For 53 years Frances Mary Fischer wore the wrong shoe in her feet. That’s what she refers to as being a man for almost five decades. It was like living in agony.
“When you wear the wrong shoe, you get blisters. It pains. It has been like that for me. Every morning I would look in the mirror and it would make me want to cry. You don’t like the skin you are in, you hate the image that you see,” she said. “Nobody understands.”
For Fischer, a transgender woman, taking a decision to transition was tough. She waited for her two children to grow up. “I waited till my kids were out. Now is the time for me to blossom,” she said. “The pain of remaining in the bud is more than the pain of blossoming. I feel better now. I don’t hate what I see in the mirror.”
For years Fischer had her own wardrobe, hidden away. She would dress as a woman once in a while and go out. But except for those stolen moments, she lived in the disguise of a father, a husband and a man.
But expression came at a cost. Fischer started her official transition from male to female in August, 2001, when she applied for a name change at the Supreme Court for the County of Onondaga, according to the affidavit filed by her in June, 2003. It took her two-and-a-half years to change her name from Frank Mark Fischer to Frances Mary Fischer. When the judge refused, she approached Lambda Legal for help and then sued New York State. She finally won the case but the victory is just a beginning of many battles, legal and otherwise that she has to wage every moment in her life. She lost her job at Alliance Relocation Services in Oct. 2004. She blames it on discrimination against transgender people. She cleaned tables, ate onion soup for days but did not give up. Nor did she ever lose her faith.
“It is good that I have not shot myself in the head. May be this is because of my background as a priest. It is so difficult. It just pushes you to the extreme,” she said when I met her last year. At the time she had no job and no money to pay her rent.
Born into a Catholic family in Iowa Falls in 1952, Fischer was the fourth child of Esther Mae Polles. Polles had seven children. Fischer was right in the middle, the fourth child. And so was his sex. It lied somewhere between the male and the female. “I always had a nurturing instinct. It was like having a maternal instinct,” she said.
Even as a child, then known as Francis Mark Fischer, she loved to play with dolls and once traded her bicycle for a neighbor’s doll. But her family never suspected anything except for perhaps her mother, who she said, pushed her toward priesthood because she thought it was the best way out.
“Maybe my mother knew. Maybe she pushed me toward priesthood because she knew I did not feel like a man,” she said. “My birth was fraught with little miracles. The umbilical chord was around my neck. I could have died. At 3 I had been run over by a car. It literally crushed my mid-section. It made me a eunuch. My mother considered it a sign,” she said.
By 1955 she had been indoctrinated that she was chosen to be a priest. Fischer and her younger brother Jerry both became altar boys when they were young. Their father, a military personnel, imposed religion on the family. All children were to attend services at the church, volunteer for any help that the church needed and religiously pray.
As a young child Francis was deeply attracted to religion. As an altar boy, he loved wearing cassocks. She said it was because it resembled woman’s clothing. “I did not identify with the soldier, the football player and wrestler…not with the man in charge,” she said.
Little Francis did not know what being transgender meant. But he wondered why he did not have a vagina or why he was not like his sisters. “I was desperately seeking why I am not like my sisters. I wanted to play with the girls,” she said. After the accident, young Fischer asked the doctor why he did not have a vagina. “I was questioning my very nature since I first came into my being,” she said.
At home, he was tormented. The siblings used to sing ‘Franky’s going crazy…’. Franky, as they called him, stomped, kicked and cried but they would not stop.
Franky did get crazy after all, as her brother Jerry Fischer called it. She became the woman she had always wanted to be. Years after Fischer’s family came to know about her being transgender, her brother is still struggling with the idea of his big brother becoming a woman. Jerry still falters between ‘he’ and ‘she’, while referring to his brother, who is now a woman. He has to remind himself that the brother who was an altar boy like him and who gave him his first condom is no longer a man. He instantly corrects himself if he calls Frances a he. But he does it again.
“To me it is very strange. I did not see Frank as being transgender,” he said. “He was a brother, a wrestler, the guy who had helmets and grenades…”
When Jerry met Fischer at his father’s funeral last year, he said he did not feel any difference. But the change in the physical appearance was difficult to take in.
“I am trying to figure out what the heck. She is my brother. I just ask why,” he said.
In 1993 Fischer’s mother died. At her funeral, he did not give any indication. But later on everyone started noticing things about Fischer. At family reunions relatives noticed Fischer had painted nails or no hair on her arms. Some even suspected she wore a bra inside her shirt. But no one ever thought Fischer would transition so completely.
Her brother finally realized he had one more sister when Fischer’s ex-wife Diane Fischer sent the newspaper cutting of an article that was published in Syracuse Post-Standard about Fischer’s struggle as a transgender woman.
“He used to have a big Afro in those days. But everyone had. My big question is why,” said Jerry, who lives in Iowa Falls. “Probably he hung around with the wrong crowd. We don’t have anything that flaming here.”
All the rejection and the shock in people’s eyes have only strengthened Fischer’s faith in god. A Born Again Christian, Fischer gave up her brotherhood vows when she thought the Roman Catholic Church was exclusive in its vision.
“I have had a communication early on in life. I was born again early,” she said.
Doubts about the Roman Catholic Church began to disturb Fischer just before she became a priest. She read the scriptures, generic parchments and compared the teachings of the Church and God. At the time she had been following the church’s teachings blindly, she said.
“Christ is the high priest between men and God, not the priests,” she said. “At the point when I realized this I said I can no longer be a Roman Catholic priest because this is not what God said,” she said.
Fischer became disenchanted. With a doctorate in religion, Fischer’s questioning of the Roman Catholic belief also made her write her thesis on fallacies of the Catholic Church. “Here people put a checklist. If I go to the church once a week, I will be a good person,” she said. “The dichotomy was there. A man with man was banned. Deuteronomy 23 of the Bible says a man should not put on what pertains to a woman.”
She went to the archbishop of Dubuque and asked him what to do. “I didn’t know what I wanted,” she said. That’s the time Fischer met Diane. She used to sing in the choir. She proposed and they got married. When their first child David died, both moved to Syracuse to be with Diane’s family. They got divorced in 2001 and now Fischer lives with Franky, a cross-dresser.
The cross hung from a gold chain in her neck. It was difficult to miss. Except for her voice that is still deep and sounds like that of a male’s voice, Fischer looked like a woman. Dressed in a light pink shirt and beige pants she did not attract much attention at the Onondaga Library compared to the time last fall when I met her at the Carousel Center. People stared at her confused by her voice and her persona.
Fischer’s eyes had a dreamy look when she spoke about religion. The voice was distant. But the cross remained intact in her hands. She kept touching it as if in reassurance, while she talked about herself. “I believe I am the product of Satanic influence. God would not want to put somebody in this torment,” she said. “God allowed Satan to mess with me. But that made me strong. I would not have become the person I am. All the evil is in the world. It is allowed by God. My adapting my body from male to female to match my identity is my change. I am evil.”
She attends Believers’ Chapel in Cicero that welcomes members of LGBT community but not without condition. Frank Porter, assistant pastor, said these people are welcome only if they are willing to give up their lifestyle. He did not know Fischer personally but said that Christ did not approve of LGBT lifestyles.
But Fischer is unshaken. Fischer considers herself asexual. Her transition has nothing to do with sex or the desire for it. “It has to do with identification. Christ healed- that’s my nature too. It is an awkward feeling to not fit. Even after 1,000 surgeries, I will still not fit in. God is pro-choice. He wants you to live.”
Her faith is also what strikes her friends. Faye Brooks, Fischer’s friend, met Fischer at the Expressing Our Nature, a support group’s meeting. He has known her for around 3 years. “She is very religious…now more than ever. Her state is more of an amplifier for her,” he said.
He said her faith also makes her trust people easily. “She is very honest. A giving and caring person…almost to the point of putting herself at risk.”
Brooks related how once when Fischer had gone overseas, she had let one of the tenants live in her house. The tenant had been having some problem with finances and nowhere to live. “She stole her things and even damaged the house,” he said.
Friends have kept her company and have provided her with shelter when she needed it. Her boyfriend Franky took over the lease of her apartment at 110 2nd North St. in April because Fischer was not in a position to pay her rent. Also, Franky underwent an operation and had difficulty in climbing the stairs to his third floor apartment. Franky is on permanent disability security and gets around $7,000 a year from the government. The money is not enough for both but they manage. Sometimes they get food from Rescue Mission or Peace Corps, at other times friends bring over food to share.
The one-bedroom apartment had boxes and clothes lying everywhere. The small kitchen table had been pushed against the wall to make space for Franky’s stuff. He recently moved all his things here. Both had been cooking a dinner of split pea soup and patties when I arrived.
Fischer and Franky met last year at EON’s meeting. “We have a strong relationship. Our faith in the lord is a big thing.”
Fischer had been waiting for a bus when Franky first talked to her. “I asked her if she could teach me computers,” he said. It was around August last year that Franky brought her computer over to Fischer’s house and stayed on.
“She did not know if I stayed for the computer or her,” she said. “We just stuck together after we met. It developed over the months.”
Franky underwent surgeries for back and neck and these rendered him helpless. This is when Fischer took over. She nursed him. “After Thanksgiving he literally became a cripple. He had trouble,” she said.
“She has been a tremendous help in getting my body back together. I think the lord brought together to take care of each other. It is not a legal connection but a familiar connection,” he said. He called Fischer to ask what she thought their relationship was. Words like co-dependence, couple and friendship were thrown in.
“We just have fun. If we both had jobs, we would do more stuff,” he said.
In a denim skirt and a powder blue top, Fischer looked the woman she aspired all her life to be. Franky’s lip stretched into a smile when he described Fischer. “I think she is pretty. I don’t think of her as any other way than a woman. I give her that respect,” he said. “I don’t know what to do without her. If I had stayed there I would have been dead.”
Besides Franky, Julia Dunn is a friend Fischer knows understands her. Dunn and Fischer grew up together in Iowa Falls, where Dunn still lives. Fischer had been preparing for priesthood and Dunn saw nothing that indicated Fischer felt like a woman.
“She wrestled in high school. She was no macho guy, just a regular guy. She would have made a good priest,” she said.
For 34 years they had not met. But when Dunn received a voice mail from her brother that Fischer was coming for her father’s funeral, she decided to go. She had been looking for her childhood friend.
“We were buddies. I could say anything to her. Franky was a real good person,” she said.
When Dunn saw her, she said found the same friend I could laugh with. “The only thing that had changed was her sex,” she said. “I found my friend.” When Fischer went to Iowa Falls last year, she stayed with Dunn. And then the conversations flowed and the obvious questions followed.
“I asked her why she did it,” she said. “I have no problem with it. I wish people could give these people a break. Franky is a beautiful woman. I love my Franky.”
Such people have made life a little easier for Fischer, who is still trying to get a job. She has sent out at least 1,100 applications so far, she said.
“My voice gives me away. They don’t want me to use the same restroom,” she said talking about the difficulties in getting a job.
For now both Franky and Fischer are surviving on food stamps and security money. They pray together before every meal.
“We would get where we want to. The lord will carry us through this,” said Franky, while Fischer put another tray of patties in the oven.
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