Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  Our relationship had been getting more sexual over the last few months, and I had the distinct impression that Claire liked it a lot more than I did. To be fair, I’d like it a lot better if I had the right equipment. We hadn’t gone “all the way,” but at this point we’d done a lot of other things, some working better than others since I had trouble connecting with my body. She’d been sexual with a couple of other people and said I was the least selfish guy she’d ever met, which I suppose was a compliment.

  Claire spun my desk chair around to face her and sat down on my lap. It would’ve been a lot easier to let her talk me into fooling around, but I had to have this conversation with her and if I waited, I was only going to feel worse.

  “Can we talk about something?” I asked.

  She ruffled my hair with her fingers. “Whatever pops up,” she quipped.

  I don’t know what expression I had on my face, but I suspect it was an echo of the crushing feeling in my chest because her eyes opened all the way and she stood up. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “What happened?”

  “Sit down,” I said, which was stupid because her eyes got even wider.

  She perched on the edge of the bed across from where I sat. “Are you sick?”

  “No,” I said quickly.

  “There’s someone else?” Those bright golden-green eyes narrowed.

  “No.”

  “You’re gay,” she declared, leaning back on her hands and kicking my shin lightly. “I knew it. Of all the luck.”

  “No. Claire, let me talk.”

  She sighed and flopped all the way back on her elbows. Claire had this fantastic mass of black hair that spilled down her back. I loved playing with it. Unfortunately, what she didn’t know was that half the time I was thinking about what it would be like to have hair like that. She complained about it a lot: how long it took to dry, how hard it was to keep it from frizzing out, what a pain it was to dye it goth-black when her natural color was a mousy brown, but she never made a move to cut it off. Lying back on the bed with her hair spread out behind her, she looked like a pixie with small bones and big eyes. I offered another quick prayer to anyone who was listening that she could understand what I was going to tell her. My brain kept coming up with things to say, but my mouth wouldn’t cooperate because everything sounded so idiotic.

  “You’re sure you’re not gay?” she asked while I struggled. “I mean, it’s okay if you are, though I’ll be upset ’cause I like fooling around with you.”

  “I like girls,” I said through my constricted throat.

  “And me in particular?” she asked. “Did you screw around on me?”

  “No, again no, give me a minute.” I couldn’t breathe, but now that I’d gone this far, I had to keep going.

  “Chris, you’re kind of creeping me out here,” she said, but then stared up at the ceiling. “I’m shutting up.”

  Time stretched into an infinite plane. I thought about running, standing up and going for the car, driving until I got to Minneapolis and never coming back. Then I considered telling her I was gay after all, but I’d lose her and gain nothing. It wasn’t too late, I told myself, just jump her, she’ll eventually forget the whole thing. But she wouldn’t. Claire was not only smart, but she remembered entire conversations weeks after they happened. You could not get anything by her.

  Claire sat up straight again and opened her mouth. I didn’t want to have to bat down another false guess.

  “I’m a girl,” I blurted. It wasn’t the elegant explanation I’d intended, but I had to start somewhere. As soon as I said it, I blushed and couldn’t look her in the eye, so I stared at the left side of her jaw.

  Claire cocked her head and blinked at me, her eyebrows drawing close to each other. Her mouth opened and closed and opened again.

  “What?” she said with a sideways shake of her head.

  The iron fist in my throat eased now that I’d started. “Ever since I was a kid I’ve known I was a girl,” I said. “But I got stuck with this body. I thought God made a mistake, and I kept waiting for Him to fix it.” I ran my hands down the front of my chest. “This isn’t who I am.”

  Her face was white enough that I worried she was going to faint, but she reached toward me and laid one hand alongside my cheek. Then she traced her thumb down the line of my nose and across my lips. She put her fingertips between my collarbones and ran them down to my sternum.

  “How?” she asked.

  I didn’t know if she was asking how I knew or how I planned to fix it, but I wanted to answer that first question, so I did.

  “When I was about seven, Grandma Em sent me a set of books for Christmas,” I began.

  I told her how the set included The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, The Marvelous Land of Oz, and especially Ozma of Oz. The first book was cool, Mom rented the movie and we watched it, but the second and third were a revelation. In them a young boy, Tip, escapes a wicked witch and goes off on an adventure to find the missing Princess Ozma. At the end of The Marvelous Land of Oz it’s revealed that Tip is Ozma—that the princess had been bewitched into a boy’s body and now would be restored to her rightful self.

  I told Claire how the first time I read that scene an electric shock traveled from the hair at the very top of my head down to the soles of my feet. In the scene, Glinda asked the witch, “What did you do with the girl?”

  And the witch said, “I enchanted her…I transformed her—into—into a boy!”

  At first Tip protests but Glinda says very gently, “But you were born a girl, and also a Princess; so you must resume your proper form, that you may become Queen of Emerald City.”

  Claire listened, mouth half open, as I said how I’d read the scene over and over again. How I’d searched everywhere in my life for the magic to turn me back into my rightful self. I knew I was born a girl, and I wanted so badly to resume my proper form as Ozma had. Claire closed her mouth and her eyes turned down at the corners.

  “How old were you again?” she asked.

  “Seven or eight,” I said. “But I knew I was a girl before that. In kindergarten, I kept lining up with the girls when it was time to come in from recess and the teacher would make me go over and get in line with the boys. Before I was five it didn’t really matter if you were a boy or a girl, but as soon as we started getting divided up, I knew I should be with the girls.”

  “So what…what happened next?” she asked.

  “I tried harder to be a boy,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d just missed something, that maybe everyone has to work at it, so I had Dad teach me about cars, and I went out for the swim team, and I hung out with guys and did what they did. And after about six years of that I started to think that I’d become a very good fake.”

  “But you’re one of the sweetest guys I know,” she said. “I always thought you might be gay. You’re so…” She trailed off.

  “What?”

  “…different from the other guys,” she finished. “I mean, there’s the cars and the swimming and stuff, and you look like a really cute guy, and your parts work—” She gestured at my crotch, causing me to reflexively cross my legs. “But you don’t talk like a guy. At least not when we’re alone.”

  “Talk like a guy?” I asked.

  “I don’t know how to describe it, but it’s different. The only time you really talk like a guy is when you’re mad, otherwise it’s a little like talking to my girlfriends.” She pressed the heel of one hand to her temple. “I think my brain is scrambling.”

  She stood up from the bed and moved into the open part of her room, between bed and closet. I watched her gaze travel up and down my body a few times.

  “It doesn’t make any sense,” she said, shaking her head. “I don’t understand how you can be that way.”

  “There are some good websites that explain it,” I said and wrote a few on the pad of paper by her computer.

  “How are you going to be able to live like that?” she asked.

  “What?”


  “It’s not like you can turn into a girl or anything.”

  Her voice sounded distant and she was still standing across the room, away from me. How upset was she? Was she in shock or was she taking this relatively well? I couldn’t afford to let myself hope and so my answer came out harsher than I intended. “I can get a sex change,” I said, the words hanging in the air like icicles.

  “You’re kind of tall for a girl.”

  I stood up. “I should probably go.” I wanted her to contradict me and tell me to stay. I needed to know she was going to be okay with this revelation.

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ll see you at school tomorrow.”

  My heart clenched. I went into the living room and put on my boots and coat. She followed and watched me.

  “Does this mean we’re going to split up?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  Claire’s face was still paler than usual and at first she only stared, as if I hadn’t been speaking in English. “What?” she asked.

  “Are we going to split up?”

  “Chris, don’t ask me that. I don’t know.” She sounded angry, each word bitten short.

  “Well tell me when you make up your mind,” I said and stepped through the door into the freezing air.

  By the time I’d started the car and driven halfway to my house I wanted to turn around and take that back, but I was afraid I’d find her still standing in the living room and staring after me in shock.

  When I got home I had no appetite, so I told Mom I didn’t feel well and I was going to bed early. Up in my room I set my alarm for four a.m. and then lay down and stared at the ceiling. The conversation with Claire played over again in my head until I finally fell asleep.

  Chapter Three

  Claire

  After she did the dinner dishes, Claire wandered around the house twice before settling into her room. She sat at her desk, fingertips tracing the website addresses Chris had written in her notebook. Chris thinks he’s a girl, sounded in her brain like a gong that rang and echoed and rang again. Chris thinks he’s a girl. How should she feel about that? How did she feel? When he’d told her, she’d been angry, and then sad for herself. But as he talked about it, he’d looked so relieved that all her own feelings kept turning into guilt.

  Most of the time he was so sad or angry or under a dark cloud, and this afternoon as he talked to her, his eyes lit up from deep within. For a moment, telling the story about Ozma, he’d relaxed in a way she’d never seen before. She couldn’t begrudge him those feelings, but the whole situation was so awfully bizarre.

  Could she ever stop thinking of him as “him,” she wondered? The idea made her brain ache and tilt sickeningly sideways, until she put one hand on either side of her face to try to hold her mind still. There had to be answers. Chris had left her these website addresses for a reason. If her Mom saw, she’d wonder why Claire was reading those sites, but she’d already visited gay, lesbian and bi teen sites, and Mom would never suspect Chris was…whatever Chris was. Plus Claire could say it was for a school project or something.

  Her mom knocked on her door, waited for Claire to say “Yeah?” and opened it.

  “Want to watch CSI?” she asked.

  Her mom had dyed her light brown hair to a dark blond and it still seemed weird to Claire. Maybe her own black-dyed hair seemed as strange to her mom. Beyond their clashing hair colors, they looked too much alike: round faces, slight dimples, hazel eyes.

  Claire forced a smile. “I’ve got a lot of homework.”

  With a resigned nod, her mom went back into the living room. She must’ve been feeling lonely again. Mom’s last boyfriend had been a dud and they’d split up before the holidays.

  Claire called up the websites and read until her eyes burned and all the tiny muscles around them ached. When she squeezed her eyes shut, her eyeballs wanted to drop backward into her skull.

  First, it turned out that genetics weren’t the final word on whether a baby was a boy or a girl. Based on two weeks of sex ed in junior high, Claire had thought everyone with XX chromosomes became a woman, and XY meant you were a man. But because of the way hormones, genes and other factors combined, babies with XX genes could turn out male or somewhere in between, and the same was true for XY. Some people were even born with both XX and XY chromosomes, or XXY, XYY, or in very rare cases, XXYY.

  Plus people didn’t begin as boys or girls. In the womb, all bodies started out very similar and then moved toward boy or girl or combined characteristics from both. Sex and gender were so complicated that no one had yet pinpointed why some people were transgender and others weren’t.

  Transgender. That was the word Chris had written at the top of the page of website addresses. “Trans” from the root for “across, over, beyond.” Meaning Chris thought he could cross from one gender to another. Could he?

  Claire had been staring at web pages for so long that the words danced on the screen. Rubbing her eyes, she minimized her browser and logged into World of Warcraft.

  From the login screen, her character gazed back at her: a human paladin with very black hair and light brown skin. When the Burning Crusade expansion came out a year ago, she’d tried making paladins of the newly available races: aliens and elves. The alien females resembled tall women with big boobs and bigger butts, and the skinny elves appeared breakable. Claire had gone back to her trusty human.

  Chris had created a statuesque alien, female priest. Claire remembered teasing him, saying, “You just want to look at her butt and boobs.”

  And Chris had replied, “Sure,” in that distant, uncommitted tone he used most of the time.

  “Do you wish I looked like that?” she’d asked.

  “You are kind of short,” he’d said, flashing her a thin smile because all the aliens were seven feet tall or more.

  He’d changed the topic quickly after that and Claire had spent weeks studying the other girls in school, worrying that he wanted someone with more curves, with a bigger chest.

  But maybe he didn’t want to be with someone who looked like that. Maybe he wanted to look like that?

  She selected his priest, Thalia. Despite her considerable chest and the fact that there were dozens of skimpy outfit choices for the alien women, Chris had dressed her in a demure robe.

  He hadn’t made her so he could stare at her boobs. He’d made her to imagine himself like that.

  Claire switched to staring at Chris’s main character, Amalia the mage. She’d never realized how much Amalia resembled Chris, with curly brown hair and brown eyes, thin lips and a cute, narrow nose. This was how Chris saw himself? How did he know how he was supposed to be?

  She went back to her web pages, to the studies she’d found about transgender people, searching for ones about trans women. That’s what Chris would be, because he wanted to be, or was, a woman.

  Two studies performed on the brains of transgender and nontransgender people had found that an area in the brain of trans women was the same size as that area in the brains of the women in the study who weren’t transgender. In men the area was bigger.

  Other studies about gender found differences in brain structures and even the way parts of the brain were linked together. In some, trans women’s brains looked just like other women and in some trans women had distinct brain structures—but Claire didn’t find any that said that trans women had brains like men.

  Was it possible that Chris had been born with a girl’s brain but his body developed male? All this time he’d been perceiving himself as a girl when everyone else naturally assumed he was a guy. How weird would that feel?

  Claire put her fingers to her temples and rubbed her sore head. Maybe she could find out how weird it felt. She logged back into World of Warcraft and clicked the “new character” button to make a human male version of herself. But she kept getting distracted by picking hair or a face that looked attractive to her, rather than like her. No facial hair because that seemed like it would itch, black hair, pale skin. She named him �
��Klahr.”

  He appeared in the human start zone, picked up a quest and went to kill some marauding wolves. She’d played as a male character before, but always a nonhuman and she didn’t think of the character as being her: more like being in a really great Halloween costume. She tried to think of Klahr as her, but his clunky run and the top-heavy way he swung his mace felt off-balance. Plus he had no waist at all. He was a total brick.

  She couldn’t imagine having to play him all the time. What if she was only allowed one character and that was it? What if she had to go around in that brick-like body all the time? It would be time to find a better game.

  She deleted him.

  She went into the kitchen and refilled her glass. Her mom had gone to bed hours ago. The ruddy clock figures on the microwave read: 2:13.

  To bed soon, just not yet.

  More searching, more numbers and studies. Being transgender was not as rare as she first thought. In the US about 0.6 percent of people identified as transgender. And some surveys said if you included all gender nonconforming people, that number went above 1 percent, more than one in every hundred people. That meant there were millions of people like Chris in the world.

  But she didn’t want Chris to be a woman. She liked him as Chris, maybe a Chris who wasn’t sad as he was now, but still the guy she knew. It made her feel sick to think about any guy turning into a woman, let alone her boyfriend. There were men and there were women and you couldn’t go from one to the other.

  It seemed unnatural. But when she’d started to wonder if she was attracted to girls as well as boys, she’d heard plenty from people who found that unnatural. To her it only made sense to like whomever she liked and not bother about what gender they were. Was it any different with Chris?

  Sure it is, the back of her mind said. We’re talking about changing his whole body. Guys don’t just turn into girls, the world isn’t set up that way.

  Claire couldn’t even understand how it was done medically and wasn’t sure she wanted to know. In the articles online, there were references to surgery and often multiple surgeries. How could it be right to change like that if it involved all that medical intervention? Didn’t that point to the unnatural craziness of it all? Who needed to take a perfectly good working body and turn it into something else?