He was sure he had been born into the wrong body. Now he has been “born again” and wants to go back to being a guy.
The New York Post reports that ABC news editor Don Ennis showed up for work one day in May wearing a little black number and an auburn wig and announced he was transgender. He wanted to be known from that point forward as Dawn and said he was leaving his wife.
But then he suffered a bout of amnesia from which he returned insisting he was Don after all. In an email obtained by the website NewsBlues.com, Ennis wrote to friends and coworkers:
I accused my wife of playing some kind of cruel joke, dressing me up in a wig and bra and making fake ID’s with the name ‘Dawn’ on it. Seriously. I thought it was 1999 … and I was sure as hell that I was a man.
Ennis said that his true (male) sex became obvious to him once he took off the bra (even though the fact of his having hormone-induced breasts might have given two reasons for further doubt). The email continues:
Fortunately, my memories of the last 14 years have since returned. But what did not return was my identity as Dawn.
I am writing to let you know I’m changing my name … to Don Ennis. That will be my name again, now and forever. And it appears I’m not transgender after all.
I have retained the much different mind-set I had in 1999: I am now totally, completely, unabashedly male in my mind, despite my physical attributes.
I’m asking all of you who accepted me as a transgender to now understand: I was misdiagnosed.
I am already using the men’s room and dressing accordingly.
It’s so odd to be experiencing this from the other side; as recently as last Friday, I felt I was indeed a woman, in my mind, body and soul.
Even though I will not wear the wig or the makeup or the skirts again, I promise to remain a strong straight ally, a supporter of diversity and an advocate for equal rights and other LGBT issues including same-sex marriage.
Ennis says he believed that his confused sexual identity was a byproduct of his mother’s having given him female hormones as a child. The purpose, he maintains, was to make him look and sound young in order to prolong a bit-part acting career. The plan backfired, however, when he ended up developing breasts and began thinking of himself as a woman.
But a week after his sex reassignment, he returned to the hospital claiming he had experienced a “drastic loss of memory” and that in reality he is not a woman trapped in a man’s body but a man trapped in a woman’s body.
He now plans to change the sex designation and name on his driver’s license and called his three-month odyssey into the world of women “a tremendous gift”:
But this time, he asserts, it is for keeps:
The new change I’m revealing to you today did not arise because I couldn’t hack it, or people wouldn’t accept the new/real/female ‘me,’ or I had trouble finding shoes that fit (Oh, I found plenty, more than I could afford).
Even my beloved, who had encouraged me to be true to myself at the expense of our marriage, had finally accepted my new identity.
At the risk of sounding cynical, one might point out that Ennis hasn’t yet tried the “other” designation.
