Was Princess Peach A Sign?

Or, Coming Out As Transgender In Your 40’s

There she is, Princess Peach, the best Super Mario character, IMO.

Old Friends

It’s before the days of Uber in Los Angeles. I’m in grad school. I have gone to a weird art party in an abandoned building downtown, because of course I have. I want to leave, because of course I do, but I’m afraid to walk the several blocks to my car. I call Jamie. She picks me up.

We are at a Halloween party. I have had too much to drink. Jamie drives me home. I throw up in her car.

We are in a film class. Before I can stop myself, I make the most embarrassing, pompous, elite, condescending comment of my life, suggesting that everyone needed to “brush up on their Godard.” Jamie likes me anyway.¹

We come up with a stupid fake language that I can’t even remember and say people’s names and crack up. We start adding, “in the cit-ay” with a musical lilt to the end of all sentences. When I decide to get myself a nemesis, she backs me up.

When I didn’t have any friends, she was my friend.

But after grad school, our lives went different directions. Jamie got married and had kids. She moved to Houston. We would talk on the phone but she was depressed. I didn’t know how to help her. Didn’t know what to say. I stopped calling so much. Years went by. We exchanged Happy Birthday texts. I saw her a few times here and there.

So, when I sent a stupid bitmoji wishing her a Happy New Year in 2023, the text I got back was surprising on multiple levels. It said:

“So, I haven’t told the whole world yet, but last year I accepted that I am transgender. My name is Jamie.”

See, thing is, all those moments in our friendship that I mentioned above, those things actually happened with someone who doesn’t exist anymore. A guy named Jim. Jim had been my closest friend in grad school. Jim is the one I lost touch with. Jamie is the one I was meeting now, over text, for the first time. I will come to realize later, however, that it really was Jamie who I was friends with all along.

She explained that she would be coming out soon at work and that she was working through things with her wife and family.

Mind Blowing

Over the next few months, I watched from afar as things… didn’t go so well for Jamie. She was trying to keep everything the same, but it was becoming clear that nothing ever could be. One by one, pieces of her life seemed to fall away, her marriage, her relationship with her kids, her job. A dark time just got darker and darker.

When I found out she had gotten a new job in Portland and moved halfway across the country by herself… I couldn’t wrap my head around it. How? How could she go through all of that, lose so much, while still battling depression, mind you, and not… give up? How was she still trying?

We can be inspired in all kinds of ways. Jamie’s perseverance, her survival, her continuing to put one foot in front of the other after everything she’s lost… it had inspired me beyond measure. I needed to hear her story.

Jamie’s Story

“In one way or another, I’ve thought about being a girl my whole life.  It was in the corner of my mind, even though it wasn't something that I liked to engage with,” Jamie explains. “But I also was always attracted to girls, so it made it confusing.”

I had never thought about just how confusing being trans could be for someone from our generation. As a kid growing up in the 80’s, I had been taught what it meant to be gay, but no one had ever explained what being trans even was.

Discussing this with Jamie, she had a similar experience. So, the fact that anytime she played Super Mario Brothers 2, she always picked Princess Peach², or that she read books like Are You There God? It’s Me Margaret?, didn’t register as anything out of the ordinary to her.

However, when puberty hit, she started to struggle with her physical self. “I was really irritated that my body goes up and down and not inward and outward. Like my body wasn't growing right.” Things she wanted to happen weren’t, and things she didn’t want to happen, were. “ I remember hair growing on the back of my hands and being so horrified - like, I look like a caveman from some exhibit at the museum.”

Despite all this, however, she assumed that having these thoughts… this was a universal experience. That’s the thing, when something is happening to you, something that you don’t talk about, and it’s all you’ve ever known, how are you supposed to know that it’s not happening that way for everyone else, too?

“I honestly didn’t know that other boys weren't feeling that way.  And I think that's the big thing that, until very recently, I thought a lot of people felt these things. I just thought it was part of the process that everybody goes through, although now I know it certainly is not.”

It Was Time

Signs built up over the years and her feelings got harder to tune out, leading her to research being trans online. Her truth started to reveal itself.

“So February 22nd, 2022 I went to the park right next to the Rothko Chapel in Houston.  And it's kind of like a pilgrimage place - people go and pray or they meditate or they do whatever.”

The interior of the Rothko Chapel in Houston

“And I thought I need a sign, I feel like this is too big of a thing to just accept. I was sitting on this swing underneath this great big tree and…

…this big monarch butterfly landed on my knee. Not lying, it really happened.”

“So, I just thought, okay what if for the rest of my life, I live as a woman and I call myself a woman's name and wear women's clothes and just ask people to accept me as a woman? Because that's just who I am.”

“And I felt in that moment a weight had been lifted, I felt really happy. I felt elated. I just felt something fall into place.”

What Happened After That

Jamie was optimistic moving forward. She came out to her wife and they tried to find their way together. “I didn't question that my that my wife would stand by me and that we would be able to make it work because I believed that we were soulmates and that nothing could ever break us up… But I think we both were naive about what it would do to us.  And, every time after that when she would try to tell me the truth, that she was not okay with it, I wouldn't hear it, because I was like, ‘she's just nervous, she just has cold feet. She's gonna see how great this is.’”

After awhile, things fell apart. And then so did Jamie. And then, because of that, more things fell apart. It wasn’t long before she had lost everything.

At this point in her story, she had already inspired me with the sheer bravery it took to come out in the first place. However, it is here, at this moment, that I feel she truly shines as an incredible source of light and hope.

“It was very difficult to not end it because there were times when I came very close, but after losing all that stuff, I have just tried really, really hard to be a person who gets back up.”

Somehow, she kept going.

“I checked myself into a hospital,  tried different kinds of treatments, I got back on medication, I got back off of medication, I did the transcranial magnetic stimulation thing, I went to a ketamine clinic, I took a mega dose of mushrooms.”

“I'm trying to do whatever it takes to be a whole person, a person who contributes in the world, and who is worthy of love, and who can do anything for my family.”

Despite getting a new job and moving to Portland, it’s her family Jamie thinks of most these days. “They were trampled by me and my inability to regulate my emotions. I failed them so hard. Every moment apart from them is a stab in the heart.”

So, she tries. She gets up every day and tries.

I worry about her. I mean, of course I do. I ask her how she’s doing, if she’s doing anything nice for herself. Her response: “Every day, three times a day, I dissolve an estrogen tablet under my tongue.”

“I am committed to that promise that I would be who I am.  That I would let Jamie out, that I would let her be who she is.” 

Faced with a similar set of circumstances, I honestly don’t know what I would be capable of. However, trying to imagine it… the immense amount of pain, confusion, loss… it seems unbearable. Jamie coming out inspired me, but Jamie persevering inspires me even more. Her last statement on the matter really sums it up for me:

“I mean, I even did laundry today.”

1. Although she still teases me about it to this day.

2. The only character worth playing, IMO. I mean, she can basically fly.