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I arrived in Seattle by train from Los Angeles on January 17, 2000, having left California after 36 years. It was four months after I’d said goodbye to my mother, who died from Alzheimer’s disease. I was all alone in the world.

As I dragged my three suitcases up the stairs of King Street Station and made my way toward the bus stop, I saw a line of people waiting at the rescue mission. Looking their way and hoping they wouldn’t notice me, I began to wonder how long it would be before I was standing in that line.

At the stop I caught the bus to my motel in Eastgate, where I would spend the next 57 nights in a desperate race against time.

I needed to get a job and find a place to live. I was trying to fight the depression that had daunted me for more than 11 years. Then there was the growing panic as the money ran out. Because of bad weather or bad luck, I can remember looking at maybe one apartment and applying for only one job, with the Census Bureau.

Time was tight and the fear and nausea were increasing. I went to an Eastside charity’s office and asked for help. The lady there was nice, but she told me something true: You can’t be homeless out in the suburbs. I’d have to go to Seattle.

She handed me a lot of papers with names and addresses. But there was no one I could talk to about the agony I was in.

I went to the Eastgate office of the Department of Social and Health Services, and they offered me “Emergency” food stamps. It only took nine days for me to get them.  Three days after that, I was homeless.

That morning, I’d gone into the motel manager’s office with $100. “I am about to be homeless,” I said, giving her the money to keep my personal property stored in boxes there. I spent all day moving my boxes into a storage room and then, with $20 in my pocket, took the bus to Seattle. It was my mother’s birthday.

I finally made it to the Women’s Referral Center at 8 p.m. It was my first night of being homeless out of 2,524 nights, almost seven years.

I was fortunate that for the first two months I was staying in a church basement on Capitol Hill. The women’s numbers were small there, and the fewer the numbers, the less chance for conflict. And I was able to get work with the Census Bureau – which led to a full-time job with pay that lasted nine months.

But every time I had to go to the Referral Center, to wait in an overcrowded room with a lot of angry, antisocial people, I was afraid. I had heard rumors about what went on in some shelters where the “scary women” in the room were going. And I am a transsexual – I had sex reassignment (“sex change”) surgery 33 years ago. I had noticed the prevalence of many lesbians in the staff of our shelter system and I remembered the rampant trans-phobia that I had been a target of in the 1980s, by gays and lesbians, that cost me my job as a respected and experienced counselor working with LGBT clients.

If I was found out here, in this shelter, I thought, I would be turned out to the streets, where I knew I wouldn’t last long.

I was fortunate to learn that it was the policy of the shelter system not to discriminate on the basis of gender identity, this being four years before that policy was codified into the state’s civil rights law. Still, I feared for my safety. Sometimes I felt like I was in a bad women’s prison movie. Paranoia is a flower that blooms when you’re homeless, and I was afraid of the bullies who could make your life a living hell very suddenly.

One day the biggest, baddest, meanest woman of them all, an ex-convict with a hair-trigger temper, wanted to talk to me.

“I don’t want to do you no harm,” she said as I was waiting for the punch or the punch line. “A friend told me you said that you had a sex change.” I said that I didn’t know what she was talking about. I didn’t want to be under the thumb of this woman, and fortunately I was able to get a permanent bed in a different shelter, and no one would give me any more grief for almost three years.

In 2003, I met one obnoxious raging bull of a woman, who was permitted to use what had been my safe haven – the shelter’s television room and its couch – for sleeping. She would make friends with you in the room, and as soon as you left she would say really nasty things about you. And when staff leaked my secret and she got wind of it, I was to be tormented for 14 months. The worst time was when a man attempted to rape me in broad daylight on a Marysville street. I managed to escape him when a bus came. But when someone else told her about it, she muttered, “Aw, gee, who’d want to rape it?”

I fell into a much deeper depression after the rape attempt and I gained another 60 pounds, a total of 180 more pounds than I weighed in 1988. I was to find hope through Antioch University’s Women’s Education Project breakfast, where they have art projects available for homeless women, and I had become involved in a creative writing group. Eventually I would start writing songs and singing them each week at Antioch – more than 80 songs, including the Homeless Blues Chronicle, a serialized songbook. I found dignity, an income and a home through a case manager at the Downtown Emergency Service Center.

Since that time, I have endeavored to find my place in the world. I had spent almost seven years being homeless and I had met several dozen homeless trans-women (male-to-female) and several trans-men (female-to-male), and never once had there been any outreach to me from any trans or LGBT organization here in Seattle. I had wanted to return to the trans and LGBT communities where I had once been respected, but my offers to facilitate were ignored by the leading trans organization here, despite my skills, abilities, training and experience. I had found myself warmly accepted by a lesbian group, so much so that I carried their banner in last year’s Dyke March. But a few days later, I found myself being shunned and excluded for not being “a real woman or a real lesbian” and I left them after losing a 29-1 vote to try to get them to stop it.

But I was to find great acceptance as a woman among women working as an advocate, writer, speaker and facilitator with WHEEL (Women’s Housing Equality & Enhancement League) and its partner organizations in the homeless community. I was able to tell my story to Gloria Steinem and 800 others at Town Hall last July. And I lost 145 pounds! The greatest honor of all was when I was asked to emcee the 15th annual Homeless Women’s Forum luncheon, where I even got to lead 150 women in singing.

I have been doing everything I ever wanted to do. I just hadn’t been able to do it for the trans and LGBT communities. Until now.

Since a friend hooked up my first PC, I found my way onto Facebook and I have been able to build up a network of 2,100 friends and I discovered the long-lost sisterhood and brotherhood of trans people, over 1,500 in all, and leading advocates, organization, writers for trans and LGBT rights and several hundred homeless people’s advocates.

Because of my great success at advocacy and networking I was invited to join the board of the Gender Identity Empowerment Coalition, a national and international trans advocacy group.

So every day I am able to do something that matters, that makes a difference in the lives of other people. And life is good again. 

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