Breathing Easier, Despite Discrimination: Megan Tracy

Megan Tracy remembers vividly the very first time she wore a dress, even though it was nearly 45 years ago. Just three years old, she snuck into her older sister Laurie’s bedroom and spotted a red corduroy farmer’s dress with a big pocket adorned with an anchor.

“I put the dress on and looked in the mirror,” she recalls. “It felt like I had been holding my breath and then started breathing.” Wanting to share her good feelings, she went downstairs exclaiming, “Ta Da!” Her mother stared. Laurie ripped off the dress.

Their shock stemmed from the fact that Megan was born a boy; the sight of their son and brother in girl’s clothing was anathema.

Megan continued to secretly dress in girls’ clothes whenever she got the chance. Eventually, her other sisters—Megan has 19 siblings—began dressing her up as part of what they saw as a game. One day when she was about six, she asked to go out and play in her girls’ outfit with her best friends Bert and Bobby. Bobby spit on her. Bert beat her up. Megan says she learned a valuable lesson that day: “Not everybody’s receptive.”

While watching a talk show when she was 11, Megan learned a word that explained everything she was feeling: transsexual.

That knowledge didn’t lessen her struggle, and Megan overcompensated for her feelings. She picked fights with other kids. In high school she acted macho, and engaged in substance abuse and self-mutilation. Megan also became deeply depressed.

At 16, her mother discovered her dressed as a female and asked if she wanted a gender change.

“I so badly wanted to say yes, but I looked at her, and the pain in her eyes,” Megan recalls. “I said, ‘This is just a Halloween costume.’ I fought like hell to be normal.”

Her first marriage ended because her wife could not abide Megan’s need to express her female gender identity. It was Megan’s second wife who encouraged her to be true to herself, for the sake of their son. “She told me I can’t be a decent parent if I can’t take care of myself,” Megan says. Though the couple divorced, they remain friends.

It’s been 14 years since Megan transitioned to live full time as the woman she’s long known herself to be. She has a good relationship with her son, now 17. Though she continues to struggle with depression, Megan says, “I’m happier than I was. Everybody’s got to start somewhere.”

She’s more at peace since her transition, but there have been costs. Megan is estranged from her daughter. She was threatened with arrest for using the women’s restroom at a local Wal-Mart, and prohibited from using the women’s room at the college where she earned her paralegal degree. She once had a can of beer hurled at her from a passing car while walking down the street in Concord, her home; a police officer who witnessed the assault did nothing.

“It hurts,” Megan says. “Sometimes it’s very, very difficult to be true to your convictions when so many people are against you.”

She is hopeful the New Hampshire legislature will add protections for transgender people to existing civil rights laws, so she and others can live free from the harassment and discrimination they face just because of who they are. “We’re not asking for anything more—or less,” she says. “Just the same protections as everyone else.”