What impact did your transition have on your career and your marriage?

“I was a vice president of a mutual fund at the time, and it was a pretty good income I was making. Nobody ever suspected anything, but one day, I decided I just couldn’t do this anymore, so I quit. Everybody was shocked that I quit, but they accepted it. Eventually the word got back that I had changed my sex…

“Fortunately, we were fairly well off. I had managed to make some money, so I started discussing things with Eva…Eventually, we decided that we had to get a divorce. I was living here with her and I decided that I [had] to go. So that’s when I went off to live [by] myself as a woman, alone in the city — another great adventure.

“I came back here to this apartment, and Eva went back to Florida. We are friends. She occasionally calls me and reminisces about the good times that we had. And we did have a really good marriage.”

Where did you go to work afterwards? Did you face discrimination?

“Well, I took all of the women’s jobs that there could be [at that time] — the most menial jobs. I became a secretary, I became a housekeeper, I became a salesgirl. I did all of those jobs to get to know women.

“[At the time], my mother lived in Suffern, NY, and I bought her and her husband an apartment there. When I would go to visit her, I would come back [to the city] and I’d go through the bus terminal, and I would get a lot of catcalls and nonsense. I knew that I wasn’t passing as a woman yet. There was trouble [because] people didn’t see me as a woman. Finally, I knew that if I could walk into the bus terminal and not be noticed, then I was a woman. That was my final testing of it.

“Now, I know nobody ever thinks of me as a man. Immediately, I’m a woman. And some of the friends that I’ve had, particularly aviation friends, after I ‘came out’ with all of this and I told them, these friends never even suspected anything. So I knew that I had changed to become a woman thoroughly.”