A Determination to Fight for Her Identity

Stephen G. Bloom Mercury News Staff Writer

Transsexual braves barriers of suspicion while seeking her place in the world

Maria Masters, 43, stretches out on a soft-cushion couch, crossing her legs, gently tugging at the gold earring dangling from her left ear.

She nervously clicks her red-painted nails on the coffee table, then rearranges the Savvy and New Woman magazines.

On the surface, Masters is a typical Silicon Valley career woman. Divorced with custody of her two sons, 17 and 20, she lives in a stylish two- story Cupertino condominium. She favors silk blouses, long-line skirts, heels. She drives a white BMW.

Thirteen months ago, Masters was laid off from her $46,380-a-year job at Paul Masson Winery when the Saratoga champagne plant closed. She went on 13 interviews, but none produced a job. One interview lasted five minutes, another was cancelled as soon as the interviewer saw Masters.

What's the problem?

Maria Masters used to be a man.

Last April, John Masters checked into a Colorado hospital to undergo a three-hour sex-change operation. His testicles were removed, and a functioning vagina was crafted from his penis.

Early this month, the last obvious male giveaway - a protruding adam's apple - was surgically flattened and shaved from Masters' trachea.

Masters followed the lead of an estimated 20,000 other American men and women who have surgically changed their sex.

The most famous are pioneer Christine Jorgensen, tennis star Renee Richards, and composer Wendy Carlos, as well as Welsh writer Jan Morris - accomplished celebrities before their transformations.

For those transsexuals, more fame and glory followed their sex change. Their careers flourished. Movies or books told stories of bodies that did not match genders. The last, fading image was an image of a freed soul.

But for most of the 100,000 diagnosed transsexuals in the United States who suffer from the medical syndrome gender dysphoria displacement, the story isn't glamorous.

Many are social outcasts forced to band together for friendship. Even when transsexuals are skilled, many employers are wary of hiring them.

Maria Masters - who legally changed her name - is no exception. Middle- aged women out of work have a hard enough time finding management-level positions. Women who once were men have an almost impossible time.

Out of work with little hope of finding a job commensurate with her 21 years of experience, Maria Masters is living on $166 a week in unemployment insurance benefits, which are due to run out April 25. Her savings are just about gone. She is fearful that the bank will repossess her home and car. She doesn't know how she can afford to send her sons to college.

She doesn't have enough money to finish the final complement of her transformation, breast implants.

On top of that, Masters has to cope with the not-so-easy task of suddenly learning how to be a woman. Daily she practices saying "hello" two octaves higher than her normal voice. She occasionally slips back into her manly stride. She rehearses how a woman is expected to shake hands.

Masters also has to learn how to handle her budding sexual desires. At 6-feet-2 and 165 pounds, she has to meet men in a suspicious, hostile world where transsexuals are looked at as freaks.

"She'd probably have an easier time meeting people and finding work if she were a convict who had just been released from San Quentin," says Mildred Brown, a San Jose therapist who counsels transsexuals, including Masters.

Brown's transsexual clients include a broke mechanical engineer who, after the operation, resorted to cleaning bedpans at a nursing home, computer operators and electronics technicians whose only employment opportunities now are washing dishes.

"I'm trying to be ladylike, understanding how to deal with the world, but it's not easy," Masters says.

In her spare time, Masters gos to shopping malls to observe how women dress, how they walk and carry themselves.

"There's more to dressing like a woman than makeup and pantyhose," Masters says. "It's accessories - scarves, belts, earrings. You have to worry about color coordination - like matching shoes and handbags. Then there's your eyebrows, your nails, your hair. You don't learn these things as a teenage boy."

Masters' first inkling that he was different came when he was 9 or 10. "I used to stay up late nights, praying that I would wake up as a girl," Masters recalls. To satisfy the cravings, he would head for his mother's closet to dress in her clothing.

In 1953, Christine Jorgensen made headlines with her well-publicized sex- change operation, performed in Denmark. Masters tried to read everything on Jorgensen, the former Bronx GI-turned-glamorous woman. He told his parents he wanted an identical operation.

It was a schizophrenic existence. He felt more comfortable sitting down while urinating, yet among his friends he went overboard to show his masculinity. He went to bordellos with buddies. He worked at his family's bowling alley. He became a construction worker.

In 1962, he met the woman who two years later would become his wife. "All I needed, I thought, was a good woman who could straighten me out," Masters says.

The newlyweds spent their honeymoon in San Francisco, and did what other newlyweds do on their honeymoons: sightsee and stay in their hotel room. "I went through the motions," Masters says. "I learned ways to fake it. I was stunned that my feelings of wanting to be a girl didn't go away."

Determined to shed his feminine side, Masters plunged deeper into the world of men. He enlisted in the Navy, and he and his wife moved to Florida, where Masters worked as a water rescue technician on the Gemini space project.

But when Masters came home at night, he made a beeline for his wife's closet. He also began buying clothes on his own through mail order catalogs.

Only by fantasizing, he says, was he able to have sex with his wife. The couple's first son was born in 1967, followed three years later by another son.

Masters' wife threw him out of the bedroom when she discovered his nocturnal habit. Nonetheless, the marriage stayed intact when he agreed not to dress as a woman in front of the family. Masters says his wife did not believe in divorce.

In 1977, the family moved to California, and Masters was hired at Paul Masson.

Wilma Phillips, who worked with Masters, remembers John Masters as "a male chauvinist who would bark out orders. There was no room for discussion. He was hardheaded. No one had any idea he would ever turn out to be a woman."

Another worker, Ginger Stoddard, recalls that John Masters often swore at employees and called women "broads" - perhaps another overreaction to trying to appear macho.

At home one night, he decided to give a name to the woman he was becoming. While standing naked in front of a mirror, he heard on the radio Johnny Mathis sing "Maria," from "West Side Story." "I repeated 'Maria' over and over and knew that was it."

There was no turning back. He started shaving his legs, dressing in bras, pantyhose, and slips. He paid for a personal color chart at I. Magnin, and began wearing Alexandrea deMarkoff and Lancome cosmetics.

It was at this time he started leaving the house dressed as a woman, first walking the neighborhood, then getting bolder, and going to shopping malls.

But the male/female conflict stirring inside did not dissipate. One day, Masters left work early, took five tablets of the sleeping pill Seconol, then called a pharmacist for a refill. The suspicious pharmacist alerted Masters' physician of the overdose.

"What I think was happening was that Maria was trying to kill John. He had a growth between his legs, something horrible, that never should have been there." After the botched suicide attempt, Masters and his wife filed for divorce in 1982. He says he could not stand being married any longer, could not carry on two lives. "I could no longer bear to look in the mirror and see John. I needed to get out."

Through a support group for transsexuals and transvestites, Masters sought counseling, but continued playing the stalwart male publicly. He dated a younger woman who worked on the champagne assembly line.

During the divorce proceedings, Masters and his wife contested custody of their two teen-age boys. Before the court-ordered custody hearing began, Masters told the boys he was a transvestite, and during the hearing, he told the mediator.

Masters wanted to come to the hearing dressed as a woman, but on his attorney's advice, he wore men's clothing.

The mediator approved legal joint custody, but ordered that Masters take primary care of the boys except every other weekend.

Both boys told the mediator they preferred to live with their father, not their mother, Masters says. When asked if they were aware of their father's cross-dressing, the boys said yes, but still said they preferred living with their father.

In 1984, under the counsel of therapist Brown, Masters began taking hormones administered by an endocrinologist. He also started electrolysis on his face.

Masters and Brown agreed that if Masters could function happily for one year as a woman, a sex-change operation would be appropriate.

He told his bosses at Paul Masson of the decision. The next Monday, a memo went up on the company bulletin board notifying workers that "John Masters will return from vacation as a female employee. He will be known as Maria Ann Masters. It is our hope that the change will take place without incidence."

To prepare for his first day back, Masters spent four hours dressing, choosing a black suit, pearl necklace, gold earrings, black pumps, a red blouse and a brunette shag wig. At first, there were titters and whispers among the workers. Then the mean jokes started.

Obscene photos of nude men were posted in the bathroom. Above the toilet a banner read, "Queen's Throne." Cans of fruit punch were left at his desk.

In May, 1985, Masters was told that he, along with 262 other employees, would be laid off when Paul Masson close its plant in December. Masters was given nine months of severance pay, and was out of work the next February.

Two months later, he flew to Trinidad, Colorado, where Dr. Stanley Biber performed the irreversible castration and constructive surgery. Masters' penis was used to form a vaginal cavity and vaginal lips. Penile matter was tied and molded to form a clitoris.

Masters has no ovaries or uteris, and accordingly, can neither bear children nor menstruate. To maintain her transformation, she must take estrogen and progesterone pills for the rest of her life.

The surgery, a well-established medical procedure, is generally performed by urologists or plastic surgeons who operate at 24 centers throughout the United States. An estimated 500 of the operations are performed annually. Masters chose not to go to the nearby Stanford Gender Program because, among other reasons, it specializes in female-to-male sex-changes.

Depending on where it is performed and what is done, cost ranges from $5,000 to $18,000. The fees are seldom covered by insurance since the operation is termed elective, cosmetic, or experimental.

When Masters returned home, she asked her sons how they wanted to address her. "I wasn't their mother, and I certainly wasn't their father," she recalls. "I suggested Aunt Maria or Maria, and they picked just Maria."

She gave her old clothes to the Salvation Army, and started looking for work. With guidance from a firm to assist laid-off Paul Masson workers, Masters was given pointers on interview style: how to shake hands, what to wear, what to order for a lunch interview.

Armed with a new identity, resume' nd wardrobe, she began making calls. If contacted for a recommendation, Chester Hutchinson, Paul Masson's director of personnel, vouched for her abilities.

But the interviews went as she feared. After a few minutes, most interviewers were suspicious, and the interview was politely terminated.

One interview with a recruiter lasted two hours, and appeared to be going well - until Masters met the plant manager, and "I knew I was dead on the spot. He took one look at me and his eyes said 'no way.'"

"Employers think the transsexual will cause too many problems - 'What are the customers going to say? How are the other employees going to react? Which bathroom will the new person use?'" says Joanna Clark, a transsexual and author of a series of papers on the legal aspects of transsexualism.

Masters and other transsexuals have no legal recourse since they can't prove a prospective (employer) discriminated against them based on sex.

With no prospect of work, Masters says she may start a catering business. She is also thinking of offering a class for corporate personnel managers, dealing with issues of transsexualism. But she has no illusions of ever making as much as she did at Paul Masson.

Masters and her son, Daniel, 17, have a pact that she won't go to his high school. "I love her," says Daniel, of the woman who once was his father. "I used to think, 'God, why doesn't this go away!' but it didn't. I had to get used to it, and I have.

Some of his friends have come to the condominium, and he introduces Masters as "Maria," sometimes saying, "she's a friend of my dad's."

To be sure, he says, life with Masters isn't "your normal 'Leave It to Beaver' family. When we're out together, people stare, and if it starts bugging me, then I just wave back and smile at them."

Masters' older son, a 20-year-old community college student who lives with his mother two miles away, tells friends that Masters is his stepmother, and that his "father died a while ago."

After a four-year period during which Masters' mother refused to talk to her, the 68-year-old woman phoned, following the operation, calling her son "Maria" for the first time.

She hopes to start dating men, but avoids bars, and "meat markets." Several months ago at a nightclub with former co-worker Stoddard, Masters was asked to dance, and "she was on cloud 9," says Stoddard.

She goes to a manicurist monthly, and uses the same hair stylist she had as a man. But as a woman, she pays $14 more for a trim.

Service takes longer as a woman, she says, and waiters are more likely to push desserts on her than they did as a man. When her TV broke down recently, the repairman talked to her as though she were a child.

Masters has learned to use her new sex to her advantage. When she went shopping for new tires, the salesman showed her the bill and she said in a feminine voice, "Couldn't you make it just a little less? I'm a divorced mother of two boys." He did.

There are assets to having once been a man. The experience, she says, gives her an added edge in the dating game that few women can match.

"I know men better than most any other woman do. I want to make my men feel like kings when I go out with them. I'm not a servant to anyone, but I understand the male mystique. I know men want to be made to feel very special, that they are No. 1."

Top of page

You are visitor to arrive at this page since January 1, 2000.

Copyright 1987, The San Jose Mercury News.