by Mary Collins
So where was my mother in all this? And why have I used the word “penis” thirteen times?
In coming out to my mom, and sharing my plans for medical treatment with her, I was navigating two major areas of conflict. The first was my mother’s difficulty with the concept of “trans” as it applied to me, and the second was her deep parental attachment to my physical self.
As a single parent, my mother’s position was compounded by the intensity of her bond with an only “daughter.” It had been us against the world for so long. Not only did my coming out essentially call into question everything my mother knew about me as a person; it also felt like a rejection of what she had given me: my body, my name, my role as daughter.
“It’s like you’re asking me to be in the room when you shoot yourself,” she said, weeping, during one of our earliest conversations.
In changing my name, cutting my hair, throwing out old clothes, starting hormone replacement treatment, undergoing top surgery and then a hysterectomy, I imagined that, to my mother, J. died by degrees. It’s taken me a while to realize there wasn’t a single moment when my mother “lost” her daughter but a period of four to five years when every time she saw me, something was gone or had changed. I wasn’t, broadly speaking, a different person, but my signs were different.
Aside from my grandmother, most of my family is what I’d called Holiday Irish Catholics. Some of us go to church sometimes, but “religious” is not one of our top identifiers. Yet when I came out, many of my mother’s fears seemed to come from a deeply Christian place. She told me, on more than one occasion, that to undergo hormone treatment and surgery would be unnatural, against God in some way. Despite all our progress together, despite her agreement that my decisions have improved my quality of life, we still clash on the “physical changes” front.
Much like that of my schoolmates, the Collinses’ overall reaction to my transness happened on the individual-as-exception level. They tried to change the way they referred to me because it mattered to me, not necessarily because they believed my masculine identity. I don’t want to suggest that the individual approach isn’t important; it’s essential. You don’t have to have far-reaching or radical ideas about gender to call someone the right name. But because I was dealing with larger issues, including creating my identity and surviving the process, I began to become impatient with my family’s response. My mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins were trying to understand, struggling. I just couldn’t manage their discomfort and my own at the same time.
By the time I had top surgery, in my junior year of college, I had been on testosterone for around three years. “T” is a naturally occurring hormone that appears in varying levels in all biological sexes. A monitored schedule of T injections aimed to trick my body into halting the production of estrogen as its primary hormone, and adjust my secondary sex characteristics accordingly. T launched me into a second puberty. My voice dropped; I began to redistribute weight and muscle and grow facial hair. My appetites changed; I sometimes slept for ten, twelve hours at a time. I’ll admit I found myself unable to cry for almost a year and unable to remember dreams at all. My daily moods reached a more constant, upbeat elevation.
The morph in physiology through hormones is the most known arc in the trans-guy narrative, even more than the penis stuff. It’s the moment when people think of trans boys as becoming Real Boys, or at least looking like them. And for a long time, I believed testosterone made me real too. What it actually did was give me a real relationship with my body for the first time, a connection that spurred me on to a love of fitness and cooking, and improved my sense of personal style. Not everyone needs hormone treatment for this to happen.
While the “concept” piece of my trans identity was at the center of our disagreement during high school, the “physical changes” argument between my mother and me ramped up freshman year of college. I began my testosterone regimen, which segued into a six-month semi-estrangement. We exchanged a few terse e-mails but didn’t speak to or see each other, despite being only a two-hour drive apart. My mom didn’t feel emotionally capable of seeing me or having me stay with her if I was taking hormones. The full extent of all our distances from each other reverberated back and forth unpredictably.
We reunited the summer before my sophomore year in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. I was working with friends at a summer camp and living with my stepfather. The reconciliation was tentative and quiet. The disagreements continued, but this time so did the communication.
It’s horrifying when something that gives you great fulfillment has the exact opposite effect on someone you care about. For every answer you demand to find in yourself, there is a complementary question directed outward: If they really loved me, why wouldn’t they be happy for me? Don’t they trust me to make the right decisions? Is their love conditional? Am I really hurting them or are they choosing to react this way?
Reconnection and believing in reconnection seem simple, but they aren’t things you can schedule or predict. It’s hard, and there are no guarantees.
My grandmother used to say (and still does; she’s ninety-two) that if we could just “keep the lines of communication open,” my mom and I would one day understand each other a little better. Like two busy people just blindly ringing each other up, timing always wrong, after hours or on hold, until one day we connect. And this connection doesn’t mean forgiveness or acceptance or even agreement of any kind.
It just means two people who are finally ready to be on the phone.
WORD BANK
At birth, sex is assigned to a baby based on anatomical reproductive organs and genitalia. Gender identity refers to one’s inner sense of gender. Gender role is associated with the behavior expected from different sexes in society.
Mismatch
Mary Collins
Sex Assigned at Birth
We all begin as female in the womb.
Eggs fertilized by a sperm with a Y chromosome eventually develop into boys, but nature’s original template is the female body, breasts included.
What did I know about the gender of my first and only child when I delivered my baby? Based on the simple biology of external private parts, I had a girl. I named her J. and used female pronouns whenever I spoke about her.
Right from the start, J. proved extremely sensitive to the texture of fabrics, as well as quick to respond emotionally to loud noises, too much activity, and anything remotely menacing, like a spooky-looking stuffed animal. Scientists have shown that these traits are inherently more common in female babies.
As J.’s mother, I am an athletic woman, ambidextrous, dyslexic; I hear pitch differently in my left ear versus my right and am quite gifted at parallel parking. These traits appear much more frequently in men (though there’s still some controversy about the parallel parking).
But I never felt my gender did not match my body.
By age twelve, J. started deliberately constructing a gender-neutral look using the tools available to any middle school kid: haircut, type of shoes, size of watch.
By sixteen, J. had moved onto the name and switched to Donald, and asked teachers to start referring to her with male pronouns.
By eighteen, Donald began hormone treatment to lower his voice. After six to eight weeks the shift is irreversible, because the vocal cords thicken.
By twenty-one, Donald told me he needed to remove his ovaries and possibly his uterus for a range of reasons, including the increased risk of cancer caused by the male hormones he was taking. In an effort to balance out the mismatch between his mind and his body, he had to resort to a toxic hormonal brew. The conflicting signals created side effects.
I remained skeptical that such a mismatch could ever occur, but eventually learned from research and interviews with psychologists that boy fetuses develop their physical traits—a penis, for example—about eight weeks after conception, but their brains are flooded with male hormones again at about six months, which shapes their perception of the
ir own gender. Nature actually takes two steps to build a man that looks and identifies as male. The possibility for disconnect is built into the process.
Does that mean a child of, say, twelve should have the right to alter his or her body with hormones and surgery to change his or her gender? How young is too young? Is it better for someone to wait until at least the mid-twenties, when the mind and capacity for understanding cause and effect are fully developed, or does it become ever more difficult the longer the person waits to transition and, perhaps, raises an already high risk for suicide?
Of course, many even question the right to make the transition at all.
Some long-term studies, mainly done by Swedish scientists, have tended to muddy rather than clarify the answers. Even after gender-reassignment surgery, transgender people are at much higher risk for suicide. And some studies have showed that many young children with a conflicted sense of gender identity often lose their desire to alter their sex and grow up to be gay.
Oophorectomy—ovarian-removal surgery. The word itself sounds Dr. Seuss-like, with the O, O, P, H, O, spelling that captures for me the quixotic medical advice Donald received. Something deep within him drove him forward. Doctors and counselors wanted to help him grab the holy grail of a balanced personal identity, but I also knew that Donald was thirty times more likely to die of a heart attack after he removed his ovaries than of ovarian cancer if he’d kept them.
My own ob-gyn told me this and said she would never perform the surgery. In previous conversations with this doctor over the years, she had said her practice did not perform any gender-transition-related surgeries, but during my latest visit, she revealed that one of the doctors in her practice now handles such things.
Such things.
But ovaries and a uterus are not things—which is such a gender-neutral word—they are part of one’s gender. Donald quickly disabused me of my antiquated attitudes and opted not for an oophorectomy but a full-blown hysterectomy at age twenty-two, because his swollen uterus pressed against his other organs, causing great discomfort, and he rightly feared another burst ovarian cyst.
My own mother had a hysterectomy in her early fifties because a pap smear had shown the early stages of cancer; she almost hemorrhaged to death in the operating room. I remember the parents of my best friend at the time telling me they would care for me if my mother died (I was thirteen, and at the time, both my parents were in the hospital in intensive care, my mother, recovering after her surgery, and my father, dying of cancer).
In my universe, cancer is pretty much the only reason why anyone would slice out body parts and risk bleeding out on an operating table. In Donald’s world, his biology was the cancer, and he rejoiced that he could use modern medicine to eliminate it.
The doctor made small incisions on either side of Donald’s abdomen to remove the ovaries and suck out the uterus, a procedure known as laparoscopic surgery, considered minimally invasive (ah, the irony). Swift, clean (no six-inch scars), and, from Donald’s point of view, an amazing success.
His body felt the new clarity almost immediately. No more bloating. Better moods. Better energy. No more swollen ovaries.
During the same span of time Donald elected to carve out his maleness, my own estrogen and progesterone levels gradually dropped as I entered menopause. I expected hot flashes (true), vaginal dryness (no), a lower sex drive (barely), mood swings (actually my moods stabilized).
What I experienced instead was a slight weight gain, larger breasts, an evening out of my temperament, a softening of my personality over all, a rise in my empathy for others, and a greater sensitivity to loud noises, rough fabrics, and strong smells. (I still parallel park well.)
Donald’s surgically and chemically induced “second puberty,” between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two, seemed to more directly match the scientists’ prediction for my natural menopause. He became more like me in the alpha-woman androgynous stages of my twenties and thirties, and I became more like Donald when he was J., a sensitive, intellectual, artistic girl.
All the scientific studies in the world will never pin down what it means to be male or female. None of us inhabit our gender the same way decade after decade.
Just as my only child was about to graduate college and launch into full adulthood as a working, self-sufficient person, I came into my own as a heterosexual female in my fifties with some masculine tendencies that I embrace rather than hide. My daughter now feels infinitely more comfortable as a trans man stripped of the feminine biology nature bestowed on her/him at birth.
Gender Identity
Facebook has more than fifty categories for gender. I teach at a nearby state university and when I told one of my college classes this, none of the students believed me and had never heard of most of the terms listed on the site: agender/neutrois, androgyne/androgynous, bigender, cisgender, female to male (FTM), gender fluid, intersex, male to female (MTF) . . .
I scanned what the students were wearing and saw pink sweatshirts on the women and dark-blue tops on the men, lightweight pointy toed shoes on the women and sneakers on the men. None of them wore any of the super-expensive designs from Prada, Marni, and Giorgio Armani, all of which had just launched gender-neutral lines featured in the slick pages of the New York Times Magazine under a story titled “One.” In my students’ day-to-day lives, the gender stereotypes I’ve experienced all my life remain startling in place.
Those aged fifteen to twenty-five are leading the charge for a more gender-fluid vocabulary, but they represent a tiny subset of that age group. From what I see in my classes, the majority of young people remain remarkably disengaged from and even oblivious to the most significant linguistic shift in my lifetime.
In 2015 the New York Times officially introduced the title “Mx.” for individuals who do not want to be clearly identified as male or female. The Washington Post now accepts “they” as a pronoun for gender-fluid people. Other mass media markets have followed suit. As a young woman growing up in the 1970s, I remember the debate over the title “Ms.,” used so women no longer had to identify their marital status. While researching these changes I came across the interesting fact that “you” was the plural of “thou.” Languages are meant to evolve.
But for reasons I have not yet fathomed, I embrace Ms. but struggle with the idea of eliminating male and female pronouns as identifying markers. Discerning if a person is a man or a woman remains important to me as I navigate social interactions. My relationship with Donald has forced me, for the first time, to ask myself “Why?” When I mention to my classes that I am writing a book with my transgender son about our lives, they generally look uncomfortable and remain silent. According to a study done by YouGov, Americans under age thirty are far less likely to consider being transgender as morally wrong than, say, citizens over age sixty-five (more than one in three believe that), but somehow I still don’t see that more open mindset among the young people I deal with, other than a very vocal minority.
College admissions offices have started to anticipate the cultural shift my own students don’t see coming. Brown University and the University of Vermont, to name just two, no longer ask students to check if they are male or female; instead they ask them to select their gender identity. At the University of Vermont, one student received approval to be officially referred to as “they.” Many dorms offer gender-neutral floors with gender-neutral bathrooms, clearly a step ahead of states like North Carolina. Donald’s college health-insurance program covered the cost of his gender-reassignment surgery, and other states have started requiring all insurers to follow suit.
Some languages embrace a gender continuum. The Swedes added the gender-neutral pronoun hen to official dictionaries in 2015 to substitute for boys and girls; they especially encourage preschools to use hen to guard against stereotyping kids at an early age. In the Philippines, to cite another example, the Tagalog word for gender, kasarian, translates more accurately as “kind or species.” Even though the root for gender i
n English also sprang from a word that meant “kind,” today our language remains firmly in the world of his/her/he/she/man/woman. It or they, which one of Donald’s trans friends prefers, just seems to sit there oddly on the page, and when spoken, seems to bust open and misshape the rules of grammar.
It is going to college now.
They like school.
But Donald’s experience has made me rethink even my native tongue, which I work with for a living as a writer and teacher of writing. Of course many grammatical rules can be seen as arbitrary, but others prove necessary for communication and form the foundation of a common language. From nature’s point-of-view, if “nature” can even have one, most species need a distinct male and distinct female to procreate.
But not all.
In many parts of Europe—Germany, for example—there’s a strong movement toward a post-gender world with gender-neutral bathrooms, neutral pronouns in the classroom, even rigorous rules against gender stereotyping in billboard ads! For some odd reason the American media never seems to bring up trends in other countries and instead portrays gender-related changes—such as the call for legislation to allow transgender individuals to use the bathroom that matches their self-designated gender—as some boundary-pushing exercise. Progress is taking place all around the world, and it can seem sometimes as if the United States is lagging behind. But, to be honest, there are so many other, more important issues to worry about for transgender individuals and their families.
Today, when members of the military and their families tend to lean conservative on issues such as LGBTQ rights, I must remind myself that the US military has often taken the lead when it comes to opening doors to people of color, women, and immigrants. It would be easy to wax patriotic about the laudable track record, but usually recruitment came down to supply and demand. During World War II, for example, my mother was mocked in her small New England town for volunteering to serve in the Navy, but the huge manpower shortage meant the country actually needed her services. As a WAVE, a member of the Women’s Reserves, she took on jobs, such as drafting maps, rarely open to women before.