Just a warning that this episode contains mentions of suicide and self-harm. The suicide prevention lifeline is 988. We’re also talking adult content. If you’ve got kids around, maybe wait until later to listen.
Billboard:
Maxx: I wanted to wear a skirt and I wanted to be pretty and I was. And I slayed. (laughter) Um. I…
(quirky staccato music starts)
Ariel Lavery: How old were you when you first formed an opinion about what you wanted to wear out of the house? How you wanted to present yourself to the world?
Maxx: Every single photo of me, whenever I was littler, I was always wearing a dress or a skirt.
Ariel Lavery: Did your parents help you perfect your look? The way you wanted people to see you?
Maxx: My mom had to like do a special thing. And I I had to, like, in my mind I was like is that twirl good enough. Is it good enough for me.
Jennifer: Yeah. We had to take, when we would go shopping we would have to take the dress and we would have to spin it. And if the skirt did not make a full spin when you spun the dress around then it was not an approved dress and it had to go back on the rack.
Ariel Lavery: After talking to 14 year old Maxx and his mother Jennifer, I was thinking about how kids, at a young age, are very opinionated about how they dress. Even with my toddlers it often has to do with how they want to identify that day: Elsa, or Spiderman? But what if the rest of the world doesn’t approve? Lately, there has been a wave of new legislation across the country that limits kids in what they are allowed to do. In some states, this legislation limits these kids’ and parents’ ability to gain access to physical and mental healthcare. And much of this care is incredibly specialized.
Jennifer: We already have, you know, not enough mental health providers anyway much less trans affirming therapists in you know the middle of nowhere where we are.
Ariel Lavery: In majority rural states the impact of legislation rolling out can mean these kids’ healthcare could potentially disappear completely.
(theme music starts)
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: Trans girls is easy picking and they have managed to turn it into a culture war but not a damn one of the Republicans that does this has any understanding of what it is to be a trans child.
(theme music swells)
Ariel Lavery: We’re hearing from women near and far this season about how living in rural America affects their health. In this episode, we delve into the lives of individuals who, until very recently, have been fairly invisible. We’ll hear from a woman who lived over six decades before receiving the gender affirming care that, ultimately, saved her life. Today, young people have more access than ever before to this care. But with the rapidly changing legislative climate, what is in the hearts and minds of these kids and their families? Today, Becoming Me, on Middle of Everywhere: Telling big stories from the small places we call home.
(theme music ends)
Scene 1: Meet JoAnne
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I am a retired attorney which I'm not sure there is any such thing because I get asked legal questions several times a day.
Ariel Lavery: This is JoAnne Wheeler Bland, a prominent figure in certain circles of Kentucky as she’s achieved a lot in her 75 years of life. Two-thirds of her life was dedicated to her highly successful law career, winning cases as a trial attorney and even serving as a special justice for the Kentucky Supreme Court.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I can count the cases I ever lost on my fingers.
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne and I sat down on the decorated back porch of her stately home in Elizabethtown, Kentucky.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: It's really nice. We love it out here.
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne was graciously hosting me after she had just had a stint in the hospital.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I'm still recovering from the rigors of being in the hospital and this is where they had those IV things sticking in me and like I'm allergic to the adhesive.
Ariel Lavery: That’s what it looks like.
Ariel Lavery: She was dressed comfortably, in a long sleeveless, flowing dress that revealed scabs and bruises along her arms. She accessorized with jewelry and jangling bracelets, her wispy hair slightly disheveled and pushed to the side. JoAnne comes from a long family line whose accomplishments she loves talking about.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I was born in Silicaga, Alabama in 1945. My father was a farmer, my grandfather Bland was a farmer. They were also businessmen. They were into all kinds of businesses and side ventures and what not.
Ariel Lavery: When the family lived in Kentucky, JoAnne’s father served on the Hardin County School board where JoAnne grew up.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: My father died in 1975. My mother was elected to fill his term. She served another 12 and a half years and she also got to serve as chair of the Hardin County
School System. Now my real hero growing up was my grandmother Bland. My grandmother Bland was so far ahead of her time.
(upbeat 1940s era music starts)
Ariel Lavery: Grandmother Bland was able to attend a women’s college down the railroad tracks from her family’s hotel where she worked.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: She built rental properties and rented those out. She raised four children. She was president of the PTA for years. She was a leader in the methodist church. And she was a yellow-dog-democrat. And she served on the Sonora town council and ultimately was mayor of Senora back in the early 1940s. Which was unheard of…
(contemplative music starts)
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: My grandmother bland and her youngest daughter who lived with her would go to Louisville to Stewarts. That was the Macy's, the you know, the big place in Louisville. They will always went on Saturdays. They didn't have a lot of money, but they shopped. And I love to go and watch them shop, try on clothes. I'd sit there and watch. And as you know, as probably everybody knows, mothers or grandmothers or whoever's taking care of their kids. The little boys go with them into the restroom. And you do your business, and that's fine. I don't really know whether I was six, six and a half sev... I don't know. But I do remember them telling me. You can no longer go with us to the bathroom. You have to go to that bathroom over there. And that's when I realized I was different. And it it was a total devastating shock. I didn't want to go over there. I wasn't one of those people.
(music fades)
Scene 2: Under Cover of Suits
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne learned how to present as “one of those people”. Being the first male born to a family full of farmers and businessmen it was important for JoAnne to step into her role.
JoAnne: They were grooming me to be the patriarch of the family. And I hated every moment of it. There was all this pressure put on me to play sports. I would just say no. I would do crazy things trying to prove that I was strong like, carrying one bale of hay in each hand. (Ariel laughing) Then I got to where I could pick up two with each. And I got little bitty hands. Look. I got. Look, I do not have man hands. I was afraid to get too close to anybody. And when I was in school, I couldn't go to a boy's bathroom.
Ariel Lavery: Really? So what did you do?
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: You learn how to you don't drink. You don't drink or eat anything until you get home.
Ariel Lavery: So you may have just been chronically dehydrated?
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: …and now I have kidney issues because of that. It never went away. It was 24/7.
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne concealed her identity to everyone, never letting on to anyone how it felt to be her. Not her parents, her siblings, even her Grandmother Bland ever knew who she really was.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I was good. I was better than most. I was better. I was the best.
(pause)
Ariel Lavery: After graduating high school, JoAnne got a Bachelors of Science in Business and Economics, followed by a Doctorate in Jurisprudence at the University of Kentucky. While there she met her first spouse.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: She was Methodist. Her family was Methodist. I kept thinking if we ever get married, that’ll stop it. That will stop, stop it. I didn’t. I called it “it” because I didn’t have words to describe it. I just. I thought that that would cure me. You know, plus, I liked that girl and ultimately we were married in 1970. She was still in med school. I had just graduated from law school.
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne was hired in a law firm in Elizabethtown, which she described as a rigorous practice.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I worked on 676 different cases in four months because that’s the kind of (crosstalk) that’s the kind of practice they had!
Ariel Lavery: But keeping busy suited her because, to her dismay, the marriage had not “cured” her condition.
(melancholy music starts)
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I would be so depressed, and I would come home and get out on the tractor, where I could be alone in nature. A lot of trans people turn to alcohol or drugs. Trying to cope. I realized it's not going to work and then you realize I'm trapped. I don't know what to do. I got so depressed. In 2007,8,9, I was taking five prescription antidepressants a day, a prescription mood stabilizer and as much Imitrex as I could find for my terrible migraine headaches. Now all this, this going on in my head, we now have a name for that: gender dysphoria.
Ariel Lavery: Gender dysphoria is when a person feels great distress or anxiety about their gender identity not matching their birth sex, or other sex-related physical characteristics. It’s obvious that JoAnne experienced this condition from a young age, but had gotten very adept at concealing it. Yet, at this moment, it seemed that JoAnne’s spouse knew something was up.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: She hid all of our guns because she was scared I was gonna… And I had actually thought about all the different ways I could kill myself.
(melancholy music ends)
Scene 3: My Come to Jesus Moment
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: Thanksgiving in 2009 I had my own what I call come to Jesus moment where I had been so distraught that I got to the point that I have either got to transition, which is what we call going through this process. We've got-I've got to transition or I'm going to kill myself staying the same as I've been trying to do it. It's not working. I can't go on like that.
Ariel Lavery: At the age of 64 JoAnne finally decided she was going to emerge.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: There's an organization their acronym is WPATH, the World Professional Association for Transgender Health.
Ariel Lavery: WPATH promotes “evidence based care, education, research, public policy, and respect in transgender health.” And many transgender people and professionals see them as the authority on gender affirming care.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: They write the protocols. And I had, I read the protocols. I knew what was required. So I knew that you had to see mental health professionals in order to get referral letters and bless, and the blessing to go to an endocrinologist, and then to a surgeon. And so at that point, I've got to find mental health professionals. So I started doing research in January of 2010, and I was looking as far away as Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Nashville, Lexington and anywhere.
Ariel Lavery: There weren’t any therapists with experience treating transgender people near Elizabethtown. But she found one in Lexington, an hour and a half away.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: On that particular day I had been to Louisville to federal court. And I was wearing my lawyer suit. So I’m sitting in the parking lot thinking and thinking. And I’m thinking, I can’t do this. I’ve never told anybody. I don’t think I can do this. So I started my car and I drove to the edge of the parking lot. And something inside told me, if you drive off this parking lot you will be dead within two weeks.
Ariel Lavery: She musters up the courage to turn the car around, go inside, and explain herself.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I said before I talk to you I want you to know that I’ve been a trial lawyer and I’ve had to argue cases in front of juries. I’ve had to argue cases in the court of appeals in the supreme court. I’ve sung solos and duets in church. And I said I am more scared to come in and talk to you than all of those things that I’ve done for forty years.
Ariel Lavery: In the therapist’s office, sitting on the couch, she takes a deep breath.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: And I said, I think I'm transgender. And I truly expected a bolt of lightning to come down and strike me dead right there on the spot.
(pause)
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: And then an amazing thing happened: my migraine headaches stopped. My suicidal thoughts stopped. My depression stopped. And I cold turkeyed all of the medicine that I was taking.
(contemplative music)
Ariel Lavery: When we come back, JoAnne becomes herself.
Scene 4: Transitioning
Ariel Lavery: Having survived her first therapy visit, JoAnne went full force ahead. For her next visit with a therapist, four days later, she left the house without the suit.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I went as JoAnne.
(upbeat dance music )
Ariel Lavery: Not long after, she booked an appointment with an endocrinologist, but not without some flack from the receptionist over the phone.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: And she said, I want you to know your insurance will not pay for this. And I said well, I got cash.
Ariel Lavery: She starts hormone treatments and begins the process of transforming her male body.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I had just enough testosterone to have hair on my body, which God I hated. (sound of laser begins) And so they asked me, What part do you want today? Do you want your arms or I said, I want it all today. Every time the laser touches you, it feels like you've been stung by a bee. Went home and I thought I was on fire. Second time I went, the power was turned up. I felt like it was all I could do to lay there. She would tell me, or am I hurting you? You want me to stop? And say no, I said the pain that I've lived with all my life, this is nothing compared to that. I'm also going through, through hormone replacement. And when I start having my hormones replaced, I start having night sweats and hot flashes. And eventually I'm just like I'm going through a second puberty. And here I am I feel like a 13 year old girl in a 65 year old body.
Ariel Lavery: The WPATH protocols that JoAnne had reviewed recommended at the time that a person take hormones for at least a year prior to gender affirming surgery, which is the process a person undergoes to get their physical appearance to match their gender identity.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I hadn't been on hormones for a year, because I started in March of 2010. And here it is September.
Ariel Lavery: But after only six months of hormones JoAnne found a surgeon she wanted to work with, in Scottsdale Arizona. At this time, in 2010, there were only a handful of surgeons in the country able to perform gender affirming surgery, meaning, JoAnne had to get on the list ASAP.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: One year to the day. I saw my first mental health professional on February the fifth 2010. On February the fifth 2011…
Ariel Lavery: She flew to Scottsdale to get her surgeries.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: He sent me to a dental place where they do all these X-rays. He wanted to know where all the bones are. I said I still want to be able to look in a mirror and see me. I know you can change me to somebody I don’t recognize. (contemplative music starts) The next day I had 12 hours of facial surgery. Seven days later, I had 14 hours. I had 26 hours of surgery in seven days. And that's like, you know, 27 or eight hours of anesthesia that really wiped me out. And I had a really hard time recovering from that. Really hard time. They thought I was gonna die. I couldn't eat. He had done all that facial surgery and he had gone through the inside of my mouth and put all these sutures and stitches in there. Plus, he had cut my jaw bone in two places and brought it together and put metal and screws in that.
Ariel Lavery: Since coming out, JoAnne’s support network had essentially dissolved.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: (sigh) My spouse, we went through a divorce. My law partner told me he couldn’t practice law with one of those people. My church family that, here, in the big Methodist church. When they found out I was trans they told me don’t ever come back.
Ariel Lavery: Without anyone to help her through this process, JoAnne relied exclusively on the surgeon’s staff to transport her and care for her while she healed. And back home people were talking.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: The sex change. Well, it's not really the sex change. It’s gender affirming surgery. And everybody, everybody knew, everybody around here knew, I mean my life has not been a secret. Everybody knew I’m going to Arizona to have surgery.
Ariel Lavery: Her prominence in the community, JoAnne explained, made this a process that is already a public matter, the equivalent of local news. This scrutiny is something every trans person I spoke with talked about: the very public nature of transitioning. For some people, a public transition is not an option due to one’s social and economic circumstances. The opinion of colleagues, kids, friends, parents, the people in the small town you live in, perhaps even rhetoric you hear politicians spewing can prevent you from gaining the confidence to make a public transition. Your support system could disappear (snaps fingers) overnight. That is how JoAnne found herself, at age 65, in a painful new body entirely alone.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: I was out there by myself. I was out there in the hospital 17 or 18 days.
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne finally decides she’s strong enough to fly home. But this time, home wasn’t Elizabethtown, though she would eventually end up there. After separating from her wife, she had bought a condo in Louisville to start her new life.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: So here I am, in Louisville in my condo, first night, and it's the first night by myself. And it was probably the scariest night of my life. Because I'm alone. What if I start bleeding? You know, what happens if something comes loose? I was, I was very concerned that they wouldn't take care of me. Or they would say they didn’t know how to take care of me. What they really meant, they don’t want to.
(pause)
Ariel Lavery: JoAnne counts herself lucky. Even though she had to wait most of her life to live as herself, she had the means to go through this whole process without a community or family backing her along the way. Her life as a successful lawyer made it possible.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: To me transitioning meant I got to have the vagina. 15% of trans women ever get to have surgery, some of them don't want it. Most can’t afford it.
Ariel Lavery: Depending on what type of surgery you’re looking to get – a mastectomy, facial surgery, vaginoplasty or phalloplasty – it can cost anywhere from $3,000 to $25,000 or more just for the surgery, according to a recent Forbes article. Factor in the extra expenses for travel, hospital stays, drugs, and aftercare and you could be looking at one-hundred thousand dollars for a full-body surgical transition. People without deep pockets might choose to fund this on credit cards, even mortgage their house! But, like JoAnne said, the percentage of people going through with gender confirmation surgery is pretty low. A paper published by Transnational Andrology and Urology in 2019, stated that between 25 - 35 % of people identifying as trans underwent surgery.
Marcy Bowers: I will say I think with a greater awareness of a gender diverse presentation and the greater societal acceptance, we’re seeing people seeking less surgery and less hormones, which may come as a surprise to people on the outside.
Ariel Lavery: I spoke with Marcy Bowers, the then president elect of WPATH who has been a leading gynecological surgeon in the field.
Marcy Bower: It's widely known that major urban centers are going to have better access to care. And unfortunately, people in smaller communities do have to travel distance usually to find someone who has not only knowledge but also has some insight into what needs to be done. The current accepted figure is that 0.6% of the population is transgender. So that's 1.6 million people. I actually think it's higher, because I think trans people typically are undercounted.
Ariel Lavery: It’s extremely difficult to survey the population of transgender people and even more so to figure out how many rural residents identify, or want to identify, as transgender. The best resource I was able to find on this was a report by the Movement Advancement Project back in 2019, which found that transgender people are equally represented in rural and urban areas. And perhaps surprisingly, an earlier study from the CDC found that trans women are MORE LIKELY to live in rural areas than cisgender women. Another CDC study cited in this report shows that over half of the US transgender population live in majority-rural states, most of those being in the south. Reading these figures totally challenged my perception that rural areas of the country are always more homogenized than urban areas. And, I’m imagining, that because this is such a hard population to report on, there are many people living in those rural areas who remain invisible, both to the data, and to us.
Scene 5: Youth Transitioning
Maxx: Um, I don't think I ever really knew what it, like, being trans was until I actually, there is someone in my grade that I'm actually still friends with, came out to me as trans.
Ariel Lavery: Remember the youth we heard from at the top of this episode, talking about dress shopping?
Maxx: When I actually realized that I was a trans male, was whenever one of my friends came out as a trans male.
Ariel Lavery: This youth, today, goes by Maxx.
Maxx: And I was like, I can be that.
Ariel Lavery: Maxx is a fourteen year old transgender middle school boy who lives in my town. He didn’t realize until he was older that he was trans, which many people experience with the onset of puberty. His mother Jennifer is incredibly supportive of Maxx’s needs. Be that picking the perfect dress with a twirl, or pursuing the gender affirming care he decided he needed at age 11.
Jennifer: There wasn't like a big sit down moment.
Maxx: (crosstalk) Yeah I was like thank the lord I do not have to talk about this.
Jennifer: It never occurred to me to think about being trans. It just wasn’t on my radar. I learned about a lot of things that I didn't pay attention to. Or things that I would have disregarded. I mean it, for me, it it has absolutely been a journey of growing up. Because I grew up in Mississippi, and I grew up with a whole lot of toxic crap in my head.
Ariel Lavery: Maxx’s transitions have happened in stages. Before the age of 10, he identified as 100% girl. But as he matured and approached puberty his sense of who he was evolved. At 10 years old, the girly girl Jennifer knew came out to her as bisexual.
Jennifer: Then later (sigh), this turns into, I’m trans. That is like, how am I going to do this because it’s like ok well, that’s name changes, that’s, that’s medical…
Ariel Lavery: Mothering a trans youth sounded like a full-time job. And I was kind of amazed by Jennifer.
Jennifer: You start with the pediatrician, you have to go to the pediatrician and you have to say, you know, this is my child and my child feels like they are in the wrong body. And so the pediatrician has to do a physical exam to make sure because there are androgen insensitivity there are other endocrine disorders that can cause your your brain and your body…And you start with a psychologist and the psychologist then decides do you need to also have psychiatric support because a lot of these kids are incredibly depressed. And they have a lot, I think it's one in five attempt suicide. They self harm. So then the psychologist decides…And then, and depending on where you are age-wise, when you go to see the psychologist, they may send you to a pediatric specialist who's a pediatric endocrinologist, we go to Vanderbilt. That's what they're calling the transgender clinic…if you are a child who has yet to enter puberty, or you are very early in puberty, then well so let's say that that would be between nine and 11 years old. You're seven years old, they're not going to be sending you there. And that's really important to say. They're just socially transitioning and being supported and loved. If you are in that pre puberty nine to 11ish. They offer puberty blockers.
Ariel Lavery: Puberty blockers delay the onset of puberty hormones that start to get turned on around this time.
Jennifer: so let's say you were lucky enough to know, at nine years old that you're transgender, you got put on puberty blockers. Let's say you're you're biologically male. So you're a very tiny little boy still going into high school. And you get to take estrogen. And you will develop into a fine boned, beautiful, female presenting person. That is ideal. It's not somebody who's gonna have to go and have the hair lasered off their face, they're not going to have to have their jawbone shaved, they're not going to have to go through a lot of the distress that we see with older men, biological men who are trying to present as women now what they're having to go through. So this is a wonderful gift because again, it's about the distress, you're, you're alleviating so much distress for someone. Unfortunately for us puberty blockers were not an option.
Maxx: Yeah, I was too old.
Jennifer: Max's growth plates had closed. The next step was to see was there anything medication wise that would give him comfort and help alleviate the dysphoria. And I think dysphoria is something we need to make sure it gets gets out there that all of being transgender is not just, I want to be somebody different, it is diagnosed as great discomfort, great distress at being in the wrong body, at seeing your body change in the wrong way. And so for Max, being biologically female, and being past puberty, that means menstruation. And that was causing a trigger. And so the pediatric endocrinologist gave him birth control, and put him on one that literally stopped his his period, like, almost the first month you were on it.
Maxx: Trans healthcare is very, very limited. I have to go all the way to Nashville to get health care for me. Just to get like my birth control. Skip a whole day of school, go there and then come back in one day.
Ariel Lavery: …a four hour round trip at a minimum. Maxx is a very lucky and loved kid. His mother has researched and processed loads of information in order to understand how rigorous and detailed transgender care is. But even with this incredible parental support Maxx engaged in some self-harm early on. Jennifer recently made a Facebook post describing Maxx’s changed behavior before transitioning. Maxx “became withdrawn and lethargic. She started therapy and medication, but things got worse. I had to lock up everything sharp, every pill in the house, even ink pens because she would use them to self-h*rm. Life was dark and sad and hard.”
(melancholy piano music)
Ariel Lavery: Nearly a dozen states have now signed bills into law that target transgender people. For kids: playing sports; using the bathroom; and getting the kind of care that Jennifer has been able to get for Maxx now have potential legal implications in some of these states. Tennessee has made it illegal for providers to perform medical procedures that will help enable a minors’ ability to identify with or live as their chosen gender, which could impact the Transgender clinic at Vanderbilt.
Jennifer: It’'s terrifying. I mean, you know, for us if it closed and we can't get care we'd have to move. But we can move. Not everybody can.
Ariel Lavery: Fortunately, Maxx can continue to get his birth control. But since this interview, the Kentucky legislature signed Senate Bill 150 into law, some of which will take effect this June. It restricts school’s staff use of student’s preferred pronouns, and bans any kind of discussion on gender nonconformity. Perhaps some of the most severe restrictions are those banning any kind of gender-affirming medical care that aids in the transition or postponement of puberty to minors in Kentucky. It even requires doctors to reverse any care they have already given to a transgender youth regardless of the negative repercussions.
(pause)
Ariel Lavery: The simple question now is, what will these kids have to go through later on to get their lives back?
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: The only regret I have is that I did not have the courage to do this when I was younger. I wish that I could have done this earlier. I feel like I lost so much of my life. I wish I could have just lived as a girl. It's as simple as that.
Conclusion: Going Forward
Ariel Lavery: I wanted to talk with JoAnne one more time before publishing this story. But she has continued to be in and out of the hospital for cancer treatment and its grueling side effects. Last I heard from her she had been in the hospital for weeks and getting her 20th blood transfusion. In her latest text she described her state as “weak, tired, anxious, scared and frustrated”.
(contemplative music)
Ariel Lavery: Jennifer has also been exhausted by her fights to keep her child healthy and happy. After the restrictive Kentucky bill was passed in the senate, Jennifer texted me to say that Maxx was livid and thinking about writing a letter to our legislator. But when I checked back in with her a week later she laughed dismissively and said, Oh no, Maxx isn’t going to write any letters any time soon. And later, when I asked her if Maxx would be joining the ACLU’s list of clients to file suit against the state, I was very surprised to hear he would not. She told me, “it’s too much for him right now. He doesn’t want to be the poster child for trans kids–he just wants to be a kid.”
(contemplative music starts)
Ariel Lavery: As I think about the path ahead for Maxx, I see a future with more awareness about people like him and JoAnne, their experiences, and needs. But, obviously, with that growing awareness, comes fear. JoAnne has learned to negotiate that fear, moving within and around it. Becoming a spokesperson, an educator, and a leader in trans rights in her state. But she controls her own narrative so well, that I find myself stuck still trying to place her story. When I watched her sitting on her porch, talking about her struggles, her hospital wounds exposed, there was still something lingering behind her words – like raw pain and vulnerability. Perhaps this is what’s left behind from a lifetime of hiding from everyone, even her influential grandmother Bland.
JoAnne Wheeler Bland: There are times when I get real melancholy. It’s like, I wish, if there’s one thing in my life that I could do, I wish I could spend one more day with her as JoAnne.
Ariel Lavery: If you or someone you know is having thoughts of suicide please call the suicide prevention lifeline at 988. If you identify as trans and need to talk with a counselor you can reach counselors with the Trevor Project at 1-866-488-7386 or text 678-678.
Credits:
Ariel Lavery: This episode was produced by me, Ariel Lavery with editorial help from Asia Burnett and Derek Operle. Our editor is Josh Adair. Thank you to Annie Davis, our intern, for keeping up with the constant tasks we send her way. If you’d like to learn more about gender affirming healthcare there is a list of resources on the episode page for Becoming Me on website at middleofeverywherepod.org. Connect with us at Instagram and Facebook at middle of everywhere pod and Twitter at rural underscore stories. Our theme music was composed and produced by Time on The String Sound Studio in Paducah Kentucky. Other scoring comes from APM music. This is a production of WKMS and PRX. This program was made possible, in part, by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, a private organization funded by the American People.