“I've known since I was nine that I was a little bit different than everybody else,” Sherrie Scaffidi says.
“But back then there was not a lot of information about people who were like I was. So I kept it hidden and I didn't do much about it. I told my late wife I think in the early 1990s. It didn't go over well at all, so I kept it hidden. She passed away in 2012, and that's when I decided that I was going to live my life the way I was supposed to be. So I started cross hormone therapy and in 2015 I came out to my three grown children. And I haven't looked back since then.”
Scaffidi, 72, is a transgender woman who came out to the world at the age of 65 in the year 2015. She’s well know in Reno at Our Center, and from her involvement in various groups including with PFLAG, an organization for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) people, their parents, families, and allies and with TAG, the Transgender Allies Group.
It was a difficult journey with her wife, while she was alive. “For most of my adult life, I had a full beard and, after I told her I would, shave it off and grow it back and shave it off and grow it back. I just did not want to, as the saying goes, rock the boat. She wasn't very happy with it. I could understand that. And so I think her biggest concern was our kids, how they would feel about it. And so that became a big issue for me, when I decided to come out to tell my kids.”
That turned out to be much easier.
“They always tease me that their biggest concern or their biggest disappointment was that I didn't think that they would accept me,” she told Our Town Reno. “They always say you brought us up to be accepting of everybody. Why would we not accept who you are?”
Scaffidi poses with family.
Accepting who you are every step of the way is the key Scaffidi said. “That beard was part of my person. And I knew that if I was going to transition, I would have to start electrolysis and never have that beard again. And it was a part of who I was. And so I think one of the things I try to get across to people is you have to accept yourself for who you are. You're not weird. You're not a strange person. There's nothing wrong with you mentally. Just accept who you are. That's pretty much the hardest thing that I think people have to do.”
Overall though, she says losing her spouse, and also losing a child, have been much more difficult experiences.
“Any issues that I have as being transgender are very minuscule compared to losing my spouse after 42 years of marriage. We lost a child. Those are big things. Somebody calling me sir instead of ma'am, to me, it's not a big deal anymore. It's not that important.”
Scaffidi, a New York native who was in the Navy for a while often works with veterans who are a part of the LGBTQ community. She’s been a lobbyist for LGBTQ rights in Nevada for the past few legislative sessions. At Our Center, she has also helped parents.
“We try to get the parents to understand that, ‘this is who your child is and you're probably going to have to mourn parts of what you thought was going to happen with that child’. If you have a daughter who is transgender and is actually male, who's going to transition, you're not going to have that wedding where the daughter is going to be in the fancy dress. It's very hard for parents to get to that point. So we have to try to let them understand that this is what's important, that you're going to have to love your child no matter who they are. And you would much rather have a trans son than a dead daughter, because the suicide rate for young trans people is astronomical,” Scaffidi said.
Scaffidi has also worked with students at UNR’s School of Medicine where she portrays patient scenarios.
“We're getting more and more therapists and doctors who are becoming a little more aware and starting to learn how to administer cross hormone therapy and understanding more about the mental aspects of what you go through when you're transgender,” she said.
Though Scaffidi asks the people around a trans person to be more understanding she also suggests that the transitioning person be sensitive to the situation as well.
“Try not to act like a teenager when you're going through puberty again, when we start hormone therapy,” she said. “So if you're 65 years old, don't try to dress and act like a 17-year-old. It's not going to work. You can wear stylish things, but not something that a 17 or a 15-year-old is going to wear. Even though you may feel that way inside. Be very cautious of that.”
Training people how to use correct pronouns is also what she tries to do on a daily basis.
“The outer appearance doesn't really matter. And that's one of the things we always try to get across to people. We're all just people. We just look a little bit different than we did before we transitioned,” she said.
Scaffidi lives in Carson City, but appreciates that Reno is more open and she often makes the drive.
“I find that Carson is not quite as accepting of trans people as Reno is. It's a smaller city. People are more rural because that's just the way Carson is.”