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As a young teenager by then living in Charlotte, Katie gamely tried to be more "girly." She grew her hair long, padded her bra, read Teen and dated boys. She was voted onto the homecoming court at Charlotte Latin School, even after she'd come out as gay to friends and family at 16.
Katie never came out as a debutante, but she nevertheless attended several debutante parties in Charlotte as "a big ol' lesbian." The experiences inspired her one-person show Debutante Balls, about class and gender issues in the South, featuring riffs on Charlotte as a "New Money" town. Turner says today, "To even know the difference between Old Money and New Money is ridiculous."
In some childhood photos, she looks like a girl; in others, like a boy -- so much so that years later, a housekeeper assumed snapshots around the house depicted a pair of twins.
The night before Kt made "Scott" his legal name, mother and child had an argument in her parents' Texas home. "I remember being 10 years old," Kt told her mother in anger, "and looking at my vagina and thinking that you and Grandmom must have had a doctor remove my penis." Then, crying, she locked herself in her parents' guest room.
The next day, Scott Turner Schofield, newly "christened" at a courthouse in the Houston suburbs, returned to his mother's house. A long way from fully accepting her child's new identity, Dickson took a big step: She hugged her son and said, "Happy birthday, Turner."
Dickson started using male pronouns out of respect for her child's wishes. Then, it became second nature to her. Her daughter may have changed, Dickson now reasons, but all children change as they grow older.
In Texas, Dickson and her second husband had told people they had a daughter. After they moved to Pennsylvania in 2005, they began telling strangers, "We have a son." Recently Dickson met a woman who offered to pass along some dating advice. "Young women can be very manipulative. You tell him, 'Don't get her pregnant!'"
Turner's lesbian lover broke up with him after he changed his name.
"If you're a man, that means I'm not a lesbian anymore," she said.
"Who am I going to date?" Turner wondered. "Will I be so convincing that I can date straight women? If I date lesbians, how will that work for both of us?"
As a gay woman, Kt never felt she entirely fit. She'd gone through "a granola, homeopathic, Earth-mother lesbian" phase in college. But she always felt like the frat boy at the slumber party. "I was there, but I didn't belong."
As he grew more male, Turner sensed that he started getting the cold shoulder from feminist and lesbian organizations.
"Radical feminism is like the equivalent of the good ol' boys club, and they can be very conservative about who they let in. Nobody's said anything, but there's been a kind of pulling-away, an unspoken message of 'You can't come into our space.'"
He began going out with straight women. Since grade school, Kt had been attracted to ultra-feminine girls. In college, she'd try to seduce them. "I enjoyed queering the dating pool. At the time, I was pretty androgynous, and boyish lesbians are considered the 'gateway drug.'"
Turner denies he has a "type," but he admits some friends have a theory for his attraction to feminine women -- "Yeah, that makes you way more of a dude when you've got a hot chick on your arm."
To become more of a dude, Turner embarked on a do-it-yourself sex change regimen. He researched gender alteration online and purchased a supply of his first steroid, Andro-D Gel, from a body-building Web site in December 2004. Steroids such as Andro-D Gel encourage the human body to produce more natural testosterone and are best known for bulking up such baseball players as Mark McGwire before Congress declared andro-infused dietary supplements controlled substances in January 2005.
During his potentially illegal gender modification, Turner rubbed two tablespoons a day on his inner wrists and the backs of his knees. "I noticed weight gain through muscle mass, a little bit of a voice drop and general horniness -- the typical steroid response," he recalls. But the effects were more subtle than he'd wanted. "I guess that it plateaued after a while. My voice never really changed, and I always felt like my voice was really wrong, which is why I was desperate to go on testosterone."
To go further, Turner had to convince a physician to sign off on injections of testosterone, a more heavy-duty hormone. That meant pelvic exams, blood tests and providing a psychologist to identify him as having "gender identity disorder." He describes the diagnosis this way: "It basically means that I'm crazy, and the only way a doctor can treat my illness is to help me change my gender."
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Calendar
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Spruce Pine Alien Festival @ Spruce Pine Alien Festival
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Robots, Rockets, & Rovers @ The Schiele Museum of Natural History and Planetarium
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Double Trouble Improv Comedy Night @ CATCh
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AllMachines
- Through Dec. 30, 12-9 p.m.
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AllMachines - Raymond Forklift
- Through Dec. 30, 12-5 p.m.
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Street Stories 11
Secrets and legends behind Charlotte's long and winding roads
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Get Out of theWay! 1
Brian Robinson -- the mover who stranded a house on Providence Rd. -- is back on the streets
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Sniper School 1
Private camps teach just about sniper skills
