Grace's Daughter

Grace’s Daughter

By Michelle Lynne Kosilek

Copyright 2011 Michelle Lynne Kosilek

Smashwords Edition

Smashwords Edition, License Notes

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Dedicated to my sisters.

Your courage and love have taught me that the only thing that can defeat us

is our silence. I love you all.

Table of Contents

Foreward

Preface

Acknowledgements

Author’s Note

Prologue

Chapter 1 - Darkness

Chapter 2 - Abandoned Childhood

Chapter 3 - Running

Chapter 4 - When Home Left Me

Chapter 5 - Waiting for the Train

Chapter 6 - The Trial

Chapter 7 - The Long Run Home

Chapter 8 - New Life

Chapter 9 - The Re-Trial

Chapter 10 - Coming Home

Chapter 11 - Not Just Another Chapter

Chapter 12 - The Final Act

Epilogue

Foreword

Dr. Randi Ettner

It is a privilege to contribute to this book. The narrative you are about to read—Michelle’s memoirs—is riveting. I hope by penning a few words, I can amplify a voice others have sought to silence and lavish praise on the author.

I met Michelle on only one occasion; a day I vividly remember. The grim grey and wire exterior of the prison stood in sharp relief against the backdrop of a New England fall’s resplendent colors. My assignment was to interview Michelle, confirm her diagnosis of gender identity disorder, and opine on the necessity of medical interventions—including reassignment surgery—which she was being denied.

Under different circumstances Michelle and I might be colleagues or friends. Michelle, through her intellect, determination, and unwavering commitment to purpose, has done from inside prison what I attempt to do in my own work outside the prison walls.

Namely, to advocate for a condition known as gender dysphoria—the disabling impairment of having a gender identity that is not congruent with one’s anatomy. One in 11,000 natal males come into the world with this condition...and they will leave the world with it, as it is a lifelong affliction. While experts in the field believe the origins can be found deep within the hypothalamus of the brain, the etiology remains largely unknown.

What is known is that treatment is medically necessary. Medical interventions are the evidence-based best-practice standards, and the only efficacious treatment for this rare condition. Nevertheless, due to public misperception and ignorance, and an unfortunate confusion of sex with gender, many people regard this as a lifestyle choice or mental illness. In the case of an inmate requiring these procedures the judgments are even harsher.

I have served as an expert witness in several prisoner lawsuits. Transgendered prisoners are often placed in isolation. In too many instances, they are denied appropriate treatment. The result of this stigmatization and indifference is often brutalization and self-mutilation. Many prisoners with this condition attempt to castrate themselves—a tragic endeavor of surgical self-treatment-- in the absence of appropriate medical care. Michelle accurately describes the situation thusly:

…many prisons routinely deny treatment for gender dysphoria, with predictably tragic results, spending millions on litigation rather than providing treatment. Of the thousands of medical conditions currently known, only this one is routinely ignored.

It is my promise to you, Michelle, and the hundreds or thousands of silent individuals who are imprisoned in the correctional system and imprisoned by gender dysphoria that I will speak on your behalf.

Preface

Dr. Cindy Tavilla

There is a game often introduced by group leaders at workshops, retreats or trainings meant to foster camaraderie amongst strangers. The game is Truth Truth Lie. Each person states three things about themselves, and the others are to guess which of the three statements is not true. To win the game, one must be able to stump the crowd with a statement that would seem totally unbelievable to the rest. The following statement was once as unlikely to me as it is for most people I share it with:

One of my best girlfriends, Michelle, someone I call my third sister, is a transsexual woman doing life in an all male prison for murder. Of course, I couldn’t stop there without telling the story. I would go on to say that twenty-three years ago, we were working at a state prison for the most dangerous mentally ill men when Michelle was named Robert. I was quite fond of Robert back then, but unfortunately, as the Program Coordinator, I had to fire him when a criminal check came back revealing a previous conviction in another state. Within two years, I left my job to have a baby and Robert contacted me shortly thereafter to ask for a recommendation to complete his application for a Master’s Degree in social work. Robert’s past didn’t dissuade me, and I wrote a glowing, genuinely enthusiastic letter in support of his goals.

Less than a year later, I was the consummate suburban stay-at-home mother making baby food in my blender. Robert was making headlines for murdering his wife and showing up at trial with long hair, lipstick and lawyers asking the court to refer to Robert as her. I was shaken to my core. I was confused, and not a little bit disgusted. I wasn’t interested in understanding. My focus was on caring for a baby, keeping house and living a normal life free from bizarre sideshow drama. Robert was sentenced to life in prison, and soon after, legally changed her name to Michelle. I worked on my doctorate in Clinical Psychology and while I was becoming more understanding of gender and sexual variations, I never once read anything about Gender Identity Disorder. I held the newspaper accounts of Michelle’s legal trials and efforts at getting the state to allow and pay for her sex reassignment surgery at arm’s length. Once in a while, I would tell the dinner party version of how I once knew this individual, and my audience would be wide-eyed and shake their heads. I used my past association with Robert as entertaining storytelling material. Looking in from the outside, Michelle and I couldn’t have been more opposite, more separate, more disengaged from one another. And then the voice spoke.

I was sitting in the back pew of a church in Boston. Feeling increasingly disillusioned and disappointed in the community I had been actively participating in for two decades, I was looking for a spiritual home. Feeling the urge to volunteer, to be of service, I considered joining the Prison Ministry offered by this urban church. I’ve long held the belief that we each give from our own surplus. We serve in ways that we are able. I was a clinical psychologist, and I had worked in a prison, so felt that while the surroundings might deter many people from serving this population, it would not bother me. And then the message came.

It wasn’t technically a voice that I heard. But the message was as crystal clear as if spoken aloud into my ear. Was it God speaking? The Universe? The Collective Unconscious? My vivid imagination? I still don’t know. It said, Write to her.

If what really compelled me was letting someone in prison know that someone on the outside cared about them, I didn’t have to join a group. I already knew someone in prison. Someone I had had no contact with for almost twenty years. Someone who had been the target of enormous public ridicule and hatred because of her past crime and ongoing legal battles.

Over the years, I had learned to trust and heed these clear messages, even if I didn’t understand them. I wrote a short letter. I received a reply a few days later. I wrote again, and thus began a transformative friendship that no one could have predicted.

I reached out to Michelle because I thought I might have something she needed. I walked away with more than I started with. Compassion. Tolerance. A listening ear. Little did I know at the time that Michelle would be a teacher, a confidante, a girlfriend in every sense that the word connotes. I became educated about Gender Identity Disorder through her and through my own research. I learned that I wasn’t wrong about Robert, in terms of the intelligence, kindness, enormous caring for those forgotten and living on the fringe of society. I was afraid I was a horrible judge of character, and learned that I was not. Robert was and Michelle is a healer, a dedicated counselor to many who are in need of support, and I became one of those she helped with her compassionate listening.

I encouraged Michelle to write her story, which she did in a fearless and unwavering way. Week by week, chapters of her life arrived in my mailbox on handwritten, yellow lined, legal-sized paper. Though I had heard many of the stories before in our letters and later our telephone calls, reading them as a whole gave me a new respect and awe for this human being who has navigated some of the most dangerous and unchartered waters imaginable, often alone, and emerging with an optimism and grace that defies logic.

Michelle has earned the status of victim but does not wear it as a costume. Her life over the past twenty-two years has been a testament to the ferocity of the human spirit to survive and be recognized. She has worked to help alleviate the suffering of her many sisters, other transgendered incarcerated individuals across the country. From offering words of support, to guiding them through the legal process to assure that they are receiving all that is legally due to them, she has hero status, but again, does not want this label either. Michelle’s memoir is at times difficult to read, as she doesn’t flinch from the grit of living life as an abandoned child, an adolescent getting by on the street, an adult whose relationships run the gamut from pathetic to dehumanizing. Nor does she downplay the ultimate violent act that sent her to live in an all male prison while courageously trying to be recognized as the woman she has always been. If you are like me, you will have your share of doubts. Have them. If you are like me, you will question her motives. Question them. If you are like me, Michelle’s story will educate, transform and inspire you. Be open to the education. Be transformed. Be inspired.

Acknowledgements

This memoir was conceived in pain and nourished by the healing hands of all those who tried to understand the bizarre process that results in the birth of a transgendered child, then defended my right to self-determination. There would have been no legal victories without the tireless professionalism of four attorneys: Frances S. Cohen, Jennifer Chiasson, Jeffrey Locke, and Joseph L. Sulman, and their most recent and most dedicated legal secretary, Annie Newell, therapist-at-large.

In my darkest hours, the light of love came into my life and pulled me back from the precipice of that abyss that so many transgendered women look into at some point. I will continue to try to find the words, Jessica.

Kia Earp was there even before the lawyers, and her sisterhood was and still is an important spoke on this persistent wheel called life.

And finally, my eternal gratitude to Cynthia S. Tavilla, Psy.D., and her niece, Dianna Sawyer, my editor. It was Cindy’s belief in my writing and my right to travel redemption’s lonely highway that resulted in this memoir. At a very painful point in her own life, she encouraged me and transcribed my chicken scratches into printed words, then introduced me to her niece, a professional editor and published author, who lovingly produced what follows from about 500 pages of chaos. My sister-from-another-mother and the niece who granted me honorary auntie status. May you always find one another’s footprints.

Author’s Note

The truth doesn’t shine brightly for all the actors in every drama, especially the villains. In the course of writing this memoir, I have had to reveal very disturbing facts about people who would normally be thought of as above reproach. Their behaviors have run the gamut from immoral to criminal, and all are documented in the case files of two civil actins in Federal court (92-12820 MLW and 00-12455 MLW), as well as my prison record. Unfortunately, every word of this memoir is true. Fortunately, Grace will always defeat cruelty.

The statements, views, and opinions in this book are solely those of the author. They reflect events and conversations as experienced by the author, and reported by the author.

Prologue

On July 28, 2010, a month-long heat wave finally relented, and it was cool enough to power-walk. Within a minute of leaving my building on the way to the yard, I was greeted by an old friend. Kim Thanh had lived in my building for several years before moving across the Quad to Three-Block. Kim told me he had been looking for me, and that he had something for me because he was going home in a few months and didn’t need it.

A robe, he said. I never use, he added. My heart raced. You wait, he instructed, holding up his hand with the fingers spread as he walked off. I paced back and forth. The rules require it.

I’m a prisoner, and while the nuances of prison life are myriad, the only one that mattered to me that day was the property policy that limits the type and quantity of all possessions we are allowed to have. It was this policy that had prompted Kim’s generosity. He knew that I would appreciate a new robe; what he didn’t know was how much and why, so he had no idea why I was crying when he came back outside with a laundry bag containing a new electric blue velour bath robe with red trim and sash. Or why I hugged him so tightly when he handed it to me, saying, You keep the bag. I no need. The best gifts come when the gentle rains of grace fall on the seeds we have planted in the hearts of others. With a new robe, I could finally give my wedding dress the safe-keeping it so deserves.

Her wedding dress is the only garment that a woman will save forever, and hand down to a daughter occasionally. I won’t be able to do the latter, but thanks to my dear friend Cindy, my sister from another mother, I will be able to save it. The red velour bathrobe I wore to my wedding was the closest thing to a dress I’m allowed to have, my only dress in twenty years.

I’m a prisoner, a transsexual currently transitioning to female while living in a men’s prison. It is undoubtedly the most humiliating and reactionary environment in which to transition from one identified gender to another, but I had no choice in the matter. When I finally felt free enough to stop pretending, my choices were limited.

Our wedding was not state-sanctioned, though it was well-attended. On behalf of the happy couple, I sent hand-made invitations to all those I cared for, requesting their spiritual presence at the appointed hour, and a random act of kindness in lieu of a wedding present. My spouse is also an imprisoned transsexual, but in another state. When we said our vows on October 20, 2006, I wanted, needed to be as girly as I could for Jessica, even though hundreds of miles and impregnable walls prevented her from seeing me. I had a bouquet of flowers, a maid of honor, and an enlarged photograph of Jessica. My maid of honor was a friend, another transsexual who has been unable to publicly declare the fact that she, too, is a woman. This was a rare chance for her to feel connected as a woman to these sisterly rituals that are such an integral part of our lives as women. I was honored to have her there.

The realities of prison life are too complex to properly explain in this memoir, but some have results that are so far out of proportion to their intended purpose that they can fill one’s days with grief. A property policy that allows for only one bathrobe seems so innocuous on the surface, and I’m sure there are those who would say that we are lucky that showers are provided and we’re allowed to buy bathrobes.

In my case, a new thirty-six dollar bathrobe from the only vendor we’re allowed to buy from is a prohibitive expense, more money than I earn in a month as a five-day-a-week cleaning lady in my housing unit. I barely even earn enough to buy a couple of jars of peanut butter a month, cosmetic items, and writing supplies.

The first man who saw me wearing it said I looked like Super Girl. At my age, which is sixty-one, I’ve learned to take compliments like that with a smile and a polite thank you. They help to balance the years of terror I was subjected to by a world unable to forgive a little girl for being born with a medical condition called Gender Identity Disorder.

I immediately washed all the prison off my red wedding dress/robe and hung it up to dry in my room. For the first time in my twenty years as a prisoner, the concept of home came into play. My only home was in the hearts of those who loved me. There had not been a physical structure that included a family, a sense of belonging, or a place where I could reasonably expect to be allowed to store something important. When I called Cindy and explained my problem, and she told me that I could consider her home my home, I mailed my wedding dress and the journals that this memoir is based on. And when I told my friend Johnny that I had mailed something home, I couldn’t contain my tears. I was loved, and I was finally convinced that my journey to redemption had not been stalled in that silent, terrifying darkness in which it had begun.

Chapter 1

Darkness

It is commonly believed that trauma can imprint memories as well as or stronger than joy. Accordingly, my oldest memory is of the time when I was first admonished for being a girl. When I was four and my sister, Patricia, was seven, we lived in a trailer with my mother and her boyfriend, Red. All my thoughts, feelings, fears and urges, likes and dislikes, every molecule that was the essence of self, was female. Yet no one believed me, based on externally visible, unwanted body parts. The messages I was getting in response to my clothing and toy choices led me to an inconsolably depressing realization. I was a girl who had accidentally been given the wrong outside parts! I recall my mother and Red taking a doll away from me and giving me a balsa wood airplane, along with the first painful warning of what awaited me in the future. You're a boy, not a girl, and boys don't play with dolls or wear their sister's clothes. I threw the airplane on the roof of the trailer and sat on the steps to cry.

My sister tells me I shouldn't cry over my airplane; I should cry over my sins. Apparently, my sins were just beginning, and to those who have learned to wear their faith as a weapon, I may be seen as unredeemable. I forgive them. My heart insists that I aspire to something more profound than the anger and hatred that has been directed at me by those whose formative years were, like mine, partially mis-informative. Some of history's worst examples of human behavior have been the result of nothing more complicated than our innate need for the approval of others; because we are social beings, we are readily convinced that those who are different are bad for the social order. If the crucible of belief-formation happens to be fueled by a claim that these are God's beliefs or mandates, or equated with patriotism, it is a frighteningly seductive step down that road to black and white thinking, leaving most of our cultural palette by the wayside, and our civil rights in jeopardy. It is my fervent prayer that they will have as much grace in their lives as I have been gifted with, whether from the love of friends and families, or from mere circumstance, which even St. Augustine recognized as an invitation to gracious behavior. It is grace, I believe, that allows us to surrender our black and white thinking.

When a mother abandons her child, they both become prisoners for life, regardless of the eventual outcome. Inherent in this act is a lifetime of emotionally flooded moments whenever this subject is broached in conversations, movies, news reports and novels. On the radio or television, or overheard on the subway ride, it can instantly return the mother or her child to the most painful moment that the abandonment evoked for either of them. For my mother, these reenactments ended in 1977 when she died. That she had previously died a little bit on the day she left my sister and me at our grandmother's house has never been in doubt. When she failed to return for us and her mother relinquished responsibility for us to the Chicago Police Department, how many miles had she put between her pain and her past? When she died, I was too young and too preoccupied with my own brand of dysphoria to properly let her go to her long-sought peace. In my selfish race to achieve self-destruction, I had no patience to lean on, and certainly no strength to share with her. As a four year old, precocious and already problematic, it was black and white: I told her I was a girl instead of a boy and then she left. I don't have the words to describe it, but I know in my little girl's heart that our mother has left us because of my sins. Despite my sister's advice, praying doesn't help. I hear the voice of despair for the first time. I've been captured by a darkness that knows nothing about dollies and dancing with snowflakes. My mother, my sister, my world are all gone, replaced by an orphanage called St. Hedwig's. It is run by nuns, for whom English is a second language. Their native tongue is cruelty, and it has several dialects, each more painfully memorable than the last.

I sleep in a dormitory with a large number of boys. In the corner is a private room where Sister Oswalda sleeps. She makes me clean the hallway.

My sister Patricia lives on the girls’ side, and works in the dining room. Sometimes she puts a raw potato under my cup. I love raw potatoes. Raw carrots, too. We have the biggest garden in the world with apples, cherries, and pears, but it’s a long walk away, past the garbage dump. I have to pull weeds sometimes.

Sister says we shouldn't eat the fruits in the garden. She says it's a sin to eat them without asking.

Who’s fruit is it? I ask, because then I’ll know who to ask.

You ask too many questions! Sister yells.

What about the dead people? I ask, because I’m afraid of the cemetery at the edge of the garden.

It’s not polite to call them ‘dead people.’ They have gone to Jesus.

What does sin taste like? At confession, Father says God forgives all our sins. Why doesn't God just give everybody fruit?

Stop asking so many questions!

Sister called me Spawn of Satan when I wore the dress. I don't even know what spawn means. She hit me when I asked. She chased me all the way up the ladder on the slide. She tore my dress when she pulled me down from the slide. My beautiful dress, blue with small yellow flowers. My left shoulder hurt from falling off the slide.

I'm hungry and I have to pee. It's very dark in the closet under the stairs. I heard all the kids come down to supper, and then go back up. I think Sister forgot about me. I think there is a spider in here. I think God forgot about me. I don't know why this is happening. It didn't happen to Bobby for taking the dead people's fruit. Or to Thomas when he said a bad word. Sister just put soap in his mouth. I prayed again a little while ago. Please, God, fix me like the other girls. I don't want to be the spawn of Satan, whatever that is. I still have to pee. I don't want to look, in case God hasn't fixed me yet. I prayed to God and Mary, too. She's his mother. Maybe she can talk to him. Maybe God is busy finding food for the children in India. Sister says they have no food when we don't eat all of our food. Maybe God could give them the dead people's fruit. Maybe God can't hear me because I'm locked in this closet. Maybe this is too much darkness even for him.

The second time I was caught wearing a dress, I was imprisoned in the same closet under the stairs. For my original crime, Sister had decided, well after nightfall, that her gift of reflective solitude was preferable to a paddling, although her manner of inquisition as to whether I had had enough time to consider the seriousness of my misdeeds (wearing a dress and running when called) resulted in possibly more pain. I'll never know. The psychic pain from being brutalized merely for stating my gender later contributed to my self-imprisonment in the bottle and in the arms of Morpheus, beginning an on-again off-again drama of self-denial that ran for decades. A paddling would have consisted of a series of blows across my naked buttocks, while I repeated Sister’s words one at a time. So I may have been fortunate and only been subjected to five blows: SMACK-I-SMACK-will-SMACK-not- SMACK -disobey- SMACK -Sister. This was a standard dose, delivered with a wooden paddle about 4 inches wide and 2 feet long, with holes drilled through it - possibly for the offending child's ungodly impulses to escape through. Serving a sentence in the prison of your own body because others refuse to admit that neither the prison, nor the key, even exists, is no different than being in a concrete and steel prison with a life sentence. Both will teach you that if you don't embrace patience and humor, you will be embraced by anger and hate, insanity's internship.

The physical pain I avoided when sister shook me and saw me grab my injured left shoulder might have been kinder in the long run. As children we seem to shake off physical pain rather easily, but psychic pain invents its own reason for hiding. The closet under the stairs administered multiple blows of psychic pain: the darkness, the hunger, the spider, the fear of being abandoned alone in the closet all night, the unanswered prayers and a little girl's sadness and confusion about why God would do this to her. After five and a half decades of beatings, rapes, stabbings and emotional muggings, this pain can only be neutralized by releasing that imprisoned little girl. Stuck in a male body, I remain in that closet under the stairs, where my terror was kindled.

In the several years between my closet imprisonments, I survived by living in my head the life I was being denied. A fertile imagination is an isolated child's best friend, and loneliness was a receptive plot. The time and energy required to fantasize an alternative existence leaves no room for boredom, so the passage of time during that period was no more cruel or kind to me than the other inhabitants of St. Hedwig's. The nuns fed us very well, we were clothed and regularly bathed, and educated so proficiently that when my mother reclaimed us shortly after my second night under the stairs, my orphanage version of a fourth grade education exceeded the standards in the Chicago public schools by such a large margin that I was allowed to travel to a different school one day a week to receive advanced classes in algebra.

But back in St. Hedwig's, my precociousness lead to unintended consequences. As a fourth grader, I was bright enough to occasionally be summoned to a sixth, seventh or eighth grade classroom to answer a question that had stumped the students in that class. These missteps by the nuns sometimes resulted in retaliatory beatings by a student whose pride had been hurt, but they were no more painful than the hand-spanking and paddling from the nuns for poor work performance or poor penmanship in class.

I had few friends. But I wasn't totally isolated. The terror of the closet under the stairs may have temporarily stifled my dress wearing impulses, but I was still a girl, needing to be with other girls to say and do and freely express my little girl thoughts and feelings. Mary's father was the caretaker or groundskeeper, and they lived in a house within the black painted wrought iron fence that surrounded St. Hedwig's. When we were allowed outside, I would sometimes wander around behind the back of the kitchen and towards their house, hoping to run into her picking dandelions or just sitting under a tree. She may have been as isolated from the other children as I was, for I never saw her with other girls.

In Mary and me, and in a boy named Bobby who had webbed feet, grace found its purpose. With Mary, I could be as silly-girly as I needed to and be accepted. Sometimes we wandered over to the girl's playground, where the slide that sister had pulled me down from was a grim guardian, always reminding me that things were not as they should be in my convoluted world. I didn't see Mary often, but when I did, I could see myself through the eyes of another, in the way that girls like me, and maybe even all children who are a bit different in some way can instantly recognize acceptance or rejection of themselves as valid, as just another child.

Bobby was born with connective tissue between all his toes on