The Fallacy of Assignable Gender

By Transcendent Publications

Humans often encounter expectations that they behave differently from the people they are. Many left-handed people have trod lightly on this path. When internalized such conflicts can be profoundly disconcerting and must be resolved. Each transgendered person contending with her or his suppressed gender identity exists in a continual state of such conflict. That person is and is not the child, adolescent, and adult she or he has learned to be. Experience and reflection will ultimately prove that essential identity is far different from education and endeavor. Even inevitably recurring brief secret episodes of release merely reconfirm the transgendered persons implacable obsession rather than providing respites from it. Such a conflict will not, because it cannot, resolve itself.

The focus of The Fallacy of Assignable Gender is gender identity conflict. The work begins with an intimately personal account of a forty-year struggle with that conflict. The condition is examined from the perspectives of medical science, religion, political theory, the arts, and others. Perhaps as compelling as the nature of the condition is societys reaction to it. Fifteen common mischaracterizations share an apparent determination by those who proffer them to ignore or reject what has been learned at great cost. Each straw man is explored and refuted.

A four-step plan is presented whose goal is elimination of gender identity suppression. Whether the readers interest is personal or professional, ending the social and economic scourge of suppressed gender identity will require a broad concerted effort. Its undertaking is long overdue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Sep 5, 2007
• ISBN: 9781453583357

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Copyright © 2007 by Transcendent Publications LLC.

Library of Congress Control Number:   2007905385

ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-4257-7341-0

ISBN: Softcover   978-1-4257-7330-4

ISBN: Ebook       978-1-4535-8335-7

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Author’s Statement of Authenticity:

This work’s content is original, except where attributed, and is the whole truth to the best of her knowledge and belief. Where text is based on, or quoted from, other sources, those works are cited and believed to be reliable.

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CONTENTS

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1   A Boomer’s Hometown

A Pleasant Valley

Something in the Air

A History of Ownership

Serving the Market

The Neighborhood

A Major General Store

An Old Soul

Weather Memories

2   A Matter of Perception

Appearing Normal

Responding to Appearance

Filling the Slots

Seeing as a Child

The Importance of Being

The Substance of Appearance

The Image in the Mirror

3   A Manner of Being

Gender and Society

Gender and the Workplace

Nurture and Competition

A Nurturing Act

The Matter of Self

4   Encounters of Youth

Exceptional Differences

A Friend’s Family

A Perplexing Tale

A Like-aged Neighbor

School is Elementary

Passive Influences

To Grandma’s House

5   A Singular Event

Playing in the Leaves

In Need of Help

Love as Strength

To the Shore

The Rain Must Fall

6   A Normal Boy

The Young Scout

Not in the Handbook

The Reason for the Group

A Good Friend

Goals, Performance, and Achievement

An Indispensable Honor

7   For Higher Learning

A Freshman Again

Spending Money

The Virtue of Honesty

The Modern Art of Compromise

Emptying the Closet

A Friend for Life

Self-Diagnosis

8   Key Relationships

Two Selves

A Personal View of Reverence

The Ernest Prayer

Love and Obligation

From the Garden State

The First Child

A Younger Sibling

Great-Relatives

A Paragon

The Family

9   Lessons of Self and Gender

As a Dog

By Another Name, a Rose

Defining Union

Civil Unions

Nobler to Bear

A Female Father

Perverting a Gift

Shadow People

On Responsibility

Sharing Responsibility

10   Music Discovered

What We Hear

Part of the Music

A Style of Singing

Beauty by Another Name

Caring for the Instrument

The Gender of Music

How Music Transforms

The Dramatic Arts

Abuse as Entertainment

Telling the Conscience

11   A Room with No Door

The Journey of Hiding

Thoughts of a Child

A Donning Awareness

The Weight of Waiting

The Family Shepherd

The Romantic Scene

12   A Time for Resolution

Moment of Crisis

The Sublime Mr. Frost

Faith in Action

A Cathartic Search

Gender Identity Expressed

Healing by Faith

Hamlet’s Bodkin

Inertia’s Curse

The Right Doctor

In Olive Drab

To Be a Wife

Something about Dad

Telling

Home Again

13   Stepping Out

What It Will Be

Spreading the News

The First Day

Benchmarks

Not Conforming

Adapting to Change

Introspection and Introversion

Feeding the Beast

Relatively New

A Change of Name

An Autumn of Loss

The Badger State

Back to the Valley

When It Rains

14   The Condition and its Future

Science and the Conflict

The Persistence of Identity

What Can Be Disproved

People versus Magnets

Women with a Past

A Common Bond

Tangible Diagnostics

A Leading Institution

Physical Ambiguity

A Fable of Advocacy

A Pragmatic View

Trusting the Method

Practitioners and Progress

Gender Anatomy

The Teenage View

15   The Law and the Church

Friend or Foe

The Theoretical Case

The Arts Proxy

Stellar Minds

Constraining Partner Preference

The Judicial Record

The Gardiner Remand

Unequal Protection

Checks and Balances

A World Less Flat

The Continental View

Church Views

The Body Preeminent

16   Popular Misconceptions

Unboxed Thinking

Addiction

Apotemnophilia

Autogynephilia

Emotion over Reason

A Fabricated History

Iowa by the Sea

Reversing History

Homosexuality

A Troubled Man

False Memories

Preferring Orange

Sexual Perversion

Shunning the Role

A Crisis at Midlife

The Tumbleweed Hypothesis

17   A Call to Action

The Case for Acting

The Four-Step Plan

The Awareness Step

The Legislative Step

The Screening Step

The Elegant Step

18   Following the Plan

Ethics and Change of Sex

A Center in Practice

Arbitrary Priorities

Into the Trenches

Likely Outcome

Rearing by Identity

Free at Last

Effects of Transition

Egg in Santa’s Beard

Being a Victim

A Closing Word

Definitions and Conventions

DEDICATION

This work is dedicated to my family and friends who

consistently provided support and stability during a difficult period,

even with a few challenges, questions, and doubts, and especially to

my mother who, in addition to countless acts of generosity,

shared an incredible day during my transition year and responded

with strength, courage, compassion, and love.

PREFACE

This work is an exposition of the transgendered condition from the perspective of someone who has known it intimately. No one else could tell this particular story, and it needs desperately to be told. Society is far from having a generally accepted and accurate understanding of this condition that powerfully affects, directly and indirectly, an unknowably large but significant number of people. Those who have dedicated a substantial portion of their lives to the study and treatment of the condition and, perhaps especially, those who are skeptical or cynical regarding its nature should benefit from this personal recounting of actions, anguish, discovery, joy, and faith. The future of medicine may well hold the ability to prevent gender identity conflict or to treat it before its nascent victim is even aware of the need for treatment. Even so, the struggle of male-to-female (MtF) transgendered people will have afforded the rest of humanity a deeper understanding of societal, familial, and egocentric expectations for each person’s living his, and especially, her richest and fullest-possible life.

By writing about life as a transgendered person, I am not implying that there are not hundreds or even thousands of world problems at least as important. I would not suggest that a transgendered person’s life is necessarily more harshly cruel and tragic or more arduous than the life of anyone else. However, the unique set of circumstances this condition visits upon those and the families of those who have it, and society’s reaction, or lack of action, regarding it, warrant this and other efforts thoroughly to address the condition. For its own sake, society needs both to enhance public and professional knowledge and understanding of the condition and to encourage greater systematic efforts to alleviate the suffering it causes.

Many of my recounted experiences will seem familiar to other transgendered women. To the extent that this narrative shows similarities with, and differences from, the accounts of other MtF women, this work should be useful in refining the ability to diagnose and treat others who approach and then experience transition. While not comfortable with the inclusion of every personal aspect and element in this work, I believe their omission would have resulted in an incomplete account that could reduce its utility. There is also a reticence in writing parts of this work because they could be misunderstood or taken out of context and used specifically to thwart the work’s primary purpose of trying to help others with the condition. Some people with other identity questions or psychosexual disorders might present my experiences as their own in sessions with their counselor(s) from a mistaken notion that the deceit will help them obtain a desired, but possibly inappropriate, professional action. If successful, they could not only aggravate their conditions and jeopardize their own lives, but they would threaten the future of the professional practices of those who were trying to help them improve their lives. Yet the importance of trying to help those who might otherwise see decades of their lives only partly lived by resisting public disclosure and who might even deny to themselves the existence of their own conflicting gender identities makes this effort worth these and other risks.

Any reader might know, or know of, an MtF woman who is in, or has gone through, transition. Of possibly greater interest, though, is the person who the reader believes is a relatively normal male friend, co-worker, family member, trusted professional, a pseudo stranger who often shares a seat or cabin during a morning commute, or a more distant but readily recognized acquaintance, but she is actually an MtF woman. She is living both a public male life and an intensely secret private life closely guarding her conflicting gender identity out of confusion, fear, shame, and concern for people about whom she cares.

During a hypothetical morning commute or wait in an airport boarding area, the person seated nearby holds his newspaper quite normally and appears relaxed, but her breathing is shallow and her pulse is rapid. She has not started to reread the same paragraph for the fifth time because she is suddenly having difficulty with the language. Perhaps triggered by the appearance of a woman nearby, a clothing ad in the newspaper, an unbidden thought about her hidden wardrobe, or some other reminder of her suppressed identity, she is hoping, as she has so many other times before, that this latest iteration of her intense urge to dress will pass quickly. She again prays that her identity conflict will just go away, be cured by some always-illusive power of reason, or continue to be a barely manageable but still fiercely suppressed other self.

Each such man appears to be someone’s son, brother, uncle, cousin, and/or even father, but her gender identity is constantly at war, for lack of a stronger term, with the rest of her life. She buys her clothing necessities or gifts for her in stores, from catalogues, and online in nervous dread that someone will discover that the items are really intended to satisfy all-too-brief manifestations of her own true gender identity that she otherwise continues to suppress. Transvestite males buy such things too, but I cannot know what the entirety of the experience is for them. The suppressing transgendered person’s dread is surreal, readily understandable, and occurs each time his carefully crafted and assiduously maintained façade again comes perilously close to its calamitous destruction.

A fellow commuter, casual acquaintance, co-worker, lifelong friend, or close relative may recently have experienced another in her long history of such wrenching episodes. If her wounds were physical, the continual and frequently severe bleeding would induce even the most unsympathetic, callous, or self-centered person to intervene, if only to keep her or his shoes dry. Yet the hemorrhaging, though real, is intangible, and it stealthily affects all people with whom she comes in contact. Worse still is her inhibiting conviction that any fate would be preferable to the unbearable shame and embarrassment of discovery by people about whom she most cares or who are important to her for other reasons.

When an MtF woman’s gender identity can no longer be suppressed, her life and the lives of those closest to her finally contend with the reality of a conflict that, at present, has only one known effective, though imperfect, treatment. However dramatic and eventful may be the acknowledgment for herself and the revelation to others, the resulting and nearly indescribable freedom of no longer suppressing who she really is releases the incredibly large genii from her impossibly small, but carefully crafted and diligently maintained, bottle. For her entire life to that time, she maintained dual and seemingly bizarre fantasies. One was the other-gendered self she was compelled to approximate in secret and to become in incessantly recurring imaginings. The other was the seemingly whole but fabricated shell-person she let others think she was. Both false but real pseudo persons finally reach their long-overdue end. The penultimately demanding role of acting from an early age as a convincing male, and even trying to convince herself that she can surmount her obsession and be the male she pretends to be, has seen its last performance.

The metamorphosis to a new reality for an MtF woman comes by her accepting and admitting, to herself and to other people, who she had always resisted appearing to be. The newly unfettered self finally shatters the impossibly thick, yet transparent, barrier through which she viewed the lives of others but that had separated her from a whole and real life of her own. The longer she postpones transition, the more of her life passes lived as someone else. She lives as a shadow person who is not complete and whose gender identity is different from her physical and publicly perceived biological or anatomical sex. While not being able to be physically the whole woman she has always yearned to be, she can live more completely as the woman she is than she ever thought possible and far more so than she could as an irreparably incomplete man.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Many psychiatrists and psychologists have dedicated a large part of their research and/or practice to helping transgendered people. They have helped to establish and advance standards of care for treating the condition. While acknowledging the need for, and utility of, such standards, however, a few of these professionals have realized that the standards are a guide for helping people rather than insisting that people must be forced to fit those standards. The professionalism and dedication of these few, both to their patients and their field, have been an immeasurable blessing to the transgendered people they have helped when other practitioners would find the risk of deviating from their profession’s cookbook daunting or inhibiting to the point of inertia. I will always be grateful that I found such people when I most needed them.

Drs. Milton Diamond and Keith Sigmundson have shown the essential role that practitioners of science must play in attempting to rectify the effects, however well-intentioned but nonetheless errant, of theories and/or practices propounded by others who have attempted to practice science without rigorously adhering to the essence of its method. They have argued persuasively that extensive attempts to alter the direction indicated by any subject’s internal gender identity compass consistently and spectacularly have failed. Their efforts lend substantial support to this work’s argument regarding the condition’s extant innate nature. Without the efforts of such dedicated professionals to test and refute their discipline’s missteps, research and the practice of the science of the medical arts would be reduced to little more than shamanism.

The genealogical work by at least three generations of my mother’s family has helped to clarify the dates when, and places where, various family members made their homes and built their businesses. Those who have established, contributed to, and maintain the online Internet Movie Database (http://www.imdb.com/) have provided, and continue to provide to its users a link of inestimable value to their own pasts. The database is an organized wealth of information about those who have used the transforming power of film and television to help viewers interpret, measure, and shape their lives and the world they share. The Sarasota County Public Library system ranks among those which have repeatedly demonstrated the competent commitment to access to and dissemination of knowledge that helps make local libraries the invaluable tools they can be in perpetuating and improving the intellectual health of our communities and nation.

The work of everyone involved at Xlibris and especially editor Roderick de Asis, reviewer Christine Gerra, and coordinator Kathrina Garcia was most helpful in preparation of the final version of the manuscript. Scrupulous application of style and meticulous attention to detail characterized every step on the path to this work’s completion. As one of countless beneficiaries of the labors of these and all of the above-mentioned wonderfully dedicated professionals who have sought to improve their society, I gratefully acknowledge their contributions.

INTRODUCTION

Relevant history, media coverage, much academic literature, and personal experience show that, while every adult may have heard about the transgendered condition, few have an accurate understanding of even the most basic of its aspects. Most people are unaware, for example, of the distinction between a transgendered person who is suppressing her gender identity before transition and one who has acknowledged and affirmed it during and after transition. The distinction is paramount. People who, through no fault of their own, are suppressing their gender identities are the primary focus of this work, but most of society is not even aware that gender identity exists.

Gender identity conflict is viewed from three vantage points as a basis for proposing a new effort at more effectively addressing this pivotal aspect of the lives of thousands of Americans. A similar effort applied elsewhere could help an unknowable number of other people around the world. The life experience of a transgendered person includes uniquely shared elements among the populations of MtF women and FtM men, to a greater or lesser extent, depending upon her or his age at transition, and that is described in this work from a most personal perspective. The condition as others have seen it, primarily from a scientific and a pseudoscientific vantage point, is the second view. Society’s contention with transgendered people in law, by religion, through its institutions, and throughout its culture is the third approach. In much of the work, all three perspectives have some bearing, and a subject’s consignment under one heading is intended, by no means, as exclusionary.

An unfortunate, persistent, and occasionally intentional ambiguity permeates discussions of the transgendered condition and compounds the task of those trying to understand it. Often, when attempting to differentiate between matters of behavior and physiology, conventional use of gender refers to the former and sex refers to the manifested identity of the subject, but gender and sex are often used interchangeably. Thus, a suppressing MtF woman would be described accurately as exhibiting masculine gender and being physically male even though her gender identity is feminine and female. Possible confusion is exacerbated by those who do not accept the existence of gender identity and its primacy regarding gender identity conflict. The usage described in this work’s Definitions and Conventions has been followed throughout this work.

In addition to the exposition of other aspects of the condition, the following chapters include an account of an undetected and undisclosed deception of more than forty years duration. Very lengthy secret lives are an unfortunate and dreadfully common part of the existence of each suppressing transgendered person and of the journey each one makes to her or his climactic and shattering disclosure. This account includes elements unique to my own experience and others probably shared by most transgendered people. I am not certain into which category every kind of experience should fall, but I have attempted to include as much information as might be useful in categorizing them. If samples of various populations made lists of those experiences, it might be useful to know which, if any, lists were identical and what that suggested about each universe. Also included are references to the accounts of other transgendered people, primarily regarding their encounters with the courts. The positive direction suggested by recent enlightened rulings abroad shows that wide variance between or among populations regarding the true nature of, and appropriate treatment for, the condition persists.

Despite evidence that at least some aspects of the transgendered person’s experience may be as old as humanity, society’s effort to contend with these people has only relatively recently begun to include serious investigation into the condition, especially regarding analysis of its likely genesis and its most effective treatment. The problem’s occurrence has apparently not been bounded by time or geography, and different political entities have reacted to it in a variety of ways. These struggles are examined from both a historic view of the condition and the way in which it has been handled by various courts.

Where the United States Government and its political subdivisions rest along the continuum of reaction is of more than passing interest to many people in local, national, and the international communities. The manner in which this country accommodates an almost infinite number of distinct, yet overlapping, minorities is arguably one of its greatest strengths. Yet continuing unrest over the correct legal definition of marriage colors much of America’s public discourse. Its definition may ultimately include any two people, any three or more people, or even a person and a pet or plant. Without recognition of the prime importance of gender identity to, and in defining, that pivotal interpersonal relationship, any legislated privileges and prohibitions will be based solely on grossly insufficient determinations regarding each one’s physical anatomy rather than on an essence much more important and fundamental to each person’s humanness.

Estimates of persons likely to be transgendered in a given population seem to differ as widely as do the people making the estimates. While I would count only those individuals whose identity conflict demands, has demanded, or will demand surgical resolution and as complete a transition as possible, some people would include a broader spectrum of gender dysphoria and still others would even include intersexed people who honestly profess gender consonance and have no gender identity conflict. Unless otherwise indicated, MtF women and FtM men refers to the first set of individuals throughout this work. Britain has approximately 5,000 post-op transgendered people with 3% to 18% questioning the appropriateness of their surgery (Batty 2004) from its estimated population of 60,270,708 (Central Intelligence Agency 2004). Excluding those questionable surgeries, still an average one in every 12,427 to 14,700 people in Britain transitioned appropriately. If the British model applied in the United States, between 20,408 and 24,054 people of all ages, races, creeds, etc. would already have transitioned here.

If a case for public support for reasonable efforts to help this population, however defined, rests on whether there are 20,000, 200,000, or 2,000,000 transgendered people in the United States, an effort to determine the condition’s incidence would be essential. Incidence would also be essential to estimate accurately the cost of effective intervention. Whatever the overall incidence for any given population, its impact for each transgendered person, her or his family, and, to a lesser extent, each affected community, is, as I attempt to show from a very personal perspective, preeminently significant.

Extant public accounts show that MtF women have begun transition at a variety of ages including in young adolescence, in their teens, and during their twenties. Their fortitude is commendable. I might envy the timeliness of their effective familial support and/or the lack of critical restraining influences, their more effective and efficient introspection, the increasing availability of appropriate resources, and/or other factors that have facilitated their transition. Yet I cannot say with confidence that the nature of the mechanism that caused their gender identity conflict was either very different from, or similar to, my own. Whether anything other than mere chance causes some MtF women to suppress the conflict for decades while others transition much earlier is still a matter of speculation and hypothesis, rather than of established fact.

Much about the condition remains a mystery, perhaps with more unknown than known, for both the scientific and medical community as well as ethical, moral, and spiritual theorists. Whether by intuition or logic, though, the process by which many experts either accept or reject the premise of the condition’s early biological origin is invariably tinted by a filter of predisposition toward or against that genesis. Those opposing innate origin for religious reasons see the condition as another wrongly chosen alternative to the single dichotomous female or male Biblical model where gender and sex are synonymous. For them, the combination is properly oriented solely to the production and dedicated rearing of children. Others are predisposed to the acceptance of any honest expression of individual personality as long as it does not involve physical violence or other harm to another person. These people are likely to assert that transgendered people have merely chosen to live in a less conventional manner. They would argue that such choice should not be restricted, perhaps simply because they see challenges to conventions as essential to preventing society’s stagnation and lethargy. I attempt to respond to these very different views by explaining the nature and content of my own experience and, especially, the sum of nearly half a lifetime’s frustrating efforts to rationalize, eradicate, compartmentalize, and otherwise tame what seemed an insatiable obsession.

The introspection reflected in the title of this work was unavoidable in relating life experiences and the circuitous path I took to resolution, but that is not in the least a part of the purpose of this work. If there were no other suppressing transgendered people in the world, then relating these experiences might do little more than tease the same curiosity that was fed by sideshows of an earlier era’s carnivals. The biographical information I have included is intended to show the physical, familial, and social influences that suggested the roles considered appropriate to females and males during my childhood, adolescence, and all the years prior to transition, as well as my interaction with those influences. I believe that observation, rather than speculation, supports the contention that gender identity informs every aspect of each one of every human’s interpersonal associations.

A transgendered child’s sense of gender identity may be ambiguous, deeply felt but concealed, or even asserted but not resolved. Yet in each case, her or his gender identity is in conflict with that child’s biological sex. It must be virtually impossible for such a child to establish the kind of enduring, meaningful, and complete relationships with parents, siblings, other relatives, friends, and others that are essential to her or his growth as a whole person. Some growth occurs as inevitably for humans as it does for weeds in an untended field. The direction of that unavoidable growth for a transgendered person runs parallel to, rather than intersecting with, the more complete lives of those whose consonance of gender identity and physical sex make fulfilling perceived societal expectations for their behavior far less confusing.

Whatever the incidence of gender identity conflict, it is a terrible experience for each suppressing transgendered person and a tragic loss for the society that both perpetrates the unhealthful fraud of inappropriately assigned gender and which loses the greater contributions that might have been made by those people who endure it. Suppressing transgendered people half-live a secret real life, which seems like a fantasy to them before transition, while they present an elaborate fantasy that is perceived as real by everyone else. An acute awareness that normal people can and do form meaningful and fulfilling associations is a constant reminder to transgendered people that there is a major difference between their own hidden selves and other people around them. Some suppressing transgendered people will even commit themselves to marriage in an attempt to claim the coveted intimacy that is denied to their secret selves. A deeper understanding of the nature of gender identity conflict and of society’s role in exacerbating, rather than alleviating, the problem are essential to the development of an effective means of more efficiently addressing the condition.

This work concludes with a proposal for a multifaceted program that, if implemented, would effectively address most aspects of the problem. Whatever productive or constructive benefits come to those who suppress their gender identities for decades of their lives, those benefits come at a horrendous cost to transgendered people and an inordinate opportunity cost to society. Reasonable efforts to avoid those costs are not merely an opportunity for society, as the US Constitution’s Preamble says,  . . . to form a more perfect union . . . (Kashner 2007, 499), but they are an obligation to which the United States has bound itself.

To borrow from one of the most American of pastimes, this work’s adding, however modestly, to a wider understanding of what it means to be a transgendered person would be comparable to getting a game-winning runner to home plate. The work’s series-winning homer would be helping to bring about the earliest feasible and least traumatic transition for the greatest-possible number of present and future suppressing transgendered people.

1

A Boomer’s Hometown

A Pleasant Valley

It would be difficult to overstate the natural beauty that must have greeted the earliest settlers of the Ohio River Valley between the Ohio’s source in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and the downriver city of Wheeling, West Virginia. Heavily forested hills sloping gracefully down to the full and flowing river must have made a welcoming home for the tribes of Indians who would eventually locate along the river’s banks. During the most recent 200 years of its history, the valley saw the construction and demise of Forts Pitt, Steuben, Henry, and others when members of a different culture and society made the area their home.

A reconstruction of Steubenville, Ohio’s Fort Steuben near the original fort’s site on the riverbank resulted from the efforts of a group of very committed Steubenville residents and generous donors. The fort and city were named to honor the service of Baron Friedrich von Steuben, the Prussian-born volunteer and officer who joined George Washington and his forces at Valley Forge. At an age when others were seeking a less rigorous life, von Steuben sought and won permission to use his Prussian training to help the Continental Army during the hard winter of 1778. His efforts so improved confidence and cohesiveness that a drill manual he authored became the Army’s standard for the next thirty years (Dupuy et al. 1992, 708). The resulting discovery, or rediscovery, for the Army’s leaders and soldiers that an American army could challenge successfully the established order may well have been the difference between the mere desire for independence and their undertaking the sustained action necessary to achieve it.

Much of the Ohio Valley’s same picturesque vista must also have greeted the farmer/settlers who arrived after treaties were negotiated with the Iroquois Confederacy and other Indians. The next wave of land transformers were the industrialists who saw ample local coal deposits and river transportation as necessary resources for the manufacturing and sale of steel. First Pittsburgh and then other area towns saw steel-related companies such as Weirton Steel, Wheeling Steel, and Follansbee Steel build and begin operating manufacturing facilities that would employ tens of thousands of workers. Such enterprises were the impetus to further economic development throughout the region.

My hometown was founded shortly after the start of the Twentieth Century and, in addition to its steel mill, was the home of a glass factory that made products used throughout the United States. One of the company’s craftsmen made pieces my maternal grandmother prized throughout her life. They included a ceiling fixture that was composed of a center globe and four smaller shades covered with windmills painted in a light orange and cream, several flower-covered vases, and a colorful but heavy green table lampshade with a painted pastoral scene. One of the town’s steel manufacturers still makes roll roofing that has been used internationally. During World War II, local soldiers saw the material on roofs in Europe and appreciated the connection to their hometown, which would suddenly seem a little less distant. The product had its origin in metal roofing that was common in Wales, and Welsh artisans comprised much of the town’s early population.

From Pittsburgh to Wheeling, the Ohio River Valley has produced vast quantities of air and water pollution. but it has also produced innumerable thousands of tons of steel supplying the economic foundation for millions of people in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia over the last one hundred years. The lush wooded hills combined with the river and rails serving the mills have provided to generations of local residents a nestled and nurturing sense of security and purposeful economic productivity. Despite the continuing economic and political battles over controlling pollution, optimal vantage points and especially favorable weather conditions still let the heavily utilized river valley appear quite picturesque. Other of the valley’s attractions are decidedly manmade.

While further from the larger University of Pittsburgh, Carnegie Mellon University, and West Virginia University, my hometown is within an hour’s drive of three private colleges and one state college. The metropolitan status Wheeling Symphony and the major Pittsburgh Symphony also are within an hour’s drive. Historic Wheeling was called the Gateway to the West via US Route 40, which was also known as the National Road. Among Wheeling’s offerings are summer outdoor symphony concerts in its Oglebay Park amphitheater, winter symphony concerts and occasional plays in its Capitol Theater, and the restored Federal Customs House. As Independence Hall, the customs house served as a key meeting place for planners of the state’s separation from Virginia and, later, as West Virginia’s temporary State Capitol. Natural beauty encompasses cultural, educational, historical, recreational, and other offerings that help most area residents know they do not want to live anywhere else.

Something in the Air

In the 1960s, valley air was widely reported to be the dirtiest in the United States. Whether that distinction was supposedly won by a difference of a few more micrograms or kilograms per cubic meter mattered little. Similarly, the possibility that an area elsewhere in the country might have an air pollution problem almost as severe did not lessen residents’ feelings of concern. Residents found some solace in the belief that valley air was not the most hazardous to human health. The larger size of much of the particulate supposedly meant that it could be filtered by, rather than remaining in, the lungs or being absorbed by the body. Despite the millions of dollars area companies have spent over the last forty years to control pollution, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) toxic release inventories have continued to show thousands of tons of emissions released each year affecting the valley and beyond. The report for one valley municipality showed more than 5,000 tons of air emissions in 2004 (US Environmental Protection Agency 2006). When few, if any, neighbors are major shareholders or chief executives of firms reporting high emissions, valley residents could view with utmost skepticism claims of substantial progress in release abatement.

Initially, steelworkers, pensioners, and dependent business owners were loathe to criticize publicly so important a component of the regional economy, and politicians shared the reluctance to challenge the foundation of area tax revenue and employment. The obvious alternative for steel users of readily available foreign supplies from countries with less effective environmental policing and controls has been a mitigating factor that would either justify inaction or invite tariffs and trade wars. Much of the conformist and cold war 1950s attitude persisted into the 1960s. Most complaining about pollution was sotto voce or was seen as a naive failure to acknowledge a necessary cost of prosperity. These impediments to greater action finally failed as areas far enough away called attention to aggravating evidence of the harmful emissions.

A History of Ownership

In an earlier era, the valley’s natural resources and manufacturing potential were an economic beacon to those who saw opportunity in its light. Two of my maternal great-grandfathers were among them. One of my maternal great-great-grandfathers was an English immigrant coalminer who mined coal in Illinois, became a mine boss in Steubenville, Ohio, then a storekeeper, and then a postmaster in another Ohio town near Steubenville before moving to my hometown. Another of them was a Welsh immigrant coalminer who also mined coal in Illinois. Had he lived longer than fifty-three years, he would almost certainly have come to our town where two of his sons established a business.

My mother’s grandfathers were merchant/entrepreneurs who recognized the new town’s need for services they could provide. Their families were, for a time, next-door neighbors; each family living in a home across the alley from what would become my present home. My mother’s paternal grandfather bought our town’s first commercial lot in 1904 and began construction of a general store the day the sale closed. His store was supplied from another store he had started in a town a couple of miles away. Ten years later, he established a bank after disagreeing with other directors of the town’s first bank. Perhaps because of his father’s background, he acquired and operated a small coalmine. Mother’s maternal grandfather owned the town’s first furniture store / funeral parlor, started the cemetery in which he was buried, and then started several funeral homes, the largest of which still bears his name.

Each man played a part in the area’s economic growth by serving the mercantile and financial needs of the Welsh and, later, Italian immigrant steelworkers, coalminers, other merchants, and their families. Their tangible legacy is the things that would not be where they are if these two men had not lived as they did. Their intangible legacy is the family lore of their ambitions, abilities, interests, and aversions and, especially in the case of the bank, the effect on all of the people whose lives would have been quite different if they had not been able to finance construction of their homes and businesses. In addition to the economic risks undertaken by these entrepreneurs, my great-grandfather started the town’s funeral parlor roughly one year before the horrendous flu pandemic of 1918 when exposure meant increased direct and immediate risk to his own life and the lives of his wife, their five children, and everyone else about whom he cared.

Today, most high school and college graduates are advised that they should expect not just numerous job changes but even several career changes over the course of their working lives. The continuity and stability that was part of the above relationships must appear to be a distant and unconnected history for them. It may seem as useful a contemporary model as street-side watering troughs for carriage horses, but it was, for well or ill, a central part of the social, cultural, and economic ties that bound each person and family to their community.

Mother’s father helped his father in the stores before accepting responsibility for managing the bank and, later, starting an insurance agency in the bank. He not only provided economic support for himself, his wife, and their two daughters, but he also cared for his mother, continued to assist his diabetic father, helped to provide for two less-successful brothers, and assisted other relatives and other members of the community through their financial and other difficulties. He managed to do all of this with such grace and sincerity that, long after his death, people he had helped would readily acknowledge his assistance and express their gratitude.

He willingly executed both his ex-officio and assumed responsibilities from an internal sense of commitment that was unrelated to the task’s ability to produce income. Following the bank holiday in March, 1933, only those banks that their respective regulators found financially stable were permitted to reopen. Despite a lengthy list of pressing matters, Grandfather loaded the requisite bank records into his car and drove to the state capital over more than one hundred miles of narrow two-lane winding roads to become one of the first bank officials given permission to reopen.

The prove-you-are-not-a-crook interpretation given by the period’s less-appreciative voters to some of the federal government’s anti-depression actions, especially those that were later declared unconstitutional, did not impede their implementation. Many of those actions did have the salutary effect of helping to restore public confidence in the nation’s financial system. Still, those who opposed many of the administration’s efforts might be forgiven for believing that, however severe were the nation’s economic problems, efforts to correct those problems must not violate the covenant that bound the nation. Opponents knew that the country had survived previous economic uncertainty but it might not survive significant change to its system of government. It was difficult for these people to trust an administration that did not seem to trust fully the system over which it presided. Others would contend that when one is drowning, she or he cares not who is throwing the rope nor of what substance the line is made.

Political sentiments aside, Grandfather’s sense of obligation to his family, his depositors, and his community demanded that he make that trip to the capitol. His internal, rather than an imposed, sense of commitment may have eased his hypertension at a time when medicine offered few options for treatment. Grandfather believed neither in lengthy nor frequent vacations, and he would not abide avoidable absences from his work. He told one employee who wanted a two-week vacation that if he were not needed for two weeks, he would not be needed at all. While worthy use of leisure has been a laudable goal for humanity since the dawn of recorded history, there are some for whom the term leisure was defined as a wasted opportunity to be productive. Even leisure, as one of the few prescriptions for treating hypertension at that time, was resisted.

One of Grandfather’s few favorite personal indulgences was caring for the new car he would replace every two years. He had his two-car garage built with a natural-gas heater and a pit to facilitate his caring for the car’s routine maintenance in cold, as well as warmer, weather. Our family physician never tired of reminding us that Grandfather’s idea for a doctor-ordered vacation was to spend a few days at a bankers convention in Atlantic City. Grandfather had taken his wife and daughters to the New Jersey shore for several summer vacation trips but putting the trips together, thinking about his business while he was away, and catching up after his return must have minimized any therapeutic benefits of those trips for him. Grandfather suffered a major stroke at home, and each time there seemed to be a slight sign of improvement, he had another stroke. He died two weeks after the initial attack a few months before his fifty-first birthday. He had lived a very full but all-too-brief life and had the opportunity to see and hold only one of his six grandchildren. Long after his death, his daughters would keenly recall any instance when he had seemed to be disappointed in them. These women were well educated and independent, but they remained very much devoted to their loving and deeply loved father.

My father, a native of New Jersey, began working in the bank following his military service in World War II and, following Grandfather’s death in May 1948, my grandmother became the bank’s president and Father also managed the insurance agency. Several years later, the bank acquired what had been a jewelry store adjoining the bank on its north side and one lot on each side of the whole structure. An extensive remodeling closed a limited public access stairway to the building’s second floor and opened a four-foot archway in the thirty-inch concrete wall separating the building’s basement. The second floor had variously housed a beauty parlor, a dentist’s office, and a private apartment. The whole building became dedicated to bank use adding a new brick and tile façade, public and employee parking on each side of the building, a renovated interior, and construction of the county’s first drive-up window in the building’s rear. The whole structure, after two sales of the bank’s controlling interest, has become the town’s branch of the county library.

Grandmother, with the help of a high school librarian, resuscitated the county’s failing library system. Grandmother was the library’s treasurer for more than thirty years, and she would have found no other successor use of the building more gratifying. Her eclectic interest in reading was fed by a spirited intellectual curiosity and included novels, biographies, and such timely works as Hitler’s Mein Kampf during World War II and Marx’s Das Kapital during the cold war. She did not read those works because she had the least doubt about her own beliefs regarding such matters. She read them to satisfy her curiosity about why these men believed, wrote, and acted as they did. She wanted such works to be available to others for the same reason, but if she had thought that availability would significantly increase support for either fascism or communism, she would have been opposed to it. She had little regard and no respect for anything she thought was anti-American, sacrilegious, or farfetched, but she had a great amount of patience with those she believed were pursuing their opposites.

I began working with her in the bank during summers while still in high school and though born shortly after his death, I learned about her husband and my maternal grandfather from countless stories of ways in which he had been an important part of the lives of many people in town. Older bankers elsewhere in the state nostalgically described pre-World War II banking as a time when banking was fun, and bankers could help build their communities by responsibly lending to those in whom they had confidence. This subjective means of evaluating loan applications was readily open to abuse, but there also were powerful constraints posed by depositors, directors, and the larger communities where each banker / lender lived. Some shortsighted and/or dishonest bankers may have abused their authority and responsibility, but the majority who did not were warmly regarded by people they and their institutions were able to serve. Many of the bank’s customers said they would not have had their homes if Grandfather had not approved their loans. While lacking much formal education, Grandfather had cultivated a strenuous work ethic, a keen business sense, and a generous heart for sharing what they produced.

Serving the Market

During the ten years of my post-college tenure at the bank, there were roughly a dozen commercial banks within a five-mile radius of ours. Including credit unions, savings and loan associations, and finance companies, there were more than enough competing institutions to approximate economists’ definition of pure competition. The virtual absence of pricing power, the relative ease of establishing a new institution, and the minor dislocation if any one institution were to close were common in the competitive climate for financial services in much of the valley. Eventually, fewer banks would substantially alter that climate. Larger banks began to precipitate an almost annual battle encouraging the legislature to liberalize the strictures of the state’s unit banking statues. Larger banks argued that they needed to be able to grow faster to compete with their larger competitors in, but primarily outside of, the state and suggested that too many smaller institutions meant a lack of concentrated capital necessary to meet the credit needs of larger borrowers.

The unit-banking statutes that had permitted larger banks to attain their relative status did not permit the asset consolidation that would facilitate ever-greater pooling of facilities, control, and profits. By spurring the legislature to raise the percentage of equity that constituted a concentration, larger banks might have effectively increased the ability of all state banks to meet the borrowing needs of their larger borrowers. The maximum loan for a bank with equity of five million dollars, though, would be five times greater than a bank with one million so that growing businesses gravitated toward larger banks. Winning larger minimum-capital requirements could reduce prospective competition from new smaller banks since their organizers would have to raise more capital to open. Each move would reward bigness primarily for its own sake. Consolidation of assets and equity also increased the power of larger banks to influence the economic character of their market area. Despite the influence of local bankers on their representatives, the momentum to greater size proved irresistible. The tide pushing institutions inside and outside of the state to seek rule changes that would permit them to become ever larger has continued to this day. The result has been a virtual carousel of name changes on bank buildings across the country.

The almost-intimate family-centered small institutions offering financial services to their neighbors is a far less prevalent contemporary banking model than it was for the last several centuries. The nation seems continually to prove that in a national community, few residents actually know the owners of their local community’s branch businesses, and they only know those businesses by the advertising messages such corporate citizens pay to have heard. Ability to influence local managers of those branches is reduced. That is a stark contrast to the model where a small bank’s teller window served as a pseudo backyard fence over which neighbors visited. The banking business transacted was, at times, almost incidental to the weightier matters discussed. Earlier banking differs sharply from crisp and impersonal transactions with young and recently hired minimum wage tellers and interactions with frequently rotated and relatively inexperienced branch managers who have little substantive decision-making flexibility.

The consumers recurring feeling of being another small fish in a very large pond and of being distant from anyone with the power to set policy has enduring social ramifications. Niche markets where old and smaller new banks can still attempt to be community banks are still staffed by local ownership, but these bankers must still contend with regulations intended to influence and limit the behavior of institutions many times each community bank’s size. These concerns were very much a part of innumerable family discussions and, as I became more involved in management of the bank, such conversations became almost incessant whenever we were not actually working in the building.

The Neighborhood

My grandmother’s house, her father’s house and Grandfather’s family’s home next door, our church home, the elementary school and high school I attended, my great-grandfather’s funeral home, another great-grandfather’s general store building, the bank, the drive-in theater, a five-and-ten-cent store, several restaurants, several other businesses, and the homes of my closest friends were all less than one mile from the house where I grew up. In the 1950s and 1960s, few social matters remained secret in such a setting unless they were known by only one person. That was especially true during warmer weather when the absence of residential air-conditioning in most homes meant that, if it was not raining, there were many open windows. Everything in town was within walking distance, although the hills usually made things seem much farther apart. If winter’s ice did not make them treacherous, downhill trips were never a problem, especially when a ride back was waiting at the other end.

Our street was named for its location one block east of the town’s Main Street, which placed it two blocks east of West Street. What the layout lacked in imagination and originality it regained in simplicity and utility. East Street was a teachers street where most homes held at least one family member who taught at the high school located in the next block north or the elementary school located roughly six blocks south. For many years, commercial local bus traffic served a stop at one corner of our block at Main Street every half hour. When children were still too young to drive but old enough to begin to want to, they still had access to larger and more varied stores, three indoor (when that modifier was not redundant) movie theaters, and other diversions in a town across the river via that bus service. The busses provided access to two other surrounding communities, but those towns lacked the subjectively superior shopping, bowling, and theater attractions available across the Ohio River.

A Major General Store

Again, my great-grandfather’s second general store was the first store in my hometown. It was built after increasing grocery orders from the town’s steel company employees and their families were generating greater sales volume than his first store. When Grandfather was a teenager, he would take grocery orders at the mill workers’ homes, fill them at his father’s store a few miles south, and return with those orders in a horse-drawn wagon. The store in our town eventually housed the local telephone exchange on its mezzanine until an increasing number of phone customers meant a need for more operators and greater floor space. The exchange moved to the town’s municipal building. A photo of the store’s interior shows a generously stocked, but apparently very well organized, assortment of food and other merchandise.

Great-grandfather worked in that store from sunrise to sunset for roughly thirty years and died the weekend after he retired. Diabetes fed his failing eyesight in his later years, which meant he could hear but not always see the children who would steal candy from his store. A number of long-overdue accounts at his death indicated that other forms of theft were a cost of store ownership. These darker experiences were certainly not characteristic of most of his clientele but, despite his efforts to help those in need, there were some who chose to help themselves.

In addition to the later phone exchange, the town’s City Building also contained the police department, fire department with its one and then two trucks, a dentist’s office, and a few other commercial offices. After the volunteer fire department constructed its own building, its old home became the town council chamber. The City Building’s dentist lived at the end of our thirteen-house street and in a house diagonally across from my grandmother’s home. A visit to this dentist was almost always followed by a milkshake from the restaurant a few doors away from his office. That confection always made fleeting any memory of the visit’s less-enjoyable aspects. The restaurant building, through its various incarnations as a movie theater, snack shop, and restaurant was part of the intimate history and fond memories of most of the town’s residents.

An Old Soul

One of its oldest residents and an almost daily visitor at the restaurant was to be feted by its owners on his one hundredth birthday. He was offered a new suit for the occasion and drove his car several times across the river for just the right one. A prime requirement was that the suit must include two pairs of slacks. This delightful, elderly, but thrifty gentleman was not interested in a suit that might have to be discarded if the first pair of slacks became worn. Seemingly undiminished in his faculties, enjoying generally good health, and having many friends, he was a frequent and most welcome restaurant patron and a warmly regarded resident of the community. Sometime after the party, he confided to one of the restaurant owners that he thought he had lived too long and, in a short time, he passed away almost as an act of will.

Each person’s enduring desire for a longer and always healthy life, possibly with a perpetually cloned ancestral pet, is an aspiration in conflict with this old soul’s sentiment. To Christians and others, the same God who gave them the ninety-second day of their tenth year also gives to an increasing number the tenth day of their ninety-second year. Each day, however trying, can be taken as a gift they did not earn but which comes and is gratefully received and acknowledged by some while being only grudgingly accepted by others. Perhaps because they dismiss possible existence of an afterlife, even agnostics, atheists, secular humanists, etc. will revel in merely being alive on a planet teeming with other life. Many people do not believe in a sedate retirement but seek to keep their minds actively engaged contemplating fact, fantasy, or philosophy even if they suffer chronic and severe physical impairment. For those who are able—an Ansel Adams anticipates taking another photograph, a Richard Tucker singing another aria, and an Albert Einstein taking one more stab at a unified field theory—whatever their rationale, such people are in love with living. They will do whatever they can to be as much a part of life as possible.

If not anxiously anticipating attainment of spiritual immortality, or perhaps because they are tired of fearing it, there comes for other people a time when the sheer tedium of physical longevity is felt as a great burden. Theirs is not really a wish for death but an awareness that the gift of life now costs more than they can, or are willing to, pay. The calendar’s run through its endless parade of seasons no longer warms the heart with wonderfully repetitious characteristics of temperature, sounds, scents, and sights. The promise of renewed life that is synonymous with spring now seems an uninspiring monotony of routine. However glorious the spring blossoms, these disenchanted fatalists know the beauty will fade.

Memories of the way these same people used to enjoy nature’s panoply, and the family and friends with whom they shared it, now harshly conflict with an all-too-real present that starves the least interest in creating new memories. The flame of spirit fed by their own determination to live as much life as they have been given to learn, to accomplish, and to share dims for these people who see themselves as having neared a final and acceptable destination. For them, life is not, or is no longer, a fascinating journey. It changed at some moment to become a series of items on a list to have been experienced, endured, or accomplished. When life no longer seems to offer interesting challenges, prospective achievements, and/or desired experiences, because of poor health or otherwise diminished capability, that would require setting new and achievable goals, life becomes an insufficiently compelling alternative that warrants continuation of their struggle.

Each of these two very different views either welcomes continued terrestrial life or resists it. As firmly as anyone may believe her or his feet are set on one camp’s solid ground, she or he may well encounter a test challenging that determination. From a time in youth when almost anything and everything seems possible and ten years seems an unimaginable eternity, to an older age and circumstance when options seem few and ten years ago seems like yesterday, the transit colors one’s view even as perspective can be fed by it. The old soul would probably say, Don’t tell me how you feel now but wait until this happens to you. As firmly as people might reject so pessimistic a view at present and embrace goals almost as they embrace life, at a more advanced age and in a moment of weakness, some would decide they agree with him. On deeper reflection, yielding to such temptation is contrary to so much spiritual, rational, emotional, and sensory knowledge and belief as to be wholly unacceptable to many, if not most, people.

Weather Memories

The relentless march of seasons carries every person onward, but each passing season becomes part of the memories that help each person be the person she or he is. The remembered winters of my youth included snows that would refreshingly cover everything outdoors with a quieting and brilliant blanket of white. When the flakes stopped falling, the glistening blanket of white lasted about a day before the black soot and other particulate pollution from local industry began to transform the snow’s clean and shining sparkle into a dingy gray. Riding a sled down the hills at the town’s park was a favorite way to spend idle winter hours for most of the children in our neighborhood. Donning the requisite layers of clothing, including heavy boots over hard-soled shoes, and then wrestling with the sled up our cellar steps was a steep price to pay for the rides, especially when the whole process was reversed after a tiring afternoon of repeated hill climbs that were so much less fun than the ride down. Somehow, that calculus of value produced substantially different results when performed by a child wanting to sled-ride. Snow was not the only medium of entertainment provided by our winter weather.

Whether from melting snow or freezing rain, the ice that would form on an alley between my elementary school’s two buildings would induce a line of kids to take turns running and sliding on it at terrifying speeds. Girls were usually outnumbered in those lines, which may say something about relative development of judgment between genders in childhood. The one or two times I rather tentatively took up the challenge meant an unhappy pairing of my head with the ice and asphalt. I managed to avoid double vision and stitches but decided that this particular winter thrill