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Since coming out as a trans woman, Julianne says she’s happier and more confident. (MARLO CAMPBELL)

For many people, the start of a new year represents a blank slate, making it the perfect time for all sorts of new beginnings.
   
For Julianne, a 37-year-old Winnipegger whose last name Uptown is not publishing to protect the identity of her 12-year-old daughter, the start of 2012 marks the continuation of a new beginning — one she initiated last spring when she finally came to terms with her true identity as a transgender woman.
   
Transgender, or trans, is an umbrella term sometimes used interchangeably with the word transsexual. It describes people whose inner gender — i.e., their sense of maleness or femaleness — doesn’t match their sex (which, in contrast to gender, is defined biologically, determined by reproductive organs and chromosomes). Although transgender people as a group are perhaps most visibly represented within the queer community — they’re the T in the GLBT acronym — being trans actually has nothing to do with one’s sexual orientation; trans folks can be gay, straight, bisexual or asexual, just like anyone else. Nor does being trans necessarily have anything to do with how people choose to outwardly express the way they feel inside (see: women who like to wear high heels and fake eyelashes verses women who prefer army pants and no makeup.)
   
Born male and raised accordingly, Julianne says she had a sense of something not being right by the time she was five or six years old, though she didn’t know what that something was. Looking back on her youth with the benefit of hindsight, she says her high-school years were spent expressing "the most amount of femininity you can have with the least amount of being bugged by anyone about it." In her case, that meant growing her hair long, shaving off her body hair to more closely resemble the women she saw in the porn she watched obsessively, and gravitating towards anything pink — be it a customized guitar pickup or a pair of Zubaz pants (this was the early ’90s, after all).
   
Despite having terrible marks, Julianne managed to graduate — but with no sense of direction and the growing stress of an as-yet-unidentified personal issue, her life began to spiral downwards. She bounced from job to job. She rushed into a marriage on the heels of a bad breakup and had a child with her wife, only to separate from her soon after. She became clinically depressed. In addition to taking prescribed anti-depressants, she began self-medicating with marijuana — a coping strategy that turned into a seven-year addiction.
   
"The longer you go without dealing with those problems, the more they come back to bite you in the ass," she says. "There were so many times where it would have been just easier, in my drug years, just to kill myself — and the thought crossed my mind many times."
   

Ten years ago, while still living and identifying as a man, Julianne began cross-dressing. Cross-dressing falls under the trans umbrella, though not everyone who does it suffers from a gender-identity conflict; some people cross-dress just for fun, others to satisfy a sexual fetish. For Julianne, however, it was a stepping stone on a path toward accepting her authentic identity.
   
That acceptance came early last year when she quit smoking weed and was prescribed a new combination of meds. Within days, what she calls "her girl side" came back — only this time, she recognized it for what it was and embraced it. Since then, she has officially changed her name and begun living full-time as a woman. With the help of electrolysis and hormone therapy, she’s also started a physical transition that may include undergoing genital-reassignment surgery in the future.
   
Not everyone who identifies as trans decides to embark on the physical transformation that Julianne has, explains Chad Smith, executive director of the Rainbow Resource Centre, an organization that provides support and services to Manitoba’s GLBT community. In addition to drop-in counselling and referral services, RRC provides monthly meeting space for both the Winnipeg Transgender Support Group and PFOTI — Parents and Friends of Transgender Individuals — a recently formed support group for family members of trans people modelled after the national, 24-hour support/educational resource known as PFLAG.
   
"Some people go partway, halfway, fully — some people might identify as transgender and never transition," Smith says. "Their transition process might mean that internally, they identify and they have safe places where they identify, and that’s all they’re going to do — and that’s OK."
   
Because of this fluidity and, in some cases, invisibility, it’s impossible to know the exact size of Winnipeg’s trans community. What Smith has noticed is that people are starting to come out as trans at younger ages — "We’ve seen someone as young as Grade 3 here," he says. He credits the trend to increased awareness, safety and knowledge.
   
Certainly, the last several years have seen increased mainstream media attention given to trans issues and trans people — from Felicity Huffman’s critically acclaimed portrayal of a transsexual woman in 2005’s Transamerica (a performance that earned her an Academy Award nomination) to the recent appearance by Chaz Bono (trans child of Cher and the late Sonny Bono) on Dancing With the Stars.
   
Still, though trans youth may now have the opportunity to see themselves represented in films or on TV, Smith says society at large has a long way to go in terms of what is (or isn’t) considered acceptable gender expression — a rigidity that ultimately hurts everyone, regardless of their sex, gender, sexual orientation or gender expression.
   
"Society says this is how males should act and look and dress and behave, and this is how females should act and look and dress and behave," he says.
   
"Gender is so narrowly restricted... We need to just redefine gender. It needs to be more fluid. There needs to be that ability to be yourself and identify as yourself."
   
As per internationally accepted health-care guidelines, trans-identifying people who do want to physically transition must first be diagnosed with gender identity disorder (sometimes called gender dysphoria), a condition listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), though the fact that it’s considered a disorder is a source of continued controversy. Usually, people are also required to live as their authentic gender for at least a year before medical interventions will be performed. However, exceptions can and often are made for a variety of reasons, in recognition that every individual’s situation is different.
   
In Winnipeg, medical services for trans adults are offered by Klinic Community Health Centre. Though it has been trans-friendly since it opened (its intake forms, for example, have always included boxes for "male," "female," "trans" and "other"), Klinic formally established a trans health clinic in November, 2010, which means trans people no longer have to travel out of province to seek diagnosis and assistance with transition, be that medical help, counselling or other forms of support.
   
"What we try to do here is protect the dignity and human rights of the individual — and what’s in their physical and psychological best interest," says Lisa Goss, the clinic’s co-ordinator. "We really talk to the clients about how they’re feeling, how this journey needs to look for them."
   
Goss conducts all of the clinic’s intake assessments.
   
"Depending on where they’re at, I may be the first person in the world they’ve ever spoken to about how they feel who they are, deeply inside, is not aligning with how they’re walking around in the world — or they could have been living as their desired gender for many years," she says.
   
Goss says there’s no particular motivation or circumstance that ‘causes’ someone to identify as trans. Rather, she says, "The Number 1 reason why is because that’s who they are — that’s who they’ve always been inside."
   
In addition to providing care to individuals, Klinic trains local doctors and other service providers on how best to support trans folks (infrastructure such as gender-neutral bathrooms, for instance, can make a big difference when it comes to being inclusive of all people, Goss says).
   
More recently, Klinic has been involved with the development of a brand-new trans health clinic for children and adolescents. Operating out of the Community Services Building at the Health Sciences Centre for the past six months, this program is one of only a handful in Canada offering holistic, multi-disciplinary care to trans-identified kids and teens.
   
Care provided here looks different depending on the age of the person seeking it, explains pediatric endocrinologist Brandy Wicklow — part of a team that also includes a psychiatrist, a psychologist and an endocrine nurse clinician. For younger children, it might mean counselling to help them work through their feelings; sometimes, Wicklow says, questions about gender identity aren’t an indicator of being transgender but simply a part of normal development.
   
For adolescents, support might be hormone blockers to prevent them from getting their periods or developing facial hair.
   
"These children are significantly distressed with the fact that they’re going through puberty in a body that doesn’t feel like it belongs to them, and it’s causing them anxiety and depression," Wicklow says.
   
"They’re going through a huge developmental change, and I think that you can adversely affect someone’s development also by not addressing these sort of issues."
   
A lot has changed in Julianne’s life since she transitioned. For one, she finally found a job she loves. She started in November; her boss knows she’s trans and is completely supportive.
   
Last month, she broke up with her girlfriend of seven years. She has since moved out of the house they shared in Fort Rouge to a downtown apartment. She says her transgender identity was not the reason for the split. "She’s always been good with that, very open-minded in that regard, still advocates for me here and there, gives me advice when I need it."
   
Julianne came out to her family this past June. Telling her parents, she says, was "one of the hardest yet most relieving things in my life.
   
"You sit there and you go, ‘I can’t believe I just said that to the two people that should know me the best and have just seen me on this road of shit for the last 15 years or more, doing all kinds of stupid things.’"
   
All things considered, they’ve been supportive.
   
"I know that there’s going to be bumps in the road," Julianne says. "I know that family, friends, they need time to accept — if they’re going to."
   
Getting to this point in her life has been a long journey, but Julianne says she’s happier than she’s been in 10 years. She’s sharing her story now, she says, in hopes of helping other people who may be suffering like she once was.
   
Her message? "Hang in there. If you take your own life because you think that everyone thinks you’re a freak, you’re just letting them win. Keep reaching out and keep going and don’t ever let anyone — not even the closest person in the world to you — don’t let them tell you who you are, because only you know who you are."