by
John Blake
The Rev. Erin Swenson's heart thumped wildly. She was so close to panic that her fingertips tingled. The crowd inside Shallowford Presbyterian Church in Atlanta stared at her in disbelief. Swenson, an ordained minister and father of two daughters, had just walked to the front of the church in a green dress, heels and an eggshell-white blouse. She was going to speak publicly for the first time about a 42-year-old secret that had driven her at times to thoughts of suicide.
Swenson told the hushed crowd that she was a woman born in a man's body. Now that she had taken steps to correct that, she made an unprecedented request before the assembly of Presbyterian church leaders: Allow her to retain her ordination as a minister, even though she had switched genders.
"I understand that the changes in my life may seem to be bewildering, or even outrageous," Swenson said in a calm, measured voice. "But they are not intended to be so."
Swenson made her request on Oct. 22, 1996. Some 1,000 delegates from the Presbytery of Greater Atlanta had gathered for the group's annual assembly, where Swenson's ordination was the chief topic of debate. Some delegates questioned her motives. "Didn't you think about your family?" "Aren't you mocking God?" "Is it true that you wore your wife's clothes?"
As the questions droned on, Swenson closed her eyes to recite her favorite prayer.
When her turn came to speak, Swenson walked to the front of the church and steadied herself by looking at a huge wooden cross that loomed over the pulpit.
Then she prayed again.
God, help me keep my heart open to people.
FINDING SUPPORT
Five years later, Erin --- formerly Eric --- Swenson is stepping back in the spotlight. She and her ex-wife, one daughter and father are finally talking about the extraordinary journey --- as a family and as individuals --- they have taken together since that autumn morning.
Today, Swenson has no official congregation, but she leads an unofficial one --- a transgendered support group that meets in her cozy Grant Park office. Since the Presbytery's vote in 1996, she has become a leader in the transgendered community (transgendered is the umbrella term for cross-dressers, transsexuals and those born with ambiguous sexual characteristics).
Part of Swenson's appeal comes from her soothing personal presence. A marriage therapist by training, she has a gentle, empathetic voice and a relentlessly jovial manner. With her shoulder-length blond hair and 5-foot-9 frame, Swenson, 53, can melt into a crowd as a woman.
Other transgendered people don't slip so easily into their new gender. Some members of her support group --- balding 6-footers sporting lipstick and linebacker shoulders --- seem trapped in gender limbo. They don't look like a woman or a man.
Swenson goes around the room to find out how everyone is doing. Most of them share the same stories: losing their families and careers and being taunted by strangers in public. The conversation ranges from hormones to hairstyles.
Swenson holds up a recent article about a Catholic priest who is undergoing surgery to become a woman.
"I don't feel so lonely now," she tells the group, chuckling.
They don't get it.
"When I'm with ministers, I'm the transsexual," she explains. "When I'm with transsexuals, I'm the minister."
The isolation started when Swenson was a child.
One night, when he was 11, Eric had a startling dream. He saw himself walking down an enchanted road. Each step around a bend would gradually reveal a subtle transformation, from male to female. Swenson emerged from the road permanently female.
"It was probably the first transgendered experience that I really had," Swenson says. "The dream was so vivid that I began to use it as fantasy. I would comfort myself with it at night."
It was not the type of dream that young Eric thought he could share in his "sexually repressed" household. Born in Buffalo, N.Y., Eric had moved with his family to Atlanta when he was 10. His father, Karl, was a branch office manager for a national manufacturing firm. His mother, Ruth, who died of ovarian cancer in 1991, was a housewife. He has two younger sisters, Jana and Jill.
Swenson's secret life began with that dream. That same year, he crept into the powder room of his parents' home and used wadded-up bathroom tissue to create breasts under his T-shirts. Other cross-dressing experiences would follow, with Eric using his mother's clothes. He would pledge never to do it again, but eventually break his vow.
Swenson's family had no clue. Eric was not effeminate. He was a member of the high school wrestling team and excelled at such traditionally male hobbies as electronics and carpentry. "There was absolutely nothing that led me to believe that there was a gender problem," says dad Karl Swenson, 83. "He did all the boy things. He never showed any interest in dolls or males."
Eric prayed for deliverance, but none came. He joined the Mount Vernon Presbyterian Church in Sandy Springs the same year he first cross-dressed. He was elected to the Presbytery's Youth Council. Church leaders groomed him for the ministry.
But the desire to be a woman did not evaporate. The boy looked for salvation elsewhere.
"I grew up believing that when I fell in love, I would be cured," he says.
SHORT-LIVED 'HEALING'
In 1967, Swenson met Sigrid Lyons at Camp Calvin, a Presbyterian youth camp in Hampton. Both were youth counselors. Swenson was 20, awkward and inexperienced around women. Still, he recalls being "intensely, terribly" attracted to Lyons, a slim, vibrant woman with dark good looks.
Lyons, then 23, noticed Swenson as well. She thought he was handsome, smart and great with kids. Six months later they got married. Swenson's desire to cross-dress evaporated. "She healed me," Swenson says. "She gave me my life back."
The healing lasted three months.
While his wife was away one morning, Swenson put on her clothes. Afterward, he curled up in a fetal position on his bed and cried. "I was devastated," he remembers. "I felt lost."
As Swenson's gender confusion intensified, he became increasingly aloof from his wife. Their sex life disappeared. Swenson threw himself into school to escape his inner turmoil. After graduating from Georgia Tech with a degree in electrical engineering, he earned two master's degrees from Columbia Theological Seminary in Decatur and a doctorate.
Then he immersed himself in church work. After he was ordained in 1973, Swenson served as pastor at churches in Dalton and Lithonia. He also became a chaplain at a psychiatric center, an instructor at Emory University's Candler School of Theology and a counselor at a mental retardation counseling center. In 1984, he opened a marriage therapy practice.
Swenson's reputation grew. He was a compassionate counselor and a renaissance man --- an accomplished singer, small-plane pilot and an electronics whiz.
And yet he was miserable. He was still secretly dressing as a woman with his wife's clothes.
"The war inside of one's self is incredible," Swenson says. "It's like being at odds with your own molecules."
Sigrid initially had no idea her husband was at war. She never caught him cross-dressing; she never noticed her clothes amiss. "There were glimmers, but they were things that I stuffed. . . . ," she says. "This was back in the 1960s and 1970s. This was a different world."
The couple's personal problems were superseded by another concern. In 1976, their younger daughter, Lara, was born 10 weeks premature. She had cerebral palsy, which would require constant therapy and multiple operations.
"Our family was so structured and couched in routines that couldn't be broken," says Cerjan, the couple's elder daughter. "I think that's how we got by for some time. I had some friends who didn't like to come to my house because . . . it was so sad."
Swenson began to hint at suicide to his wife. He drove aimlessly around the city at night thinking about taking his life with a car crash. His guilt over the divide between his public image and his private life deepened. "I was working in therapy with clients about being self-actualized and authentic when I was the phoniest person in the room," he says.
By 1994, Swenson was desperate.
MOMENT OF DECISION
Years of counseling with five therapists had not helped Swenson. He wouldn't even open up to his therapists. He had read volumes on transsexualism and sex reassignment surgery, and thought that might be his answer. Finally, a therapist recommended that Swenson contact Margaret Lamacz, a psychiatrist in Baltimore who specialized in counseling transgendered people.
Swenson flew to Baltimore but wasn't forthcoming when he met Lamacz. He told Lamacz that his struggles came from "low self-esteem." Lamacz told Swenson his problems were deeper.
" 'You know what you are,' " he recalls her telling him. " 'You don't need a diagnosis from me. You've known it for a long time. You're just afraid that people aren't going to be able to accept it.'
"Those were the words that I needed to hear," he says.
Swenson decided at that moment that he would undergo surgery to become a transsexual. "The flight back to Atlanta that evening was magical," he says. "I felt free."
Swenson's family felt otherwise when he finally told them.
"I just felt sick," his wife says.
His older daughter's reaction was delayed. She reflexively hugged him when she heard the news. Then she walked to her car and bawled. "I was hurt for a few days, and then I was plain furious," Cerjan says. "I couldn't see how he would disrupt our family this way. I thought he was being self-centered."
Swenson's father cried. His two sisters still have not recovered. Both still will not talk publicly about Swenson.
To win his family's support, Swenson took the same approach he would later take with the church: He talked constantly to them.
He told them he suffered from a medical condition known as "gender identity disorder." He told them that his desire to be a woman was not a choice. And he told them that he might take his life if he were forced to keep living as a man. The process took six months.
"There didn't seem to be an alternative," his father recalls.
Swenson's family members accepted his rationale intellectually, but each had to find their own way to accept it emotionally.
Swenson's father thought about his father-in-law, a Klansman and a homophobe. "I felt subconsciously, if I was truly going to be the opposite end of the spectrum of my father-in-law, I better darned well start showing it," he said.
Sigrid thought about protecting the person she still loved.
"If other people were going to accept her and be able to stay with her, I had to be a major part of that," she says. "If I had just gone absolutely crazy and become adversarial, then people would have to take sides."
Eventually, something unexpected took place within Swenson's family. They discovered that they felt closer to Erin than Eric.
"My father was always very distant, closed off," Cerjan says. "Erin seems to be a very open person, easy to get close to. It's a more honest relationship. She's able to be who she is with me. And to me, you can't be close to somebody unless you're able to be yourself."
Erin became her hero, Cerjan says.
"She's become a role model for me," she says. "That was not something that I had expected to happen. But she showed me that you can really be yourself and do what makes you happy. And in doing that, you can make yourself better for other people."
MOUNTING A CAMPAIGN
Not surprisingly, members of the church were a harder sell than Swenson's family.
Like many mainline denominations, the Presbyterian church is embroiled in a running debate on homosexuality. When the 11-member Committee on Ministry received Swenson's request in 1994 to approve a name change, the panel was unanimously opposed.
"I took my stance, as the gay basher that I've been, that this was not a proper thing," says Jim Siephert, a committee member. "I thought it was messing with creation."
Swenson made her request for practical and spiritual reasons. She wanted to retain her ordination because it was central to her identity. But she also wanted to retain health insurance for her daughter, Lara, something that would be jeopardized if she lost her ordination.
Swenson mounted a campaign to change the committee's stance. She wrote letters to committee members. God, she insisted, calls a person, not a gender. The committee remained unconvinced. So Swenson personally lobbied them. She had lunch with them, met with them in their offices and homes.
They were impressed. After 18 months of letters and meetings with Swenson, they agreed to support her.
"I found Erin authentic, sincere, trying to see herself in the will of God, not trying to create an issue," says David Fry, now chairman of the committee.
Members also began reading about gender identity disorder. They concluded that Swenson's case was not a homosexual issue, but rather a gender one.
Even Siephert changed his mind. He became convinced that Swenson had been carrying a "crucible" for years that she had no control over. "I finally put aside my preconceptions and prejudices and looked at it from the standpoint of the person."
But would the Atlanta Presbytery follow the committee's decision? The committee took 18 months to support Swenson. The Presbytery had one morning to decide.
Representatives from at least 1,100 metro churches packed into Shallowford on the day of the vote. The debate took an hour. The tone of the discussion varied from sympathy for Erin to incredulity. The debate ended with Swenson's brief speech at the front of the church.
The vote stunned most people. The Presbytery of Greater Atlanta voted 186-161 to retain Swenson's ordination. Swenson closed her eyes in relief when the decision was announced. The decision made Newsweek magazine. It was the first time a mainstream church had upheld the ordination of a pastor who had become a transsexual.
Karl Swenson was in the audience that day, sitting next to his daughter. "I was real proud of the way she handled herself on that occasion," he says. "She kept her cool and just did me proud. I apologize to nobody for what she's done."
Five years later, Erin Swenson is a member of the committee that held her professional fate in its hands, and Siephert is one of her closest allies. "I don't shake hands with her, I hug her," he says. "I told her, 'I hug broads.' I'm not ashamed to hug her or to converse with her so that people know I'm not just a friend --- I'm affirming."
STARTING OVER
Swenson's family has also found a way to affirm her, but it's still a challenge. During the same year Swenson won the church victory, Swenson and Sigrid divorced. Eric changed his name to Erin. And Swenson finally had his surgery. His father helped pay the $14,000 needed for the operation.
Now Swenson is starting over. Virtually all her former clients have left her. She and Sigrid sold their home. Swenson lives in an attic apartment near Grant Park that she rents for $325 a month.
Sigrid and Swenson remain close. They call each other when the other's car breaks down. Swenson does laundry at Sigrid's house. Both continue to care for Lara. People often mistake them for a lesbian couple.
"We have a 30-year history together, most of which we were married, raising two girls," Sigrid says. "I accept her as a woman, but I see her almost as nongender. She's just Erin. She's my best friend."
Karl Swenson carries his own sorrow. Like Sigrid, he still accidentally calls Erin "he" on occasion. "He was my only son," he says of Eric, his voice dropping to a whisper.
Erin Swenson's life remains busy. She works on a computer help desk for an Atlanta company and counsels people at nights and on the weekends.
And she still misses Eric's wife. "She is my mate for life," Swenson says. "She may be married again. I'm sure I won't. But no matter what happens, I am married to her forever."
But Swenson doesn't miss Eric. In her tiny apartment there are no traces of him. The place is full of books, discarded computer parts and stuffed animals. Does she ever think of him? She pulls a picture of a bearded Eric from a box nestled in a closet.
"He seems like somebody who just doesn't come around anymore," she says, looking at the picture before gently placing it back in the cardboard box. She closes it with a smile.
God help me keep my heart open to people.
For years, Swenson recited that prayer before counseling marriage clients. It was her way of reminding herself to not judge people who came to her for help.
Today, Swenson is learning to extend that acceptance to herself.
"I don't think of myself as a woman," she says. "I don't think of myself as a man. I say I'm a transsexual. But labels are like stones in a stream. They're good to cross the stream, but if you stay on them, you don't really go anywhere.
"Maybe the one label that I do like is, if someone asked me who I really am, I would say, 'I'm a child of God.' "
Reprinted from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, 9 July 2000, with the kind permission of the author, John Blake.
