by Mary Collins
The sweat pooling on my back and ribs under all my layers of clothing stung with each step. I had been doing so well, trusting that all my discomfort would be over soon. Yet every day I had believed myself closer to top surgery, my rejected claim was sitting in a clerk’s outbox. I possessed some savings, but out of pocket, the surgery was going to cost more than $8,000. I didn’t have $8,000.
A few months earlier, I switched from my mother’s insurance to my school’s. She and I had both agreed to the terms. My mom didn’t feel comfortable having her insurance cover the physical changes she was opposed to, and by having me move policies, we were able to remove at least one point of conflict from the list.
My school’s policy covered hormone treatment, but its attitude toward GCS was vague. Emerson’s health-center director was tireless in helping me, and together we pored over the policy to find some way to appeal.
I couldn’t really share my claim defeat with my mother because I thought it might be a kind of victory to her—not that I was sad about it but because the medical system was preventing the same thing she wanted to prevent.
I missed my mom, who as a single parent and often self-employed writer/editor always had a kind of doggedness and resourcefulness in dealing with bureaucracy. She knows where to apply pressure and never forgets to follow up. Indeed, no matter how hard I tried to keep my “shit” from her door, there were days when I broke down and called her. I needed a ride somewhere or I needed help with a bill or I was just really depressed. These calls were our white flags, proof that our bond was intact.
My fraternity brothers were attentive and kind, but they were peers, not parents. It just so happened they were high-functioning peers. The insurance-claim debacle prompted me to come out to my pledge class, many of who did not know I was transgender. One of my pledge brothers, Dave, exhibited his characteristic gentility.
“I have no idea what that means,” he told me earnestly. “Tell me about it.”
I told them about it. The situation made its way to our pledgemaster (he who runs pledge) and then the active brotherhood.
I had no idea how far the information had carried. But by the meeting later that night, they had promised to help fund-raise so I could afford top surgery.
I graciously thanked them. They’re really nice, I thought, but who are they kidding?
They certainly weren’t kidding me. A central core of brothers set up a page and worked tirelessly to fund-raise toward the cost of my surgery. Within twenty-four hours they had almost $2,000.
Another of my brothers, Ben, a journalist worked for Out magazine at the time, conducted a short interview with me in response to the campaign. “Boston Fraternity Raises Money for Trans Brother” read the headline of the article.
Within another twenty-four hours, donations were pouring in from around the world.
I missed two days of work at my campus office job while I entertained media inquiries. Other RAs graciously covered my “on duty” nights at the dorm. I skipped some classes and fell asleep in others.
A national LGBTQ organization asked me to sign with them as a spokesperson. Inside Edition offered us $3,000 for our story if we would give them before-and-after pictures of me. Surgeons e-mailed me offering to do my surgery “free of cost.” I said no to these, but agreed to other media inquiries. HuffPost Live had us on-air. We were on the front page of the Boston Herald and got a feature in the Boston Globe and a follow-up with Out.
Ours was the heartwarming story of the moment. We were rehabilitating the shattered respectability of fraternities, prompting an outpouring of love from “Greek” orgs and comments like “That’s what a fraternity should be like.” I was thrilled to bring such positive attention to my new brothers, and to the inconsistent state of trans health care. I was less clear about the attention directed toward my body and me.
On the first day of media, I called my mother to tell her firsthand what was happening. It was late. Next to me, my “big brother” Ryan mapped out a schedule to help me manage the next twenty-four hours. Homework, interview, food, interview, sleep, interview.
“You might see me on TV,” I warned my mom.
Her voice was measured, brimming with concern for me, for herself. I can’t remember our conversation, only a feeling. Be careful.
Like an outsize version of my coming-out at Loomis, this public stage represented a dramatic new step. I wasn’t ready or willing to share everything. How could I talk about my family when things were still so muddy and difficult with them? How did I answer questions about my parent’s reactions? How could I cast off my privacy but keep my mother’s intact?
The answer was that I couldn’t. But I didn’t know it yet.
Within those first twenty-four hours, I wrote a thankful post about the fund-raiser update on my Tumblr. I was stunned when other trans people reblogged it and a vocal minority disparaged me. Why was my surgery “free” while they were working overtime for theirs? Lucky bastard!
Others were mad I wouldn’t share the wealth, and strangers e-mailed me asking for the money. Even those who passed along messages of support occasionally sent terse follow-ups because I wasn’t getting back to them fast enough. A student posted anonymously on a public Emerson “confessional” Facebook page, accusing me of using donations to buy coffee at Starbucks. Transphobic forums and articles surfaced in response to the expanding list of articles. I read comments from people who made light of killing and raping me and people like me. I occupied pages of Google web and image searches. There would be no going back. It was the fastest, most brutal education I have ever received.
On day two I answered a phone call from my mother, in distress. She was concerned about the questions I would receive going forward.
“They’ll want to know about me,” she said. “They’re going to ask about your family and where we are in all this.”
She asked me to shut it down, and I readily agreed.
The boys were fully supportive of my decision. After nearly three days in the media spotlight, we had raised $23,308. My surgery was scheduled for the winter break, only weeks away.
“We accomplished what we set out to do,” my brother Christian said.
He was right. They had helped me; I had helped myself. We pledged the excess funds to the Jim Collins Foundation (no relation), an organization that gives grants for gender-confirming surgeries to those in need. A storybook ending.
Within the next day or two, the insurance company “clarified” its position and agreed to cover my surgery.
My fraternity brothers and I all assumed this was a ploy to save face after the punishing media coverage, but we were discouraged by the college’s PR department from publicly stating so. A few days later I was told that a lost memo had been found proving Emerson’s insurance to be trans-inclusive. The policy had just never been updated correctly. My surgery would be covered, and future trans students would be saved the trouble of having to crowdsource their funds.
At first I was mortified. After all, we had just fund-raised $23,000 that I didn’t actually need anymore. But then I realized: this is way better. We donated more than expected to the Jim Collins Foundation, and my medical care was rightly in the hands of a medical-care provider. Perhaps most importantly, this wouldn’t happen again at Emerson.
On the home front, Mom and I both breathed easier, knowing our problems were back safe with us.
Later still, I learned that, through all this, my stepfather Andrew (who I call my dad because he took on that role) had made a series of calls to the college asking them to investigate the issue. It was his calls that prompted the paperwork search.
By agreeing to come out, be visible, and share my story, I achieved so much. My surgery was financed in full, the college’s insurance policy was clarified to benefit others, and all the money I didn’t need was going to a worthy charity.
So why did I feel so much anger and shame?
I felt I had sold out myself by agreeing to be “trans” for the camera.
As much as I long to be social and fun, I’m also incredibly private. I enjoy being alone for long periods of time. I’ve never had the compulsion to go to a club or even to Disneyland. But it wasn’t the media overkill that upset me; it was the sneaking suspicion that I was more manipulative and desperate for help than I had realized. Once the fund-raiser took off, I quickly understood that if I played “trans” in all the right ways, people would help me get what I needed. And they did.
I do feel like I didn’t earn an all-expenses-paid surgery, even though I sweated so hard for my physical and mental health progress. I do feel guilty and embarrassed about all the attention. And I do feel shitty and ungrateful for not being solely positive about all the amazing help I received. I love my fraternity, and I love my brothers. I was so hurt when those few trans people termed me a lucky bastard, but that’s exactly what I am.
Disclosure
Mary Collins
A woman in her sixties spills hot tea across my table in a bagel shop.
The conversation begins. Don’t worry, I assure her.
We exchange simple introductions, then, for some reason, she asks the question: Do you have children?
Yes, a daughter, I say reflexively.
In the next millisecond I feel compromised, caught in some weird disclosure game I still haven’t figured out how to navigate with integrity.
She has no children, she tells me.
Is my daughter in college?
Yes.
Then I shift the topic to bagels and the weather.
In the past I had a daughter, but now I have a transgender son. Just weeks prior to the spilt-tea incident, he (I use that pronoun with confidence at this point in the story) had a hysterectomy, the final step in his effort to make Donald’s gender identity match his body. But in that random moment in that mundane space I was on autopilot, and in the primitive parts of my mind that allow me to speak without thinking, my daughter still resides.
After several years of practice, I know now not to weigh down the situation with the truth. I will not see that woman again. I do have a child. That child was in college at that time. I do not need to explain that I had a daughter but now have a son and they are one and the same person.
I am making up my own disclosure agreement as I go along, and I know that Donald has had to do the same.
In his case, now that he’s had top surgery and takes hormones, he can more easily present as male anywhere he wants. Transgender people refer to this as going “stealth.” When he worked in New York City as an intern for several organizations, his resume gave him away (if that’s even the right phrase) a bit because of some guest-speaking assignments he listed on it. But his fellow interns never knew, even his housemates—five men in a jammed townhouse in Brooklyn—didn’t know until he chose to tell them a week before he moved out.
Did it matter? Would anyone answer the woman in the bagel shop with phrases like “Yes, I have children, a daughter with cerebral palsy”? Or how about “Yes, I have a child, a gay son in college.” So why do I feel deceptive when I say I have a daughter instead of saying I have a son? Why did I feel a touch of unease that Donald had not told his housemates that he is a trans man?
I could have felt positive about his discretion, the yin to disclosure’s yang. Why make people feel uncomfortable about something that’s really none of their business? It shouldn’t impact the way they perceive you or treat you.
Donald himself has told me that there’s nothing to “disclose,” since that infers he has something to hide. While driving back from grabbing an iced coffee together, he surprised me with his level of anger about people online comparing the case of Rachel Dolezal, the now former president of the NAACP chapter in Spokane, Washington, who is a white woman who pretended to be black, with Bruce Jenner coming out as Caitlyn.
Dolezal lied and deceived to further herself, Donald argued, but Jenner sought to finally tell the truth. My trans son flushed red and tensed his shoulders while summarizing the way people online discussed parallels between the two stories. I told him to put his views in his essay, because I do not fully grasp his argument and hope I’ll understand it better if he writes it down.
I do know that I’d be ashamed if I had a daughter who tried to pass as black and secured jobs and even college scholarships because of her ruse, but I am not ashamed that I have a transgender son. I am confused. I am afraid. I need to educate myself more about what that means for him. But I am awed by the fact that my child has the courage to engage in a journey toward self-realization that few people could ever think to undertake. I questioned physical steps he took at such an early age that even medical professionals argue about, but the feelings I have about that are not shame based.
When I look at the medical literature, with imposing titles like Journal of Homosexuality, about disclosure for anyone on the LGBTQ continuum, I hear conflicting messages.
Transgender people who do not disclose their status struggle more with depression and are more apt to harm themselves or even commit suicide.
Transgender people who do come out face a lot more harassment and bias, especially in rural areas. Of course, as an anxious mother I read “harassment” and think “violence” might be a better word.
Most transgender people come out to their family and friends but not their employer or coworkers.
And back and forth it goes. The discussion reminds me of the way the media talks about exercise—do short, intense workouts; no, take lots of short walks all day at a moderate pace; work out an hour each day; no, just thirty minutes three days a week is fine.
The answer must be arrived at on an individual basis.
For additional guidance I began exploring disclosure rules in a range of professions: When should a lawyer reveal that he knows his client has done something awful or tell a judge that he has a conflict of interest in a case? How about a psychiatrist who feels her client might turn violent? And, of course, the medical profession must weigh huge questions when it comes to whether or not to tell a cancer patient he has no chance, or a woman that her husband will not make it. When do you disclose these hard truths? First, do no harm, as the Hippocratic oath says. But which is more harmful: disclosure or discretion?
One summer while Donald was still in college I went to an island in New Hampshire with a boyfriend and his two young sons, both under age twelve. We spent a week in a cabin, with about thirty other people on the island with us, each in their own cabins, but we all united at meal time. My boyfriend’s sons only knew Donald as my son. I didn’t really think about it one way or another; it just happened naturally that way because when they saw Donald, they saw a man.
At one point I was chatting with a group of mothers while watching a camp volleyball game, and it came up that one of them had gone to my high school and we had some mutual friends. Since Donald had also attended my alma mater, Loomis, that also came up.
The woman’s entire energy shifted as I stood there chatting idly about Donald. In that moment I knew that she knew our story, that our mutual friend must have talked about the journey Donald and I went on together while he was in high school, the hard times, the tough decisions, the first person in the school’s 150-year history to come out as transgender.
Without hesitating, I brought up that Donnie was now in college and really enjoyed his school because it was very LGBTQ friendly and he is transgender. I let it slip in there like a glass of water on a hot summer day, meant to take the edge off, meant as a kind offering. And she took it without hesitation—open, friendly, and apparently relieved that I had chosen disclosure and done so with comfort and confidence.
But at the close of the conversation I felt that I had to tell her not to tell her young sons who played with my boyfriend’s kids because they did not know and might find it all very confusing if they did.
I switched from disclosure to discretion in less than a minute.
Donald himself moved from being a young woman with a girlhood to a trans man with no boyhood i
n the span of about a year. This history further complicates the disclosure/discretion game. When should I reveal that I raised a daughter when I’m circulating with people who see me with a son? To never bring that up feels like a form of shunning, a death for something I loved above all else in my life. People might presume you simply switch the name and pronouns and get on it, but those who would say such glib things have never had to negate a past girlhood for the sake of a current manhood.
When Donald comes home to visit, I must remember to put away the photographs of J., the daughter he used to be. I have many albums stored in a cedar chest of baby pictures; my four-year-old girl in her Halloween costume, my eight-year-old girl playing in a blue boat at the lake, my twelve-year-old girl graduating middle school. But any image of his past life as a girl unsettles him, which, of course means that there is no childhood for Donald as a boy, no reference point for a young Donald versus an adult Donald.
We moved from the South to New England when J. was fourteen, leaving behind nearly everyone who had ever known my child as a daughter and girl. The first time I returned to visit, I reflexively answered the question “So how is J.?” with pat replies. Fine. Navigating a demanding high school. Volunteering at the theater. In friends’ minds, they were still adding to the narrative they knew as J., the golden-red-haired girl with the green eyes whom their daughters played with on the neighborhood trampoline.
But I knew that narrative had come to a full stop, like a period at the end of an incomplete sentence.
With each subsequent visit I started shutting down the narrative known as J. and building a new storyline known as Donald, my trans son. The people who cared about us did not get in the way of this shift, though the physical distance and this sudden, new timeline for a young man who was once a girl made it harder for most friends to follow along. Donald and I lost touch with almost all of them. When I visit the area now, even I sometimes have trouble believing that I ever lived the life of a mom with a daughter who used to play broomball in the cul de sac with me after school.