by Nick Krieger
A few hours later, I received the text informing me that his surgery had gone well, and that’s when I got really nervous. Fearful of finding Jess on the couch in agony, I made my way home slowly that evening. I was pleasantly surprised to open the door to a celebration, our living room full of friends, and a coherent, content Jess propped up in the armchair. An oversized button-down shirt draped his thick, padded chest, the mark of a purple pen still visible on his neck.
As his mother recounted the simple drive to the center, the valet parking, the kind staff, and the quick in-and-out surgery that had them home by midday, she referred to Jess as “she” and “Jessica.” The rest of us used male pronouns for him. Although everybody in the room must have noticed, nobody seemed to care. Sylvia put our whole house at ease, bestowing upon us all “dears,” “sweethearts,” and other tokens of affection in a voice as comforting as the homemade chicken noodle soup simmering on the stove. Listening to her describe the day’s events relieved much of my own anxiety, and by the time all of our guests left, my only lingering concern surrounded the notorious drains. I’d been assured by Brownstein that I could empty the fluid from these contraptions twice a day alone, but I was worried about my squeamishness and propensity to faint. Timidly, I asked Jess and his mom if I could watch this part. “Come on, sweetie,” Sylvia said, her white nightgown trailing as she led me into Jess’s room.
I summoned my composure and steeled myself for the gross-out factor as Jess, seated in a chair from our kitchen, unbuttoned his shirt. Clipped to the bottom of his elastic bandage, on either side of his belly button, two grenade-shaped receptacles held small amounts of red liquid. Unable to see where the tubes, covered by all the padding, entered his body, I tricked myself into seeing the setup as a couple of water balloons with colored dye hanging on hollow plastic strings.
Sylvia knelt before him and undid the safety pin that tethered one of the balloons to his wrap. “You want to massage out any clots,” she said, gripping the tube with the thumb and first two fingers of one hand. Using the same fingers on the other hand, she squeezed then slid along the tube as if playing a musical instrument.
“Do you have to worry about the pressure?” I asked. “Will the receptacle explode when you open it?”
“It shouldn’t,” she replied. “I’m going to cover it with a towel, just in case.” She held the receptacle in one hand, rested the towel over it, and used her other hand to flip the plastic stopper open. Jess sat there silent and vulnerable as I’d ever seen him, letting his mom lead the caretaking dance.
Sylvia poured the contents into a measuring cup and Jess recorded the time and exact amount, somewhere in the two-tablespoon range, on a piece of paper. Sylvia pressed the air out of the receptacle before closing the stopper and reattaching the clip to his bandage. I watched silently as she did the other one. “Easy,” she said.
“I can do that,” I replied, energized by my relief. “I can definitely do that by myself.” I smiled at Jess, who looked happy but exhausted, and said good night to them both.
Lying in bed, I could hardly believe how much just seeing Jess in his peaceful, somewhat drugged state, had alleviated my anxiety. I was certain that I had all the support and resources I needed for my turn in three weeks, but listening to Sylvia flit around in the guest room behind me made me yearn for the one thing I still wanted: my mommy.
My mom’s response to my e-mail had arrived a few days before, less than twenty-four hours after I had sent it, and she’d offered the two things I’d explicitly requested. She’d also included a few sentences of apology and support from my dad. I passed along my appreciation for his note through my mom, but made sure she knew I was not open to any direct contact with him. I simply did not trust him; he’d spilled his emotions onto me too many times, burdened me too much with his pain, consistently doubted and questioned me to a debilitating degree. Excluding him was selfish, but damn did it feel good to make a positive move for myself that he couldn’t taint.
There is a reason flight attendants instruct you to put on your oxygen mask first before helping others; once I had placed my own needs first, I surprised myself by how much I was able to be there for my mother as she struggled with my news. Her ignorant questions and sadness no longer threatened me. I was secure enough to reiterate and explain myself over and over with total calm. She surprised me, too, with her composure, and although I wondered if shutting out my dad had served as a warning of what could happen, as we continued to speak, I could feel her loneliness, how little she had in this world, and that she didn’t need an example—she wasn’t going to give up her kid for anything. I finally felt safe.
In these conversations, long and carefully controlled like our tennis matches had once been, I shared with her every detail of Jess’s swift recovery, dropping “Jess’s mom” this and “Jess’s mom” that as if tentatively trying to elicit her help, yet too afraid to directly ask. When she said it had been her first instinct upon receiving my letter to fly out for my surgery, I told her I wanted her there if she felt like she could handle the situation. She wanted to be there, as long as my expectations were reasonable. “You know I don’t make chicken soup,” she said.
“You know I don’t eat chicken,” I replied. “I eat Amy’s No Chicken Noodle Soup.”
“Does that come in a can?”
“Of course,” I said.
We booked her a flight for less than three weeks away.
The next day, I slouched onto the couch in my therapist’s office and put my water bottle on the table. Shelby adjusted her long peasant skirt, placed a pillow behind her back, and straightened her spine as if to meditate. I grabbed a couch cushion and centered it on my lap. “So,” I said, starting to fidget with the cushion’s string fringes. “I kind of need one of those therapist’s notes. For surgery. I was hoping I wouldn’t. It doesn’t have to say much. Just that I’m of sound mind to make an adult decision.”
“Of course,” Shelby said. “My supervisor will have to write it.”
Shelby and I had started meeting back when she was in one of those New Age psych grad schools and she was still collecting her clinical hours. In our three and a half years together (with a few breaks), my primary reason for seeing her was the same as the one I had mentioned in my intake interview: dedicating an hour of my week to checking in with myself significantly improved my quality of life.
“I figured your supervisor would have to do it,” I said. “But it won’t be a problem?”
“Not at all.” I could see in her smile that she was glad to help.
I sighed deeply.
“Did you think it would be a problem?” she asked.
I fought the urge to crack a joke about her textbook shrink move. “I just thought your supervisor might have to do a special evaluation or assessment of me.”
Shelby shook her head no and it occurred to me that I’d insulted her.
“I know the therapist’s note is a technicality,” I said. “But I had no idea how nervous I’d feel actually asking for it.” I pulled the cushion on my lap closer, hugging it to my stomach. “And every time we talk about surgery, I express some doubts.”
“It only makes sense that you have fear and doubts,” she said. “If you didn’t, then I’d be concerned.”
I nodded. Only in my recent conversations with trans guys had I been able to tease out the worries they’d long since forgotten now that they were proud and confident in their bodies and genders.
“I’ve known you for a long time,” Shelby said, “and one thing that I admire about you is the integrity with which you make decisions, your constant striving to know yourself.” Without removing my eyes from the mandala behind her, I packed her statement into my affirmation pouch for a rainy day.
The next week she had the letter. I read the few sentences quickly, my eyes honing in on one. “Born female, Nina meets the DSM-IV criteria for Gender
Identity Disorder.” My heart sank. “Really? I thought we were just going to go with the sound mind thing.”
She apologized sincerely. “It’s the form letter my supervisor uses.”
“You do know that diagnosis has the word stereotypical in there. Repeatedly,” I said. “I don’t have some disorder for failing to meet a gender stereotype,” I declared, drawing out the last word.
“It’s fucked up,” she said.
She’d never cursed in my presence before, and it riled me up even more. “I have to live in my body for the rest of my life,” I said. “This surgery is a huge gift to myself. I’m spending my entire savings on it, and the fact that I need a piece of paper that says I’m mentally ill really pisses me off.”
Shelby kept quiet for a few moments, a move we’d both agreed was helpful when I grew agitated. “You’re welcome to write a new letter that she could sign.”
I appreciated her offer, but told her to never mind a letter that would yellow in the bottom of some drawer. Only when I left her office with my piece of paper, the key that so many had been forced to acquire by reiterating a standard narrative, the myth of a sole transgender experience that bore no resemblance to mine, did I decide to rewrite the letter, one that I’d make sure would be read.
Dear Dr. Surgeon,
As a small child, Nina Krieger’s toys included an entire stable of My Little Ponies as well as a Barbie Glamour Bath and Shower Set. Nina doesn’t remember playing with these toys, certainly not aggressively nor in a rough ’n’ tumble fashion, but she fondly remembers a picture of herself topless washing her naked Barbie.
Growing up, Nina played many games with her brother and often expressed angst over the one she called the broomstick hoist—she and her friend would loft her brother into the air with a broomstick they’d stuck between his legs. Wondering if Nina’s game could be construed as a castration attempt, I hypnotized her to see if perhaps she’d screamed, “You can’t have one if I can’t have one.” But after the hypnosis, she only cried and apologized to her brother.
Nina appears to have had a normal puberty. She responded to menstruation as if she’d sprung a leak, plugging it up like a plumber, and in eighth grade, she showed off her breasts in tight shirts. There appears to have been some adolescent turmoil going on at this time because she brought a carving knife to school and received a suspension. It is impossible to tell if this was a plea for help, but she could’ve been trying to say, “Look at my tits! Look at my tits, and I’ll knife you.”
Nina told me she didn’t always urinate sitting down and spoke with pride about her ability to aim into a hole in the ground while carrying both her travel backpack and daypack. She also said she didn’t care much for toilet paper. “Is that because men don’t wipe after peeing?” I asked. “No,” she said. “Do you know where toilet paper comes from? Let’s save some trees!” I was unable to label her behaviors as cross-gender practices.
As part of my assessment, I sent Nina to a medical doctor who probed for undescended testes below the waist. He also checked her ear canal, nasal pathway, and mouth for gonads passing as tonsils, but found nothing out of the ordinary.
While Nina displayed no diagnosable gender unease throughout childhood, around the age of twenty-six she saw a toddler on a jungle gym wearing a pair of corduroys, Keds, and an Oxford shirt. Shortly thereafter, she began shopping for herself on the boys’ side of GapKids.
In conclusion, born female, Nina resembled a girl, then woman, then boy, and is on her way to becoming, well, I have no idea. But whatever the ending, it will be happy. Such is the case when a client writes her own story.
Sincerely,
Dr. Therapist
On the Saturday night before my surgery, I left Sandra and Derek chatting in the corner of the dyke bar that wasn’t completely a dyke bar, and waded through the crowd of sporty tomboys in baseball caps, pretty-faced boy-dykes and girl crews that resembled boy bands. I played connect the dots with these images, linking my history into a trajectory that only made sense in hindsight.
I was ordering a glass of water, my taking-it-easy drink, when Greg joined me at the bar. He sported a mustache, a four out of ten on the creepy scale and his only facial hair choice due to his workplace dress code. He ran the back of my fingers along his coarse stubbly cheek. “Impressive,” I said, flipping my hand and grazing his other cheek. Greg still pointed out his physical changes at yoga, or when I joined him and Jess at our house to watch football. Two years after his first testosterone shot, and I was invested in his maturation, felt connected to him and his growth by bearing witness to it, and considered him a pretty great guy, even though he’d probably never be one of my best friends.
He clinked his beer against my water. “You ready for Wednesday?” he asked.
“Ready as I’ll ever be.” I refrained from asking him any anxious questions, since I’d discovered early on that most of his answers involved a dismissive “I don’t remember,” stifling the conversation and reassurance I sought.
“I’m not sure if Jess told you this already,” Greg said, “but I’m trying to start a group. For trans and genderqueer guys.” He threw out some new and familiar names.
“Jess mentioned it briefly,” I replied.
“It’s by invitation only. Kind of a gentlemen’s club.” Greg dragged his beer closer to himself and circled around his vision of regular get-togethers, support, community. “I see us going away together, a houseboat, a log cabin.” He gazed well beyond the shelves of liquor in front of us and shuddered. “Whoa. That just gave me the chills.”
I had no interest in grilling meat, driving go-karts, or playing the kind of clubhouse games I envisioned, but I was certainly into the idea of meetings, talks, and sharing. Every trans guy didn’t have to be my buddy, but they were all family, and ours was small enough that we had to look out for one another. “Thanks for including me,” I said.
“Jess will let you know about our first meeting,” he said before heading into the thickening crowd.
I stood alone for a few minutes, thinking back to the first time I’d walked through the doors, how different I was, how different we all must have been when we’d entered this place, before we understood that queers received nine adolescences like cats received nine lives, and the permutations of gender were infinite, the complexities a challenge to explain in a language only built to hold this or that, when many of us were other, something we could see here long before we could speak it.
I looked over at Bec, seated on the covered pool table that had been one of his many stages. Back when I’d just started observing him from afar, I’d watched him perform one of his famous stripteases on that very spot. Lip-synching to the original version of “Fever,” he’d run his fingers down the lapels of his gray jacket, flirted with his suspenders, and then tossed a heart-shaped cutout into the crowd before splitting his undershirt down the middle. As he strutted around in his silk boxers, a crowd of mostly dykes went nuts with applause. I imagined they all saw what I did in him, a beauty that transcended gender, only for me this became my guiding light.
Bec and I bumped into each other regularly, but for the most part, I’d maintained my stated position in the corner. Now, on the cusp of a big step on my own path, I wanted to break free from the wall, let him know how much he’d impacted me, just being himself, a seahorse of inspiration. Across the bar, grease held back his neatly combed hair, and underneath his motorcycle jacket, the white of a fresh T-shirt, stretched tightly across his flat chest, glowed. I hesitated for a moment, but my self-conscious fear of going after-school-special cheesy on him fell away as the confidence I’d absorbed from him took over. “Hey,” I said, marching directly up to him. “You probably heard,” I continued. “I’m having top surgery on Wednesday.”
He interrupted my speech with his congratulations.
“Well, I really want to thank you for talk
ing to me about your experience and answering my questions,” I said.
Bec flashed his warm, charismatic smile. “I’m happy you made a decision that you believe will increase your comfort.” He leaned forward over his crossed legs. “You know what’s going to happen?” He grabbed my shoulders and pushed them back. As I opened across the chest, I felt myself extend in every direction. “You’re going to grow.”
On Tuesday night, after the last yoga class I could attend for six weeks, I picked my mom up at the airport. In the guest bedroom, I showed her all of the printouts I’d made—neighborhood maps, walking routes to gourmet markets with prepared foods, directions to and from the surgery center, everything I’d collected to ease her neurosis and distract me from my own. It was late, after eleven, and lounging on her foam-mattress bed on the floor, we’d somehow fallen into a do-over of the “normal” debate.
I was trying to explain why our family gatherings bothered me—all of the men in matching white button-down shirts debated sports, discussed the economy, and prepared the meat while the women poured the side dishes into bowls from take-out containers, communicated with the hired help, and claimed the seats closest to the kitchen for easy clearing.
“That’s the way our family is, same as you are the way you are,” my mom said.
“But you all act like your way is the only way, the right way.” I wished I could’ve explained how detrimental gender roles, expectations, and assumptions had been to me, that by not fitting into the system thrust upon me, I’d felt as if there was something inherently wrong with me. I envisioned the somber introductory music of a special with Barbara Walters, the voiceover of her inquisitive rasp: “Tonight, we have cisgender women—girls who wear dresses as children, dresses as teenagers, and dresses as adults—how do they do it? In exclusive interviews, we will meet the family of R., who for safety has requested we use only her first initial.” Image cuts to a girl in a dress surrounded by a room full of adults with fuzzed out faces. How would my mom feel if that’s how she was represented?