Interview With Paula Ellis

What organization do you work for?

I’m with Trans-Cendence International. I’m the Vice President of our organization and I lead our Dallas chapter. Right now we are in Dallas, Fort Worth, Denton, Oklahoma City and hoping to grow further. We are a support organization for transgender people and their loved ones. Very often, we find that transgender people are abandoned by their families, and our mission is to keep families together. We give people a place to talk about their problems. Not just for transgender people, but we want their parents, and their spouses and their children included so they all have a place to talk about what they’re going through.

 

What is your message?

Transgender women really are just women. Transgender people are who we say we are. We’re not trying to fool you. We go to great effort to be authentic and to be real. The way the world perceives us when we’re younger, that’s the act, that’s not who we are.

 

What’s your personal story?

I knew I was different when I was a kid. I had a lot of issues growing up. My whole life I lived trying to think ‘what would a dude do in this situation?’ Responding the way men did was not natural to me. It was terrible. I tried to be what the world said I was. By the time I got to age 50 I couldn’t do it anymore. I was suicidal and I had anxiety and panic attacks. I ultimately tried to take my own life. I couldn’t do it anymore. That’s when I decided I had to transition. It couldn’t be worse than what I was feeling already. I could not take it anymore. Since then, for the last five years, I’ve transitioned and my life is a whole lot better now. I feel okay with myself. I’m real. It’s not like everything’s perfect, but I feel much better. My interactions with people feel real, they’re not fake, they’re not forced, I’m just me, and it’s wonderful.

 

Does that mean everything felt fake for 50 years of your life?

For the first 50 years of my life, everything was fake. I knew what I was, but it seemed impossible for me to transition. When I first thought about it I was 18 years old. That was in 1981, and it seemed impossible. It seemed like an excellent way to get myself killed here in texas back then. They were shutting down programs for transgender people then. I thought, ‘there’s just no way. I’ll just try to be what they tell me I have to be, and I guess I’ll just live that way. Who needs to be happy, right?’” And that’s what I did. In the end, I simply could not take it anymore.

 

So the transition wasn’t much of an option when you were younger?

There were transgender people back then, but I didn’t even know how to get started. I didn’t identify as a gay person, I didn’t have any connections with the gay community. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know anything about it. I just heard about it. The people I heard of were famous, or had money or seemed completely unrelatable to me. I didn’t know what to think. They told me I was immoral so I thought ‘I guess I’m just immoral.’”

 

Then what changed?

Things changed when I started my transition. I realized that I was either going to do this or die. I thought I’d probably die, to be honest, because I’d waited so long and I felt so miserable. I realized I would try this and if it was better then I wouldn’t kill myself. As I transitioned, I learned lots of stuff. I learned about myself, I learned about people that were different than me. People of different races or religions or sexual orientations. I’d lived in a little bubble. I realized when they lied to me about what my gender and what I was that maybe there were a lot of other things they were lying to me about.

 

When you transitioned did people shut you out of their lives?

Some people hung with me. My mother and my sister and my step-father have been great. I was married at the time I started, I’ve been married 17 years. My marriage more or less ended the day I came out to my wife. We still barely speak. She wants nothing to do with me. I lost most of my friends and a lot of professional colleagues. I’ve made lot’s more friends. My facebook was sad when I started transitioning. I had maybe 25 people I was friended to on facebook. It’s not really a numbers contest, but I’m friends with over 1300 people now. I interact with a lot of them. My life is totally different now. I’m way more positive and outgoing. When I was younger, I was terrified of speaking in front of people or being in front of people. It just felt so forced and unnatural. I love public speaking now. It’s something I would have never imagined before.

 

Would you like to add anything else?

The department of health and human services wants to give doctors a pass to deny reproductive care and discriminate against LGBT people for religious reasons. I can tell you what that’s like. As a transgender person, we face a lot of discrimination in health care already. DFW is a huge city, and there are only a handful of doctors that provide healthcare for transgender people. Frequently, we are told, even for routine medical care, that ‘we don’t really know how to treat transgender people,’ as if we have green blood or alien DNA, like we’re not human beings. What they’re going to do with this part of the Health and Human Services is make it even easier for doctors and medical people to discriminate against other people. That’s just wrong, and it will kill a lot of people. I know many transgender people that have died because of this. Or worse than death. There’s worse than death. If you’re incapacitated for the rest of your life, death might look pretty good at some point. That happens to people because they can’t get medical care. People think about religious freedom, but a founding principle of medicine is that doctors should treat others without prejudice, and they should treated them based on standards of medical care based on science. This is a foundation of medicine. What these people are proposing is to let doctors practice not medicine but bigotry. That’s just so horrible about what they’re proposing.