Monika: Do you remember the first time you saw a trans woman on TV or met one in real life that helped you realize, “That’s me!”?
Cathryn: I was aware of Christine Jorgensen while growing up. Wendy Carlos and Renée Richards both made headlines when I was in college. My generation mostly grew up thinking we were, if not the only one, then at least exceedingly rare. The trans woman character on All in the Family was more of a wake-up call, as was the trans woman regular on The John Larroquette Show - Jazzmun (aka Jazzmun Nichala Crayton), which followed the wave of daytime talk shows featuring transsexual women. I had a Betamax and recorded many of those shows, watching them over and over.
By the time I was going through what must have been my fourth Gender Identity Disorder (GID) crisis, they seemed to strike every ten to fifteen years, I had started simply being myself, relying on a beard to be gendered male. Since I had effectively lived my childhood in parallel, I skipped the usual transition from adult to teenager that many trans women experience.
Aside from my first support group meeting, the only other time in my life when someone truly triggered my awareness of being trans was shortly after we moved to India. At a party, I met a woman who was leaving for the States that same week, just as I had arrived. We spent the entire night talking. I believe she was intersex. That moment stayed with me.
Monika: Many of us feel the pressure to “pass” as women, and even after surgeries, society keeps judging us. How did you personally deal with the outside world’s expectations?
Cathryn: Apparently, despite my broad shoulders and large frame, I passed even before I transitioned. It scared the hell out of me, but it also caught my attention as someone who’s always been a social observer. Let me explain.
During my daughter’s junior year of high school, my ex decided to volunteer as a parent at Band Camp. While they were away, on a whim, I shaved off my beard. From that moment on, I no longer reliably passed as male.
At the time, I was self-employed as a cabinetmaker and kitchen designer. More than once, after I had spoken with a couple about their kitchen remodel, I noticed something strange: the wife would start using female pronouns for me, and it would completely confuse the husband when he came back later to discuss money. On several occasions, I’d be out fishing with one of my college buddies, and strangers would casually refer to me as his wife. Mind you, this was while I was still trying to present as male. It terrified me that my deepest, darkest secret might already be an open book.
And here's the kicker: when I finally transitioned, the only times I didn’t “pass” were when I was trying to. Ironic, right? I was never “pretty” or glamorous, just a middle-aged woman finally comfortable in her own skin.
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| Harvest Queen at the Nemeton of the Ways Harvest Moot. |
At one support group meeting, a well-meaning trans woman handed me a list titled "Fifty Things a Real Woman Would Never Do." I laughed out loud. She was offended until I explained that there wasn’t a single thing on that list I hadn’t personally seen a woman do. That’s when I had a realization: either I was just a woman, or I was completely crazy. And I decided, if I did it, and I was a woman, then it was, by definition, something a woman does.
One real eye-opener came when I started engaging with the lesbian circles at First UU. Another trans woman was attending at the same time, she was drop-dead gorgeous, with a flawless voice. And yet, they didn’t accept her. Eventually, I asked one of my friends why they embraced me and not her. Her answer stuck with me: “Because you’re real. She isn’t.” After that if someone complained to me about not passing, I’d reply “Bea Arthur passes, why don’t you?”
Monika: Choosing a name is such a deeply personal decision, one that can hold layers of significance and meaning. How did you come to choose the name Cathryn? Does it carry a special resonance for you, perhaps representing a part of your journey or embodying a particular feeling or aspiration?
Cathryn: From an early age, I privately called myself Cathy. When I transitioned, I formalized it to Cathryn for paperwork purposes, choosing a unique spelling so I wouldn’t be just another Catherine. It’s a Welsh variation that was quite rare at the time, though it’s become more common now. Around the time of my transition, my mother told me she’d found my baptism papers. Neither of us remembered the event, but apparently, during one of our family trips back to New England, my cousins Marty, Diane, Kathy, and I were all baptized together. I used to joke on some of the old discussion lists that the minister must have confused cousin Kathy with me! From the moment I first went online, I did so as Cathy, I never once used my dead name.
Monika: Without social media, networking must have been incredibly challenging back then. In Cathy’s Adventures in Genderland Part One, you mentioned calling around, even reaching out to a TV talk show, to find contact information for a local transgender support group. But I imagine that many of those local groups were mainly focused on crossdressers. Is that accurate?
Cathryn: Interestingly enough, one of the first social uses of DARPA, the precursor to today’s internet, was contact among closeted transsexual women. The networking source for the rest of us was trans magazines sold mostly in adult bookstores. The ads in those magazines were mostly aimed at contacts among crossdressers, but one organization, the IFGE, was for networking among those with actual gender issues. I called them.
Around the same time, I was using my first “free” month of AOL to interact with trans groups, only to discover that, since I was literally three miles too far from the AOL telephone number, I had to pay long-distance fees, which added up to a couple of hundred dollars.
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| First ritual at the Serpent Mound. Cathryn, Susan Davis, on the right, Sarah Fox, Monica Roberts. |
I switched to CompuServe because you could log on, download the conversations, compose answers and responses offline, and then log on again to upload them all at once. They had a section dedicated to trans people in the Human Sexuality Forum. It was run by a pervert, Howard, who wouldn’t let us use our trans names unless we could prove they were our legal names by sending a copy of our ID to him. Even then, we were identified as trans so some innocent porn dog wouldn’t hit on us by mistake. Of course, this actually meant every trans fan out there came after us while we were navigating to our forum to download or upload our conversations. The system was designed to slow us down when others attempted to private message us.
Monika: What was your first experience like with in-person support groups?
Cathryn: Prior to attending my first in-person support group meeting of the Crystal Club, I met Kori, a transsexual member, online via the HSF on CompuServe. I also met Sarah Fox, a mostly closeted transsexual, there as well. The Tri-Ess support groups back then rejected transsexuals, but about half the 3-D support groups around the country, including the Crystal Club, were transsexual-inclusive. We both attended our first meeting at the same time.
That first meeting I noticed the members were all gathered talking about sports and cars and such while the wives were preparing the food and cleaning up. I mostly hung out with the wives but being myself for the first time in public was such a rush and having Sarah there as well overcame any reluctance to come back.
The two of us went from newbies to running the Crystal Club in almost record time. Dr. Fox was a Ph.D. psychologist and expert on pre- and neonatal development, and we were quickly enlisted to do Trans 101 presentations at various churches and OSU as a team. We got in touch with Ohio NOW and started lobbying the Ohio legislature with them and founded It’s Time Ohio, the Ohio chapter of It’s Time America, a group advocating for trans rights.
The other primary networking available back then was e-mail lists. A hosting company would set up mail forwarding of messages to all the registered members. Most online networking went this way rather than the AOL and CompuServe models at the time. The biggest one was TransGen, run from Brown University. It leaned heavily towards transsexual-identified people and academics, and made it possible for me to do some actual statistical research on transsexuality due to its very large and active membership. Crossdressers were much more active on AOL than on e-mail lists. One of the nice things about e-mail lists was how easy it was to arrange one-to-one communications “off list.”
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| At the Harvest Moot. |
Monika: You’ve clearly been a pioneer in trans networking and community-building. But when did that shift happen from personal exploration to full-on activism? What sparked your journey into trans advocacy?
Cathryn: Networking and community building are the basis of non-ego driven activism. My senior year of high school in West Virginia, they were doing Bible readings in the morning announcements. This was AFTER the O'Hair decision. I demanded they not stop the readings, but read from the Torah, the Quran, and the Ramayana as well, and threatened a lawsuit if they did not comply. I instantly acquired three teachers as co-conspirators: the journalism teacher, the drama teacher, and the Problems of Democracy (civics) teacher. By year’s end, I had engineered a full school walkout without my fingerprints on it. My father was the head of the Job Corps office in Huntington, and this got me into the civil rights movement as a result, in a highly racist West Virginia.
My freshman year at OSU, I got involved in the anti-war movement with a vengeance. Back when I lived in India, I shared many dinner conversations with fairly high-ranking military men who happened to be my friend’s fathers. I learned firsthand that we had no business in Vietnam; we were engaged in pointless back-and-forth, and the government was totally lying about almost everything related to our involvement there. In the seventies, I started teaching a course for the Ohio State Free University on the History of Magick and Occultism, which led me to become one of three openly out Pagan spokespersons in central Ohio back then. I also did radio and television interviews and served as the occult consultant for the OSU psychology department. When my next GID crisis hit I was already online as Cathy, getting involved in trans activism was just natural.
Monika: It sounds like activism runs in your veins. Would you say you were born to be an activist?
Cathryn: I’ve always been an activist by nature, as you can see. My instincts are as an educator. Getting involved in the trans world was no exception. My first big shock was the Standards of Care of the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association, HBIGDA (later renamed WPATH). Having grown up taking responsibility for my own life decisions, it was a splash of cold water to learn that even as an adult, I was not to be “trusted” to make decisions about my own body and life!
Privately, I called HBIGDA the “penis protection program” and pointed out, from my feminist point of view, that half the world’s population was born without penises and got along fine that way. That a post-op regrettor essentially made themselves into a surgically constructed transsexual with the exact same issues as regular transsexuals, only arriving there by their own choices rather than birth condition.
Monika: Thinking back to the early days of your hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgery, which group held the keys to accessing them? Who controlled that precious gate back then?
Cathryn: The Central Ohio Gender Dysphoria group, otherwise known as Meral Crane, was the only route to hormones and surgery, or so I was told. Meral ruled over all the pre-operative transsexuals within sixty miles in every direction from Columbus, Ohio. I was handed her literature and quickly discovered that my first “legal” estrogen pill would run me about 1,400 bucks with all the requirements.
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| Meditating in the Temple. |
I found another therapist, told Sarah Fox about her, and the two of us went our own way from Meral Crane, except we kept running into her. Despite the fact that I honored the tradition of the Crystal Club by inviting her to our Christmas party (I was president by then, just a year after my first visit), I was told she had declared me “not a real transsexual” and warned those under her care to avoid me.
Within a month, Sarah and I were doing Trans 101 presentations on the same stage as her. And since we actually knew the science, we unintentionally made her look like the uneducated fool she was. She had been blackmailing women in her program to give presentations, or else have their surgery letters withheld. I called it “Meral Crane’s Traveling Troupe of Trained Transies.” Sarah and I got into activism in a big way. We organized It’s Time Ohio, lobbied the Ohio legislature alongside the president of Ohio NOW, and I started the Midwest Transsexual Alliance. We showed up for various programs, walkathons, and events as openly trans participants. I invited Leslie Feinberg and Kate Bornstein to speak at presentations at the First UU Church of Columbus, where I was now also involved with the lesbian circles. That was the wonderful fallout of being declared untouchable by the Meral Crane group: the lesbians of central Ohio welcomed me with open arms, and I totally avoided the “transition to trans” trap as a result.
END OF PART 2
All photos: courtesy of Cathryn Platine.
© 2025 - Monika Kowalska
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