A woman's quest to erase a past that won't die

By Jessie L. Bonner

updated 3:58 p.m. ET April 24, 2009

PAYETTE, Idaho - Catherine Carlson threads through the discount store, her hiking boots clopping against the linoleum. She is numb to the shoppers who glance curiously as she plucks a pair of long underwear from a sales rack.

Cold sneaks through the walls of her trailer home, but this is the only remedy she can afford. At checkout, Catherine writes a $15 check. The clerk with the "Deb G" name tag examines the signature and runs her eyes over Catherine — the side-swept, faded blond hair, large knuckles, blue jeans and plaid work shirt.

Under the harsh fluorescent lights of the Bi-Mart, Catherine's narrow face is mapped with fine lines and abandoned by cosmetics. She ignores the unwelcome survey of her appearance.

Catherine, 52, leaves the cocoon of her trailer about once every 10 days. Payette, a tiny community of farmers and ranchers in southwestern Idaho, did not know she existed until a year ago when she decided she could no longer hide.

On that day last winter, she climbed into her silver 1993 Plymouth Voyager and drove down Main Street to pick up a friend whose car had broken down. A police officer pulled her over and found that her driver's license was suspended. He wrote her a ticket.

Catherine stared at the citation. It was issued to both her and to Daniel Carlson.

Nearly three decades ago, she underwent surgery to become a woman and took legal steps to remove her male name from public records. The ticket triggered memories of a man who, as far as she was concerned, no longer existed.

In her mind it was clear: She would have to fight to be Catherine.

And so, she mounted an impossible campaign to erase her former life, a yearlong battle against every slight and indignity — real or perceived.

Catherine would not accept that the past, no matter how painful and imperfect, is always with us, no matter how we might try to escape it.

Payette County had resurrected a ghost she laid to rest long ago. She decided the men and women who live and govern here should be the ones to bury it.

The past, however, turned out to be just as stubborn as she was.

The home anger built
Broken pavement winds through the rows of white trailers that residents describe as a transient camp. No one stays for long, except for Catherine, who has lived here for three years.

Her 1971 Broadmoor RV sits close to the entrance. The newspaper box is broken. White paint is peeling off the rickety wooden steps where a welcome mat reminds visitors to "WIPE YOUR PAWS."

Inside, the odor of dogs and tobacco lingers in the living room where Catherine hand rolls cigarettes and dotes over two black Pomeranians, Shadow and Teeny Tiny Tina. Blankets draped over the windows keep the morning sunlight from spilling in. Camping gear and fishing tackle are stacked against the walls.

She brews pot after pot of weak coffee in a kitchen where the plates are paper and the curtains are old dish towels.

This is the home anger, frustration and mistrust built.

She keeps her reasons in a silver briefcase, where court documents from nearly 10 years ago detail a dispute between Catherine and her mother, who revealed during the case that her daughter was born male. That cemented a place for Daniel's name in public records.

Catherine lived in the shadows for years, protecting herself from scrutiny — until Dec. 3, 2007, when the officer pulled her over and found both her legal name and her birth name, listed as an "also known as," in county records.

He scrawled both on the citation. She was fined $841.

"It's not just a ticket," Catherine said. "It destroys my ability to be me."

Her driver's license was first suspended in 2006 when she refused to pay a fine for driving without a seat belt. As in her teenage years, when suicide seemed a viable option, she was pleading to be heard but going about it the wrong way. Seat belts stir troubling memories of institutions and their inflexible rules.

As a matter of principle, she refused to pay the citation and failed to appear for court-ordered community service and a hearing.

Charlie Litchfield / AP Catherine Carlson, who weighs less than 100 pounds and constantly battles fatigue, rests for a moment in the kitchen of her mobile home in Payette, Idaho.

Quietly, she cloaked herself in anger bred from a lifetime of being hurt and misunderstood. Daniel had been ridiculed by his classmates, sent to the hospital after an attacker punched him in the jaw. Catherine deadened herself to the stares, the teasing, the derogatory terms for people like her.

In Payette, old battles became new again and she fought the authorities with a rage they did not expect. She was not physically attacked here, her home was not vandalized, yet she seemed to want retribution for every indignity lurking in her tortured past.

Payette just wanted her to pay the ticket.

By emerging from seclusion, she forced questions the county had never considered: where to house a transgender in a jail with separate cells for men and women, which courthouse bathroom she should use, whether her old, male name should be stricken from records.

She went to jail four times in her fight to be recognized as a woman.

"It's frustrating," said Chad Huff, the county sheriff. "We certainly don't want her to spend time in jail, she just continues to find a way to get here."

'I was an abomination to God'
Catherine was born Daniel Steven Carlson and raised by a strict Mormon mother in Wyoming and small towns across Idaho and Montana before her family moved to California. From the age of 5, Daniel believed he should have been a girl.

He was beaten for cross dressing in middle school, and tried to castrate himself with a razor blade. At 18, he nearly jumped from the Golden Gate Bridge after his stepdad told him he was no longer welcome in their home and his mother had him excommunicated from the church.

"I could not deal with the fact that I was an abomination to God," Catherine said.

Those pleas for help landed Daniel in mental hospitals, where infractions like refusing to take medicine were easily dealt with: Daniel was strapped to a bed and injected with sedatives.

He was in his early 20s and broke when he found Dr. Stanley Biber, a former Army surgeon who was one of the first to perform gender reassignment surgeries in the United States.

Charlie Litchfield / AP Catherine Carlson, 52, points to her image in a family picture taken nearly 30 years ago before she underwent a procedure to transform her gender to the one she believes she was born to be: a woman.

Before the doctor would consider the operation, Daniel had to submit to a psychiatric evaluation, start hormone therapy, pass as a woman and legally change his name. He worked three jobs to raise $15,000 for the surgery.

A confused boy began the lonely journey. He went alone to Colorado to finish it on Thanksgiving Day 1980.

"That doctor gave me life," Catherine said.

The transition can take one year, or several, as patients undergo hormone therapy and cosmetic surgery. They relearn how to walk and talk, and they become experts at blending in.

Catherine was married, divorced — and, at one point, beautiful. In an old photograph, a young Catherine with short blond hair and denim skirt poses in front of the bridge where Daniel tried to die.

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An estimated 35,000 Americans have undergone gender reassignment surgeries. They are doctors, government workers and activists. They have families, children and serve on their local parent teacher associations.

They do not live under the blanket of fear Catherine and other transgenders experienced in the 1960s and 1970s as they clung to their secret. The alternative, in some cases, meant death.

"You carry this with you for your entire life, a profound problem that other people find incomprehensible," said Jennifer Finney Boylan, a 50-year-old novelist and English professor at Colby College who was born a male.

"Often you end up in some sort of crazy argument where you have to defend who you are," she said.

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