by Rachel Gold
“Looks like you’re in good health,” he said matter-of-factly. “I received the letter from Dr. Mendel about your gender dysphoria. You want to go on HRT?”
“Yes, totally.”
He smiled then, which made him seem a lot younger than my dad all of a sudden. I wondered if the mustache was an attempt to look older. He had a handsome, wide mouth and perfect teeth.
For the physical exam, Dad stepped out of the room. Dr. Gopal called me “Emily” effortlessly and I loved it. But as we were finishing up, when he asked if I wanted Dad to come back in for questions and the instructions about the prescriptions, I said, “You should probably still call me Chris around my dad and use he/him pronouns. He’s not used to it yet and I really need him on my side for this.”
“I understand,” he said and called Dad back into the room.
He detailed the prescriptions he was giving me, how to take them, what to expect. After a pause, he added, “Now some people think more is better when it comes to estrogen, but that is not the case. Taking more won’t make the process any faster. You need to stick to this regimen. Okay?”
“Yes,” I said. “No problem.”
“Also you need to think about, and should talk with your parents about, fertility preservation.”
“What?” Dad blurted. “He can’t have kids?”
“Of course he can, if he takes steps now,” Dr. Gopal said. “I can recommend a good fertility clinic or there are mail-order kits that allow Chris to freeze some sperm for later use.”
I winced, but if Dr. Gopal had used another word, Dad wouldn’t have gotten it.
“How long do we have?” Dad asked.
“Sooner is better. More time on hormones means a lower sperm count,” Dr. Gopal said. “That is generally reversible if Chris stops taking hormones, to a point.”
“You’re doing this fertility thing,” Dad told me. “Or no hormones. You aren’t giving up your ability to have kids.”
“Okay, yes,” I told him. I kind of wanted to thank him for making that call for me, but feared that would set a bad precedent.
“Lower fertility does not mean none,” Dr. Gopal said. “If you’re having sex, or plan to have sex, with your girlfriend, or anyone else who can get pregnant, you need to use a contraceptive.”
I’d mentioned Claire during the exam, when we were chatting. I wished he’d said this then, not in front of Dad. I couldn’t tell if my face had gone red, white or both, because my cheeks felt burning cold.
“We’re not,” I mumbled, but he handed me a brochure with a condom package stapled to it anyway.
I didn’t want to look at the brochure less than I didn’t want to look at Dad, so I opened it. Bright orange lettering told me that the great news about STDs was how preventable they were. Each page balanced between telling me not to have sex and telling me to use condoms or other barrier protection if I did. I liked that one of the couples looked androgynous but girly and could’ve been me and Claire. They were grinning at each other under the headline, “Have Fewer Partners,” and I totally agreed.
Dad shifted, making his chair creak. “How dangerous are these hormones? What else do they do?”
The doctor leaned back against the white table that ran along one wall and folded his arms loosely into what seemed to be his lecture pose. “There are risks, as with any medication. Chris is in excellent health, and we’ll want him back here every few months to make sure his liver and kidneys are processing the hormones well.”
“It’s all reversible, right?” Dad asked.
“More or less,” the doctor said. “Chris will start to notice his skin softening, his body hair will become less heavy. Over a period of a few months to a year the fat on his body will start to redistribute itself. His face will look softer, and he will start to develop breasts.”
“Good Lord,” Dad said. A muscle clenched in the side of his jaw and he shook his head, but didn’t say more.
“Up to that point, he can stop taking the hormones and the changes will reverse themselves. Once he’s developed breasts, you would need surgery to reverse that.”
Dad’s normally tan face turned blotchy, parts becoming pink and other parts a faint yellowish green.
“Dad, please…”
He sat back against the wall and didn’t say anything. And that was it. The doctor gave me the prescriptions and told us to come back in a few months. I made Dad stop at the first Walgreens we saw and fill the prescriptions. Then I took one of each of the pills with a candy bar and bottle of water to wash them down.
“Do you want to go to a movie?” Dad asked when I got back in the car.
“That’d be cool.”
I thought he’d say more about the doctor’s visit, but he didn’t. He took us down the street to a theater and bought two tickets to the latest James Bond flick. I wondered if this was another last-ditch attempt to indoctrinate me back into manhood, but I didn’t much care.
Sitting in the theater reminded me of being out with Claire and Natalie, and I wondered how Natalie was doing. She’d gone in for her surgery a few weeks back. I’d seen short posts from her on GenderPeace, but she’d been pretty out of it.
As we left the movie, I figured it wouldn’t hurt to ask. “Dad, while we’re down here, can we go see Natalie? She had to have some surgery this summer, and I’d like to see how she’s doing.”
“She live around here?” he asked. “We can’t stay long. I promised your mom we’d be home for dinner.”
“She’s only a few miles away.”
As I rang her doorbell, I wondered if it was a bad idea to stop by unannounced, but that was one of the downfalls of not having a cell phone. Natalie’s mom answered the door with a big smile and my pounding heart slowed down. I’d been afraid that if her dad answered, he wouldn’t be cool about the visit at all, though I didn’t know that for sure.
Natalie’s mom had her hair tied back again and wore the same kind of outfit she had on for the slumber party: loose black pants and a law school sweatshirt. She stepped to the side of the doorway and waved us in.
“What a surprise!” she said and held her hand out to my father. “It’s good to see you again, come in.”
“Thank you,” Dad replied and gave her hand a quick shake. His gaze traveled around the foyer. Their house was a lot nicer than ours—not much bigger, but I knew he was seeing the building materials and how nice they were. The foyer floor was a fine gray stone and the windows on either side of the door had stained glass patterns in them.
“Jerry, would you like to join me in the kitchen for coffee while the kids talk?” she asked. “I just made a pot.”
“Thank you,” he said again.
To me she said, “Natalie’s upstairs in her room, first one on the left, go on up. I know she’d love to see you.”
I bounded up the stairs. I paused outside Natalie’s door and knocked.
“Who is it?” Natalie asked weakly.
“Emily,” I announced through the door.
“Hey!” Her voice picked up volume. “Get in here!”
I pushed open the door. Her room was a rich palette of cream colors and light browns with a bed dominating the far wall where Natalie sat propped amid teddy bears. Two flower arrangements flanked the bed, and I felt stupid that Claire and I hadn’t thought to come out together and bring one. Plus now Claire was going to be mad that she didn’t get to come on this trip. Natalie’s hair frizzed out from her head in a dark halo, and she looked very monochrome with no makeup on, but she was smiling.
“Sit down,” she said, gesturing to the chair next to the bed. “Are you just dropping by?”
“Dad brought me in to get hormones, can you believe it?”
She laughed. “That’s great.”
“So how is it? What’s it like? How do you feel?”
“It hurts,” she said, still grinning. “It hurts a hell of a lot. But I wouldn’t trade it for the world.”
“Tell me everything.”
“Well,
first I had to go off hormones for two weeks, which sucked as you can imagine. Then Mom and Robin and I flew to Arizona—”
“Robin?”
“My sister. She said she’d make it more like a holiday for Mom so she didn’t freak out while I was in surgery. I got prepped and shaved and they ran all these tests, and then they put me under. And when I woke up I felt…I don’t know how to describe it. I mean, I was high on all the drugs, so I was feeling pretty happy anyway, but separate from that I felt whole.
“That first day out wasn’t so bad, but then the heavy drugs wore off and it hurt like a bitch. Plus the strong painkillers made me sick, and let me tell you that puking after that surgery is unbelievably awful. But after a couple days I could get up and walk a few steps, and after that I started feeling better pretty quickly. I’m still sore, and I’m supposed to take it easy for a few more days, but I walk around some every day now. And, wow, it’s so different. I mean, for the last two years I’ve been living as a girl, but with this freakish part that I always had to hide and pay attention to, you know. It’s weird. And now, I’m just me. And in some way I always was, except it all fits together now.”
“Cool,” I said, feeling envious, but also afraid. I wasn’t a big fan of surgery in general.
“How are you?” she asked, and I updated her about all the craziness in my life since I’d told my parents.
I finished by saying, “I guess I should go check on Dad and see if he wants to go. I’ll come back out with Claire soon.”
I gave Natalie a gentle hug.
“I’m excited for you,” she said.
“Same here,” I said and laughed.
With school starting in a week, it would be a lot easier to get around without Mom watching my every move. I felt sure that a visit to my trans girl bestie wasn’t on the list of Dr. Webber-approved activities for me.
I went down the stairs wondering if I should join a club at school and use that as the excuse to come see Natalie. At the bottom I stopped, hearing my dad’s voice.
“… and that’s when you stopped trying to fix him?”
“Her,” Natalie’s mom said, the word gentle but heavy.
Dad grumbled, “Her… I can’t get used to it. Always had two boys.”
“Did you?”
“It’s a thing you’re born with then?” Dad asked. “A brain thing? Chris has a girl’s brain?”
Natalie’s mom hummed a soft sound that combined agreement and question.
“That’s one good way to think about it,” she answered. “Science hasn’t pinned down one single thing that determines gender identity, and that’s true for all of us. We don’t know why you feel like a man and I feel like a woman. We’re starting to understand that genetics and hormones, the brain, and our culture all come together to give us that sense of who we are.”
A chair leg scraped as she got up. She asked, “More coffee?”
“Thank you, no,” Dad said.
“I’ll tell you a few things that really helped me understand,” she said. “First, identical twins are more likely than fraternal twins to both be transgender, so there is definitely a genetic role in this. And let me tell you, as a mom, as the person who carried Natalie in my body, that’s really comforting. But also I learned that Natalie’s body was heading down the ‘boy’ pathway at six to eight weeks but her brain didn’t start to develop the parts that give us our identities until months later. So maybe the hormones she was exposed to changed, or the way her genes interacted with the hormones was different, or all of that.”
Dad repeated, “I can’t get used to it.” I heard the heavy clunk of a coffee mug against the table like a judge’s gavel coming down.
Natalie’s mom didn’t answer. I snuck up a few stairs and came down again, heavily, so they’d hear me.
In the car on the way back to Liberty, Dad didn’t say much, but what he said gave me an idea about what else Natalie’s mom had said in the kitchen.
“You didn’t tell me Natalie used to be a boy,” he said.
“No,” I said. “She’s just a regular girl now. That’s how she wants people to see her. She doesn’t go around with a big ‘T’ on her chest.”
“T?” he asked.
“For transgender.”
“Your birthday dinner, all that time, I wouldn’t have known,” he said.
I didn’t know what to say to that, so I didn’t say anything. I wasn’t sure if he was going down Mom’s well-worn track about how I’d make an ugly woman, or if he was trying to say something else.
When we got home I made sure I thanked him a couple times for taking me to the doctor. He shrugged and left for the car shop. Maybe after all that trans stuff, he had to be around “real guys” for a while.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Claire
The first week of school, Claire felt the return of a familiar terror from when she’d been in sixth grade and junior high, waiting for the pretty girls to spot her, descend and pick her apart like vultures on a dead body. This fear echoed the night at the restaurant when she’d realized how much she’d stand out if Emily had been out as herself.
Even if Emily wasn’t out at all at school, even if she was manning up and doing Chris to the gills—for reasons Claire didn’t understand and kind of hated—the other students would eventually figure out that Claire didn’t fit in. More than ever, she wasn’t like most of the other students here.
And Jason knew it.
She caught him watching her. Was it malice in his eyes or revenge? Was it still about the fact that a girl had given him a black eye? Or had she become the lightning rod for his hatred of all things different from himself?
The other girls in the yearbook club told her about the rumors that spread out from Jason’s cheerleader girlfriend/arm-candy-of-the-month. Guys weren’t supposed to gossip like that, right? But Claire knew where the rumors about her being “a queer” originated from. When she wasn’t terrified, she kind of liked that Jason had picked the word “queer” instead of “lesbian.” Like he was trying to be bi-inclusive in his hate-gossip but didn’t know how.
As much as people talked about her, they also talked about Chris and his decision to quit the swim team. He hadn’t been such a great athlete, nor was the swim team that popular, that it was a big deal to the school’s reputation. But September was a slow gossip month.
Claire jumped any time someone said the name “Chris,” even if they weren’t talking about her person, her Emily, which was how she overheard the swim guys talking during week two. She’d finished up lunch and gone to bus her tray when she heard them. From the end of the tray conveyor, she moved a few steps left so that a wide, square column blocked her from being seen by the table where the swim team sat.
“Heard Chris’s dad is making him work,” one guy was saying.
“He told coach it was grades,” another said.
“Oh right, his weren’t that bad last year. Not by the end.” The guy speaking lowered his voice, but not so much that Claire couldn’t hear as he said, “I heard he’s gay. Got kicked off the team so he won’t be in our locker room.”
“No, he’s still got that girlfriend.” That came from Ramon, the captain and the guy Emily liked best on the team.
“You sure that’s not for show?” gay-gossip guy asked. “I heard she’s for sure queer. Maybe they’re covering for each other.”
She should go confront them, but she was shaking. The smell of aging, greasy tater tots from the cafeteria swamped her, reminding her of too many lunches alone with books in junior high, waiting for classmates to jeer at her.
“That’s farcical,” Ramon said. Claire suppressed a laugh at the cleverness of his word choice.
Jason’s booming voice cut in. He must’ve been one table over. He said, “No, it’s true. Jessica saw them at Southdale with some red-headed girl. That’s probably who that little goth punk is really dating. Maybe your coach caught Chris checking you all out.”
Claire forced herself around the
side of the pillar, one hand on it for support. She was about to tell Jason how disgusting he was, and what an asshole, and all the things she’d usually say. But that would make life harder for Emily. And she thought about being in the church, the warm bread in her hands, the idea of feeding the good in situations and in people.
“Chris and I are together,” she said. “He quit the team for grades and money and because I asked him to spend more time with me.”
That last was true. She wasn’t obligated to add that she’d asked “him” to spend more time with her as Emily.
Jason made a whipping sound and gesture.
“He’s gay and I’ve got him whipped?” Claire asked. “I must have superpowers.”
“Or you threatened to stop covering for him.”
“Right. What’s it going to take for you to get over this old-fashioned homophobia?” Claire asked. “Queer and trans people have existed in most, maybe all, cultures and times. Hundreds, thousands of cultures. You’re just being ignorant.”
Jason stood up and came toward her, but Ramon put himself half between them. He was as tall as Jason, if not as wide.
“Hey man, Chris is one of us, on the team or not. Let it go,” he said.
“Oh maybe he quit the team because you two had a lovers’ fight,” Jason singsonged.
Ramon crossed his arms over his chest. “Nah, the whole swim team is doing each other and Chris is the only straight guy. That’s why he quit. But don’t tell my girlfriend, okay?”
All the swim guys cracked up and rose up from their seats, pounding Ramon on the back and saying variants on, “Good one.” Jason used the movement of the swimmers to walk away, muttering things Claire was certain she didn’t want to hear.
Ramon stayed behind, scrutinizing her. He’d been asking last fall if Chris liked dating Claire. And he’d gone to Chris a few more times for relationship advice, which Emily and Claire had conferred about since neither of them turned out to be an expert on straight guy relationships.