The Stranger Within

By Judith Skillings

While The Stranger Within is undeniably a story about coming to terms with being transgender, I found I often identified with the struggles of both “Stacey” and “Jack.” I think we all have vulnerable aspects of ourselves that we are afraid to expose to public scrutiny. We have all experienced rejection and pretended to be something we weren’t to gain acceptance. I suspect we have all ached, at one time or another, to be different in some magical way other than how we are—smarter, taller, richer, wiser, funnier, prettier, healthier. In that sense, this story is everyone’s story. They both played the hand they were dealt, changed what could be changed, and accepted the rest. And did it with great flair.
Judith Skilling, Psy.D.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TransGender Publishing (imprint of Castle Carrington Publishing)
• Release date: Jan 12, 2023
• ISBN: 9781990096921

Book preview

Preface

The first time I recall seeing Dee Rockwood, she was with our dear friend, Doc Pete, and they were on their way to practice the martial arts at a local gym. Honestly, my first thought was My, what an attractive woman. She slammed a couple of round house kicks into a punching bag on her way through the weight room where I was struggling to maintain my fitness. I recognized that she must have had some training in the martial arts and commented on that.

As she walked by, she said Well yeah, a bit, I’ve got a couple of bronze medals from the Pan Am games. And she was gone.

Shortly after that, I discovered that she was teaching a Tai Chi class at the Senior Center right after the Spanish class I was teaching. I took her class. A friendship blossomed. At some point, she made a reference to being transgender—although she would immediately point out that she is no longer transgender but a woman. Still, once upon a time, her birth certificate indicated male. I confess, the possibility that she had ever been mistaken for a man had never crossed my mind, but I tried to act like people disclosed this to me all the time and the conversation moved on.

I joined a writer’s group she was facilitating and read the story of her transition process during the 1980’s when it was still a rarity. It’s a fascinating story, and I hope you’ll check it out—Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness. Dee, however, had disclosed to me that one of the casualties of being forced to pretend she was a boy when she was a child (and shamed when her efforts fell short) was that she had developed a male personality who she used initially to run interference for her. Tragically, the male personality—Rocky—became dominant and lost awareness that he had been created by a bullied little girl. Dee’s memories of her life between the ages of 8-ish and 38-ish are sketchy at best.

When she wrote her story, she left out the multiple personality disorder (nowadays referred to as dissociative identity disorder). She has resolved those issues but didn’t want any confusion about her transition story or her mental health. Dee developed a second personality because she was transgender and could not get that truth acknowledged. It was not the other way around where being transgender somehow came about as a result of having a second personality. I think her decision was a wise one. Her book stands well on its own without the split personality aspect.

I wondered, however, how it might have been for the two of them who shared a body: one male, one female. I wondered how it would have been for Rocky, the man everyone wanted to be, who thought he might have mental health issues only to discover that he was the product of a little girl’s desperate imagination. What was it like to be in treatment for recurring lost segments of time, only to be told that the original occupant of his body was female and that she was bound and determined to make appropriate adjustments?

Also, I wondered how it would have been for Dee waking up as a pre-pubescent child in a 30-something body.

With Dee’s full permission, support, and help, we set out to tell the story of Dee and Rocky’s journey. I used different names in the book (Stacey and Jack) for two reasons. Mostly, I didn’t want any pressure around having to get each detail exactly right. I wanted some literary license. Secondly, in the beginning, it wasn’t clear whether or not Dee would choose to acknowledge that the story was about her. Dee is a wonderfully mentally healthy woman. She is at peace in her body and has a great relationship with Rocky who still surfaces occasionally. She tells me that they communicate as they switch places from dormant in the background and functioning in the real world. To me, it is understandable that she might not have wanted to invite conversations and curiosity questions about having two personalities. As it turned out, I am writing this because she has decided, if her story can give even one other person hope, then it is worth sharing as the story of someone who was broken, literally climbed out from being buried alive in her own psyche and has made a wholesome life in the world.

While it is undeniably a story about coming to terms with being transgender, I found I often identified with the struggles of both Stacey and Jack. I think we all have vulnerable aspects of ourselves that we are afraid to expose to public scrutiny. We have all experienced rejection and pretended to be something we weren’t to gain acceptance. I suspect we have all ached, at one time or another, to be different in some magical way other than how we are—smarter, taller, richer, wiser, funnier, prettier, healthier. In that sense, Dee and Rocky’s story is everyone’s story. They both played the hand they were dealt, changed what could be changed, and accepted the rest. And did it with great flair.

I hope you enjoy their story.

~Judith Skillings, Psy.D.

Chapter 1

A Case of Mistaken Identity

The first five years (1951-1956)

Stacey

By way of background, I should tell you that my psyche is 30ish even though I live in a body that’s nearly 70 years old. This is what comes from being MIA (missing-in-action) in my own life for about thirty of my first forty years. It’s complicated.

Things started off normally enough. You get born. You breathe. There’s a long period of sucking and pooping and crying, while all the mechanics of the body come online, and the wiring gets adequately hooked up so that, when you go to suck your thumb, you don’t stick it in your eye.

I imagine there were plenty of very normal, gender neutral, bumps in the road as I toddled about, getting praised for walking before I was 10 months and—I hope—for saying the right word at the right time.

Can you say Da-Da?

Of course, there were also frowns, smacks, and swats for the usual: throwing the kitty in the bathtub, drawing a picture for Mommy on the wall, or smearing peanut butter in the toaster one day when I thought I might cook dinner for everyone.

For the most part, I was a good kid and did all the right things. The kitty never got another bath. I stopped using the walls as art canvases. I set aside any grand cooking plans. There was, however, one place where the same offense kept being repeated, and it confused the living bejesus out of me in those early years.

I’m Stacey. Although I’m a woman now, I was a little girl back then. I liked girlie things—pink bows, nail polish, tea parties, dollies, shiny patent leather shoes, and pretty coloring on my face. I had an Eww! response to mud, slime, slugs, and spiders. I still have the Eww! response to spiders, although it’s been a while since I threw a tea party for my dolls.

Here’s where it got dicey. By some tragic quirk of construction, I was born with an outie rather than an innie when it came to genitals. It was such an itty-bitty little thing when I was three but, my goodness, you wouldn’t believe all the rules that went with it.

My first inkling that something was deeply, seriously, amiss showed up when my father discovered me in my mother’s closet nestled amongst her brightly colored dresses, feeling their soft fabric on my face. I loved the feel of the satiny flows of cloth against my skin. I recall stroking the soft silk over my cheek. Oh my God! You’d think I’d been playing in excrement for the That’s a filthy thing to do! messages that I got.

If you have an innie down there between your legs—where no one ever sees—you get to put on your mother’s makeup and mostly people think it’s cute, even if there is vague annoyance over the mess. I do not advise trying it if you have an outie in that hidden place. All hell breaks loose. Imagine, at three, trying to understand what an outie between my legs had to do with wanting a pretty face or soft cloth against my skin.

Boys don’t do that.

Sweet Jesus, you might as well have told me we don’t breathe in this family.

The list of dos and don’ts commanded by that inch of flesh was stunning. It governed—as in prohibited—my access to dolls, dress-up, tears, playing house, and clothing colors, to name just the most obvious limitations. Mind you, I was three, and the people on whom my very survival depended, were telling me in serious, sometimes desperate or shocked or furious, voices that this extra piece of flesh meant that pink is absolutely not allowed. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure out why we couldn’t just let it be our secret.

I did fight back. I did stand up for myself.

"I’m not a boy. I’m a girl."

I’m here to report, it didn’t go over well in my conservative, Appalachian, family.

My salvation was a library next door. In retrospect, I must say my life sometimes seems as though it has been an obstacle course of unintended consequences. I often escaped to the library next door, even when I was just three and four. It was a small town, a quiet library, and—blessed be—with a bored, but compassionate, librarian, who read to me whatever book I chose. Apparently, some books were among the few items that were ok for both the pink and the blue crowd. She helped me learn to read and to understand the numbers when I chose number books.

Getting read to by the librarian and being allowed to roam the shelves and pick out books that held my interest, meant I had learned to read and do numbers by the time I was four. I used books to escape and stimulate my imagination where I created worlds in which I flourished. Here’s the unintended consequence. I used books to escape and created imaginary worlds in which I flourished, which led me to comic books and yearnings to be a superhero. I’m not sure 4-year-olds should have unsupervised access to comic books. It can lead to things like thinking you can fly if you just tie a bath towel around your neck. I’m happy to report that I survived that particular misadventure.

Life at home was just plain hard. At the top of the list was that—as much as I tried—I couldn’t make anyone understand that I was a girl. People, who theoretically loved me, got really mad when I tried. And I couldn’t win for losing because whatever being a boy was, I didn’t seem to be much good at it. It had something to do with wanting to play with cars (moving inanimate objects around in the dirt seemed pretty boring to me) and throwing a ball in some magical way that my body just couldn’t manage. On top of that, my father was an undertaker. So, we lived over a funeral home. Not exactly a source of merriment and a positive outlook. Coloring all the rest, my dad’s abuse of alcohol was beginning to get the better of him.

I’m not sure if the librarian knew how desperate I was for a place to be where I simply fit in. At 4 and 5, I didn’t really think of it as being liked, but in my own, little kid way, I aspired mightily to the absence of rejection. I think the librarian meant well when she fed my fantasies of the magical kingdom called kindergarten. Whatever her intention, I pinned a lot of hope on the experience. I just knew things would be different in this new world with new people and wonderful new experiences of all sorts. As it turned out, not so much.

Chapter 2

The War Zone of School

Stacey

It took about an hour in my kindergarten classroom to realize that all the hype about learning exciting new things had been overdone by more than just a little. By this time, I could read basic books and—I kid you not—I was expected to sit like a lethargic cheerleader while Nathan struggled with the b sound in bat. And then, we heaved ourselves forward cheering him on to the a sound until we crawled our way to the t.

Nathan was proud and I was happy for him but, heaven help me, there were six kidlets in our group. We then inched our way forward to Becky Sue and the process was repeated with hat. I wanted to help. It was a long list: bat, hat, mat, sat, pat, rat. I thought if we could just get past the hurdle of what the words were, maybe we could get on to a book. So, I read the whole list out loud while Becky Sue was struggling with h. Oops. Apparently, this was the fun part, and I had ruined everyone’s glorious opportunity to discover their own words. I had managed to be wrong again. I endured and tried really hard (with only modest success) to sit still for this sounding things out game. Finally, it was time to go outside to play.

I wonder if hope dies the same death in everyone as a soul is crushed. Maybe, in some people, it holds on strong, until it suddenly just crashes to its death over some little thing. In me, it died a slow death. I kept hoping for a chance to be me, to play a game I wanted to play, with the kids I wanted to play it with, in the way I wanted to play it.

One of the school’s several bullies found me during that first recess. I was playing jacks with Becky Sue, who didn’t seem to mind that I had told her what her word was. I didn’t even know what a sissy was, but the tone with which the word was hurled at me was hard to misinterpret. My father used that same tone when he had told me to wipe that crap off your face when I had tried on just the tiniest bit of my mother’s rouge the week before.

Well, of course, I punched him, and wouldn’t I just love to tell you that that set him in his place, and he didn’t bother me anymore. That’s just not how it was in my particular magic kindergarten kingdom. First off, he was bigger than me. Everyone was bigger than me. I was one of the youngest in the class, and I was little for my age. It set him back some, but it’s only in books and Hallmark movies that the underdog stands up to the bully and a deep friendship is born. No. What happened is, I got in trouble for fighting, and he now had more motivation to call me names.

I talk about it like it was just one kid. I wish! For so many reasons, starting with being a girl in a boy’s body and moving right along through being smaller, younger, smarter, and a wee bit—well maybe more than a wee bit—hyper in the classroom, I was that kid that other kids loved to pick on. I fought back and got teased for hitting like a girl, which was generally followed up with getting in trouble for hitting, period.

And so it went. Some days were worse than others.

I do remember one particularly long, heavy day in kindergarten. Two little girls had brought their Ginny dolls to school and, of course, I joined in. I wasn’t allowed to even speak about dolls at home, so the dazzling opportunity to get my hands on one caused me to throw caution to the winds. The girls welcomed me into their play. They weren’t the least bit confused about whether or not I belonged in their group. I hadn’t even played with the Ginny for more than a few seconds, and I heard the sharp voice of the recess monitor. She, of course, called me by my wrong name.

Jack. Come over here!

I knew the schtick. I wasn’t in trouble in the way that I would have been at home, but the whole Ginny thing was over for me.

They’re choosing up teams for kick ball. Why don’t you go over there?

Kindergarten, remember? This was not a duel I was going to win. I went and joined the line up as teams were chosen. But, because I now had the taint of the kid who plays with dolls all over my friggin’ self, I was of course chosen last—if I was lucky. On some days, they simply declared themselves done when they got to me and started playing, leaving me hanging out there, unchosen.

Chapter 3

Jack the Superhero is Born

Stacey

Remember the comic books? This is where they come in. Over a lifetime—short as it was at that point—of being told I was wrong in some shameful way for being me, I had developed a persona I could call on to be who it was people seemed to want. This zone of acceptance was when I pretended to be Jack. My parents thought it was my real name. Everything was easier when I pretended to be a boy.

In my imagination, I endowed Jack with all the abilities that the best boys had, the ones that men had in comic books. Secretly, I was faster than a speeding bullet, stronger than a locomotive, able to leap tall buildings in a single bound. I wasn’t getting a whole lot of confirmation from the outside world, as yet, about my abilities as I pretended to be a boy, but it made everything that went with peeing standing up—like foregoing Ginny dolls—a lot easier. But it was play-acting, a show, and, therefore, there was no home for me in it. It was a safer place to be, but there was an emptiness to it for me. Everybody thought life was moving forward but, for that brief stretch, when I put on my Jack character, I had taken myself out of the scene. Rather than missing the real me, everyone just seemed happy when I pretended to be somebody else.

When school finally let out that day, I couldn’t have told you what I was feeling using my mad, sad, glad vocabulary. There was a soggy grayness in my chest that pulled at my shoulders and neck, making me want to curl into a ball. There was a leaden dark feeling behind my eyes that made everything I saw seem cold in my brain. My hands felt tingly and hot like they wanted to be fists but had no identified target. Well… that’s not entirely true. That extra appendage between my legs, I would have happily destroyed it if I could have figured out how.

I had learned that one was not supposed to use any word at all to describe that particular body part. That, in itself, was very strange indeed. First, I was supposed to be grateful for it, because being a girl was to draw the short straw in the whole gender thing. Second, one was not to