The only regret—for all of them—has been Eli’s loss of fertility. Joanna took the sea horse as a family symbol because the male sea horse holds his developing offspring in a brood pouch and then gives birth after a labor that can last several days. Kate wrote, “Eli is soon to be rendered infertile by the very treatment that has made possible his visions of himself as a father. So we wait for the day when science might make a sea horse of him.” Infertility may be the steepest price of transition; many trans people I met spoke of the longing to have children, but transmen mostly disliked the idea of carrying a pregnancy, and transwomen mostly mourned their inability to do so. They wanted to be fertile in their affirmed gender, and our science is a long way from making that possible; this issue as much as any other defined the limitations of transition.
Early in his transition, Eli wrote on a blog, “I’ve felt sometimes that the guy who is me—this guy Eli—is out there somewhere, waiting for me to find him, waiting for me to figure out how to become myself. I worry because everything feels unsteady, and I don’t know where to look for the guideposts, and I worry that I’ll never find him. But someone really important to me once said, ‘It’s okay. You’re strong. And Eli? He’ll find you.’”
• • •
The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has long required that athletes be screened for gender. The original method was a physical examination; then measurement of hormone levels; then a scan of chromosomes. The reasoning behind such testing is clear. If men and women did not compete separately in athletics, almost all the champions would be men because testosterone strengthens the body. But the testing itself has been fraught with contradictions and problems.
In 2009, the South African runner Caster Semenya was subjected to gender testing after she won gold in the women’s 800-meter race of the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) World Championships. IAAF suggested she might have a “rare medical condition” that provided an unfair advantage. Tests revealed that Semenya had internal testes instead of a uterus and ovaries, and a testosterone level three times that of an average genetic female. In the wake of the controversy, the IOC said that women with hyperandrogenism might be disqualified from events. But the idea of a normal level of androgens for women is a fiction; individual levels vary widely. The IOC requires that any irregularities be reviewed by a panel of experts, who decide case by case and in strict confidence. Even before this recent controversy, Arne Ljungqvist, chair of the IOC Medical Commission, said, “There is no scientifically sound lab-based technique that can differentiate between man and woman.” Of her humiliating ordeal, Semenya said, “God made me the way I am and I accept myself.”
As a human-rights advocate, Shannon Minter spends most of his time in court avoiding ontological questions and focusing on the human stories of the people he represents. In Kantaras v. Kantaras, Minter argued on behalf of a transman who was divorcing his wife. The wife was challenging his legal parenthood by attacking his legitimacy as a man—and therefore, by extension, their marriage; Florida does not allow same-sex marriage or adoption. When the case was broadcast on Court TV, Michael Kantaras, who had lived a fully assimilated life, was brutally exposed. An elderly, heterosexual, Republican-appointed judge was called out of retirement to hear the case. Minter called his client’s parents as witnesses and saw the judge’s thinking changing day by day. “Michael’s mom said, ‘It is so painful to me to hear anybody refer to Michael, even in the past, as she,’” Minter recalled. “Here’s this woman that the judge could totally relate to. So he never did it again.” The judge eventually wrote, “Transsexualism is a massively complex and difficult problem deserving of the highest respect and sympathy. Being further denied by the courts of the basic fundamental right to marry violates their Constitutional rights and degrades them as human beings.”
Minter believes that the unifying challenge for gender activists is to create a society in which gender is disestablished as a legal concept. “Everything short of that is going to entail significant incoherence,” he said. “There is no sensible, much less scientifically valid, way to classify people based on race. The Supreme Court has recognized that. We don’t put race on birth certificates; race is no longer a legally relevant category except as a self-identification. That must also happen with gender.” Minter added that this shouldn’t be confused with the somewhat dated feminist ideal of abolishing gender. “People are very attached to their own gender. I certainly am. It’s much more like religion. It would be shocking to think that the government could define somebody’s religion. It needs to be just as shocking that the government could define someone’s gender.” Minter’s determination comes out of personal history. A man in his fifties who has an extraordinary record of accomplishment and a wide circle of friends, he said, “A week before my father died, he introduced me for the first time to someone else as his son, and it meant more to me than anything else that ever happened to me.”
In looking at disability, I ran up repeatedly against Peter Singer’s eugenic idea that not all human beings are persons; in trans studies, the progressive idea that not all males have male bodies. Though Singer and the trans advocates appear to be at opposite ends of the spectrum, at some level they present the same argument: that changing social mores and advancing science have caused us to question the basic structuring principles of human society. Genesis describes a world born in categories: God made grasses and trees, then whales and fish, then fowl and birds, then cattle and creeping things and beasts, then human beings to have dominion over all the rest. “Male and female he created them,” says the verse. In the great creation story, humans and animals occupy categories that can never cross, as do men and women. In the twenty-first century, new arguments are afloat that some human beings are not persons, that some persons are not human beings, that some men are women, that some women are men, that some human beings are persons but are neither women nor men. Globalization has blurred national identity, and intermarriage has compromised racial identity. We like categories and clubs as much as we ever have; it’s only that the ones we thought were inviolable turn out not to be, and others that we never imagined are taking their place.
• • •
When Carol and Loren McKerrow met, she was runner-up for Miss Texas, and he was completing his training in ophthalmology outside Fort Worth. When they married, he took her home to Helena, Montana. They adopted their son Marc because they thought they were unable to conceive. However, Carol became pregnant with Paul, later Kim, about the time they brought Marc home; Carol gave birth to another son, Todd, a couple of years later. Marc had behavior problems. “Whenever school called,” Carol recalled, “it was an awards ceremony, academic or athletic, for Paul, or to tell me Marc had been suspended.” While all the anxiety was focused around Marc, Paul was secretly struggling with gender. “I had a paper route when I was ten,” Kim remembered. “It was very early. I used to cross-dress because I didn’t think anyone would see me. Then I would throw away the clothes and pray that some power could dispel this thing that was making me unlike anyone else I knew of.”
Paul became a great athlete and was quarterback on his high school football team. “That was the recipe to be normal, and a way to shut off your brain,” Kim said. “If you’re uncomfortable with your body, you want to control that body, and sports are a really good way to do it.” Paul was valedictorian and class president at Helena High, where he was voted most likely to succeed. “I knew the word manqué, as in artiste manqué,” Kim said. “That was my word, because it just meant, ‘Oh, if only you knew.’”
Paul went on to Berkeley and spent his junior year, 1988, abroad. “Everybody else is going to Florence or Paris,” Kim said. “I’m going to Norway because I’m just going to hide in a long, dark winter, read Beckett, drink blackberry tea, and starve. I went thinking, ‘I’m going to stop this.’ A couple months into it, it was like, ‘I can’t stop this.’” Some people give a single date for their transition; Kim described hers as
happening from 1989 to 1996. She moved to San Francisco and saw old friends and family as little as possible; the only person from her previous life who knew was her brother Todd, who was openly gay. He was easygoing and had come out without much drama, but she kept even him at arm’s length. Kim was the most generic name she could think of, and she changed her last name to Reed, her old middle name, to make a fresh start. Even so, Kim felt awkward and artificial; it took five years for her to start hormones. “I wasn’t sure who I was,” Kim said. “I wasn’t even sure gender was the gateway. It’s awfully complicated, awfully expensive, awfully isolating, and the practical angle alone is very difficult.” Today, however, Kim has an unaffected femininity. Once when I was out with her, someone came up to her and said, “My friend is struggling with transitioning. You’re so relaxed; how did you learn all these gestures?” Kim said, “When I was making the switch, I was too conscious of how I moved, and it wasn’t until I began to forget about it that who I really was started to take over.”
In the winter of 1995, Carol’s younger sister, Nan, was diagnosed with colon cancer. When Kim, still Paul to the family, would call her aunt, she would talk to her mother, too, but for almost five years, they didn’t see each other. When Nan died, however, Carol expected Paul to attend the funeral. Kim, who had been on hormones for over a year, was a pallbearer, with only a ponytail to attract comment. Carol said, “It was a funeral. But he looked so sad, and I still had no clue. A month later, Paul called and said, ‘Did you ever wonder as I was growing up whether I was comfortable with my own sexual identity?’ I said, ‘I thought you were the golden child.’ He said, ‘Well, I’ve been dressing as a woman.’” Carol was bewildered. “I felt very sad, for all that anguish he’d been going through that I didn’t even suspect,” she said. Kim sent her mother a stack of medical information. “I didn’t need to read any pamphlets,” Carol said. “For me, it was, ‘I love my child; the intelligent, caring, humorous person is still there.’ All I wanted to know was, ‘Are you happy now? Are you comfortable?’” But she worried about telling Loren.
Kim once said, “When I transitioned, I felt like I had climbed out of a wet suit I had been wearing my entire life. Imagine that magnificent rush, the tactile sensations, as though your body had just woken up. But I also felt like this new person couldn’t go home, and I began to dismantle all my connections to Montana. At the time I didn’t know how thoroughly all of this saddened me, and to compensate for that, I started to turn my hometown into a place that I didn’t really need to go back to.” That exile continued even after Loren had been told the news; no one else in the family was to know. Marc had been in a car accident and suffered a traumatic brain injury, which led to even more erratic behavior than he’d previously exhibited, and Kim was afraid of his response. “I felt like I owed it to Marc to tell him, but I thought he would hurt me, and I felt too vulnerable,” Kim said. Carol said, “Marc is saying, ‘Am I ever going to hear from Paul again?’ and it was getting worse and worse. But Kim said, ‘When Marc knows, all of Montana knows, and I’m just not ready for it yet.’ Kim was right, because Marc wanted something on Paul. Marc wanted to say, ‘Well, at least I’m more normal than you turned out to be.’”
Loren had contracted hepatitis in medical school; while Kim was growing into herself, his condition was worsening. He was on a waiting list for a liver transplant, but at sixty-two, he was not given priority. In the summer of 2003, he decided to visit each of his children. Kim had moved to New York, told her parents that she was a lesbian, and started seeing a woman named Claire Jones. Carol and Loren had dinner with Kim and Claire the night they arrived. “I started feeling better about everything,” Carol said. “I loved Claire the minute I met her. I was so worried Kim was going to be alone. Claire walked around the corner, and I just breathed a sigh of relief.”
Several months later, Loren collapsed and was taken on an emergency flight for treatment in Denver. Kim flew immediately to join her parents. She arrived at the hospital a few hours before her father died, while her brothers were still arranging transport to Colorado. Kim reached Marc on the phone as he was boarding his flight and said, “I’ve been out of touch. I didn’t know how to handle it; but now because of Dad’s death, we’re all going to be together, and you need to know about me.” At the Denver airport, Kim gave Marc her card and said, “Here are my phone numbers. You can call me anytime.” At that point, Carol burst into tears—not about Loren, but because Kim and Marc were speaking again. There they all were, displaced in a strange city, bereft of the reason that had brought them there but also more united than they’d been in years. Later that day, Carol, Kim, Marc, and Todd set out for Montana by car. During the long trip, Kim reaffirmed her connection to Marc and tried to answer his many questions. He was bewildered, but not unkind. Whenever there was cell phone reception across the plains of Wyoming, Kim made calls to uncles, aunts, and cousins. “My father has died,” Kim recalled. “They’re reeling. They’re hearing the news about me. And they respond with ‘We’re just glad to have you back.’”
Carol decided to host a tea party for friends in Helena who could help get the word out about Kim, so she wouldn’t need to discuss the matter at the funeral. “My mom, God bless her, just owned it,” Kim said. “People couldn’t really throw a fit because everyone had the emotional meat tenderizer of my dad’s passing forcing them into kindness.” Kim was at the airport picking up Claire when the tea party took place. Carol had invited nineteen women and the male pastor from her church. She explained Kim’s transition in brief, then said, “I’m not responsible for my child and who she’s become, but I am responsible to her, and she is a wonderful person. I love her. I don’t know if you need to know anything else, but that’s all I need to know.” After a moment of silence as the guests absorbed this information, somebody said, “Amen.” Then Carol said, “I’m telling you this now, and I’m not going to speak about it again the rest of the weekend. I’m concentrating on Loren’s service, and celebrating his life.” When I asked Carol why she hadn’t encountered the kind of community hatred that I had seen so many other families battle, she said, “I think it’s because of how we had lived our lives up until then.” Kim added, “My dad wouldn’t grab the bull by the horns like my mom did. A tea party was the last thing he would do. But he would somehow cause things to be such that a tea party would happen. He would delight in the fact that his little nudge had caused everything to fall into place.”
Sue O’Leary was one of the guests at the tea party; her son, Tim O’Leary, who had been Paul’s closest friend, was in town for the funeral. “There’s a viewing of my father’s body at the funeral home, and all of my friends who have heard the news are there,” Kim said. “I’ve said I’m not going because I want to keep it about my dad, but I’m really chickening out. Before I know it, Tim and all these guys I knew in high school, essentially the football team, open our front door, and they’ve got cases of beer under their arms, and Frank Mayo’s saying, ‘Yeah, I had this dream that we were all fat, bald, and old, and you were a girl.’ It was the living room I grew up in, and Claire’s sitting on the couch, knocking back cheap beer, and there’s a couple more cases outside in a snowbank to keep them cold. This guy has his arm around Claire, and they’re laughing, and I was just like, ‘This is going to work out just fine.’”
The next day was the funeral. Carol recalled, “I’m not a Bible student at all, but there is one verse everybody knows, John 3:16, and it says, ‘God so loved the world that whosoever believeth in Him shall not perish and have everlasting life.’ I just really caught on to that whosoever and I held on to it that day of the funeral. When people said, ‘I see Marc, I see Todd, but I don’t see Paul,’ I referred them to the friends who had come to my tea party.”
As Kim and Claire traveled home from Helena a few days later, Kim decided to make a documentary that would begin with her twentieth high school reunion that fall; Marc had been held back a grade in elementary school, so they graduated in th
e same class, and both planned to attend. Prodigal Sons charts Kim’s departure from her geographic community to her identity community, Marc’s deterioration and the enormous stress it placed on the family, and Kim’s complicated, ambivalent love for her brother. The film is full of the childhood Kim shared with Marc and Todd, including footage shot by her father when she was still Paul, the quarterback. At the film’s start, Marc’s head injury has fossilized his sense of the past, so that he looks only behind, while Kim’s transition has meant that she looks only ahead. As her changing identity and his unchanging identity collide, she enshrines the very history she long wished to abrogate. When Kim appeared on Oprah with her mother to promote the film, Oprah played a clip in which Marc accused his mother of trampling the Bible by welcoming Kim. Oprah said, “Well? Do you believe in the Bible?” Carol said, “I believe in my child.”
Six months after I met her, Kim called me one night, excitedly, with an invitation. The pastor from her church in Helena was organizing a Prodigal Sons weekend: a screening on Friday night, seminars on Saturday to discuss issues raised by the film, and a sermon by Kim on Sunday—all, coincidentally, the weekend of Carol’s birthday. I traveled to Montana a few days early. A year earlier, Carol had invited twenty-six people to her house to see the film. “I worried about some of those people, so I told their spouses that I was concerned,” she explained. “Since I’d done that, they all felt very proud of saying at the end of the evening, ‘See? Everything is fine, Carol. You needn’t have worried.’” One of those people was an old friend who had recently lost his wife, and at the end of the screening, he seemed disturbed. Carol asked if he was okay, and he said he was not. “My heart sank,” Carol told me. “Then he told me that he had just had no idea that it was so serious with Marc, and how much I had been shouldering.” Carol and Don bonded through the conversation, and when I went out to Helena, they had become a couple; two years later, they invited me to their wedding.
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