Roxanne "Roxy" Andorfer is thankful this year for staying sober, finding happiness and finally becoming a physical woman.

Like most "transwomen," Andorfer, 58, said she always felt female and believes the conflict between her mental and physical states — gender dysphoria — was a source of her alcoholism, depression and ennui.

In April, Andorfer began taking a female hormone and a medication to suppress the main male hormone. Within a month, "My body felt a lot lighter," she said. "I was a lot happier on a consistent basis. I found my confidence increasing. ...

"Having the testosterone suppressed, that was wonderful. I likened it to having been slowly poisoned from the inside by my own hormone system all my life, so it was like suddenly, 'Oh, wow, this is how I should have felt all my life.' So it was very uplifting."

In June, Andorfer "came out" — beginning to dress and to identify herself as a woman and telling her friends that she is transitioning from male to female. In September, she told her adult children in Illinois. Early this month, her testicles were removed by Marci Bowers, a gynecologist in Trinidad, Colo. Next August, if all goes as planned, Bowers will refashion Andorfer's penis into a vagina.

Unlike some transsexuals, Andorfer won't have breast implants, but will rely on the hormone therapy. Already, she said, her breasts are more sensitive because of the activation of milk glands. She said other physical changes include softer skin, finer hair, a reduction in her beard and some body hair, and more feminine facial features due to more fat tissue over the bones. She said she has lost about 25 pounds so far, but that may be as much from changing her eating habits as it is from the hormone-induced loss of muscle mass. She said she also has regained hair on the crown of her head and on her temples where it was thinning and is no longer troubled by asthma.

But for Andorfer, the best changes have been emotional. "Testosterone blunts the experience of emotions," she said. "I've always been more in touch with my emotions and more expressive about them than other anatomical men have been, but I have noticed that they're even more intense without the testosterone involved. ... It's much richer and more finely textured experience."

Andorfer said that she never considered herself a gay man because she always was — and still is — attracted to women. "Now I'm a lesbian in a woman's body," she said. People who undergo gender reassignment commonly remain sexually attracted to people of the same gender as they were attracted to before the change.

But Andorfer emphasized that she is not changing her gender for sexual pleasure. She said she has been celibate for 14 years and doesn't expect that to change soon because hormone therapy has decreased her sexual urges. "For me, it was more that I want to be a whole person," she said. Her age makes her post-menopausal, she said, but if she were younger and it were possible to transplant ovaries and a uterus, she would also have that surgery. "Before I die, I want to be the person I was supposed to be," she said.

On Nov. 11, lawyer Paul Mannick filed a petition in state District Court on behalf of Andorfer, asking to change her first and middle names to Roxanne and Christiana. Andorfer, who kept her surname, asked that her given names not be published because she does not want to be remembered as male. State District Judge Jim Hall has yet to set a hearing for her case. Andorfer said she will ask a court to change her gender designation later.

Andorfer grew up in the Midwest, preferred to play with girls as a child and began to suffer depression as an adolescent. She said she learned to suppress her femininity in college, took a doctorate in psychology from Northern Illinois University and became a clinical psychologist. In 1980, she joined the Army Reserve, transferred to the active-duty Navy in 1983 and worked full time as a therapist at military hospitals around the United States and abroad.

She said she became a binge drinker in graduate school, and in the Navy she learned to drink heavily without showing it. After her second divorce, she stopped drinking with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, but her bouts of depression became worse. In the buildup to the first Gulf War, she was sent to Saudi Arabia without a supply of antidepressants, causing a depressive breakdown that led to a medical discharge in 1991.

In 1994, Andorfer arrived in Santa Fe to interview for a position as a psychologist at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital. That didn't work out, but she found Santa Fe "a perfect fit," decided to stay and take a low-paying job. She started drinking again, let her psychologist license lapse, moved to Illinois, then back to Santa Fe, fell off the wagon once again, became destitute and in 2006 was granted full disability by the Veterans Administration. She said she quit drinking alcohol again and learned via AA's 12-step program that her gender dysphoria is at the root of her destructive behavior. That is what she aims to change now.

In a recent interview at the Friendship Club on Rosina Street where she attends AA meetings five times a week, Andorfer asked that she be photographed in a way that does not clearly identify her. She said doesn't want to expose herself to violence, although that has not been a problem except in the form of verbal threats on Internet chat rooms.

Andorfer estimated one in 3,000 people are transgender, though only a few of them will try to change their gender. As many as one in 500 people, she said, are born some form of "ambiguous genitalia" or other "intersex" conditions. Various studies cite similar figures, but say these conditions are under-reported because of social taboos. The Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation office in Los Angeles, for example, has no statistics on transgender people.

Andorfer said she personally knows eight other transgender people in Santa Fe — roughly half of whom are women and half are men — though she would expect many more because of the town's reputation for tolerance. She said transgender people seldom socialize with each other, do not often identify themselves that way and usually prefer to keep a low public profile. "My circles are women's circles," she said.

Andorfer is quick to laugh at herself, calling herself "a silly girl." After discussing the costs of her surgeries and hormone therapy (about $25,000), she joked, "You've got to get a new wardrobe." She prefers "transmen," "transwomen" and "transpeople" to "transsexual," "transgender" or "tranny," a term she finds offensive. She said slightly more than half of the clerks she deals with call her ma'am, and she "gently corrects" those who call her sir.

"I'm not hiding what I'm going through because I think the public and especially the young people who are in the position now that I was 40 years ago in not understanding this, they need to have it talked about," she said. "So many transsexual teenagers kill themselves out of desperation because nobody understands. ... There's a whole segment of the population that's been suppressed."

In Native American cultures, "two-spirit people" were the shamans and "mediators between the physical world and the spiritual world," Andorfer said. "It's only in the industrialized societies where we've been treated like freaks."

Contact Tom Sharpe at 986-3080 or tsharpe@sfnewmexican.com.