美国国家公共电台 NPR Coming Out As Transgender When There Was No Language To Describe It

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DAVID GREENE, HOST:

It is Friday, which means it's time for StoryCorps - and today, a story about being yourself even when the path to do that is uncharted. Elizabeth Coffey-Williams grew up transgender in Philadelphia in the late 1960s. Now 71, she came to StoryCorps with her niece Jennifer Coffey.

ELIZABETH COFFEY-WILLIAMS: When I first came out to my family, it was the late '60s. And a lot of the words they have today, like transgender and nonbinary - they didn't have them.

JENNIFER COFFEY: Yeah.

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: You know, all of the fruits and nuts were already on the tray. They just hadn't been assigned names. So attempting to tell your extraordinarily² loving blue-collar parents that you were transgender was tantamount to telling them I was from Jupiter. My parents were afraid - what - you know, this might be contagious³. And they sort of whisked me away for a while. And at that point, my parents were telling the rest of the family that I had just gone.

COFFEY: That's got to be traumatizing.

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: It was years that I did not see my brothers or my sister. I would call. My mother would let me talk to them on the telephone, but I couldn't come home. And at that point, I had heard Johns Hopkins was, if not the only place, one of the only places in America where they would perform gender¹ confirmation⁴ surgery. And I pushed open those big doors. I said, hi, I'm here. But they said, that's not how it works. We have a whole program that you have to go through. And I thought, I'm not really here for a shrink. I just want a plumber⁵.

COFFEY: Good lord.

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: I know. But I did get through that program. Later on, my mother sat the kids down and told them the truth, the big secret. And then one day, there was a knock on my door. And there was my little brother Billy, who was only 11 or 12. And he just looked up at me and said, hi, it's me.

COFFEY: (Laughter).

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: The next thing I knew, I was hugging, and he was smiling...

COFFEY: Oh.

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: ...And I was crying. Was he ashamed of me? Uh-uh. He wanted me back.

COFFEY: Wow.

COFFEY-WILLIAMS: When I opened that door, all I can say is it was like my heart was exploding and I was going to have family again. It made me feel wanted, and it made me feel loved. That meant more to me than anything had meant in a long time.

GREENE: Elizabeth Coffey-Williams talking to her niece Jennifer Coffey at StoryCorps in Philadelphia. Elizabeth now lives in an LGBTQ-friendly housing complex for seniors in downtown Philadelphia. You can hear more from Elizabeth and her neighbors on the StoryCorps podcast, which you can get at npr.org.