Transsexual in Recovery



Sober Bartender


One Year Clean and Sober


Trick or Treat?     Treat! 		The first month in that VA rehab was like being let out of prison. I hadn't been clean and sober that long since high school, not even in Basic Training or jail. But my hope for a "normal" life was shortlived; without drugs to supress them, my transsexual feelings flooded back. The macho atmosphere of the VA was no place to confess my incipient womanhood, so I wrote until my fingers cramped, as though I could exorcise it via writing. Instead, my soul searching confirmed what I already knew deep down: I would suicide if I didn't deal with it. I prayed I could make it through my transition clean and sober. My diary and journals from 1988 paint a portrait of conflict, doubts, fear and, eventually, acceptance that I had no other choice but womanhood.

I was homeless after I left rehab, spent my first few nights of freedom on someone's floor. The next two weeks I slept in roach infested hotel rooms on vouchers that the city gave to indigents. Then God stepped in: several back due state disability checks arrived at the same time as a vacancy at a clean and sober hotel in the middle of the Tenderloin. I got a temp job as a data entry clerk and went to my support meetings, scared of relapsing back onto that junkie treadmill. Just as diligently I resumed the path to womanhood. A huge weight lifted from me when I started estrogens and electrolysis. Despite my few misgivings, I knew I'd found what I'd been looking for all my life: myself. With my foundation in recovery established and my pathway clear, the next item was my professional career.

As much as I ached to begin fulltime womanhood, I knew my job search would be greatly complicated if I presented as Christine. Thus I started interviewing as "Chris" even though my driver's license had an "F" thanks to a DMV form signed by my endocrinologist. When my temp job fell through, I was offered employment as a bartender in a lowbrow dive near my former haunts. The irony was delicious, all that booze at my fingertips and no desire to drink it. Three weeks later when a company hungry for programmers hired me on the spot. After six months as an exemplary employee, of making my boss and coworkers love me, I revealed my true self. Instead of firing me, they let me work as a woman. We announced it with an email to the entire office. I started my new life in the first week of December, 1989.



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