Carefree Travel   By Melissa Tawn   It would seem that Janet Bowen had managed what many transsexuals dream of: a seamless transition which changed her identity but not her profession. But then …

James Brown had planned his transition to womanhood very carefully. He was in his early thirties when he made the final decision to realize his lifelong dream and transform his body into that of the woman which, inside, he knew he really was. For several years, he had been living a dual life. During the work day, he was still James Brown, owner and manager of Enterprise Travel, a small but prosperous travel agency which specialized in handling institutional clients. James Brown was cheerful and personable, though he tended to be very quiet and not particularly sociable. The three women who worked in his office always wondered why he was still single, and each of them (secretly) set her sights on nabbing him one day.

Away from the office, however, James Brown lived the life of Janet Bowen, a vivacious woman who was the life of the party at the several singles bars she liked to frequent. She was beautiful, cheerful, and carefree, though she was careful not to get involved sexually with any of the many men who tried to pick her up. She drank only in moderation, and never went beyond casual kissing and petting. Still, many a bachelor had high hopes for her.

Nobody knew what Janet Bowen did for a living, but in fact she had recently also set up a travel agency, Carefree Travel, about two miles away from James Brown’s agency. At its inception, Carefree Travel had no clients, but Ms. Bowen did hire a secretary and an office manager. She explained that she was in the process of negotiating long-term contracts with various institutional clients, but that this would probably take some time. She also had to be out of town for a few weeks to deal with an urgent personal problem. In the meantime, the office manager was asked to assemble a new staff and organize the office.

Shortly after Carefree Travel was finally set up and duly registered with the state, James Brown called the staff of Enterprise Travel together and delivered the bad news. The doctors, he explained, had found it necessary to perform major surgery on him, which would force him to make significant changes in his life. Therefore, with a heavy heart, he decided to close down his business and sell all of his existing contracts to another agency. The best he could offer his workers was a generous severance package and very good letters of recommendation. He was sure that they would find other work with no problems. Indeed, he had checked with the agency he was selling out to (he did not name it) but they were not hiring at the moment.

The women who worked at Enterprise Travel were sad, but there was nothing they could do. They wished Mr. Brown the best of health and left with tears in their eyes. James Brown sent out letters to all of his institutional clients, explaining that - for medical reasons - he was forced to close his business and that their contracts had been transferred to Carefree Travel, whom he could guarantee were extremely professional and efficient. He gave them a special e-mail address at which he could be contacted in case problems arose.

Following these events, James Brown left town for good, leaving no forwarding address. Janet Bowen was also away, but she returned after ten days, looking much happier than she had been before. Carefree Travel, she gleefully announced, had purchased all of the institutional business of the now-defunct Enterprise Travel, and was ready to begin its operations.

So far, so good! It would seem that Janet had managed what many transsexuals dream of: a seamless transition which changed her identity but not her profession and which allowed her to keep the client base she had taken years assembling. But of course, the fabric of life, no matter how carefully tailored, inevitably has a thread or two sticking out, and pulling on such a thread, potentially, can unravel it all.

In Janet’s case, the “thread” was a very minor client - the State Commission for the Preservation of Historical Sites (CPHS), the travel arrangements for which had been handled by Enterprise Travel and was now to be handled by Carefree Travel. Being a state agency, the finances of the CPHS were subject to scrutiny by the office of the State Comptroller. In practice, this was a mere technicality. The CPHS duly submitted an annual report with the comptroller’s office, which was usually just filed away after a cursory read-through by some minor clerk (after all, the CPHS was a very insignificant cog in the big machine of state government and its budget was too small for anyone to really care about). However, state accounting procedure mandated that, every year, a few reports to the comptroller be chosen at random for detailed review and audit, and it just so happened that, in the given year, the report of the CPHS was among those selected.

The auditing of the CPHS’s expenses was assigned to Howard Wilson, a recent graduate of the Fisher School of Accounting at the University of Florida who was very eager to prove herself in the eyes of his bosses. Although he realized that he was turning his investigative microscope on a crumb in the state’s total budgetary loaf, he decided to do so with vigor and zeal.

The transfer of the CPHS’s accounts from Enterprise Travel to Carefree Travel immediately stood out for, in Howard’s eyes, this violated the letter of the law. By law, all services to state agencies performed by outside contractors must be allocated through a process of competitive bidding. The proper procedure, when Enterprise Travel closed its doors, would have been to ask for new bids from all travel agencies interested in getting the contract. While the terms of the contract between the CPHS and Carefree Travel were identical with those between the CPHS and Enterprise travel, a reopening of the bidding might have saved the state some money.

Howard next checked on the agencies themselves. Travel agencies are not licensed by the state (in fact, the only state in the US to require licensing of travel agencies, Rhode Island, rescinded that requirement in 2008) but they do have to register with the state and file information about their owners and staff. Howard pulled the files on both Enterprise and Carefree and found them very interesting. The owners of both agencies gave very similar biographical details: both were born on the same date in the same city, and both claimed to have earned degrees from the same university. This looked like more than a coincidence - this looked like possible fraud.

Howard called Special Investigations Division of the state Attorney General’s office and turned the matter over to Geraldine Towson, an SID fraud investigator. Geraldine began by checking out James Brown and came up with a lot of blanks. The birth records showed no James Brown was born on or near the date listed as his birth date (he had, of course, retroactively altered his birth certificate to Janet Bowen, as he was legally entitled to do after his SRS) but there were records of a James Brown with the given birth date attending grade school, middle school, and high school (he had forgotten to have those altered). At the university he claimed to graduate from, there were no transcripts and no graduation record in his name (he had had those altered to Janet Bowen) but there were records of him living in the dorms for two years, and two police records for being involved in brawls at bars in the campus area, as well as a few traffic citations. After one of the brawls, he spent a night in jail and, as part of the routine booking procedures, he had been fingerprinted.

On the other hand, there were birth records for Janet Bowen, but no school records and there was a university transcript and record of graduation, but none of the other supplementary documentation which one would expect from a college student. Janet Bowen did not even have a bank account or a credit card during her entire college period. She had never applied for a loan or a scholarship during her college years. Yet it also seemed that she had no income then or later - and did not file federal or state income tax returns - until she suddenly emerged from her cloud of obscurity with sufficient funds to start a travel agency. In fact, until Janet Bowen started her agency, she had no telephone (land line or cell phone), no car registered in her name, no utility bills.

With clear evidence of fraud in hand, Geraldine summoned both James Brown and Janet Bowen to her office for questioning - or at least tried to do so. It seems that Mr. Brown could not be located. His last known address was a rented apartment, which he had vacated a few months before. He had cancelled his phones (both landline and cellular) and his credit cards. His bank account had also been closed. The matter was turned over to the police and they issued a warrant for his arrest.

Janet Bowen was easier to find and, on the appropriate day, showed up in Geraldine Towson’s office. She explained that she had purchased the CPHS’ business as part of a package from Enterprise Travel and certainly did not realize that there was anything illegal in the matter. If there were any legal problems, she would be more than happy to relinquish the contract and let the state go through a bidding process (and, to tell the truth, she would probably not bother competing for it; the CPHS’ business was too small to be worth the effort). Geraldine was not satisfied. There was clear indication of fraud in Carefree Travel’s registration with the state. There were indications of possible money-laundering and tax fraud as well. From where did Janet Bowen get the money to start her travel agency, given that she had no previous job or credit history? She demanded that Janet produce documentation concerning the source of her income. Janet decided that it was time to consult a lawyer and refused to answer any more questions. Geraldine threatened to turn the matter over to the IRS, the police and the FBI. Janet stormed out of her office. Geraldine sent her a registered letter demanding that she produce certain financial records within two weeks. Janet did not comply. Geraldine went to the police, and a warrant was issued for the arrest of Janet Bowen.

Janet had not been inactive for those two weeks. She talked to Dr. Jayne Mautner, who had performed her surgery, and Dr. Mautner had referred her to a lawyer in her state, Robert McIntyre Esq., whom she recommended warmly. Not only was he a very well-known attorney, but Robert, born Robyn, was a female-to-male post-op transsexual who had also been one of Dr. Mautner’s patients (and who had authorized Dr. Mautner to reveal this fact to any of her other patients who might need legal help).

Attorney McIntyre was a senior partner in the firm of Cohen, Herron & McIntyre which specialized in dealing with state agencies and interpretation of state business regulations. As he sat (clad in his usual impeccable dark blue suit, white shirt, and striped tie, looking very professional indeed) and listened to Janet Bowen’s tale, he realized that he had a serious problem to contend with, but was sure that he could handle it. In a long formal letter to the SID, he broke the matter up into several subissues. Among them:

(1) Did Howard Wilson have the legal right to initiate any background check on Janet Bowen? The comptroller’s office is legally empowered only to conduct audits of the accounts of state agencies and their financial relationships with outside bodies. Since Carefree Travel had yet to perform any services for the CPHS or bill them, it and its management did not fall under that mandate. The proper procedure would have been to send a letter to Carefree Travel informing them that their acquisition of the CPHS contract was not in accordance with state law, and was therefore void.
(2) As to possible fraud in the registration of Carefree Travel with the state, the office of the comptroller is not empowered to investigate that or reach any conclusions in the matter; any suspicions should have been turned over to the appropriate state office which handled registration of travel agencies.
(3) Since Howard Wilson’s investigation of Carefree Travel was not founded in law, neither was the basis for Geraldine Towson’s investigation. The SID has no right to initiate investigations into the personal lives of innocent citizens without legally-obtained significant evidence of possible fraud. In particular, the court orders which she had obtained and which allowed her to look into the school and bank records of James Brown and Janet Bowen were without proper foundation and so the results would be inadmissible, should the matter come to trial.
(4) On that basis as well, the warrant for the arrest of Janet Bowen should be quashed immediately. Any failure to do so could result in a lawsuit by Ms. Bowen against the state and against Ms. Towson personally, for the violation of Ms. Bowen’s civil liberties.
As to the facts of the matter at hand, Attorney McIntyre was willing to meet with Dan Harrison, the deputy Attorney General who handled the SID, and try to clear up any misunderstandings.

The choice of Dan Harrison was deliberate. He and Robyn McIntyre had been classmates in law school, and had belonged to the same study group, which made them very close indeed. Several times, Dan had been rebuffed by Robyn when he tried to date her, but when she announced to everybody that she was transitioning into Robert, he had been one of the first to stand by her/his side and support him through that very difficult period. Since then, they met frequently at various social functions and on committees of the bar association and always remained on good terms personally, though they were often on opposite sides of various cases.

When Robert McIntyre walked into Dan Harrison’s office, Geraldine Towson’s lengthy report was open on his desk. “This looks serious, Bob”, he said. “Geraldine is a very good investigator and there is definitely some hanky-panky going on here. She suspects some serious money laundering, and so do I. You can raise all of the technicalities you want about the investigation up to this point, but we are not going to let this one get away.”

Robert McIntyre just looked calm. “Dan,” he said, “do you remember when we were in Law School?”

“How could I forget, Bob? I had real hots for you, as you were certainly aware, until I found out that under that pretty exterior you are really a guy.”

“Do you remember how difficult it was for me at the beginning, trying to get people to stop thinking of me as Robyn and start thinking of me as Robert?”

“Sure, it must have been horrid for you.”

“It was pretty bad, especially persuading the various secretaries that the paper submitted by Robert McIntyre satisfied a seminar requirement for Robyn McIntyre, and stuff like that. Some of them couldn’t handle it at all. At more than one point in time, I was nearly suspended from law school because of some such technicality.”

“Yeah, I remember that you once had to threaten to sue the Dean.”

“Well, here we have essentially the same situation.”

“Are you trying to tell me that Janet Bowen and James Brown are really the same person?”

“That is precisely correct. I have the documents here to prove it, and of course you can match Janet Bowen’s fingerprints with the ones of James Brown which Geraldine found,” said Robert McIntyre and handed over a large manila envelope. “There is no money laundering; there is no fraud. All that there is here is an attempt by my client to transition quietly without losing her sole source of income. Now she admits that the CPHS bit was handled poorly and, as she told Geraldine, she is quite willing to cancel the contract immediately and will probably not submit a new bid for it when the time comes. But everything else is just a matter of her switching from one identity to the other in as painless a way as she knew how.”

“She should have been more careful.”

“Yes, she should have; but the transition period is a very hard one - take my word for it. And, the last time I looked, carelessness was not a crime in this state. Please, look over the documents and then let’s draw up some sort of agreement which will make everyone feel happy and feel that they have done their jobs properly, without compromising by client’s right to keep her private life private. If she has to pay a reasonable fine for the trouble her carelessness caused, I am sure she would not object.”

After a certain amount of negotiation, such an agreement was hammered out between the two attorneys. Dan Harrison had some trouble selling it to Geraldine Towson, who was not told the real reason the case was being dropped. She protested loudly about a “sellout” and threatened to take the matter to the Attorney General himself. It was only after Dan Harrison pointed out to her that her own violations of formal procedure - as catalogued by Robert McIntyre - were far more serious than those of Janet Bowen and could easily result in her dismissal from the civil service, should he choose to make an issue of it, that she assented. Howard Wilson, who was more concerned with keeping his job than with standing on principle, had no objections.

After it was all over, Robert McIntyre and Janet Bowen had a long talk over dinner at a fashionable restaurant. “There is an inherent cusp point in transitioning,” Robert explained. “an existential Rubicon if you wish, which has to be crossed; it is the point at which the persona you present to the world formally switches from the ‘old you’ to the ‘new you’.

Many transsexuals do not attempt at any sort of continuity at that point - they change their name, location, and occupation. They break off all contact with their former friends and acquaintances and, literally, begin a new life. One person simply vanishes off of the face of the earth as another emerges. This may be hard at first, but can be done and can work, especially if there was nobody you really cared to remain in contact with. It has the advantage that one doesn’t have to explain things to others, but does require a lot of preparation and, of course, entails the loss of everything you have built up in your old identity.

Other transsexuals try to maintain their life continuity as best they can. They change their name and legal paperwork, but remain (or try to) in the same social setting with the same job. This can work if friends and coworkers are supportive and understanding for the most part, something which is more and more frequent as transgendered people become more accepted by society and protected by law. But it is often very hard on all sides. People who refuse to accept the transition can cause a lot of trouble.

You tried a middle path - changing your identity but trying to maintain your previous occupational status and - most importantly - your client base, without disclosing to them what is going on. That was really not a good idea. You probably would have had less trouble if you had kept Enterprise Travel and just let your workers and clients know that you were about to undergo the perfectly legal procedure of sexual reassignment. You would undoubtedly have lost a few of them, but it would have come out better in the end. At least they would have appreciated your honesty and not suspected that you were masking some other illegal activities. As it is, we had to disclose your transition to the state authorities and I have no doubt that most of your clients will find out too, sooner or later.”

Janet looked at him with dreamy eyes. She wasn’t really concentrating on what he had to say, but kept on thinking that he was really very cute as well as very smart. As far as she knew, he was also single.