As an African American woman who began transitioning in the 1960s, Tracie Jada O’Brien is a rarity.
Few lived publicly then, and fewer survived.
Now, as the city of San Diego marks its first Transgender History Month, she is living history, and a pillar of the local trans community.
She was born in St. Louis in 1951, a result of The Great Migration of African Americans from the South.
Her family were the first Black people in the neighborhood, she said, though urban flight soon changed that.
She described her childhood as “fantastic.”
“The only thing that was lacking was the affirming of my gender, because I felt different from the very beginning of my life,” she said.
There wasn’t a word yet for being trans. She just felt female.
“And as a child, I began to act on that behavior and learned very, very quickly that was inappropriate. So that began my trauma of hiding things of that nature,” she said.
Adults would reprimand her. Kids would bully her.
But she said her “higher power” always gave her these glimmers of affirmation.
Without mainstream role models, the first time she saw someone like her was in a sideshow of a traveling carnival.
It had “shake dancers — that was scantily-clad women ‘impersonators’ doing shake dances,” she said.
There was one woman there who didn’t strike O’Brien as an impersonator.
She felt a jolt of recognition: “Bzzzzzzt!” she said, mimicking the moment’s electricity for her. “That connection. Her name was Greta Garland. I’ll never forget her name. And I saw me.”
She found a gay coffee house in St. Louis where LGBTQ+ youth would dance and drink sodas and coffee.
Other moments made her feel seen, too, even if they were not so nice.
When the boy at school told her she had a “punkish build,” which she took to mean a feminine build.
When the girl upstairs called her “Olive Oyl” during a fight — the tall, lanky, big-footed female star of the Popeye cartoon.
“Looking back in hindsight, people saw me,” she said. “They just didn't know what to do with it, you know what I'm saying?”
At 14, she shot up to 6’3” in a matter of months, and her feet stretched to size 13.
She said it destroyed her then, to look so unlike the women around her.
Still, she persisted. She began adding stockings or a blouse to her outfits — a mixture then called “jojo drag,” she said.
“I didn't look like the average chick to walk down the street. And when I walked down the street, people laughed at me. And that happened all my life. You see, it still hurts me to this day,” she said.
Then, another glimmer: She found Christine Jorgensen’s autobiography in the library.
Jorgensen was one of the first people to successfully undergo gender affirmation surgery.
O’Brien can’t remember how she found the book, but it gave her hope.
She stole the book and hid it under her bed.
“Oh my God, there’s an answer for this!” she remembers thinking.
At 19, she moved to what felt like a freer place: San Francisco.
“San Francisco was like a utopia. It was the early '70s, it was the hippie era, it was the free love era, and it was just so much fun,” she said.
People held a freer attitude toward drugs, too.
She tried “mini-Bennies” — small speed pills — and woke up the next morning with a leg cramp.
“And I said, ‘Well, I’ll never do that again,’” she said.
But she did, and over time developed a drug addiction.
She lived unhoused in the Tenderloin District.
“What I found there was a place to survive, and what I found there were people like me that were trying to survive. What I found there was prostitution. What I found was hustlers. What I found was the stage. What I found was the bar. And that's what I was shown. So that's what we did,” she said.
Few businesses would hire openly trans women then, especially ones who couldn’t “pass” as cisgendered. Sex work was a common way to survive.
"Doing sex work, it was challenging wanting to change your gender when your anatomy at birth is what brought in the money," she said.
She came to San Diego in the early ‘80s because she heard there were sailors there who would pay money for sex, she said.
There, she found The Eagle.
“(The Eagle) was an African American favorite bar that catered to people on the ship who were LGBT and came into shore. It was so much fun,” she said.
By then, she was 31, still in the throes of addiction and unhoused. She said her trauma immobilized her.
To survive, she began stealing small items.
“Because at some point in time, my looks was not enough to even make $2 because I was so deeply in my drug addiction. I was homeless, I was shoeless and teethless. Nobody would pick me up. So we started going in stores,” she said.
Police would issue her a ticket for petty theft, then she would jump on the trolley, and go steal somewhere else.
After a dozen petty theft tickets and prostitution charges, O’Brien said she found herself in a section of county jail called 2-D.
“That's the queens tank. That's where the transgender girls and the effeminate gay boys are housed,” she said.
She said she became the “tank captain” — passing out food and commissary. It showed her a glimpse of her potential.
“There was this other part of me that I could rise to something above where I was,” she said.
One of the other women incarcerated there told her about Stepping Stone, an LGBTQ+ recovery center.
She was released on Christmas Eve, 1991, and decided to go to Stepping Stone.
“That was the beginning of a whole new life,” she said.
She stayed there almost two years, the longest resident to ever be there, she said. “I needed that time.”
In recovery, she met Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, a veteran of the Stonewall Uprising. They became fast friends.
Griffin-Gracy had a plan to take out student loans and use them for top surgery, O’Brien said. They went to San Diego City College together to see about getting admitted.
O’Brien ended up enrolling and attending classes, she said. It was the first of many ways Griffin-Gracy would help her carve a new life for herself.
Griffin-Gracy taught her to drive and gave her a car, O’Brien said.
O’Brien tried to get hired as a caregiver.
She bought clothes and shoes from what she laughingly called “The Tall Girls Shop and the Big Foot Girls Store” to make herself presentable, but employers rejected her.
“They sent me letters that said, 'In no specific terms will we ever entertain a thought of licensing you to take care of people with your background,'” she said. “I was devastated.”
Another employer rejected her for “falsifying documents” when she used her chosen name to apply, she said.
But she found a job somewhere that would take her: a care home for HIV/AIDS patients.
There, she admitted the same women she had met in jail. She held their hands while they died.
It still moves her, she said.
She tried to think of what this experience taught her, then gave up.
“I don’t know what it taught me,” she said. “I just did it.”
She leaned on her community, and bent her arc in a new direction.
She earned a certificate from City College, and became an alcohol and drug counselor.
She modeled for a flier she developed with an AIDS foundation to educate sex workers on the disease.
She consulted for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to improve policies and resources for trans people.
And she became a trans services coordinator for Family Health Centers of San Diego.
A picture of Olive Oyl hangs in her office.
At 68, she received gender affirming surgery. She said she finally feels complete.
This month, she’ll fly to Chicago, where she’ll attend the Democratic National Convention with Griffin-Gracy.
If her child-self could see her now, she said, “She’d be ecstatic. She’d say, ‘Oh mama, you did it, girl!’”
At 73, she said she’s tired. But she keeps going to offer support to trans youth that she never had.
“It's really weird. At home, I kit around like an old lady. But as soon as I leave the house and get to work, I'm up and at it, I’m up and at it. Because I'm on a mission,” she said. “I don't want any other trans, non-binary, or anyone who's slightly different to ever feel or go through what I went through.”
She still wonders why she was born the way she is. She’s heard theories. But, she decided, it’s not important.
“I'm not by myself. We're all over the world. We're all in every different culture,” she said. “So at some point in time, we were okay until somebody decided that we weren't. Just that simple.”
