What follows is a transcript from Dianne's video, which you can watch here: https://youtu.be/3FEOBZpNkUg
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My name is Diane Skoll. I’m a transgender woman. I live in Ottawa. My day job is as a software developer. I have a side hobby as a stand-up comedian. I transitioned fairly late in life. I was 48 when I started living full-time as a woman and I’ve been doing so since 2015.
As for my identity, I’m not non-binary. I’m definitely female identifying, but I actually have a child who is non-binary so I’m fairly familiar with that aspect under the trans umbrella as well, but for myself I’ve always identified as female. Ever since I was quite small, I knew something was up.
Well, it first started when I was about six years old and I kind of had these weird wishful almost fantasies of being a girl. And I didn't understand this. This was in the 70s. There wasn't much information, certainly not for a six year old, so I just ignored it, suppressed it, and then when puberty hit that's when it really hit me that something was different about me and so I initially assumed that I just liked to cross-dress. I didn't know why I liked it, I just knew that I liked it. And then as I got further through puberty I just put it down to like a kind of a kink or a sexual fetish and so I didn't really think about it more than that. I went through what I think are fairly typical phases of buying clothes and then purging them, sort of a fear of loathing and self-disgust, and the cycle went on a few times. And then I met somebody when I was 19 years old and we actually got married when I was 23 and I assumed that having a partner would make these feelings disappear because again I thought they were just sexual and I thought I could just get rid of them. But clearly that didn't work. I still felt urges to present female.
I had told my partner before we were married. I told her that I liked to present female but I didn't tell her that I was transgender because at that time I didn't understand that myself. Anyway we had three kids and so for about 18-19 years I just suppressed everything and then it just all blew up in a huge way, overwhelming gender dysphoria, and I had to confront the issue. And so it wasn't until my late 40s that I really understood who I was and what I had to do to live an authentic life.
Living with it was difficult because I just suppressed it for most of my married life but when I did finally accept it, I remember vividly the exact day actually it was a Christmas party in 2013 at a trans support group. I went to their party and I realized, hey this is deeper than just wearing women's clothes I’m a woman. At that point my marriage was in trouble not only because of the trans issues but for a whole bunch of other reasons. So my partner and I were seeing a marriage counselor at that time and in one of the sessions I said look, I’m a transgender woman. I’m not just a cross-dresser. And so the counselor was very taken aback and so was my wife at the time. But I had to be truthful. So I started taking steps to physically transition. I started seeing a gender therapist. I started doing hair removal laser hair removal and then I came out to my mother. My father had died in 2013, so he never knew about this. I came out to my mother and she was very shocked and surprised because I’d never given any inclination of this before as far as she could tell but she was supportive. She said, you know if that's what you are and that's what you have to do, then I’ll support you. Same with my sisters. I came out to them and they were supportive. And I finally came out to my kids who also initially were very taken aback and my youngest was quite upset because she didn't understand. She was quite young. She didn't understand what it meant. She thought I would be disappearing and some strange person coming in my place. But she quickly found out that no, I’m still the same person inside, I just look and present a little bit different. So my kids were all fine. But it was the death knell for my marriage, which was in terrible trouble anyway. And so that just killed it. So my marriage ended in October of 2014 and in April of 2015 is when I started living full-time as a woman. And I have done so since then, and I’ve done a lot of steps of medical transition as well. I know not every trans person wants to do that but for me it was fairly important to do that and I just felt so much better once I was out and living as myself
I’m very lucky and privileged in many ways. For example I’m only five foot two inches tall, so like, I can pass for female at a casual glance very easily so I’ve never had people hassle me or give me a hard time. And I realize that is not the experience for a lot of trans people, and so I feel incredibly lucky for that. The hardships mostly were my own internal fears more than anything real. So I was very worried about being read or being in physical danger when I was out. That was a huge concern for me, but as I started living full time and realized that people weren't paying attention to me, I was kind of invisible which is the way I like it, that fear subsided.
My divorce was like incredibly acrimonious and stressful and awful. So that was a real hardship. But I think that would have happened anyway, transition or not. So it did add stress but I don't think it was caused by the fact that I was trans.
To get over the fear of interacting with people I said well what's the scariest thing I could do and I decided to take an improv course where I would have to interact spontaneously with people up close. And I loved it was awesome. And so that was a huge joy, discovering this part of life that I really liked. And just being able to be myself and have friends who knew me as myself was a huge joy. And the absence of the crushing gender dysphoria that I had experienced was amazing. That was like as if I’d had like a terrible terrible pain - chronic pain - all my life and it suddenly was lifted. It was amazing.
Well my cat gets me out of bed, so that's an easy one. I think my guiding principle in life is just to try to be good to other people and try to enjoy life as much as possible. If anything, the pandemic has shown that life can be very unpredictable. So you might as well make the best of it while you can. So I try to be positive. I try to have fun and enjoy my life and do things I like.
I’m lucky enough that I actually really enjoy my day job as well so that's a big positive. That hugely motivates me to get out of bed every morning. So my day job is, I’m a software developer. I actually didn't study that. I studied electrical engineering, but I wound up in software and I’ve been doing that for about 31 years I guess. For 19 years I owned my own company. We did anti-spam products and services and I grew it from just me to 12 people. I sold that company back in 2018. The market had changed and it just didn't look like there was much growth potential. And since then I’ve been doing contract, software development contracts for various other companies.
I don't know that I really had a clear picture of what it would be like when I when I started out. I knew a lot of trans people because I belonged to an organization called gender mosaic. So I saw all these different trans people and how their transitions had played out, and they were all pretty different. Some people had a very easy time of it, some people didn't. Some people were happy afterwards, some people were not for various reasons. So I didn't really know what to expect when I started out and I didn't have a clear picture. As it evolved I realized that I’m much happier. That's huge. I’m way happier now that I’ve transitioned.
I also, it's funny, I started out wanting to be like super feminine presenting. I hated my voice so I actually took singing lessons to improve my range and try to get the pitch up and sound more feminine, but as I grew more comfortable in my transition I kind of stopped worrying about that. I realized you know what I’m happy in my life. This is who I am. If my voice betrays me then fine, I’m okay with that. I can live with it. Just because changing my voice drastically when I was speaking to people that I knew felt really really weird. I felt really strange doing that.
So to answer the original question what did I expect versus how did it turn out, I didn't really have many expectations but it's turned out for me really positively.
I don't dream about trends related stuff in the future anymore because I’m in a pretty good place as far as that goes. So basically I have opportunities for a couple of long-term contracts that I’ll actually find out about next week. So I’m hopeful I’ll get one of those. So that'll be my work life settled. I want to advance in comedy, like I have done paid comedy on a weekend at a club so I’m not totally amateur, but I’m nowhere near what you would consider professional or well-known, but I’d like to get better at comedy and kind of advance in that world as well. I’d like to travel.
I have a partner. we have a very good relationship so I’d like to keep building that. I don't know that I’d ever want to get married again, but I do like being in a relationship with somebody.
What I would tell my 10 year old - 10 year ago self, would be get out of this marriage ASAP! It's toxic! So that's the first thing. And also, I would say to myself that, don't be so afraid of transitioning. It's not a leap off a cliff. It's not going to destroy your life, it's actually going to be a positive, so just have the courage to take that step.
I don't know what I tell myself 10 years from now, but I would say well I hope you had a good life and fun and did well in your work and your comedy and had a good relationship.
Trans people are at heart pretty much like everybody else. I don't think being trans is a mental illness. I don't believe that at all. I think it may well be a brain difference, but I don't think it's a defect. I think it's just a difference. And so I would want people to know that despite all the things in the news about how bad things are for trans people, and how much we suffer, which I’m not trying to minimize because all of that is true, there are a lot of trans people who are happy and leading productive, meaningful lives. And that doesn't get covered in the news because, you know, the news is "if it bleeds it leads" otherwise we're not interested.
And I’d also want people to just chill on some of the hot button issues like just chill about the whole trans people and sports issue and the bathroom issues and all the cultural war issues that are going on. Because in reality those things are not a problem. Nobody dresses up as a woman to go into a woman's washroom to assault a woman. That's ridiculous. Just look at the reality. Look at the statistics and calm down.
So after I did improv I did quite a lot of improv for a few years. I decided to try stand-up comedy. I thought, well that's also performing and I really like performing. So I did stand-up comedy. About five years ago was my first set and I discovered I loved that even more than improv. The first time I got a laugh, it was a huge shot of adrenaline and endorphins, so I’ve been doing comedy not as a profession obviously, but as a hobby, for about five years, and I love it. I’ve done stand up in clubs all over Ottawa. I’ve done stand-up on zoom, so all over the world. And at first I didn't do trans-related material because I didn't know how people would react. I just did observational comedy. Then I decided to do trans-related material and it worked really well because I think when you do comedy about real things in your life you can make it much funnier. And in a sense being trans is kind of funny and weird. It's a lot of things, but it's also strange and funny. So I had a huge vein of material that I could mine for that.
And so I found people really enjoyed that. I had a lot of positive feedback about it. And I’m not really activist - you know I don't do - I support trans rights but I’m not really vocal about marching and that sort of thing. That's just not my personality. But I find that when you get a room full of people laughing with you who may not know a trans person - may never have met a trans person - they realized, hey this is... she's just like anyone else not some strange creature to be feared, but just like anyone else. And I think that actually goes a long way to helping trans visibility and helping people understand that we're just normal people with one slight difference.
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