‘I Want To Be A Very Happy Girl'

Bits of hair remain on Jasmine Olivia Perry’s face despite shaving. The hair on her head is cropped short, her chest is small and her voice is deep. It will be two years before her breasts develop and longer for her hair to change.

Jasmine, whose name is legally Richard Kogut, has already decided: This is the year she will live as a woman.

She started taking estrogen three months ago and she’s already noticing slight changes.

She’s more emotional now than ever before. And despite her checkered past and living in a community that she worries won’t support her, she says she’s happier.

“I feel like life is easier,” Jasmine said. “When I have an issue I feel like I can get through it.”

‘I can’t live it fully’

Jasmine, 45, hasn’t dressed as a woman out on the streets of Windsor.

She sometimes wears short shorts and women’s shirts, but only behind closed doors and inside of friends’ homes. “It’s hard for housing,” she said. “It’s also hard for the job situation. I think a lot of employment places aren’t up to par with transgender people.” Jasmine, who is attracted to women, often refers to herself as “this girl” and uses feminine language. She has a feminine walk and when she talks, she uses feminine hand gestures. Friends have told her that she has nice legs. All that gives her encouragement to keep moving forward, but she’s still concerned about her appearance. Getting through this year could be difficult.

“If anyone says something, emotionally, I don’t know how I’m going to react,” she said.

Jasmine was recently fired from a job at Super 8 Motel in White River Junction. The manager there said she wasn’t able to keep up with the demands of the job, but Jasmine thinks it had something to do with her transition. She lives off the disability insurance she receives for anxiety issues while Medicaid pays for her estrogen.

Still, she worries.

“I am depressed about that issue because I can’t live it fully the way I want to,” she said.

‘People through it was wrong’

Jasmine started dressing as a woman when she was seven years old. Problems with her family and problems with the law prevented an earlier transition from male to female.

In 2013, she was arrested for causing injuries to her fiancé’s child, according to police reports. At the time, she admitted to causing the injuries. She now denies them.

“I was trying to get a relationship going with a female but it didn’t work out,” she said.

She’s been in and out of prison since 18, she said. Her criminal records show a burglary charge and an arson charge in 1989.

She was released from jail in December and is now working with a parole officer in Springfield and a therapist in Windsor.

“I have an opportunity to fulfill my dream,” she said of transitioning.

Friends say Jasmine is a gentle person. She denies she’s changing her name and gender in attempt to hide her past.

“I am choosing this lifestyle because I want to,” she said. “I’ve always wanted to be a girl.”

She attributes her arrest to a tumultuous childhood. She was adopted at age 3 when her birth mother couldn’t care for her. She went to school in Bellows Falls and started dressing in feminine clothing when she was 7, wearing female stockings and undergarments.

“At that time people thought it was wrong,” she said.

Her adopted father made fun of her for it and called her “Rachel.”

At 11, her father got angry when a football she was playing with went past the neighbor's fence. She went onto the neighbor’s property to retrieve it and when she did, her father put her hand on the neighbor’s electric fence and left it there for 10 minutes. If she took her hand off, he’d hit her — her father warned.

“He already had his belt off,” Jasmine said.

She failed gym class that year because she wouldn’t get dressed for class. She wanted to hide the marks her father left, she said.

She dealt with anger by starting fires, she said. In 1989, Jasmine was sent to jail for 16 years after setting her neighbor’s house and barn on fire. Nobody was home at the time, she said.

“It’s in the past but it is difficult, but I’m trying to get a job,” she said.

Jasmine’s father, also named Richard Kogut, died in August of 2012. Her mother died in 2013.

She described herself as a loner in school who didn’t have time for friends and relationships. She went to school and helped her father with his cleaning business.

“I didn't really feel cared for or loved by my adoptive parents,” she said.

She doesn’t have family support now.

“All the support people I have for what I’m going through I consider my family,” she said.

She wants to put it behind her.

“I want to be a very happy girl. That’s what I want to be and that’s what I wake up to every morning,” she said.

‘People are just afraid’

“I’m not changing really anything about me, just my physical appearance about me and my name,” she said.

But the people who support her can’t relate to the process she’s going through.

“Trying to get connected with other transgender people, here in Windsor you don’t have that connection,” Jasmine said.

There aren’t local support groups.

One of her supporters is Rev. Mandy Lape-Freeberg of the Old South Church in Windsor, who Jasmine met at a community supper.

“I felt that Jasmine could be a help to us as a congregation. We could learn what she’s going through and we...could all be stretched a little bit,” Lape-Freeberg said. “I’m astounded and amazed of her courage; especially for someone who doesn’t have the supports that so many of us take for granted to say ‘this is who I am and I need to do this, I have to do this, to not do it is to not be myself.’” Lape-Freeberg has been pastor of the church for 15 years. The local church didn’t start accepting gay marriages until four years ago.

“I didn’t move on it because I was concerned and I didn’t want to start a fight, which can sometimes happen,” she said.

Four years ago, Lape-Freeberg met with other church leaders and decided: “It’s time.”

Lape-Freeberg and a deacon talked to a retired minister who still attends the church who said at the time ‘If you allow same sex marriage in this church, I’m leaving,’” Lape-Freeberg said.

Eventually that person came around and all the other members did, too, she said.

“Nobody left the church,” Lape-Freeberg said.

Lape-Freeberg saw Jasmine needed a supporter.

“He, now she, seemed alone in the world in some ways. That’s my call to be present for people, especially people who have gotten overlooked and don’t have a lot of people caringfor them,” she said.

Christine Porter, the director at the Windsor Public Library, first met Jasmine when she was looking for books on transitioning last fall. The library hardly had any.

“I just feel like she’s trying to find her place in the community. I feel like she’s trying to belong,” Porter said.

“I notice her still covering up around town. I’ll say, ‘it’s 80 degrees outside, take your jacket off,’” Porter said.

Porter recently organized a talk at the Windsor Welcome Center for Jasmine and others because she saw how worried Jasmine was.

“I feel like there’s a long way to go and people are just afraid,” Porter said.