By Noelle Russell | Daily Reporter
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COLUMBUS, Ohio — Mitchell Wear gazed at the man across from him, clasped his hands.
Theirs was a simple ceremony, a handful of family members and friends gathered to celebrate the union of two people very much in love.
It was 2010. Gay marriage was still illegal in Ohio.
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Click here to purchase photos from this galleryThat hadn’t stopped their plans. There would be no big to-do, no frills. Friends put up modest decorations in the clubhouse of their apartment complex and set out the three-tiered wedding cake and snacks for their closest friends to enjoy after a casual ceremony.
It was against state law for two men to marry, but they would legally wed that day.
On paper, Wear was still a woman.
Miles to go
Wear, 41, a Hancock County native now living with husband Joe in Columbus, Ohio, looks back on the early years with a sigh. He remembers a little girl who struggled to find her way.
He flips through family photos from back then, chatting openly about the confusion one feels as a child born in the wrong body. He settles on one image: a school yearbook picture, New Palestine Elementary.
A tow-headed little girl with a wan smile stares back, perched awkwardly on a stool for her portrait. Grade 3, the year of “tragic hair,” he groans, and yet-to-be-diagnosed attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Wear remembers her, how she didn’t know where she fit.
He wishes he could go back in time, hush that anxious child he used to be and tell her it would be different one day.
Many people who grew up with him won’t know the name, Mitchell Wear, he said.
But they would remember that little girl.
Wear doesn’t speak her name — or appreciate others asking what he was called at birth. “Dead-naming,” his husband chimes in, reminds people who are transgender of someone they haven’t been in a long time — maybe never were at all.
For some, it’s insulting.
Wear bears little resemblance to that child now — aside from a stubbornness he admits only grew with age.
With hormone therapy, blond locks and fine features gave way to a full beard and mustache, a shiny bald head often topped by a ball cap.
More striking is his confidence, the wide smile, the frequent jokes at his own expense, that belie how long it took to get here. That make transformation look so effortless.
With his transition from female to male, Wear also found his voice. He is no longer trapped in that female child’s body.
He wants to use his voice to promote understanding, he said, to lessen the fear of people whose gender identities aren’t so easily defined by “male” or “female.”
It isn’t easy. There are so many who won’t listen, whose minds are closed.
He throws up his hands.
“I’m one person, trying to shout at the world that ‘Hey, we exist. We are perfectly normal human beings,’” he said.
Transition is an apt term to describe the trans experience, he said. It signals something isn’t over, not for him or others like him. It isn’t defined by surgeries or name changes or weddings, necessarily, but it is bolstered by equal rights to all those things, he said.
The transgender movement has miles to go, he said, and he’ll make sure his footsteps are part of the path.
Last year, he joined friends for a protest march in Washington, D.C, standing in solidarity alongside thousands fighting for LGBT rights.
He held his cellphone high above him, armed outstretched, that sunny afternoon, trying to capture as much of the crowd around him as he could. He beams in the foreground of the photo, one man in a rainbow sea of acceptance, grinning for all he is worth.
Wear intends to stay at the forefront of that battle — for better access to health care, for recognition as a protected class, for acceptance.
He’s realistic. He doesn’t expect to see it in his lifetime.
“I’d like to be proven wrong,” he said.
‘I had no words’
Wear never considered himself “a 9 to 5 kind of guy.” His husband is retired, and Wear enjoys taking on odd jobs to help out with the bills. The schedule gives him the flexibility to volunteer, to spread a message he said he won’t stop sharing.
Over the years, Wear has spent hours on public stages, speaking before college students about his experience as a transgender man. With each speech, he hopes to make a positive impression on someone who might never have met someone in transition, to open a dialogue about their differences.
He assures audiences that in this safe setting, no question is off-limits, he said. There is joy in accepting who you are and embracing that truth, he tells them, but the road can be riddled with heartache, especially when loved ones don’t welcome someone they consider a stranger.
He speaks of crippling costs for those who choose to undergo surgery, as he has, the recovery time and lifelong scars.
He shares victories he knows others might find trivial: How good it feels to settle into the barber’s chair for a shave, or to strip off his shirt in the scorching Midwest summer sun, finally comfortable in a body without breasts.
He considers himself one of the lucky ones.
With his beard, a gravelly voice, no one questions he’s a man, he said. He “passes” — a term he uses but seems to resent.
There are many who don’t, who still draw glares and muttered insults because their outward appearance confuses and scares people who don’t understand how hard they struggle, he said.
He hurts deeply for those still caught between worlds, how he sees them treated.
That sadness is tinged with anger.
He shakes his head in disgust, recalling news reports of violence against someone in the trans community, how it hurt like it was someone he knew. He can recite the language of some of the more hateful threads he’s stumbled across on social media — all that fury aimed at people who felt just like he did growing up, he said.
He taps on the glass of that picture frame from his youth, talks about the little girl captured there. She didn’t know it would get worse before it got better, he said.
She couldn’t focus in class and hated school. She didn’t understand why she felt so different than the other children — the other girls.
“When I was small, I had no words for how I felt,” he said. “Something was wrong, something was different.”
A quiet anger took root when he was young and confused, Wear said, a bitterness that took years for him to understand and begin to overcome.
Some days, it’s still there.
Defining a difference
Wear’s parents adopted him as an infant. After having had two boys, they decided they wanted a girl.
Wear shrugs at the irony.
He thinks he was as young as 5 when he began to notice he was different from other children his age. It was a feeling he carried, unable to define.
He remembers the first time he tried.
It was 1993, the summer before his senior year at New Palestine High School.
Wear looked in the mirror and saw a masculine young woman looking back, her blonde hair cropped short. Other girls noticed her. Some found her attractive. Wear told his closest friends that summer he was a lesbian.
By the time the first bell rang that fall, the whole school knew.
There were people who were accepting, who treated Wear no differently than the girl they’d known junior year. But the unkind ones, their voices always seemed louder.
But Wear wasn’t ashamed. And sometimes, that pride caused the most problems, he said.
One day in English class, a fellow student overheard Wear talking to another girl about being gay.
Wear doesn’t remember the exact words the young man shouted at him, whether a teacher intervened or Wear just up and left the room — only how it all made him feel.
It was an experience that repeated itself, sometimes as a snide remark, whispered too low for a teacher to hear, sometimes by overt harassment.
Wear distracted himself, often through volunteer work. He most enjoyed putting in hours at an area hospital. He brought juice or magazines to grateful patients who simply smiled, who didn’t ask him questions he didn’t know how to answer.
School remained a constant source of grief.
A classmate leaned over the balcony one day as Wear walked the hallways below, screamed at him to go and die. The message ended with a slur against gays.
Wear decided whoever he was, he wasn’t welcome.
‘That person doesn’t exist’
Wear dropped out of high school — not once but twice. He took odd jobs after that to get by.
Three years passed before he came out to a close friend as transgender. Wear hoped it might get easier, telling people after that. But the fear of rejection never went away.
Some people surprised him and embraced his discovery. Others pushed him away, confused or disgusted.
For years, some family members refused to call him Mitchell, to acknowledge anything had changed.
It used to make him furious. The feeling softened over time. He came to realize for some, using the name he grew up with was a way of coping. It wasn’t intended to be spiteful; it was those who’d known him for years holding onto a little girl they loved.
Calling Wear by his birth name doesn’t bring that child back or change how far Wear has come since he left her behind, he said.
“That person doesn’t exist anymore,” he said, “and hasn’t for a long time.”
‘I’m Mitchell’
A former co-worker gave Wear his new first name, though she didn’t know it at the time. She had a little boy, maybe 2 when they worked together, named Mitchell.
She talked about him at work, in passing conversation, and her husband sometimes brought the boy by the store where they worked.
One day, it dawned on Wear.
“The way it sounded in my ear, it was ‘Oh. I’m Mitchell,’” he said. “I found my name.”
Wear started going by his new name in 2002. For biological women transitioning into men, the change is simpler, Wear said — short hair and men’s clothing can go a long way.
He started hormone therapy April 28, 2003. The date is a special one, locked in his memory like an anniversary.
Or perhaps, more appropriately, a birthday.
“I was Mitchell before that, but the day he was born was the day of that first shot,” he said.
With testosterone coursing through his system, Wear’s body underwent a boy’s puberty and a woman’s menopause all at once — “hell on wheels,” he joked.
For a year, he went by two names. Some relatives called him by his birth name. With friends, he was always Mitchell.
By then, Wear had been married to a woman and divorced, a parting he said was on good terms with a woman he still respects.
But he needed to learn where he fit in this new world.
He jokes that over those early years, he came out three times — first as a gay woman, then as a transgender man, then as a gay transgender man.
And with each step, he came closer to understanding what he wanted for the road ahead.
‘Who they are’
Wear met his husband through a mutual friend in 2009. Wear, who was newly single, sent an email to Joe — an IT professional at the time — at his friend’s urging.
They bonded over politics, their world views, joked about how much they both despised Walmart.
Wear saw in him a man who was funny but also smart, who could carry a conversation into the wee hours.
In Wear, Joe found a compassionate partner who went out of his way for others, who was strong-willed but charming.
They admit it all moved fast.
Within a few months of dating, Wear packed up his life and moved to Ohio to be with Joe.
They were married a year later.
Theirs were simple hobbies. They found joy in the kitchen they shared, testing new recipes and revisiting old favorites (Wear has a knack for desserts, Joe said). They wanted to see the world together, taking trips to Florida, California and the nation’s capital. Wear still hopes to hike through Scotland one day.
And as Wear’s transition continued, Joe became his strongest supporter. They talked through each decision together. What would change? Would it help? Could they afford it? They were questions they answered as a couple.
In 2011, Wear prepared for his first surgery. The cost for the new couple was staggering. The surgeon who specialized in male-to-female chest surgery charged $6,000 for a double mastectomy — and didn’t take insurance.
It was money they just didn’t have.
After months of soul-searching, they borrowed from a friend, a loan they’re still working to pay back some seven years later.
Then, in 2014, the next step: Wear underwent a hysterectomy, severing the tie with monthly reminders of a body still biologically female, he said. That surgery, they were relieved to learn, was covered by Wear’s insurance because of an unrelated medical condition.
The surgeries were painful — for weeks, Wear couldn’t lift his arms above his head, he remembers — but liberating. He no longer had to bind his chest just to answer the door or run to the mailbox, worried someone would see the hint of a female form.
Wear looked more and more like the man he felt he’d always been inside.
When Joe talks about his husband, that’s the man he describes. Who Wear was or how he was born — they’re details that just don’t matter.
“People have a very almost pathological need to ask trans people questions about who they were and what they were before,” Joe said. “(People who are trans) want you to accept them for who they are.”
‘The world sees us’
Together, the Wears navigate questions from strangers and friends alike, not just about their relationship but what it means for Mitchell Wear to be transgender and married to a gay man.
Some questions, they answer. Others, they don’t.
When Wear tells people about the transgender movement, he doesn’t bog them down with history or statistics. He doesn’t focus on body parts, on surgeries — being trans is so much more than that anyway, he said.
He just tells his story, of accepting himself and surrounding himself with others who did the same.
It’s a tolerance he hopes is spreading as people who are transgender become more prevalent in conversations about the LGBT experience.
“The world now sees us,” he said. “Before, I think we were kicked back in the closet pretty far. We’ve now kicked the door open.”
Some parts of his story, he finds himself repeating more than he wishes he had to — that people who are transgender “are not around to scare people, recruit people, check you out in the bathroom,” he said.
He wishes people weren’t so afraid.
Small victories
Wear considers himself out of transition, though he’ll continue to inject doses of testosterone throughout his life to maintain his physical masculinity.
Still, even all these years later, some demons remain.
In a crowd of men, he feels uneasy. What if they knew?
Every day, people who identify as trans are ridiculed for something they can’t control, Wear said.
Some are killed.
Wear still feels self-conscious in public bathrooms, even as he ducks into a private stall.
He longs for a day when people like him are recognized for more than their gender.
“Human, kind, compassionate — I am all those things,” Wear said. “I want to shout at the world, … that I am a trans man and that it’s OK.”
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They talk of confusion, of discovery. For people who are transgender, “born in the wrong body,” becomes an oft-repeated mantra. Some say it quietly, only to themselves, for years as they wrestle with the feeling they are different. Others sing out their discovery, the first step to feeling comfortable in their own skin. Deciding to transition — to live as the gender that matches what they feel inside — is a life-changing choice. It is often marked by a new name; sometimes, surgery. Some will not understand. Many will not agree. But these men and women press on — and find joy in the journey.
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