around the public and they say that, nobody’s gonna be, like, “Huh! Dad! Trans! Trans! Look out!” At some point, I said, “You can still call me Dad. We’re still new.” And then I started working in, “You know, this is what could happen when we’re out in public. What would you like to call me? You can call me Alison. You can call me Allie. You can call me this or that or whatever, and they were, like, “Well, we’ll think about it.” And I was, like, “All right. You think about it.” As it started narrowing down, it was “No, I don’t like that one. No, I don’t like that.” It kind of landed on Daya. They’re still getting a little used to it, but they’re really good about it.
In terms of your life on a day-to-day basis, what’s that like?
It’s not that different than what it was before. It takes me a little bit longer to get ready in the morning, because my hair’s a lot longer. I don’t normally wear a lot of makeup, as you can see. I just have a little bit on. It takes all of five minutes. I put on a little bit more to go to work, but in general, it’s not that different than how it was before. It’s just I get “ma’am” now instead of “sir.” Sometimes I get “sir” and then they look at me and go, “Oh, sorry.” Or they won’t say anything. The one thing that is different is that I’m a lot more calm, and I’m not always thinking about something else. I’m living more in the moment as opposed to my mind wandering elsewhere. Some of that has to do that my mind’s been on transition for the last three years, and now I’ve crossed a major hurdle, and so I don’t have to think about it so much. I still have three kids. A lot of my time is spent “What are they doing? Are they feeling okay? What are they doing in school? When are we doing this? Oh, you have a birthday this weekend that we’re going to go to, so how am I going to get you to the birthday party?” So, in the end, it’s not that different.
How about your relationship to your extended family?
I told my brother and his wife about, maybe four months after I figured it out for myself. And they were totally cool. They were the first ones I told outside of my ex and my therapist. And then, at some point, I decided to tell my extended family, and so I sent an e-mail to my extended family and said, “This is what’s going on. Just watch this space for any developments.” They went, “Cool. We’re there for you.” I had one cousin react negatively, but I don’t see him very much, and he’s a borderline psychopath, basically, and so nobody was really surprised, and I’m not all that put off by it. My grandmother was, like, “Are you happy?” “Yup.” “Good! That’s all that counts.”
And your parents are okay?
Oh yeah, my parents are cool. In between the e-mail and telling my brother, I told my parents. I was worried about how my dad would take it because he has a very, it’s hard to explain, he can be very insensitive and very difficult to have an emotional conversation with. So when I finally told them, his response was something like, “I just want you to be happy,” which was totally shocking to me. But I was very happy to hear. When I told my boss’s boss, who actually I knew before I got the job, he was the one who kind of brought me into the company. He and my parents had been friends for years, so when I told him, his first response was “How did your dad take it?” So I was, like, “Oh, he was cool with it,” and he was, like, “Okay. Just wanted to be sure. I know how he is.” It kind of comes as a bit of a shock to some people, how he responded. But they’ve been great, really big supporters.
Do you have anything else that you’re burning to say? Or anything else you thought we would ask or haven’t asked?
I don’t know.
Do you have any questions?
I have found that, after coming out, that there are a lot of former military people that are– not that it’s that surprising, because from stories that I’ve heard, it’s people trying to prove their masculinity or whatever in case of trans women, and be more masculine in case of trans men. But I’ve always found that interesting that we have a higher percentage of the population as veterans.
There’s something so interesting about that too, about the idea that it’s all about masculinity. The military, in essence, has such a masculine connotation to it.
Yeah, it does. A friend of mine who’s a therapist out of a VA hospital in the Rochester area, I told her, and she’s, like, “Oh my God, how was it in the military?” And it never really came up in the military, because I was in a uniform every day. And everybody was in the same uniform every day. So when I looked around, I only saw the same people and the same things looking back at me. There was not a whole lot of difference. To me, it wasn’t until I got out of the military and stopped wearing the uniform that everybody else was wearing to work that it dawned on me that there is a difference. And it brought it a lot more to the forefront.
When did you start interacting with True Selves and the Pride Center?
It was shortly after I’d got my current job, so it was at the end of 2015, and I was looking for a support group. I had tried going to the LGBT center in New York City ’cause they run support groups there. I didn’t like the way it was organized there. It was very structured and pass out your sheets for today and what we’re reading and how we’re going to talk about it. It just didn’t jive with me very well. I was going to a support group at the VA, but there were only, like, two or three of us, and there wasn’t a whole lot of people like me. The two other people who would show up were retired and older and weren’t in the same stage of life and all that stuff. So I didn’t really find a whole lot of commonality there. So I was really just looking for a place to go, and I just happened to look up, I didn’t even know there was a Pride Center of New Jersey but I thought maybe there would be. And I looked up support groups and it led me to the Pride Center, and next thing I know, I’m showing up at a group meeting. I wasn’t always able to go to the meetings, but when I did, it kept bringing me back.
Any other parting thoughts? I don’t have any follow-up questions that I can think of. You were pretty detailed all the way through.
When I get going, I have a hard time stopping.
That’s great. That’s what you hope for when you do an oral interview. You’re hoping that the person just starts telling your story. So I think what I’ll do now is I’ll just stop the recorder.
Okay.