Voices of Purpose #8: Amy Stephens, Part 1
By: Serena Jamison
Tags: Journey, Transgender, Biography, Interview, Voices Of Purpose

“This is thrilling Amy!” I say to my latest guest. “I don’t often get a chance to physically see my interviewees!” Amy smiles into her camera. “So how are you and what are you up to?”

Amy thinks for a second, “That varies at different points throughout this year, as far as how am I, I’ve had some very good high points in 2020, even through the pandemic. Especially the month or so coming out of my facial feminization surgery in late August and September, those were good times. A little nerve-wracking, especially leading up to it because you’re trying to stay away from the pandemic while trying to get to surgery, healthy and happy and fortunately I was able to do that. Now you know we’re into December, we’re going into the dark time of the year, you’re in the Midwest, I’m in upstate New York, it’s dark here for long periods of time and the mood goes up and down. I had a moment today even where I had a feeling that I had to acknowledge it, let it go by, and have a little cry. Here I am, I feel a lot better because of that. It is what it is, but overall I’m in a good spot.

“I have two beautiful daughters, the ups and downs of the relationship with my ex-wife,” Amy continues. “We still care for each other, we still live together in separate rooms within the house, we make things work for the benefit of the family and make sure we provide our kids with the best possible life they can have at this point, it’s been important this year for us to be together during the pandemic.”

Amy then thinks for a bit, looks up to the ceiling, and goes, on, “What I’m up to? The big thing I’m up to right now is I just wrapped up my second semester at the State University of New York Brockport where I am working on my master’s of science in mental health counseling, that is something that I started thinking about early in my transition and something because of life, career and everything else I put off.. Being a full-time graduate student takes up a lot of time, I’m fortunate to be in a place in my life that I can do this right now..”

“I do the podcast that we were talking about before with my co-host Penny Sterling, called ‘Transformation Thursday’. We tend to focus on transgender and LGBTQ related issues but we also talk about other stuff. We talk about elections, news coverage, so we’re not always dealing with trans stuff but I think with what’s on the horizon with transgender rights I think that’s probably going to take up a bigger portion of our time on the show. I work part-time at a local Starbucks, I helped my oldest daughter get an interview there and she has a job at a local Starbucks as well. That’s my life in a nutshell!”

Serena continues, “So, the first avenue that I’d love to talk about is, you talked about how you live with your ex-wife and daughters, you still have a family unit even if one piece is an ex-wife. Would you be willing to talk about how the relationship has grown and changed through the last few years?”

Amy takes a second to collect her thoughts. “I always look at this question because I’ve been asked it before and I always try to answer from my own perspective because it’s hard to answer from someone else’s, it’s hard to jump into someone else’s head. The way that I see it, as the relationship has changed with my ex-wife is that you go through the spot of cruising along in life, seventeen years into a marriage, you have your routines, you have your practices, you have your family life situation down. We had our ups and downs, I think more ups than downs, and now all of a sudden I throw in this curveball. First I called it being a “crossdresser”, then it was “gender fluid”, eventually it moved to identifying as “transgender”. You throw these huge curveballs in and I think she honestly has dealt with them as best as she can.”

Amy pauses a bit. “I’m so impatient with these things, I was always two, three, four steps ahead of her on these things. I had done the research, I knew who I was, I was moving and progressing much faster than she was.”

“To get to the point of where we’re at, and I’ve told this to her, to be able to be friends, to be able to live together, to be able to do what’s best for our family, it’s an amazing testament to both of us but I would say that for her, it’s even more of a testament because she had further to go than I did. All the way around.” Amy glances at me as she continues, “Both of us were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. I wasn’t a member when we met but I was in the process of converting, she’d already been a member. Throw in that religious background that teaches very binary gender-specific roles in life for men and women, that’s a hard thing for conservative religious people to have to deal with. I wasn’t perfect, I definitely have some regrets in how I handled the situation and I’ve spoken with her about that, but yet I think we’re in a good spot. As best as we can be right now.”

“Did she use this opportunity to try to make changes in her own life?” Serena asks delicately.

Amy ponders the thought for a bit before responding, “Yeah, once again this is a question I have to answer from my external observations. She’s definitely changed and evolved.”

“How has your emotional state of mind evolved as things have changed within the relationship?” Serena responds

“They’ve changed, there’s an ebb and flow with that too,” Amy offers. “It’s mostly been positive. There’s one side of it and this is my feeling on it… that at some levels I feel abandoned because you have a spouse and they’re supposed to be with you forever and ever, especially within the confines of the doctrines of the Mormon church. But at the same time I broke the social contract. I am the one that because the marriage was built on a cisgender heterosexual relationship, I’m the one that broke that social contract. At the same time that I feel abandoned, she can turn around and has said essentially the same thing to me.”

“It’s an understanding, there is this dual dynamic that’s in place and how each couple that navigates this is up to them, in how they do this individually and as a partnership within a relationship. There’s always an ebb and flow. Overall, I’m in a better spot mentally than what I was, coming up on four years ago when I started this journey.” She pauses to think for a second. “There’s not to say that there are moments that I don’t get sad about it, I still do. There’s also moments that I’m also so happy and content with who I am as a person. This is the extreme mind f*ck of being transgender, especially when you transition in your 40s, or with a family, and you’ve been married for a while. This is a mindf*ck. My ultimate happiness and contentedness on one hand makes me happy and prevents me from dying by suicide.

“It gives you a path to move forward that you’d like to continue,” Serena offers

Amy nods and says “I remember in late summer 2017 I was driving down to Pittsburgh to see a friend and listening to a bunch of podcasts. They had a few transgender women on as guests on different episodes. One of them said, ‘being transgender and LDS almost killed me. I was thinking about suicide.’ I’m like ‘I didn’t get to that point’ and then half-a second later, ‘oh, I did get to that point’. I didn’t get to an attempt, I had the ideation, I had the plan, I had the means, I had all of the means to make it happen.”

She breaks her thought and then emphasizes, “But my garage was a mess. So I wasn’t able to pull the car in.”

Amy and Serena share a bit of a laugh over the thought, and Amy says “I mean, it’s great that we can laugh and chuckle about it now, “

Serena ventures, “It’s the small stuff, you’re dealing with these huge, gigantic issues.”

Amy smiles. “But the garage was a mess. And that’s one reason I don’t clean it up now.”

“It’s almost a memorial so to speak. It’s there as a way to help you to realize that there’s still things to do, which is interesting too,” Serena muses.

Amy nods. “As a friend said to me, she told me a couple years ago, ‘Amy, don’t clean the garage. Just get in, get out, get what you need, make sure you can never pull the car in.’ Okay, okay, it’s good advice.”

Serena thinks for a moment. “As a follow-up, does it feel like the previous relationship quote-unquote failed?”

Amy looks again to the ceiling, frowning slightly. “No. No. Our marriage wasn’t a failure, we have two beautiful kids, we have seventeen years of active marriage. We’re still technically married. No.”

“I’m glad to hear that,” Serena states.

“The reason why is because there’s so much I hear within the transgender community, ‘I wish I knew then’. You can get hung up on that, and that can go down the spiral of ‘shoulda-coulda-woulda’, but it doesn’t do me any good, then I wouldn’t have my kids, I wouldn’t have the life I do, I wouldn’t have the knowledge I do.” Amy looks directly at Serena when she says “I bring into my experience now forty-five years of going through life as somebody that I wasn’t and if I can use that to pay it forward especially as I work on my mental health counseling degree and start working towards private practice, that’s a gift that I can give to future generations of transgender people and their families.”

Serena replies, “That sounds really good, especially since at least myself walking towards that question a couple times, I always thought to myself ‘people do change, people have the ability to define what relationships are, people have the ability to understand how their standing is with other people and even if a relationship is grown out of.’ It might not necessarily be the change that either one of you wanted especially walking into the process but it sounds like the change you both needed at the end of all of this,” she notes.

Amy sighs. “That change is the hard part because I changed. There’s elements of us that continue throughout our life and continue through transition, but coming into congruence with who you are as a person.” She continues, “In my case, it brought a lot of confidence. Sometimes it’s been said that maybe I’m a little more stuck-up, more conceited. I also know what I want and how to go after it, and for some people in our lives that have been around us for a long time and they haven’t seen that from us previously that is a really hard adjustment to make to that person’s new confidence and willingness to go after what they want.”

“Basically…” Amy continues, “I hate this term but transitioning is selfish. It’s the most selfish thing we’ll ever do for ourselves, but it’s also the greatest act of self-care that we can do for ourselves. So that type of determination if someone has not seen that in you before can be a little off-putting. I’ve seen that from friends, I’ve seen that from loved ones and family, at some level there’s some distance that has grown between us because they’re not used to seeing that type of confidence out of me. That comes back to feelings, three weeks into me being on hormones, I knew I was me.”

The marker Amy’s holds in her hand punctuates the air as she goes on, “I had a feeling driving down the road in front of my house a couple miles south of me at a stoplight on a bright Saturday August afternoon. I had this feeling come over me, I am me. I am who I am supposed to be. I know I’ve had this feeling before inside but I couldn’t place when or where I had it before. I just had this feeling of me, and that was three weeks after starting estradiol. And those early changes as research shows, especially understanding mental health and understanding how some of these hormones work, the psychological side of it, are actually are some of the first areas that our bodies start to change. Then that self-doubt comes in because in our society we’re dealing with so much anti-transgender crap on every side of us, is this really who I am? But then I have to remember back to that Saturday in August where I was.”

“That very first taste,” Serena adds.

“And if I remember back to then, if I dig down to that memory, it’s still there.” Amy confirms.

Serena replies, “That must be the most helpful anchor you can possibly have to yourself, is to have a memory like that, a piece of yourself that helps you to know ‘this is who I am because I touched it, I touched it way back when and I knew it’ As you continue to walk so slowly into the direction of where you need to be , it’s still there that you can reach back and say, ‘right here’.”

“It would be really easy to forget that and fall into self-pity and go down I call it the spiral because that’s what it feels to me, to get into that spiral of negative emotion, but when I look up out of the spiral that’s what I think of, that’s what I see, I see that bright sunny August afternoon.” Amy shrugs but with a happy look.

Serena considers for another second and says, “You talked about how you’ve changed as far as the people around you, seeing a much more confident and assertive Amy than they may have been used to, knowing you previously. Many things have changed in five years. I don’t need to talk about your catalog, I just want you to talk about the emotions that you feel as you’ve come to find this Amy.”

She thinks and carefully responds, “It comes in bits and pieces. It doesn’t come all at one time. This is one thing where I think I did a good job with my transition, I want to focus on those sides of it. I do have some regrets related to this and I don’t want to talk about that side. On the positive side, I did find a counselor. I did find communities of support. I did find friends who supported me. I did come out to my spouse at the time.” Amy ruefully smiles, “Probably should have come out to her earlier, but that’s one of the regrets that you look and say ‘hindsight. I probably should have put her on the front side of that, not a counselor or some friends.’ But the part of that being that, I told people I found support in person and online. We can’t discount the online support.”

“Especially now,” Serena agrees.

“The Williams Law Center at the University of California Los Angeles, their estimate is that 0.6% of the population is transgender. I think they’re low on that… but still for us to find community a lot of times in any type of size or number we need to do that online. I built the networks around me, I took time to figure out “am I a crossdresser”? Because that was the term I started with. That evolved into “genderfluid”, and it got to “transgender” and where I’m at today.”

“The point is that I started the process of coming out in February 2017. I didn’t start hormones until July 2018.” She pauses. “And so, right or wrong, it was very deliberate that I sought counseling, I sought help, I worked through this over a sixteen-month period before I started hormones.”

“I think you and I both know people within our communities that wake up and say ‘I’m trans!’ and within a month or two they’re on hormones. If it works for them, great. That was not going to be the right thing for me. But in late 2017, I actually made a decision and the decision was probably one of the more fateful decisions I made, was to change primary care physicians. I changed from a plain suburban family practice physician with limited experience with trans and LGBTQ healthcare.”

Amy goes on, “Rochester has a significant LGBTQ population for the size of our area, we have a very good clinic that specializes in LGBTQ healthcare, I transferred to them. As I walk through this journey I need someone to provide affirming care, whatever my decision ends up being as far as hormones, that was in the back of my mind but at the same time I wanted to be sure. I don’t know how you can ever be sure about such a thing,” she chuckles, “it’s such a nebulous thing. ‘I want to make sure I’m really sure.’”

“My doctor on the first or second visit suggested that I try hormones, but I asked for anti-anxiety meds, depression meds. Six-seven months later I’m still running through my head the same things, ‘this really isn’t what’s working for me’, eventually that’s when I decided that I’d get on hormones. That’s when I was actually able to taper off the anti-anxiety and depression meds.” Amy quickly says, “That doesn’t work for everybody, even on HRT, a lot of people still stay on their medications for anxiety, depression, whatever else, but for me I was able to taper down and only be on hormones. I am on a few other things right now but that’s more related to pandemic and anxiety and other issues related to that.”

Serena starts to say “Finding a community, especially in the middle of all of this…”

Amy nods as she replies, “That’s actually, you know, I did find community not only in the transgender community and the gender-expansive crowds here in upstate New York but I also found community by performing stand-up comedy regionally here, and in London. I was able to find some places that were within the LGBTQ and allied communities where I was able to make friendships. With the pandemic that’s been ripped away. I don’t know if I’ll ever be a professional comedienne but at the same time I miss a lot of the people and the space that I had there to be me in a cisgender environment.” She nods her head sadly as she concludes, “I miss that.”

“How long would you feel that you have been on your journey as far as gender transition?” Serena asks.

“If you want to get really philosophical about it, it would be my whole life.” Amy responds. “But that’s looking back and saying ‘Okay, I missed some things along the way.’ When I was younger, my mom has brought this up a couple times, I crossdressed as a kid. I played dressup with the girl cousins all the time and a few years ago when I started the coming out process, one of the cousins I met for dinner, I hadn’t seen her for three decades, one of the first things out of her mouth was ‘I remember when you were a kid you loved to play dress-up. You were one of the first ones to run downstairs and put on a dress.’ I’m like, ‘well that hasn’t changed.’

She goes on, “But then like a lot of us, I ended up playing hockey, getting involved in different things, that side of things diminished but never went away. I remember being ten or eleven, my parents had a work friend and we went over to their house, we were playing dress-up with the daughters, got caught, and never saw them again. I remember my dad freaking out about that. The expectation was that boys don’t do that stuff.”

“I broke my back in high school and missed a quarter of my junior year, and I had a lot of free time at home during the day,” Amy relates. “There may or may not have been clothes for the opposite gender that ended up fitting me, and I’d wear them when nobody else was home. So I could look back and say ‘from that perspective it’s always been there.’ It played a role in my first marriage and why we ended up breaking up. My first ex messaged me earlier this year and basically confirmed it, that was kind of cathartic in a weird way.”

“At the same time, I didn’t grow up Mormon. I ended up moving to Arizona, becoming Mormon, and at the time I was actually starting to crossdress a bit more. Mormonism provides you a space, if you want to stay in the closet. It worked for a long time, it did. I went from 2000 until 2006, so it suppressed it for a long time.” Amy thinks a bit further. “If you really want to get into the last four years probably, would be what I’d say would be looking at this critically from a gender transition place, socially, medically, surgically. We’re right at four years.”

Serena nods. “Within those four years and up until today, how much are you able to inhabit yourself as Amy and how much consideration do you actively give to the fact that you are transgender?”

Amy sighs hugely. “I wish I didn’t have to give any time to it.” Serena laughs as Amy continues. “That’s the shame part of it, is that for me it would just be nice to just disappear and slip into society and just live my life. But, you know we mentioned this a bit ago, there’s this culture war that’s being fought right now over people like us and our identities and if we’re valid or not. Our existence says we’re valid.”

“It’s hard to have this conversation on Twitter, or Facebook with people, because I’ve had so much more success in my day-to-day interactions with people, my podcast because I think we do our podcast where we can have conversations with people, where we can show our cards and be honest to who we are, so from that perspective this is a battle that has to be fought. You and I will probably be long-gone and hopefully future generations behind us will be able to live in peace.”

Serena nods and Amy pauses thoughtfully. “I wish I didn’t have to think about it at all but I do. I look at mental health counseling, in my field I’m going into, we’re woefully underrepresented. There are very few transgender people who go into clinical psychology, counseling, mental health work. There are some but from an academic standpoint there’s so much more research out there on other topics, and if you look at it even further there is not much gender research out there related to the trans and non-binary community.” Amy pauses a bit. “It’s specifically mostly generalized to the white community, so there also needs to be a lot more research done for our brothers and sisters and non-binary pals who come from populations of color. I just did a research paper trying to find stuff on trans people of color, I found one or two articles. It was really shocking how little there really is out there on these topics.”

With a look and a shake of her head, Amy goes on to say, “The problem we run into with this is that our foes just say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’ That’s all they say. ‘Science says XY, nothing else.’ No, now you’re just missing the whole intersex conversation. How do you have a conversation with someone when all they say is, ‘No, you’re wrong. You’re not valid.’” Amy throws her hands up in frustration. “I don’t know. If you listen to this week’s podcast episode, we brought that up. You can only do so much with so many people.”

“There’s so many excuses that they can bring up that effectively invalidate what you’re saying, like religion, social excuses…” Serena starts.

“Their excuse is ‘no’.” Amy asserts. “That’s all it comes down to. You mentioned religion. ‘No, God created Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve.’ That’s the worst thing to say to someone because we know it’s not true. So much of the language, and this should resonate with Mormons, has been mistranslated or misconstrued, different versions, like the New International Version, the American version, it’s all translation. I listened to a podcast called “the Bible Bash”, it talked about one of the chapters in Hosea, where the language revolving around God in Hebrew is super-non gendered but over the years the tradition has come down as a ‘male-gendered God’.”

“The ‘Great I Am’.” Serena says.

“Yeah!” Amy chuckles. “You look at this chapter in Hosea, if you dig down into the Hebrew… I know that you and I have a bit of a different perspective. I look up at the sky and I say ‘I don’t know.’ If there is a God, they’re definitely non-binary, they don’t have a body, and I don’t think they really care too much about me being transgender, or you being trans. I don’t think God is that involved in our daily lives.”

Serena continues, “Or if God is that involved…”

“Then why is there childhood cancer?” Amy points out. “God should worry more about childhood cancer than me being transgender. God’s got his priorities messed up if he’s worried about transgender people.”

“This interview has been going very well Amy, and we’ve talked with you more about your experiences. However, we’ll make sure that it’s posted for another time, so that our readers can enjoy this part of our conversation first!” I say.

“Please be sure to check out Transformation Thursday, on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify, publishing weekly including tomorrow,” I say. “The link can be found at the end of this interview. Thank you so much to Amy Stephens for talking with me today and offering so many amazing thoughts. I’m looking forward to sharing more with you all soon! Thank you for reading!”

Listen at:

https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/transformation-thursday/id1476592738

https://open.spotify.com/show/4Fg1V1oyKFWJ4fnh2dyUgW

https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9hbmNob3IuZm0vcy9kM2Y4NmRjL3BvZGNhc3QvcnNz

Connect at:

https://www.facebook.com/transthurspod/

Support the podcast at:

www.transformationthursday.com