Pride Issue 2022 

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Authentic Lives
Utahns remember the pursuit of their truer selves.
By Carolyn Campbell

In 2007, Sophia Hawes-Tingey saw a counselor about her feelings, desires, cravings and fantasies related to becoming a woman. Forty-one years old at the time, she had begun experimenting with dressing—and passing—as female.

But she was 16 when she passed as a woman for the first time.

"It was Halloween," Hawes-Tingey recalls. "My mom let me borrow her wig and a dress and helped with the makeup."

Hawes-Tingey remembers going in costume to visit her mother at the pizza restaurant where she worked and where Hawes-Tingey was friends with several of the employees. She heard someone call out "Check five!" as she entered, which she learned meant that a "hot" customer had entered, a reference to the restaurant's four ovens.

Decades later, Hawes-Tingey started visiting a Unitarian Universalist church, initially presenting as male but soon attending weekly as Sophia.

"Interacting with my deeper-level nature, I started feeling like some traits fit my masculine side, and some were part of my feminine expression," said Hawes-Tingey, chairwoman of the Transgender Inclusion Project.

As Hawes-Tingey describes, her masculine persona included her logical side, while her emotional, sensitive and nurturing traits were more aligned with her feminine identity. Looking back on that time, she said she felt a strong, internal feminine energy while seated in a circle with 40 other women at a Vagina Monologues audition. Then, at a mall, wearing only foundation as makeup, she was greeted as "ma'am."

"I started to realize I was passing," she said. "If I went to the bank, I was 'ma'am' until I presented my driver's license and credit card."

When she decided to start going to work full-time as her feminine self, she held an informal ceremony the Friday before to thank her former male identity "for protecting me all those years."

"I had to let it go," Hawes-Tingey said. "Then, I gently fired it."

After the ceremony, she removed her male clothing for the last time. She said she then had the joy of "letting those two ways of thinking synergize, which allowed me to become a more complete human being."

She adds that it still tickles her when a doctor asks if she thinks she might be pregnant, or how long it has been since her last period. Her response is always that it's been quite a while.

For LGBTQ people, "there are so many transitions to experience—emotional, physical, social and, sometimes, post-surgical—on the way to living authentically," Hawes-Tingey said.

And the transitions don't necessarily stop with the individual, as friends and family members watch their loved ones making shifts in their lives and find their own awareness expanding about the realities of being lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or one of an infinite number of identies for which acronymical labels fall short.

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Finding Answers
As host of the Human Stories podcast, Jill Hazard Rowe regularly features in-depth and inspiring LGBTQ stories. And yet, as recently as 11 years ago, Rowe thought that being gay was merely a choice people made. "I didn't study the issue beyond the information that the church I attended fed me," she recalls. "I never took it to my Maker. I didn't find my own answers. I never thought I needed them."

In November 2011, Rowe knew that her husband planned to talk with their son, Hunter, about new friends he had recently brought home. "We suspected they were gay," Rowe recalls.

That evening, she and her husband crossed paths in their kitchen. She asked if he had spoken with Hunter, and he responded with a heartfelt "Oh, yeah."

"I knew what was going down," Rowe said.

Her husband revealed that during their discussion, Hunter had disclosed that he is gay. But he had also asked his father not to tell Rowe.

"That's how good a Mormon I was," she said. "He didn't want me to know."

Rowe told her husband she needed to speak directly with her son. And later that night, Hunter came into his parents' bedroom and came out to her.

Rowe said she experienced her own transition as she and her son expressed their love for each other, and when Hunter told her that while she had told him all his life that she loved him, that night was the first time he truly believed her.

"When your child comes out, you mourn the loss. But then you can celebrate who they really are," Rowe said. "I changed a lot at that moment. I continue to change and learn and challenge my previous ways of thinking."

Now, Rowe says that when life places a frightening door in her path, "I just give myself permission to go through it and discover what's on the other side."

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Time to Heal
Candice Metzler, a local therapist who is transgender, says that Utah's LGBTQ community is both growing and broadening. As more people feel they can safely live as their authentic self, she said, their individual expression and gender fluidity add to the palette of LGBTQ identiy.

"The LGBTQ world is incredibly diverse in how people claim and experience their sexuality," Metzler said. "We are starting to understand what that all looks like."

"It's exciting to see people increasingly getting out there and taking their lives to new places," she continued. "We are seeing more and more people successfully finding ways to live their lives."

Ann Pack remembers her former wife feeling that they should wait until their daughter was an adult before telling her that Pack was transitioning to live as a woman. "She initially thought we should not tell her and keep it hidden as long as possible," Pack recalls. "I, of course, felt differently."

Their daughter had noticed that Pack was frequently meeting with the leader of their Latter-day Saints congregation. She asked her mom, "Why is Dad meeting with the bishop?" Pack's ex started to invent an explanation, but then had a feeling she should tell her daughter the truth.

"We had already introduced her to our transgender friends. She knew what it meant," Pack remembers. "We sat her down and told her I was transgender and transitioning."

Pack's daughter thought her parents were about to tell her they were divorcing. "I reassured her I would always be her dad," Pack said. "We were adamant that we would stay together and do our best to navigate this." Over the next few years, Pack said she tried to transition as slowly as possible for both her wife and her daughter. "I knew it was going to impact her. It's hard when you know things will hurt people you love," she said.

Pack's appearance changed. She no longer looked like a dad.

It was hard when she and her daughter were together publicly. When people referred to her as her daughter's mom, she said, "it was a big warm hug of euphoria" that validated Pack's gender. But her daughter hated it. She asked Pack to correct people who assumed she was the mom.

"No, I'm her dad," Pack would say. She didn't want her daughter to see how happy the mistaken identity had made her. "One day, I hope my daughter will understand that I tried to do my best. I wish I could have been the husband my ex needed and the dad my kid wanted."

Pack and her ex separated last year. Their divorce became final months ago. Pack understands that her daughter is grieving, and she's allowing her daughter to dictate their relationship.

"She's trying to process it all. It will take time to heal," Pack said. "I'm loving and being there for her when she wants me to be."

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Moving On
Thirteen years ago, 57-year-old Jay Rosenberg decided, "I'm divorced, single and moving to a new place. It's time to stop living a lie."

Fearful at first—because he had worked for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and been involved in the Mormon Youth Symphony and Chorus—he initially came out only to his family and friends.

"I was afraid I would lose friends I'd had for 50 years," Rosenberg said. "Now 90 percent of them still support me."

He regularly returns to Salt Lake to visit his four sons and daughter—and to attend Utah Pride. And although he was excommunicated from his adopted Latter-day Saint faith, he stays in touch with friends from church, including his own former mission companions.

Now living in Sioux City, Iowa, he has opened the local Pride celebration several times by singing the national anthem. He met his current partner, Tony, online.

"He's attractive, but his intellect truly attracted me," Rosenberg said.

The two lived together for a short while, "then he asked me to marry him," Rosenberg said. He said Tony's parents were far more supportive than his own Jewish mother, who he recalls asking, "Why don't you just wait until I die?" But after announcing their future wedding, Tony successfully charmed Rosenberg's mother, who is now happy that he's her son-in-law.

The above stories render experiences of coming to terms with living authentically. And the benefits of such living "are pretty simple," says Metzler. "Living an authentic life means being seen for who you are and being able to be a participant instead of an observer," she said. "It's an opportunity to live a healthier way."