‘I’m Not Brave. I’m Just Being Me’

After decades as a print journalist, Caragh Donley, 64, is now a senior producer for The Kelly Clarkson Show. She lives in New York City.

This isn’t like experimenting with new bangs. You don’t wake up one day and say, “Let’s give gender transition a shot.” I spent my entire life deciding whether to stay fearful and silent or risk everything on a chance to live whole and happy. It took until my 60s, but I finally made the choice.

As a kid, I had these recurring dreams that Tabitha from Bewitched turned me into a little girl. The dreams made me feel happy. But once puberty hit, I decided to ignore those thoughts. In my tightly wound world, the message was: “God never makes mistakes, so just keep quiet.”

Somehow, I found a way to get a letter to Christine Jorgensen, the first trans woman most Americans had ever known about. She sent back a sweet and encouraging letter and an autographed copy of her autobiography, which I read and reread for years. I stashed it in my closet under a pile of Sporting News magazines.

In my younger years I kept a lot of therapists in business, searching for one who’d say, “Get over it.” Instead, they all confirmed what I didn’t want to hear. So I tried packing my secret away. Got married. Raised two beautiful kids. Divorced and dated up a storm. I honestly didn’t think I was pretending. I thought the other stuff was a mistake.

Right before the pandemic, though, something shifted. I was turning 60. My son graduated from college, and my daughter finished high school. And I received a box of home movies from my aunt, my dad’s sister. My father had died before I was born, and it was wild seeing him in motion for the first time. Knowing that that young man only had two years left to live was a wakeup call. I thought, I don’t want to die with regret.

This time when I went to the doctor I said, “I’ll take whatever you give me if you can make these feelings stop.” But by the end of the session, he’d prescribed estrogen, and I have not turned back since. You might ask, why mess with things now? You’ve masqueraded for so long, what’s the point? My answer is, I realized my time to do this was running out. And at an age when my skin is starting to sag and wrinkle, it has also gotten thicker, to deal with society’s judgments.

But the only way I could’ve done this was with the incredible trans community that has welcomed me in and, more important, the blessing of my kids. Their generation is open to letting people live as themselves, and that gives me hope. People tell me I’m brave to have done this, but I’m not brave. I’m just being me. Everyone who befriends me, every salesperson who doesn’t freak out when I show them my old license, they’re the brave ones. I’m just doing what I have to do, but they have a choice, and they choose to be kind. I find that pretty courageous.