This week’s episode of In the Den kicks off a new series! There are similarities and differences between all of our individual stories. We come from diverse religious backgrounds, political parties, family dynamics, and geographic areas. Each of us started at different levels of acceptance, but we all relate to the desire of wanting to protect our children over our own biases. So a few times a year, we will be sharing a Mama Dragon’s story. Today, we meet Jasmine.
Special Guest: Jasmine
Jasmine grew up in California at a time when being gay was illegal. Her very conservative family made it very clear that there were “normal” people and “sinful” people, who were to be shunned and avoided, if not treated more harshly. As a very small child she knew she was different but felt her difference was even worse than being gay. So she spent decades trying to hide and ignore this reality that the world was not ready to accept. All of this dramatically changed about 5 years ago when one of her children came out to her wife as trans. Fortunately, Jasmine and her wife had grown past a lot of the closed-minded bigotry they had been raised with, and they both loved their children very much. Even though this went against their religious beliefs they knew they were not going to reject their children. But accepting their child as trans also meant accepting that trans was valid. For Jasmine, this brought to the surface all of the decades of pretending. At the time she knew very little about any LGBTQ topics, but that was about to change.
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In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org.
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Donate to this podcast
This week’s episode of In the Den kicks off a new series! There are similarities and differences between all of our individual stories. We come from diverse religious backgrounds, political parties, family dynamics, and geographic areas. Each of us started at different levels of acceptance, but we all relate to the desire of wanting to protect our children over our own biases. So a few times a year, we will be sharing a Mama Dragon’s story. Today, we meet Jasmine.
Special Guest: Jasmine
Jasmine grew up in California at a time when being gay was illegal. Her very conservative family made it very clear that there were “normal” people and “sinful” people, who were to be shunned and avoided, if not treated more harshly. As a very small child she knew she was different but felt her difference was even worse than being gay. So she spent decades trying to hide and ignore this reality that the world was not ready to accept. All of this dramatically changed about 5 years ago when one of her children came out to her wife as trans. Fortunately, Jasmine and her wife had grown past a lot of the closed-minded bigotry they had been raised with, and they both loved their children very much. Even though this went against their religious beliefs they knew they were not going to reject their children. But accepting their child as trans also meant accepting that trans was valid. For Jasmine, this brought to the surface all of the decades of pretending. At the time she knew very little about any LGBTQ topics, but that was about to change.
Links from the Show:
In the Den is made possible by generous donors like you. Help us continue to deliver quality content by becoming a donor today at mamadragons.org.
Connect with Mama Dragons:
Website
Instagram
Facebook
Donate to this podcast
JEN: Hello and welcome to In The Den with Mama Dragons. I’m your host, Jen. This podcast was created to walk and talk with you through the journey of raising happy, healthy, and productive LGBTQ humans. Thanks for listening. We’re glad you’re here.
Today is the first of another new series that we are adding to the podcast. Mama Dragons Stories. There are similarities and differences in all of our journeys. We come from diverse religious backgrounds and we come from diverse nations. We started at different levels of acceptance. But we all relate to the desire of wanting to protect our children over protecting our own biases or anything else. So, a few times a year, we will be sharing a Mama Dragons story.
Today we are going to meet Jasmine and take a deep dive into her personal Mama Dragon story. Like always, I want to remind everyone that this is a singular story and it is as unique as all of the 10,000 other stories that we would find inside of our groups. Jasmine, we’re going to take a deep dive into your whole story. So, I’m hoping you’ll start us off with, like, a super quick snapshot of who you are. Kind of set the tone.
JASMINE: For the most part, when people meet me, they see a very energetic older lady. My passion is dancing. My obsession is climbing. I so love climbing. And the cry of my heart is equality for everyone which is something I’m trying to do more for. But that’s me in a snapshot.
JEN: That’s awesome. Welcome, Welcome, Jasmine, to our show. Welcome in the den. Thank you for being here.
JASMINE: Thank you.
JEN: I want to start off with getting to know you as an elementary child, preschool, elementary school, what was your life like, your family and if you can in there, include what did you understand about gender and orientation at those young ages, your own and general?
JASMINE: I kind of have to go, to set the stage right, pre-preschool. As best as I can determine, somewhere around the age of 3, I knew I was a girl. I was in a male body, but I knew I was a girl. But something around the age of 3, traumatic happened. I think I’ve blocked the actual event out of my head, but I’ve been able to piece enough together to know that around the age of 3, I knew I was a girl and I knew it wasn’t acceptable at all. And you have to bear in mind, for that to happen now-a-days is going to be difficult for any child. This is back in the ‘60s, when the word “Transgender” didn’t exist. Not the concept. Nothing. So, at that age, I started burying who I was as a 3-year-old who knew I was a girl inside. I knew that wasn’t allowed, that society wouldn’t accept me there. So, I buried it deeply.
JEN: How did you know, at the tiny young age, how did you know that this was no okay?
JASMINE: That’s part of what I kind of lost. I think it’s blocked. I don’t know. I don't know how I knew. I’m guessing, at that time my mother was a single mom and living with my grandparents. And I’m guessing I was dressing in girl’s dresses or something of the sort and I was caught by my grandparents. My grandparents, whom I loved very much, but they were extremely traditional and very judgmental. My grandfather was a beautiful person but he was the most bigoted racist person I’d ever met. And, had he caught me playing with girl’s toys or acting feminine in any way, he would’ve lashed out at me. And that would’ve been enough for me to say, “Oh, I guess this isn’t acceptable.” Again, that’s conjecture from what I know of things.
JEN: And then you said you knew that you had to bury it. I interrupted you, but go back there.
JASMINE: So, I just buried it. It’s kind of like you got that little pebble that got into your shoe. And it’s annoying, but you’ve got to go aways. In this case a few decades. So, you’ve got to ignore that pebble. So, you do your best to ignore the pebble. But, every so often, it just gets really irritating and you can’t ignore that pebble. The pebble in your shoe just really irritates the heck out of you and you can’t ignore it anymore. So that would happen from time to time throughout my life. And so, I buried it but it would kind of resurface. And I would be reminded that, No, this is not acceptable in life. You asked about school. Kindergarten was great!
The first few years were great because they didn’t segregate by gender. And I could play with all the other little girls, and I was happy. I was having a good time. And then I got to, was it third or fourth grade. And they started segregating, the boys do this and the girls do that. And my life kind of fell apart.
Now, I have to say, I also had other issues that didn’t make for a smooth childhood. I was quite chubby and I have dyslexia. So, I had some learning difficulties. But I think an awful lot of it was just being in the wrong place all the time. I’d be put into the boy groups to do boy things that I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand. We just went through the Superbowl and I can’t fathom why anyone would want to go to that. I mean, they couldn’t pay me thousands of dollars. If they said, “Hey, Jasmine, we’ll give you $10,000 to sit and watch the thing.” Maybe $20,000 or $30,000, but even then, I don’t know if it’s enough. I can’t sit and enjoy, partly because I’m not a spectator. I’m a very much a participant. I like to be active. And partly because it just looks – I now like things that are active where I’m engaged. But watching something just never appealed to me.
And so much of when you’re in elementary school is, the boys need to do this. If you’re not doing it, you need to be watching others do it. And I always felt like a square peg in a round hole. And I never really got beat up that much – not physically, but emotionally, a lot. I just never fit. I never had any friends. I just learned to hate school. I hated it with a passion. And summer was the best time for me because summer was the time I got to be away from it all. I was away from the kids that, again, they didn’t abuse me physically, but emotionally with words and the way they would act toward me because I didn’t fit in. And I just never could.
JEN: During this little phase of hiding, you were young. Were you aware that you were hiding or were you hiding it even from yourself?
JASMINE: You know, at that point in the elementary years, I don’t think I realized. I think I was even hiding it from myself. When I got into my puberty and pre-teens and teens, it became more apparent to me and I knew. I had these desires, these feminine desires that weren’t normal. And then it was, if anything, even harder because these desires would come up and I would want to act on them but I know I wasn’t supposed to. And I mean, my childhood kind of sucked, to be honest. It wasn’t the best.
JEN: Were you internalizing messages like this is because I’m a sinner and I need to be better. This is my own fault because I’m not trying hard enough. Were you internalizing those kind of messages?
JASMINE: Well, no. First off, my family was not religious at all. So, there was no religious element to anything. It was more from a just strong conservative, men do this, women do this.
JEN: Social expectations?
JASMINE: Yeah. The roles you were supposed to play were very strongly enforced. Guys were supposed to do this and girls were supposed to do that. And guys were supposed to look like this and girls were supposed to look like that and everything. And what little was available in the media on anything even closely related would have been homosexuality which was always portrayed very negatively. I mean, this would’ve been the late ‘60s early ‘70s we’re at right now. And, yeah, if there was anything on TV that was anything to do with the topic of LGBT, it would be negative.
And I remember, probably around that time, I like Star Trek – The original Star Trek with good old William Shatner. Some of you that are a bit older may remember that. There was this one episode – I will never forget this – this one episode, there’s this lady that I guess that Captain Kirk had scorned at some point. So she had a score to make with him. And somehow she had the magic turntable machine. She drugged him and put him on the machine and it swapped their soul from one to the other. So she was in his body and he was in her body. So he’s now in a female body. She’s now in a male body. And I remember as a child watching that and thinking, God, if there was just such a machine that we could do that. And I was probably, I don’t know, 10, 12 years old at the time. And I so wanted that magic machine. And I knew it was fantasy. And at that moment, I don’t know if I even knew why. I just knew that, gee, if there was such a machine, wouldn’t that be amazing.
JEN: How old were you then?
JASMINE: What’s that?
JEN: How old were you then when you were watching that Star Trek episode?
JASMINE: Ten. I’m guessing 10 or 12 at the time.
JEN: So still elementary-ish age?
JASMINE:Yeah. Things like that would happen that would really bring home that I’m different. I have desires that are different.
JEN: Move us through your trajectory a little bit into, like, the middle school and high school ages. You mentioned before once puberty kicked in, it was a little bit hard to keep lying to yourself. What was happening through those years? Did you still live with your grandparents?
JASMINE: No. No. No. But by now, my mom got remarried. And we all lived together. It was interesting because of my dyslexia, I was held back a couple years because I had to catch up English-wise. So, because of that, I was always behind. That created a situation where I was always kind of the loser in the class, for lack of a better term. And I was seen that way, I think. And I was always struggling. From about – oh, shoot, forever. I was always struggling in school.
Part of the problem is, especially in the lower grades, but even when you get up higher, everything’s assuming you know how to read because the teacher’s going to have a lecture. But let’s face it, then there’s the homework and you’ve got to read chapters three through four. And they expect you to come back and know that. And what would be a half hour reading for the average kid, was a two or three hour reading for me. And so I was always behind. I always felt inadequate. If I could get out of school, I did. Fact of the matter is, I never graduated. I turned 18. I quit the high school I was in because they could legally do that and started going to the community college because the local community college had a program specifically for adults that had reading issues that needed to catch up. And I eventually took my GED through that course and similar ones.
But from junior high through high school, I was in and out of school a lot. And another thing that didn’t help was my mom moved a lot. So we moved to a new school, there’s getting used to this new school. And we several times moved to a new place and would move back to the original place. That happened like three or four times throughout my high school. And, as you can imagine, that didn’t make for a stable high school experience. But I was very introverted, very quiet. Again, the groups I was put into, I didn’t relate to. So I just didn’t say much.
JEN: Did you date at all?
JASMINE: Oh, God, no. Let’s see. I fantasized about dating and having girlfriends when I was in high school. But, no, I never even came close.
JEN: Did that make it extra confusing for you, because you know you have these things, but also you want to date girls?
JASMINE: I never added those two together. If you don’t mind, I’m going to jump a few decades into the future.
JEN: For sure.
JASMINE: The day I came out to my wife, I was obviously somewhat terrified to tell her I was – and I’ll get into more of that later, but I had to tell her – and I told her, you know, I think I’m actually a woman and I’m trans, blah, blah, blah. And she got very emotional. My wife does not get emotional. She got very emotional and you could see it. So that meant it was really bad. And she started to cry and she said, “Does that mean that you like guys?” Because, if you’re a girl you like guys if you’re hetero. And I thought about it for like two seconds. And said, “No. No. I definitely only like girls.” And she responded, “Well, that means you’re a lesbian.” That felt so good. Just to have that label placed upon me. And it was just so perfect and so right and coming from someone I love and respect a lot and yeah.
JEN: All the sudden you’re like, that is me. That’s the club I should’ve been in.
JASMINE: Yeah. Yep. Yep. And that’s the first time I’d ever thought about myself in that way. Growing up, I was just this confused person.
JEN: But now you had a category. That’s awesome. So you graduate from high school – you don’t graduate from high school, you get your GED. You’re moving through life. At some point you stumble upon your wife.
JASMINE: Right. Oh, boy. How much of that story should I tell you? I’ll give you the edited version because it’s a fun story.
JEN: OK.
JASMINE: So, again, trying to fit into a world I don’t fit into, I did what a lot of people probably do. I joined the army. It was to make a man out of you, right? It didn’t.
JEN: It didn’t help. Okay.
JASMINE: It didn’t even come close. Even before I transitioned it didn’t really change me. But anyway, I joined the army for a variety of reasons. That, I think was somewhat in there, but not significantly. So, anyway, my first duty station was Fort Bliss, El Paso, Texas. And one day, I should say I’d gotten involved in religion in my late teens and started going to church. So it was a Sunday. I’d gone to church that morning and it started snowing. And all my friends told me, “Don’t worry about it. We’ll get half and inch. It’ll be gone in the morning. No big deal. It never snows much in El Paso, Texas. It’s the middle of the desert. It’s El Paso.” So I didn’t think anything about it. Went on my way. I mean, it was cold for the rest of the day, from what I recall, went home. I had a little apartment off-base.
And got up the next morning, I had to get up at 4:00 a.m. for my duties. So I got up at 4:00 a.m., looked out the window, and there’s like 2 feet of snow in the front yard. There’s never 2 feet of snow in El Paso, Texas. I went out and did a morning run in the snow. That was interesting. Running in 2 feet of snow is an interesting run. Anyway, got it all done. Called into my supervisor and was told, let’s wait and see if the snow subsides because they weren’t taking any chances with it snowing. I waited an hour and then was told, “Nope, we’re just closing the base down. We’re not doing anything today.” So it was like, Gee, I’m snowbound. I’m stuck here. What am I going to do for all the time?”
So I decided, I’m going to call all my friends. I would chat with each friend as long as their willing to talk to me until I just chewed their ear off, and then I’ll go to the next one. I would kind of slowly pass the whole day that way. That was my plan. So I called the first friend who was an ex-girlfriend. And so I chatted with her for a few minutes. She said, “Oh, I’ve got some other friends over here. Why don’t you come over and we’ll have lunch together.” I’d never driven in snow before. I had no flippin’ clue what I was doing. I thought, “What the flip. I’ll go over.” And they were a ways from where I lived. I got to their house and that’s where I met my wife, in a snowstorm, in El Paso, Texas, a place where it never snows. It took a snow storm.
JEN: So you’ve been talking to us this whole time about how you don’t fit in, you’re weird, there’s not a spot for you. She didn’t see it, right?
JASMINE: No.
JEN: Or she saw it, and loved it.
JASMINE: I think a bit of both. Well, part of it was – I should back up a little bit – prior to meeting her, in my 20’s, I had a small handful of friends, three or four. They were all female. None of them were girlfriends although a lot of people thought of them that way. I even did at times because I was confused. But they were all friends. So here I had my wife, my best friend, everything all rolled up in one. So now, my whole high school and school years there was all this segregation. And, even in high school, the only way you were hanging out with girls is if you were dating them, which I said I didn’t do. Now I had a wife. So I had a permanent girlfriend, wife that I could be around all the time. I could be myself. I could be free with. That so helped my life. Life got so much better because I had this person that I could depend on and always be there.
JEN: Did you talk to her at all about some of these thoughts you had been having your whole life?
JASMINE: Oh, God, no. Not even close. Those were such deep secrets that, again, it was like the pebble in the shoe. I tried to ignore it. And when I succeeded in ignoring it, I didn’t even know about it. And when I didn’t succeed in ignoring it, I wanted to.
JEN: So she had no idea and you had kids. You decided to become parents. How many kids do you have?
JASMINE: We have 10 children.
JEN: That’s a lot more than average.
JASMINE: Yes. Especially for a non-Mormon.
JEN: You said that you had become religious. Did your wife share your faith?
JASMINE: Yes. We were both devout Christians at the time. That changed over time. Our religious journeys have amazingly been in parallel which has been a beautiful thing, but we’ve changed a lot.
JEN: That’s nice. OK. So you have 10 kids. You’ve got the house, it’s full. And at some point, I don’t even know the order of your kids. I didn’t realize you had quite so many kids. But, at some point, you're doing the church thing and life’s going okay and you’re wiggling the pebble around to new locations where you can tolerate it and hide it. And then one of your kids comes out.
JASMINE: Correct.
JEN: What happens at that point?
JASMINE: That was about six years ago. One of my kids comes out as trans.
JEN: What was your initial reaction? “Oh, no. We’re not allowed to do that.”
JASMINE: So, they told my wife. A little bit later, I think a day or two later, my wife told me. The minute she told me, it was like a jigsaw puzzle exploding backward. There were still a few pieces missing and it was very fuzzy. But all the messed up pieces of my life, all the little pebbles I wanted to ignore, suddenly made sense because knowing that my child was trans, I knew that’s who I was. And I hardly even know what the word meant. I mean, I had barely, barely knew what the word meant. But I knew it was a real thing, that’s something that happened to other people out there somewhere. I never even dreamed of contemplating it connected to me or my family or even to anybody I would know. But when my child came out, instantly, it was, “Okay. This is real. And if it’s real for them, then it’s real for me.”
JEN: Were you a little bit jealous in the moment?
JASMINE: Oh, not at all. God, not at all.
JEN: You’re putting this together like this whole world view. But you’re looking at your kid and trying to respond to that.
JASMINE: I think, at the time, I had two initial thoughts. We want to support our child and take care of them. And, knowing it and now what? That pebble never had a name before. Now it has a name. And I went from this annoying thing in my shoe to a part of my soul and my life, almost in an instant.
JEN: How old were you at this time?
JASMINE: Oh, shoot. I would’ve been in my mid-50s.
JEN: Were you listening to your wife process this coming out process of him and still not talking about yourself yet?
JASMINE: The immediate conversation with my wife was how can we support our child and what can we do. And we both were raised extremely conservative, extremely homophobic, extremely kind of cold-hearted in a lot of respects, especially myself. And we were basically raised that everything liberal was bad and everything conservative is good. And everything’s black and white. And the five years or so to my child coming out, various things had happened in our life that helped us see that some of those teachings weren’t so true. And just because somebody’s gay or whatever, doesn’t mean they’re a bad person. And I don’t think we would’ve ever just kicked our child out. But there was certainly a time where we were super conservative and would’ve had some issues with it, or at least I would have. And whereas, at the time it happened, we were more open. I’m going to take a step backward and say something because I think it’s significant.
JEN: Yeah.
JASMINE: So, I don’t remember how much before our child coming out this happened. Our kids are all getting older. The older ones are going to college, the younger ones are, obviously, still in elementary and high school. And they’re starting to show their individuality. One piece I missed, we converted to Orthodox Judaism.
JEN: Oh, that was like a big part of the story. Okay. So you were super, ultra-conservative Christians. And now you’re orthodox Jews.
JASMINE: Right. I no longer consider myself orthodox. I do consider myself Jewish. I love Judaism. It’s so beautiful. But there are certain aspects of orthodoxy that don’t really work for me. But, anyway, that’s significant in a way, so it was during Chabas, the Sabbath. For those that don’t know, during the Sabbath, meals are very important and you usually have really nice meals and the whole family is there. So, one of these days, the whole family is there. We’re having a meal. I don't remember which one, probably lunch. And, again, I realized the kids were getting older. They were starting to show their individuality. And I knew that it’s easy as kids get older – because I’d saw it happen in my family growing up – you’d kind of drift away. You’d become different. And I had a little speech.
And I don’t remember verbatim what I said. But basically, the sum of it was, “Hey kids. You’re getting older. You’re starting to become yourselves. And I want you all to still love each other and get along. That doesn’t mean you have to agree on everything. But I want you to get along. I want you to express who you are and be who you are. But, I want you to love each other and get along.” I said that. Several of my kids assumed I knew they were queer. I had no clue.
JEN: They thought you were opening the door. “We love you no matter what”, kind of?
JASMINE: Yes. And it had that flavor to it. I’m looking back on it, it totally made sense that they thought that. But, no. I was just thinking, Gee, you know, they were just showing their individuality and some were more into this and some were more into that. But that little speech opened a big door for a lot of people.
JEN: That’s a speech we should all be having, even if we’re not suspecting our kids might be queer.
JASMINE: Yeah. And letting your kids know they’re always loved and always accepted I think – especially I think in those teen, young adult years when there is so much change and you’re finding yourself and what-not and maybe becoming a little different. And I just wanted my kids to know they’re always going to be loved no matter how different they are.
JEN: So take me back to what’s inside of you at this point for just a little minute. Some of us, our kids come out and it kind of puts us into a tailspin. We’re trying to process how to help them, how to support them, how to parent them, how to shield them from the arrows we know are coming. You’ve got all that going on. And then also, you’re like, “And ME.” So you’ve got both things kind of happening at the same time. Did it feel tumultuous or did it feel like, “Now the peace phase comes.”
JASMINE: My child comes out as trans, this was an adult child, 20s, early 20s.
JEN: OK.
JASMINE: And several of the older kids are in that age range. So it’s a little different then when your kids are adults then like when they’re in their younger years.
JEN: Yeah. More independent.
JASMINE: They had already moved away from home and were kind of making life on their own. This was more of an FYI. When they’re away from home, it’s more of a “Okay. What are your pronouns? How do we react? What can we do to help?” They’d established themselves with some friends and they were on their own. So for my trans child at that time was, “Well, what can we do? We love you.” I think the biggest thing we wanted to do was make sure they knew they were loved and accepted no matter what.
Shortly after that, I came out to my wife. And I told you a little bit about that experience. That was amazing. And we just agreed, “We don’t know where this is leading. We, again, knew very, very little about the queer world in general, much less trans, specifically. We did know enough to know that there are people that conclude they’re trans but don’t really change a gender presentation. There are people that conclude they are trans but it doesn’t really have that big of impact on their lives. And there are others for whom it totally changes them. And we had no clue. So that all happened in Seattle, a very open state. I’ll put it that way. And then we moved to Utah.
JEN: Did you move to Utah after your kid had come out and you were in the middle of all of sorting out what you were going to do?
JASMINE: Shortly after they came out, we were already looking at potentially moving and we came out here and I started exploring. At first we were in a house. Some of the older kids stayed in Seattle and just rented the house from us that we owned there, which worked out phenomenally well, because we didn’t have time to sell it because we were moving very quickly and the younger kids came with us.
JEN: How many at that point, how many kids were young enough to come with you?
JASMINE: It was 5 and 5 if I’m remembering correctly.
JEN: All right. You’ve cut them in half. Alright.
JASMINE: So, the house we rented was big enough that all the kids could easily be upstairs and that’s where the kitchen was and whatnot. But my wife and I had the downstairs that we could easily block off to be our own suite with a nice big family room area. Anyway, so, for the next few months, we would research stuff on the internet. Sometimes we’d watch YouTube videos on the TV about transgender and whatnot, or movies or whatnot that dealt with the topic and just discuss it. I played around a little bit with makeup and did a horrible job with the makeup. My wife said I looked like a clown, very lovingly so, but she said, “You look like a clown.” And I said, “Well, I don’t know what I’m doing.” And dressing up and whatnot. And that went on for a few months until I started getting suicide.
JEN: After holding it for so long, what made it even harder at this point?
JASMINE: Because I’d let the genie out of the bottle. Before, again, it was the little pebble in my shoe. I tried to ignore it. It was no longer a little pebble in my shoe. It was part of my body. It was part of my soul. And I knew that now. For the longest time I thought of it as something almost, I wouldn’t say external to me, but not innately part of me. I think, in the past I always thought of it as almost like an illness or a problem. But not one I wanted to get rid of. That I found very interesting because I always saw, as a child – because that’s the way it was presented in the 60’s – if you were gay you were sick. You were mentally ill. That was very much propagated back in that area. The 50’s and 60’s and even into the 70’s somewhat. So I always thought, Gee, if being gay was bad, whatever was wrong with me was even worse. That was my feeling. And yet, I never wanted to be fixed. If a small child is sick or they have an owie, they run to mommy and daddy, can you fix my owie. I never wanted my owie fixed. It was like, it was wrong but it was part of me. And it was an interesting dichotomy in that I didn’t want to get rid of it even though I didn’t want to acknowledge it.
JEN: So you’re hitting a pretty dark spot. You and your wife are kind of on this journey together at this point?
JASMINE: Oh, very much so. Very much so.
JEN: But you hit a really dark spot. Talk to us about that.
JASMINE: The problem was I knew it. When I didn’t know it, I could go through life just thinking I was really messed up. I didn’t fit in. I was awkward. I just didn’t fit anywhere because that was always the way I felt around a lot of places. I can’t say everywhere, but a lot of places. I just felt very awkward and like I didn’t fit. But now I knew why I didn’t fit. And it was real and it was part of me. But I was still pretending. I was pretending to be somebody I wasn’t. Before, I was trying to be the best at what I thought I was supposed to be and failing. Now, it was, I know who I am and who I’m not, and I’m pretending to be who I’m not. And that was very painful.
JEN: That kind of makes sense to me, like you spent all this time pretending who you thought you were supposed to be. And then it switches and you’re still pretending to be that person but now you know you’re not supposed to be.
JASMINE: Correct.
JEN: That makes perfect sense to me the way you explained that.
JASMINE: Yeah. Very depressed, very suicidal. And my wife said, “Okay, it’s time to find somebody that knows more than we do.” We’d been researching on the internet and reading stuff, watching YouTube videos and whatnot. And when I started getting suicidal, she, “Okay. This is beyond what we can do. I don’t want to lose you. We need to find a therapist at this point.”
JEN: I really like your wife.
JASMINE: She’s an amazing lady. She’s a very amazing lady.
JEN: I really like her so far. OK. So you got help and what did the help say?
JASMINE: So I went to my therapist. I found a therapist and she specialized in transgender patients. She has patients as young at 3 and as old as 80 that are trans. Within the first session she said, “Oh, you’re definitely trans.” Which is, if you go to my blog j616.org.
JEN: We’ll link that in the show notes if somebody wants to find your blog, it’ll be there.
JASMINE: 616 is a special number. It was on the 6th, I believe it was May of 2019 that I was told, “You’re trans.” It was not until the 16th that I was finally able to accept it fully. You know, I mean, it’s just an amazing thing. And it happened, a month or two later I went on HRT. That was an interesting experience. I kept thinking, a year or two from now, I’ll come out publicly. And then it became a year.
JEN: Wait, you were on HRT for a whole year before any sort of social transition?
JASMINE: I started HRT. I started it shortly after seeing my therapist. I was so terrified calling the hospital that dealt with it to get a prescription. At the time I started, I thought a couple of years from now, maybe I’ll come out publicly. I’ve got to give this time. A few months later, I’m thinking, “Well, maybe a year would be sufficient.” I think a few months later, both my wife and my therapist are asking me, “Why are you waiting?” Maybe the end of the year would be a good time. And it went from the end of the year to November. So November’s become a very special month for me because it’s my biological birthday and it’s my very special birthday.
JEN: So when you came out in that November, who are we talking about? Is this the first time your kids heard about it? Are we talking, like, more public?
JASMINE: OK. So that summer, we went back to Seattle. I’d come out to all the kids here. I wasn’t presenting publically at all at this point. I’d come out to my family here in Utah. That summer we went to Seattle. I saw all my family there and I came out to all of them. Though all my kids knew. This would’ve been like August, I think, of 2019. And then, in November of 2019 is when I came out publicly to pretty much the whole world.
JEN: And is that the point where you were like, I’m not putting on the man costume anymore? I’m living. Okay.
JASMINE: We came up with this brilliant idea. I’d read something that said especially for coworkers or if you’re at church or something like that, you don’t want to be one day male and the next day female. That’s very difficult for people to process. They said it’s better off if you do it over the weekend or something like that so they have time.
JEN: Over a weekend? How do you come out over a weekend?
JASMINE: Well, the idea is to let them know, then not present until the following. Say like work, you’d let them know, you’d send them an email on Friday after you left work. And then Monday, you’re presenting differently.
JEN: So they have like a couple days to process it before they see you.
JASMINE: I did a little bit more than that. I gave them a week with some change. I notified all my coworkers before Thanksgiving week of that year. I worked from home, I think Monday and Tuesday, and then Wednesday I took off. We went to Vegas. That was my coming out party was in Vegas, partly because I was terrified of presenting female where somebody might see me that didn’t know I was trans or knew me as masculine. If some of my people from work were in Vegas at the same time, the possibility of them running into me in Vegas with all the people there was so remote, I wasn’t worried about it.
JEN: So you can be anonymous.
JASMINE: Exactly. So I went to Vegas. And from the time we left I was presenting female and I have not presented male since then.
JEN: How did your work handle it when you went back?
JASMINE: They were phenomenal. I was so blessed. I am just so blessed overall. My wife has been a blessing. My family’s been a blessing. My friends have been a blessing. At one point, I was terrified of coming out. I was going to lose my job and they were going to hate me and all these thoughts that go through your mind when you think you’re going to do something like this. And I’m terrified, but what do I do? And one day there was an announcement, “Hey there’s this program corporate headquarters is doing everybody should watch it. It’s not required but you should watch it.” It was strongly advised that you watch this program. I don’t even remember what the name of it was. I thought, what the heck, management’s really pushing it. I’ll guess I’ll watch this thing. It was stories of queer people in the company and they’re coming out.
JEN: That’s amazing.
JASMINE: It saved my life because I was so scared I was going to lose my job and lose everything.
JEN: That’s amazing.
JASMINE: I’m seeing that, that not only were they supportive, it was a big deal to them. This wasn’t a big fluff – a lot of companies have token support you know, but there was no meat behind it – this was very real.
JEN: Very meaty.
JASMINE: Just beautiful, amazing stories of people that had gone through some very difficult times but were openly queer. That saved my life because I was so terrified of losing my job and then just losing everything. But, from that I knew, Gee, work was open. I had a lady that I’d really admired for quite some time. And, around that same time, found out she was a lesbian. I thought, “Okay. She’s the person I’m going to come out to.” And she was so loving and I was so terrified to come out to her. I remember sitting in her little office and just crying. I couldn’t even get the words out. And she was like, “Well, what’s wrong.” And I finally got the words out, she was so supportive and so beautiful. And gave me the strength to take that next step.
JEN: That’s so lovely.
JASMINE: So, I basically gave work a week to adjust before they saw me presenting feminine.
JEN: And was everybody great, did they just switch name and pronouns and you just kept going to work.
JASMINE: For the most part, yeah. There was one person who was previously on my team that when I got back was no longer on my team. And I think there’s a likelihood that person was rather bigoted and didn’t want to be on the team with me anymore, which is fine.
JEN: Good riddance.
JASMINE: Yeah. Exactly. It’s sad that somebody’s that cold hearted. On the other hand, if they’re going to be that way, I’d rather they’re not in front of me. Everybody was wonderful. I’m sure people slipped up on names and stuff occasionally. But if they did, it was so rare. I don’t remember it. They were beautiful. I was so, so blessed. You hear stories of trans people being just totally ridiculed and whatnot at work. I got the opposite. I was incredibly blessed with a beautiful bunch of people that totally accepted me.
When I was in Vegas I got my ears pierced for the first time. That was such a fun event. And I remember one day at work, it had finally been whatever, six weeks, the magic time when you can take them out and put something new in. And I, there in the women's restroom and it’s like, I don’t know how to do this. I’d never done it before. And one of the other ladies sees me and she realizes I’m thumbling. “Would you like some help with that?” Just so supportive. So beautiful.
JEN: There is something supportive in general about a women’s bathroom in Vegas.
JASMINE: I’ve had some amazing experiences. It’s funny because you don’t get that in men’s bathrooms. Men, they go in, they do their business and they're done. Women, the go in and they chat, they socialize, they help each other out. The environments are vastly different, believe me.
JEN: Agreed. So talk to me now. I have this vision in my head of this person who’s doing what needs to be done, working hard, being a family dedicated individual, but kind of always a little unhappy, like a little bit in the background not fitting in, trying to find your place, stumbling through. So, what does it look like now? What does life look like now compared to the whole rest of it?
JASMINE: God, life is amazing. I’ve said this many times. I would rather live one more day as Jasmine Arabella, my true self than a thousand years as the person I never was. Life now is so incredibly amazing. Yeah, I have my bad days. I get depressed. And I have my problems. Money’s not quite what I want it to be and all the normal shit. But, being real, being yourself, being alive, is so beautiful and so amazing. I would say, if there’s a blessing to being trans, that’s one of them in that I think a trans person who is blessed with the opportunity to be fully themselves, to be fully out – and I know a lot of them aren’t and that’s really sad – there is nothing like it as far as gratitude in life and living and in the beauty of live and just loving life. I don’t know how else to put it.
And, again, I do have my bad days when I get tired or depressed or whatever. But on the average, life is so amazing. And finding who you are and there are so many aspects of my life. It’s like my siblings, who I have yet to meet since I’ve been me. So someday that will happen, I suppose. They’re in different places and we just haven’t met up. I remember when I first came out or shortly thereafter I came out to them, there was a lot of, “Are you the same person? Or you’re not the same person?” and you hear that with trans people. Some trans people, “I’m the same person, I’m just a different gender.” And some people will say, “No. I’m a new person.” And I think there’s truth in both.
JEN: Same.
JASMINE: In a lot of respects I am the same person. But in other respects, I am so new and different. I mean, the biggest one – in fact, it’s interesting as people think, Gee, your wife was married to a man and now she’s married to a woman. That’s got to be really difficult for the marriage, right? And I’ll admit, we’ve had to adjust. The most difficult thing – she will say this to you. If she was in the room she would tell you this. It’s not my being trans, it’s that in my being trans I found out I’m not the quiet mild introvert I was for 30 plus years of our marriage. I’m a very excited energetic extrovert that the party’s never big enough or long enough. I go dancing, I get there when the DJ starts, if not before, and I usually don’t leave until he's done at 2:00 a.m. And I’ve gone to afterparties and danced ‘till 4:00 a.m. That was fantastic.
JEN: I get the idea that it was heavy. Carrying around this secret from yourself and the world was really heavy. So you kind of stayed quiet. And then once the secret was out, then Jasmine got to come out.
JASMINE: Yeah.
JEN: Does your wife like these things? Does she want to go dancing with you for all hours?
JASMINE: Oh, no. God, no. She’ll get on the dance floor for a few minutes with me. She is still the quiet introvert I married. And that’s fine. That’s been a difficult thing. Like I said, that’s for our marriage been the biggest challenge, not my being trans, but the results of my being trans and that being the biggest one that now I’m an extrovert. And I’m super active. And she’s a fairly sedentary introvert. But, we find places where things mesh up. I mean, there are times when she needs to rest, sit quietly in the corner and read, OK. I’m going to go climbing or I’m going to do this or I’m going to go do that. Give you a couple of hours of alone time, time for yourself. Then I’ll come back and we’ll do something that’s more along what she would want to enjoy. And that’s been a learning process of how to mesh those differences together because, I mean, almost everything I do that I chose to do is very active. I’m either hiking or running or dancing or something. And I like being active.
JEN: I’m also getting a little bit older, and I find this phase of life, one I find myself often looking back, what do I wish maybe was different? Do I have some regrets? Do you have regrets about your life journey, or does it feel like it’s just culminated in the grand finale.
JASMINE: For sure there are things that would have been easier had they been different. I mean, had I grown up in the current era instead of the one I did, obviously, I would’ve known what trans was as a young child instead of having to wait decades for the word to be invented. So there are things like that. But, overall, no. I mean, first off, I would’ve never met my wife and married her had I known who I was at the time. We have 10 beautiful children that we wouldn’t have had things developed differently. And the minute you change something, “Well, I wish this was different. I wish I had transitioned earlier in life.” Well, what else would’ve changed then, you know? I mean, had I figured out that trans was a real thing and it was real and it was me 15 years ago when I was extremely conservative and rightwing. That would’ve been disastrous to say the least. It would’ve been really hard.
JEN: Yeah. You might not have survived that.
JASMINE: Yeah. I don’t know that I would have. I think I’m not very religious anymore, but I am very spiritual. And I think many things in life, there’s a right time and a place for it that there’s a flow of things. And, like I said, had my child come out as trans even a few years sooner, I don’t think we would’ve been ready for it. We would’ve still loved our child. I don’t know that we would’ve been really ready for it. So, when they came out, we had been exposed to enough LGBT people and things that we were receptive. So I think, I so believe that there’s a flow to things. I’m not very religious.
But I’ll leave you with this. I’m on a rollercoaster and my rollercoaster is incredibly fun. Most people, when they talk about “life’s a rollercoaster”, they’re talking about the ups and downs and they mean it very sarcastically and negative. Rollercoaster, you pay a lot of money to wait in a long hot sweaty line to go on it for a few seconds. Roller Coasters are meant to be fun. My rollercoaster is fun! Sometimes it’s scary and sometimes I don’t know what’s coming up. Is it going to be another turn, or a loop-de-loop or a corkscrew. And you can’t tell because my rollercoaster’s hopefully going to go for a few more decades. At least that’s my plan. But my rollercoaster’s fun and I don’t always know which turn it’s going to make and sometimes that’s scary.
JEN: I love that embracing of the whole story.
JASMINE: Life is amazing and there’s so much beauty and so much love and so much that we need to slow down and appreciate. Life moves so fast now-a-days and even the simple things. Obviously, you can’t every moment appreciate everything. But a few moments out of your day won’t destroy your schedule. If you take just a moment to appreciate your spouse or your partner or your best friend or that flower that’s sitting in a vase or your child or your cat. Whatever it would be, those things that bring you joy and make life worth living instead of just taking them for granted, we appreciate them. And I drive people nuts because I’ll go to a garden, there’s a couple of gardens here that I go to occasionally and they have rose gardens. And I’m the crazy lady that goes to – well maybe not every flower – but each bush and I want to smell that rose. And I want to smell this one. I want to smell that one because they’re beautiful and we should smell the roses and we should wake up and enjoy life.
JEN: I could use a little bit of you in my life. I want to thank you for sharing your story with us today. I think it’s another beautiful example of how, when we support our kids in their own authenticity, it frees us up to be authentic ourselves and to enjoy a more honest and authentic world that exists that we sometimes even accidentally protect ourselves from. And yours is such a great example of that, of a child who showed you how to set yourself free, almost. I love that. So, thank you, again, so much for coming.
JASMINE: You’re very welcome.
JEN: Thanks for joining us In the Den. If you enjoyed this episode, please tell your friends, and take a minute to leave a positive rating or review wherever you listen. Good reviews make us more visible and help us reach more folks who could benefit from listening. And if you’d like to help Mama Dragons in our mission to support, educate, and empower the parents of LGBTQ children, please donate at mamadragons.org or click the donate link in the show notes. For more information on Mama Dragons and the podcast, you can follow us on Instagram or Facebook or visit our website at mamadragons.org.