On the journey of Veronica Malone from being born Pete Malone, renowned swimming coach
Seemingly out of nowhere over the last few years, Veronica Malone has emerged as a prominent proponent of transgender rights locally.
Witness her leadership roles with PFLAG (Parents, Families and Friends of Lesbians and Gays) of Kansas City, for instance, and her promotion of the local chapter of GLSEN (the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network). You might find her speaking to the Olathe City Council about adopting nondiscrimination ordinances. Or speaking out against legislation in Jefferson City or Topeka that seeks to require high school students to play sports on teams based on their sex assigned at birth.
As one who considers herself an advocate, not an activist, she acknowledges that the matter of gender identity and sports is complicated. But she also believes solutions can be found if the mean-spirited and opportunistic politicizing were replaced by a spirit of fairness and inclusion of a vulnerable group — one that a 2017 National Institutes of Health report says is “exposed to widespread social stigma, discrimination, harassment, and physical and sexual abuse.”
To her, it’s all about watching out for and helping those “struggling with who they are or how they’re fitting in.”
That’s something to which she can relate.
Because she didn’t come from out of nowhere.
Building champions
Veronica Malone has gender-transitioned from the identity of Peter D. Malone, a giant in USA Swimming history who made an indelible contribution to the sport here by founding the Kansas City Blazers swim program and running it for 35 years.
And her journey was a long time in the making even as Malone was coaching multiple Olympic gold medalists (Janie Wagstaff in 1992; Catherine Fox, who had two golds, in 1996; Scott Goldblatt in 2004; and Shannon Vreeland in 2012), and being named one of the 25 most influential people in the history of USA Swimming.
In 2001, Malone was bestowed with the highest honor the organization awards, simply called the USA Swimming Award, and later inducted into the American Swimming Coaches Association Hall of Fame.
It wasn’t just Peter who achieved all that, she says.
“Without Veronica, I don’t think I would ever have been so successful,” said Malone, who prefers the pronouns “she” and “her.” “She was in me all the time.”
But that didn’t make Malone free to be what she now calls “authentic.”
“Maybe if I’d felt comfortable that I could (transition) and not have my career thrown to the sunders, I might have moved quicker,” she said in her home earlier this week. “But I didn’t see it happening in a smooth way.”
Not that it’s been entirely smooth, she knows. Particularly when it comes to a family she calls “the gold medals” of her life that she acknowledges still is working to process and reconcile this fundamental change.
That’s why she has not wanted to be a news story, per se, or to “lead parades.”
But she also has come to feel a duty to try to make a difference for those who might feel alone or ostracized as part of an estimated 0.6% of the U.S. population (approximately 1.4 million people as of 2016) that identifies as transgender.
And a responsibility to try to foster understanding in an effort to quell the fear and hate and suppression often inflicted by ignorance.
And to find the peace she has now that makes her finally feel like herself even while saying, “I co-exist with my past.”
Feeling trapped
As she thinks of it now, with therapy, the child born in 1949 felt the sensation of being trapped in the wrong body by her early teens.
It’s a concept well-explained in an important and moving story written by The Star’s Eric Adler in 2014, in which he quotes psychologist Laura Edwards-Leeper, who works with transgender children.
“We are talking about a subset of kids who are saying, ‘I am born in the wrong body. My body doesn’t match my brain. God made a mistake,’” Edwards-Leeper said then.
Malone made her first public appearance speaking of her transition in 2019, “A Conversation With Veronica Malone” as part of a speakers series at the University of Kansas Medical Center after being invited by a former Blazers swimmer, Larry Long, the assistant vice chancellor of student affairs.
At the time, she recalled actresses from the era, such as Donna Reed and Barbara Billingsley, and remembered thinking, “I want to be that; why can’t I be that?”
At her home on Wednesday, she thought of lying in bed back home in Ohio hoping to wake up the next morning as a girl. The boy would dream about it and come to feel pangs to be like the women from his neighborhood he admired for their compassion and strength and willingness to listen. But he tamped down the feeling because exactly what was a child raised in a traditional home of the times supposed to do about such a mysterious feeling?
“You kept telling yourself, ‘God doesn’t make mistakes,’” she said. “You look in the mirror, and you see this boy’s body, and everybody’s telling you you’re a good-looking male. Know what I mean? So who made a mistake?”
For decades, that vague sense of yearning bubbled dormant in the background.
Competing in Toledo for Ron Ballatore, who would go on to coach UCLA and Florida and become an icon of the sport, led Malone into a galaxy of the best minds of a generation of swimming as he became consumed with coaching.
But even leading a fulfilling family and professional life, sending swimmers to every U.S. Olympic trials from 1968-2012 and guiding numerous Olympians among an estimated 10,000 that Malone coached over the years, the feeling of being incomplete frequently hovered nearby.
So in the mid-1970s, she was struck by the news of tennis player Richard Raskind transitioning to Renee Richards and suing to play at the 1977 U.S. Open after undergoing sex-reassignment surgery.
More recently, she took inspiration from Caitlyn Jenner’s transition from Bruce Jenner: “Everything I heard sounded a lot like me,” she said in an email, noting she had met Jenner at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and always been an admirer. Her transition gave Malone confidence, she wrote, and helped her realize that she, too, could be a role model to help others “find their true self proudly.”
When she considers the pivot points along the way, the 1996 Atlanta Olympics represented a key moment. In the wake of Blazers’ protege Catherine Fox winning those two gold medals there, Malone became increasingly frustrated with USA Swimming leadership and tired and got to thinking about life after swimming and … “who am I?”
That included “wrestling with that I was jealous I wasn’t a woman.”
The more she looked in the mirror, the more she saw “this other person.” But she remained “afraid to unlock this suitcase, or unlock Veronica.”
The shattering death of Malone’s brother in 2001, though, also evoked a profound shift in perspective and urgency to “own the black line” of her life, borrowing from a term she used to use on swimmers to urge them to control their own race.
Increasing curiosity and online research led to April 1, 2005, which she considers her birthday as Veronica through several days at a workshop in Seattle (after a swim meet there) for people exploring becoming transgender.
Among other nuanced points learned there, the workshop also provided the basis for choosing the name Veronica, derived from a Latin term meaning “true image” and associated with “she who brings victory.”
“It had to be a name that, when people heard it, they only could see a woman,” she said. “It had to personify what I see in a woman. And I see women as strong. So (I wanted) something that to me demonstrated a strong name and expressed femininity, and the ‘V’ was for victory.”
‘Veronica was alive’
By the time Malone was announcing retirement in 2010 while also fighting a MRSA (bacterial) infection that would threaten Malone’s health for several years and render her immune system compromised, the transition was well underway through hormone treatments — but not surgeries (to this day).
“Veronica was alive by that time,” she said.
But despite feeling the walls coming down and feeling “much bigger and much fuller” by no longer pretending to be something she wasn’t, despite feeling it was easier to be Veronica than Peter, a different sort of transition was ahead: reconciling it with her family, a topic that it took her nearly two years to directly address with her daughters after telling her wife.
Inclined toward privacy over this intimate topic, her wife and daughters declined through her to comment for this column.
But suffice to say it has been difficult and complicated for all, something Malone wants understood for many reasons, including a point of appreciation for them.
“Don’t make it look like it was easy for them, because it wasn’t,” she said. “But they’d much rather have me be part of the family than not, and I’ve never shown any interest in being anywhere else but here.”
Her wife still grapples with it, she said, “and she will until I die.” And while Malone has felt no need to bury her own past, she wonders if it might have been easier for her wife to move forward if they’d held a funeral for Peter.
But she also believes her wife has come to understand her more and better and feels the same about their three daughters, all educators of whom she is deeply proud and parents now of nine grandchildren.
That wasn’t the only part of her life that changed, of course. It took years, but Malone also re-engaged with USA Swimming after being shunned as word of her transition murmured out in the first years after retirement.
“I felt very alone for a long time; nobody reached out to talk to me or looked for any understanding,” she said, noting she went from being a popular speaker around the country to being ignored, and adding, “I didn’t become instantly stupid. Everything I learned and everything I knew didn’t just go away …
“When that all dries up, it’s a little shocking.”
But in 2019, she was invited to speak at the USA Swimming LGBTQIA+ breakfast during the USA Swimming Convention in St. Louis. It was an emotional challenge to go, she said, and she recalls “some hard looks and comments in the halls.”
But for the most part, she was welcomed all around the convention and her talk about the “journey to victory” was so warmly received she’s been invited back for more.
Feeling whole
Midway up the staircase from her basement sits the 2001 USA Swimming Award in the name of Peter D. Malone.
It’s perhaps her most prized possession.
“I’m very proud of the life I lived as Peter,” she said. “And I’m very proud of the life I’m living as me.”
She knows everyone’s story, everyone’s journey, is their own, and understands that “a lot of people in our community” believe there is a need to put the past to rest as they ask others to accept them.
Meanwhile, she also respects the confusion that this momentous change might cause those who aren’t in that community even as she’ll keep working to try to dispel that.
As for herself, though, she’s never felt more whole than now as a person fully expressing her uniqueness, a 360-degree version of a soul that she once considered a 180.
And even if few might understand the feelings that led to this, perhaps many can understand what it might mean to find yourself.
“A lot of my transgender friends, they just block out their whole male existence (as if) you’ve got a dead name, and almost a dead life journey to that point,” she said. “But I felt my life journey was not worth closing the door on.
“That I’d learned a lot from it, and I thought I’d made a lot of differences, and how could I keep both but be myself?”
This story was originally published July 18, 2021 at 5:00 AM.