Deann Wessell's Brave New World

The story of a Brookfield firefighter's transformation into a female, legal pioneer

by Chris Kanaracus

photos by Steven Sunshine

Deann Wessell had been divorced for nearly three years when the subpoena arrived in the mail at her Brookfield home. Wessell read the contents of the envelope, and then, for the third time in her 43 years, she reached for her gun. She sat there in the dark for a long time and thought that this time maybe she would do it. But she was getting it together; she was convinced that she had made it but now wasn't sure. [[paragraph]] Under the terms of her May 1995 divorce, Wessell had received joint legal custody of her 14-year-old daughter. It was only now, in October 1998, that her ex sought to revoke that privilege, and after what Wessell had been through in the past 41 months, the subpoena was the last thing she wanted to see. [[paragraph]] The timing was horrible because Wessell had just completed a male-to-female sex-change procedure, a process that had not only transformed her body but her life as well.

Wessell had already lost friends, family, and a treasured job at the Brookfield volunteer fire department as a result of her more public display of her cross- dressing, something she had done for most her life but had kept secret.

With the help of two close friends, Wessell made it through that night, opting to go to court rather than commit suicide. The hearing was a short one, lasting only two days and ending in an out-of-court agreement. "Cooler heads prevailed," says Wessell's lawyer, Kevin Nugent of Boston. "The only contention made by the other party [Wessell's ex-wife, Deborah Hetu] was that custody should be denied to my client because she is transgendered."

In front of a Worcester County judge, Nugent argued that "as a transgendered individual, Deann is a member of a distinct class of people, one that should be afforded the same rights as any other." Nugent suspects Hetu's own lawyer agreed, and consensus was quickly reached.

That agreement is considered the first of its kind in Massachusetts, and even nationally, only a handful of such victories exists. Wessell herself found great satisfaction in the verdict. "I think the best way to put it is that I've triumphed as a gendered parent."

Her victory was mostly symbolic, though. Wessell's daughter, the agreement reads, would have to initiate contact with Deann and "that more than likely won't happen," says Wessell who believes, in the intervening months between her divorce and the custody hearing, her daughter was turned against her.

But Wessell is used to disappointment. "When you decide to enter the gendered community, you have to expect to lose everything. Anything you get to keep is a bonus."

Until a few years ago, it seemed the transgendered community was content to simply "lose everything." It was only in the early 1990s that their status in mainstream society began to move from cannon fodder for Jerry Springer and company to the increasingly vocal, political, and socially active minority group they are today. Wessell's victory in court is considered strong evidence of the growing strength and acceptance of the transgender movement that, in the words of San Francisco lawyer and leading transgendered advocate Shannon Minter, "seems to have happened only yesterday."

Nationally, Wessell is not alone in her victory in family court. Dana Ellen Covert, a male-to-female transsexual from Florida, won sole custody of her six children in June 1998 after a one-year court battle. And Joshua Vecchione, a 40-year-old female-to-male transgender from San Francisco won a high-profile victory in October 1998, when he received joint legal custody (with visitation rights) of his three-year-old daughter. Shannon Minter, who assisted in Vecchione's case, says the opposition used the novel argument that because Vecchione had once been a woman (he completed his transition in 1977), his marriage was null, due to the fact that California does not recognize same-sex marriages. Additionally, Vecchione's ex-wife, Kristie Vecchione, says that her husband had purposely misrepresented his former sex to her for years. In the end, however, Joshua Vecchione prevailed on both issues.

But victories like these for transgendered parents remain few in number. Minter, a lawyer with the National Center for Lesbian Rights who transitioned from female-to-male on the job in mid-1996, says that "even nationally, published case law is scant, and of that, most of it is pretty negative. . . . We've got quite a way to go."

THE JOURNEY OF DEANN WESSELL from small-town firefighter to a legal pioneer bears a strong resemblance to the growth of the transgendered movement -- a long period of dormancy ending with a flurry of decisive action.

Her first inklings that "something was different" about her came at the age of five. "It wasn't an obvious sort of thing," she says. "I didn't like sports or other things boys liked, but I really didn't know what was going on. I just knew something was."

Enrolling in Tantasqua Regional Vocational School provided a sort of refuge from those inner stirrings. "I got caught up in the whole tough-guy image of the place. . . . I threw myself into my schoolwork [carpentry] and basically was trying to prove to myself that I was a man."

At home, however, just the opposite happened. At nine, Wessell experimented with cross-dressing. "It was like a compulsion. And it was a strange thing for me as a kid. I mean, all the while you grow up, your father's telling you, `You're a boy'; and then you go and put on one of your mom's dresses and you just feel . . . appropriate."

"Dressing," as Wessell puts it, remained a sporadic event until 1973, when she married her former wife. "It really kicked in then. My wife would work the second shift, and that would give me a chance to do my thing."

Sometimes her thing would involve driving around town in full female dress, with a cooler of beer riding shotgun. "Doing that would really make me feel good. I could really relax and be alone with my thoughts. I just felt like this was really me. It gave me a rush. At least until I got home sometimes and would get busted by my wife."

She managed to contain her habit. And in 1976, she "became macho again." But other seams were showing. When under stress, Wessell found a release valve by visiting a hairdresser, where she would get her hair permed, poring over the pages of Cosmopolitan and Vogue, eyeing the layouts and makeup tips.

In November 1994, Wessell separated from her wife. She soon met Anni Coven, a gregarious woman in her mid-40s who thought she had met "a man . . . a firefighter, a hunter, a carpenter, a big strapping macho man." It didn't take long for Wessell to break the news.

"At first, I was of course taken aback. But Deann had always been an angry person from the day I had met her. And when she would come home dressed, I would see the anger dissipate. I saw the change. And I said, `Anything you want, hon.' I saw a difference," says Coven.

But her tolerance soon came to an end. "One day I came home and found that David [Deann's former name] had decided to shave his legs. And that was my breaking point." Coven moved out for a short time.

Counseling sessions had helped the couple. But real understanding came once Wessell was diagnosed with "gender disphoria," the textbook definition of which is as follows: "characterized by an incongruity between the physical or biological sex of the body, and the perceived gender of the individual's mind."

"What a lot of people think is that this is some kind of sex thing, a perversion," says Wessell. "It's not. What I like to say to people is this: `It's not about sex, it's about gender. Sex is what's between your legs, gender is what's between your ears.'"

Her words carry the measured cadence of someone who has struggled for a sense of identity. She is certainly convinced, as is Coven, that she has always been a woman -- a female consciousness trapped in a male body.

Her conviction serves her well, and thankfully so, for scientific data supporting the theory of gender disphoria, while compelling, remains in its infancy. Some of the strongest evidence comes from a 1995 study from the Netherlands that showed a key region (hypothalamus) in the brains of deceased male-to-female transsexuals to be of a distinctly female quality.

Wessell has completed a series of hormone treatments, and says that chemically, she is fully female. She has grown breasts. Her wispy blond hair is styled, and her nails are meticulously painted and manicured. She dresses in conservative suits and blouses and limits her makeup to a bit of pancake and lipstick.

But her hands probably won't ever change. They are too big, the fingers too thick, the palms too callused from years of manual labor. And no blouse or brooch can assuage the masculinity of her broad shoulders and six-foot, 200-plus pound frame.

She thinks she can pass, though. And briefly, through the dim light of a fast-approaching winter evening, her smile appears mid-sentence and a visitor is convinced.

It is that very smile that belies the litany of suffering and loss Wessell claims to have endured throughout her life. She prefers to speak only in passing of early abuses at the hands of her father, but she asserts that she does so for a reason. "I was an abused child and all that. . . . It wasn't fun; but I really downplay that now, because it would be easy for someone to make the mistake of labeling that time in my life as some kind of reason for who I am today."

Bringing her cross-dressing out in such a small community as Brookfield, with a population of only 3000, has had its consequences. In fact, Wessell lost one thing she held most dear: her job as assistant chief of the local fire department, where she worked for more than 20 years.

Wessell says that approximately six months prior to her removal, she had begun to openly discuss her ongoing lifestyle change with her coworkers. But instead of acceptance, she says, she suffered ridicule, disrespect, and finally discrimination, when in May 1997 she was not reappointed as assistant chief. Wessell alleges that the department and town selectmen worked in concert to remove Wessell from office purely out of bigotry and ignorance.

But some of Wessell's former peers hint at another possible reason for her removal. "The whole time he was going through . . . whatever you want to call it, he was really `in your face' about it. Saying things like, `You better not discriminate against me, you better treat me right, blah blah blah,'" says a town employee whose husband served alongside Wessell on the fire department. She goes on to tell of a retirement party thrown for several retiring firefighters including Wessell and then chief Edwin Boucher, a party in which she says Wessell took the opportunity to `put up a soapbox' and deliver a lengthy diatribe against the department at-large. "What he did was so inappropriate."

Her words are backed by another firefighter. "He was really getting on people's nerves with all that stuff. I mean, it was hard for us too, you know, without having someone in our faces about it."

Speaking her mind -- at least around Brookfield -- is something Wessell has sought to curtail in recent months. She keeps a low profile, doing her shopping in other communities and generally keeping to herself. She says she feels comfortable around town when she does pay a visit, but reveals lingering concerns when she says that she does not want her address known. "You know, I can still take care of myself, but why leave yourself open to what some people are bound to do?"

Her safeguards seem to be working. The overwhelming reaction to the topic of Deann Wessell, during a series of visits, was that of shoulder-shrugging indifference. "Haven't heard of anything like that," says a fresh-faced police officer outside Brookfield's sturdy red brick Town Hall. "No, we don't get involved with anything like that around here."

But Wessell isn't completely invisible. "Oh yeah, you hear it kind of a lot. `That's the guy that wears dresses,'" says a worker in the selectmens' office.

"A lot of people will snicker and laugh," says local nursery owner Donna Latino, who was the only Brookfielder surveyed to openly support Wessell. "Whatever makes a person happy, then fine. That's the way I was brought up."

That kind of acceptance is something the transgendered movement has been fighting for from the beginning, and the going has been slow. So slow, in fact, that it wasn't until very recently that even gay-lesbian-bisexual (GLB) interest groups began to support transgenders. "It was a revolutionary moment, in my mind, when I went to the National Conference for Change three years ago and saw the transgendered community represented for the first time ever," says Shannon Minter. Minter says the embracing of transgendered issues by GLB's came after a short period of intense lobbying by a handful of transgendered advocates, most notably Phyllis Frye.

"The Gucci-shoe wearing gay set had distanced themselves from us ever since 1971, after Stonewall [the 1969 police raid on the Stonewall club that is considered the definitive beginning of the gay rights movement]," says Frye, now a Texas-based lawyer, and who was in attendance at Stonewall.

Frye says her lobbying effort found its roots in events at the third Gay March on Washington in 1993, which marked the first time in the history of the march that a transgender advocate was allowed to speak. That speaker was Frye, who saw even that gesture as marginalizing. "They put me on podium #2. The one with no media coverage."

Frye's colleagues were so enraged at this treatment that they threatened to stage a protest in front of the stage. But it was Frye who talked them out of it. "Looking back, I see that as a grave error in judgment. But back then, I thought the movement was really starting to come along, and that a protest would be disruptive."

But by 1994, Frye's patience had come to an end. "When they left me off the list of people recognizing the 25th anniversary of Stonewall, I started raising hell." Along with comrades Jessica Xavier, Denise Norris, and Riki-Anne Wilchins, Frye unleashed what she terms "a barrage" of faxes, letters, phone calls, and visits to queer interest groups.

That was just the beginning, according to Frye, who in June 1994 held the first transgender law conference in Austin, Texas. The conference has become an annual event, and serves as a training ground of sorts for transgenders, many of whom Frye says have become regional and statewide activists.

Shannon Minter says that until those recent efforts, queer interest groups were reluctant to place the transgendered community under their umbrellas. Jennifer Levi, an attorney with Gay and Lesbian Advocates and Defenders (GLAD) in Boston, says that the sentiment among GLB advocates was that the inclusion of a movement that, at the time, they thought to be extreme, would prove too great a hindrance to their own efforts. The attitude has changed somewhat. Other groups, including the National Organization for Women (NOW), have become transgender-inclusive. And at the 1995 Conference for Change, albeit considered one of the most liberal of the gay rights groups, organizer Tony Conatty announced that "the transgendered community has turned this [gay rights] movement on its ear."

But the transgendered community is doing quite well on its own. Websites, support groups, social clubs, research centers (including the International Foundation for Gender Research in Lexington) are springing up at an astonishing rate. "Statewide, regionally, locally, everyone's kicking ass," says Frye.

Gender PAC, a transgendered lobbying group based in Washington, has already held one so-called "Lobby Day," where more than a hundred transgenders mingled with congressmen in the foyer of the Capitol.

And Deann Wessell is becoming involved as well. She has made many new friends in the transgendered community, has spoken at area colleges and high schools, and she and Anni are planning a book. "I think that I was put here on earth, being this way, in order to spread the message, to tell the truth about gender disphoria and transgendered people," she says.

ANNI AND DEANN SIT SIDE BY SIDE at the kitchen table. The closeness of their bond is obvious -- they finish each other's sentences, nod appreciatively when the other speaks, and exchange fleeting but intimate caresses.

They may have to settle for that. Due to her hormone treatments, Deann's genitalia have, in her words, "shriveled up to almost nothing." Moreover, Deann says that sex is the last thing on her mind. "I've really just gotten over the hump with this thing. I don't know where my desires are right now . . . right now I have no sex drive at all. I don't know if it's due to the drugs or what, but all I can say is that is something to worry about in the future."

Additionally, Wessell all but rules out the possibility of her taking the next step: sexual reassignment surgery. "Not only do I not have the money for that [the procedure can cost upwards of $30,000], I really don't know if I want to do it."

Wessell says she's had enough changes for a while. She is concentrating on what's well in hand, especially her relationship with Anni Coven.

"Anni's been there for me whenever I've needed her. She's stuck through this thing with me, something not everyone would be able to do . . . I owe her and Christine [her therapist] my life. Literally." Indeed, for according to Wessell, the only thing between her and suicide that August night had been the intervention of her two friends.

Her relationship with Coven has been one of the few things Wessell has been able to keep since her transition. But no matter how great that gain, one is hard pressed to ignore all of her losses, especially that of her daughter.

"I had decided that I was going to go through with this [transition]. And so I sat down with my daughter and I told her all about gender disphoria . . . just explained as best I could what her dad was going through. And she was shocked, of course, but overall I think she accepted it."

Their relationship has since become strained. Wessell refers to letters unanswered and gifts returned, and finally to a recent letter from her daughter, one that Wessell says was filled with all manner of bilious statements.

According to Shannon Minter, such experiences are common among transgendered parents (divorced parents, in general), but aren't necessarily the rule. Dana Ellen Covert says her children supported her completely throughout her transition. "I was amazed at how little of a problem it was. They're all such good kids," says Covert.

Adds Minter, "A parent will always be a parent to a child, and while a lot of ties get broken initially, I've found that eventually a lot of kids come to accept it."

For now, Wessell waits with cautious hope for that day to come. She has been speaking of her daughter in a strangely indifferent, even banal fashion. But as one listens more closely, clues appear, poking through a therapy-honed emotional barrier. Her brow crinkles briefly. She glances at the table and folds her hands a little tighter. The conversation drifts into talk of holiday plans, and she fights back a blooming wetness in her eyes with a hard grin, one that transforms her face into a curious juxtaposition of deep, scarring pain and the epitome of defiant resolve.

Her voice is up a notch or two, and she is leaning forward a bit, her gaze fixed intently. "You know, it's hard. I admit it. And it always will be. I'll always love my daughter. Not having her around hurts me. But I, right now, finally feel like I'm me. I'm at peace. This is who I am. And to tell you the truth, sometimes, I wish it wasn't so, but it is. Becoming who I really am touched every single aspect of my life. I never thought it would to this extent.

"I spent a lot of my life trying to put down the fact in my own mind that I was transgendered, and that's all over with now." And she reiterates: "I didn't ask to be born this way, but maybe I was for a reason. Maybe I was put here on this earth to help others, to spread the message."

She eases back in her chair and glances over at Anni Coven, who nods in agreement.