The legacy of Trish Frye: Finding and fighting for love
Patricia Dooley Frye, a cheerful retired music teacher who died Sept. 28 at 77, didn’t set out to have a front-row seat to the United States' transgender revolution. Trish just meant to stay married to the person she loved.
Trish, as people who knew her best called her, met Phyllis Frye in the fall of 1972. Trish was then a 29-year-old music teacher in Bryan, not far from the dairy farm where she’d grown up, but she was hardly schoolmarmish. She’d just returned from a couple of years teaching in Monterrey, Mexico. She wore her hair in a stylish beehive and drove a Mustang.
“She was sure of herself, confident,” Phyllis said. “She didn’t need a man.”
Phyllis, though, was trying hard to be one. She’d been born Phillip, and when she introduced herself that way to Trish, nothing seemed amiss. Trish, like everyone else, saw a square-jawed man’s man with military posture and a dimpled smile.
It was a facade, Phyllis confessed a few months later.
She told Trish that, growing up in San Antonio, she’d realized around age 6 that her female brain didn’t match her male body, but she had done her dangedest to exude Texan manliness anyway. In Phyllis’s 24 years, she’d been an Eagle Scout, an Aggie corps cadet and an Army lieutenant. Attracted to women, she’d married while still in college and fathered a son. But Phyllis’s wife left after finding out that Phyllis sometimes wore women’s clothes, taking their toddler son with her. When word reached the Army base in Germanywhere Phyllis was stationed, it cost her her Army career. She tried to slash herwrists.
Even by today’s standards, it was a lot to process. Trish said that she’d never heard of such a thing, which wasn’t surprising: At the time, hardly anyone in the U.S. had. In Texas, “gay” was a fighting word, and “homosexual” was something you whispered. Phyllis herself didn’t yet have the phrase “transgender lesbian” to explain who she was; she just prayed that Jesus could forgive her.
Trish, though, was interested, not afraid. She and Phyllis began driving to Houston, to the Jesse H. Jones medical library at the Texas Medical Center. Phyllis, hungry to understand herself, scoured medical and psychology journals for articles — there weren’t many positive ones — and Trish, armed with rolls of quarters, photocopied the pages.
By early December, they were in love.
‘You’d might as well be yourself ’
In a fit of born-again righteousness, Phyllis had thrown out all the women’s clothes she’d brought to Texas. At last, when she couldn’t bear her male appearance anymore, she bought new ones. Someone spotted her and reported her to Texas A&MUniversity, which fired her for it. She felt lucky to land another engineering job right away — but it was in Pittsburgh, and she and Trish had been serious about each other for only a couple of months.
Trish thought it over a week or two. “If cross-dressing is the only thing wrong with you,” she informed Phyllis, “I’d like to marry you.”
That June, at Trish’s family’s farm, they were declared man and wife. “My family was so glad I’d married a woman,” Phyllis said. “Maybe I wasn’t as queer as they thought I was. Maybe Trish could cure me.”
They sold Trish’s beloved Mustang to pay for their move to Pittsburgh and left right away.. Phyllis grew a beard and put in long hours at the new job, but after a couple of years, her feminine self showed through. Once again, she was fired.
This time they moved to Houston. Phyllis found civilengineering work at S&B Engineers, and Trish taught music at an elementary school in Fort Bend ISD. They bought a ranch house — not in rowdy Montrose, Houston’s gay neighborhood, but in Westbury, which prided itself on Little League.
Phyllis began to “transition” — to go out as Phyllis, not Phillip, at night. Dresses couldn’t reshape her blocky male body, but she did what she could. She shaved off her beard, plucked her eyebrows and grew her nails long. Trish coached her to dress conservatively.
At last, in 1976, Phyllis worked up the nerve to tell S&B that she intended to live full time as a woman. The firm promptly fired her — which, at the time, was entirely legal.
In fact, it was Phyllis who was breaking the law. Section 28-42.4 of Houston’s Code of Ordinances made it illegal to wear clothing associated with the opposite sex. By appearing as a woman, she risked arrest. Trish lived with the worry that, at any time, she might need to bail Phyllis out of jail — and to do it fast, before Phyllis got hurt there.
Even wearing her male drag, presenting herself as manly Phillip, Phyllis couldn’t find work. To Trish, that didn’t mean Phyllis should retreat. It meant she should go forward, becoming Phyllis, not Phillip, full time.
“If no one is going to hire you because of who they think you are,” Trish said, “you’d might as well be yourself.”
‘Phyllis has done nothing wrong’
“The pressure on the two of us was intense,” Phyllis said.
“Pressure like that either splits you apart, or it jams you together. It jammed us together.”
Trish kept her life with Phyllis secret from people at the Quail Bend elementary school. (Conveniently, people there knew her as “Pat” Frye, not “Trish.”) Her schoolteacher’s salary was their lifeline, and she loved teaching music to fourth and fifth graders. But what Texas school would employ her if word got out?
Broke, they struggled to pay Phyllis’s child support. To save money, during Houston’s sweltering summers, they didn’t turn on the air-conditioning. They drank powdered milk and wore clothes that Phyllis sewed. Their Methodist church one year designated them the recipients of the Christmas cannedfood drive for the poor.
If it weren’t for Trish, Phyllis thought, she’d have starved or been forced to sell her body on Westheimer. That was what happened to people like her.
Trish’s parents urged her to divorce Phyllis. Phyllis’s family disowned her. Phyllis and Trish had been Republicans, but their Republican friends shunned them. Only a few of their Westbury neighbors stayed friendly.
Their house was egged. Their tires were slashed. In the middle of the night, kids rang their doorbell and banged on the windows. On Christmas and Easter, obscene phone calls tied up their phone. Once someone burned a dirty diaper on the porch. Another time, after Phyllis ran afoul of a conservative group at the University of Houston, students drove to the house, banged on the windows and doors and screamed rape threats. For months after that, Trish didn’t feel safe.
They developed strange survival skills. They didn’t give candy to trick-or-treaters because they were afraid that if a neighborhood kid were poisoned, Phyllis would be blamed. When one of their dogs died, they asked a neighbor to watch them bury it. Otherwise, they worried, cops might dig up their yard, searching for corpses.
The hatred made Trish furious — but not at Phyllis. When her parents pushed her to leave Phyllis, she told them: “I made a marriage vow.” And: “Phyllis has done nothing wrong.”
Queer history
To students of Houston’s queer history, Phyllis’s trajectory from there is legend. Because her military benefits would pay a small stipend if she were in school, she enrolled in the University of Houston’s law school, fighting her way past a wall of rejection. She volunteered in the office of Houston City Council member Ernest McGowan, and from that perch inside City Hall, charmed and shamed the council into repealing its cross-dressing ordinance.
In 1979, Phyllis helped organize the first National March on Washington for Lesbian and
Gay Rights. Her hellraising gay friend Ray Hill spoke at the main gathering, but neither Phyllis nor any other trans people did. The lesbian-andgay-rights movement considered them too far outside the mainstream.
After Phyllis passed the bar exam, even gay law firms wouldn’t hire her, and she lacked the nerve to launch her own. Instead, she made money by selling Amway cleaning products to gay bars, until one day a gay man needing legal help called. Giddy after that case went smoothly — and also needing money — she advertised her services in This Week in Texas, a gay and lesbian magazine.
She turned out to be a junkyard dog of a lawyer, happy to take clients who couldn’t expect much from a Texas jury, cases that the established gay firms wouldn’t touch — people like the gay cop so hated by other officers that they framed him for theft. Over time, Phyllis’s stubborn charm won over the Harris County courthouse. Impressed by her diligence, archconservative Judge Jim Barr sent her his toughest cases.
“If no one is going to hire you because of who they think you are, you’d might as well be yourself.” Trish Frye, wife of Phyllis Frye, who became the nation’s first openly transgender judge
Courthouse employees waved.
Sometimes a lawyer would joke, “Phyllis, when are you going to run for judge?”
She always drawled the same reply: “I’m too busy running for human being.”
She became a recognized expert in transgender law and, over time, a star in the tiny world of trans activism. She protested gay and lesbian groups’ refusal to embrace trans people. She was a guest on “Donahue,” one of the biggest talk shows on daytime TV.
‘Either you love the person or you don’t’
Asked to speak at universities and national gatherings, Phyllis always insisted the invitation cover a plane ticket for Trish and an extra night at the hotel. That way, they could finally afford to travel. At conferences, Phyllis usually ended her speeches with a call to action, urging her closeted trans audience to come out. If she could do it in the 1970s in Texas, she demanded, what were they all waiting for in the 1990s?
Often, they were worried about their spouses. Not every spouse was as supportive as Trish.
Trish herself shunned the stage. She even avoided being in conferences’ group photos, says her friend Christopher Bown, who was forever urging her into them. But even so, conferencegoers recognized her and sought her out. “People respected Phyllis,” Bown said, “but they loved Trish.”
Spouses of trans people came to her for advice. With most, she was gentle. But she had no patience for the spouses who complained, who worried what people would think of them if their partner came out, or who weren’t sure whether to stick with the relationship. To them, she’d say flatly, “Either you love the person or you don’t.”
Still, in a way, Trish herself stayed in the closet. As much as she loved Phyllis and as proud as she was of her, she continued to keep their relationship secret at work. She retired from Fort
Bend ISD in 2002 but soon regretted it, and jumped at a 20hour-a-week job teaching music to pre-K kids at a Methodist church. She loved working with the new age group. And once again, she worried that if she were outed as Phyllis’s wife, she could lose her job.
As Phyllis’ visibility increased, hiding their relationship became harder. Their rare fights involved Phyllis’s growing public profile. In 2010, one of Phyllis’s cases made the national media: Trans woman Nicki Arraguz Lloyd had been denied benefits after her firefighter husband died battling a blaze. That same year, Annise Parker — Houston’s first lesbian mayor and Phyllis’s old friend — appointed Phyllis as an associate municipal judge.
In some ways, that part-time job wasn’t a big deal. It would involve hearing parking tickets and performing courthouse weddings. But in another way, it was huge: Phyllis became the United States’ first openly trans judge — and most likely, the first openly trans judge in the world.
‘Our plan’
About 10 years ago, after Phyllis got a diganosis of myelodysplastic syndrome, a slow but serious form of blood cancer, she began cutting back on her work, closing up shop and shoring up her legacy. She donated her papers to Texas A&M’s Cushing Library. In 2018, Trish finally retired. They savored small stuff, the way that people do when time is running out. They watched birds at the feeder.
They spent time with Trish’s sister and her kids.
But it didn’t end the way they expected. “Our plan was for Trish to be the widow, not me,” Phyllis said.
Phyllis responded extraordinarily well to a new drug. And last year, Trish learned she had brain cancer.
The couple sold their Westbury house and moved to Brookdale, a West University Place assisted-living facility. Their new friends there quickly shut down the one man who treated Phyllis badly. Carole Willis, one of those new friends, stayed with Trish when Phyllis had to go out. “Everybody loved Trish,” Willis said. “Phyllis, too. But Trish was adorable!”
In the rough days after Trish died, calls from her many friends gave Phyllis some comfort. One, a teacher at the church where Trish taught, told Phyllis that actually, everyone there had known Trish was married to Phyllis. They just never told Trish they knew, or that they stood up for her when detractors said ugly things behind her back.
Phyllis loved hearing that. But mainly she was reeling. She hated “being stuck with this widowhood s---,” she said, and joked darkly that she was “doing pretty well,” that she’d had only a couple of drinks so far that morning.
She’d lost her best friend. Her wife of 48 years. The person who’d loved her even before either of them had the words to describe her. The woman who’d stood by her no matter what bile the rest of the world spewed.
For a long stretch of seconds, Phyllis, a world-class talker, was quiet.
Then at last her voice cracked: “I loved her so much.”