INTERVIEW: The Advocate's Parker Marie Molloy [Part One]

By Jon Graef in News on Mar 1, 2014 7:00PM

A effortless, effusive conversationalist, and a tireless, passionate journalist, Chicagoan Parker Marie Molloy's work writing and reporting on transgender issues has appeared in media outlets like The Huffington Post, Salon, Rolling Stone, and Talking Points Memo. In January 2014, she was brought on by The Advocate to cover transgender issues for them as a full-time correspondent. Ahead of her Thought Catalog-published Kindle e-book, My Transgender Coming Out Story, Chicagoist had the privilege of speaking with Molloy in an honest, in-depth conversation about her life as a transgender woman.

This is the first of a two-part interview. The first part, below, focuses on Molloy's life in conjunction with her book. The second, to be published tomorrow, Sunday, March 2nd, focuses on transgender issues on local, state, and national levels.

Chicagoist: So, like I said on Twitter, I don't have any questions prepared, but that hasn't stopped me before

Parker Marie Molloy: (chuckles).

C: But, basic background: tell me about your background as a Chicagoan.

PMM: Sure, sure! As a Chicagoan, I grew up in the southwest suburbs, the far southwest suburbs. It's a small town called Manhattan. It's kind of out by Joliet.

It's a town—I think, growing up, I remember [the population] was 3,000 people, or something like that. I grew up there, and then I went to college at Millikin University down in Decatur. I was there for three semesters as a music performance major, and then I realized, "wait, there are no jobs in this."

C: (laughs). So you turned to journalism instead?

PMM: Well, I came back home, took a semester off from school, lived with my parents, then I came back and decided to finish college at Columbia College Chicago, and moved to the city. I ended up getting a degree in Arts, Entertainment, and Media Management. It's about as vague as it sounds. (Laughs.) …

After I graduated Columbia, I kind of bounced around from a few different things. Did some work...internships at record labels, did some work for a music talent management company.

So I did that for about a year, then my life took a—I kind of hit the point where I was dealing with some pretty rough gender dysphoria for a good 13, 14 years at that time.

I kept telling myself, "hey, this is going to go away, this is going to get better, you can deal with it. Try to be a guy." And, so, finally, I kind of broke down and hit the point where it was like, "OK, I can pursue this, or I can kill myself." That's kind of where we were at.

Given the two choices, I just decided, "you know, I'm just going to have to do this and see what happens."

C: What year was that?

PMM: That was...(brief pause) 2012.

C: Oh, so are you just recently out?

PMM: (enthusiastically) Yeah! Yeah, only a couple years out.

C: How's it going so far?

PMM: Pretty good! After coming out...I came out to my girlfriend, who, at that time, I'd been dating for four years. She's very straight. (Laughs.) Not. Into. Women. Into men. So, it was something where, over the next couple of years, she and I really worked to try make things work. But it just sort of apparent that we were no longer physically compatible. And so, we recently just broke up.

C: Aww, jeez.

PMM: (laughs) Yeah, she moved out on Valentine's Day.

C: Oh, brutal!

PMM: But, you know, it was more like, it was convenient. I wouldn't be home, she could move out. It wouldn't be like I'd have to sit there and watch her pack her things and move away. But yeah, there's an odd irony to that.

We eventually got to the point where we were both essentially making compromises on who we were for the sake of the other person.

C: With most relationships, though, you have to do some sort of comprising. What's the difference between that universal standard, and what was going on with your specific relationship?

PMM: You know, I totally agree that, to make a relationship work, you're going to have to find some common ground, make some compromises. But the one thing you can't compromise on is who you actually are as a person. You're straight, you couldn't make a relationship with a man work, even if you had some common ground. It just doesn't work. I think that was the case with her.

She's straight, she was into men, presumably. (Laughs.) As time went on, though, I think it became a little too much for her. My physical appearance changed quite a bit after I started hormone replacement therapy, which was October 2012.

C: Is [hormone replacement therapy] an ongoing thing?

PMM: Oh, yeah. That's something I have to do for the rest of my life—not if I want things to revert to the way they were, which is totally the opposite of what I want. (Laughs.)

C: I'm obviously an outsider here, but it sounds like the two of you made a good faith effort, and being single again can sort of serve as a point of rejuvenation.

PMM: Oh, totally. I think the fact that she and I made the effort we did--and we didn't push it further than it could possibly go--I think that's the key to us continuing to be friends, to continue to be able to talk. It's still fresh, but we're going to be fine as far as being friends.

C: That's great.

PMM: Yeah! You make an effort, you try, and you go with life throws at you.

That's really similar to my own situation. I didn't choose to be transgender. It's just who I was. Growing up, it would have been awesome if, other than being the way I was, I would have just been either been a girl who was happy being a girl, or a boy who was happy being a boy.

That's one thing that people take for granted--their body and mind and what society expects from them matches together. There's a cohesion there. In my case, it was like, "something's off." (Laughs.)

C: That cohesion—that's cisgender?

PMM: Yeah. And everyone has there own challenges to deal with. These just happen to be mine. I just want to take what I have and make things have that same cohesion.

C: So you literally were living cognitive dissonance then.

PMM: Yup! Pretty much. You realize something's wrong, and it's your reality for so long that you being to convince yourself, "no, no, this is right, this is how it should be. Everyone must feel like this." (Laughs.) Life must be really bad for everyone. (Laughs.) That's what I thought! "Man, this life thing really sucks!" (Laughs).

Then, as time goes on, you realize that it's not normal, the way you feel compared to other people. … So those little things that were built into my frame didn't match up with what the world seem to expect from me and what my body seem to expect from me as well.

Like anything else, some people need to take insulin because they're diabetic, and men have to take testosterone supplements that they're endlessly pitching on TV. Low-T?

C: I don't think that's actually a thing.

PMM: [Laughs]. But it's something that people take if they want to improve how they're feeling—to try to be more in line with how they feel they should be. Same thing with women going through menopause who pursue hormone replacement therapy to try to offset physical side effects for one reason or another.

That's kind of the same thing here. Something's not balanced in my body, and while that itself wouldn't kill me—I wouldn't go into a coma if I didn't go on hormone replacement therapy—I wouldn't be able to concentrate, focus, to do any of the things I wanted to do in my life.

So I started hormone replacement therapy. The mental effects were amazing. It just feels like a fog has been lifted. I know that saying has been used to describe this, or to describe someone starting anti-depressants, but that's totally what it is.

I would even say, even if there weren't any physical effects, if it was just the focused, clear mindset I had, I would still be like, "this is great. This is a vast improvement over what things were."

C: What I'm curious about is how those feelings of discomfort them turn into suicidal thoughts. Because everyone feels discomfort, especially during adolescence, but maybe not to the degree where they start thinking about taking their own life.

PMM: It's somewhat of a struggle, because other people do feel discomfort, or they do feel awkward, in the awkward teenage years, where they seem off to themselves, especially as they're going through puberty.

I think it just became something where, as time went on, I had a harder time being further into the future as myself with planning, dreaming, whatever.

I had a really hard time going, "a year from now, I'll be a man who's engaged, and then five years from now, I'll be a father with a child, or something like that." And then, "when I'm old, I'm a grandpa"—those thoughts became harder and harder to have seriously.

It just felt like I was joking with myself, trying to convince myself that any of these things were remotely possible, even down to the fact that "I will be alive, and I will be a man."

That was one of the tipping points I finally hit.

When I was growing up, I didn't know that transgender was a thing. I remember in fourth or fifth grade, somewhere around then, just laying in bed at night--and this was when I was religious at that point in my life, in the sense I went to church--but I remember just praying. "OK, God, let's make a deal here. Whatever you want, I'll do it, just make me a girl when I wake up in the morning. Thanks, buddy!" (Laughs.)

And then I'd wake up, and be like, "dammit. God! You didn't hear me. Let's work on this." (Laughs.) And it kind of kept going on being like that. I didn't know that it was even possible, because, growing up, people would tell me, "yeah, you're a boy." I'd go, "OK…I guess so."

But at the same time, I found myself being really jealous of the girls in my class. It wasn't a sexual thing, it was like, "it's really cool that the girls get to so cool things with their hair"; "That outfit's really cool. Why do I have to wear these stupid jeans or whatever?" (Laughs.)

It was almost impossible for me to...my mom had such a hard time dressing me, because I was so awkward in clothes. There was a period in my life where I would wear sweatpants to class...

C: YOLO!

PMM: (laughs). Yeah, it was like, second grade, and I was like, "Mom, I don't want to wear jeans!" And my reason for it, which is kind of ridiculous, is right around the zipper...zippers on any jeans, I was like, "I don't like how it bumps out like that. I don't like that bump. In that area. At all." (Laughs.)

So my mom was like, "that's what jeans are! Everybody wears jeans," and I was like, "I don't care. I don't like it." There was a period in my life where I would go to school wearing sweatpants and sweatshirt. It looked like I was working out all the time. (Laughs.)

C: So you were that young—second grade, fourth grade, fifth grade—when you were having these thoughts.

PMM: Yeah, definitely! There are other people who say...the narrative you hear sometimes, which is often told by people who felt the need to get passed gatekeepers—doctors, psychiatrists, or whatever, to try to get hormone replacement therapy—say, "I knew when I was three years old." People can know when they're that young, which is kinda cool.

But yeah, gender is something that's not learned. It's just in you. And so, for me, it took time, where it was a series of a lot of little things. I think I was 14, 15 years old, when my family finally got the Internet. (Laughs.)

They got those AOL discs in the mail.

C: YESSSS!!!!

PMM: 103 hours. Awesome. I would go on there and just start Googling—well, not Googling, because Google didn't exist.

C: I know what you mean.

PMM: I opened up the Encarta Encyclopedia, or whatever, and I'd just start looking up, "OK, what am I, what is this? Like, "boy who thinks he's a girl." Eventually, over time, I stumbled upon the term transgender. I said, "that's exactly it. That's me." And so, I said, "cool, I have a name for this."

Unfortunately, any trans people that I saw, whether it was TV, movies, reality TV, whatever the case, never seemed anything near to what I was. So I was like, "if that's what that is, then maybe I'm not." Because what I saw a lot of the time was this super over-the-top...like, drag queens, essentially. And that's not me.

My style of clothes is generally jeans and wearing a hoodie.

C: Ironic you're wearing jeans now.

PMM: I know, right? (Laughs.) But I think that there's this expectation of trans people, that I'm sitting in my apartment in a ball gown, which is ridiculous. I've never actually worn a dress outside. I have a couple of dresses where I'm, "OK, let's see how this goes...nope, that's not working for me." I go to work in pants. I don't go home and go, "I'm going to put on all this makeup."

C: You don't have to be super flamboyant.

PMM: That's totally it. It helps that, in real life, in the real world outside of the media and the Internet, I've come to meet some trans people who are much more like me than what I saw in the media. A lot of my friends in person, they're not over-the-top. They're not flamboyant. They're just people.

There are certainly trans people like that, just like there are cisgender people like that. We're as diverse as anyone else. That's why, "oh, you don't look transgender." That's because you have an idea of what one person looks like. "Oh, you don't have a five o'clock shadow and are wearing a cocktail dress?" Sorry. Sorry to disappoint. (Laughs.) I'm just a regular gal.

When people say, "I've never met a transgender person," my response usually is, "well, you probably have."

C: They just didn't tell you.

PMM: Yeah, exactly. You never met a transgender person that you know of. I went and had a burger at Five Guys today.

C: Yeeeaaahhhhhh....

PMM: I know! So good! I walked in, and the guy said, "What can I get you, ma'am?" That guy probably is like, "I've never met a transgender person." Yeah, he has! It's that sort of thing. We're everywhere.

And that's what I try to do with my writing, is to make people realize transgender people are normal. We're not some sideshow you need to gawk at.

When I started to see how awful the coverage on trans issues was, where there'd be a story about a trans woman being murdered, and they'd report it as "man in odd clothing murdered." Or they'd report using masculine pronouns, and they'd refer to the murdered person by their birth name throughout the piece. So that's when I started going, "this is ridiculous." Because, one, that's not accurate. It's disrespectful to the people who died, and, two, it misinforms the public. …

It's just something where I started doing a lot of writing, and doing essays on trans issues and specific things like that. I just started reporting on the world, making sure I would get the correct names, and the correct gender. Then, essentially, I picked up freelance work where I could find it.

CHow did you come on the idea of the Kindle short? What details can you give us about it?

PMM: Last year, I did a lot of writing for Thought Catalog. In addition to publishing short stories, personal takes on current events, and just... well, whatever they want, they also put out a set of Kindle Singles. These are usually extremely short pieces, sold for just a few dollars. As a lot of my writing had to do with my transition, I was approached by Chris Lavergne at Thought Catalog about writing something that was a more comprehensive take on my coming out process.

I've written "the coming out story" half a dozen times. For whatever reason, that seems to be what a lot of media outlets want from trans people. Honestly, for me, I want to write about other things, and not continue to have to tell and retell that old story. So, I agreed to write this out. This way, if people find themselves inclined to learn a little bit about my upbringing, they can check out this quick read, and I can move on to writing about wider, cultural issues.

Come back to Chicagoist for part two of our interview with Parker Marie Molloy, wherein we discuss those very wider, cultural issues to which she alludes.