Hoping Md. Is 'Ready for a Person Like Me'
House Candidate Would Be State's 1st Transgender Lawmaker

By Daniel de Vise
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, September 2, 2006

Dana Beyer rapped on a door at the end of a leafy Silver Spring cul-de-sac. A woman answered. She listened to the candidate's spiel, sought her views on abortion rights (for) and growth (against) and found little on which the two did not agree.

"It's good to see more women running," she told the candidate as the two parted.

For the five decades preceding a fateful 2003 trip to San Francisco, Dana Beyer lived her life as a man named Wayne. The September primary will tell whether her legislative district, one of the most progressive in Maryland, is ready to elect the state's first transgender lawmaker.

Beyer, 54, a retired eye surgeon, is running against seven other Democrats for three seats that will represent District 18, which includes Chevy Chase, Kensington and parts of Wheaton and Silver Spring, in Maryland's House of Delegates. "Mansionization" rates as a major issue here.

Beyer's campaign is not about gender. If there is one overarching theme, it is universal health care, a concern that took her to Kenya, Nepal and rural Mississippi as a young physician. Like her seven rivals, Beyer supports abortion rights, opposes capital punishment and endorses same-sex marriage.

"I think I'm the only person on the dais who has actually been in one," she said, drawing chuckles at a recent candidate forum in Kensington.

She was also, for the record, the only woman on stage with two ex-wives.

It was hard enough for Beyer to explain her transition to the Chevy Chase neighbors who had known her for nine years as a man. By running for elective office, she has effectively outed herself to a district of 60,000 voters. Friends have told her she's crazy.

Beyer said the transition left her fearless, in the sense that the hard part was behind her. She found a new identity as a community activist, she said, empowered with confidence and "a set of skills and a life experience that no one else has." That, and her resolve to reform health care, convinced her that she should run.

"I knew I had to put out my story," she said, citing a decision to discuss gender issues on her Internet site and in interviews. "I wasn't going to emphasize it, but I wasn't going to hide it, either. . . . Everybody voting in this race knows more about me than they know about all the other candidates combined."

Beyer was raised mostly in Queens, N.Y., the first of two children born to a Conservative Jewish family. She said she was born intersex, her gender identity confused by conflicting genitalia, a condition she ascribes to the drug DES, which was prescribed to her mother during pregnancy. Puberty plunged her body into hormonal civil war.

She lived her first five decades as a man, graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Cornell University, receiving a medical degree from the University of Pennsylvania and raising two sons in a marriage that lasted 19 years. A second marriage ended amicably after the 2003 procedure that Beyer terms her "transition."

Before the transition, she said, she felt like "an actor, or a fraud, living with this mask on." But she feared alienating her parents, her med-school chums, boyhood pals from yeshiva and her younger brother, a philosophy professor at the U.S. Naval Academy.

Common wisdom within the transgender community dictates that "we're going to lose half our family, half our friends," she said.

In the end, Beyer lost no one -- with the understandable exception of her second wife.

Beyer recalled the first visit to her parents, living in the Seinfeld-esque suburb of Delray Beach, Fla. It began awkwardly, particularly with her mother. But "six hours later, we were sitting down with the family photo albums, saying, 'She looks like Aunt Frances. No, she looks like Aunt Becky.' "

She imagines that most voters who greet her at their doors know about her transition. "Word gets around about something like that," she said. But it almost never comes up. She has knocked on 5,500 doors, at least 100 a day, and recalls only one man, a former town official, who mentioned it overtly. "He just threw it in," she recalled, while ticking off the reasons he was impressed with her.

Perhaps they don't care. Beyer has knocked mostly on Democratic doors so far, and it's common wisdom that "you only lose to the left in District 18," said Jon Gerson, community outreach director for the county teachers union.

Early in the race, some political operatives told Beyer that old-guard Democrats weren't ready for a transgender delegate. She's not so sure.

"You know, I think this district is ready for a person like me," Beyer said. As evidence, she cited Richard S. Madaleno Jr. (D), the openly gay delegate she hopes to replace in the House. Madaleno is running for the state Senate.

At the candidates forum one recent evening, Madaleno introduced his partner and their 3-year-old daughter. His sexual orientation prompted much talk when he ran for office in 2002, Beyer recalled. "And now, nobody cares."

Beyer has $51,401 in her campaign account, the third-highest total among the eight candidates. The field includes two incumbents, Ana Sol Gutierrez and Jane E. Lawton, as well as another five challengers: Dan Farrington, a lawyer from Chevy Chase, is probably the most natural politician among the newcomers. James Browning of Silver Spring, a former executive director of Common Cause Maryland, is arguably the most politically astute. Jeff Waldstreicher of Kensington has the most cash on hand and the endorsement of Montgomery teachers. Al Carr, a Kensington Town Council member, is beloved in his home town. Noah Grosfeld-Katz, son of departing state Sen. Sharon M. Grosfeld, has name recognition.

Across the district, Beyer stands in doorways and talks about putting "a doctor in the house," running marathons and cooking dinner for her sons. David, 21, is a senior at Brown University; Jonathan, 18, is an emergency medical technician. She has, "simply for fun," knocked on the doors of Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, both constituents; neither was home.

On a recent Thursday, Beyer planted a sign in the front yard of Mike McCurry, the former Clinton press secretary, who recently sent his endorsement. She has also been endorsed by former Montgomery County executive Neal Potter, Montgomery police, state and local National Organization for Women chapters and retired schoolteachers.

The influential county teachers union has not endorsed her, backing instead the two incumbents and Waldstreicher, deemed the strongest pro-education candidates. Beyer suspects a political motive: She sits on the board of Teachthefacts.org, the group that fought, and lost, a legal battle with religious conservatives last year over curriculum changes that included discussion of transgender issues.

The issue of her gender has surfaced only in oblique references on the campaign trail, such as a knowing wink, as when Beyer joked with the woman on the Silver Spring cul-de-sac about the open-minded district they share.

"I'm glad I'm not running in Virginia," she told the voter.

"Well, you wouldn't be," the woman replied.