The Great Elephant Ride

by Stephanie Timmer

  Childhood adventures play a significant role in molding us into who we become. Steven Alan Timmer was an interesting sort of person with a super short fuse: I had a very bad temper that could be set off for any reason. I never really wanted to hurt anyone, but I just lost it from time to time. I hated doing so but could not seem to stop. I remember always being frustrated, just not comfortable—it would not take much for me to go off, on anybody, for nearly any reason. I think my younger siblings bore the brunt of my wrath. For the most part, I was an upbeat person and had a tendency to look at the bright side of things.

  I don’t recall being hard to get along with, but I had few friends and none of them were very close. Many times on the playground I would float between different groups, joining in when I felt like it, but more often than not, I would just watch and observe. I remember daydreaming frequently, and on beautiful spring days, I would just go sit under a tree and watch the sky. I was alone a lot, but I cannot say I was lonely. I wished I could be like other boys: they seemed to be having so much fun, but whenever I tried to plays sports with them, I did not enjoy it no matter how hard I tried. It was a lot more fun just to watch.

  It was finally a relief when I got into 7th grade and into the junior high school. There were no more recesses during the day, making my life a lot easier. When you are in class you are busy, and you have a very limited social life. I ate lunch with the same group of boys every day, and occasionally we would sneak out to the ball field and have a cigarette. I can’t say we actually smoked them; we lit them and sucked a mouth full of smoke through, but that was the extent of it. We smoked more for the thrill of something we were not supposed to do rather than from peer pressure.

  In junior high, girls started to look like women and boys started to look like men. I loved the way the girls looked on “dress up” Wednesdays. Many of the girls wore skirts or dresses on Wednesdays, and a few on occasion wore pantyhose. I would look at them and wonder what it was like. The early bloomers started to flaunt their newfound sexuality, and the girls with the biggest breasts quickly became the most popular. I could only watch and wonder whether nature had played an evil joke on me, as I started to grow hair all over my body.

  Hair had covered my complete torso by the time I was in 10th grade, and I was shaving every day. I had grown to six foot in junior high and then only grew another inch the entire time I was in high school. In 9th grade I had taken a job as a dishwasher at a local family restaurant. It was a great way to earn money and an excuse not to go out with friends. I developed friends at the restaurant and began working my way from dishwasher to cook to head cook.

  Cooking seemed to be one thing that came naturally to me. My mother only taught the girls in our family to cook, and my next oldest sister is probably one of the best I have ever known. She could make anything from appetizers to deserts. I am a great cook, but I am a lousy baker. So desert for me is usually ice cream. I enjoyed cooking and did it for the entire time I was in high school. I did not date when I was in school, so this made it easy to get extra hours. Everybody else wanted off Friday and Saturday nights for dances, dates, and football.

  The internal stress I felt increased significantly during my high school years. I fought so hard not to want to be a girl. I would try to put it out of my mind, but it only took a whiff of perfume or a seeing a pretty girl and the feelings would rush back. I became extremely jealous of girls, especially attractive females. I often wondered what kind of girl I would be if I had the change, not knowing that twenty-five years later I would get my chance.

  The Junior and Senior proms where especially hard for me. The girls would spend hours talking, planning, and shopping for the perfect dress, while dreaming of the perfect night. I would overhear the waitresses talk about it during break, unable to join in the conversation. I would just sit there eating my meal, pretending I could not hear them. Occasionally they would leave a magazine in the break room. I would often be the one who would voluntarily clean it and make sure the magazines ended up in my bag.

  I was not sure why I felt this way, why I preferred to be a girl than to be with a girl. It was a very confusing time. One thing I did know is that I could not tell anyone about my feelings. This really ate at me. I started to drink, not a little but a lot. This accomplished two things: first, it allowed me to fit in with my friends, and second, it gave me a bit of freedom. I did not always just drink with my friends. Most of the time I would hide whiskey in my bedroom. A drink a night became the norm and on weekends a lot more than that. Yes, my parents caught me a couple of times, but they had no clue how much I drank.

  Surprisingly through all this, I was doing very well in school, and between my sophomore and junior years and between my junior and senior years, I went to college for electronic engineering at a prestigious engineering school. This gave me something to do during the summer; the annual summer camping trip was getting a bit old for me by then. I also doubled up on my required classes and by the time my senior year came around I only had one class I had to take, so most of the time I was a teacher’s assistant going around and helping to get labs set up and playing with lab animals.

  I had a keen interest in genetics back then. I would raise hamsters of all different colors. I would breed them to find out what were the dominate color traits. I would breed dark ones with light colored ones, long hair with short hair. Once in a while I would be surprised by the results. One particular batch of hamsters had a beautiful fawn color with fur that was longer than normal and as soft as a baby bunny. They are, after all, rodents, and they bred as fast as I could get rid of them and sometimes even faster.

  I would sell them or give them away to students who would come into biology class. One day there was this chubby, round-faced girl who wanted a hamster. I sold her one—I told her it was a male, but it was actually a female. It was incredibly pregnant, and two days after she brought it home, it had sixteen babies. Now no good deed goes unpunished, and later that girl became my wife. Our paths would cross multiple times before that happened, but fate had plans for us, just not right away.

  I realized that if I did not make a change, I was going to end up going down the wrong path. I could not tolerate living with the religious dogma telling me I was wrong every day, and I did not want to work in a restaurant for the rest of my life. I was going to beat this and be a man. I was going to be someone my parents could be proud of. That worked for a while, but I am sure that in my case they now probably favor abortion. College was expensive, and my parents were not fans of higher education, so it was up to us children to pay our own way through college. Unsure of what I could do because I did not have the money I needed, a friend of mine offered me a solution. He introduced me to the Marine Corps recruiter. They had an education plan call the G.I. bill. In our platoon that was commonly referred to as the “Gee I wish I had not joined.”

  At the age of seventeen, I signed on the bottom line and enlisted in the Corps. Because I was seventeen, I had to entice my parents into letting me sign up. It was called the delayed entry program, and even though I would not go in for another year, the first year counted toward promotions and retirement. Six weeks after I graduated, I was on a plane heading to California and boot camp.

  I cannot say I hated the Corps. I was proud to serve; it felt as though I was finally doing something good and was part of something that was bigger than myself. I felt grown up. I learned confidence and ability to serve, qualities I still cherish to this day. During the toughest part of my transition, I still used what I was taught: as long as you are alive you can make a difference. You are not allowed to surrender while there is another in need of your help, and most of all, you don’t ever leave anyone behind. As our drill instructors would tell us, what does not kill you only hurts—get over it.

  My enlistment was cut short because of vision issues. It was during the Reagan era, and the U.S. had not been involved in any major conflict since the Vietnam War. There was a strong push for reduction in the force by the p
oliticians. So when my color vision deteriorated to the point where I no longer qualified for my position, I was given a choice of going into the infantry or getting an honorable discharge. Not wanting to dig ditches and eat mud, I chose to leave the Corps.

  The Marine Corps never lied to me. However, they failed to bring it to my attention that if I took the honorable discharge, my time in services was exactly one month shy of being able to qualify for the G.I. bill or veterans assistance. Once I signed the document, everything was official, and they were off the hook for any further obligations. This put me in a bit of a bind. I had no job, not much money, and no place to live. I had no choice but to return to the place I had been running from: I had to go back home. That was very difficult.

  Returning home, I managed to get a good paying part-time position at an ice cream factory that eventually turned into full-time. It was a very short time back at home when I enrolled in college. I would go to college five nights a week after work. My weekends were for homework and getting caught up on sleep. Moving home also meant that if I lived under my parents’ roof, I had to partake in their puritan rituals. On Sundays I got two ninety-minute naps only to be interrupted by some type of chanting from a hymnal.

  It was difficult. It felt like I went from being a man back to being a boy. I was old enough to drink, yet they thought I was drinking too much when I would grab a beer while studying. They did not know what a lot of alcohol meant for a Marine. When you no longer had the ability to lift the glass to your lips, then you had had enough, unless your friends got you a straw. I avoided my parents as much as possible.

  Somehow during all this, fate kept pushing this one girl in front of me. It was that chubby faced girl I had sold the hamster to in school. She had matured a lot since then and had become attractive. She had gotten rid of her thick glasses and had gotten contacts. She had a haircut that matched her personality and spirit. I felt comfortable with her. She was very charming and like by my family and parents.

  Everyone in my family graduated from high school, got jobs, and got married within a year or two after graduation. My parents never pressured me into getting married, but it was not discouraged, either. After about three months of dating my wife, I proposed to her and surprisingly she accepted. My parents were happy because their problem child seemed to be making decisions that they could agree with.

  Two years after I proposed to my wife we got married. On the wedding day, she looked beautiful. The most beautiful I had ever seen. I could not believe that she had agreed to marry me. That day I felt so incredibly lucky. I was in love and vowed that I would be the best man I could be to her. Anything she wanted I would get for her and make her the happiest woman in the world.

  It was within the first year of our marriage that I was diagnosed with my eye disease and told I was going to go blind. Since I had returned home, my vision had gotten worse, but I was still able to drive. I had trouble reading street signs and would occasionally run a red light, but other than that I had a good driving record. I would keep my license for another three years; each year new restrictions would be added until it got to the point where the license bureau just said no. As difficult as one would imagine it would be to be told that you are going blind, it barely affected me, for what I was struggling with seemed so much more difficult. Going blind was just a simple life issue I had to deal with in comparison.

  I can honestly say I was happily married for a while, but it was not long before I found myself searching. Something inside me was just not right. I could not put my finger on it. The feeling I had was this discontent. I was hoping that once I got married, things would be fine. I had a beautiful wife, we were not rich but we had what we needed, and we started to grow our life. As everything unfolded as one would hope with a marriage, I was left with an uneasy feeling.

  Be careful what you ask for—you just might get it, and don’t ask questions you really don’t want an answer for. One night unexpectedly I found the answer to a question I am not sure I wanted to ask. I discovered a Tapestry Magazine at a bookstore where I would have coffee between classes at night school. I was finally able to put an answer to a question I had not openly asked. I discovered that there were others who felt the way I did: the term for what I had felt all these years was “Transgender.” I was transgender. It took me the next twenty-five years to work through denial, to explore this, accept it, and travel the most difficult journey anyone can imagine in order to be free.

  If you have never experienced freedom, you may understand what it is, but once you experience it you will know what it is. And once you know what it is, you cannot unlearn it. You will be willing to do what ever it takes to be free, and this is what I had to do.

  Life Begins at 43

  I climbed aboard the elephant on January 15, 2009. I had just returned from running a marathon in Disney World. Like so many other things, the Race was done in high Disney fashion, with large screen televisions, Disney characters and even skydivers. An interesting event, the runners arrive at 2:00 AM to get ready for a race that starts at 6:00 AM. It is the only race I have run where the runners looked more tired at the start of the race than after the race.

  By 6:00 AM, forty-nine thousand runners had lined up for the full marathon. It was as though the entire population of a small city all got up at once and lined up in an orderly fashion on the street. It was like they were in a really big parade or the world’s fastest mob. Because of my speed, I was in the Red Coral—the elite group—and so was allowed to go first. The sun had not yet come up, and the excitement of the race was building. The Corals started to fill up, and there was this growing rumble of excited voices as the runners readied themselves for the 26.2 mile run. The weather was great and the runners were ready. I had run the Las Vegas marathon less than a month before and was, physically, feeling pretty good.

  The gun went off, the fireworks started, and slowly the mob began to move. I had run nearly four miles before the entire group got through the start line and activated their timing chips. For the next three hours, I would be alone running with my thoughts. I was excited, but my mind was preoccupied with something else. I was going to have surgery in five short days! After months of thought and deliberation, I was going to have my Adam’s apple removed. That small bump on my neck was a constant reminder of who I was not. That small bump was something that had always bothered me, though in hindsight no one seemed to notice it was gone.

  As I ran and my mind wandered, I had almost made it to the Disney World Cinderella Castle where I connected with another runner. Aaron was a flight attendant for a private jet service company and she really fit the part. She was thin—all marathon runners are, especially those who can run one in less than 3 ½ hours. She had long blonde hair neatly pulled back in a ponytail. She also had a great personality and outlook on life. We ran together for a while, talking and enjoying the run, but I eventually had to stop for a restroom break and lost track of her.

  Soon after the break, I was running and trying to make up lost time. With my mind still on my surgery, I failed to notice that the pack of runners had split up, with half veering right and half-veering left. Being the unique individual that I am (in addition to being blind), I ran straight. There is often a price for being unique and going your own direction and this, as it turned out, was one of those times. Running down the middle, I came face to face with an immoveable object that, had I followed the masses, I would not have discovered. Not to dwell on physics, but when a moveable object connects with a stationary object, the object not cemented into the ground is going to react in an equal but opposite direction.

  I regained my breath from having it knocked spectacularly out of me. I picked myself up from the ground and stated to run again. Initially, my pace was slow, but soon I was back to my stride inserting myself back into the pack at a slower but comfortable pace. My thoughts, despite my abrupt and embarrassing collision, were soon back on the surgery. What was it going to be like? Were people going to notice? I had only come
out to a small group of individuals—the safe group, the group that can be sacrificed if, after being told the secret, did not want to associate with you again. As I ran, I thought about my surgery and how it could, potentially, be my public admission. My Adam’s apple was in plain sight and a visual reminder of my gender. Everybody could see it. What explanations could I offer when or if someone noticed it missing?

  The race continued and my thoughts continued to race. It seemed like a long run, but I actually finished in a good time—even faster than my Las Vegas marathon time. The race concluded in one of the Epcot parking lots, surrounded with buses. It looked like a modern wagon train where at night they form a protective circle around the settlers heading west. At the end, there were a lot of people gathered, but because I had my “Visually Impaired” vest on, my friend Linda was able to meet me right at the finish line. It is nice to have a friendly face greet you after a run. We went through and got my medal and some food as we headed towards the busses.

  As we were walking, I met up with Aaron again. She had a really good finish time and an even better looking boyfriend on her arm. We hugged and congratulated each other as we got on our separate busses heading back to the hotel. Linda and I had flights to catch. She was heading home to New Hampshire and I was off to Miami-Dade County schools to give a presentation. I had so wished I could have been going to New Hampshire with her.

  I arrived in Miami later that night and relaxed until my driver came and picked me up the next morning. The Miami-Dade County school district is one of the largest in the nation, and this account could mean a lot for my small company. My company creates software that helps students read. I had done this presentation hundreds of times before to schools all over the country, but today I was fragmented. I had to force myself to focus, knowing that in forty-eight hours I would have the first of several surgeries that would alter the course of my life.