Kathryn Camfield is a blogger, writer, former radio announcer, and transgender ally from Reno, Nevada. An experienced crossdresser since 1957, Kathryn began living and working as a woman in 1998, finding the freedom to express her feminine side with the loving support of her wife, Cindy. After decades of hiding this part of herself, she finally found someone who accepted her exactly as she was. Kathryn spent approximately 34 years working as a radio announcer in several American states, while also pursuing her passion for writing. She has published mystery novels and a nonfiction book about writing, and taught thousands of students how to write their first novels through America Online.
Her forthcoming book, Your Gender: Your Choice!, draws on her personal experiences to encourage crossdressers and others under the transgender umbrella to overcome shame, embrace their individuality, and stand up for their rights. As a passionate transgender ally, Kathryn believes that trans women, trans men, and crossdressers must support one another in the struggle for acceptance and equality. In our interview, she shares her remarkable life story, her relationship with Cindy, her views on transgender representation in the media, and her hopes for the future of transgender rights.
Monika: Kathryn, welcome! It is a pleasure and an honor to host a fellow blogger on my site.
Kathryn: Hi Monika, and thanks for your interest in me.
Monika: To begin, tell us a few words about yourself.
Kathryn: A few words? I laugh because my wife Cindy would be saying “be careful what you wish for.” Anyhow, I’m a transgender ally. An experienced crossdresser since 1957, I have lived and worked as a woman, on and off, since 1998. I reside in Reno, NV, with my wife, Cindy. I was a radio announcer for about 34 years in Ohio, Michigan, Texas, and Florida. In addition, I have written four published books, and I taught people how to write books on America Online for seven years. I have played guitar, bass guitar, and djembe (a hand drum), and I have worked on various computers since 1986.
Monika: You mentioned working as a woman since you came out. Where did that path take you professionally?
Kathryn: Since I came out in 1998, I have worked as a woman. First (1998–2005), as office manager and workshop coordinator for Mark Allison Acting Workshops in Pasadena, California. Secondly (2005–2013), as supervisor of store operations for Las Vegas HQ, a chain of souvenir shops in four Las Vegas casinos (Tropicana, MGM Grand, New York New York, Excalibur).
Monika: How would you describe life in Reno these days?
Kathryn: We moved to Reno, NV, in March 2013. Cindy is a nanny, caring for four babies for three different families. I am semi-retired, writing my books from my home office and occasionally teaching other seniors like myself how to ballroom dance. (I used to teach at Fred Astaire studios in the 80s.)
Monika: Have you ever considered living full-time as a woman, rather than on and off?
Kathryn: I spent five months in 2011 discussing that with Sandi, my VA psychologist, and we finally decided that I have been a cross-dreamer (one who dreams of being a woman) but that I am not actually a trans woman. We decided that, since I have a supportive wife, have successfully lived and worked as a woman, and because I cannot afford either hormones or the operation and am now 68 years old, I should just let well enough alone. Going through the physical transition at this age would really not improve my life more than it is, so I am channeling my efforts into supporting the trans women who KNOW they are women trapped in… well, you know.
Monika: Your time in the US Navy ended when you were booted for dressing in women’s clothes. Tell me what happened.
Kathryn: Yeah, horrible, isn’t it? (Yes, I am being sarcastic.) I had been dressing on weekends from 1957, through high school and college, until 1969, when I enlisted to avoid being drafted and sent to Southeast Asia. Luckily, I was sent to Southwest Texas instead. In the Navy, I learned to really write, and I edited the weekly base newspaper. My experience in college radio gave me the opportunity to work off-base, nights, at radio station KSIX in Corpus Christi (40 miles from Kingsville). Then, in 1971, I had the only run-in with the law I have ever had.
Monika: You mentioned a run-in with the law in 1971. What happened?
Kathryn: I had secretly acquired some women’s clothes which I wore during my 7pm to midnight radio job, since no one was ever there. One night, I kept the clothes on while I drove home to Kingsville. I checked my post office box and came out the door to what looked like the entire Kingsville Police Department, guns drawn and lights flashing. I guess no one had ever gone into the Kingsville Post Office at one in the morning. They did their best to embarrass me while waiting for the Shore Patrol to pick me up. Fingerprinted me. Took pictures of me. Inventoried my clothes. Called in other officers to see me.
Monika: How did things unfold once you were back on the base?
Kathryn: Back on the base, the Patrol let me sleep on a bench in the waiting room until the staff psychologist showed up. He asked me if I was gay. I said, “No.” He asked me if I had ever attempted to have sex with other men. I said, “Yuck. Never.” He looked through his Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Then he inquired again if I was gay. I said, “Not only do I not love men, I hate men.” Three weeks later, I was drummed out of the U.S. Navy with an Honorable Discharge under “general conditions.” That meant, in the event of war, I would be a hostage. No, actually, it meant I could never enlist again.
|
| Cindy and Kathy Camfield backstage on the TV show To Tell the Truth, 2000. |
Monika: You married three times while trying to become a man. Start with the first marriage.
Kathryn: It’s true. I got married in Lansing, Michigan, in 1972. I was 25, and I told her about my crossdressing. She thought my dressing as a woman was fun. After we were married, not so much. She sought a real man. She found him. We agreed to an amicable divorce, and I moved to Sarasota, FL, in 1975. For the next nine years, I worked as a creative director of an advertising agency, dressed on weekends, and dated a bunch of different girls, not becoming close to any of them because I didn’t want to share my deep, dark secret. Suddenly, on May 15, 1984, my dear Aunt Audrey died from a ruptured brain aneurysm. Just like that, the only woman I had ever loved, the sweet lady who had raised me in the absence of my mother from the time I was eleven, was irreversibly gone.
Monika: Losing your Aunt Audrey must have been a terrible blow.
Kathryn: Yes, I went into a yearlong decline. I gave my female clothes to Goodwill. I swore this time I would shake my horrible abnormality for good. Ridiculously, I decided it was my fault that Audrey died. If I had not wanted to be a woman, she’d still be alive. At this point in my life, I couldn’t figure out who I really was or how I had become so screwed up. I was consumed with guilt. I took a friend’s gun in order to kill myself. However, I was too scared to do it. I began to think that the only way to combat my desire to be a woman was to force myself to be a normal man. Then, at this crucial, confused, desperate time in my life, I made a most significant, nearly overwhelming mistake.
I got married again.
Monika: Did you tell your second wife about your secret?
Kathryn: I decided not to tell my second wife about my horrible secret, and for a few years, I tried to be a man. But, after a six-month-long bout with lymph node cancer and a successful five-hour operation in 1986, I had become acquainted with my own mortality. I made some choices that my wife did not accept. I decided to start writing books, and I began working from midnight to six at a local automated radio station, just for the money. This simply demonstrated what we already knew: our marriage was in name only. We were two people living in a house with five cats and a mortgage. Two people who rarely saw each other.
Monika: How did that marriage come to an end?
Kathryn: I hid my clothes and dressed at the radio station because no one was ever there. (Sound familiar?) Occasionally, I’d dress at home when she was not around. But after 12 years of marriage, she finally caught me. Although she absolutely refused to discuss the problem, she decided that I was sick and depraved. She divorced me but kept the house and our five cats.
Monika: Where did life take you after that divorce?
Kathryn: Well, I was fifty-two years old, consumed by my desire to be a woman but still wanting to love a woman and have a life. Twice divorced with no family and precious few friends. One thing that had kept me going was that, since 1993, I had been working for the America Online Campus. Two early evenings a week, I had been teaching students whom I had never met, in states I had never visited, how to write their first novel. Three of my own novels had been published in 1990, which is what had attracted AOL.
Monika: Tell me more about those online classes.
Kathryn: We did the classes via the early form of chat rooms and with text libraries and e-mail. My classes had become very popular. When I stopped teaching in the winter of 2000, AOL told me that I had taught 4,735 students in seven years. Notably, the novels I had written featured a female main character (protagonist) named Veronica Slate. Interviewers asked, “Why did you choose to write from a woman’s viewpoint?” I told them that I like women. In fact, I love women. What I did not have the courage to say was that “I wanted to be a woman.” But writing the Veronica Slate novels from the viewpoint of a woman kept me sane.
Monika: Everything changed when you met Cindy. How did it happen?
Kathryn: Yes, indeed. In 1997, I established a long-distance relationship with a California middle school English teacher who was taking my writing classes. Soon we struck up what became a year-long daily e-mail correspondence. Cindy Petersen had recently divorced her husband after 25 years because he carried on an extended affair with a girl half her age. Cindy found out about it by opening the phone bill. Her two children were grown: one a high school assistant principal, the other a nurse. We both had no siblings, we both had no dads (her dad had died young), we both loved old movies and reading books, and we were both Virgos, just two years and two days apart. I was born on August 27, 1946, and Cindy on August 29, 1948.
Monika: After a year of daily emails, what was it like to finally meet face to face?
Kathryn: After a year of daily emails and late night chat room sessions, we finally met in person in February 1998, when Cindy flew to Florida to see me teach at a writer’s conference. Inside of 24 hours, we both knew we had finally found our soul mates. I was as sure as the day is long that this was my last chance at happiness. Thirty days later, I drove my purple Saturn, packed with some meager possessions and my computer, across the country. We moved in together in Pasadena, and I did something I never thought I would ever do again.
Monika: You said you did something you never thought you would do again. What was it?
Kathryn: Because of the deceitful nature of our exes, we had agreed when we got together that we would have no secrets, that we would tell each other everything. I admitted that I had wanted to be a woman my whole life. As one would anticipate, she asked me if I felt I was a woman trapped in a man’s body. I said no. All I really wanted was to dress like a woman without having to hide.
|
| In Reno, NV, USA. |
Monika: Cindy’s reaction to your feminine side must have meant a great deal. How did she respond?
Kathryn: As my Danish friends called it, I was a cross-dreamer. Since Cindy is a Danish-American, she immediately got it. The clever girl that Cindy is, she researched transgender topics on the internet, joined an online support group for transgender wives, and bought me a dress. I could scarcely believe it. Someone finally got me and apparently loved me in spite of myself.
Actually, as Cindy told me, “Many of the things I love about you are what some people would consider feminine traits: your consideration, your warmth, and the fact that you are not competitive or mean.” “I love that I can talk to you about anything, that you actually care about what I think, that you are gentle and kind. You make me feel beautiful and adored. Besides being in love, we are good friends, as well.” As if she needed to, she concluded, “I love you exactly as you are.” We’ve been together for sixteen years.
Monika: Tell me about your writing, including your forthcoming nonfiction book, “Your Gender: Your Choice!”, due out in paperback in 2015.
Kathryn: Writing under a pseudonym (Lary Crews), I wrote 3 published mystery novels. The first two, Kill Cue and Extreme Close-up, were republished and are still available in trade paperback from Amazon. My 3rd novel, Option To Die, is out of print. I wrote a nonfiction book on writing called Novel Secrets, also out of print but occasionally found on eBay.
Monika: What led you to write your new book?
Kathryn: My second non-fiction book, Your Gender: Your Choice!, will be out in paperback in early 2015. Its main reason for existing is best expressed by the subtitle: “For the first time in your life, finally be who you really are.” Cindy had always told me that I should tell other crossdressers not to be ashamed of who they are.
Monika: What can readers expect to find inside?
Kathryn: Using my life story as a matrix, I explain to everyone under the “transgender umbrella” how they can fight for their rights, how they can be proud of the unique individuals they are, and how they can learn to be happy no matter what gender they are. I’ll also include information about how others can be transgender allies like myself.
Monika: Where do transgender women stand in American society today?
Kathryn: Right now, I’m watching the rest of the world begin to understand the trans community that has become my home, and it is incredibly exciting. Time magazine called this the “new civil rights frontier.” After all, the cultural Right Wing has largely lost the argument against homosexuality. Those who argue against gay marriage and gay adoption are increasingly at odds with social norms, and the pseudo-religious homophobia that was common sounds more and more bigoted.
Monika: Is the opposition to the trans community fading as well?
Kathryn: However, the Right Wing still feels the need to police gender. If they can no longer call gay people sinful and expect to be taken seriously, someone else has to be the scapegoat, the “other” against which “normality” is defined. Guess who is the new target? Yep, us. The time is here when everyone who believes in equality and social justice must decide where they stand on the issue of trans rights, whether that be the right to equal opportunities at work, or simply the right to walk down the street dressed in a way that makes you comfortable. If we believe in social justice, we must support our own trans community as it makes its way proudly into the mainstream.
Monika: Who are the transgender role models you look up to?
Kathryn: The role models I follow are varied. Top on the list is Kimi Cole, President at Nevada Stonewall Democratic Caucus and a founding member of the Transgender Allies Group (TAG) here in Reno. Cole, 59, transitioned five years ago, and she is a real mover and shaker in the trans world. In addition, TAG President Brock Maylath is a wonderful man who accepted me with open arms and immediately put me to work speaking at our annual open house this week. Among the role models whom I don’t see every week are Eddie Izzard, the famous “executive transvestite” comedian and actor, and Kristin Beck, the ex-Seal whose documentary was on CNN recently.
Monika: Looking back, what was the hardest part of coming out for you?
Kathryn: Coming out was remarkably easy for me in 1998 because of Cindy’s support. Perhaps because of my “secret,” I have never been good at making friends, so there were few people to be told about my new status. I have no children, and Cindy has two grown children who are lost in their own world and only tangentially interested in their stepdad. My mother and stepfather, who are now divorced, do not speak to me at all and haven’t since 1998. I have no other family. The only difficult thing about my coming out as a crossdresser living as a woman is my perceived feeling that trans women look down on me because I am ONLY a crossdresser. That’s one reason the book I am writing is so important to me: I want them to know that I am tirelessly on their side.
Monika: How do you feel about the way transgender stories and characters have been portrayed in films, newspapers, and books so far?
Kathryn: I cringe every time someone like Venus Van Dam, the transgender prostitute, shows up on Sons of Anarchy. It’s enough that Venus is played by a man, but his “breast body suit” makes him even more ridiculous. Although transgender characters have appeared in such films as The World According to Garp, Second Serve, Boys Don’t Cry, Normal, and Transamerica, it was not until the TV show Dirty Sexy Money in 2007 that a real transgender actress played a transgender character: Candis Cayne as Carmelita. Now, of course, transgender actress Laverne Cox plays Sophia, a transgender inmate in Orange Is the New Black.
Monika: Transparent has stirred debate because Jeffrey Tambor, a cisgender actor, plays a transitioning character. Where do you stand?
Kathryn: Although some trans people are upset that cisgender man Jeffrey Tambor plays Mort, who is transitioning to Maura, on Transparent, I do not agree. He is perfect for the part of a cisgender man who becomes a trans woman because he is a cisgender man and a great actor.
Monika: How might his performance shape the way mainstream audiences see trans women?
Kathryn: Tambor will likely make America understand trans women much more readily than the glamorous Laverne Cox has. Most trans women who come out later in life are not as sexy and hot as Cox is. Unlike Cox, most of us are not, without effort, conventionally beautiful.
END OF PART 1
All the photos: courtesy of Kathryn Camfield.
© 2014 - Monika Kowalska
