47 | OutBoise Magazine | 2015 Pride Guide
Trans Idaho
outboise.com | Issue 8.2 | June 2015
By Dianne Piggott
Boise Pridefest 2015 is here. I can’t help but
think about how things are now for transgender
people and how things used to be. In 1997 I started trying to understand how it was that this “gender buzz” in my head would never go away. How
come I would put on women’s clothes and look in
a mirror and feel like that person, that woman in
the mirror was the real me? And why did she have
a Mona Lisa smile. What did she know?
Dial up modems and Netscape helped me
find information and helped me see that there
were other people like me, and there were options, that there was some vague kind of hope. But
the people all seemed to be far away and in big
cities like Portland and Seattle and San Francisco.
I needed to find people like me in person, face to
face. I saw listings of a group in Boise, but emails
bounced and the phone number had been
disconnected. Well, I thought, I’ll put an ad in the
Boise Weekly and see if I find anybody! Before
then I had met only one transsexual, when I was
19, and I was so deeply closeted and confused
that I never said a thing to her.
Amazingly, that ad brought results. There
were other people like me! A few of us trans gals
would get together on Saturdays and chat and
then go to the Emerald Club afterwards. The
legendary Mary Kelly owned the place and we
would watch the drag shows and go home reeking of cigarette smoke. It was a safe place and
we had some small community. It gave me courage and I learned a lot, but the rest of Boise was
not so encouraging. Well, except for the Flying M.
But there was scant other support in the area as a
far as therapists or doctors for hormones. And most
all of the trans people I knew lived in stealth, under
cover out of a caution borne of necessity.
I finally left Boise and went to Seattle to transition. I met more people there and started going to
the Ingersoll Gender Center meetings. There was
more community but there was a lot of marginalization and suffering, everyone seemed to be
struggling so hard. There was a hierarchy in the
trans community that divided the “true transsexuals” from the “heterosexual crossdressers.” You
were judged based on your being pre or postoperative, based on how well you passed, even
based on how long and how deeply you had suffered. It was stressful.
And the outside world, the general public,
still had no idea what to do with us or how to treat
us. After almost two years of trying to go full time,
trying to transition, trying to make enough to live, I
gave up and left. I felt like fate had shown me that
I wasn’t “worthy” or trans enough. I was confused
and I wasn’t ready, and the world wasn’t ready. I
came back to Boise and hid in denial for 12 more
years.
Funny thing, It didn’t go away. After twelve
years I was still transgender. The pain and aching frustration hadn’t gone away. I still knew I had
something to deal with and I hoped that things
had changed. I popped my head up again and
looked for community. And I almost cried with
what I found! This time there were many other
trans people in Boise! I found helpful and supportive transgender people who had found their way
and made their lives work. I found Emilie Jackson- Edney and the people in the Tri States group.
I found the wonderful Moms and the amazing,
inspiring young people in the FATE group, I found
PFLAG, and I found a vibrant and inclusive LGBT
community. There were therapists and doctors in
Boise who knew how to help trans women and
trans men move forward in healthy ways. I hadn’t
just found the light at the end of the tunnel, I had
found the dawn of hope!
Continued on page 49