Something went boom. We could not quite see the fireworks, but we could see the sky flickering blue, and green, and white. A neighbor’s dog was barking. The sky flickered.
We sat there in the dark, my sister and I. I could smell the fragrance of the newly mown lawn. From the quiet street I heard the laughter of children. Two small figures ran down the side street, sparklers in their hands. It was a great night for them, the stuff of dreams.
We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass.
That boy and girl ran down the road and disappeared. Light from the fireworks flickered off my sister’s face.
I wouldn’t be hearing the voices of those children again. It made me wonder where they’d gone.
* In previous works, I gave her the pseudonym “Nora.” There’s a chapter about her in She’s Not There in which I describe the morning my aunt became convinced she’d died. My mother had recommended that the best response to this situation was for my aunt to drink a nice glass of milk.
DR. CHRISTINE MCGINN
© Lev Radin/Shutterstock
You cannot deny the biology of men and women. But where society gets it wrong is the binary. There are plenty of people in between. It’s a mystery, and I think it always will be a mystery.
Dr. Christine McGinn is a surgeon, a mother of two, a backup flight surgeon for the space shuttle program, and a transgender woman. As a man, she saved her sperm before transition; ten years later she used that sperm to have children with her partner Lisa. The two of them are both biological mothers of their son and daughter, and each mother was able to breast-feed the twins. I sat down to talk with Christine at her office in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on a hot summer day in 2011.
CHRISTINE MCGINN: Because I was a physician, I knew that you could freeze sperm and use it later. So that’s what I wanted to do. This was in the last few months before I started living as a woman.
At that point of my life, I was really afraid. I didn’t realize that the transition could be a success. It was like jumping off a cliff. The whole donation thing was very scary. I had to go down and do something that was very male in order to save the sperm. [Laughs]
It was totally opposite of everything I was working on at that time in my life. Producing sperm? I mean, please.
I found out that I had to do it, like, six or ten times. I started off trying to do it at home and race in, and it was so embarrassing. I ended up finding a parking garage, because I would—I could just—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it at the place, like, the sperm donation room.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: I had a friend who donated sperm for an in vitro. He said it was a strange experience to kind of be taken to a very professional environment, and then to close the door and to open the drawer and to find the copies of Bouncy and D-Cup.
CM: Like that’s going to work? You know? I’m a woman. [Laughs] You should have, like, some chocolate here. And a candle.
JFB: Maybe some Joni Mitchell. [Laughs] All right, so somehow, you managed to save your sperm.
CM: Right. And then, for the next ten years, I just was freaking out. I would read conflicting studies about how long sperm can survive frozen. It was not the typical situation, but I had a biological clock. Because, apparently, the biggest danger to frozen sperm, or embryos, is ionizing radiation from the universe. [Laughs] Which you cannot—you, like, cannot shield against.
JFB: Ionizing radiation from the universe?
CM: Yes. These little particles that are zipping through the universe, and right through our bodies; we can handle the direct hits because we have a lot of different cells, but a sperm is, like, one cell. So the longer it sits, the longer it’s exposed, they don’t know if it’s going to work or whatever.
JFB: And you didn’t have a relationship at the time?
CM: Well, I was ending one. I was separated and still married, pending divorce.
JFB: How many times have you been married, in all?
CM: I’ve been legally married twice, and civil union once, with Lisa.
JFB: When you were a husband—and I don’t know about you, I always find it weird to talk about when I was a man—did you and your—wives ever talk about having children?
CM: Of course, because it was very important to me. I’ve always really wanted kids. It’s something I never had any doubts about. Ironically, both of my wives never had kids and had no interest in them.
JFB: What kind of husband were you? What kind of father would you have been?
CM: I think answering that question is just going to be kind of, like, making stuff up. [Laughs]
JFB: Hey, man, there’s a great future for you as a memoirist.
CM: I’m not playing games with you. I think I would’ve been exactly like I am now, minus the breast-feeding. [Laughs]
I mean, I’m a parent, you know. This whole mother/father stuff is kind of random.
JFB: Is it a false binary? As someone who was a father, and who has been a mother, I’m finding that, in most ways, what I’ve taught my children are the same things I was going to teach them in any case. But as a man, I was a fairly feminine hippie thing. You know, I’ve never known how to throw a football. But you, Christine. I mean—you were in the navy? I’m going to guess you knew how to throw a football.
CM: Yes. And I look forward to that now. I really do. Like, I cannot wait to take my kids fishing. But there are plenty of women who fish, you know. My sister is a perfect example. She loves to fish. But it’s like my brain lives in two worlds, the “Yes, you have to live in this society where these stereotypes exist about what is male and what is female.” Then there is me; I just do what comes natural to me, and sometimes it’s considered male by everybody, and sometimes it’s considered female by everybody, and I don’t really care.
Then there’s the scientist in me that knows that there is a difference, there is not a binary, but a gender spectrum. There are chemicals that are different in men and women. And when a transgender woman transitions, we are somewhere in the middle. Especially having gone through a simulated pregnancy, in order to breast-feed, I felt the changes of those hormones. I felt my milk let down when not only my baby would cry, but a baby on TV would cry, and even, ridiculously, when a door would close and make a squeak.
You cannot deny the biology of men and women. But where society gets it wrong is the binary. There are plenty of people in between. It’s a mystery, and I think it always will be a mystery.
JFB: It sounds like you’re saying that males and females really are two different beings, with plenty of territory in between, but motherhood and fatherhood are social constructs, especially if we’re not talking about giving birth, going through labor. Post-birth, is your relationship with the child the same whether you’re male or female?
CM: I challenge people to define what is male and what is female, and I think you run into the same problem when you try and define what is mother and what is father. Especially now that we have science, and you can have an adoptive mother that breast-feeds.
So the mother produced the egg but didn’t deliver the baby. The definitions are changing.
JFB: Is it a good thing, that the definitions have changed?
CM: Yeah, I think so. There is nothing in my life that has compared to the amount of love I have for my children. Anytime there is that much love, it’s gotta be a good thing.
Ironically, for as much love as I have for my children, I see a lot of hatred produced by people who are not comfortable with that idea. Like the case of the “pregnant man” on TV a few years ago.
JFB: That case kicked up a lot of dust. I get asked about it a lot. I try to take a middle path and basically say, “You know, whatever—here’s a family of people that love each other. How can you be against that?” But it is funny the way even transgender people are sometimes as uncomfortable as anybody with the idea of there being something more than two binary choices.
CM: Right. You know, even though I can throw a baseball, I tend to be more of a binary person
. I do get gender spectrum and gender queer. I get it all. But personally, that’s not where I fit. So I can become uncomfortable by that as well.
JFB: I saw a T-shirt one time that said, “There are only two kinds of people: those who reject the binary, and those who don’t.”
CM: That’s funny.
JFB: Let’s back up. Eventually, you wound up with Lisa. Could you talk about your relationship? When did you tell her you were trans? She didn’t know when you first started dating.
CM: It was our third date. We went out to dinner, and it was hard. She was assuming I had been married to a man. She was assuming I was one of these lesbians that wasn’t sure of their sexual orientation. She wasn’t taking me very seriously, because she thought I wasn’t, you know, a true lesbian, a card-carrying member. What we call a gold-star lesbian.
And here I am, nervous, because I’m trying to, like, talk about my former marriages without being too specific. So it was really kind of funny.
JFB: I find that the—sometimes, the simplest, most innocent questions that people ask me can demand that I either lie or else have a conversation that’s much more intimate than I want to have, simply in order to tell the truth.
CM: Right, right.
JFB: I’ll frequently meet other moms who will say, you know, “What does your husband do?”
CM: And you don’t feel like telling them the truth. Like, you don’t feel like opening yourself up to their judgment.
JFB: I remember one time I was doing a story for Condé Nast Traveler. I was having dinner by myself, as you often do when you’re a traveling reporter, in Nevis, which is a Caribbean island. And—
CM: It’s also a lesion, in plastic surgery, that could be removed. [Laughs]
JFB: [Laughs] Well—
CM: How do you spell it?
JFB: N-E-V-I-S.
CM: Is it, like, a little red island or something? [Laughs]
JFB: It’s next to St. Kitts. Somehow, sitting at the table I made the decision—I’d had a few drinks, and I just decided to be a widow. So I just told them, “Yeah, I used to be married, but you know, he died.” And so then I could describe the man I was married to as my former self.
CM: I’ve had fantasies of doing that, but I’ve never had the guts.
JFB: Well, can I say, don’t do it, because you immediately feel like a creep, because people are sympathizing with you and their eyes are tearing up over something that, in fact, never happened.
CM: It’s so George Costanza.
JFB: Exactly. It’s the transgender equivalent of George Costanza.
CM: “I’m an architect!”
JFB: So what did Lisa do when you finally spilled the beans?
CM: I said, “I have to tell you something.” She’s like, “What?” And I said, “Well, you know, when I said I was married?” I don’t remember exactly how I said it, but I said something like, “I wasn’t the woman in the marriage.” [Laughs] I was trying not to have to say it.
And this is when I fell in love with her. She just said, “I’m attracted to you. You don’t have to go into all that right now. I just want to sit here and have dinner and get to know you. That doesn’t matter to me.” Which, at that moment, was pretty cool.
JFB: As the relationship deepened, did you have to negotiate your former male identity in any way? Did she have to get her mind around it, or did she essentially say, “Okay, I’m with you, I’ll follow you,” from that moment onward?
CM: She was, like, an A-student in gender studies. Being a feminist and a lesbian, I—well, that doesn’t qualify her, because there are a lot of feminists and lesbians that do not get the transgender thing at all.
JFB: Not to mention gay men. I’ve seen that. What’s the phrase about, “To someone who only has a hammer, everything looks like a nail?”
CM: I agree. But she got it.
JFB: How long after—how long into the relationship did you start talking about kids?
CM: I kind of wanted to get this done by the time I was forty. And yet—this is the kind of thing you don’t push somebody into.
JFB: It was a biological clock for you, in a way.
CMG: Yeah, more than one, because I was scared that my sperm wouldn’t work the longer they sat.
JFB: Was there a moment when she finally agreed? When she said, “Okay, let’s do this”?
CM: It was her idea. She said, “Let’s start doing this.”
JFB: What was that like?
CM: It took us years to get pregnant. We tried, and then stopped for a while, because it was really emotionally hard to go through that and not get pregnant. The difference with in vitro is that when somebody gets pregnant naturally, you either are or you aren’t. When you do in vitro there’s, like, ten different steps where you have to sweat it out for each pregnancy. It is tormenting. It is really just gut wrenching. We had a miscarriage.
I felt like I was in Las Vegas. Like, keep rolling the dice.
JFB: Tell me about the birth of your twins.
CM: The day Lisa gave birth, I had been putting furniture together, which, there you go, there’s a manly thing. That was my job.
JFB: I did that, too.
CM: I got stuck with that gender role. But then, I wasn’t the one that was pregnant.
JFB: I find that there are certain things that still fall to me, that are the man’s job, simply because they’re not things that Deedie knows how to do. And I keep doing them out of habit, I guess. Like mowing the lawn.
CM: I really think that that’s love. Because that really is annoying for you, probably. But you put that aside and realize that it’s just easier for you. That’s a very loving, selfless thing.
JFB: And also, I guess my transition took away enough from Deedie that—
CM: So there’s guilt involved? [Laughs]
JFB: I feel like, in addition to everything else that she may have lost, she shouldn’t have to mow the lawn, too.
CM: When my kids were born, it all happened so fast. One of the twins became distressed in the womb. They had that baby out in, like, three minutes. And I never felt so helpless in my life. Here I am, a surgeon, and I can’t do anything except hold Lisa’s hand.
I’ve never had so much emotion in my life, ever. It was just a flood.
JFB: You had to induce a false pregnancy in order to breast-feed? Tell me how you did that.
CM: As a doctor, I knew that it was possible. I followed the protocol that involves simulating pregnancy with hormones. It’s estrogen and progesterone. My simulation pregnancy was over a month before Lisa delivered—with twins, we were expecting them to be born earlier. That entire month I was just pumping nonstop, every two hours. We had a whole freezer full of milk. And you know, the first couple of weeks of it was no good, because it had all of the hormones in it. So we only saved, like, the last week or so. But still, it was a freezer full of milk.
Lisa had no idea about the way breast-feeding takes over your life, because this was her first. It was kind of funny that I went through that on my own, first, weeks before she did. And then it took her a couple of days to actually—for her milk to let down.
The children were so small when they were born. They were only five pounds. At first we had to feed them with a syringe. They were breast-feeding as well, but they weren’t latching that great on either of us.
JFB: What was it like when they finally muckled on to you?
CM: Oh, I can’t even put it in words. I really cannot put it in words. It was—I was just—oh.
JFB: Were you amazed? Were you afraid?
CM: It was heaven. I was afraid. I don’t know, it was uncharted territory. Like, I knew the milk was good. Lisa was a little concerned that it would be like skimmed milk, or something, you know. [Laughs] Like—she’s like, “Is it the same stuff?”
JFB: Is it the same milk?
CM: And she was a little dubious about, like, is this really all right? I think that’s totally natural for a mother, to be concerned.
I will jus
t say that there are things nobody thinks about when two women are both breast-feeding. Like, technical stuff that you don’t think about. When you have a mother and a father, the mother decides when the kids get fed. Right? The father doesn’t, really. Right?
But you know, when you have two women who are filled with pregnancy hormones and have that, like, mother-bear attitude about how things should be done … It was really crazy.
JFB: So did that cause serious conflict between you and Lisa?
CM: Totally not serious conflict, because the most important thing are the babies.
Eden finally latched—I breast-fed her more than Luke. Luke was never really good. Lisa hated breast-feeding. Eventually we decided to stop.
I’m putting on my science hat again—when you decide to stop, there are hormonal issues. The strongest emotion a person can feel in their life comes from oxytocin, which is the love drug.
JFB: Oxytocin?
CM: That’s what’s responsible for babies’ bonding during breast-feeding. So the baby latches on, breast-feeds, your brain just [makes oozing sound], just, like, oozes this gooey love substance, oxytocin. Fathers are proven to have higher oxytocin before the delivery, and just stroking your child’s head. You know, when the baby—when you smell a newborn’s head, it really—that smell, it’s like—
JFB: I just saw a friend’s newborn on Friday, and I was like, [makes sniffing sound]—
CM: My niece said it the best. She came in and smelled them, and she was five years old at the time, and she’s like, “They smell like cupcakes.” [Laughs] And it’s universal. When you ask me what that’s like, I can’t describe it, you know, and I’m a huge fan of food and cupcakes and chocolate, and so that’s the closest I can come to it—it’s like chocolate. [Laughs]
JFB: So when you stopped breast-feeding, was it a kind of a mourning, a loss?
CM: Yes. Lisa wanted to stop before I did. The problem is, once a baby gets a nipple, a plastic nipple, it gives more milk. And so they don’t have to work as hard.
Stuck in the Middle with You Page 22