Insult and injury.As journalists struggle with gender issues, murdered Pfc. Barry Winchell's girlfriend mourns her loss It was, in almost every way, your typical boy-meets-girl stow Stow (stō), city (1990 pop. 27,702), Summit co., NE Ohio, a suburb of Akron; settled 1802, inc. as a city 1960. Chiefly residential, it has some light industry.. They met in a bar. He timidly admired her auburn hair, her green eyes, her figure. She in turn was attracted to his buzz cut and his quiet and calm demeanor. Their shared background in the military got them talking, but it was chatter about everything from family to dreams for the future that kept the conversations going, sometimes all night long. The Nashville preacher's girl wasn't crazy about how much Bud Light he drank, but his full acceptance of her, as she was, helped overshadow that concern. "He made me feel like a woman," she says in a voice kissed with a Tennessee twang. "That was so wonderful to me. It's what I look for in life." All that changed last July when Calpernia Sarah Addams came home from work one night and learned via the television news that her boyfriend of four months had been bludgeoned to death in his Army barracks at Fort Campbell, Ky. Immediately their conventional love affair became a distracting, complex sideshow to the media circus surrounding the murder of 21-year-old Pfc. Barry Winchell. Addams, 28, is no ordinary woman--which has confounded some journalists covering the murder. A male-to-female preoperative pre·op·er·a·tive (pr  - p  r- transsexual 1. A person with the external genitalia and secondary sexual characteristics of one sex, but whose personal identification and psychosocial configuration is that of the opposite sex. 2. A person who has undergone a sex change. adj. 1. Of or relating to such a person. 2. and former Navy medic, Addams works as a lip-synching entertainer at a gay club in Nashville, about 55 miles from Fort Campbell. Because she is still a biological male, she says, Winchell considered himself gay. And it was Winchell's homosexuality, of course, that landed his slaying on the front page of the nation's newspapers. That spotlight also hit Addams, who was fully aware of the precedent she represented. The American public knew of other gay soldiers slain in homophobic fits and had even filled theaters for Boys Don't Cry, an acclaimed film about the 1993 murder of a transgendered Nebraskan. Still, a combination of these elements was new and could be combustible. "I knew immediately that my being a transgendered person would add a Jerry Springer-like angle to this stow," Addams says. "I didn't want to shame or humiliate Barry's memory.... I didn't want to see the headline `Drag Queen Lover Tells All.'" Yet as nonsensationally as Addams behaved, the transgender angle nonetheless complicated the otherwise straightforward stow of a dead gay soldier failed by a military policy intended to protect him. Reporters struggled to describe--within the confines of TV clips and newspaper sentences--the relationship between a soldier who considered himself a gay man and a preoperative transsexual who considers herself a woman. "How do you show that [Winchell's murder] was a hate crime if his girlfriend is referring to herself as a she? Why would someone be enraged by this guy having a girlfriend?" asks journalist Monica Whitaker of The Tennessean, a Nashville newspaper. "When I interviewed Calpernia, I always referred to her as a she, and I wrote it that way. But after I discussed it with my editors, I had to go through and change it to he in the stow to keep it clear.... It's not clear-cut." Transgender advocates disagree, insisting it's "really very simple," in the words of Alan Klein, a spokesman for the transgender advocacy group Gender-PAC. Klein calls the media's handling of Addams "the second horrible thing that happened to her," pointing to a December 9 New York Times piece that referred to Addams as a female impersonator. Other reporters put quotation marks around her legal name, Calpernia. But Addams acknowledges that while she wasn't pleased with some of the coverage, she understands the confusion. Even she referred to herself as a "female impersonator" when talking to The Advocate, later concurring that it's unclear what one would call a person who considers herself a woman, is biologically male, and performs as if she were a drag queen. "It's the media's job to get complicated information across in an understandable format, but it's not my job to make it easier for them," she says defiantly. Now that the attention is subsiding, Addams says she has time to grieve. Winchell never spoke of the intense harassment that preceded his death. Instead, as young lovers do, they spoke dreamily of their futures. She sobs as she recounts how profound a loss she has suffered. Many male-to-female preoperative transsexuals enter relationships with closeted gay men who use them as a "bridge into homosexuality," she says. When they cross that bridge, though, they usually leave. "It turned out, Barry liked me as I was," she says, crying. "It really hits me that Barry was a rare and wonderful find, somebody I could really look forward to malting a relationship with. And now he's gone." Friess is a reporter at the Fort Lauderdale, Fla., Sun-Sentinel. |
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