by Jess Row
If consulting a plastic surgeon, he would be told that no surgical alterations to his features are possible (or even legal).
In his community, he might be encouraged, at best, to adopt temporary, expensive, and inconclusive approaches, such as changing his hairstyle, using tanning products, colored contact lenses, and so on.
Is there another way to approach such a case? Consider the following recent medical advancements relevant only to this particular case:
Radically improved understanding of the melanogenic process and the use of peptide-based agents for skin darkening (Silpasuvan 1994, 1996, 1997)
Reconstructive techniques specifically designed for Negroid features (Cavell 2001; see also specifically Worth, “The African American Male Face: A Surgeon’s Analysis,” 2004)
The development of artificial cartilage and collagenoids applicable to permanent solutions for face alteration (Teng 1992, Silpasuvan 1998, Worth 2000)
Although there are several substantial obstacles still in place, such as the inability to perform hair transplants without immune rejection (Covington 1999) the answers to this patient’s needs, so to speak, are staring us in the face: it is possible to initiate a regime of decisive racial reassignment through surgical means, which in tandem with other forms of treatment commonly used in sexual reassignment (voice lessons, for example) could be considered a new field of potential relief for such individuals. And, from a practical point of view, as the world becomes more and more interrelated and national and geographical barriers less substantial, the desire for these procedures will doubtless become more and more acute in the next century.
Subject: JAMA editorial submission
Date: Wed, 27 Aug 2008 11:40:54-0400
From: Freedmark, Gary
To: Silpasuvan, Binpheloung
Dear Dr. Silpasuvan,
We read your editorial submission, “Racial Reassignment Surgery: Possibility and Reality,” with interest. However, we are not able to publish it at this time. While the topic you raise is potentially significant to the global medical community, we feel there is no substantial clinical evidence that would warrant raising this inflammatory possibility in the current media environment. If you have clinical evidence to share, however, please do so in the form of a full-fledged article.
Cheers,
Gary Freedmark
Associate Editor
“Real-life” transitioning plan (RLTP)
Martin Lipkin (GI: Martin Wilkinson)
May 4, 2001
PHYSICIAN STATEMENT
Mr. Lipkin/Wilkinson is an Ashkenazi Jewish/Caucasian American male transitioning to African American (black) male identity. In keeping with the RRS-SOC (Racial Reassignment Surgery Standards of Care, B. Silpasuvan, 1999) he is required to carry out a period of psychological transition during the surgical alteration of his physical identity. Because RRS is an experimental procedure approved only for specific use in the Kingdom of Thailand, RRS patients (unlike gender reassignment patients, as specified in the WPATH Standards of Care, 2001) are not expected to reveal themselves or “come out” during the course of the transition. The adjustment, then, must be an internal one, based on the responses of strangers to one’s new racial status. It is furthermore recommended that this process of transition be conducted in a location that is similar to one’s home city or community but not the home city or community, to reduce the risk of accidental “outing” or self-revelation.
After consultation with Mr. Lipkin/Wilkinson, I have determined that the appropriate period for the RLTP in this case is six months. This is due to financial and practical considerations having to do with the availability of surgical facilities in Bangkok and the expense of the “real life experience” (RLE) away from Mr. Lipkin/Wilkinson’s home.
Before leaving Thailand for the United States, Mr. Lipkin/Wilkinson will receive at least one month of intensive skin pigmentation treatment as described in the Preliminary Treatment Plan. Together with regular shaving of the head and some minor daily makeup application, as well as changes in wardrobe and some preliminary speech therapy, he will have achieved a simulacrum of the appearance of an African American male. All of these appearance alterations are reversible, should Mr. Lipkin/Wilkinson choose not to continue with the treatment.
PATIENT STATEMENT
I left America as the white man Martin Lipkin. I will return as the black man Martin Wilkinson.
I have chosen as the site of my Real Life Experience Philadelphia, the City of Brotherly Love.
For the duration of this Experience I will be a lifelong Philadelphian. My childhood home was the North Allen Projects, now demolished, at the corner of 11th and Poplar. I attended William Penn Primary School and Polytechnic Academy in Center City. And then, as a scholarship student for track and field, Lycoming College, one of a handful of black students on a leafy campus in coal country, five hours from the city. This may explain minor irregularities in my habits of speech. My father died of lung cancer when I was a child; my mother moved to Florida with my two younger sisters after I went to college.
I cherish my earliest memories of home, like the Marvelettes playing on our tiny AM radio in the kitchen. Sitting on a plastic chair on our tiny concrete balcony while my mother plaited my sisters’ hair into cornrows. Chicken and waffles on Saturday mornings. And the terrors: stuck in the never-working elevator for two hours one morning. Hearing gunshots in the hall, hiding under the table, hiding in the bathroom, turning off all the lights so they’d think there was nobody home. Never coming to the door when the police knocked afterward.
All these things made me who I am.
Young, unattached, successful, owner of my own consulting firm—branding and product development—I live in a condo in Center City. I drive a leased BMW. Without family in the area, having lost most of my childhood friends to crime, prison, or simple drifting and dislocation, and simply too busy with my work, I have a very limited social life, which I am seeking to rebuild.
My childhood church was the Church of God in Christ and His Disciples, a storefront church, at the corner of Cambridge and North Percy. It burned down when I was in college. Therefore I am a new member of the choir at Elon Baptist. Starting with the Saturday-night services—the beginner’s choir. From there I find my way into other service opportunities in the community. The Urban League. Big Brothers Big Sisters. I volunteer my time as a computer specialist and financial counselor.
I don’t follow music or movies very closely. Though of course I loved hip-hop in my youth, I now tend toward neo-soul and jazz vocals—John Legend, Esperanza Spalding, Macy Gray, Erykah Badu, Cassandra Wilson. You’ll usually find my radio tuned to R&B 100.3. Though when I’m especially stressed (this goes back to my track and field days) I put on Schumann or Brahms or Vivaldi. My high school coach, Pop Garfield, was a Brahms devotee; he used to make us listen to the First Piano Concerto before meets. Play like geniuses, he always said.
I have a credit card at Lord & Taylor. I subscribe to Black Professional and Vibe. My look is understated but right in all the details. A black silk Balenciaga pull-on over Emporio Armani pants on a Sunday morning. A Brooks Brothers double-vented suit, warm brown, with a chartreuse pin-striped shirt and a blue-and-green paisley tie. Gold cuff links with tiny emeralds. I keep my head clean-shaven and occasionally stop in at South Street Barbers for a straight-razor shave.
I may advertise myself on dating sites or even contact a matchmaker. I would like to meet a woman much like myself. Eventually, I would like to get married. With one caveat: because of a rare genetic disorder, I can’t have children. Biological children. So—and this is what I’ll tell the matchmaker, or write in my profile—I’m hoping to find a black woman open to adopting a black family.
On a tattered legal pad from my suitcase I make a list:
Martin Lipkin
Matthew Wilson
Mark Wilbury
Wilbur Martinson
BodyMore
Grnmnt10234
XcashKingX
Alan93
Martin Wilkinson (Philadelphia version)
Martin Wilkinson (Baltimore version)
Martin Wilkinson (Bangkok version)
How many more, I’m wondering? How many more could there be, between Northern State and Bangkok, between 2001, say, and 2004, when Martin married Robin, and they adopted Sherry? How many versions are there now? If I did a Yahoo! search for all the Martin Wilkinsons in the Northeast Corridor, would they all be him?
But that isn’t the point, it’s not germane, I can hear him saying, it’s just routine corporate secrecy, for one thing. Just like Apple hiding its latest version of the iPhone. After all, what was the word Tariko used? Prototypes.
The body is raw material; the story is raw material.
What is it that he’s really been telling me all this time?
I flip back through the pages—mostly scrawled notes, nearly illegible, from when I was listening to Martin’s tapes the first time, before I got down to the hard work of transcription.
—even if classical methods of creation should prove inaccessible
(furthermore?) there still remain some illegal methods
a (finitude?) of heretical and criminal methods
It isn’t that difficult, I’m thinking, is it, to tell people what they want to hear? To mold a story to the listener’s ear. This is a kind of fiction that really has legs. The customized memoir. The Novel Genome Project. What did he say to me, back when he handed over the tapes? You’re the Alex Haley to my Malcolm X. A black man, I’m thinking, is the perfect vehicle, the vessel for every American desire, the vector for every narrative. It’s almost tempting to keep this project secret ad infinitum.
In a sense, publicity is the kiss of death.
Goddamn, I almost say out loud, Martin, you’re a fucking genius. I roll out of bed, my gut vibrating, as if I’ve been kicked. The nausea is coming back now, in a hellish green wave. I drop down in front of the toilet, shoving back the seat with a loud clack, but the bubble lurches to a stop in my throat and refuses to move. Enough, I would say, if I could speak. Enough! I split my mouth with a fist and drive the index finger back until it scrapes my tonsils. And then vomit in a great whiplashing heave.
4.
From: Kelly Thorndike
Subject: postcard from Bangkok
Date: April 14, 2013 8:07:08 PM EST
To: Rina T
It’s been four days. The place I’m staying is this beautiful, large, landscaped house, sort of stucco-like, Miami-ish, on the outskirts of the city. Although it’s hard to say “outskirts” here, because Bangkok is the kind of city that feels like a village on the street level almost everywhere. China is like this, too, of course, but because it’s never truly cold here, the outdoor life is much more permanent than in the China I know. Everywhere you look there’s a food stall or an outdoor market or a pedicab vendor, or all three. Where there are sidewalks, the sidewalks serve two or three purposes; other places (like out here in the burbs) the action just spills into the road. You see people washing dishes and chopping vegetables, arranging flowers, eating, nursing, just chilling with the newspaper, their toes an inch away from the traffic. And it’s all rather orderly. There’s something about being an American that just imposes the frame of poverty and desperation on any scene like this. But Thailand’s not Cambodia. Or Burma. In fact, it’s full of illegal Cambodian and Burmese refugees, according to the Bangkok Post.
And then there are the ghastly avenues and expressways like any Western city, only twice as large, eight or ten or twelve lanes across, always streaming with traffic, and impossible to get across all at once, so you wind up stuck in the traffic meridian with trucks practically scraping your nose. Thank god I only had to walk a little ways, around one neighborhood where the guy I’m interviewing lives. You don’t want to try to get anywhere substantial on foot. The scale of the city is just madness, and I say that judging by the cities I know a little better, Beijing and Shanghai and Taipei and Tokyo. I asked about taking public transportation and my driver just laughed. It exists, of course; there’s an elevated train, the Skytrain, very neatly designed, but it only covers about a fifth of the metro area, if that. How would Tokyo work without a subway? With pink taxis, eight every block. From this guy’s house to his office took an hour and a half, and that was a lucky break, I was told.
Here’s something I read in a tourist brochure, and I don’t know if it’s true, but it sounds right. When Thais decorate a room, inside or out, they start with the plants first and then add the furniture and whatever else. In the house where I’m staying you can hardly walk around without banging your shins against planters and bowls and these huge clay tanks for lotuses and little winking fish. The small streets, the village city, is just overrun with plant life, and the absence of it makes the large, grandiose public spaces unbearably dusty and sick.
Speaking of sick, I had a very odd attack of jet lag/motion sickness/vertigo when I arrived. This is so much more than you asked for, so feel free to stop reading now. What that forces you to notice, of course, is the most momentary kind of experience, like the quality of the air brushing against your face. (If you’re outside, or anywhere near a major street, it’s not good.) But then when you come back to yourself there’s this feeling of relief and possibility and gratitude as well. And I’m beginning to grasp why people show up here and feel a certain kind of giddiness. My guy is one of those people, an American businessman who came here and started a whole new enterprise. Can’t say anything more, because I’m only just getting the bits and pieces of the story myself and anyway it’s under wraps for the magazine. But here’s my stupid theory, for better or worse. The sensory range of Thailand is very, very wide. It’s there in the food, in the aesthetics, the temples, the color schemes, and also of course the way the city reproduces global images so perfectly but not quite.
But it doesn’t push itself on you. There’s a kind of dreamy slowness there, too. Not like India. I was in India only once, visiting a girl I knew in college on the way home from China, and I found it unbearable, the way my taxi was surrounded by beggars at every traffic light. I can see how one could show up in Thailand and think, I could do this. Not Bangkok, maybe, but from what I’ve read there are thousands and thousands of farangs living out in the countryside and in the beach towns, whole colonies of German men with Thai wives who have taken over villages in the remote interior. For all the overwhelming qualities as a whole picture it’s remarkably unthreatening. And then, of course, there’s the lack of resentment, the lack of anger.
Rina, I have to say, it’s good to be talking to you this way. A little outside of myself. And the situation. I’ll keep going, if you don’t mind. Don’t feel obligated to keep reading, though.
Thailand is one of those places that is so much itself that it makes the rest of the world seem impossible. Let me tell you what I mean. The first day I was here, on the way home from a meeting, I told the driver I wanted to stop and get some coffee. So he took me to this bubble tea place—I guess that’s what he thought I meant by coffee. Right off one of the main avenues, across the street from a gigantic shopping mall, underneath the Skytrain. So you’ve got the ten lanes of traffic ripping by, the sidewalk is elbow-to-elbow, the sunlight cutting in and out between the buildings, the humidity descending in waves, and then inside this place it’s like a walk-in freezer crossed with a pediatric hospital, all white tile and big splashes of color, you know what bubble-tea drinks are like, Technicolor froth with those strange black balls at the bottom. Full of teenage girls in spike heels and big chunky bracelets and those ripped-up asymmetrical sweaters that look like knitting accidents. And then I see—after I ordered my plain, unsweetened oolong tea, which made the twelve-year-old at the counter very sad—a little sign
at the front of the place, over a booth, with a picture of a man wrapped in what looked like swaddling clothes, and in English and Thai, These seats reserved for monks.
Do you see what I mean? It doesn’t have to be so radical a shift, necessarily—not halfway across the world. I mean a place that doesn’t lack anything, that doesn’t depend on a relation to somewhere else. You might even say that about the West Coast, about Berkeley or Mountain View or Seattle, as versus the east. Honestly, if you can live in Berkeley, why would you want to live somewhere else? You get me?
I’m not being very coherent, am I? Let me put it this way: when I left college, when I went to China, what I was looking for, without knowing it, was a place that made Baltimore seem like a bad dream. The quality of not being able to square one reality with another. That’s what I wanted. And I got that. Then—mostly because Wendy needed it—I agreed to go back. (Not to Baltimore, but close enough.) I was altered enough. Or at least I thought I was. Then, of course, I flunked out of grad school, effectively, and Meimei came along, and it didn’t matter anymore. Life was life. Now, of course, all those bets are off. I’ll say this: it doesn’t just go away, that need to erase one reality with another. Or, better yet, find a way to make them overlap. There’s a claim on me that hasn’t gone away. I think I’m beginning to understand how money is really made. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?
There’s a little gulping sound coming from my laptop, some kind of alert noise I must have turned on once without realizing it. It’s coming from a browser window I left open to Facebook while I was typing this email. Someone is pinging me, I think that’s the word. I was never one for instant messaging or chat rooms and never even try to find people that way, and luckily, I’m in a chat-averse age group, the last ones who prefer an actual conversation to little furtive messages skittering across a screen. I click on the flashing blue dot, almost vibrating for my attention in the corner of the screen.