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| Submitted by Michael Brown | |||||
| Sunday, 30 November 2008 16:15 | |||||
Road to a New Identity Is Not Without Its HazardsSun Nov 30, 2008 4:47 am (PST)New York Times, NY, USA The Neediest Cases By ABBY AGUIRRE The origin of Rena Dunsworth might be traced to fall 2006, when a small woodworking company in Denver modified its discrimination clause, for that was when Stanley Wilcox started wearing pink nail polish to work. Then 51 and a maker of custom wooden doors, Mr. Wilcox had sensed since he was 6 years old that he was meant to be female, and he had also sensed for about as long that this was not a feeling for which he would be rewarded. "I would often fantasize about becoming different women I knew," Ms. Dunsworth — formerly Mr. Wilcox — says now. "Then I would kind of clamp down really hard, afraid people would see the girl in me." When his workplace put in writing that the sexual orientation and dress of its employees did not matter, Mr. Wilcox was heartened. But after the nail polish, he noticed that his colleagues treated him differently. Then, one day in February 2007, he overheard a co-worker allude to his imminent dismissal. "Turns out it did matter," Ms. Dunsworth says. Mr. Wilcox decided not return to work the next day. He was already behind on his rent and suddenly without income; the same week, his car's transmission died, hastening a psychotic breakdown that would propel Mr. Wilcox, who said he was long given to incapacitating depression, out of the Rockies. "Voices told me there was going to be a 9.0 earthquake in Denver and that I'd better get out of there," Ms. Dunsworth says now. And so he embarked on what seemed to him the logical next move: to put on a white polyester dress and three-inch heels, and walk to New York City. Somewhere near Troy, Mo., about 45 miles northwest of St. Louis, after a lucky run of hitching rides, Mr. Wilcox found a new name. Having waited hours for a car to come, he wandered into a cemetery, where he came upon the grave of one Rena Dunstan. "I saw the tombstone and thought, 'Dunstan, done-Stan, I'm done being Stan.' " From then on, Stanley Wilcox was Rena Dunsworth. Ms. Dunsworth arrived in New York City three weeks later, having narrowly avoided several "close calls," among them a group of men in a truck who offered to perform a roadside sex-change operation. After a few nights sleeping in a church on 66th Street, Ms. Dunsworth — still in the dress — found her way to the compound of homeless shelters on Wards Island. There she met Gina Veltre, a transgender mentor of sorts who showed Ms. Dunsworth how to match clothes, apply mascara properly and accessorize with flair. "She taught me a lot about being a queen," Ms. Dunsworth says. In addition to the new fashion sense, though, Ms. Dunsworth picked up a marijuana habit, one that would progress over the 14 months she spent there. After a few false starts, Ms. Dunsworth got clean and, in April 2008, was accepted into the Sara K. Abrams Residence for the homeless and mentally ill on the Lower East Side. Around then, she began again to make art, an activity that had given her pleasure as a young child, as a teenager and, later, as a professional wood carver. "Without art, I'd probably be dead," Ms. Dunsworth says. The more she draws, the quieter the voices, particularly the ones that suggest she walk into traffic or jump off a bridge. And she is seeing her abrupt departure from Denver in a different light. "I think the voices that warned me about the earthquake were really saying that I needed a big change," Ms. Dunsworth says. "I was miserable for a lot of years." Ms. Dunsworth is starting to feel stable and even content, perhaps for the first time in her life, she says. She has legally changed her name. She has made friends unlike any she had in Denver. She loves New York. She hopes to get off the medication she takes — Abilify for psychosis, Zoloft for depression — and to work again. In the short term, she is looking forward to art classes at the Educational Alliance Art School, tuition for which was provided by the UJA-Federation of New York, one of the seven agencies supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. "Art is a bridge between earth and heaven," Ms. Dunsworth says. "My hope is to get confident enough to bring my drawings to a gallery and say, 'What do you think?' " [Photo: Rena Dunsworth, who spent 14 months in a homeless shelter, received art school tuition through the Neediest Cases Fund.]
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