Had you told your wife at this point?
SS: Oh, yeah, yeah, I sure did.
That was how long before that?
SS: This thing started in our life almost 12 years ago.
You've been married... since 1990?
SS: Since 1990, yeah, yeah. The whole issue of transgendered people, you very much go through a spectrum of experiences, You don't really know where you're going to stop or continue to, until you go through that process. Certainly when we first started it, it was simply "I'm comfortable cross-dressing at times," but that really wasn't it at all, it was something substantially ... more profound than that.
Which you'd been aware of since you were a kid, right?
SS: Yeah, but I was in denial, no one thinks that they're going to change their gender...It's one of those things that you think is fixed until you learn otherwise. So after going through the Human Rights Ordinance [voted down in Largo in 2003] and seeing the number of people that came forward and the courage that they showed, as well as the clash of two worlds ... up until then I had always been able to keep my transgender world and my professional world separate but that experience told me that maybe I wasn't going to be able to do that in perpetuity. But more significantly it was just tiresome trying to live a life of two genders, and that began a very therapeutic intense conversation with a group of professionals that got me to the point where I am today.
So there were times throughout those 12 years when you tried cross-dressing in settings other than Largo?
SS: Oh absolutely, yeah.
Describe that.
SS: One of the things that has been probably the most distressful in this whole process is people focusing on the physical manifestation of dressing. Transsexualism has nothing to do with dressing. So I don't want to dwell on it a lot. But certainly after you get, at some point when you realize my gender is wrong, then the question becomes can I live life comfortably in another gender? Some people can't, for a number of reasons, some physical, some psychological. So before you start hormonal therapy you need to be pretty sure you want to start changing your body, and before you start considering gender reassignment, what the average person equates to sex change, before you start cutting into healthy flesh, you need to be absolutely sure that this is something that not only you want, but that you can do in the real world. We do that. We're required through the medical protocol to work very closely with our therapists and try to insure that the gender we relate to in fact is something we can live in some point in the future. And that took place over the last five or so years, absolutely.
So you started seeing a therapist after the debate over the HRO, or had you already...?
SS: Well I was thinking ... what really was the thing that was the most profound experience — I attended a pretty select class [Executive Leadership Institute for local and state executives in 2006] at Harvard.
That's what the shirt is about.
SS: Yeah — we talked about transformational leadership.
Transformational leadership takes on a whole other...
SS: Another connation ... but it talks about the whole issue of comfort zones, how we all get very comfortable in our personal and professional lives and we stop growing, and I realized that so much of my hesitation was not really the physical manifestation, the changes, as much as the loss of prestige that one inherits as a white male. It was almost a profound experience that if I'm gonna get where I'm gonna be, I'm gonna have to leave the safe world where I learned to hide and step out and start to live. Everybody in the class was challenged to do that in ways that was a very emotional experience for a group of 67 professionals from all over the world that culminated literally in people crying at the end of the class.
Have you heard from any of your classmates?
SS: Absolutely, yeah.
Did you talk about this issue there?
SS: I was called on the issue there
How were you called on it?
SS: The experience is a very introspective, reflective process, and at one point I said I can't participate, I cannot disclose very intimate details about who I am.
Oh, they must have jumped on that.
SS: Yeah, and there were a number of people in the class who were sponsored from the Victory Fund that supports openly gay and lesbian elected officials. We had a number of those folks and they kind of drug me off to the side.
