by Gold, Rachel
“Elizabeth,” she said, holding out her hand.
“This is Emily,” Natalie said.
“Glad to have you, welcome.”
We had a few more minutes before we started, so Natalie introduced me to more people with a dizzying array of descriptors. I met Renee, a woman in her mid-fifties who had begun her transitioning process recently and looked like someone’s plain grandmother with the hands of a lumberjack. Vivianna was half-Asian, half-Spanish with the body of a ballet dancer. Natalie assured me twice that she’d been born male, though I found that hard to believe. Steve was an average-sized guy with short brown hair and a goatee.
“Shouldn’t he shave?” I asked quietly, thinking about how I couldn’t stand my own facial hair.
“He’s FTM.”
My brain took a second to translate: female-to-male. He’d been born with a girl’s body. I took another look. It was impossible to tell.
There was another female-to-male member of the group, Mark, who looked like a teenager but dressed like he was older. Then there were a couple of people who very clearly looked like men in dresses. And one who looked like a man in a dress trying very hard not to look like a man in a dress but failing. “Those two are just cross-dressers,” Natalie said. She indicated the third. “And she’s just a little off-balance.”
Elizabeth called the meeting to order and we all went around and said something about ourselves and what was going on in our lives. Renee had been at the same job for twenty years and still dressed as a man to go to work. She was trying to figure out how to talk to her HR department about coming to work as a woman. That’s going to be mind-bending for them, I thought. Steve wanted a girlfriend but wasn’t sure he’d find someone to accept him for who he was. Vivianna gave an update about her and her husband’s quest to adopt a child.
When it came around to me, I tried to think of something intelligent to say. “I’m Emily,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous using that name with my deep voice and monstrously lanky body. “I’m in high school, and I’m trying to figure out how to talk to my parents. I have a good therapist and a really great girlfriend.”
There was scattered applause and welcomes.
“That therapist will really help,” Vivianna said. “I worked with one for almost a year and when I came out to my parents it was such a non-issue. I was in my early twenties and living on my own by then, but they said they’d always suspected and my mother said she always wanted a daughter. I have three brothers. I hope it’s like that for you.”
Steve spoke next. “Mine said they understood, but they keep screwing up my name and my pronoun.”
“Oh that sucks so bad,” Natalie told him. “It just feels so invalidating, doesn’t it? You really look great, though, no one would read you.”
To “read” someone was to see that they’d been born the other gender from the one they were presenting to the world. Natalie meant that no one would see Steve as anything other than a guy, and I thought she was right. How embarrassing to look like a guy to everyone and still have your parents call you “she.”
“My parents threw me out,” Mark said. “I was seventeen, and I ended up homeless for a couple of years. I’m working on forgiving them, but I’m not sure I ever want to see them again.”
As the group was breaking up, Elizabeth sat next to me. “Was it helpful to come today?” she asked.
“It was okay,” I said. “I think I have a lot of work to do.”
She looked me in the eyes. “You won’t regret it. If it’s really what you want, you’ll never look back.”
“I know,” I said. “It just seems so hard.”
“Everyone has to go through a journey to become themselves. It’s just more of a challenge for some than others, but a greater challenge also means a greater opportunity.”
“Right,” I said, unconvinced.
She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet, sliding out a small picture from behind the credit cards. “I don’t show this to a lot of people,” she said. “But I think you need to see it.”
I looked down at the image of a young man glaring angrily at the camera, his hair hastily brushed to one side, and his brows lowered menacingly. He’d set his lips in a thin line, but that didn’t disguise the full bow shape of his mouth that looked exactly like Elizabeth’s. I looked up at her. The only similarities were the shape of her face, her lips and her nose. Anyone else would have assumed they’d been siblings.
“No,” I said. There was no way that had been her. I felt like an idiot for assuming she wasn’t one of us, and at the same time, I was thrilled.
“Twenty-seven years ago.”
“Wow, you think I could look like you?”
“No, I think you could look like yourself. And I think you will look beautiful.” She took the picture back and put it away. “You’re welcome here anytime.”
“Thanks,” I told her, smiling.
On the way back to the car, Natalie asked, “Isn’t she cool? She went to Europe in the eighties to get the surgery.”
When I dropped Natalie off at her house, she paused and fished in her purse. “Hey, this isn’t really kosher, and I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, but with you stuck out there in the boonies and everything…” She handed me a small prescription bottle.
The label said Spironolactone and had her name on it. I turned it over in my hand. “How? You can’t give me yours.”
She smiled. “I told my doctor that I accidentally threw out my hormones when I was cleaning up. There are two kinds in there, the Spironolactone is an anti-androgen, it blocks testosterone production, and the round blue ones are Estrofem. You shouldn’t start with that whole dose of that. Break them up and do a quarter of a pill for a few weeks and work up like that. That should last you a couple months and maybe by then we can figure out how to get you your own supply. I don’t think my doctor will go for the ‘lost it’ thing more than once.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Take ’em with a meal,” she said and flashed me a grin. “And for goodness sake, hide them well. It’s easier to explain hard drugs to your parents than hormones.”
I laughed and hugged her. “It’s wonderful, thanks.”
I drove back to Liberty trying to imagine what it would be like to be able to go through my days without always having to remember to be a guy. Elizabeth transitioned twenty-seven years ago and she was only in her middle age now. She’d already lived more than half her life as a woman. What if I could just be myself all the time?
When I got home, Mikey was watching TV with Dad. Mom was in the bedroom we kept as an office for paying bills and stuff. I went up to her and leaned on the filing cabinet. She was sitting at the desk sorting through a pile of mail with her hair messy as it usually was on weekends. She wouldn’t wear sweatpants around the house, but she had on a pair of loose terrycloth pants and a sweater jacket.
“How was your trip to the city?” she asked distractedly.
“It was cool,” I said. “I saw something unusual.”
“Hmm, what?” she asked as she dropped an envelope into a short pile on the desk and picked up the next piece of mail.
“A woman who used to be a man.”
“What?” she pivoted in her chair to face me. “How?”
“I guess surgery,” I said, trying to sound super-super casual.
“How did you know?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together tightly at the end of the question.
“She told me. She said sometimes women get born into men’s bodies—”
“You were talking to strange…people?”
“In the middle of the mall, it was harmless,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I just thought it was interesting that that’s possible.”
“Chris,” Mom said in her stern voice. “I don’t want you going into the city alone, and you certainly don’t need to spend time talking to freaks like that. If that happens again, you get up and leave.”
“It was just a
conversation, Mom, she wasn’t hitting on me.”
“You don’t know what people like that are thinking. You’re a good-looking young man and you need to be more careful. Promise me you’ll watch out for yourself.”
“Sure, Mom.”
She stood up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t tell that to your dad, he would flip.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go work on my homework.”
I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. I felt torn in half. One half was happy and excited about life. She’d gone to a support group meeting and got hormones and she had a girlfriend who loved her. The other half was a papier-mâché shell that looked like a guy on the outside and was hollow within. His emptiness was full of echoes of my mother’s voice saying “freaks like that,” “you’re a good-looking young man,” and “your dad would flip.”
I fell asleep staring at nothing and dreamed that the papier-mâché man was choking me to death.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I started taking the anti-androgen and the first fraction of an estrogen pill with breakfast the next morning. I didn’t expect to feel different right away, but I did feel lighter when I went to school. That was probably the placebo effect, or just pure hopefulness. Yes, my mom thought transsexual people were freaks—that wasn’t really unusual for a woman who’d spent all her life in rural Minnesota. She’d come around when she saw how happy I was...right?
During science class, I imagined the estrogen soaking into all the cells of my body, reassuring each little bit of me that everything was going to be all right. I sailed through the day. In psych class I gave Mr. Cooper the decoy paper that Claire had emailed me the day before. I’d changed a few details, but her story was very good at imagining what it was like to be a boy waking up as a girl. A lot better than my version.
The week waltzed by and on Thursday I met Claire after school to go to Dr. Mendel with me. I’d told Mom she didn’t need to come along just to make sure that I was going and that I planned to bring Claire so we could talk about “boy-girl” stuff. That did the trick.
Claire and I sat on the couch in Dr. Mendel’s office. Claire’s fingers tapped out a pattern on the arm and she kept crossing her legs one way and then the other as Dr. Mendel closed the door and settled into the chair across from us. I thought Claire might have worn extra black for the visit because she had on black cobweb earrings and black bracelets in addition to the usual black shirt, jeans and boots. I’d made it all the way down to sweater number six this week, and Dr. Mendel was in a cream colored jacket over a plum shell and gray pants.
“Thank you for coming,” Dr. Mendel said to Claire. “I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about you. And you also game together?”
“I play a paladin mostly,” Claire said. She thought that Dr. Mendel asking me what kinds of characters I played was supercool, so I was glad Dr. Mendel started there again.
“It’s no wonder that you’re Emily’s protector in the real world then.”
“You think so?” Claire asked. “I mean, that I’m a protector?”
“Yeah,” I said without waiting for Dr. Mendel to answer. “I’d be in a lot worse shape without you around.”
“But I kind of freaked out there at the start,” Claire said.
“That’s natural. Emily had years to figure this out. You had to adapt to a lot of new knowledge in just a few days,” Dr. Mendel told her.
“When you put it that way, I guess I am pretty awesome,” Claire responded with a grin. “So, what do we do here?”
“I was hoping I could help answer any questions you have so that Emily doesn’t have to field all of them, and then if we have time I’d like to hear more about Emily’s early experiences of herself, and I bet you would too.”
Claire looked at me and then back at the doctor. “Totally,” she said. She uncrossed her legs and put her hands on her knees. “Questions, hmm. I read a ton of stuff and it’s still jumbled up in my head, so I’m sorry if I don’t say things the right way.”
“It’s okay,” I told her and squeezed her shoulder lightly. I wanted to know what questions she still had and Dr. Mendel was right that I felt grateful not to be the only one to answer all of them.
“What’s the difference between transgender and transsexual and gender nonconforming?” Claire asked. “Lots of cultures seem to have had men who dressed like women, for example, ancient Sumer, Greece and Rome, some Native American cultures. And it sounds like some people are okay just dressing as women or living as women but not having all those surgeries. How do you know what’s what?”
“I don’t want to just cross-dress,” I said.
Dr. Mendel held up her hand before I could go on. “Emily, let Claire have her questions. It’s a good question. There’s a difference between gender nonconformity and gender dysphoria. Many people feel that their gender expression doesn’t fit the cultural norm for their gender and when that’s the case, most of the time, they may choose to identify as transgender, which is a broader category than transsexual.”
She went on, “I think everyone has had some experience of gender nonconformity. When I went to college in the ’60s there were quite a few people who felt that women wearing pants was still gender nonconforming. I’m glad we got rid of that idea. And when my husband took a few years off teaching to raise our children and research a book, he really had to struggle with cultural opinions about a man staying at home with the children.”
“My mom thinks my goth look is gender nonconforming because I don’t wear bright colors and show off my boobs and paint my face,” Claire offered.
“Precisely,” Dr. Mendel said. “Now, gender dysphoria specifically refers to the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. And even gender dysphoria isn’t an unchanging condition. There are children who experience gender dysphoria but for whom it doesn’t persist. Not every feminine boy or masculine girl is necessarily transsexual.”
“Aw, I was just about to go around diagnosing my other friends,” Claire said with a grin.
Dr. Mendel smiled back at her with genuine humor. “I did a lot of diagnosis from the sidelines when I was in school. I do want both of you to know that if gender dysphoria is present in childhood and persists into adolescence, there’s a very high chance that it will remain into adulthood unless treated.”
“Mom shouldn’t wait for me to grow out of it then,” I offered.
“Neither should you,” Dr. Mendel said.
I thought about that. “You’re right, there’s still a part of me that keeps thinking if I do the boy thing enough it will stick.”
“There are plenty of transsexual women who’ve joined the military or taken up extremely masculine professions to see if they could get maleness to stick to them and not have to come out as women born into male bodies,” Dr. Mendel said.
“I don’t want to do that,” I told her. I felt a chill shudder down my back just under the skin. In junior high for over a year I was really convinced that I wanted to go into auto mechanics when I grew up. What a disaster that would have been.
“Why don’t you talk about what you do want,” Dr. Mendel prompted.
The rest of the hour was great. I told Claire more of the stories from when I was little, like dressing up in Mom’s clothes and playing with the girl who lived down the street as if we were two girls.
***
Maybe it was all the talking and support that made me feel bold that weekend. I didn’t plan ahead, I just got in my car on Saturday and started driving in the opposite direction from the Cities until I ended up in Annandale. I pulled over in a residential area in front of a house that looked dark, and got the duffel out of the back. It now had Claire’s makeup kit in it as well. It took me over half an hour to change in the car and do my makeup in the rearview mirror. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t very well go into either gender of bathroom as a man and come out as a woman.
The other problem
was that I really didn’t have any good shoes. I had some black boots that were more punk than anything, so I’d thrown those in the car with me and they’d have to do with the long skirt. They looked vaguely stylish. Also I only had a hat for my head. The good news was that my hair had grown long enough in the back to hang down past my collar in a few thick curls. The bad news was that it still looked too short for my taste, but I couldn’t do anything about that now.
I tried to get a good look at myself in the mirror, but it’s hard to see how you look from a two-inch-by-six-inch reflection. If I turned to the right, I looked pretty girlish, but from other angles, not so good. If I kept my eyes down, I should do pretty well. I’d shaved my face to within an inch of my life that morning and the foundation was thick enough to cover any lingering trouble there. Plus I felt like the estrogen was softening my skin already, though it was probably way too soon.
I figured I’d try a really quick trip into a store and see how I did. I went to Walmart. There were enough people there that I could blend in, and I thought I should get a purse before I went anywhere else.
I walked in and across the store without actually taking a full breath. My shoes sounded loud on the floor. Out of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a woman turn and look at me, but I didn’t stop to find out. My heart was beating against my breastbone like a person pounding on a door.
In an empty aisle of purses I had to stop and make myself fill my lungs a few times so I wouldn’t just pass out. The store smelled like lemon cleaner and the dark musk of leather. I smelled like iron-edged fear.