By Dawn Wolfe Gutterman
Billie Henning first expressed her true gender publicly in 1949.
"We had a party at our high school and it was a costume party," Henning said. "So what I did was I found a girl to go to the party, and I said, 'How 'bout you go as Dagwood and I go as Blondie?' So we did."
Despite what some right-wingers might claim, though, it wasn't that high school experience that "caused" Henning to be transgender. Whatever the reason, Henning knew from a very young age that the clothing she was being forced to wear on her male body did not "fit" the girl that was her heart and soul.
While she doesn't remember exactly which grade she was in at the time, Henning does remember clearly a few times when her true gender identity asserted itself at a very young age.
In about fifth or sixth grade, Henning said, "I was going to be in one of these stand-in tableaus that the kids did in grade school, so they came and put some lipstick on my lips. I said, 'Oh! I need more!'" When Henning went to her teacher and was told she had enough lipstick, she was adamant, "NO, I need MORE!"
"Another time," Henning said, "some guy had fingernail polish on his hands and I was sitting next to him in school after Halloween and I got jealous over it."
Since Henning didn't have sisters, she turned to her mother's closet to find clothing that felt natural to her.
"I saved one blue dress for a long, long, long, long time, and finally I gave it up – because I was getting better clothes," she said, laughing.
While in college, Henning said, she dressed as a woman whenever she was alone in her apartment. But then, in the mid 1950s, Henning did what just about everyone in her generation did: got married, settled down and had kids.
"I don't know why you did it," she said. "You did because you didn't know any better."
However, Henning's gender identity refused to be suppressed by the same forces that ushered in McCarthy and one of the worst decades of sexual repression and sexism in U.S. history. Thankfully, Henning had an ally in her wife.
"Any time we had a chance to go to a costume party or something like that I went as a woman," she said. "And she did go out and help me buy some shoes, so I could have some heels … it kept progressing a little bit more and more."
For a while, Henning was even able to baby-sit her first daughter as a woman, until her wife asked her to "cool it" after the birth of their second child, also a daughter.
"It was like she grew up with that idea, and it didn't bother her," which made Henning's eventual transition an easier process. Henning explained that, when she transitioned, her eldest daughter helped her younger daughter cope with and eventually accept the change.
That transition, though, waited a long time. In 2002, at the age of 70, Billie Henning made the transition to become her true self full-time.
"My wife died, so I was free," Henning said in explaining her long wait to be herself. "I did love my wife, and I didn't want to hurt her. And we didn't – we still didn't know much about what was happening to me, why I did these things, until the Internet came along. Once the Internet came along in the 90s I began to find out that there is such a thing out there, there are people out there, there are groups out there."
"I am deliriously happy," Henning said about her new life. "Everyone who runs across me now says 'I can't believe it! Billie, you are so happy! You just bubble all the time!'"
That happiness shows – not only in her voice and posture, but also in her energy. At 74, Henning works part-time teaching speech at a local college, edits video tapes on religious topics, and serves as the president of a museum group and vice president of a historical society.
Asked what advice she would give to individuals who are considering whether or not to transition or who are questioning their gender identity, Henning said, "The first thing I want a person to do is to get in touch with a support group. That's the number one thing. We'll let you come to the support groups if you want to, let you dress if you want to in privacy and come out to the group. So you get the support; all kinds of support."
