by Nick Krieger
Jess’s sexual energy often frustrated me, and I did wonder whether, if she could stop resenting men so much, she would accept herself a bit more, the guy parts she clearly identified with, and stop acting out their insecurities. But I also wondered if I was projecting all my own ingrained perceptions and personal issues on to Jess, because as much as it surprised me, as much as I couldn’t quite wrap my head around it, some women loved her commanding, direct approach, considered it the essence of being secure. Our attitudes were so different, Jess and I; she was assertive where I was self-deprecating, and although I’d go to extremes to avoid replicating behavior that I associated with jerk guys, like using a pool cue like a phallus, I did want my body to represent the way I saw it. When it came to how we understood our bodies, Jess and I were similar.
“It’s not easy to express,” I said to Zippy. “When you tease me about hitting on straight girls, you assume I have a hooha. And that’s not the way I see it.” I told her, as well as I could, how my packer had shifted my physical sense of self, acted as a vehicle to visualize myself with male parts and allowed me to actually relate to my body below the belt. For me, there definitely was a connection between attitude and anatomy, but instead of having a dick turning me into a dick, it made me feel comfortable and at peace.
As Zippy listened intently, I imagined this conversation was one of the better ways, but I couldn’t explain my body one by one to everyone. Wearing a packer was another way to express myself, and yet I’d shoved it at Tori so that she would notice, nearly begging her to see me in a new light. For as much as I wanted to indict some trans guys when I caught what sounded like misogyny, I could often see both sides of the rift I noticed inside queer spaces—strong, confident women pissed about former dykes turning into asshole dudes and these very guys referring to these women as transphobic for refusing to acknowledge, accept, or respect their new identities.
Zippy and I talked uninterrupted, challenging each other and laughing until we were exhausted, like old times. The next day, she left a message on my voice mail. “I just called to say thank you for showing me your cock last night.” I saved the message. And I continued to resave it every thirty days. Zippy never greeted me with “Hey, girl” again.
Six. Wings
On a Tuesday morning in early January, at eleven o’clock on the dot, I marched up the long, narrow staircase to Greg’s apartment. At the top, I stopped and patted my pockets, the contents the ostensible purpose of my visit. I made out the hard shield of my notebook, as well as my pen, backup pen, and backup to the backup pen. I knocked on the front door, a journalist reporting on Greg’s first testosterone shot.
For most of my winter break, I’d read voraciously, covering more than a thousand pages of transgender history, science, memoir, and narrative nonfiction books, as well as various legal, medical, psychological, and archived documents—literally anything I could find through the internet or library. The worst were the third-person narratives, written by journalists who treated their subjects like zoo animals. I thought I could better, I needed some new material for my upcoming semester, and so, when I bumped into Greg at my house on his way to the gym, I asked if I could observe and write about him.
“What are you going to write, ‘Greg the Trans Guy’ is on the elliptical machine?” he mocked.
So much for doing better, I thought. I wanted to write about “Greg the Person,” the deceptively sweet, hilarious guy who’d probably crack some killer jokes on the elliptical machine. But it was true that personally, I wanted to know about “Greg the Trans Guy,” and after my night out with The Boys a few weeks before, I couldn’t see this happening organically. Greg and I had settled into the area between acquaintances and friends, a place filled with enough care that I felt horrible for offending him.
I apologized immediately, but before I could even finish, excitement overcame him. “Forget about it,” he said. “You should come over tomorrow at eleven—I’m getting my first T-shot!”
The next day, Greg opened his front door to the apartment he shared with at least a few others. A long hallway with a handful of doors stretched the length of the floor. I followed him directly into his room, cramped with mismatched furniture and, with only one cloistered window, devoid of natural light. In the corner, a TV—a loaner from his surgery recovery—rested on a table, and in front sat a folding chair for visitors. His room had that warm, lived-in feel, as if he’d holed up in there for a while.
Greg handed me his prescription for testosterone cypionate and took off padding around the house. I deciphered the scribble, which called for biweekly intramuscular injections ramping up to 200 mg, a “standard” dose for a trans man. Greg’s tube socks swished past the carpeted doorway several times before he reentered. “Check this out,” he said, handing me a two-page printout.
I read the top, “A Letter to Would-Be Transsexuals,” by the American Boyz, a support organization for FTMs, female-to-male transsexuals. Greg paced in semicircles around his bed while I uncovered the potential pitfalls of “sex reassignment.” The summarized version went like this: You will be discriminated against; finding employment might be difficult; you won’t ever have a “normal” body of the opposite sex; naked, you will be an education campaign and potentially a freak show; your dating pool will shrink; you may lose your friends and family; adopting children will be difficult; there are certain countries you can never visit; you will be dependent on a substance created by large corrupt pharmaceutical companies; statistically, you are more likely to be killed by hatemongers; and people will ask you about your genitalia . . . for the rest of your life.
“What a buzz kill,” Greg said when I was done. “My therapist gave that to me last night.”
The list functioned as a know-before-you-go to transsexual country, a warning like the “dangers and annoyances” section of a Lonely Planet guidebook, a few paragraphs that would always scare me even when traveling to a relatively safe place like the Netherlands. “Probably not the kind of stuff you want to think about right now,” I said. I’d been at his house for five minutes and could already tell that I was too invested in his well-being to keep a reporter’s objective distance.
Greg told me that he was taking testosterone in order to pass, the word many trans guys used for being recognized as men despite the term’s complex and colorful history. Greg wanted to see and hear the man that he was, and he wanted his identity acknowledged and reflected by others. For him, his decision to start testosterone was straightforward.
The handout served as a gut check, one final reconciliation. Had I any interest in passing, I probably would’ve still turned back at number two, “discrimination,” never making it anywhere near number twenty, and certainly not to the last sentence in the handout, the welcome sign that read: “You can be yourself here, but you’d better learn quickly how to survive.”
I looked up to see a young man materialize in the bedroom doorway. He wore a mesh ball cap, a five o’clock shadow, and hollow expanders in his ears. Removing his leather jacket, his forearms flashed like the flanks of a Thunderbird, streaked with dark ink and fiery stars. He embraced Greg with a couple hearty thumps to the back. He turned to me. “I’m Jack,” he said. The hoop piercing his lip curled up into a sexy smile.
I almost swooned. “Nina,” I finally forced out.
He gripped my hand in a firm shake. I quickly explained that I was in a writing program, working on some trans-themed stories, and asked his permission to take notes. He told me his last experience with a journalist had been negative, the angle of the final piece bothered him, and yet he was unconcerned by my presence. “Take notes or whatevs,” he said. “Do what you need to do.”
I was pretty sure he’d just given me permission to mess up, something I now considered a foregone conclusion. Because to me, Jack was completely new, a walking education campaign, everything about him intriguing. And he probably thought of him
self as just a guy, a person who ate, breathed, and pissed like the rest of us—wait, how did he piss, sitting or standing up? No wonder he’d acted aloof—dealing with people like me all the time must suck.
I moved out of their way, trying not to block the dim light coming in through the window, and sat in the folding chair next to the bookcase. I jotted down a few titles—Middlesex, In a Queer Time and Place, and Stupid White Men—figuring a good journalist would stop admiring Jack’s emo-boy skater style and take some notes.
From under his bed, Greg removed a Tupperware box holding a vial and prepackaged needles and handed it to Jack. “Is there any way to stop the zits?” Greg asked.
“You can go to a dermatologist,” Jack replied, slipping on a pair of black latex gloves and unwrapping the packaging on the needles.
“How long does it last?”
“Going on four years for me.”
Jack filled up the syringe, talking Greg through the preparation process. Eventually Greg would need to learn to do his shots himself if he wanted to continue with testosterone for the long term, which would be necessary to maintain some of the effects, but, scared of needles, he’d sought the help of his friend. Greg situated himself, placing his hands on the Oakland Raiders blanket on the back of his bed. He stepped one foot forward into a lunge.
“Put weight on your left leg,” Jack said, standing behind him. “My practice may seem strange, but I’m gonna spank you. It’ll loosen you up, make it hurt less.”
Greg turned his head around. “I’m all for spanking, but really?”
“Trust me.” Jack pulled Greg’s T-shirt up and slapped him five times above the waistband of his Fruit of the Loom underwear.
I shifted in my seat, reminding myself to breathe. I hated needles. The sight of them nearly made me pass out. I’d learned to look away during my own vaccination shots and to focus on something concrete. I liked numbers and found math exercises as calming as counting sheep. There were 365 days in a year, 52 weeks, and 26 shot cycles. In four years, Jack had stuck himself 104 times. In the next twenty years, Greg would have to do this, five hundred something . . . I inhaled deeply. I promised myself I wouldn’t look away.
Jack grabbed a wedge of flesh, just above Greg’s ass, and held it between his thumb and index finger. Using his other hand, he stuck the needle into the muscle, slowly emptying the syringe. He extracted the needle and covered the site with a pink Hello Kitty Band-Aid. I exhaled.
“Is that it?” Greg asked.
“I told you. I fucking rule,” Jack said.
Greg opened his arms and enveloped Jack in a warm bear hug. “I didn’t feel anything. Thank you.”
I noticed the high pitch of Greg’s voice for the first time. How soon that would change. Everything would. I could recite all of the expected changes from the definitive Medical Therapy and Health Maintenance for Transgender Men: A Guide for Health Care Providers. The permanent and reversible effects mingled in a dissonant clinical poem: heightened sex drive, muscle growth, fat redistribution, increased body odor, facial and body hair growth, clit growth, stretching of the vocal chords, weight gain. With that shot, Greg had triggered male puberty. If he continued his biweekly injections, he’d break through the squeaky voice and adolescent acne into adulthood and be rewarded with the traits common among grown men, like male pattern balding.
It was hard to tell which were the desired effects and which the side effects. The clinical poem sounded like the FDA-required warnings on prescription drug commercials where I found myself asking if anyone would really “ask your doctor” about the latest and greatest drug if “thoughts of suicide” and “anal leakage” were mentioned as possible outcomes. But the cold detached language of medicine had a way of fading into the warm flesh and blood of the actual people who benefited from the treatment.
Greg placed the covered needles and vial back into the Tupperware box and sat cross-legged on his bed. “Do you remember what your first shot felt like?” he asked Jack.
“It’s changed over the years. Now it’s like nothing to me,” Jack said. He was perched awkwardly on the edge of the bed. On a silver chain around his neck, I noticed the Hebrew characters for L’Chaim, meaning “to life.” As he’d tell me later, he got the chain after his eighteenth birthday, around the time he began taking testosterone.
Starting hormones had been the first step in Jack’s transition, before having the more expensive top surgery—the common path among FTMs. I’d recently discovered from my books that the term transgender was initially created by gender benders with no desire for surgery or hormones who wanted to separate themselves from transsexuals, those who desired to legally and medically change their sex. But now transgender acted as a uniting umbrella term for all nonnormative genders, and for Jack’s generation, trans seemed to be the shorthand for everything. He was twenty-two and a decade younger than Greg, but his experience elevated him to elder in the room.
“When is stuff gonna start happening?” Greg ducked his head, leaned forward, and whispered. “Like my hooha?”
“Oh, you’ll feel it,” Jack said. “You’ll be like, whoa, hi. You may be creeped out at first. But the tranny cock is fun.”
I added tranny cock to my list of names for the dicklet, or what those reliant on textbook physiology called an enlarged clit.
“Can you penetrate with it?” Greg asked expectantly.
“Kinda. If you find the right angle,” Jack said. “Trust me. It’s worth it. The teeny weeny changes everything.”
I wrote down teeny weeny, wondering if it was something I could, in good conscience, publish. I had quickly learned rule number one in transgender etiquette was not to focus or define people by what’s between their legs; this made sense—in daily life, I paid no attention to the genitals of cisgender—or “cis”—people, as my readings referred to folks who are not trans, those with gender identities and presentations that “match” the sex they were assigned at birth. But nowhere in the medical literature or the personal stories I’d read did anyone mention “waking up with morning wood” as Jack just did, nor make it sound so appealing.
Like me, Greg understood what T did in theory, but he wanted to know what it had done to Jack, and by extension what it would do to him. “Does your orgasm change?” Greg asked.
“I used to have more. Now one and I’m done for a while,” Jack said. “But it’s big.”
“Are you less emotional?”
“I’m less labile. But I’m still emo.”
“Can you cry?”
“I don’t cry often.”
“Is that bad?”
“Sometimes I feel like I need to, but I can’t.”
“We should get you Beaches or Steel Magnolias. Or maybe a guy movie, like Rudy.”
Greg fired away relentlessly, asking over and over again about emotions, acne, shaving, joint pain, spatial sense, smell, taste, energy levels. The effects were too enormous to contemplate. I understood having a physical sense of self in the male ballpark, especially now that I’d experimented with packing, but to live as a man seemed so extreme. Unbearably uncertain. How did Greg know that after devoting the next couple years to a second puberty and a life-altering change that he would be happy to be recognized and treated as a man? I flicked my pen against the side of my chair in anticipation of each question.
“Do bowel movements change?” Greg asked.
“Uh-huh. Because of the oil. More times a day, not solid.”
“So, it’s true. Men are full of shit,” Greg said. “Will I not want to cuddle? Will I stop asking for directions?”
A guffaw shot out of my mouth.
Jack turned around to face me. “Aren’t you supposed to be taking notes?”
I looked down at my blank piece of paper, my pen frozen in my hand. Embarrassed, I tipped my notebook up toward me.
“
Oh, I’m just teasing ya,” Jack said. His mouth curved up into that charming moon sliver of a smile. Had I believed I was anything more than a naïve little pest, I might’ve engaged with my own coy reply. “I’m catching a few things,” I said instead, and jotted down: Are you any different from them? My mind had run off on a marathon of what testosterone could do to me. Would you be happier as a man? I wrote, and closed my notebook.
If I wanted to be a man, I would know, I thought. I would have to know. I would always have known. Wasn’t that what my trans reading course was teaching me, what Greg had been trying to tell me with his stories of stuffing his underwear with a sock as a kid, his recollections of peeing standing up?
Greg tapped Jack on the leg. “Hey, what are you doing now? You want to go to Hooters?”
“Fuck yeah,” Jack sang.
“Are you guys serious?” I asked.
“The wings are to die for,” Greg said.
I found chains and greasy food awful enough without throwing the exploitation of women’s bodies into the mix. I knew the argument that a woman could choose whether to work at Hooters or not, but until there were as many “schlongstaurants” run by women as there were “breastaurants” run by men, I wasn’t buying it. Greg and Jack didn’t so much invite me as they didn’t care one way or another if I tagged along, and I returned to my reporter role to avoid my moral quandary about patronizing Hooters.
The bright light of the sun did little to cut the crisp winter chill. A brisk wind blew debris, leaves, and trash along the sidewalk. The two of them walked stride for stride and I trailed behind, allowing them a respite from the interloping journalist. Greg threw his arm around Jack and pulled him in close, knocking his cap off in an affectionate headlock. With that one move, Greg shattered the last of my doubt that underneath his hard shell there was anything but a tender heart.
At his shiny blue Hyundai, Jack opened the passenger side door and I climbed into the backseat. Within seconds, Greg launched another inquisition, this one about body hair growth. “Do you get hair on your upper legs?” Greg asked.