Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  Who did I want to be like when I grew up? Natalie, I thought, or any of a dozen people I’d met on GenderPeace. Or Tammy Baldwin, the State Rep. from Wisconsin who had the guts to be an out lesbian in the US Congress; she was great. Or any woman politician or scientist, or those running big technology companies… Oh, right, those aren’t men. Think.

  How about Joan Roughgarden the biologist? I’d loved reading Evolution’s Rainbow and learning about how diverse sexuality and gender could be on our planet. Maybe Mae Jemison who was the first African American woman astronaut to travel in space and she got to be on Star Trek. Or Dr. Ellen Ochoa, Director of the Johnson Space Center, she’d been to space four times. What about Susan Kimberly, the former St. Paul City Council member who transitioned and went right back to being in politics? Nope, being born with a “male” body and having the guts to transition to be yourself wasn’t going to count for Dr. Webber’s quiz.

  “Mr. Cooper, my psych teacher, he’s cool,” I said, thinking, crap, that assignment is due tomorrow.

  “What do you like about him?”

  This was the stupidest game, but I had to go on playing it for the next forty minutes. “He’s smart and educated and he usually listens to the students.” That last part was thrown in for Dr. Webber’s benefit, but he didn’t seem to get the hint.

  He popped another mint and again offered them to me. I shook my head.

  “Good, Chris, so you’d like to be a man who is smart and educated. Do you want children?”

  I shrugged. “Maybe.” I glanced at the clock on the wall. What I wanted was to carry my own children… I couldn’t even stand to think about it in front of this jerk. I stood up and paced across the room.

  “You’re afraid if you have children, you’ll hurt them, aren’t you?”

  “Sure,” I said, thinking, You absolute dumb ass. I didn’t want to talk about having children, so I went back to brainstorming other male role models and letting him pick out the qualities of the man he thought I should grow into.

  In the car with Mom on the way home I told her, “I don’t want to go to Dr. Webber anymore. It’s not helping.”

  “But you seem happier,” she said.

  I hadn’t thought about the effect that talking to Claire and meeting Natalie had on me, and that Mom connected that positivity to me seeing the shrink. Damn. I’d have to go again. Maybe I could fake an illness next Thursday.

  At home I automated my dinner table conversation.

  /run: dinner with the family

  1. smile

  2. listen politely

  3. look bored appropriate to normal teenager

  4. talk about math class

  5. ask Dad about the Bronco

  6. smile

  7. get Mikey talking about comic books

  8. exit

  I excused myself as soon as I could, saying I had to finish my psych paper. I pulled out a notebook and a pen and wrote so hard the tip tore through the paper in places:

  “If I woke up as a girl I’d have my own kids, and I’d let them grow up to be whatever they wanted. I’d get pregnant and carry them in my own body. I’d get a period like a normal girl. I’d be able to go through labor and nurse my own babies. I’d be able to be a mother.”

  At that point I was crying so hard I couldn’t write anymore. I tore the sheet out of the notebook and ripped it up until I couldn’t make the pieces any smaller. Then I threw the notebook across the room and crawled into bed, curling up as small as possible and crying myself to sleep.

  * * *

  On Friday, the essay I turned in to psych class bore no resemblance to what I’d written the night before. After school, Claire told me that her mom was out on a date again and did I want to come over? I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I felt like I could sleep for a week.

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You look like crap,” she told me while we were eating a pizza in front of the TV. “What happened?”

  “A bunch of stuff. Stupid Dr. Webber…and I have to keep going because Mom thinks that’s making me happier, and then that dumb psych assignment. What if I woke up as a girl? Geez.”

  “Harsh,” Claire said. “You know what you need?”

  “What?” I mumbled. If she wanted to make out for a while I could probably pull it off. The physical contact would do me good.

  “A hot bath.”

  “For real?”

  “Totally.”

  When we finished the pizza and NCIS, she started filling the tub and dumped in some bath salts.

  “Take as long as you want,” she said. “You can use my soap and loofah and stuff. I’ll be gaming. Vaorlea the Mighty is close to leveling, and then I can finally get out of that stupid zone.”

  “This whole bath thing is so I’ll leave you alone so you can game, isn’t it?” I asked. It wasn’t a serious question. Claire had plenty of gaming time anyway. Her mom always assumed that being alone in her bedroom meant she was reading or doing homework.

  “Whatever you say, honey,” she said with a wink as she closed the bathroom door behind her. She was too sweet.

  I shucked my clothes and lowered myself into the steaming water. I took baths sometimes when I had the house to myself. Mom’s bathroom was the only one with a tub, and I was afraid I’d give myself away if I took too many lingering baths. Plus at my house we didn’t have all this cool stuff: exfoliating facial scrub, a loofah, bath salts.

  I soaked for a while and then took up Claire’s razor to do away with the new growth of fuzz on my arms and legs. If I could’ve thought of a good cover story, I might have stopped shaving my arms, but since the going belief was that I shaved everything to cut drag in the water, I had to keep it all up or let it all go. I was not going to let that hair grow back on my legs or my chest. Most of the swim team guys stopped shaving when the season ended. Okay, except for me they all did. But they left me alone about it.

  All smooth, I drained out the hairy, dirty water and filled the tub again with clean, hot water. I put my head back and soaked longer. Then I tucked what Claire calls my “boy parts” down between my legs and had a good look at myself.

  Yeah, I looked like a boy all right, but when I squinted I saw how I could’ve looked. I had good long legs and, if I kept weight off, a flat stomach. Still no waist to speak of. Claire had this cute little waist that I could almost wrap my hands around, which made me feel monstrous. I wondered if she’d trade my waist for hers.

  She tapped on the door. “Hey Little Mermaid, how’s it going?”

  I untucked and sat up. “Come on in.”

  She opened the door and stuck her head in. “I wanted to warn you that we’re approaching the earliest time Mom could return home if the date wasn’t that interesting.”

  “Oh thanks.” I opened the drain and let the water start to run out.

  “You look cute,” Claire added and closed the door again.

  A few times in the past, she’d climbed into the tub with me, and I wondered why she didn’t now. Probably because her mom could come home. But it worried me. She still kissed me and touched me in that slightly possessive girlfriend way when we hung out together, but she hadn’t tried to initiate anything longer or more intimate.

  We used to make out at least once a week and if we knew we had an evening to ourselves, go further than that. She seemed to really like kissing and wasn’t that self-conscious about taking her clothes off. Often she’d end up mostly undressed and somehow I’d still have my jeans on. It was easier to be sexual without the constant reminder that my body wasn’t right.

  And Claire had rarely pushed me about that even though she initiated our times together. How had she explained that to herself? Had she assumed I was pathologically shy about my parts? Now that I thought about it, that was a pretty good explanation.

  In the last few weeks, she hadn’t really tried anything—not since that night she hopped into my lap before I came out to her. What would happen to us if she wasn’t attracted to me anymore? I was
already cold when I stood up from the bath and toweled off quickly. She never would have put me in the bath by myself before.

  I pulled on my clothes and left the bathroom intending to ask her. She was on the couch with another episode of NCIS cued up and a bowl of popcorn. She patted the seat next to her and my momentum dissolved. I didn’t want to have a long emotional talk about our relationship. This was comfortable.

  When I sat next to her, she put the popcorn bowl in my lap and leaned against my shoulder. I gazed down at the top of her black hair and wondered, was our relationship changing as I changed?

  * * *

  The first sign of a bad week was that I got my psych paper back on Tuesday with a “C” on it and a note that said “See me.” I thought about bolting for my car, but this meeting was inevitable. I waited until the end of the day, so there wouldn’t be other students around in case Mr. Cooper was going to say something embarrassing.

  He sat at his desk sorting papers, so I knocked on the open door. Glancing up, he ran a hand through his hair, which made it messier. Pink windburn still shone on his cheeks and two of the knuckles on his right hand were cracked from dryness. I didn’t know his story, but he was clearly not from Minnesota. If I hadn’t been freaked out about the paper assignment, I’d have recommended he get some Corn Huskers lotion like Dad used.

  “Ah, Chris, come on in. I thought you might be avoiding me.”

  I stepped up to the front of the desk. “You wanted to see me.”

  “About your paper. I was surprised. It showed a real lack of imagination,” he said. He tapped the paper in front of him with a long, blunt finger even though it wasn’t mine. “That’s not like you. And the end was pretty dark. Do you have a problem with women?”

  “No,” I said.

  “But you can’t imagine yourself as a woman.” It was a question delivered as a statement.

  I shrugged.

  He picked up notepad and flipped pages filled with his blocky handwriting until he got to whatever note he’d made about my paper. He read a few sentences silently to himself.

  “At the end of your paper, it sounded like you think that no one notices you. Do you struggle with low self-esteem?”

  I shrugged again.

  “Chris,” he said. “You’re one of my smarter students. You have the potential to be very good with people. If there’s something bothering you or you’re in some kind of trouble at home…”

  “Mom has me seeing a shrink,” I said. “And I’ve been doing better the last few weeks.”

  “Good, good. Now, do the paper over again and apply yourself, and let me know if there’s anything else you need.”

  He stood up and held out his hand to shake. He was taller than me by a couple inches, which I didn’t notice when I was in my seat. I thought we were the same height.

  “Lotion,” I told him.

  “What?”

  “Your knuckle is bleeding.”

  While he studied the back of his hand, I backed out the door. Do the paper again? He had to be kidding me. I wasn’t one for cheating, but this was one assignment I was going to hand over to Claire wholesale. She’d swap me for help on her geometry homework.

  If I hadn’t been so rattled by the thing with Mr. Cooper on Tuesday I might have checked my psych class schedule and realized that I’d planned to skip Wednesday’s class.

  This was the day we had the guest speakers from an organization called OutFront Minnesota representing the LGBTQ community. As it turned out, we got one gay and one lesbian. Probably good because if we got the “T” from that acronym, I didn’t know what I’d do.

  Our guest speakers had guts to drive out into the boonies and talk to a bunch of high school kids about, as Mom archaically put it, “alternative lifestyles.” They were also talking to a senior history class and someone’s social studies class. We were right in the middle and our class was combined with a second history class, which was how another twenty students, including Claire, got crammed into our room. Like a secret agent, she winked at me and then sat down across the room and ignored me completely, earning my profound gratitude.

  I already knew all sorts of stuff about being gay, lesbian or bi because a lot of the transgender resource pages I looked at were on LGBTQ sites. Plus I liked girls, which meant I was going to end up as a lesbian at some point in my life. So I settled in to listen, but practiced my deeply bored face.

  Most of the kids in the class had boring questions, so the bored look wasn’t hard to come by. “What do you think about the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality?” “Do you plan to have kids?” “Are you scared of getting AIDS?” “When did you know?” “How did you know?” etc.

  The speakers were better than I expected. The woman worked as a marketing person for a big corporation, and the guy designed and built furniture, which I thought was neat. Thank goodness he wasn’t a hairstylist. He was awfully pretty for a furniture builder, though; it might have been better if he hadn’t cleaned up so well for this event. His hair was shaved on the sides, longish and curly on top, with the tips dyed a golden color, a few shades lighter than his skin. His neatly trimmed beard and round glasses made him look smart except when he grinned. He had a dorky, too-big grin, but it made me like him more anyway. He wore khakis and a button-down shirt, but no tie, and the woman wore gray slacks with a burgundy sweater that I wanted to touch to feel if it was as soft as it looked. Her blond hair fell past her shoulders. I think someone at the LGBTQ Center picked out a feminine lesbian and a butch gay man just to say: See, we’re not all stereotypes.

  I listened more intently to the questions than the answers, because of the crucial importance of knowing my classmates’ various stands on queerness, and by association, gender diversity.

  “Don’t you wish you’d just been born a woman?” one of the girls asked the man. I braced my hands against my desk so I wouldn’t lean forward.

  “Not really,” he said. “I have no desire to be a woman. Being attracted to men and being a woman are two very different things.”

  My face felt like the surface of the sun. I prayed it didn’t look that red.

  “I think your teacher has been talking to you about this,” he said as he stood and went for a piece of chalk. He wrote “sexual orientation” across the board and below it “gender identity.”

  “These are two different things and they don’t go together. Sexual orientation is what makes you straight or gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer. Gender identity is what has you be a man or a woman. Since I’m a man who is attracted to men, that makes me gay. If when I was born the doctor had said ‘it’s a boy’ but I knew I was a girl, that would make me transgender.” He wrote “transgender” across the bottom of the board.

  I prayed to vanish in an abrupt fashion like teleportation or being hit by a meteor. I thought I wanted to know how my classmates felt, but now that it came down to it, I didn’t. I’d take any random act of God to get me out of this class. At any moment I was sure every head in the room would turn and stare at me, and the only thing that kept me in my seat was knowing that if I bolted for the door it would happen that much sooner.

  “What?” some hulking guy near the front asked. “What the hell is that?”

  “Jason,” Mr. Cooper responded in a warning tone.

  “It’s okay,” the gay guy said. “Transphobia is one of the last remaining prejudices that many people think is acceptable. While it’s becoming more mainstream to be gay and lesbian, and therefore less cool to be homophobic, a lot of people in America still react badly to transgender people—probably because of their own insecurities about sex and gender. ‘Trans’ is an umbrella term that includes anyone whose gender identity doesn’t match what the doctor said when they were born. Some trans people are very clear that they’re one gender, man or woman, while others identify as both or neither. That can be called genderqueer, genderfluid, nonbinary, agender. There are a lot of different ways for people to be.”

  I was in a rictus of frantic prayer:
let this end, let this end. Across the room, Claire’s hand shot up.

  “Yes?” Mr. Cooper sounded relieved to have someone to call on who wasn’t a football guy.

  “Does it really work to put that all in one category?” Claire asked. “Is someone who feels like both a man and a woman, who has a lot of flexibility about their gender the same as, say, a man trapped in a woman’s body?”

  “That’s a great question,” the lesbian said. “There’s a lot of debate going on in the LGBTQ—that’s lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer—community about that. Some transgender people don’t want to be associated with the larger community because they’re heterosexual after transition and simply want to live a normal life.”

  “Whoa,” said football guy Jason. “You’re saying a guy can turn into a girl and live a normal life? That’s fucked up.”

  “It is not!” Claire said too loudly.

  Everyone stared at her and I could only think, Thank you Lord that isn’t me.

  Claire went on talking, still at high volume, “Transgender people are like you and me, they just have a much harder life. How would you feel if you knew you were a girl trapped in that meathead body?”

  “Like a pussy,” Jason said and the class cracked up. Except for me. I couldn’t move.

  “Quiet down!” Mr. Cooper shouted. His face was very red now beyond the wind-burned spots and all the way up to his forehead.

  “That’s fucked up,” Jason said into the silence. He continued, “God didn’t make gays, and he sure as hell didn’t make men to wear dresses and want to be chicks. That’s disgusting.”

  Mr. Cooper opened his mouth to shut Jason up, but before he could, a hurtling mass of bound paper smacked into the side of Jason’s head and knocked him out of his desk. He was on his feet in a second, Claire’s offending history book in his hand, lunging toward her. Three other football guys grabbed him, while the two kids closest to Claire got hold of her arms.

  She looked fantastic, all that dark hair flying around her head.

  “You unholy, unwashed, blaspheming, heathen bastard, you think you know the will of God! How dare you!” she was screaming, followed by a string of fairly unchristian words.