Monika: I get the sense that, perhaps subconsciously, you were searching for someone you could truly confide in,
which led you to Sister Mary Elizabeth. Was it her faith, her personality, or the trust she inspired in you that
made you choose her as the person to come out to?
Jennifer: She was just nice. At the time. She was an art teacher and believed in my artistic ability, even helping
me sell my first artwork. She acted in every way like a person, perhaps the first in my life, who could be trusted.
She insisted I could tell her anything.
I was not raised with any religion, so her status as a nun meant nothing to me. Likewise, at that time, I had no
real understanding of how Catholicism worked or what it claimed to believe.
So when I went to visit her, after realizing my need to transition, and told her of my proud achievement of
self-realization, I was utterly unprepared for her response. Instantly, her kind face became a mask of rage as she
demanded that I commit suicide immediately. Yes, I would burn forever in hell, of course, but my removal from life
would supposedly protect the world from the “spiritual contamination” of my physical existence.
Monika: That betrayal sounds devastating. How did that moment shape your feelings about religion and spiritual
authority afterward?
Jennifer: In my entire life, I have never met a nun who was not a complete monster. It must be something in the
Putrid Nun Chow they serve in convents.
I should be clear that I have no time and zero respect for any organized religion on this Earth. Every religion is a
scam, run by charlatans who create power and wealth through fear and guilt rather than through open violence,
although they are perfectly willing to turn to bloodshed when convenient.
Every religion ultimately tells you that your soul could be destroyed at any moment, so you need insurance, which
they conveniently provide. The fee is your belief, your obedience, and a portion of your wealth forever. Religion is
an evil scam, and it can only produce insanity and suffering. I despise it, and I despise those pushers who make
spiritual junkies of the innocent by preying on pain, fear, and longing for relief from earthly misery.
Religion is a lie told by grifters to accomplish with stories what governments accomplish with bombs. Religion, like
masturbation, should be kept absolutely private and done alone in the dark.
Monika: Did reading Jan Morris’s
Conundrum
mark a turning point for you, a moment when language and lived experience finally aligned?
Jennifer: It was a big deal for me. You have to understand that in 1980 there was no internet, and very few
resources. If I wanted to find a book on transsexuality, I had to go to the Stanford library or to some other
medical or research institution. While Morris’s book did not “crack my egg”, as they say, it did offer me one
crucial thing. It showed me that my goal was attainable, and roughly how to go about it. It was just enough
information for me to work out the details myself, and I did.
I now knew that I needed doctors, one to prescribe hormones, a psychiatrist to provide legal permission for bottom
surgery, and of course, a surgeon to perform it. That book gave me a plan, or at least the foundation of one, and at
the time it gave me hope. Hope that I could actually fix my deformed flesh and make it fit my identity. It was the
thing I needed in the moment I needed something, anything, to give me just that.
Monika: What was the moment that actually shattered the last barrier, the experience that forced everything into
the open?
Jennifer: The moment that truly cracked my egg was seeing
The Rocky Horror Picture Show
for the first time in 1980. In those days, it was not a joke. In the San Francisco of that era, it was experienced
in the way I imagine people experience megachurches. It was, in effect, a religious experience. The feeling was
reverence.
In that theater cathedral, the scene where Frank jumps into the pool and sings “Don’t Dream It, Be It” made me cry.
I had no idea why, but that scene alone haunted and taunted me for weeks. It hurt so badly that it led to my suicide
attempt, and to my awakening to everything my brain had been hiding from me for the sake of survival.
The very next day, I began making the calls to start my transition. I had nothing left to lose, so I might as well
try to become myself fully. The alternative, I had learned, led directly to the grave. That same next day, I
stumbled upon the Jan Morris book, which is how I knew what sort of calls to make. Everything came together very
rapidly once things began for me.
Monika: I read
Conundrum
much later, in a very different time, and I was struck by its honesty. I was so dysphoric that transition felt
like the only lifeline, and I didn’t have much to lose in terms of career or money. Jan Morris, on the other hand,
had everything, success, stability, fame, and she still chose to transition. Does her story speak to how powerless
we can be in the face of dysphoria, no matter what we stand to lose?
Jennifer: It spoke to me. I transitioned not because I wanted to, not because I thought I would have much of a
future, and not because I believed it would make me happy. I transitioned because the gender dysphoria I felt was so
painful, so agonizing, that death was preferable.
I transitioned because it hurt too much not to. I did so while fighting a massive amount of terror, shame,
self-loathing, and certainty that not only would I fail, but that it would all end in my death anyway. I did it for
a chance, however small, of being able to live without pain, even briefly. It would not have mattered how much I had
to lose. Nothing in the world mattered more in that moment when I turned from suicide toward attempting transition.
Monika: Your experience sounds less like a personal preference and more like a matter of survival, something
unavoidable rather than chosen.
Jennifer: Not every trans person experiences dysphoria as intensely as I did. I was almost a textbook case,
desperate beyond comprehension. Some trans people find their dysphoria almost tolerable. I once met a trans woman
who transitioned at age fifty simply to experience what she called “the other side of life”. She claimed she had no
dysphoria at all, only curiosity and a desire to experience everything fully.
|
| In 1982, just a month before her surgery. |
Jennifer: It means that there are countless reasons for transitioning, and that extreme gatekeeping is very likely
deeply wrong. Yes, there are documented cases of psychosis in which a patient views transition as a means of
escaping mental illness, but I would argue these cases are vanishingly rare compared to the vast number of people
who would benefit from the freedom to transition for their own reasons.
Those reasons may include motivations that current medical and psychiatric science does not yet recognize. Much of
the gatekeeping around transition seems far more about maintaining outdated social norms than about protecting
people from making irreversible decisions about their bodies. I transitioned because I had no choice. But mine is
not the only trans story, and not every trans person should be required to suffer as much as I did in order to
qualify for the right to transition. This is fundamentally an issue of bodily autonomy. I strongly believe in the
inalienable right to fully own one’s own body, and one’s own life.
Monika: In 1981, San Francisco’s gay community was thriving and shaping much of the city’s culture. What about the
transgender community at that time?
Jennifer: The transgender community in 80’s San Francisco was underground, even among the gay community. We were not
liked by gay men, after all, a trans woman was the opposite of everything they liked, and a trans man was
unthinkable. Trans people were a subculture subset of a subculture, the bottom of the barrel of human exclusion.
Monika: Do you remember the first trans women you encountered in person?
Jennifer: The first trans woman I ever met was a sex worker who my psychiatrist sent me to meet, possibly to scare
me off my quest. She was ruthless and avaricious. The second lived within the invisible street culture of San
Francisco in the 80’s, a second civilization hidden from the view of the city most people knew. It had its own laws,
its own justice, and its own citizenry, all living in the shadows. She was beautiful, young, and either insane or
playing a desperate game of pretend. She constantly wore a false pregnancy belly, and everyone treated her like an
Emperor Norton of sorts, we all went along with her fantasy of being perpetually pregnant.
Monika: What other forms of survival did you witness among trans people then?
Jennifer: After that, I met many other trans people, trans women and trans men both, and there were countless ways
of surviving and trying to live something not entirely unlike an authentic life outside the bounds of ordinary
society. I met trans women who resorted to tabletop kitchen surgery because, in poverty, something had to be done,
and they did it for each other. Somehow, some of them survived. I also heard about those who did not. Despair is the
mother of unconventional solutions.
Monika: How did the wider culture treat trans people during that period?
Jennifer: In the 80’s, cis culture was not quite as vile or hateful toward trans people as it is now. It was bad,
but not as murdery or cruel. Some cis people actually tried to be supportive and encouraging, though others
literally spit in my face as I rode the bus to work. Almost uniformly, gay men were rude and dismissive. They had a
strange dislike for trans women in San Francisco at the time, though there were exceptions.
Monika: Was there anyone who stood out as an exception, someone who truly supported you?
Jennifer: One big exception was a very young gay runaway boy who called himself Robin. I sheltered him for about a
year. He was perhaps the most flamboyant person I have ever met, but also tough and street-wise, and he kept me
mostly from blundering into trouble. His father had tried to kill him with an axe, so he fled the South and ended up
in San Francisco. I helped rescue him from sex slavery, there was a huge market in runaway boys, and he needed a
place to stay afterward. I was dirt poor, living in a one-room hovel, but turning him back onto the street was
unthinkable.
Robin was utterly supportive of me and encouraged me in every way. He was the person who finally forced me to give
up boymoding and live full-time as a woman. He locked me out of my own apartment after I had showered, leaving only
feminine clothing inside. I could go to my appointment naked or dressed as a woman. He allowed no other choice. He
knew that once I faced the world properly dressed, I could never go back. He was right. While I was gone, he threw
out every piece of my remaining boywear. It was girl or die from then on. Robin was an angel of light in a very dark
place and time.
Monika: At that time, you often met trans women who were struggling just to survive. Did you ever meet trans women
who were settled in their lives, successful in their careers or relationships, and able to show you that a stable,
fulfilling future was actually possible?
Jennifer: Not while I was still in San Francisco. Later, while enduring the so-called Real Life Test to earn
permission for bottom surgery, I met many highly successful trans women.
I met my first example of lesbian trans women in a long-term partnership. One of them was a highly successful
computer chip architecture designer. Another friend was a solar physicist at NASA who studied coronal physics. Yet
another was a radio engineer.
That engineer was Sandi Woodruff. She became my partner and the foundation of my polyamorous family for over four
decades. She recently passed away.
These women completely reshaped my understanding of what was possible after transition. They showed me that a trans
woman could have a genuinely good and successful life, and that the stories of inevitable misery and regret were
oppressive lies that served only the dominant, bigoted culture.
 |
| Her whole family in 1987 at a restaurant for Stephen and her birthday, they share the same day. |
Monika: You refer to the street subculture as an ecosystem, one that also includes predators you call “Transie
Hawks”. What was it like to encounter that kind of danger?
Jennifer: I was utterly naive. Before I even understood what had happened, a man was living in my apartment and
asking to use my money. It happened almost overnight. When Robin returned from one of his boyfriend visits, he
immediately recognized what was going on and told me I had been targeted by what the street called a “Trannie Hawk”.
These were gay or bisexual predators who deliberately infiltrated the lives of vulnerable trans girls in order to
drain any money they had saved for surgery.
Monika: How did you get out of that situation?
Jennifer: Robin, despite being only sixteen, was deeply experienced in street culture. He called in favors I never
learned the details of, and the predator was removed from my life permanently, without reprisals. Apparently,
reprisals could be violent. In that sense, Robin may have saved my life.
Monika: Did that experience change your faith in people?
Jennifer: That experience taught me that monsters exist even among the marginalized. Like the child I still was
inside, I had believed that people rejected by society would naturally band together for mutual good. It was naive
and idealistic. That was me in 1981. The reality is that humans are humans. They prey on one another regardless of
class or position. The desperate are no less capable of cruelty than the wealthy and powerful. Most people are
selfish and harmful, but a small number are genuinely good. I have watched this pattern repeat itself throughout my
sixty-six years. Over time, I learned to pay attention, to recognize warning signs, and to distinguish, at least
somewhat, the decent from the dangerous.
Monika: Once you were able to see doctors and start taking estrogen again, you were living on difficult, low-paid
jobs. Yet you describe that time as one of the happiest periods of your life. What made that chapter feel so
special?
Jennifer: Two things, hope, clearly, and transformation. Estrogen hit me instantly and very powerfully. I could
taste it in my blood as it flowed through my tongue, slightly sweet, just as it smelled in the fragrance of my own
changing flesh. Day by day, I observed and documented my transformation.
Monika: What kinds of physical changes did you experience during that time?
Jennifer: My flesh changed, moved, and reshaped itself. My thin, angular, nightmarishly underfed body became
rounded, curved, and contoured. My skin changed texture. The hair on my arms and legs vanished entirely, though to
be fair, I had very little to begin with. My body never wanted to turn male, and it seemed to resist as much as it
could. Now it had been set free to do what it truly wanted to do. I can only imagine I have a great many estrogen
receptors on my cells.
Monika: And beyond the physical, how did estrogen affect your inner life and sense of self?
Jennifer: The most profound changes were neurological. Colors became brighter. Smells grew more intense. I felt
light, clean, and pure. I felt alive. I felt as though I was finally experiencing my existence from a first-person
perspective, front and center, rather than dimly from the back row of a darkened theater, unable to influence
anything. I felt fully embodied in my life. A vast and unspeakable depression lifted from me. I felt my emotions
again, as I had in childhood. Under testosterone they had felt muted, distant, almost absent.
Monika: In my case, the greatest relief was being free from a sex drive.
Jennifer: Yes, the greatest joy of all was being freed from a sex drive. Testosterone had struck me like a toxic
truck. Having a sex drive made me feel monstrous. It was horrible from the very beginning, and when it finally
stopped, when I lay on the floor of my miserable one-room apartment and fully realized that it was gone, I felt
peace for the first time since childhood.
For the first time, I could think. I could simply be. I could exist without that constant, malignant drumbeat of
tension hammering through my being. It was pure joy to sit quietly and feel content, calm, and at rest. Sexuality
and I do not mix. I felt as though I was no longer being poisoned, and the relief alone was exquisite and ineffable
joy.If it were not for the bigotry of others, transition would be among the greatest and most wondrous experiences a
human could have. True shapeshifting, every moment a new revelation, biological magic, and the profound glory of
becoming one’s authentic self.
Monika: I love the way you talk about the sensations of estrogen. I often compare it to switching from a
black-and-white television to color. At the time, trans women were required to undergo a real-life test to prove
they could live as women. You’ve said you passed completely, but for those who did not, it must have been a
nightmare. Do you see it as a relief that this requirement is no longer enforced, or do you think it had any
aspects that were genuinely helpful?
Jennifer: The entire concept of the so-called Real Life Test was inherently anti-trans. It arose from the absurd
notion that being trans is a “choice” from which people must be discouraged. It was bigotry made policy, especially
when enforced as a prerequisite for accessing hormones. Fortunately, that was not my experience. It was wrong, and
it never should have existed.
Trans people know what they are and what they need. I often argue that being trans is a form of neurological
intersexuality, something innately encoded in the brain from birth. It is a biological truth, a fundamental reality,
and for most people no more a choice than the color of one’s skin or the natural shape of one’s body. I also stand
firmly by the belief that a person’s body and life belong solely to them, not to society, institutions, or
governments. The right to alter one’s own body, whether through abortion or transition, must be an inalienable right
that is never subject to approval or denial by others.
Monika: The journey toward being our true selves often comes with a heavy cost, the loss of friends, family, and
sometimes even employment. What was the hardest part of coming out for you, and how did you navigate it?
Jennifer: I could argue that the hardest part was my father attempting to shoot me in the head, but there were
countless brutal moments. I lost nearly everyone I knew before transition. I lost family, friends, and relatives. I
was told to kill myself. I was spit on. My high school biology teacher deliberately had me fired from a K-Mart job
by forcibly outing me to my employer, all in the name of “Christian compassion”. Ultimately, the hardest part of my transition was bigotry. Every fragment of suffering I endured was the result of
it. Without bigotry, my transition would have been a miracle. Instead, it was a continuous fight to survive and to
not, quite literally, be killed.
END OF PART 2
All photos: courtesy of Jennifer Diane Reitz.
© 2026 - Monika Kowalska
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