Being Emily

by Gold, Rachel

  “Then let me give you one bit of advice, though I’m not in the habit of doing that: Don’t get angry at the rain.”

  “What?”

  “When it rains and you get wet, you just dry off again. You know it’s not raining on you personally, so you don’t get upset at it. You know the rain falls on everyone the same way. You just take whatever steps you need to dry off and take care of yourself. Dr. Webber is like that. He’s just raining and it’s falling on you, but it’s not personal. He would treat any teen who came to him and said ‘I’m transsexual’ that way; he’s not addressing who you are, Emily, as an individual.”

  I’d have hugged her, but she was a therapist and I didn’t know if that was cool, so when we stood up I just shook her hand for a long time. Before I opened the door, I paused. “My mom and dad don’t know I’m here, do they?”

  “I doubt it, Claire set up the appointment and paid for it.”

  “She paid for it? Wow. Can I do that too?”

  “Of course you can. Just call a few days in advance and we’ll set it up.”

  I slipped out to the waiting room and half-lifted Claire out of her chair into a huge hug.

  “Hey it worked,” she exclaimed. “I got you back.”

  I kissed her. “You’re a great protector,” I said.

  “Claire the Mighty,” she grinned.

  ***

  I couldn’t say I was looking forward to the next trip to Dr. Webber, but at least I wasn’t dreading it quite so much. I even played with him a little bit. At one point I volunteered, “I’ll tell you some of the fantasies I have about being a woman.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  I was trying hard not to smile. “In one, I go out to dinner with my girlfriend, Claire, and the waiter says ‘What would you ladies like to order?’ Oh, and then there’s the one where I’m shopping, and I go to use the women’s restroom and there’s another woman in there and she looks at me and says ‘Nice shoes.’”

  Mostly I put up with him trying to guy-bond with me, and talked about my childhood memories of my dad. Dr. Mendel’s advice made a big difference in the visits too. No matter how stupid they got, I’d come home and take a shower and imagine washing off any crap he said, and then I’d towel off and imagine I was drying off the rain.

  “It’s not personal,” I’d look at myself in the mirror and say until it sank in. And then I’d go down to dinner.

  Most of August was one of the strangest times of my life. Now that I was out to my parents, I didn’t try so hard to act like a guy. Slowly, I started being myself as best I could and a weight lifted off my shoulders and skull. Around the house, though, my self-expression met with mixed results

  “There is no way Sabretooth could beat Starfire in one-on-one,” I told Mikey one evening as we sat at dinner, punctuating my points with finger jabs. “If Cyclops can blast him away, so can Starfire.” I illustrated the rising and falling arc of Sabretooth’s defeated body.

  “Well what about Nightcrawler versus Starfire,” Mikey shot back. “He can teleport.”

  I was grinning at him, but I felt the hair on the back of my next standing up and looked over to see Mom glaring at me.

  “Stop waving your hands around,” she snapped.

  I crossed my arms and turned back to Mikey. “I think that would be a cool fight to watch,” I told him.

  A moment later when Mom went to the garage to get Dad for dinner, Mikey whispered, “I bet no one yells at Starfire like that.”

  I grinned and ruffled his hair. “I bet you’re right.”

  Dad never said anything, but twice while he was watching TV with Mikey and me, he simply got up and left the room. When he didn’t come back, I reviewed the last few minutes in my mind and realized he left right after I crossed my legs above the knee and folded my hands together in my lap.

  ***

  One afternoon in the middle of the month, when I went into the garage to see what Dad was doing, he put down his wrench and sat back on his heels. “I made you an appointment,” he said brusquely. “You need to send a letter.”

  It took me a minute to figure out what he was talking about. “The endocrinologist?” I asked, incredulous.

  “Yes, he’s in the Cities. I’m going with you. If he says this isn’t safe, I want you to promise me you’re not going to make a fuss. You’re going to do what the doctor says.”

  “Of course.” I skipped across the room and put my arms around his shoulders, giving him a kiss on the cheek. “Thanks, Dad.”

  “And you need to talk to that doctor, the one you like, she has to send him some kind of letter about you.”

  “No problem, I’ll do it,” I told him.

  He grumbled something I couldn’t hear and got back under the car. Knowing I had that appointment to look forward to made the last couple weeks with Dr. Webber bearable. Mom came back in with me one time to complain that I was acting effeminate around the house.

  “I’m not acting,” I said, but it fell on deaf ears. Dr. Webber suggested that my Dad should take me to more sporting events and that the family should go to church together. We did end up going to church, but I brought Claire and she actually enjoyed it, so that made it easy to sit through.

  Finally the big day rolled around. Dad put on a suit coat to take me in to see the doctor. He only had two of them, and I was glad that I got the gray one for church and not his black formal dinner and funerals jacket. I wore my usual jeans, but dug out a nice T-shirt. I wondered if I should wear something more feminine, but I was already on eggshells with Mom. I had given Dad the names of two doctors that had been recommended to me by Dr. Mendel, and he went with one of those, so I was sure this doctor had a good sense about transsexualism and how to treat it.

  On the drive in, I couldn’t keep my legs still. When I tried to stop them, my right hand danced up and down my thigh, picking at the seam of my jeans. Finally I managed to settle on wiggling my toes in my shoes on one foot and then the other, back and forth. I could tell Dad was tense too, because he didn’t bother to try to make small talk. We listened to the radio most of the way, or at least tried to.

  Funny thing: the appointment was just like the physical exams I’d gotten every year since I could remember. The nurse checked my blood pressure, weight, temperature, all that stuff, and then put me in a little room to wait for the doctor. Dad came in with me because he had questions.

  The doctor walked in reading my file. He was an Indian man with short, very black hair, thick black eyebrows and an even thicker black mustache. His white coat and the bright blue and white striped dress shirt underneath it gave his brown skin a slightly gray hue. He pushed his rectangular wire frame glasses up on his nose with one hand and closed the file, then introduced himself to Dad and me.

  “Looks like you’re in good health,” he said very matter-of-factly and without any hint of an accent. “I received the letter from Dr. Mendel about your transsexualism. You want to go on HRT?”

  “Yes, totally.”

  He smiled then, which made him look 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.

  “Well, Chris, I’d like to put you on a dose of Spironolactone, fifty milligrams twice a day. That will reduce the amount of testosterone in your blood to normal female levels. I’m also going to put you on Premarin starting at two and a half milligrams a day and then doubling that. Now some people think more is better when it comes to estrogen, but that is just 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.”

  Dad shifted in his chair. “You’re just going to give him the hormones? Just like that? Are they dangerous? What 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 there are with any medication. Chris is in exc
ellent 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 reversible, right?” Dad asked.

  “More or less, yes,” 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… well, you need surgery to reverse that.”

  Dad’s normally tan face was turning 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 wrote out 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 something more about the doctor’s visit, but he didn’t. He just 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 really 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 and I’d seen a few short posts from her on GenderPeace, but she’d been pretty out of it.

  When we got out of 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 just a couple miles away.”

  As I rang her doorbell, I wondered if it was a bad idea to stop by unannounced, but it was one of the downfalls of not having a cell phone. Natalie’s mom answered the door with a big smile and immediately 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, please 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 looking at the building materials and how nice they were. The foyer was paved with 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 a 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. At the top I paused, outside the left-hand door, and knocked lightly.

  “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. We should have visited sooner, and 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?” I asked. “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. Then 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 really 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 terrible freakish part that I always had to hide and pay attention to, you know. It’s just 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, until Natalie’s mom poked her head through the door and said it was time for me to go.

  I gave Natalie a gentle hug.

  “I’m excited for you,” she said.

  “Same here,” I said and laughed. She made me promise to come visit again when she was up and around more. 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 T-girl friend wasn’t on the list of Dr. Webber-approved activities for 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 he and Natalie’s mom had been talking about 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 transsexual.”

  “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.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  School starting brought a welcome relief to the whole family. Despite the high temperatures of the summer, the house had been emotionally cold as a tomb since June. I dove into my classes with fervor, and started going over to Claire’s most nights after school, except for the dreaded Wednesdays when I still had to see crazy Dr. Webber. He’d been taking lots of notes during my visits of late, and I started to feel paranoid. I had to figure out a way to stop seeing him, but for most of September I was content just to have my regular life back, except without as much lying a
nd pretending as I’d had to do a year ago.

  I fantasized about telling my swim coach the real reason I was quitting the team. I imagined walking into his office and saying, “Actually, here’s the truth. I’m a transsexual woman and I’m going to start growing breasts this year, so I can’t swim with the guys any more.” Unfortunately, the second part of that imagined scenario involved him outing me to the whole school, so I never went with that plan. Instead I pointed out that I wasn’t in the top half of the team and said that I needed to focus on schoolwork and earning money for college. He argued against it, but I was tenacious.

  I didn’t know if I could refuse to go to Dr. Webber without Mom trying to cut off my supply of hormones, but I had to try. After Claire and I brainstormed over the weekend, I cornered Mom in her tiny office after dinner on Sunday.

  I tried to sound as plaintive as possible, and not demanding. “Mom, I really don’t want to go to Dr. Webber anymore, he gives me the creeps.”

  “That was the deal,” she said. “You get to see your doctor, but you have to see mine too.”

  I sat on the edge of her desk. “When we have appointments and you’re not there, he spends the whole time asking about my sexual fantasies,” I said. “It’s gross.”

  Now she turned in her chair to look at me. “Are you lying to me, Christopher?”

  “I’m not,” I said. “I mean, you know I can’t stand him, but if that was it, I could keep going I suppose. He makes me feel disgusting. He wants to talk about masturbation and stuff. It’s nasty. And then he takes lots and lots of notes. I’m afraid of what he’s going to do with them. Can we just find another doctor? You can pick one who wants to change me, just not a…you know, a gross one.”

  She sighed. “I don’t know why you persist in this delusion about womanhood,” she said. “What do you think it’s going to solve? Do you think your life would be easier as a woman?”

  I sagged against the desk, holding myself up with my arms. After months of this, even the first few lines of my mother’s argument made me feel as if I’d gone three days without sleeping. “It’s not going to make my life easier,” I said. “Are you kidding?”