In the prologue to her girlhood memoir, Noelle Howey describes herself and her divorced parents, a biological woman and a transgendered lesbian, as “traditional.”

“I have a family that survived a life in the closet by employing humor, tinted car windows, and thousands of dollars’ worth of therapy,” Howey wrote. “A family that gave its patriarch Chanel No. 5 for Father’s Day. A traditional family — loving father, supportive mother, doting child — that would probably be the right wing’s worst nightmare.”

The family isn’t “traditional” in the nuclear sense, she said. But it does function with what she considers traditional values.

“We’re traditional in a simple sense,” Howey said in an interview Wednesday. “We love each other and support each other, but it is sad because people express surprise when I tell them I support my father. Families aren’t just to annoy you on the holidays.”

Howey discusses her book, “Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods — My Mother’s, My Father’s, and Mine” at the Southern Comfort Conference this weekend at the Sheraton Colony Square Hotel in Midtown Atlanta.

The annual transgender conference expects to draw more than 500 participants this year. Howey delivers the keynote address at Saturday’s lunch and plans to speak about improving the media’s depiction of transgender people to be more “genuinely inclusive” and to discuss transgenderism as part of a continuum that applies to every human.

“It is a gender spectrum and we all identify at different points along that,” Howey said. “We are too busy classifying transgendered people as others or making a mockery of them.”

Coming out over and over again
A significant message of Howey’s book is the notion that transgendered parents hurt their children more by torturing themselves in the closet than by being honest about who they are, she said.

“Partly why I wanted to write the book was so that maybe transgendered people would realize that the best thing they can do is embrace their children and themselves and that hurting themselves is what hurts their kids,” she said. “It’s losing the parent they can’t handle.”

Rebecca Christine Howey, Noelle Howey’s father, began her public transition to become a woman when Noelle was 18. The transition prompted her parents to divorce and it paved the way for Noelle and her father to nurture a better relationship than they had during her childhood, she said.

Throughout Howey’s childhood, her father was distant and temperamental. But after Howey’s father came out as a woman, the self-loathing she felt lessened, she said.

“When my father came out, she became a much more positive person because she wasn’t beating up on herself,” Howey said. “You take away that huge burden she was carrying around for 30 some years and it changes the whole dynamic.”

Now Howey’s father lives as a post-op transgendered lesbian, who is her “best friend,” but it took several years of re-building trust for the camaraderie to foster completely, she said.

“Part of it was just time,” Howey said. “We got used to it. When she finally came out dressed, she looked so much more normal and happy. There was always a feeling that she was just a little quirky. Nobody knew, including me, what to make of my dad for years, but over time her real personality came out.”

Coming out doesn’t end with family members, and often results in job loss and alienation — risks that must be taken into consideration before making a public gender change, said Virginia Erhardt, an Atlanta psychologist who specializes in transgender issues.

“I ask what kind of changes my clients can tolerate making in their lives. There is a lot to gain but also the risk of losing a lot, like families and jobs,” said Erhardt, who will present two seminars at this year’s Southern Comfort.

Transgendered people need to be mindful that family members need time to cope with the sudden shock that their gender is not what was previously thought, said Erin Swenson, a licensed general marriage and family therapist in Atlanta.

“Most of us have spent decades and only recently accepted ourselves, and it is unrealistic for us to expect them to be okay with it right away,” said Swenson, who is also a transgendered woman.

The first reaction of family members to a transgendered person’s announcement is not as important as a continued dialogue, Swenson said.

“If people are able to find ways to be connected, over time people tend to come around and find ways to deal with it that are conducive of a continuing relationship,” she said.

Size of trans population unknown
An exact count of people who identify as transgendered, either as cross-dressers or people who want to live full-time in their new gender with or without sexual reassignment surgery, is unknown. The estimated numbers in print are contested and vary by tens of thousands, according to Erhardt.

The American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic & Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, estimates that one out of every 30,000 men, or .0003 percent, and one out of every 100,000 women, .00001 percent, exhibit “transsexualism,” according to a Web site maintained by Lynn Conway, a transgendered engineering professor at the University of Michigan.

But transgender advocates dispute the APA’s percentages, citing numbers reconfigured by Conway.

Conway argues that APA’s numbers are erroneous because they are based on “decades-old data” accumulated when modern sexual reassignment surgery first became available, according to Conway’s Web site.

In the 1960s, 1,000 people received male-to-female reassignment surgery, but the numbers increased to between 14,000 and 20,000 people from 1990 to 2002, Conway reported.

The new numbers indicate that one in 500 men identify as a woman and one in 2,500 men had reassignment surgery, Conway said.

Transgender family planning
As more transgender people come out about their gender identity, images of transgendered families are changing.

“Families can look any way,” said Hawk Stone, a transgender family and individual psychotherapist who serves as co-chair of the New York Association for Gender Rights Advocacy and board chair of the International Foundation for Gender Education.

Stone, a female-to-male transgendered person, works with families to debunk the “old myth” that a transgendered person has to be removed from a family in order for a family to continue functioning.

“The whole premise is how do we take everybody through this transition,” said Stone, who will present a workshop about transgender family issues at Southern Comfort. “Every person in their lives is also going through a transition and adjustment to the news.”

Traditionally, transgender parents had children prior to realizing their gender identity, said Debbie Weill, a male-to-female senior field and policy coordinator for the Midwest region of PFLAG.

Weill heads a panel of PFLAG members who will hold a workshop at Southern Comfort this weekend.

“There is nothing in the nature of being transgendered that makes us incapable of being excellent parents,” Weill said. “One of the things that is challenging based on the current condition of gender surgery is that transgendered persons are not able to bear children after surgery.”

But as the age of transgendered people who have surgery decreases and technology increases, some transgendered individuals who might want children are beginning to consider alternative means of starting a family.

“All of my younger male-to-female transsexuals, and particularly those who know they are attracted to women, I counsel them about considering banking sperm to be used later if they want to establish a family,” Swenson said.

Female-to-male transgendered people can consider surrogate mothers, Weill said.

Also key to transgender family planning is the increase in anti-discrimination laws in the U.S., Weill said.

Last February in Florida, a transsexual man, Michael Kantaras, won custody rights of his children after he and his wife divorced.

The couple planned their daughter’s conception after they married, using sperm donated by Kantaras’ brother. Linda Kantaras, Michael’s wife, bore the child.

But Michael Kantaras won primary custody of the couple’s two children, aged 11 and 13, despite efforts by his wife to discredit the marriage as a sham.