Tranny

It was 1985 and I was five years old, still young enough to think the lyrics to Madonna's song "Material Girl" were "I am a Cheerio girl." I stood in the glow of the television in my family's living room, watching her movements in stunned, silent awe.

My parents liked music, but weren't fanatical about it. My father enjoyed country and in particular Willie Nelson, while my mother's favorite was Diana Ross and the Supremes. But something about this pop star spoke to me. Watching Madonna get into the groove, I was completely mesmerized.

Her dirty blond hair was moussed and frizzed to perfection. Her neon and black clothes were ripped and torn to accentuate her curves. Her chunky bracelets and necklaces sparkled and jangled against her arms and neck as she moved to the beat. I reached out my hand and touched her on the screen. That's me, I thought, clear as day. I wanted to do that. I wanted to be that.

This sense of wonderment was cut short by confusion. Suddenly I realized that I would never be her, that I could never be her. Madonna was a girl; a confident symbol of femininity, singing and dancing onstage in a short skirt and high heels. I was just a small boy, living in a ranch house on an Army base in Fort Hood, Texas.

My father's name was Thomas. My uncle's name was Thomas. My cousin's name was Thomas. And I was born Thomas James Gabel, the son of a soldier, a West Point graduate who never went to war. That was the name written on my birth certificate, but I never felt that it suited me.

I was born on November 8, 1980, in Chattahoochee County, Georgia, though I would never claim to be from the South. I was from Tobyhanna, Pennsylvania, and Cincinnati, Ohio, and Lago Patria, Italy. My family packed up our lives every few years and moved to a new station, wherever my father was assigned. Being an Army brat made me a traveling soul from birth, introducing me to new people and new friends, teaching me about different cultures around the world and how to adapt to new ways of life.

Even as a toddler, I was a naturally destructive force. When my mother took me grocery shopping, from my seat in the cart, I kept grabbing items off the shelves and tossing them on the ground. "Tom!" she'd scold. "Tom… Tom!" The stern older man working the register once watched my mother's plight and muttered, "Tom Tom the Atom Bomb." After that, the name stuck.

My parents weren't deeply religious people, but would occasionally drag me and my brother, Mark, who was six years my junior, to church. They were both raised Catholic, but our church denomination didn't seem to matter to them—Presbyterian, Methodist, whatever was most socially convenient with other Army officers. As for me, I was fairly indifferent about religion, as long as I didn't end up burning in hell.

After church on Sundays, I would build forts with blankets and sheets, covering my bedroom from corner to corner. Underneath those bedding canopies I created a world of my own, my first experiences with privacy from my parents. To save space on storage, my mother kept her nylons in my bottom dresser drawer. I found them, and natural curiosity led me to try them on. I wondered what was so special about these shriveled brown socks that only my mom got to wear.

In the dark secrecy of my forts, I lay on my back, stretched my legs up toward the sky, and slowly rolled the nylons down over my legs. I was almost hypnotized by the sensation of nylon on skin.

This must be what it feels like to be a woman, I thought to myself.

My father would walk by and see the sheets and blanket tent tops I had constructed over the furniture.

"Tommy, what the hell are you doing in there?" he'd bark.

"Nothing!" I'd call back, and I would roll the nylons off my legs and hide them as quick as I could. No one ever had to tell me that what I was doing in my fort was indecent behavior. I could just feel that it was wrong, as if I was born with the shame. I had already been caught playing Barbies with a neighbor girl. My father's reaction was a cold stare of disapproval and a new G.I. Joe. It was put to me bluntly that "little boys don't play with Barbie dolls like little girls do," and that was that.

My father was a warm man grown cold through military service. Military culture adheres to strict standards on what is and isn't normal, and the troops are trained accordingly. My father was too young to fight in the Vietnam War, but if he'd been old enough, he would have volunteered to go. Instead he enrolled in West Point Military Academy, graduating in the class of 1976. He wanted to become a soldier like his father, who served as a pilot in World War II. Dad made military school sound fun with his tales of bar fights and hazings, all-night escapades with friends, and driving fast cars across the country end to end with no sleep. He was a skilled mechanic and had rebuilt two 1967 Jaguar XKEs in his mother's garage, crashing the first spectacularly.

I loved hearing these stories about his wild youth, but they became less and less frequent as he ascended in military rank. He was a hard, stoic man, and while he intimidated me, I was proud on the occasions when he would pick me up from school dressed in full fatigues, shiny black jump boots, and aviator sunglasses. People saluted my father when he walked by. He was known as Major Gabel, and he wouldn't have tolerated his oldest son wearing his wife's clothes.

My confusion over my interest in women's bodies and clothing followed me throughout elementary school. I'd see older women on the street and want to be as pretty as they were. At 8 years old, I caught an edited version of Rosemary's Baby playing on late night network TV. While most kids would shy away from the terror of the Roman Polanski film, I was drawn in by the beauty of Mia Farrow. Her hair was short and blond, chopped into a pixie cut, not dissimilar to my own. I knew what it felt like to have hair so short, so she made femininity real and attainable to me. I had no idea what kind of adult I'd grow up to be, but she gave me something to aspire to. Maybe, just maybe, I would look like her one day.

Music helped me cope with these feelings. I discovered 80s hair metal—bands like Poison, Warrant, and Bon Jovi. The first cassette I owned was Def Leppard's Hysteria album, purchased in a military PX because I liked the cover art of two faces screaming through a psychedelic triangle. But the band I became obsessed with was Guns N' Roses. Their music appealed to me because it felt dangerous. I was afraid of my parents seeing the liner note artwork. The look of the band, particularly that of wiry lead singer Axl Rose, excited me most because it was androgynous. Hair was big, clothes were tight, lines were blurred. I often couldn't tell if band members were boys or girls, and I liked that.

From hours spent poring over the photos in these albums, I knew I wanted to lead my own band. I started coming up with band names like "The Leather Dice" and writing them on the back of my jean jacket with a marker. I practiced stage moves by strumming along to songs using a tennis racket as a guitar. Eventually, I decided I needed to upgrade to a real one.

With money I'd saved mowing lawns, I ordered a $100 Harmony acoustic guitar from a Sears catalog. Waiting for it to arrive in the mail was excruciating. I already knew who I wanted to be, and I was eager to get started. My parents paid for lessons from an Army wife, but I got nothing out of them. Instead, I learned to play by ear, listening to my favorite albums and playing along to them. Like most kids who had their musical awakening in the 90s, I cut my teeth on Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit." The utter simplicity of that song taught countless rock hopefuls like me how to form power chords and annoy their parents with them. Frontman Kurt Cobain singlehandedly calloused a whole generation of tiny fingers with those opening notes.

For four years of my youth, ages 8 to 12, my family lived in Italy, and it was a dreamland to me. Our neighbors were a mix of Italian, British, Australian, and German families—soldiers and civilians. I practically lived outdoors there, running wild, playing war, exploring the acres of fruit orchards growing behind our house. I made friends in the neighborhood easily, but learned never to get too attached to other kids, as they moved often. One day you'd be playing catch with your friend, and the next, his father would be shipped halfway around the world. You were lucky if you got the chance to say goodbye.

My mother fully immersed herself in Italian culture, becoming fluent in the language and taking cooking lessons. She made a point of exposing my brother and me to as much of the country as she could. My father had a harder time adjusting. The military encouraged respect and interest in local culture, but to the Italians, United States military presence could never be seen as anything more than unwelcomed occupiers on Italian land.

Any preexisting problems my parents had in their marriage had been unknown to me, and only became apparent as they intensified with the escalation of the first Gulf War, Operation Desert Storm. Tensions were high for all military families stationed overseas. I was introduced to the concept of a "terrorist threat." Bomb sweeps of the school bus became part of my daily routine, and armed soldiers stood guard on the roof while teachers taught my classes. Armed Forces Network, the only English-speaking station we got on TV, played nothing but 24/7 war coverage.

My father saw his last chance to go to war and practically begged his commanding officers for the opportunity. But for whatever political and strategic reasons, he was never sent, instead left behind at the NATO post in Napoli while all his peers got to go play war. He gave me his chemical warfare gas mask one day to have as a toy, knowing he would never need to wear it in actual combat. He had reached a ceiling in the chain of military command and was deeply frustrated by it.

Communication between him and my mother disintegrated more each day. This gave way to yelling or fighting, usually in the mornings or evenings when he returned from base. Eventually they stopped speaking entirely.

Just before I turned 13, my parents separated for reasons that were never fully explained to me. My mother pulled me into her sewing room one day and told me that she planned on leaving and taking Mark with her. I was given the choice of coming with them or staying with my father. The situation made me feel terrible, but I chose her, because not doing so felt like betrayal. Instead I felt like I was betraying my dad. My mother has since told me that things would have ended sooner if she hadn't gotten pregnant with Mark.

The Army establishment frowns on divorce and the idea of women leaving officers, so moving out had been a long, arduous process for my mother. For two years, she had slept alone on the bed in Mark's room and I slept on a cot next to her, while Mark and our father shared the master bedroom. The mood in our house was tense. My father started withholding money from my mother and wouldn't pay for basic necessities. When my mother's car broke, he didn't fix it, essentially rendering her a prisoner of the house.

At night I heard the clacking of a keyboard coming from my father's office. He would sit in front of his computer for hours, typing something. He's never told me what he was working on all those nights, but I believed it to be some sort of journal, as if he was writing out the feelings he never spoke.

Eventually my mother took me and my brother to live with her mother, Grandma Grace, in her retirement condo in Naples, Florida, and my entire life changed. Suddenly I was a child of divorce, and my mother was a single parent to two boys, starting over after 13 years of marriage. She was without money, a job, a car, or a home. My father was left behind at his NATO station in Italy, where he was placed on suicide watch. My brother and I wouldn't see him again for a year.

I hated Florida immediately. It was hot and boring. We had spent the last four years dining on authentic Italian cuisine, but when we stepped off the plane at the Southwest Florida Regional Airport, we had the option of celebrating our arrival at either Olive Garden or Domino's Pizza. No longer did my father's Army rank matter in school. This was civilian life. What mattered in Collier County was the size of your parents' bank account.

I didn't fit in with my classmates in my new high school, and none of them befriended me, which was fine because I didn't want to be their friend anyway. They weren't Army brats like me; they had all grown up together there, and I was the weird new kid. I was different. I wore United Colors of Benetton, and they wore Air Jordans. I rode a big cruiser bike with a basket, a hand-me-down from my grandma, while they all owned BMX stunt bikes. Even my teachers treated me like an outcast. In Italy, my teachers thought I was exceptional and would engage with me, placing me in the gifted programs. But in Florida, they treated me like I was invisible. I didn't know any other students in my class whose parents were divorced, and I felt like that was a stigma. Naples didn't feel like another temporary military assignment I'd need to briefly adjust to; it felt like it would be the rest of my life. I felt alone and trapped, and I just wanted my dad back.

As a newly single woman, my mother relied heavily on the church, making use of their after-school programs for me and Mark while she worked long shifts at a framing shop. My first three live musical performances were in front of church congregations in talent shows. I entered them with R.J. and Nick, two other kids in the youth group. We called our band the Black Shadows. While playing, I felt filled with the Holy Spirit, although I'm not sure anyone saw it in me. All three of these performances consisted of single cover songs: first an a capella rendition of Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody," followed the next year by an acoustic version of John Lennon's "Imagine."

Finally, after ripping through Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" as a fully electrified band, the church asked that I no longer participate. They also told my mother that they thought I was troubled after noticing the cut marks I'd made on my arms and legs, a habit I'd picked up to impress cute girls in school. I'd carve a crush's name into my shoulder, or make slashes on my forearm to win their attention. The pain was intense, but it paid off when a few girls took notice. Unfortunately, so did the youth ministers. The church paid for me to see a psychiatrist and told me not to come back until I received help. When a church turns you away, it feels as though God himself is rejecting you, saying you are damaged beyond His help.

I spent a lot of time at home. Fortunately, my grandmother's house had cable, and I passed the time by watching MTV. I stayed glued to the channel, hoping for the hosts to play another Nirvana or Pearl Jam video. When I grew bored, I would lock myself in the bathroom and try on my mother's dresses that were in the hamper. I'd stand there as long as I could, looking at myself in the mirror, wishing I was someone else, wishing I was her.

Who was "her"? She was the person I imagined myself to be, in another dimension, in a past life, in some dream. I had never heard of gender dysphoria; the idea that your psychological and emotional gender identities do not match your assigned sex at birth. I didn't have a name for the way I felt. No information was available, and there was no adult that I could trust with my secret. I thought I was schizophrenic, or that my body was possessed by warring twin souls: one male, one female, both wanting control.

I would look down at my body in a dress and blur my vision until it almost felt real. My eyes scanned upward, hoping to see her face, but I would only find an insecure teenage boy dressed in women's clothes. I'd do this until it was time to take the dress off and go through the motions of flushing the toilet and pretending to wash my hands before stepping back into reality.

I grew my hair down to my shoulders under the guise of rebellion and rock and roll, wanting to emulate the bands whose posters I tacked to my bedroom walls. But secretly I just wanted long hair like all the girls my age. My long hair and band T-shirts got me labeled a freak at school and led to fights. Someone was always waiting after class or on the walk home, ready to jump me. I was never a good fighter; I was too tall and lanky, already almost grown into the six-foot-two frame I'd eventually fill. I'd always end up bloodied and bruised.

One of my most violent encounters was with a member of the football team, who loved to bully kids like me, although I brought this one on myself by teasing him about shaving his legs. As if from a John Hughes movie, the jock threatened to kick my ass after school. "Three PM in the hallway," he said. "Be there or I'll find you." I showed up, but before I could even say a word or do anything, his friend charged up behind me and clocked the side of my head, knocking me to the ground. I landed next to some paint cans by a janitor's closet. I picked one up and started swinging with everything I had. I hit them as many times as I could, in between punches they landed on me while kids cheered on. An administrator came by and everyone scattered. I left the building and ran across the street toward the mall, while the jocks got in their car to hunt me down. My face swollen, I hid behind a dumpster in the parking lot until it got dark.

I soon lost the desire to go to class and became a pro at playing hooky. I left the house in the morning to walk to school as usual, but instead ducked behind a diner and smoked cigarettes until I was sure my mom had gone to work. Then I was free to sit at home wearing one of her dresses, sipping Kahlua and creams from the cabinet while watching soap operas. Getting drunk alone became a routine and was a natural predecessor to my interest in drugs.

Drugs were embedded in the culture in Naples. South Florida was an international point of entry for the U.S. drug pipeline. Missing their intended drop points, kilos would regularly fall out of the sky and wash up on shore into the arms of sheriff's deputies. It was easier for a kid my age to buy cocaine than alcohol. Hanging outside the mall on a Friday night smoking cigarettes got you in with the kind of kids who wanted to get fucked up, too. After cigarettes became a habit for me, I smoked weed and ate acid or psychedelic mushrooms, which could be easily harvested from farm fields after a summer rain. With the exception of huffing, I was willing to try anything I could get my hands on, and I always wanted more. I tasted cocaine for the first time at 13 years old, snorting lines in the bathroom of the public library, right off a copy of Jack London's A Daughter of the Snows.

Through experimentation, I noticed the way different drugs affected my dysphoria. When I smoked weed, what seemed like a fantasy became more real and I felt less panicked; time stood still. When I drank or did cocaine, I became numb, and I didn't care that I couldn't be her. All I wanted was another drink or another line. On psychedelics, though, not only could I fully become her, but I could fully detach from all reality.

After one year, my father's next assignment brought him back to America, in Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri, where he would eventually retire after his 20th year of his service and marry a woman almost 20 years his junior. It seemed obvious to me and Mark that she didn't want anything to do with kids, let alone the kids from her new husband's previous marriage. Dad didn't even tell us that he had gotten remarried. We learned by noticing that her last name had changed on the mail being sent to their house. Mark and I split our lives between school years in Florida and summers in Missouri, but neither of us were able to get our relationship with our father back on track after the divorce.

I hated Missouri almost as much as I hated Florida. My father's house was miles off base in a desolate spot in the middle of Mark Twain National Forest, where there was no cable, and therefore, no MTV. I wandered through those woods praying I'd stumble onto a field of marijuana growing, like I'd seen in drug busts on TV. With no other way to catch a buzz, I settled for stealing my dad's beers and highball glasses of schnapps after he went to sleep.

At my request, my dad built me a bedroom in the basement. Like my childhood forts, I liked the isolation it offered. The cavelike darkness let me sleep all day, and the privacy meant I could do whatever I wanted after everyone else had gone to sleep.

Restless at night, I would search through my dad's old military footlockers, looking at pictures and reading old letters. There were boxes from my father's past life; his half of the family possessions received in the divorce. In one of those boxes I found my mother's wedding dress. I spent all summer in that basement, dressed like a bride, and drinking Miller Lites while playing guitar or writing in my journal.

Journaling was something I'd picked up in third grade when my father was assigned to a month-long training exercise in Germany and had to pull me and Mark out of school. Because I was going to be missing so much class, my teacher told me to keep a journal and write about my traveling experiences every day. I wrote about visiting the Dachau concentration camp outside of Munich. Walking the grounds where thousands of Jewish people had been put to death by a deranged Nazi, I knew that the devil must be real. I also wrote about seeing my brother bolt into oncoming traffic and be struck by a delivery truck, which stopped directly on top of his legs. We spent the night in the hospital with him. He was shaken up, but fortunately his young bones did not break under the weight. The experience was traumatizing, but it taught me the value of expressing myself on paper. Its confessional nature was therapeutic. I came back from the trip, read these two entries in front of my class, and received an A on the assignment. I never stopped keeping a journal after that.

The only break in the monotony of Missouri was our trip to visit my grandparents' lake cabin in northeastern Pennsylvania, where I had an attic bedroom to myself. One night, I stumbled upon a sports almanac there. There was a two-paragraph article in it about Renée Richards, the professional tennis player who underwent a male-to-female sex change.

This was the first time I'd ever heard of such a concept. I could hardly believe it was really possible. In the sanctuary of the attic, I read those two paragraphs over and over. I wanted this so badly, but didn't know how to make it happen. All those sleepless nights praying to God for this one miracle never got me a word back. After everyone was asleep, in a moment of pure desperation, I turned to Satan.

There on a cot set up among boxes, beneath a single pull-string light bulb, I kneeled in front of the bed and took out a piece of paper, the sports almanac underneath for a hard surface, a bird feather for a pen, and my Swiss Army knife. I cut my thumb and dipped the end of the feather into the growing droplet, and started writing.

"I pledge my allegiance to the Dark Lord in exchange for…"

I vowed to do whatever he wanted. I offered my soul, anything in trade. I begged for Satan to please, please let me wake up a woman. Not a girl, but a fully grown woman; instant emancipation so that I could run away and escape it all. I had a full, intricate plan worked out in my head. I would wake up that next morning before the rest of my family and disappear into the woods, never to be seen again. I wrote out the contract and signed it in my own blood, but of course I never woke up the woman I wished to be.

Puberty arrived, and with it came a raging flow of testosterone. My body started changing, and I felt the peer pressure to have sexual experiences, the thought of which terrified me.

I don't know how I pulled off dating a senior as a sophomore, let alone one as beautiful as Tami. Still too young for a license, embarrassingly I had to ask my mom for the occasional drive to her house. Tami was sexually experienced, and I was not. She seemed out of my league. I had gotten a blowjob from one of the girls at church, and she had let me finger her, but I had never gone all the way. I was both terrified and relieved when Tami and I started dating, knowing that I would most assuredly lose my virginity to her.

Her alcoholic mother was passed out in the other room one night, and we were watching the early Angelina Jolie movie Hackers on the living room couch. Neither of us had any interest in the movie. I just sat there, nervously trying to think of a way to make a move, when she took me by the hand and led me into her bedroom, leaving the lights off. She pushed me down onto the bed and started taking her clothes off, and I followed suit. Once naked, she straddled me. This was it. This was the moment. I was going to have sex. My skin felt like it was on fire. I was so flushed with nerves, sweating bullets before any action even started. She put me inside of her and… ecstasy. I was reborn. I came within seconds.

"Before you cum, let's stop and put a condom on, yeah?" she whispered into my ear.

"Um… it may be a little too late for that…"

We dated for another four months before I broke up with her after she told me she slept with her ex-boyfriend. But those four months were like sex boot camp. She taught me how to fuck, telling me exactly what did and didn't feel good, stopping short of breaking out charts and graphs. I was fascinated by her body. I liked fucking just as much as I liked drugs, each of them their own escape.

The rush of pubescent hormones only amplified my dysphoria, and I grew even more angry and confused. Why did I desperately feel that I wanted to be a girl but at the same time have deep crushes on all the girls at school? I feared that I was gay. The thought of intimacy scared me. Could someone love me if they knew my secret? And would it really be true love if I kept this part of me from them? This mess of thoughts brought on my first memorable bout with depression, a mental illness present in both sides of my family. Grandma Grace, who never remarried after her husband died of a heart attack in 1964, would slip into depression and not get out of bed for days. We would admit her to the hospital for treatment, and she'd spend a month there, get released, and six months later, need to be admitted again. I felt like I understood her hopelessness.

While drugs and sex could reliably hold me over, my biggest distraction and relief from depression came when I discovered punk rock.

"You should give this album a listen," said Debbie, handing me a copy of Dookie by Green Day. Debbie and her husband, Sam, owned Offbeat Music, the only independent record store in Southwest Florida at the time. "This band is about to be huge," she assured me. "Get in before they sell out!"

Soon I caught Green Day's video for "Longview" on MTV's 120 Minutes, a show I would stay awake every Sunday night to watch at the price of exhaustion on Monday morning. The video was everything Debbie had promised—punk slackers killing their suburban boredom by watching TV. The meta nature of this was not lost on me. One night, I saw an episode guest-hosted by Rancid's Tim Armstrong and Lars Frederiksen, two punks with foot-high mohawks, tattoos, and leather jackets completely covered in metal spikes. They looked like they were from another planet. I was immediately back at Offbeat the next day seeking out the albums by every band whose video they played. Each of those albums led me to discover other bands and opened up a whole new world of music—the Clash, X, Operation Ivy, the Ramones, NOFX, and an endless list of others.