Transition: Crossing the Gender Divide| 1, 2, 3, 4

Like Erykah Ramdass, Rusty Moore thought of herself as female as a young child, but she wasn't swishy or feminine. In fact, she loved sports, hiking, camping and other physical activities. To the outside world, she fit into the male mold she was born to fill.

PHOTO: Rachele Kanigel

Rusty Moore always felt she was a woman.

She married at 21 and had a daughter. The marriage lasted 10 years and ended in divorce. A few years later she remarried, still hoping to find happiness as a heterosexual man. The couple had two children and for a time, they seemed like the perfect nuclear family.

Moore succeeded in her work as an academic, working her way up to become an associate dean at Hofstra University and winning a Fulbright scholarship to teach in Brazil. Colleagues thought of Moore as one of the guys, someone they could talk to about last night's football game or let in on the occasional sexist joke.

Inside, however, she felt constricted in her male body. Occasionally, she would dress as a woman, reveling in the soft drape of a skirt against her body. As she entered her forties, the desire to be a woman began to overwhelm her, leading to the breakup of her second marriage.

Rusty Moore as a man

Moore notes that divorce is common when one partner comes out as a transgender. In addition to their feelings of betrayal and confusion, the non-transgendered person usually isn't ready to change their own sexual orientation. "Most people don't want to become a gay man or a lesbian in the middle of the stream," she says.
In 1992, Moore met Chelsea Goodwin in a transsexual support group. Goodwin had been working at the Strand Book Store and living as woman for years. The two fell in love. Moore started spending more and more of her time dressing as a woman, although she continued presenting herself as a man at work and to her family.

"There were times I would change clothes three or four times a day," Moore says. "I would change in the car coming home from work. It was abhorrent. I couldn't stand it."

Finally, Moore decided that becoming a woman was more important than anything else -- her job, her friends, her family. "Going through transition for me was releasing myself to be myself," she says. "It was hard once I started to release that to cram myself into the old life."

Next page: Crossing Over to the Other Side
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