All photos courtesy of Rani Moore.
Rani Moore doesn’t want random men using the ladies’ room. She doesn’t want boys and girls sharing locker rooms in K-12 schools. She doesn’t want you to pretend she’s a woman.
All she wants is to be acknowledged and respected as a transgender female.
That’s not how the 54-year-old Redding resident has always felt about her gender identity. For most of her life, Moore, who was born male, believed she was biologically female. She’s gone to great lengths, including sexual-reassignment surgery and countless cosmetic procedures, to become a woman. She married a straight man, bought a straight home, and lived a straight life right here in straight Redding for nearly 20 years, no one but their closest family members and friends the wiser.
She thought her transition was complete. Then one day, not too many months ago, everything changed.
“Once I’d done everything possible I could do, I woke up and realized I was living in a damned prison,” Moore explained to me over lunch at Circada Cantina one recent afternoon. “The reason it didn’t work is that I was still struggling to be a genetic female. It’s not what I am. I’m a transgender female.”
With platinum bangs, expertly-arched brows, almond-shaped eyes, pert upturned nose, full ruby-red underlip and flawless pores, no one’s likely to prevent Moore from using the ladies’ room at Cicada any time soon. She’d just completed a seven-day facial peel and looked tall and radiant, a successful, well-groomed professional woman perhaps in her late thirties. She’s taken it just about as far as you can go only to discover that’s not who she really is, after all.
If a single event served as catalyst for Moore’s awakening, it’s the 2014 suicide of Leelah Alcorn, whose parents refused to accept her gender identity and request for transition therapy, instead forcing her to undergo Christian-based conversion therapy. The teenage transgender girl posted a suicide note on social media detailing the treatment she’d received from her parents and others, then stepped into the freeway traffic. Her note went viral worldwide, reigniting the then-smoldering transgender rights movement.
“She didn’t even think about running away,” Moore said. “Do you know how much pain it takes to step in front of a semi? At that very moment I said to myself I’m done. To see a baby go through all that, I’m done. All I want to be now is transgender female in front of the world. I want to rise up and be responsible and be a role model.”
Moore, dressed as Mrs. Claus, is director of recreation at Copper Ridge Care Center.
Moore knows more than a little about the pain and suffering endured by Alcorn and many other transgender individuals who’ve found the world as it is too much to bear.
She was born in Virginia and immediately moved with her family to Tennessee, then to the Bay Area, where her parents divorced. Moore grew up with her mother, who’s a nurse, and an extended family of step-siblings and cousins. She exhibited feminine characteristics early on. As a toddler, even though she dressed as a boy, she was often mistaken for a girl. “I looked so feminine, everyone would say, ‘Oh, what a pretty little girl!’” Moore said.
The tone and tenor of the observations changed when Moore began attending grade school, where classmates and even teachers teased and tormented the boy with the effeminate behavior.
“They said I was a girl, they said I was a homosexual,” Moore recounted. “I was viciously bullied, continuously, hair pulled and money taken. I lived in fear from the time I started grade school until the time I got out of school at 15. I walk side-to-side, and when I tried out for the swim team, the coach said, ‘I can’t have you on my team. When you walk you swing your ass and I can’t have you doing that in a bathing suit. It’s distracting.’ I didn’t make the team.”
As far back as she can remember, Moore identified as female. Learning there was a distinction between the sexes, namely that boys have penises and girls have vaginas, did not dissuade her persistent, profound belief that she was biologically female, anatomy to the contrary. She was just a girl who just happened to have a penis. She remembers coming home from junior high school one day wearing makeup, only to be confronted by her mother, who informed her makeup was for girls.
“But I am a girl!” she cried, mascara running down her face.
Moore’s mother was supportive and sought treatment for the troubled teen. It was the mid-1970s and the Bay Area had established itself as an early pioneer in the provision of psychotherapy and sex-reassignment surgery services to patients suffering from what was then called gender identity disorder. At age 15, Moore began attending therapy sessions at Stanford University Medical Center, with the hope of being approved for sex-reassignment surgery.
Things didn’t go quite as planned. Medical tests determined that Moore’s chromosomes were 100 percent male. But Moore’s belief that she was biologically female was so persistent and profound, doctors could not persuade her she was, in their view, inhabiting a male body. She says her agreement to their view was required for surgery to proceed, but she’s never seen herself as a woman trapped in a man’s body and refused to acquiesce.
“No matter what I said to them, they kept telling me I was wrong, that the way I was looking at it was wrong, and that I had to do all the stuff they said. I was telling adult professional surgeons you’re an idiot, you’re saying stuff that’s so impossible for me to comprehend, it’s stupid. When they tell you something’s wrong with you, you are damaged goods. You are not what you’re supposed to be, and you’re going to have to do all these things to fit into society as a woman. Because of my behavior they presented me with a letter saying, ‘No [surgery]. No, you have other underlying issues.’”
Which, as with many transgender individuals, was true enough. The pressure between trying to conform to one’s own sense of self and meet societal norms at the same time adds up. Moore gave up seeking treatment, dropped out of homeschooling and began living life as an emancipated 16-year-old transgender girl, discovering a precious irony along the way.
Suddenly, just like that, the bullying stopped.
“I’ve never been beaten up for being a girl,” she says. On the contrary. Once she started dressing the part, instead of tormenting her like her former male classmates, men, older men, ten years older, twenty years older, began showing their affection, monetarily and otherwise. The older they were, the more they had to give Moore recalls, lightly scolding herself for sounding crass. For the first time in her life, she felt appreciated for being who she was.
Although Moore passed as female without hormones or plastic surgery, she continued seeking transition treatment as an emancipated minor, fixing one body part at a time, chipping away at the marble, searching for the hidden woman within the stone.
She began with breast augmentation and a procedure to remove her Adam’s apple, which she jokingly describes as being larger than Don Knotts’. Eventually she joined a small group of teenage transgender girls living as girls in the Bay Area, working hard, partying hard, saving up their pennies for the next round of hormone treatments and plastic surgery.
They called themselves the surge queens, “surge” due to their predilection for cosmetic procedures, “queens” because they were living as women with, as Moore puts it, “boobs and a bird,” the bird being a penis, to which Moore still found herself attached.
“I was realizing what I was,” she said. “I went on a destructive run, hanging out and running the street. I didn’t have any maturity. All I wanted to do was look like a Barbie doll. I wanted perfect round hips, a little tiny waist, great big boobs, and I had all of that by the time I was 25. I could run along the beaches with my thong on and I looked fabulous. But I had no centeredness and I was extremely immature.”
In her spare time, Moore, shown here at Matson Vineyards, is an active member of Redding’s foodie scene.
Moore tells her story with a mixture of nostalgia and survivor’s remorse. The party was on in San Francisco’s night clubs and bath houses in the late 1970s and early 1980s and the surge queens were the life of the party. People don’t believe her now when she tells them what it was like back then, but having lived through the time period I can attest that San Francisco was a wide-open town where anything that goes went, until HIV and AIDS brought the party to a crashing halt in the mid-1980s.
Moore survived the 1980s, but wrestled with substance abuse issues well into the 1990s. Transgender males and females suffer higher rates of substance abuse, suicide and other mental health issues than the general population. She credits a Hindu couple, owners of a Bay Area hotel, for rescuing her from homelessness, providing her room and board in exchange for childcare services.
When she got back up on her own two feet, she began reading Hindu texts, discovering her name, Rani, within the pages, along with peace of mind she’s never found in Christianity. She’s been a devotee of Shiva, one of Hinduism’s three major deities, ever since.
“I remember crying with my mom when we first started discussing transition surgery because it meant I wasn’t going to be able to have my own children,” she said. “I remember crying and hating God. I grew up hating God, and at that time the only God I knew was the Christian God, and I grew up feeling such hate this had been done to me.”
Unlike the Old Testament, Shiva doesn’t have much to say one way or the other about LGBT issues, but the mere fact the Hindu hotel owners had given her a hand up was good enough for Moore. She’d found the center she needed to put her life back on track. Shortly before the turn of the century, a surgeon removed her testicles and penis and used the excess tissue to construct a realistic vagina in their place. Moore, then nearing 40, had finally completed the physical transformation she’d begun as a teenager.
“I honestly have always told people having a penis did not make me a man,” she explains. “In front of my other friends who were transgender, I would be often running around naked, and I would laugh because it’s the funniest thing to have this thing going on down there, because I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to have it. I always thought there were other girls with penises.”
Does she miss the bird? She pauses before answering.
“I waited so long … I guess they both have their pluses and minuses.”
Completing the transition has been mostly positive for Moore. Since then, she has been able to find stability, gain job skills and get a career going. She’s been steadily employed for more than 17 years and currently works as the recreation director at Copper Ridge Care Center in Redding. She’s been married twice, the second one ending in divorce after 13 years, not too long after Leelah Alcorn’s suicide.
“I just woke up one day and realized none of it really worked,” she said. “The reason it didn’t work is I still had it my head that I was struggling to be a genetic female. They [the doctors] convince you that you’re a genetic female trapped inside a man’s body. They take away every part of your being. They strip you down to where there’s none of you and there’s only isms and things. It’s devastating; it separates the psyche. I spent the past 13 years waiting on a man, the cleaning and the cooking and all that stuff, thinking that quantified me as being female. It doesn’t.”
She now understands that she’s not a biological woman and never will be. That’s where the concept of gender identity comes in. For reasons still unknown to science, a small number of people — estimates range from .1 percent to .5 percent of the population –experience what is now called gender dysphoria, defined as extreme discomfort with the gender into which they’ve been born combined with the persistent belief they belong to the opposite sex.
If the numbers are correct, that means anywhere from one to five individuals out of every 1000 people have reported at least some level of gender dysphoria. The median total estimate of transgender individuals living in the United States is approximately 700,000 people out of a total population of more than 320 million people.
Gender identity can be a confusing and somewhat cloudy concept. Simply writing this story about Moore’s transition while sticking to the feminine pronouns preferred by transgender females has been an exercise akin to learning a new language. It’s not too hard to accept the former Bruce Jenner’s contention that he’s now a woman; it’s a little more difficult to believe it was Caitlyn who won the gold medal in the men’s Olympic decathlon in 1976, even though that’s the name now in the record books.
To add to the confusion, all this gender bending doesn’t even take sexual preference into consideration. Moore has always identified as female, and as you might expect, she’s always been attracted to males. But that isn’t always the case. Transgender men, biological women who identify as males, can be attracted to biological men. Transgender females, apparently including Caitlyn Jenner, may prefer sex with biological women. Moore explains:
“Just because you’re struggling with your identity to figure out where you fit in the whole scope of things doesn’t mean you immediately become a girl just so you can go have sex with men. Some don’t. Some have everything done and are still in love with women, they just need to correct their own situation.”
Moore believes that if the concept of gender identity had been more developed when she was growing up, it would have made it much easier to accept both her biological status and the treatment offered to relieve her gender dysmorphia, sex-reassignment surgery.
“The problem back then was I was saying to a doctor I’m a girl, and they’re like, ‘Girls are born as girls, you’re not a girl, you understand?’ They lacked the classification. Now that they have a classification, that doctor, as he’s studying to get his internship, opens his book and it says this is how a transgender female, a girl saying I’m a boy, acts at an early age. Then when I told them I was girl, they’d say no, you’re confused, you’re a transgender girl. And I’d go, oh! They’re not saying I’m someone trapped in someone else’s body because that’s just a bunch of nonsense. It would have saved me.”
Although some transgender individuals express regret about undergoing sex-reassignment surgery, Moore’s confident she would make the same decision today, only the transition would have occurred much sooner and she might have avoided the pitfalls of street life in which so many young transgender people become ensnared.
Moore smelling the roses at another Matson Vineyards tasting.
Hormone treatments and sex-reassignment surgery cannot change a person’s biological sex. But they can relieve the distress that results when an individual’s gender identity doesn’t conform to their biological sex. That such treatment remains controversial is evidenced by the transgender bathroom controversy that erupted in March, after the North Carolina state Legislature mandated that all citizens must use the bathroom corresponding to the sex on their birth certificate when relieving themselves in public facilities such as schools and government buildings.
Never mind that the lawmakers still haven’t established a penalty for breaking the law, or a means of enforcing it. The legislation was a direct response by the state’s religious conservatives to a law passed earlier this year by the city of Charlotte that protects transgender individuals in public spaces, especially schools, where transgender students are regular targets of bullying and violence. Thanks to transgender activists, similar laws have been passed in cities and states across the country, including Washington and California, during the past decade.
But in their zeal to protect the transgender population, advocates and government officials have occasionally conflated gender identity with biological sex, most notably in the guidelines issued in May by the Obama administration through the Department of Education. The guidelines directs all public schools to accommodate transgender students in line with Title IX of the Education Amendments Act of 1972. Title IX states that “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”
Religious conservatives, who generally require nothing more than Bible verses to condemn all things transgender, immediately noted the guidelines appear to override provisions in Title IX that allow high schools and colleges to provide separate restrooms, training facilities and athletic programs to women. The new guidelines could conceivably permit transgender women access to these facilities and programs, invading the privacy of biological women and opening the door to unfair competition between them and transgender females, who may retain the inherent physical advantages of being born biologically male. Ten states, led by Texas and Oklahoma, have filed suit to stop the federal government from implementing the guidelines.
How that lawsuit plays out, as well as the lawsuit filed by the U.S. Justice Department against the state of North Carolina’s transgender bathroom law, remains to be seen. Moore thinks the bathroom controversy is a tempest over a pee pot that will soon blow over. As a transgender female, she understands that biological women fought for her privacy to use the restroom free from male interference, and she’s not eager to relinquish the privilege.
“We amongst ourselves are different than when we are around heterosexuals,” she confided. “When I’m in the Bay Area and I see gay men, or even straight men, in the bathroom, I don’t even think about it and go ahead and use the bathroom and never feel threatened. But in a heterosexual environment like here, if I walked in the bathroom and there’s a man in there, boom, I’m done, I’m out of there, I’m telling the manager there’s a guy in there. It’s out of context.”
She’s in no hurry to see all the restrooms and changing rooms in America’s public schools converted to unisex to meet the ever-changing requirements of gender fluidity.
“I don’t want to see co-ed bathrooms,” she said. “I don’t want young kids, boys or girls, in the bathroom with the opposite sex for any reason. If that happens then I’m going to go crazy.”
She’s grateful that celebrities like Caitlyn Jenner are providing positive transgender role models for kids and that advocates and government officials are directly targeting the bullying of transgender children at public schools. But the wounds inflicted by her classmates so many years ago still sting. She’s reluctant to trust today’s youth with too much freedom, no matter how enlightened they may seem to be about gender issues.
“I don’t mind people getting crazy with stuff, but there comes a space where we have to stop and not get lost. It needs to be confined within an understandable space, so there’s no confusion as to what’s being said.”
She believes the biggest factor in effecting positive change will be the gradual decline of religious intolerance toward the LGBT community, as conservative, evangelical Christians lose their already tenuous grip on the nation’s public institutions.
“Kids can be evil as hell, and they’re taught in church,” she said. “I’ve been in church and heard the pastor talking about how homosexuality is a sin and these queers and this and that. You can’t talk like that with kids in the same damned room, then they go back to school. You see it all the time in the newspaper. One kid beats the other kid up because God said it was OK. Every time I have a conversation with an adult they say their kids aren’t like that. I say to you that when your kids are not under your eye and supervision and they’re at school in peer groups, they join together like wolves.”
A bleak perspective, to be certain, but as the song goes, the times appear to be a-changing.
“Now, we don’t have to be quiet,” she said. “I can say it out loud in front of anyone, I’m transgender female. People might look at me and turn away, but they can’t hurt me anymore.”
