From page-boy to testosterone injections: One person’s journey fom female to male

Jim Howley was a girl who wanted to be a boy by the time she was four. It was 1979, in a town with the absolutely literary-perfect name of Plain City, Ohio. At preschool, she hung out with the boys. There—and we can imagine the tight ball of wrestling, arm-punching and Star Wars action figures—she noticed, in a moment of profound revelation, the length of their hair. She told her mom to crop her own waist-length blond hair; Mom honored the request.

“We started out cutting a little bit,” Howley, who now lives in Los Angeles, recalls his mother telling him later. “You wanted it shorter each time I finished until finally you had a cropped page-boy cut. You really liked it, and I looked at it and thought, ‘What have I done?’ But I fluffed it up a little bit and it looked kind of cute. As I looked at your new hair, I remembered taking you for professional pictures back when your hair was long and having everyone rave about how pretty your hair was. But I came to the resolution that that’s what you wanted, and I was okay with it.”

By third grade, still impossibly young, she told her parents and grandparents she would have a “sex-change operation” when she grew up.

Two weeks after high school she joined the Air Force, and then the Air National Guard. “This was before my transition and I completely disregarded the whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ nonsense,” he says. She “was happy and proud to have a girlfriend and no government agency was going tell me otherwise.” The Air Force paid for Howley’s bachelor’s degree in English from Ohio State.

In 1999, she watched the award-winning documentary The Brandon Teena Story, the Ur-text of the transgender community, an examination of sexual identity, misogyny, homophobia, terror, rape and murder. A world of possibility opened—and then quickly closed. It was “the sheerest form of emotional and mental torment I have ever experienced, every day a complete farce. And every day I remained in that existence, my spirit slowly died a little.”

Two years passed—two years during which she vacillated between absolute certainty that her path lay manward, and the gut fear of ruining every one of her mom’s remaining Mother’s Days. Suicide attempts followed: pills, booze, car exhaust, a rooftop jump into the abyss. In April 2001, now 25, following a path first illuminated in childhood, she began the first of many hormone treatments that would lead her to manhood.

Three months after the testosterone booster entered his bloodstream, his voice began the first of several steep descents. Jim sprouted facial hair; looking back on it, it seemed no more than dirt on his face. People greeted him with “sir” instead of “ma’am.” His voice snowballed toward bass. He felt, he says, “elated and free.” Did he relate differently to men and women? No, he says: He’d “never felt like a woman.”

Every two weeks, right after he would take his testosterone shot, he was buffeted by a surge of aggression.

“It was an emotional roller coaster at first, having both hormones running through the body,” he says. “Eventually I stopped having monthly cycles. But I lived on that emotional roller coaster for half a year. It was a daily battle to try and remain on an even keel.”

One summer day in 2003, 28 years old, still living in Ohio, Jim decided to take on the first of several operations, this one to reconstruct his chest.

“I was working the entire summer as a horse barn carpenter,” he says. “I observed a lot of the other guys working shirtless and there I was, wearing not only a T-shirt, but a compression vest below that to give the appearance of a male chest. Ohio is very hot and humid in the summertime and I was miserable. I thought, ‘I can’t do this anymore.’ And once the summer was through, I told my boss I had to have a surgery that would put me out of commission for quite a while, so I was going to have to resign.”

The boss was oblivious—or almost oblivious. Howley recalls his response: “I understand, Jimbo. Most guys don’t have that surgery until well into their 40s.”

“I assume he meant a vasectomy, which was such an ego boost,” Howley says.

He remembers what it meant when, as a 10-year-old girl in sweltering, summertime Ohio, a friend shamed him into wearing a shirt to cover his budding chest. “The mental relief, the complete sense of liberation following this first surgery was nothing short of miraculous,” Howley says. “You can imagine how overjoyed I was when, for the first time in 19 years, I cut my lawn in nothing but a pair of shorts and a grin.”

There were prices. Following the testosterone treatments, his desire for sex exploded. “Crazy,” he calls it.

“I thought I was already a pretty sexual and sensual person, but it is not a myth about testosterone and sexual appetite.”

At first he dealt with it self-destructively. A sideways glance from his girlfriend, a hint of criticism from her sent him into a rage: “I skipped the sadness, and from helpless went straight to anger. They say anger stems from pain. I didn’t feel good enough, even through transition. It was frustrating.

“Girls these days are very different. They are comfortable with how I am, because I am more comfortable with myself,” he says.

For five years, the needle entered his body and delivered life-changing testosterone. When he learned about his increased cancer risk in what he calls his “female parts,” he had them removed—for himself and for viewers of Sex Change Hospital Episode One. He was 31.

Why the television appearances [Howely was also one of the suitors on Transamerican Love Story]? Why talk to the media? Because, Howley says, he’s committed to other men and women who feel born in the wrong bodies. The confusion isn’t merely personal, he says: “Transgenders have a 50 percent suicide rate. If they are not killing themselves, they will kill other kids. People’s lives are at stake, especially children who are creative and have so much potential. They are made to feel that they are not good enough for this world, but we all have worth. So whatever you do, do not give up.”

Tags: lgbt, pride parade, transamerican love story, transgender