Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  “Mom,” I said, letting out the words that came to my mouth without censoring them for once. “If I can’t be a woman, I’d rather just die.”

  “Chris, don’t talk that way! My God, you’re just trying to shock me, aren’t you?”

  “No, I’m not. Just forget it. I’m going over to Claire’s.”

  As soon as we got home, I drove over to her house and told her all about it. She said what a jerk he was a few dozen times, but was surprisingly quiet for Claire. Her eyes had a hard, dark look to them.

  “I’ll hurt him if I have to,” she said at last. “I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way if he keeps treating you like that.”

  I felt comforted, and a little scared. Claire was scrappy and had a healthy disrespect for authority, but I didn’t want her to get herself into serious trouble over me.

  By the next week, I was ready to change my mind on that last point. Mom had basically lifted the social restrictions on my grounding. Mom and Dad went to see Dr. Webber and after they came home, we started having family dinners together every night where Mom would try to get Dad to talk about his day and Mikey would interrupt every two minutes with a story from school or a TV show he’d seen.

  I confronted Dr. Webber about it when I was back in his office. “Do you really think all that family dinner stuff is going to make a difference?” I asked.

  “I understand that you have a lot to be angry about,” he said. “But you have to understand that people can change. Your parents can change and you can change. Now, Chris, I have a delicate subject to bring up with you, and that’s your sexuality.”

  “Yeah, what about it?”

  “Your mother tells me you have a girlfriend.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you sexual with her?” he asked.

  “We make out and stuff, we haven’t had sex. Why?”

  “But you enjoy it?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I love Claire.”

  “Then why would you want to be a woman? Don’t you understand you’ll become a lesbian?”

  I must have stared at him for a whole minute before I could get my incredulous lips to move. “Look, Dr. Webber, do you think I’m stupid or something? Of course I know that. Do you think I haven’t thought this whole thing through, over and over again? Do you think it’s just a whim or something?”

  “What do you think of when you think about being a woman?” he asked.

  “I think about going to school,” I said. “Same as now, except I’m a girl.”

  “Do you think about going into the girls’ locker room? Looking at the other girls?” he asked.

  “Not particularly.”

  “But you think about yourself, dressed as a girl. Do you ever find that arousing?”

  I shrugged. There was no way I was touching that land mine.

  “There is a condition that some people develop which causes them to be turned on by the idea of themselves in the clothing of the opposite sex, or even having a body of the opposite sex. Do you get turned on thinking about being made love to as a woman?” He didn’t pause long enough for me to answer, for which I was deeply grateful. “Because you’re a normal heterosexual male, I think this might be what’s happened with you. You’re aroused by women and by the thought of yourself as a woman, and we need to rewire that to fit a normal heterosexual male pattern.”

  “I am a woman,” I said, but with less emphasis than I intended.

  “Chris, I want you to pay attention to what you think about when you imagine yourself as a woman, and what role arousal plays in that, and come back next week prepared to talk about that.”

  I did the first part of that assignment. I couldn’t help it. Once he suggested it, every time I thought about being a woman, I was questioning what I was really thinking about. But there was no way in hell I was going to talk to him about it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CLAIRE

  Chris was going downhill visibly as far as Claire could tell. After the second trip to Dr. Webber that summer, he stopped telling her what the appointments were about, but he was as upset as she’d ever seen him. He curled in on himself and stopped talking in full sentences when one-word answers would do. She dragged him out to movies, where he would slump down in the seat like a bag of sand. She couldn’t tell if he was really watching the movie or brooding on what the doctor had said that week.

  Since he wouldn’t talk to her, she started doing research,

  trying to figure out what the doctor could be saying to him. Obviously, Dr. Webber thought transsexualism could be cured, but how? What she found made her feel sick and miserably confused. She could understand why Chris looked like the undertaker of a medieval village struck by plague.

  First there was a bunch of confusing scientific jargon that took her about four days to wade through. It proposed that there was a difference between men who got turned on wearing women’s clothes, women who were born into male bodies, and men who got turned on by thinking about being women. That was enough to make anyone miserable, but then she found the Christian Medical Fellowship stuff.

  Apparently some groups, mostly self-identified as Christians, believed that transsexualism and homosexuality arose when a child failed to bond properly with the parent of the same sex as themselves. This unbonded kid then became defensive toward all people of the same sex as themselves and in adolescence turned the distance between themselves and people of the same sex into desire for a loving bond. Which explained the group’s perspective on gays, but she didn’t quite see how that made any sense in Chris’s situation.

  If she had to make up an argument based on this crap, she would say that he failed to bond with men and had decided he wanted to be a woman, which sounded like what Dr. Webber was saying. It just felt wrong to her. First, she knew that Chris loved his dad and admired him, and he didn’t seem to have trouble hanging out with the guys on the swim team. It just bothered him that everyone thought he was one of them.

  More looking showed that reparative therapy for homosexuality had a pretty abysmal success rate. It might seem to work for some gays who were fundamentalist Christians or really hated themselves, but for everyone else, it did a lot more damage than “repair.”

  She was more interested in the Christian arguments, which went that God and Jesus’s relationship with humanity was one of a groom to a bride, and that heterosexual marriages were a mirror of that and therefore represented God’s plan for humanity.

  That made her angry. They seemed to think that God’s plan for humanity looked like 1950s America. How many of them had really studied what it was like in Biblical times when women were largely considered property? Men could take multiple wives, and marriages were essentially arranged by families, not by individuals.

  And if you were going to interpret literally the idea that God’s relationship to humanity was a groom’s to a bride’s, then wasn’t everyone a woman in God’s eyes? When had it become so important who was a man and who was a woman? It felt to Claire like a perversion of the beauty of God’s love for humanity to make the relationship with God into something so constricting. But she also understood how, in her own life, discipline made creativity possible. Was it possible that these people could be right that God had a plan?

  She shut down her computer and rubbed her eyes, her questions no more resolved after a week of research than they’d been when she started. She just wanted Chris to be okay, whatever that meant.

  It was still light outside, because of the length of the summer days in Minnesota, and the air held the heat of the day. A half-mile from her house, a small stream wound its way between two thinly wooded banks. Claire headed there and walked along the stream until the trees started to thicken and she could sit, unnoticed, on a big rock at the edge of the water.

  The highway wasn’t far, and she heard the rush of cars behind the sound of the water, but she liked to sit here anyway and watch the leaves flutter and reveal palm-sized bits of sky. The trees didn’t worry about the kinds o
f things she did. They just grew, and they seemed to know how to grow. They reminded her of the verse in Matthew: Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.

  At the end of the day, she believed in a God who took care of His people, not one who hurt and limited them without reason. It came down to a choice between two worlds. She could look for weeks for answers and still it would be a matter of faith and belief. What did she believe to be true about this world she lived in? Did she believe that God made some people homosexual and transsexual just so they would have to overcome that? Or did she believe in a God who so loved variety and diversity that He created all manner of things and loved them all as they were?

  Put that way, the choice was clear. Her God had always been a loving God not a legalistic God. Jesus had said: This is my commandment, that you love one another as I have loved you. She was drawn to the image of Jesus as bridegroom by the same idea that captured her attention in the Song of Solomon where God was represented by the lover. It was that quality of love: deep, vast and unalterable. She knew God loved her that way and she tried her best to return it. Her relationship with Chris couldn’t compare to that, but she tried to take care of him as best she knew how.

  She realized that she might be the only person in Emily’s life who could reflect to her the kind of love that God had for everyone. Maybe that’s what she was here for. Unless it was really all about her learning to wear eye shadow.

  Claire laughed and pushed herself up off the stone on the riverbank. Actually, in a way, it was both about Emily and eye shadow, she realized. Over the last six months she’d gone from being terrified and confused to knowing she would fight for Emily’s right to be herself—and fighting for Emily was fighting for herself too.

  Standing with the cooling air on her face, Claire saw the pattern coming together. Emily was just the visible edge but everyone had parts of themselves that they were afraid to show. The more she spoke up for Emily, the more Claire felt those parts in herself come forward: the vulnerable, soft, creative elements of her own being.

  She thought of a half dozen spiritual quotes that expressed that idea, but she didn’t need to look up any of them. The connection between her and Emily and all the people in the world was for a moment shiningly clear in the early evening’s golden sunlight.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  I thought we were going to a movie, but Claire told me to drive to Dr. Mendel’s office. At first, I just stared at her because I couldn’t figure out what movie theater or restaurant was anywhere near that office park. In addition, Claire was actually wearing a red T-shirt with her jeans, which made me wonder what was going on with her.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Because you have an appointment,” she said.

  “No I don’t.”

  “Come on, drive, we’re going to be late. I made you an appointment with Dr. Mendel. Hit the gas.”

  As I turned the car in the direction of her office, my heart started lifting and the headache around my eyes relaxed. I didn’t dare hope that I would get time with the doctor.

  “How did you make me an appointment?” I asked Claire.

  “It’s called a telephone,” she said. “You punch in numbers and someone answers, remember?”

  At the office building she grabbed my hand and dragged me into the waiting room. Dr. Mendel smiled when she saw us sitting there, and I’m sure we were quite a sight with me slump-shouldered in my chair and Claire gripping my hand as if I was going to bolt. And I suppose if it had been Dr. Webber instead of Dr. Mendel, I would have. Instead I let Claire pull me into her room and push me toward the couch. Claire remained standing.

  “Chris is all messed up,” she told Dr. Mendel. “She won’t tell me all of it, but I’m hoping she’ll tell you. Dr. Webber’s been saying some crap to her, and I think she’s starting to buy it. Can you straighten her out? Err, so to speak.”

  “I’ll try,” Dr. Mendel said.

  Her reading glasses hung over her chest, taking the place of the pearls that she wore when my parents came to the appointment. She had on a bluish lavender knit sweater with short sleeves and I loved the color. It made her bright blue eyes really stand out, but when she turned them to me, the lines around them were tight with concern.

  “Great, I’ll be waiting,” Claire announced and skipped out of the room.

  I stared at the closed door. “She just told me about this,” I said.

  “You don’t look well,” Dr. Mendel offered. She pulled her chair two feet closer to the couch and sat down close enough that I could have reached forward and touched her knee. “Have you been taking care of yourself?”

  “No,” I admitted. “Life has pretty much sucked after we left here. Mom grounded me for life, Dad doesn’t talk much, I ran out of hormones so I’m a rage-monster again. And then I freaked out after this dinner thing. Well, Mom freaked out first, but I really lost it and started cutting up my boy clothes and beating the crap out of my door.”

  “You didn’t hurt yourself?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I couldn’t.”

  “That’s good.”

  “And then they asked me to go back to Dr. Webber and said if I saw him for a month I could go get hormones.”

  “That’s an interesting strategy,” Dr. Mendel said neutrally. I got the impression that “interesting” was a euphemism for “screwed up.”

  “He’s crazy,” I told her. “He thinks he can cure me of my transsexualism. He thinks I get off on thinking about myself as a woman.”

  “What do you think?” Dr. Mendel asked. Something in her voice got me—the way she just asked and then got quiet to listen to me. She really wanted to know and whatever she believed, one way or the other, she wasn’t going to push it on me.

  I started crying. The tears felt hot on my cheeks, not like all the helpless tears I’d cried in the past few weeks, these were pure grief mixed with the hurt and rage and fear that I needed to get out of me. She handed me tissues and let me cry for what seemed like the whole hour.

  “I don’t think I’m crazy,” I managed at last. “I don’t think this is all in my head. I just know I’m a girl, that’s all. Why is that so hard for everyone to understand?”

  “Probably for many of the same reasons it was hard for you,” she said, and I was able to smile because of how gently she reminded me that I’d had years to understand what it meant to be transsexual and my family only had a few weeks.

  After a pause to let her words sink in, she continued. “I know there’s a simple answer to this question, but I want you to look beyond it: why are you so hurt by what Dr. Webber says?”

  “I feel insulted,” I said, “but that’s the simple answer. And I feel invalidated, like he doesn’t really see me at all. And I’m afraid—sometimes, I’m afraid he might be right.”

  She nodded, so I went on.

  “You know, I have some girl clothes that I’ve worn out in the world a few times, and before Mom went nuts sometimes I’d just get up in the middle of the night and put them on. I liked to surf the web and stuff when I was dressed like myself. But sometimes when I’d get dressed up in the girl clothes, I would get aroused, like Dr. Webber says. I get afraid that maybe I’m just deluding myself and maybe I am a guy who gets his kicks dressing up like a girl.”

  She nodded again. “You’re worried that if you get an erection while wearing women’s clothing that you’re a fetishist or cross-dresser and not a real transsexual?”

  “Yeah,” I said, knowing I was blushing a deep beet color.

  “You know there’s no such thing as a test for a ‘true transsexual’ by which we could determine externally whether it’s right for someone to transition or not. Only you can say if this is who you are and what you need,” she said. “But I can tell you a few things that might help you answer it for yourself. There isn’t a one-to-one connection between getting an erection sometimes and
being aroused by the idea of wearing women’s clothing. As I understand it, you’re basically thrilled any time you get to participate in life as a girl.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “And your body doesn’t always know the difference between that excitement and arousal. Certainly not at your age with all the hormones you have coursing through your body as an adolescent. Have you noticed other times when you get an erection for seemingly no reason at all? Or when you’re excited about something but not necessarily turned on sexually?”

  “Yeah, I have.”

  “Do you find women’s clothing sexually exciting?” she asked.

  I thought about it. “Not really. I mean, not the clothes themselves. But sometimes when I’m in them I think about having a real woman’s body and what that would feel like to be able to touch someone and be touched without feeling like the Frankenstein monster.”

  “Frankenstein?” she queried.

  “Like I have extra parts clumsily bolted on,” I said, so embarrassed by this whole conversation that I thought I’d probably melt through the floor before the session ended.

  “That makes sense to me,” she said. “As I said, you’re the only one who can say what’s going on in your mind, but I don’t think it’s unusual for a person who knows herself to be a woman to be aroused by the idea of being made love to as a woman. If you’re aroused by the idea of being a man who presents as a woman, we should talk about that. For example, if some of the arousal comes from the idea of being discovered as a man, or perhaps being a man who is somehow forced into womanhood. Those are both also valid ways to be.”

  “No, I don’t want to be a man at all, I never have.”

  She smiled. “No one else has the right to tell you who you are, no matter what degrees they have. Are you committed to going to the rest of your appointments with Dr. Webber?”

  “I want the hormones, and that’s the only way my parents are going to let me have them.”