Wally Bacon, a popular professor at Nebraska for 29 years, returns from summer vacation as a woman. On the first day of classes this fall, W. Meredith Bacon walked carefully down the aisle of a large lecture hall at the University of Nebraska here, carrying copies of the course syllabus in her tan briefcase.

It was a walk she had made many times before, but this time she was nervous. She stood before the students in her khaki slacks and short-sleeved green blouse, wearing a single strand of pearls under her collar-length gray hair. It was the first class she would teach as a woman.

After outlining the course requirements, Ms. Bacon acknowledged that many of the students knew her as Wally just the semester before. Over his 29 years in the political-science department, Wally Bacon had become one of the most popular professors among undergraduates on the campus. Some "Wally groupies" took more than a half-dozen of the professor's international-relations courses, and he was an informal adviser and mentor to many.

Now Ms. Bacon wanted to reassure the students about Wally's disappearance. "I have undergone some fairly dramatic changes this summer," Ms. Bacon recalls telling the 30 undergraduates, before offering copies of a student-newspaper article about her transformation. "If you have questions," she told them, "stay here after class and I'll answer them."

No one had any questions.

There are no reliable figures on how many people in the United States identify with the opposite gender, and how many of them undergo a sex change. Psychiatrists estimate that one in 30,000 men suffer from transgendered feelings, but groups representing transgendered people say more like one in 300 to 500 men and boys experience "intense transexualism," with about one in 2,500 having undergone genital surgery.

Lynn Conway, who had a sex change nearly 40 years ago and is a professor emerita of engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, has done a detailed study of transsexualism in academe, and she says it is not as rare as people might think.

"Every really large university has at least a handful of students in transition at any point in time," she estimates, "and perhaps a dozen or more transitioned women and men on their faculty and staff, most of the time unbeknownst to their universities."

Ms. Bacon's well-orchestrated transformation from Wally to Meredith could be a road map for others. In an eight-page letter last fall to a handful of colleagues, the professor explained his dramatic decision to become a woman. The letter, complete with footnotes and a bibliography, was so graphic that it made some people cringe. But it also managed to address most people's concerns by presenting the transformation as a poignant but rational decision. And it noted that Lynne Bacon, Wally Bacon's spouse of 37 years, would stand by him even after he became a woman.

"This was a very careful and calculated plan," says the professor. She and Lynne didn't want the revelation to simply raise more questions: "We thought we had to be honest about the most private parts of our lives."

Little Fallout

In an interview at the couple's sprawling ranch-style home in late August, Meredith Bacon recalls how she walked upstairs to the offices of the political-science department after teaching her first class as a woman. Her colleagues swarmed around her, waiting to hear how the students had reacted. They had taken the news in stride, she reported.

Even now, a month after the start of classes, just a few undergraduates have apparently been upset enough to withdraw from Professor Bacon's three courses. Some have acknowledged snickering about the situation or calling home to talk about it with their parents, but not a single one has complained to the university.
Jody Neathery-Castro, an associate professor of political science, says "the silence has been deafening." After all, this is Nebraska -- a red state that in 2000 voted to approve one of the country's broadest bans on gay marriage. "We expected a big negative fallout," says Ms. Neathery-Castro. "But that hasn't happened."

The change has been hard, however, on some of Ms. Bacon's colleagues in the political-science department. Joong-Gun Chung acknowledges feeling "total shock and disbelief." At first he was worried about what it would mean for the department's image. He has felt reassured after none of his 200 students this fall mentioned the issue. But for him the transformation will take some getting used to.

"I've been calling Bacon 'he' for 30 years," says Mr. Chung. "It is very hard to change that."

Accommodations Made

The university's administration has been supportive. Nancy Belck, Omaha's chancellor, hugged Wally Bacon last year after learning of his plans, and issued a statement saying the university would not tolerate "any form of discrimination." The university designated a gender-neutral restroom for Ms. Bacon to use, at least until her surgeries are complete.

Why has the university been so accommodating? It probably doesn't hurt that Wally Bacon was one of the most prominent professors on the campus and was serving as president of the Faculty Senate when he announced his decision to change gender.

Businesses are more likely than colleges to protect employees from discrimination based on their gender identity. According to the Human Rights Campaign, an advocacy group for gay, transgendered, and bisexual people, 73 companies on the Fortune 500 do so, compared with 37 universities. On the other hand, few workers outside academe enjoy the kind of job protection that tenure bestows.

Some untenured employees who have tried to make the transition from male to female on campuses have been less successful than Ms. Bacon. Robert Blanchette, who worked as a computer programmer at Saint Anselm College, in Manchester, N.H., for seven years, sued it in April, charging officials with discrimination for firing him shortly after he informed them that he planned to become Sarah.

And at a small college in Indiana, a young art professor has decided to leave after his decision to disclose his sex-change plans to the college's president backfired. He says the president voiced her support but warned him that he would lose his job. The tenure-track professor, who is looking for a new position and asked that he and his institution remain anonymous, says one college official told him, "You have the potential of costing us hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars" from donors who might disapprove.

Even professors who have transitioned successfully from one sex to the other have not been quite as open as Ms. Bacon. Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College, announced her intention to change from male to female four years ago, then took a yearlong sabbatical, during which she had various surgeries. By the time she returned to class, a year later, her physical transformation was complete.

Ms. Bacon, by contrast, is making the switch right in front of her students. Although she won't have what she refers to as "bottom surgery" until next summer, she changed her name from Walter Meredith Bacon Jr. to W. Meredith Bacon last June, and prefers to be referred to as "she." The professor is halfway through a series of facial surgeries and electrolysis sessions, and plans to get breast implants in December.

Ms. Boylan, author of She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders (Doubleday/Broadway, 2003), says Ms. Bacon was smart to warn administrators and colleagues well in advance of the changes. "Typically, when you hear about people losing their jobs, it is because they show up one day wearing a prom dress and saying, 'From now on, my name is Tiffany Chiffon.'"

Students who learn that their professor is changing genders might expect "someone to waltz into the classroom wearing sequins," says Ms. Boylan. "But if what they see is a respected scholar who looks more or less like other women, very quickly we get on with the business of education as usual."

Students, she says, don't really care much about professors' personal lives: "What they want to know is, Does Professor Boylan know anything? Can she help me learn what I need to know about English?"

Focused on Work

As a boy growing up in Manhattan, Wally Bacon preferred drama and dance to football, and his best friends were girls. He sometimes dressed in female clothing when his parents and sister weren't around, and he repeatedly asked his mother and father if they wished he were a girl.

He met his wife, Lynne, when the two were undergraduates at Colorado College. He thought marrying her would "cure" him of feeling like a woman stuck in a man's body. A few years after their marriage, in 1968, Wally revealed his feelings to his wife.

Still, the couple didn't talk much about it. Instead they buried themselves in their work. Lynne Bacon teaches Spanish and French at a Roman Catholic boys' school, and Wally Bacon is a specialist on Romania and Moldova at the university, having studied Romanian diplomatic history and the political economy and leadership of the two countries. Between them the Bacons speak nine languages.

From 1990 to 2003, the professor took 18 trips to Romania and Moldova, sometimes with his wife. Their comfortable home in Omaha is filled with trinkets from their travels: perfume bottles and intricately painted eggs from Romania, and a Tibetan silk wall hanging.

Early on the couple made a decision to have no children, says Professor Bacon, "because I'm transgendered, and children are too important to have them affected by what their parents do or do not do." But they did take in several foster children and frequently threw parties for students, friends, and colleagues around the swimming pool in their lush backyard. The Bacons are longtime members of All Saints Episcopal Church here, where Lynne is an ordained deacon and the couple play in the bell choir.

It wasn't until Wally Bacon began to sink into a deep depression in the late 1990s -- and even contemplated suicide -- that he saw a therapist about feeling transgendered. A few years ago, when he actually began to consider becoming a woman, he decided to wait until both he and Lynne retired. He was worried about how such a transition would affect their jobs. And he must have realized that the transition would not be easy: He was 6-foot-3, with broad shoulders and large hands. Not to mention, as he puts it, as "bald as a billiard ball."

Two years ago he started attending national meetings of transgendered people, who identify with the opposite sex, and transsexuals, who have made the change. There he met professors and others who encouraged him to come out. He even began doing surveys on the political views of transgendered people and has a book in the works, tentatively titled "The Politics of Transgender Identity."

Ms. Bacon says now that she considers her decision to change genders at age 59 "the most selfish, self-centered thing I've ever done." But it is also "the first time I've been completely happy."

Lynne, on the other hand, is mourning the loss of Wally. But she has also been counseling her spouse on her new female look, and the couple have gradually been discarding Wally's considerable wardrobe. In May they threw a "tie one on with Meredith" party, distributing Wally's 150 ties to the revelers. "I collected clothing -- nice designer suits and sports coats -- to prove I was really a guy," the professor explains.

Although a large, wooden bowl in the Bacons' family room overflows with cards from well-wishers, the transition has cost Lynne one longtime female friend. One night last spring, the two had a blowup at the Bacons' home. The friend pushed Wally into the backyard pool, and Lynne ended up slapping her, twice.

Some of the professor's new transgendered friends warned her about the trouble she would face. "A lot of people told me to move or get a handgun," says Ms. Bacon. "But I love this city."

Student Concerns

Some of the freshmen in Ms. Bacon's international-relations course acknowledge that at first they were bothered. "I'm from Liberia, and I've never encountered such things," says Emily Myers. "During the first day, I was distracted. I found myself calling my sister. But I got over it because Professor Bacon really is a great teacher."
Some undergraduates told The Chronicle that they knew one or two students who had dropped Ms. Bacon's courses because they were offended, but a reporter could not track those students down. Damond Jackson, a junior in Ms. Bacon's course on minority politics, says a student he didn't know came up to him after the first day of class and called the professor a "freak," asking, "Can you believe this s___?" That student, says Mr. Jackson, has not been back.

Those situations, however, have been rare. Most students who spoke to a reporter said they decided after a class or two that it didn't matter whether Professor Bacon was male or female.

"I was afraid that I would start laughing the first day, but it was very comfortable," says Katie Surface, a senior who took five courses with Wally and is taking one this semester with Meredith on the politics of east-central Eurasia. "Dr. Bacon is probably the best professor on this campus. It's just his intelligence -- sorry, her intelligence. She's still Dr. Bacon."

While Ms. Surface says the change has made the professor "a lot less intimidating," it has also been confusing. "Do I treat you like one of the girls and say, 'Oh, you look really cute in that?' Or do I treat you like a professor?" wonders Ms. Surface, who works in a clothing store and has considered offering to help the professor "look more like a girl."

Steve Kingston, a senior who took several courses with Wally Bacon, says he doesn't know yet whether he will continue to banter with the professor. "I used to make comments on his suits, but now, if I do, how is that going to be construed?" he asks. "I don't know if I'll say something that would offend Meredith."

During classes Ms. Bacon isn't shy about making references to her transformation, although sometimes even she seems to forget. In her class on central Eurasia one morning in late August, she lectured about the change from a socialist to a capitalist market economy. "I'm an economic conservative," she explained, "and as I get older, I get more unwilling to accept tremendous change."

A ripple of laughter spread through the classroom before the professor caught herself. "Oops," she said. "I guess that sounds a little strange coming from me."

 

By ROBIN WILSON
Omaha