by Dale Bryant
Melinda Whiteway would have attended
the recent reunion of the Los Gatos High School Class of 1961 if she had known about it,
but the invitation never found its way to her. If she hadn't heard from Denise Fritch, an
acquaintance she'd met through Mildred Brown, she wouldn't have known the reunion had
taken place, nor that she and Fritch had been classmates.
For nearly 50 years, Whiteway lived successfully as a male. Twice married,
Whiteway is an attorney and also works as a deputy sheriff in the Santa Clara County
Deputy Reserves.
Unlike transsexuals who know all their lives they are in the wrong body,
Whiteway, who completed sex reassignment surgery last June, has only in the past few years
begun to believe that she should have had a female body all along.
What Whiteway did know beginning in early childhood was that when she was
a child, she enjoyed wearing women's clothes. "Even though my father caught me when I
was in early adolescence and had a long talk with me, I continued," Melinda recalls.
"I convinced myself it was just something I liked to do."
Then, as John, a senior at LGHS, he found himself going through a severe
depression. "One day I was in my bedroom with a loaded high-powered rifle [aimed]
inside my mouth. When I survived that crisis, my cross-dressing behavior
disappeared," she says.
It reappeared with a vengeance when Whiteway was 26. "My marriage was
on the rocks, and I had just lost a job," Whiteway recalls. "There was a lot of
emotional turmoil in my life, and after my marriage broke up, I cross-dressed
constantly."
Whiteway now believes that if she hadn't met someone new and remarried,
the crisis might have broken down the barriers that kept her from acknowledging the female
inside, and she very likely would have transitioned then.
The next 15 or so years were spent in therapy trying to "cure"
Whiteway. In therapy, she was told cross-dressing was simply a sign of inner conflict.
"In the early '70s, no one really knew much about this subject," Whiteway
recalls. As the 18-year second marriage began to break up, Whiteway again contemplated
suicide.
"Finally," Whiteway says, "I had the miraculous good
fortune to meet a woman with whom I really clicked. She knew about my cross-dressing, and
she was supportive of me."
About this time, Whiteway heard about the gender dysphoria program at
Stanford University Hospital and worked up the nerve to call and ask for material.
"When I opened it," she recalls, "I was horrified. It had all this
information about surgery and hormones. I thought this isn't me; I just like to
cross-dress."
Whiteway finally sought help in a support group for cross-dressers. One
night, Mildred Brown was a guest. "I still didn't think I wanted to transition,"
Whiteway says. "But I thought I should talk to her some time."
It didn't happen for another six months, though. Whiteway, now in another
relationship, had begun to look for excuses to avoid sex. "When I finally realized
the problem was I didn't want to play the male role any longer, I called Millie."
Six months later, she told Brown she'd like to begin hormones. She started
taking hormones in early 1994. Beginning in 1990, Whiteway cross-dressed regularly except
for seeing clients. In 1991, she began electrolysis. "I wasn't really thinking of
transitioning," she says. The electrolysis, she says, was more to accommodate the
cross-dressing. Prior to taking the hormones, she had a tracheal shave to make her Adam's
apple less prominent.
Whiteway began the first stage of surgery, in part, to rid her body of
testosterone and thus reduce her need for high dosages of estrogen. The result, she says,
of eliminating testosterone was a much more mellow, less aggressive person. "I can
still be tough," she says, "but I don't have the aggressiveness I once
did."
By now, Whiteway's appearance was changing dramatically. "It was like
going through puberty. I was giggly like a teenage girl." Whiteway adds: "When
your body starts to develop the way you want it to, it's a wonderful feeling."
Although she still tried to hide her transition in some work situations,
she was beginning to tell selective clients about it. Her biggest fear was that she'd lose
her job with the Deputy Reserves. But, says Whiteway, Sheriff Charles Gillingham barely
blinked at the news. "He called it a 'nonissue' and asked me to draw up a letter he
could sign that would explain to my coworkers what was happening."
Whiteway only wishes the transition had been as smooth with her mother.
"She was very upset the first time she saw me in female mode, and asked me not to do
it around her." Her mother was devastated, according to Whiteway, when she agreed to
see Brown, and the therapist told her that her son was a transsexual.
"She was really sad to be losing a son," Whiteway says,
"but I told her I was still the same person, only in a different package."
Whiteway says she and her mother are now "simpatico." In fact, says
Whiteway, she gets along better with her mother--and virtually everyone she knows-- than
she ever did as a male.
Frequently transsexuals move from their communities after transitioning
and try to begin new lives, hiding from those they meet that they are transsexuals.
Not Whiteway. "Being sleuth simply means you're hiding again,"
she says. "Besides, I think people can deal with it if you're honest."
Although Whiteway is a handsome woman with the bone structure of a model,
she's quite tall, and her voice is more masculine than feminine. "I'm looking for a
way to address the puzzled looks people give me when they meet me for the first
time," she says. "I'd like to be able to tell them I'm a transsexual woman
without embarrassing them."
Although Whiteway says she's completely comfortable as a female, she
sometimes finds it as hard to believe that Melinda has always been inside her as it is to
comprehend the changes that have gone on in her life in the last five years.
Still, she says, what makes the most sense is what her therapist says:
"Millie tells me that sometimes you put a situation in a box; for some people, the
box is made of papier-mâché; for others, it's made of steel. Eventually, though, even
steel corrodes."
This article appeared in the Los Gatos Weekly-Times,
December 18, 1996.
©1996 Metro Publishing, Inc. All rights reserved
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