Stephanie and Billie Jean: Living transgender in rural Pennsylvania

Clouds as dark as anthracite crested a mountain and thundered across a valley before they crashed into the quiet town Stephanie Fritsch calls home.

The late-June storm blew dust up and down the hilly streets of tiny Wiconisco, Pa., in Dauphin County. American flags thrashed outside homes where miners once lived. Rain pelted cars rusting out back.

Stephanie stood on her front porch, taking in the beauty. Her pink hair whipped around in the wind.

“This is a real Appalachian thunderstorm,” she said. “Welcome to rural Pennsylvania.”

Stephanie, 58 at the time, is a transgender woman living in rural America, where access to gender-affirming health care is more difficult, where most municipalities have no ordinances against gender-identity discrimination, and where there’s generally more support for conservative candidates who push back against transgender rights.

Approximately 16% of trans Americans live in rural areas. A 2019 report by the Movement Advancement Project, a Colorado nonprofit focused on LGBTQ equality and democracy, said that population faces unique challenges, including higher rates of poverty and “increased visibility.” Rural Americans simply don’t see or know many trans people so women like Stephanie are more noticeable, and, according to MAP, that can “increase the risk of targeting or mistreatment.”

Stephanie spent a turbulent decade in Las Vegas and wound up in Wiconisco by chance. Life’s less chaotic there, she said, and there’s an empathetic friend blocks away in Billie Jean Williams, a transgender woman she first met on Facebook.

“I warned her not to move here,” Billie Jean said. “I like having her around, though, because I have an ally, another friend and trans person to talk to.”

Billie Jean, 38, grew up in Dauphin County and cares for a younger sister with disabilities in a house she said is “literally falling apart.” She said she’s been harassed her whole life and doesn’t present her gender often in public.

“My dream is to be accepted and happy, to actually live, not survive or exist,” she said.

Stephanie sees rural Pennsylvania as a safe, stable place where she can be herself and live as a woman. For Billie Jean, who hasn’t legally changed her name or started the medical transition she yearns for, small-town life has become suffocating. She longs to disappear among the millions 120 miles southeast in Philadelphia.

Stephanie and Billie Jean’s struggles and hopes aren’t uncommon, advocates say. There’s no perfect place to be transgender.

“Transgender people have been living in rural communities forever and many have found ways to navigate their world to become highly successful individuals,” said Corinne Goodwin, head of the Eastern PA Trans Equity Project (EPTEP). “They are architects and engineers and they pay their rent and retire comfortably.”

Wiconisco, a former coal town of about 1,162, is nestled in the Appalachian Mountains, about 35 miles northeast of Harrisburg. It feels much farther.

In June, during Pride Month, Stephanie’s was the only house flying a “Progress Pride” flag, with its rainbow stripes and black, brown, pink, blue, and white chevrons. One home, a few blocks away from her in the 10-square-mile town, had a Confederate flag unfurled out front.

Billie Jean wasn’t celebrating Pride in northern Dauphin County. She said she’s already faced too much harassment at work.

“Most people in the area know me,” she said. “Many think I’m just gay or a drag queen.”

Pennsylvania received a “fair” rating for its gender-identity policies, according to MAP’s equality profile. That’s better than West Virginia and Ohio, but worse than New Jersey and New York. In Pennsylvania, 70 of the state’s 2,560 municipalities and three of its 67 counties — Erie, Allegheny, and Philadelphia — have ordinances prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity in private employment, housing, and public accommodations.

Most of those towns with protective ordinances are in Chester, Montgomery, and Bucks Counties or towns with colleges, like Bloomsburg, Gettysburg, Shippensburg, and State College. Wiconisco is not one of them.

Stephanie grew up in Connecticut, a state that scored “high” on MAP’s equality profile. Her parents owned a costume shop in Manchester, and she worked there, listening to opera on the radio while lugging around heavy bolts of multicolored fabric. She’d secretly try on the women’s costumes, but kept her gender identity from everyone, including family.

Teenagers can home in on the slightest differences, and high school, for Stephanie, was difficult. It’s when she started drinking heavily. Decades later, former classmates reached out to her, with remorse.

“When I look back, I thought I was mature, but was not able to stand up for someone being bullied,” one woman wrote on Stephanie’s Facebook page in 2015. “I know you were bullied Stephanie, because you were different, and I am very sorry our generation did that to you.”

A professional chef for two decades, Stephanie went on to work for American Airlines, handling reservations and lost baggage. In 2002, she was transferred to Las Vegas, where she first tried to transition and present her true gender at work. She experienced bouts of homelessness after getting laid off in 2003, and made ends meet with sex work.

Stephanie, who is pansexual, said she married a woman in 2005 — at Vegas’ Little White Wedding Chapel — largely because of her parents’ “programming.” That’s when she ended that initial transition process, in order to “be a father” to her stepdaughter.

In 2014, when she and her wife moved to central Pennsylvania, Stephanie began transitioning in earnest and got divorced. She no longer speaks to her ex-wife or stepdaughter. She applied for affordable housing, and in 2020 was offered an apartment in Wiconisco. She’s been there ever since.

Today, Stephanie is on disability, and finds her most consistent connections online. She uses social media as a public diary, chronicling both struggles and everyday moments of joy. She wills herself toward positivity, despite troubles with money, medical transition, mental health, and harassment.

“To me living in rural America is a total gift,” she wrote in a 2021 Facebook post.

Stephanie doesn’t hide in “Wic” and doesn’t yearn to move to a larger city. She even ran for office in 2021 to become a township auditor and won. Stephanie corrects people when she’s misgendered, locally, and she’s traveled all over the state, and to Washington, where she’s been arrested, to attend rallies, protests, and festivals.

“I will stand up to anyone,” she said. “Transgender people out in the country need people like me. I fight for them.”

It’s about 72 miles from Wiconisco to Lancaster Pride, but the 90-minute drive south was worth it for Stephanie and, especially, Billie Jean, who wore blond locks and a long, pink dress she bought at Target.

“It’s hard, and for her to do this today is amazing,” Stephanie said of her friend. “She can finally be herself here.”

Billie Jean had been fired from a retail job a week earlier. She said she’d told the hiring manager she was transgender and planning to transition. That person told others, she said, and fellow employees went through her wallet and other personal belongings.

A 2021 nationwide survey of LGBT employees by the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law found that nearly half (47%) of Pennsylvania respondents said they experienced workplace discrimination or harassment because of their sexual orientation or gender identity.

Lancaster, a city of 57,500, was a safe haven for a few hours, Billie Jean said, even though a local Christian church protested outside the convention center. When the doors opened, hundreds of people of all ages streamed in. Billie Jean posed for selfies. She didn’t buy anything — ”I’m broke” — but had a nice conversation with a Black trans woman who left Harrisburg for Philadelphia.

Stephanie chatted up almost every advocacy group and retailer who had a booth.

“Hi, I’m Stephanie,” she said to everyone.

Many already knew her, evidence of her constant presence online.

Goodwin, a trans woman, said finding community online, like Stephanie has, has benefits and drawbacks. Social media algorithms can funnel bad news and cruel people with hateful comments back to someone who’s that plugged in.

“It can really send you down a rabbit hole of ‘everybody hates me’ and that’s just not the truth,” she said. “There are thousands of allies out there, but you have to seek them out.”

Stephanie’s met friends through activism too, including Charles King, cofounder of New York City’s Housing Works, which serves low-income or homeless New Yorkers. King said he’s spent hours camped out in church basements with Stephanie before affordable housing protests in Washington.

“She managed to get there every time,” King said. “She’s an effective communicator, as eloquent as anyone else there.”

King said he’s seen Stephanie get “down in the dumps” often, on social media.

Sometimes she posts about frustrations she’s faced trying to transition, medically, later in life. She’s undergone a bilateral orchiectomy, along with hormone replacement therapy and some laser hair treatments, but other health issues have prevented her from getting gender-affirmation surgery.

Getting to appointments and consultations was an all-day event before she bought a car.

“Health care, in an urban area, could be a 15- or 20-minute ride,” Goodwin said. “In a rural area, it might be a two-hour ride.”

King urges Stephanie to practice gratitude for what she does have.

“And, unfailingly, she’ll do that,” King said. “She carries herself with tremendous dignity.”

Billie Jean would spend the rest of June and July looking for a job. She prayed her car wouldn’t die, that a miracle would save her dilapidated bathroom so she could shower and shave more regularly.

“Everything’s been hard,” she said.

Back in Wiconisco, her good vibes from Lancaster Pride had worn off.

“Here, we’re still taboo at best,” she said, “if not a pariah.”

All summer, Stephanie was excited to celebrate at a 59th birthday party in August. She invited guests on social media. The party would be a potluck, she said, and since she’s been sober from drugs and alcohol for 21 years, Stephanie was hoping for a different kind of BYOB.

“Bring your own boobs, however you define boobs or lack of boobs,” she wrote.

Two days before the party, though, the number of cancellations was growing. She went on Facebook Live to pour out her feelings.

“Even the strongest people in the world need help from people,” she said in a video.

The birthday party wouldn’t be potluck, after all: Stephanie made huge servings of macaroni salad, baked beans, and smoked chicken, far more than she needed for the handful of friends who showed up that Sunday afternoon. She’s still a chef at heart.

“I figured it’s summer, you have to have baked beans, right?” she said before guests arrived.

Billie Jean called around noon. She had to go home, get changed, and pick up her younger sister.

“Alright, I love you. See you soon,” Billie Jean said before hanging up.

When she arrived, Billie Jean sat at the dining room table and sighed. She was stressed about a forthcoming job interview at a local fast food restaurant. She said she’d dress as a man, but wasn’t sure it would matter.

“I can usually tell if a job interview is going to go south by the faces they make,” she said.

Stephanie continually ran back and forth — ”Coming through with cast iron!” — from the kitchen to the grills on her front porch.

Billie Jean and Stephanie argued about rural life, their perceptions of violence in cities, about jobs and the affordability gap. Billie Jean reminded Stephanie she “didn’t have to work.”

MAP’s report found that rates of harassment, discrimination, or physical violence in rural areas are only “slightly less” than in nonrural areas. (Logan Casey, MAP’s director of policy research, said its report was based on the National Center for Transgender Equality’s 2015 U.S. Trans Survey, and it’s important to note “how drastically the environment has changed since then.”)

The Human Rights Campaign said 2021 was the deadliest year ever for transgender and nonbinary people, with most of the victims being people of color.

Stephanie said she feels safer in Wiconisco. The township’s tiny police department gets help from the Pennsylvania State Police in neighboring Lykens. State police there said they’ve responded to 11 assaults of varying degrees in Wiconisco so far this year, along with two burglaries and two sexual offenses.

In 2021, a man shot and killed his roommate on the block where Stephanie later moved.

Last year, Stephanie’s mother died at 87 in Connecticut. The obituary listed “Stephanie Fritsch” as one of her three children. Stephanie said her mother “tried” to see her as a daughter.

Stephanie used her inheritance to purchase a Hyundai Tucson — previously she walked everywhere — and a three-bedroom, 19th-century house for $50,000. In Philly, buyers are paying a median of $218 per square foot this year. Stephanie paid $36.

At home, she poured herself into renovations, painting rooms pink and yellow and upgrading the HVAC systems. With her fixed income, she still struggles with the grind of having an older house. Her walls are filled with tributes to her parents: a sailboat for her father, who died in 2015, and a shelf of scissors to honor her mother’s skills with fabric. She has an entire bedroom filled with shoes and a sleeping balcony off another bedroom that looks out to the mountains behind her.

In late August she proudly posted pictures of her well-manicured backyard, with its lush green grass, stringed lights, and firepits.

“My little slice of the American dream pizza!” she wrote.

Goodwin said transgender people can thrive in cities or rural communities.

“We focus so often on the difficulties, and they are very real for many of our community members, but we should also celebrate when a transgender individual succeeds,” she said.

Scarlett Davis, a six-year Navy veteran, is one of those success stories. Davis, 49, lives in the woods, in Tioga County, with her wife and dogs, and works in Pennsylvania’s Department of Human Services. She began hormonal transition approximately five years ago and transitioned socially a few years later.

“No matter where you are, you will have people who accept you, and people who will not,” she said. “I don’t require a celebration for my transition. I want to buy my groceries, just like everyone else. I want simple equality.”

Billie Jean doesn’t think that’s possible in Wiconisco.

The mountains that bookend Stephanie’s home were mostly brown and bare a week before Thanksgiving. Evergreens stood out and a few bursts of burnt-orange leaves remained. Soon hunters would climb into the forest in search of whitetail deer, their rifle blasts echoing through the valley.

Stephanie had recently decided not to attend a 40th reunion back in Connecticut after a disagreement with the planners. She’d also been diagnosed with cancer and had a portion of her ear removed; bad news, back-to-back.

Still, she made a post of gratitude, at Charles King’s suggestion: “I have two adorable cats.”

Billie Jean had gotten the fast food job. People were treating her kindly there, she said. Money was still tight, though, so she was looking for a second gig.

“Fast food seems like the only thing in the area that doesn’t care about gender identity,” she said.

She’d started seeing a therapist too, hoping to get the medical transition process started, and was also addressing some long-standing health issues. She still wants out of Wic but has no family left to help her care for her sister.

“My life has consisted of being poor and taking care of dying family members,” she said.

Stephanie and Billie Jean drove to Hungry Time, a small cafe owned by a lesbian couple just a few miles from their houses for lunch. It’s one of Stephanie’s favorite restaurants. Down the road, dozens of hand-painted, wooden Donald Trump signs lined a driveway. One featured a fist giving the middle finger.

The cafe was bustling, the bell on the front door ringing every minute as the lunch crowd shuffled in. The spatula made a steady, clanging rhythm against the griddle.

“Hey, Miss Stephanie,” said Miranda Heckler-Amato, one of the owners.

Stephanie sees every outing, whether it’s a trip to the grocery store or a 45-minute lunch at Hungry Time, as activism, a chance to introduce the wider community to a transgender woman. Heckler-Amato tells her it’s not necessary, that the community is more accepting than she realizes.

“I think rural Pennsylvania is mostly plain and boring, in a good way, and Stephanie is anything but plain and boring,” she said. “She’s unique.”

Billie Jean, who wore a Billie Eilish shirt, said she’s experienced occasional moments of unconditional acceptance there, but her heart is set on leaving.

“I mean, every once in a while, people around here will surprise the hell out of you,” she said.

Stephanie doesn’t think she’ll leave rural Pennsylvania.

“I guess I could sell my house, buy a boat, and sail around the world like my parents did,” she said. “But for real, I just feel safer here and if it takes five more years for people to get used to me, so be it.”

On Thanksgiving, they planned to visit the Valley Lighthouse, a nonprofit down the road in Lykens, for plates of turkey, stuffing, and sweet potatoes. Stephanie said she’d give thanks for the house, for her cats Butch and Midnight, too. Billie Jean was grateful for her job and a car that’s still, somehow, working.

They’d be thankful for each other, too, they said.

Their words, in that little cafe, soon sounded like wishes, everyday things most people strive for, whether they live in a city or way out in Wiconisco.

“You know, I want to be happy, she wants to be happy, and I want people to be happy with their lives. That’s pretty simple, right?” Billie Jean said. “I don’t know what happened in America that made that so difficult.”