Monika: Anne Marie Graham is my lovely guest today. Anne is an American author, and Vietnam Veteran serving in the U. S. Navy on a nuclear submarine. She transitioned her gender in mid-life while in a senior role for a major corporation. She had a professional career in both genders in the semiconductor and solar industries. She is happily married and retired where people who love mountains and wish to avoid Oregon’s famous rain reside. She has just published her memoir “Tall Annie: A Life in Two Genders”. Hello Anne! Thank you for accepting my invitation!
Anne: Thank you, Monika. I appreciate the opportunity to chat with you.
Monika: Before we touch upon your career, let me start with congratulations. In a couple of weeks, you are going to celebrate the 20th anniversary of your marriage! All the best to you! How will you celebrate it?
Anne: My husband and I have a tradition by now of not exchanging gifts for occasions. We give each other ‘experiences’ instead. This occasion involved a 2-day stay at a historic hotel in our downtown and a balloon ride over our hometown in the frigid weather. He may only get partial points for this experience as the balloon ride got canceled at the last minute.
Monika: How did you meet your future husband? Was it love at first sight?
Anne: Ah, well… after I discovered the horrors of online dating sites, my dear sister introduced me electronically to a man she had gone to high school with. They had reconnected at a high school reunion and become friends again. Frank and I, having both had previous marriages, spent 3 months exchanging emails that explored each other’s lives and values. We knew we would enjoy getting together, so I finally challenged him to “come and visit me, darn it!” He drove 600 miles to my home and, yes, when we finally saw each other it was love at first sight. I mean that literally. There is an unconscious biochemical reaction in the brain when your subconscious knows this one is the right one. We both felt that upon that first meeting.
Monika: How romantic! As for online dating sites, I had my ups and downs with dates. For me, there was always a dilemma of whether to admit upfront that I am a transgender woman or reveal it after a couple of dates. Which option did you choose?
Anne: I tried both ways and both ways are very difficult. When I was honest about my background, I was besieged by men who wanted to have sex on the first date… or men who just wanted to see a real T-girl for bragging rights. Mostly the men I did give a try on a single date had significant flaws in their personalities which argued against a second date.
As I was quite good-looking in those early days (ah, hormones) I decided I could try holding off on revealing my background. I revised my profile and was approached by a very classy man who took me out to a fancy restaurant. We had just entered our dinner orders when I shared my background with him and he reacted violently by nearly flipping the table in his haste to leave. I wrote about this in my book and it convinced me to withdraw from online dating entirely. It was only a few weeks later when my sweet sister introduced me to my future husband.
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| "As I was quite good-looking in those early days (ah, hormones) I decided I could try holding off on revealing my background." |
Monika: Did you have a happy childhood?
Anne: I had a fairly ordinary childhood consistent with the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. There were no words or acceptance of gender-diverse expressions and I was ‘groomed’ into understanding how to present male. My father was a controlling and religious bigot and made life hard for me. My mother clearly loved me and that compensated for the poor male model. They divorced when I was 11 and this made daily life so much easier!
Monika: Did your mother live to the day when she could see you as a woman?
Anne: Alas, no. In spite of being an RN and a nursing educator, my mother was a chain smoker and refused to acknowledge the health problems it caused her. She passed from a stroke about 3 years before I began my transition. I see her often in the mirror when I look at myself and I am very cognizant of the deep effect her life model had on my development.
Monika: The war in Vietnam was the place of many heroic acts but it was also a very traumatic experience for many young Americans. Did you volunteer to join the navy?
Anne: Yes I volunteered. If not, I would have shortly been drafted into the US Army to carry a rifle in Vietnam which I did NOT want to do. I enlisted in the Naval Nuclear Power program for 6 years to get several years of college-level education. The education, discipline, and experience I got in the Navy were the basis of my future career and I am deeply grateful for that experience.
Monika: When I was much younger, I had a boyfriend who used to serve on a submarine and he was short. He used to tell me that a submarine is not a friendly place for tall people.
Anne: LOL. That is a myth at least in modern submarines. I am 6’ 3” and was of average height on board. Everyone quickly learns when to duck and how to dive through a watertight hatch and it becomes second nature.
Monika: After the Navy, you had an illustrious career as an engineer.
Anne: I suppose that is the word. My degree earned after the Navy was in mathematics but my first employment relied on the Navy experience. That firm called me an Industrial Engineer and I was ever after called “engineer’ in some fashion. I rose to manage engineering groups and finally used a long familiarity with the facilities side of semiconductor plants to be recruited to Intel’s corporate factory design group. There I led design efforts for Intel in a true meritocracy environment. If you could do the work, Intel would put you in the role to do it. A highlight of my career near the end was spending two years with my husband in China leading the design of a factory for Intel to be built there.
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| "I knew that my connection with this wonderful life partner could have only happened with the life history I had lived." |
Anne: That word certainly could apply. I would say I did not run away from my feminine side as much as I resisted the grooming towards maleness and hid my feminine side. That was necessary in my generation in order to not be cruelly abused at school. I had no instinct or design to compete physically with males in sporting ways and kept to myself around guys.
Monika: 20 years ago, dressed in a beautiful pristine white dress, feeling beautiful and loved, being finally your real self, and pledging to be a wife to the man you love, did you feel regret over why it took you so long to be a woman and what price you paid for this or sheer happiness that you can finally be yourself?
Anne: I did not regret anything. I knew that my connection with this wonderful life partner could have only happened with the life history I had lived. I did cry tears of joy that I could be in a position to commit to a life with him, but that is a feeling any woman who marries for love will understand.
Monika: Why did you choose Anne for your name?
Anne: Long before my older sister introduced me to my future husband, she had been my only relative who supported my early explorations of living as a woman. Prior to my transition, I traveled for Intel many times to her area and would stay the night with her. She and I would then go out on the town in Portland, Oregon as two women. We did restaurants, movies, plays, and operas. She was vital to my gaining self-confidence that I could, indeed, make this change even in mid-life. I took her middle name as my first name to honor her.
Monika: Did your sister accept your womanhood immediately? How did she help you to gain self-confidence?
Anne: My sister never once offered any resistance to the idea that I could live as a woman. As I shared my inner feelings with her on one of my trips, she immediately suggested that I could bring some of my femme things on my next trip and we could go out. She was and is a constant supporter. After all these years it is simply the case that I am her sister.
Monika: We all pay the highest price for the fulfillment of our dreams to be ourselves. As a result, we lose our families, friends, jobs, and social positions. Did you pay such a high price as well? What was the hardest thing about your coming out?
Anne: Ah yes, well, I paid that price in the loss of regard from two people that I loved and still love. My spouse at the time was adamantly opposed to the idea that we could continue together as two women and she quite angrily divorced me. My older son at age nineteen years went before a judge to change his name to remove a middle and last name that would connect him with me. That news rocked me to my core and brought me the closest to suicide I have ever been. I have worked hard to maintain contact and show caring to them because my transition did not change my inner caring for them in spite of the changed feelings they carry.
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| Local TV Interview - Available via YouTube. |
Anne: Yes. I was deeply closeted. Interestingly, my older son mentioned above had come out to us as gay two years earlier and we simply put our arms around him and showed him complete acceptance. My coming out, and a long painful time in our lives, was triggered by his shock at seeing me quickly buttoning my guy shirt over a black bra I was wearing underneath.
My younger son at age fourteen never seemed to bat an eye at all that was going on around him. We have retained deep caring and that has been a rock of support I have clung to many times.
Monika: We are said to be prisoners of passing or non-passing syndrome. Although cosmetic surgeries help to overcome it, we will always be judged accordingly. How can we cope with this?
Anne: My own experience says that one should do what they can to minimize a presentation that would draw attention. I had some minimal surgery on my face and adam’s apple and wore a short-hair wig for my first few years. I dressed professionally and did not try to ‘act’ more feminine in my high-pressure work environment as I transitioned on the job at Intel Corp. To have shown weakness or a suddenly ‘second class’ attitude would have been fatal to my career.
Also now after twenty-six years, I have learned that it takes something quite dramatically unusual to draw someone’s attention to you. If your goal is to blend in, and you try to conform to most other women of your gender, you will not catch a critical eye. If I did ever catch a critical eye, I simply ignored it and went on with whatever I was doing. If you blush or catch the person’s eye for too long, or look scared, that is when folks find confirmation in what they suspect they are seeing. The lesson is to truly ignore them.
Monika: Do you remember the first time you saw a transgender woman on TV or met anyone transgender in person that opened your eyes and allowed you to realize who you are?
Anne: I have no memory of ever seeing a transgender woman in the limited media options of my generation. My inner eye was always open to the fact that I craved to be female and did not need an external trigger. I do recall quite vividly reading a newspaper in 1974 while working for the Navy on the east coast, that ran an article about a surgery performed nearby that had ‘turned a man into a woman”.
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| Available via Amazon. |
There is much more to this story, of course, if I may refer readers to my webpage and my book at tallannie.com.
In 1996, I discovered the existence of an internet chat room for “transsexuals”, which opened my eyes to the fact that people were making successful transitions. It also taught me that there was a medical protocol, the precursor to WPATH, that would be professionally medically respected and could help someone manage their feelings and possible transition. I, once again, ran to a therapist trained in that protocol and said, “Let’s talk!”
This discovery brought on significant gender dysphoria and led to the break up of my marriage as it became clear that I could live a professional respectable life as a woman.
END OF PART 1
All photos: courtesy of Anne Marie Graham.
© 2023 - Monika Kowalska
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