| STORY
Melissa Ramaley
PHOTOS Erin Galletta
When Colleen, whose name means “girl,”
went away to college, she found a boy named Logan. He
had spiky, red hair, a tongue stud and a labret piercing.
He kept a wad of chewing tobacco in his cheek and spat
into an empty Pepsi bottle. Despite his rough exterior,
Logan treated women with respect. He was known for his
sensitivity.
 |
| Logan McGarrity binds his breasts
with a weight-lifting belt over a tank top. He uses
this method about 20 percent of the time to hide
his feminine characteristics. |
Colleen McGarrity had found Logan within herself. Since
the age of 19, she has lived as Logan.
For those first 19 years, McGarrity struggled through
a failed engagement to a man, a period of bisexual exploration
and a brief stint as a lesbian before she could identify
her feelings. On a level deeper than the baseball cap
and loose-fitting jeans she’d always worn —
beyond sexuality and in direct opposition to her physiology
— she felt male.
In February 2002, she explained these feelings to her
girlfriend at the time, who was very supportive. Together
they chose Logan as the name for Colleen’s new
identity, and this was the moment she became he. Since
then, McGarrity, 20, has been in the relatively uncommon
position of possessing a gender identity opposite his
biological sex. He is a female-to-male transgender.
“I always felt, like, 98 percent male anyway,”
he says. “All my parents ever wanted was a cute,
frou-frou, frilly, little girl. Of course, when I was
about 5, I discovered overalls, and that was the end
of that.”
McGarrity, an exploratory major taking the semester
off, says few people mistake him for a woman. Most people
refer to him as “sir” at the Akron temporary
employment agency where he works. At department stores,
he’s more likely to get the evil eye from shoppers
if he uses the women’s fitting rooms rather than
the men’s. If unisex public restrooms aren’t
available, McGarrity will go to the men’s restroom
and use a urinal with the help of a translucent blue,
plastic device.
Kim Shroyer, a close friend, says McGarrity has few
problems passing as a guy because he presents himself
well as a male.
“How you style your hair has a lot to do with
it,” she says. “Also the way you dress,
the type of bras you wear. You don’t want people
to know you have breasts.
“It’s in the way he walks, the way he holds
his head. Men don’t seem to look down as much
as women do. And Logan makes his voice raspier and deeper
than it is sometimes.”
 |
| McGarrity straightens his tie
as he dresses for work. He says he is rarely taken
for a woman at the Akron temporary employment agency. |
The biggest obstacle to passing as a guy, McGarrity
says, is his size. McGarrity is about 5 feet 4 inches
tall and weighs about 110 pounds.
“A few times, at first glance, people have seen
me as a 12-year-old boy.”
“I just haven’t hit puberty yet,”
he says jokingly. “That’s why I’m
so short.”
People do make other assumptions, however. For instance,
in his first semester at the university in fall 2002,
he had a professor who used courtesy titles to call
on students.
“Once, right in the middle of a test, he called
me ‘Miss,’” McGarrity says, crinkling
his nose. “So I put down my pencil and said, ‘I
need to speak with you in the hall.’”
McGarrity says he calmly told the professor, “I
prefer to be called ‘sir’” and then
promptly returned to the exam.
“He didn’t say anything. He just had this
stunned look on his face,” he says. “He
must have stood in the hall another two minutes.”
While McGarrity knows the professor meant no harm,
he says others act with obvious malice, like a car full
of men he once encountered at a gas station.
“They just kept watching me while one guy went
in to pay,” he says. “He comes back, and
they start to pull away. But then just before they leave,
they all roll down their windows and scream ‘Dyke!’”
But McGarrity isn’t offended by such remarks.
He says when he encounters the butch lesbian label,
he rarely contests it — he has explained himself
too many times. Among strangers, he doesn’t even
bother.
“I figure my life does not exist to make others
uncomfortable,” he says. “Being trans isn’t
the biggest part of me — not even close. So I’d
rather people get 75 percent of my life and be comfortable
than be forced to take it all in.”
McGarrity encounters the most opposition to his transgender
lifestyle from within the lesbian, gay and bisexual
community — the very people he seeks support from,
he says. While strangers rarely consider him female,
his primarily lesbian friends call him by feminine pronouns.
Shroyer is one of those friends who has trouble seeing
McGarrity as male.
Because she knows McGarrity from a lesbian bar they
both frequent, Shroyer says she assumed feminine pronouns
were acceptable. McGarrity didn’t correct her
until months later.
Shroyer says she’s somewhat masculine like McGarrity
but doesn’t feel the need to identify herself
as a male.
“I guess it’s just hard for me to relate
to what she’s going through,” Shroyer says,
shifting in her seat, “just like straight people
might have a hard time understanding how someone can
be gay, but they still support gay friends. I’m
just not experienced with what he feels, so I can’t
say I completely understand.”
Shroyer pauses to check her pronouns, slipping between
“he” and “she.” Though being
called “she” bothers McGarrity, he tolerates
it.
“I’m different from a lot of trans people
in that I’m not obsessed with the pronouns,”
he says.
“What they call me isn’t going to change
who I am.”
What McGarrity can’t stand, though, is the question,
“When are you going to have surgery?”
Without sex-reassignment surgery, he constantly grapples
with his identity.
“How many people do you know,” McGarrity
asks, “when they go to the health center, and
they have to check one of those little boxes —
M or F — who have to think about it?”
 |
| Small strands of hair fall into
the sink as McGarrity spends an evening cutting
and dyeing his hair |
McGarrity says he faces harassment when he shows identification
or pays with a credit card. Both still bear his legal
name, Colleen, and his photo before he became transgendered.
He plays for the Kent State rugby team — but on
the women’s team.
He feels male but dates lesbians. Straight women want
what he calls a “bio-boy.”
Before going out, he binds his breasts with an uncomfortable
weight-lifting belt or an elastic bandage.
With a legal name change, hormone therapy and sex-reassignment
surgeries, McGarrity could theoretically avoid those
issues.
Other female-to-male transgenders, like Liam Grice,
a graduate teaching assistant in the School of Art,
have pursued the procedures with success.
 |
| The use if this device allows
McGarrity to urinate in public men's restrooms. |
He completed the formal name change in August 2002
and in October began taking testosterone. Grice describes
the process as “going through male adolescence
at 38 years old.”
“I do feel internally very different,” Grice
says. “Drastically different, but not in a weird
way. It’s like coming home. I feel like I was
lost before. Now I’m more comfortable in my own
body.”
Since October his voice has deepened to the point he
is no longer called “ma’am” on the
phone. His jaw line has adopted a masculine angularity.
Grice says he has also noticed some male-pattern hair
loss. At 6 feet tall and 200 pounds, it is unlikely
he would be taken for a woman.
Grice hopes to get chest reconstruction surgery in the
summer.
But for McGarrity, the prospect of undergoing the physical
transition is frightening.
“It scares the shit out of me,” he says.
“That’s a huge decision. That’s irreversibly
life changing.
“I mean, my mom hates that I wear men’s
clothing. She hates that I cut my hair. I can’t
imagine her reaction if I came home with a goatee.”
It’s simply not a priority for McGarrity.
“I figure, I’m 20 years old. I’ve
got lots of time. ” he says. “If I have
to put it on hold for eight years, 10 years or longer,
then get whatever surgeries I might want, I’ve
still got plenty of time to be who I want to be.”
And though his family is already somewhat estranged,
McGarrity says he hopes their relationship can be salvaged.
He swallows each “Colleen” with a grain
of salt and remains as low key as possible when around
them.
“My mom’s still hoping it’s just
a phase,” he says. “When I talk to her,
she never wants to hear about it. If she asks if something
is wrong, and I say so-and-so broke up with me, she’ll
get quiet and change the subject.
“What I hope she’ll understand someday
is whether I get my heart broken by a man or a woman,
it hurts the same.”
McGarrity says he is bothered that people like his
mother view lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgendered
individuals as victims of their own choices.
 |
| BEFORE: McGarrity
at 18 years old, living as Colleen. |
 |
| AFTER: McGarrity
at 20 years old, living as Logan. |
“That’s a big problem,” he says.
“People think it’s a choice. You can choose
to act on it, maybe, but it’s either a part of
you, or it’s not. I’m not saying our lives
are always hell, but when you consider the shit we have
to deal with that the hetero world doesn’t, why
the hell would we want to choose that?”
Though McGarrity struggles with the contradictions
inherent to his lifestyle, he manages to lead a relatively
normal life for a 20-year-old guy.
“I get out of bed, jump in the shower, put my
pants on one leg at a time,” he says. “My
day isn’t that different from anyone else’s.”
His apartment is a textbook bachelor pad. Hair gel
and a comb adorn the bathroom sink. Pizza boxes battle
unwashed dishes for space on the kitchen counter. Wrinkled
clothes litter the bed. A picture of a scantily clad
woman serves as his computer’s desktop wallpaper.
Five days a week, he works at the employment agency.
For extra cash, he baby-sits and teaches piano. He plays
sports, watches sports, talks sports. He goes to the
bar on Saturdays. And above all else, he says his friends
are his life.
“I have very, very few straight friends,”
McGarrity says. “And I can honestly say I have
no straight male friends.”
He says it’s because heterosexuals have difficulty
lending support. For that reason, he says, finding and
keeping friends within the lesbian community is essential.
“The community becomes the family,” he
says. “The closeness is, however, both good and
bad.”
“You know that game, ‘Six Degrees of Kevin
Bacon?’” he asks. “We’re lucky
if we get two. Everybody knows everybody, and everybody’s
dated everybody.”
McGarrity gives his friends keys to his apartment just
in case they need to get away from the drama of LGBT
life. He says it’s not unusual to get a call at
3 a.m. from a friend looking for someone to talk to.
Outside the LGBT community, his closest friends are
fellow rugby players.
Though he has to play for the women’s team,
the “gentlemen’s sport” is an outlet
for aggression and a source of camaraderie.
And as a team, they have become LGBT allies for McGarrity.
He recalls when they came to his performance at a PRIDE!
Kent event last year at the Interbelt Nite Club in Akron.
“I thought maybe one or two of them would show
up,” he says. “Ten members were there to
support me. They were there to support the cause, they
were there to support me, they were there to support
everybody else performing. I almost cried. For a straight
person, putting yourself in a situation where you’re
packed with 60 or 70 lesbians takes nuts.”
So for now, with his friends backing him, McGarrity
is content, even in the face of ignorance.
“They have a certain level of understanding,”
he says. “It almost makes up for what I lost with
my parents.”
McGarrity says his mother still tells him that if he
prays enough, he can be straight.
“Mom,” he says, “there’s not
enough prayer in the world.” |
