As a Woman

What I Learned about Power, Sex, and the Patriarchy after I Transitioned

Paula Stone Williams

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781982153366
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

This moving and unforgettable memoir of a transgender pastor's transition from male to female is an "audacious, gripping, and profoundly real journey that speaks to the mind, heart, and soul" ( Joshua J. Dickson, director of Faith Based Initiatives, Biden Campaign)— perfect for fans of Redefining Realness and There Is Room for You. As a father of three, married to a wonderful woman, and holding several prominent jobs within the Christian community, Dr. Paula Stone Williams made the life-changing decision to physically transition from male to female at the age of sixty. Almost instantly, her power and influence in the evangelical world disappeared and her family had to grapple with intense feelings of loss and confusion.Feeling utterly alone after being expelled from the evangelical churches she had once spearheaded, Paula struggled to create a new safe space for herself where she could reconcile her faith, her identity, and her desire to be a leader. Much to her surprise, the key to her new career as a woman came with a deeper awareness of the inequities she had overlooked before her transition. Where her opinions were once celebrated and amplified, now she found herself sidelined and ignored. New questions emerged. Why are women's opinions devalued in favor of men's? Why does love and intimacy feel so different? And, was it possible to find a new spirituality in her own image?In As a Woman, Paula's "critical questions about gender, personhood, and place are relevant to anyone. Her writing insightfully reveals aspects of our gender socialization and culture that often go unexamined, but that need to be talked about, challenged, and changed" (Soraya Chemaly, author of Rage Becomes Her ) in order to fully understand what it means to be male, female, and simply, human.

PART I

CHAPTER 1 My Wedding Night

Opening his arms he said quietly to her, “Disappear here.”

—JONATHAN CARROLL

A cold, hard rain was falling across the South Shore of Long Island. It had been pouring all day, through the Sunday-morning church service, the afternoon football game, and again as I drove the few blocks to the church late that evening. It was December 31, 1972, my wedding day. I was twenty-one. Cathy was nineteen. Her father had decided it would be marvelous to have our wedding ceremony at 11:30 p.m. and be announced as husband and wife shortly before midnight. And so, it was.

I was uneasy and had been since July. In my final summer between college semesters, I worked weekdays mowing the college-owned cemetery, the one where my grandfather was buried, the one where my grandmother, mother and father, aunts, uncles, and cousin are now buried. As I carved patterns of grass across the open fields, I pondered a nagging question: Why am I not more excited about getting married? I knew I loved Cathy and wanted to start a family, but I also knew there were rumblings in my heart that were refusing to be bedded down. I couldn’t name them. My head and heart weren’t communicating very well. But like a brick of peat buried in ash, I knew there was a fire waiting to come to life.

September arrived and with it, my senior year of college. Cathy returned to campus after a summer at home in New York. I was busy working, going to school, and looking for a place to live and a second job to pay the rent. Late at night, spinning records at the radio station where I worked, I let my mind wander to the smoldering embers that lay beneath my busyness. Why do I care so much about the flowers at our wedding, or the bridesmaids’ dresses, or all the things other guys are not thinking about?

One night, as Karen Carpenter sang, “I’m on the top of the world lookin’ down on creation,” I thought about how much I wanted to sing with the voice of Karen Carpenter—deep, resonant, and feminine. Later that same night, while sitting with nothing to do during a broadcast of a Cincinnati Reds game, I let my mind wander. What if I were the bride and not the groom? I thought about what it would be like to shop for a wedding dress and walk down the aisle. I got so caught up in the vision that I missed a station ID at the top of the hour. I stuffed the thought back into the depths of my soul.

As I drove to the church that rainy December night, dressed in my brown rented tux and too-tight pants, I was committed. I was getting married, and that was that. The building was fairly empty, and Steve, my friend who was playing keyboards, called me over to practice the medley of tunes I would be singing during the ceremony. My voice was uncharacteristically thin and unsure of itself. I hoped it would get stronger before the ceremony.

At 11:30, with my groomsmen behind me, I walked out the side door near the stage. My legs were shaking. The bridesmaids came down the aisle, one by one, and then as Steve played the opening chords of Wagner’s “Bridal Chorus,” everyone stood and Cathy came down the aisle, radiant and stunning. Suddenly I was confident and in love and sure all manner of things would be well. I sang a medley from a Johnny Mathis album that included the Carpenter’s tune “We’ve Only Just Begun,” and now my voice had the resonance it lacked a couple of hours earlier. The vows began, people prayed, the clock struck midnight, and it was 1973. Cathy and I were married.

As was the custom in my evangelical culture, a short reception with cake and punch followed in the church basement. Since it was well after midnight, the reception was even shorter than usual. As sheets of rain blew in from the Atlantic, the guests departed.

It was 3:30 a.m. before Cathy and I got to the hotel where we would spend our first night as a married couple. It was a Holiday Inn near the Long Island Expressway. We both went into the lobby and I told the receptionist I had a reservation for Paul and Cathy Williams. It felt wrong to have given Cathy my name. I felt barely old enough to own it myself. Yet I still felt the confidence I had felt as Cathy came down the aisle. I was proud she was my wife. I knew who I wanted to go to bed with. The question I was avoiding was who I wanted to go to bed as.

The receptionist handed me the key and Cathy and I walked down the empty hallway to a west-facing room on the second floor of the modest hotel. There was a gold carpet, and turquoise bedspreads on the two beds, each with a gold throw pillow. The room had one captain’s chair on either side of a standing lamp, a dresser against the wall, and a television on a pedestal. There was no marriage suite, just carbon copy rooms with concrete ceilings, thick curtained windows, and all the charm you would expect of a Holiday Inn on an interstate.

Standing in the bathroom brushing my teeth, I stared at the mirror. I saw a kid, really, who still had pimples on his chin, there in a T-shirt and briefs, clueless. How had I gotten here? I left the bathroom and got into bed. Cathy crawled under the covers fifteen minutes later.

Even though it was after 4:00 a.m., we made love more than once. It was the first time either one of us had ever had sex, or even been that close to someone else’s naked body. Our evangelical roots forbade premarital sex. All of our senses were far too overwhelmed to fully take in the splendor of that night. The feel of her body against mine, my fingers running through her hair, the whisper of her heart’s affections into my ear, and the way my rough body responded to her soft touch. It was glorious, worth the wait, a tender time of youth.

After a few hours of restless sleep, I woke shortly after dawn. Cathy was in a deep sleep, lying on her side, hair cascading across the pillow. I could not believe I was lucky enough to have married someone as beautiful as Cathy. I had done well, marrying the most wonderful girl on campus. Suddenly, without invitation, a deep unease overwhelmed me. I was acutely aware of my body as I stared at the parallel lines in the creases of the white concrete ceiling. My dark hair, broad shoulders, stubble of beard, genitalia. Every cell was awake and on edge. My eyes focused on a single spot above the bed, where there were slight pockmarks in the concrete. There was a catch in my breath, and I whispered audibly, “Oh God, I’m in the wrong body.”

CHAPTER 2 A Gender Revealed

The past is our definition. We may strive with good reason to escape it, or to escape what is bad in it. But we will escape it only by adding something better to it.

—WENDELL BERRY

Round Lake Christian Camp was my favorite summer retreat. I tagged along with my father, who led a senior-high week at the Ohio church camp every July. Once I was old enough to be trusted, I’d spend a good bit of each lazy afternoon rowing a boat from one side of the lake to the other. When you row a boat, you travel forward while facing backward, and I learned you can navigate pretty accurately by looking at the point where you began. I would row to my favorite spot on the far side of the lake, a tiny cove where I could sit and listen to the sounds coming across the water. Then, keeping my eyes fixed on a grassy rise to the left and a sugar maple to the right, I would row back to the dock without turning around more than once or twice. It was a good lesson, learning to travel forward while looking back. I felt independent, confident, proud, a twelve-year-old boy making his way across the lake, with a freedom available only to boys in those days. Girls were not allowed to row boats across lakes. Boys had better rules.

From my cozy spot in the tiny cove, I spent afternoons gazing across the lake at the teenagers living their important teenage lives, which all seemed to have something to do with the opposite sex. The allure of girls was beginning to awaken within, but I had more important things to do. My job was to daydream. I thought about the people on the other side of the lake, like the camp cook who would charitably fry the bluegill I caught that morning. I thought of the lifeguard who played jazz on the old camp piano. And there was his beautiful wife, who I secretly wanted to be. I thought a lot about that when I was sitting in my little cove. I loved watching his wife, the gentle way she held their young daughter, the way she moved around the campgrounds, soft and feminine. I liked the way boys deferred to her, and I secretly stole glances when she was in her bathing suit. I wanted to have her body and wear that bathing suit.

Eight years earlier, my family was living on Piedmont Road in Huntington, West Virginia. I distinctly remember being in the bathroom of the house thinking, Before long I will have to decide whether to stand up or sit down when I go to the bathroom. That was it. No great epiphany, just the thought that I would soon have to decide whether to be a boy or a girl. A simple thought with profound implications. Somehow, I had fashioned the notion that I got to choose my gender. I pictured a blond gender fairy dressed in powder blue, holding a white wand. With a gentle voice she would say, “Well, my dear, the time has come. Do you choose to be a boy or a girl?” I would answer and her wand would do its magic. When I think about it now, it was a pretty novel way for a transgender child to create a narrative that matched her desire.

I did not dislike being a boy. There were days I thought I might remain one. But there were far more days when I was sure I would tell the gender fairy I was a girl. From as early as I can remember, in my heart I longed to be a girl. I would imagine myself the sister of the girl next door, petite, cute, and feminine. I wanted to be like her.

The idea that I got to choose my gender was a sign of an already developing male entitlement. I had a brother four years older than I, but all of my cousins were girls. I got more of Grandma Stone’s attention than any of the girls. I demanded it. The world told me I had a right to demand it. Boys got first pickings; the girls waited. Grandma Stone never sat down to eat a meal she had prepared until all the men and children had eaten. Then she would take her dinner in the kitchen. I was paying attention. The men sat in the parlor and talked about whether Adlai Stevenson could beat Ike Eisenhower. If one of the girls expressed an opinion, she was interrupted or ignored. If I had an opinion, I was allowed to speak. And yes, though I was only five, I knew who the candidates were, and I also knew most of my Kentucky family were Democrats. I was a novelty, encouraged in my precociousness. “Well, look at that. Little Paul knows who the candidates are.”

I assumed I was special, because the world treated me that way. Why shouldn’t I believe I got to choose my gender? It seemed like the kind of thing a boy would be empowered to do. Of course, I had no idea that if I had been able to choose my gender, every bit of privilege I was already enjoying would have disappeared. I did not realize a girl is given invisibility almost as a birthright, as my friend Carla puts it. It begins outside and moves inside, internalized for life, unless an extraordinary empowering grace intervenes.

I loved dressing as a girl, particularly when I was playing with my girl cousins. We would dress in my grandmother’s old clothes, left for us to play with in the bedroom next to the back porch. I loved those playtimes. I knew they would not occur if I was alone at Grandma’s, or there with Myron, my older brother. The clothes would not come out unless my cousins were there, and I longed for those occasions, not only for the chance to play dress-up, but also because I loved being with my cousins. Their play was gentler than the boys’, more talking and less shouting and loud motor noises. We would play house and have tea parties and it made me giddy. That is, until that day.

I was five. I had lingered longer in the bedroom and was more daring than usual. I was in one of Grandma’s blue dresses, stockings, and high-heeled shoes when my mother suddenly came into the room. Sternly, she demanded that I remove the clothes. What did I think I was doing? She shook her head disapprovingly, then used way too many words for way too long a time, telling me I had done something bad. Finally, she turned and walked away. No tender hug and a heartfelt “It’s all right, Paul. I still love you.” Just the back of my mother walking away as she returned to the kitchen. I heard her talking to her mother, saying nothing about what had just happened in the back bedroom. She acted like everything was just peachy. I was embarrassed and ashamed and ripped off the clothes, crying silently as I gave up my dreamy identity. I never forgot that encounter, and I never wore Grandma’s clothes again.

Then, seven years later, I was sitting in a cove on the south side of Round Lake, daydreaming about the wife of the head lifeguard. As much as I longed to be a girl, I was finding my way as a boy and it was not awful. I was not the kind of transgender child who hates life and wants to die because God has not granted their wish to change genders. I had resigned myself to life as a boy. It was not what I wanted, but I thought I could live with it.

When you finally do find the courage to transition genders, enlightened people think they know your narrative. “Paula felt like a girl in a boy’s body.” For me, that was not true. I felt like a boy in a boy’s body, and I didn’t like it. I wished I had been born a girl. I felt I was supposed to have been born a girl.

My consistent longing was most present before I went to sleep and when I first woke up. It would often rear its head during the day, but it was not an everyday occurrence. After my traumatic encounter with my mother, I had determined I would never again wear my grandmother’s clothes, or the clothes of any other girl. I would never again imagine myself as a girl. But of course, one’s gender identity is neither a factor of will nor of genitalia. It is of the deep psyche, and like one’s sexual identity, it is most likely fixed before birth. I was no more able to stop dressing in girls’ clothes than I was able to stop breathing. That was why it was so satisfying to sit in my little cove on the far side of the lake and imagine myself as the wife of the lifeguard. I was keeping alive what I knew to be true. I was supposed to have been born a girl.

I used to go to bed at night gratefully tucked in by the adults who cared for me. They would tell me how special I was and pray with me. But as much as I trusted those people, I knew they would never be able to tell me who I was. With all of their bigness and authority, I had already figured out the truth. They did not even know who they were. How were they going to tell me who I was? No, I was the only one who could tell me who I was, and I knew I was supposed to have been born a girl.

While my heart was longing to be a girl, I was learning what it means to be a boy. The most important lessons came from my father. Every Friday of camp week there was a softball game between the boy campers and the men serving as faculty. Every single year the faculty would handily defeat the campers. Dad would spray singles past the infielders because he understood that in softball, hits were easier than home runs. The boys were all trying to prove their stuff with mighty swings that left the ball in the outfielders’ mitts.

I was trying to prove my stuff, learning to row back to the dock without turning around to see where my boat was pointed. That seemed like something a twelve-year-old boy should figure out. Navigation was a man’s job, or so I thought. It was Dad who drove the car, read the road maps, and knew which way to go on the trail. He was the chief navigator. Therefore, if I was going to be a man, I had better learn to navigate well, which on occasion might include moving forward while looking back.

My relationship with my parents complicated my gender identity and just about every other area of life. I loved my father and wanted to be in his presence every waking hour. He was a pastor and leader, and I viewed him as strong and invincible. If I was full of myself, it was because of the delight I brought to my father’s eyes.

Dad was the youngest child of a Nickel Plate Road railcar inspector and his homemaker wife. He grew up in Martins Ferry, Ohio, a small industrial city across the Ohio River from Wheeling, West Virginia. Dad’s people were Welsh and English and had come to work in the steel mills. Dad’s mother had a will of steel and preordained that David Williams, the youngest of her eight children, would become a pastor. Dad never challenged his assignment or much of anything else among his mother’s many expectations.

I was born three years after my father became the minister of the Westmoreland Church of Christ in Huntington, West Virginia. I came into the world at St. Mary’s Medical Center, a stone’s throw from the Ohio River. My mother’s pregnancy had been difficult, and she was not well after I was born. For many months it was Grandma Stone who took care of me.

My relationship with my mother did not always feel safe. When I was a little older and could discern such things, I realized there was a hesitation in her parenting, as if each moment required an active decision about whether or not to engage. I was always off-balance, never knowing which mom was going to show up. Was it the fun-loving storyteller, or the depressed and fearful fundamentalist? Determining her moods became a major daily challenge.

Aware of my mother’s precarious hold on her emotions, I was always searching for insight into her background. Mom was the youngest of three children of a tenant farmer in eastern Kentucky. That part of Kentucky was a Scots-Irish culture, entrenched in the paradoxical qualities of independent mindedness and clan loyalty. One of the cardinal sins was to get “too big for your britches” and climb above your family’s expectations of itself. It was a world in which women married young, had children early, and did not work outside the home. It provided my mother none of the nourishment her soul desired.

As a pastor’s wife, her life did not get easier. Pastors’ wives were to be pretty but not too pretty, friendly, approachable, and supportive of their husbands. They were to dress nicely, but without effort and without spending money on clothes. They were to have well-behaved children who were at church with them every time the doors were open.

I understand that if I had been born a girl, my own opportunities would have been far more limited. I would not have received preferential treatment in public school or had the kinds of freedoms commonly afforded to boys in the ’50s and ’60s. If I had been born a girl, I would...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• What You Write This For
• Introduction: Trusting the Flow
• Part I
• Part II
• Part III
• Acknowledgments
• Reading Group Guide
• About the Author
• Copyright