Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  He'd been involved with a student, and there was going to be some legal problem.

  He had a criminal record.

  Perhaps--and Will's allegation in the car came back to me--he really was a transvestite, and he'd been caught in some public and embarrassing way.

  If that was the case, I wondered how much I would care. If I would care. No, I knew it would disturb me; I knew, on some level, it would frighten me.

  But would it lead me to push him away? I doubted it. I doubted it seriously. At that moment on that ledge, I doubted seriously that there was anything he could tell me that would lead me to break off our affair.

  And so I told him that. I realized how desperately I loved him, and I told him. I said that short of informing me that he wanted us to be merely friends--short of putting an end to our two-month romance--there was nothing he could possibly say that could upset me.

  "Maybe now is exactly the wrong time to tell you this," I heard myself murmuring, a quiver of need I wasn't sure I'd ever noticed before in my voice, "but I love you. I love you more than I've ever loved anyone except Carly."

  I had surprised myself with my frankness, and I found myself looking into the sun so I wouldn't have to look at him.

  And, ironically, it's clear now that I had surprised him, too. My sense is he would have led me to his confession with greater care if I hadn't told him how I was feeling. He would have told me a story about his childhood or his adolescence, he would have tried to describe for me the horrific longing for something he had thought for most of his life he couldn't have--but something he needed almost like air.

  Perhaps he would have gingerly worked his way through the drinking and the drugs, and how, somehow, he had finally come out on the other side, unscathed. Miraculously.

  Maybe he would have recalled how much he had hated his erections when he was a teenager, how much they had reminded him that his body was wrong. All wrong. An error that howled every time he felt himself growing hard.

  Maybe he would have told me the fantasies he had now when we made love, he would have confessed to me where his mind roamed when he was inside me.

  But he didn't. He didn't say any of that. He reassured me that he loved me, too, and then he plunged ahead, assuming--in the euphoria that enveloped us both like a fog after my candor--that our particular love could shoulder anything.

  "Okay, then," he said.

  "Okay," I said.

  "Well," he began, and he blinked. "You're in love with a woman. In a little less than four months--just after the first of the year--I'm going to Trinidad, Colorado, to have a sex change."

  "You're kidding," I said, though I had a sense that I didn't get the joke. Clearly what he had said was meant to be funny, and I was missing the point.

  "No. I'm not. I've been on female hormones since Valentine's Day."

  I turned to face him. "If this is some bizarre story because you want to break up with me ... I'd rather you just told me the truth."

  "No, that's not it at all! I love you, too, Allison! My God, you can't begin to imagine how much! That's why I'm telling you this. I'm telling you because I want you to know everything about me. I'm telling you--"

  "Telling me--"

  "Look, I'm a woman: a woman who's been saddled since birth with the body of a man. But in my mind, it's a fact: I'm female. Just like you. Well, not exactly like you, because you're straight and I'm gay. At least you've been straight up until now. But my hope and my prayer is that none of that matters anymore, because in a couple of months, I'm finally going to take care of it. The penis. I'm finally going to have the surgery that will make me as much of a woman on the outside as I am on the inside. And I know this is a huge stretch for you, but I'm hoping with all my heart you'll still love me. After all, I'll still be me. Dana. I'll be the exact same person I've always been, except I'll be dressing the way I'm supposed to, and I won't have to endure public bathrooms with urinals."

  He'd tried a joke because he must have seen he was losing me. He must have seen I was slipping away. I heard what he was saying, but I was no longer listening. I was listening instead to my ex-husband's accusations in the car, I was listening instead to my instincts from July. I was listening instead to the sighs he would make when we would make love, and wondering at the way his body, abruptly, had begun to repulse me. What sorts of people had he been with, what kinds of hands had stroked him? Whose mouths had been there before mine?

  What, exactly, had Dana done?

  It suddenly seemed that I'd been sleeping with a person who was either deeply perverse or profoundly insane.

  A person who, either way, was capable of harboring inside himself all manner of errata. Insanity. Secret.

  I think that's when I started to feel ill, and I think that's when he tried to touch me.

  And I think that's when I grew angry and told him to get his hand off me.

  But I wasn't nearly that polite.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Monday, September 24

  DANA STEVENS: I told her when I told her for a lot of reasons. Honesty. Decency. The fact that in a couple of weeks I was going to start wearing a dress.

  CARLY BANKS: Transition?

  STEVENS: Girl's gotta start sometime.

  Chapter 8.

  will

  ALL IN ALL, I THINK I TOOK THE NEWS RATHER well. Rebecca Barnard told me toward the end of October.

  "I assume this has something to do with Halloween," I said.

  "Nope. Mental illness," she said.

  Rebecca knew Dana Stevens from the university. She didn't know him well because they were in different departments, and they were constitutionally likely to have very different friends. Rebecca teaches political science, and she's built a career rehabilitating the reputations of Coolidge and Harding and Hoover. But certainly their paths crossed periodically.

  "You saw him?" I asked.

  "Everyone saw him; there must be fifteen of us on the committee. He arrived a few minutes late, and the only seat left was across the room from the door. And so he had to sashay past us all."

  "And he was wearing a dress?"

  "No, he was wearing a skirt."

  "Oh."

  "And a blouse."

  Rebecca was at the studio taping her Wednesday-morning commentary. Twice a day the station broadcasts essays and opinions by a fairly diverse group of people from Vermont and New Hampshire, and at the time Rebecca was the resident right-wing conservative. I rarely agreed with her, but she was always good theater.

  "Any idea why?" I asked.

  Though there wasn't a need--the engineer hadn't arrived yet in the booth--she pushed the microphone away from her face. "He's going to have a sex change. He's going to become a faux female."

  Rebecca was aware that Allie was dating Dana, because back in August I'd asked her if she knew him. Something about him had struck me as odd. And while I knew that what Allie did wasn't supposed to be any of my business, I couldn't imagine why she was romantically involved with a man who was so outwardly--obviously--gay. And so I'd thought I would see what Rebecca could tell me about him. At the time, she had suspected he was merely a transvestite: disgusting, in her opinion, but not particularly dangerous, since he only taught literature and film.

  "A faux female," I repeated.

  "A transsexual," she said.

  "I thought he was on sabbatical."

  "He is. But he's still a member of the library building committee. He can still come to meetings if he wants to."

  "Is he supposed to?"

  "Not necessarily. I think he was showboating."

  "Advertising?"

  "Informing us of his intentions."

  "I see."

  "I mean, he didn't tell me. He told his friends. But he's out, it's official. From now on, he's uber-trans."

  "Does that mean he's going to ..."

  "Chop it off? You bet. He says he's going all the way. Surgery's sometime in the next coupl
e of months." She shook her head and added, "I will be absolutely furious if the university health plan is funding this sort of mutilation."

  Ironically, while Rebecca thought even less of Dana now that she knew the truth, I was actually relieved. Now, I assumed, there was absolutely no chance that Allie would mistake her summer infatuation with the fellow for an affair with a future. How could she? She liked men.

  Likewise, I presumed, so did Dana. And if I had been wrong and he hadn't liked them before, well, clearly he did now.

  Why else would he be planning to spend all that money to build a vagina?

  That night when I came home from work, Patricia was in the garage. The lights were on and the door was up, and I saw she was by the wall where we stored our skis. She was still in the dress she had worn to the office that day, but over it she was wearing a bulky cardigan that I knew came from the drawer in which she kept her more casual sweatshirts and sweaters. She had a bottle of mineral water in one hand and a ski pole in the other.

  I parked in the driveway.

  "I think I'm going to break down and buy a new pair of skis this year," she said when I joined her. She hung the pole on the wall, tossing the loop around the nail with the same athletic ease with which she did practically everything. "Downhill, that is."

  "No reason not to," I said.

  I noticed that she had rearranged our skis and boots when she was examining them. We preferred downhill to cross-country skiing, but we had the necessary skis and the gear for both sports. That meant that we both owned two sets of skis. Usually, we lined up our alpine skis in one spot and then our Nordic skis in another. That evening, however, I saw that she had put her two sets of skis together, and then my two sets beside them. There were Will's skis, and there were Patricia's skis.

  It looked oddly foreboding to me, but I told myself that I was reading more into it than was there. It was, I concluded, inadvertent.

  "How was work?" she asked.

  "Fine."

  She looked at me for a long moment, and I knew she wanted more. I knew she deserved more. I wished I had kissed her when I had walked into the garage.

  "Well," she said finally, "you can tell me all about it at dinner."

  I smiled and said sure. Then, because she was entitled to more than a series of monosyllabic responses, I told her that I'd heard a very funny story that day about the professor Allie had been dating.

  Dana Stevens came out to Rebecca Barnard and her peers in October. It would be eleven more months before the professor would come out before the whole country on National Public Radio's All Things Considered.

  There would be a middle step, however, between one university's faculty and a sizable part of the United States: my radio station.

  There were actually two versions of what I would come to call the transgender tapes in the memos I would write as a station president. There was the story that ran over five days one September on National Public Radio. But six months before that, in the middle of March, there was a considerably less ambitious version that ran for two nights on my affiliate station in Vermont.

  I tend to doubt the NPR feature would ever have occurred without the Green Mountain trial run. It was sort of like previewing a Broadway show out of town--though of course that wasn't the original plan. No one anywhere in the NPR universe was hoping to try out "trans-gendered" material in the hinterlands before taking it national. The fact is, no one in the NPR studios in Washington was even aware of the two-day story we did in Vermont until after it aired.

  I should also note that only the initial programming idea was mine. That's it. And clearly that changed before NPR went into production.

  My original idea was pretty basic: a story on gender dysphoria. Nothing more. That's pretty much what we did on Vermont Public Radio the March after Dana came out. We produced it ourselves, twenty-two minutes altogether. Dana and Allie were the focus then, just as they would be later in the year when NPR jumped in. But so was the school board. Our version turned out to be as much about the fracas in Bartlett as it was about transsexuality.

  Moreover, Carly didn't have anything to do with the VPR production. She was away at Bennington at the time, and working a few hours a week for a little radio station in the southwestern corner of the state.

  After our version was broadcast, I would have been completely content to wash my hands of the whole topic. I certainly wasn't lobbying to see the story go national, or to have All Things Considered start shoveling money into it later that year--especially after some of the more bizarre encounters I had in the days immediately after the Vermont account aired.

  One crisp March morning I was stopped on Main Street in Bartlett. I was emerging from the gas station with a cup of coffee on my way to work, and I must have been focused on the way the lid for the Styrofoam cup didn't quite fit because I didn't see the fellow until he was in my face.

  "Your ex-wife's a terrific teacher," he said to me, wagging a finger, before he had even introduced himself.

  "I think so, too," I said. He was a little younger than me, and he was wearing a tan trench coat over a bulky ski sweater. His loafers were stained with white road salt, and the frames of his eyeglasses were a metallic yellowish green. He had a lamb's-wool and leather aviator cap on his head--the kind with the flaps that flip down over the ears--as if he thought he was Charles Lindbergh.

  He seemed harmless enough, but it was clear he was slightly eccentric. "I gather you have a child in her class?" I said.

  "Sure do," he said, and he volunteered the information that he was a graphic designer. "But I have to tell you," he added, "my wife and I both think your plan is a little kooky."

  I tried to smile. "What plan is that?"

  And so he told me, and for the first time I realized that there were actually people in town who knew bits and pieces about my life and Allie's, and who therefore presumed that I was using the radio station that March to try and mastermind a reconciliation with my ex-wife. This particular fellow had heard through the grapevine that Patricia had moved out on me, and so he reasoned that I was now trying to move in on Dana.

  In his opinion, the sole purpose of the transgender feature on VPR was to show Allie the error of her ways.

  That was never the case, and I suppose that's become pretty obvious now. If I'd known then how our story would end, I imagine I would have done all that I could to prevent any radio programming at all about transsexuality and gender.

  The truth is, I have never seriously believed there was anything I could do that would bring Allie back into my life as anything more than a friend. If as a result of some unaccountable twist of fate we actually wound up together, well, fine. But I would never--at least not consciously--have tried to sabotage her relationship with another person.

  Nevertheless, I was concerned about her: I have never, ever stopped caring about Allie. We were a couple for almost fifteen years, including college, and most of my memories of that decade and a half are pretty darn good.

  Obviously I never made any secret of the fact that I disapproved of Dana's lifestyle before the operation, and I wasn't happy with the idea that he had moved in with my ex-wife. That's clear to everybody who knows me. But the reason I didn't support Allie's choices is pretty basic: Say what you will about Dana and transsexuality, it's not normal. And she's a teacher. That's not a promising combination.

  Here's an indisputable fact: Dana Stevens had to be diagnosed with a demonstrable mental disorder before he could have his surgery. And just as I would have been concerned if Allie had gotten involved with a man who--for example--had some form of schizophrenia or depression that couldn't be treated with medication or therapy, at that point in my life it was inevitable that I would worry about her interest in Dana.

  I worried about what her friends would think, and what the school board would say. I worried about what the parents of the kids in her classroom would do.

  I worried, in essence, about what sort of effect he might have on her life.


  Still, my concern was never the catalyst for the programming.

  Nor, I should add, were the NPR stories that aired the following autumn a part of some Machiavellian scheme to boost my daughter's profile in Washington (as if I even had that kind of clout).

  Certainly Carly was growing more and more interested in broadcast, and because I am her father, it was inevitable I would take notice. She followed up her part-time job at the Bennington-area radio station with a summer internship at NPR. (I can take some credit for getting her the interview in April.) Early on, the ATC folks took a liking to her, and some very terrific--and powerful--people took her under their wings.

  And why not? She's a wonderful kid.

  She spent the Fourth of July that summer with Linda Wertheimer and her husband, Fred. Cokie Roberts introduced her to the Vermont congressional delegation--two Senators and a Congressman. And Elizabeth Arnold and Nicole Wells became like big sisters to her. They still are.

  But did I suggest that my nineteen-year-old daughter be the point person for a series on NPR? No way. They asked Carly about how best to approach Dana, and how her mother and I might feel about their doing something more with the story. After all, they knew me. They knew what was going on.

  Carly herself took it from there. Carly, I am proud to say, was the one who went to Linda Wertheimer and said, essentially, "Look, Coach, I'm your go-to girl. If you really want to do this story, give me the ball."