A More Fulfilling Life: Matt Aversa
Matt Aversa is a military veteran and a licensed social worker. While he makes his home in Southern New Hampshire, he works in a new LGBT unit at a mental health and addiction treatment center in a neighboring state. Away from work, Matt, 61, enjoys biking, kayaking and volunteer work. He’s also a member of the Unitarian Universalist Church of Keene, and has given talks aimed at educating the UUC community about the joys and struggles of being a transgender man.
But life wasn’t always this fulfilling for Matt. Living as a woman, he struggled for 10 years with debilitating depression, and neither he nor a succession of therapists could identify the root cause. Eventually, a determined therapist directed him to the International Foundation for Gender Education, an organization that promotes the acceptance of transgender people. “Thank God she did, because it was the thing that saved me,” Matt says. “I didn’t know anything about being transgender. But once I started to find out and I realized this is why I felt the way I did, the depression went away. I never had a problem with it anymore.”
He transitioned to living as a man 15 years ago. Since then Matt has lived his life in relative peace, blending into his community and society unrecognizable as a transgender man.
But there have been difficulties. His parents initially refused to accept him when he came out as transgender, and asked him to leave their house. Several years ago Matt accepted a position at a VA medical center, where a co-worker with whom he had prior conflicts inadvertently learned that he is transgender and outed him to another employee, although his transgender status had no bearing on his ability to do his job. This violation of his privacy forced Matt to resign. “I just said, I’m done,” he recalls. “I don’t want to do this anymore because I just can’t take that kind of stress.”
And while he feels relatively safe walking the streets of his hometown because he is not identifiable as a transgender person, Matt does live with some fear of the wrong people finding out he’s transgender. “I’ve been in groups of men who are very homophobic and I’ve heard what they say,” he says. “So I’m sure if they knew that I was transgender, they’d probably either beat me up or something [worse], because if they say horrible things about gay men, I’m sure that it would be even worse with transgender folks.”
Matt continues to work to educate the community about LGBT issues and recently appeared on a television program shown locally in the Keene area.