Only now, after the damage had been done, did I see the answer staring me in the face.
I needed Another Other.
CHAPTER 29
Maggie Blankman had introduced me to Gretchen Lawrence by email the day after our conversation, after I was first diagnosed. Gretchen responded with a perfectly friendly message telling me to call her anytime, but the first few times I picked up my phone to call, I chickened out. She was a busy college student. She barely knew me. She couldn’t have meant it.
The person who finally convinced me to call her back wasn’t Dr. LaForte—it was Faith, who sent me a link to an article from Seventeen with the headline I’M A GIRL WITH BOY CHROMOSOMES. An article that happened to be written by Gretchen Lawrence.
OMG she seems super nice, Faith wrote under the link. did U know there is some sort of support group?
After that, I really had no choice. I emailed Gretchen, and she got back to me within hours, suggesting that we meet up at a Friendly’s in Syracuse the Sunday after Thanksgiving.
The day of our get-together, I stressed so much about what to wear that it was almost like a first date. After trying on two outfits, I decided to go simple with a navy-blue long-sleeved T-shirt and jeans.
I got to the restaurant a few minutes early and burned some time looking through the menu, even though I didn’t really need to. Vee, Faith, and I had eaten at the Friendly’s in Utica practically every week during junior year, and I had the menu memorized. Vee always ordered the Asian chicken salad and picked off the fried wonton strips. Faith was a quesadilla girl. And I always had the turkey club without the bacon. Then we’d share a Mint Cookie Crunch sundae. Vee would always have the cherry on top, except when I had a meet the next day, when she’d give it to me.
Someone tapped me on the shoulder, jolting me out of my memories. “Excuse me, are you Kristin?”
I turned around to see a girl about two or three inches shorter than me with shoulder-length black hair. She had big brown eyes and an even bigger smile on her face.
Without even thinking about it, I smiled back.
“Oh my God. I’m so glad to meet you,” Gretchen gushed. “Can I give you a hug? I know we’ve just met, but . . .”
But we were AIS sisters. Gretchen enveloped me in her arms and I pressed my face against the scratchy wool of her coat. It’d been so long since I’d hugged anyone but my aunt Carla, who didn’t count because what she did was more like suffocating someone than hugging them. Gretchen was a good hugger; her arms were strong, and her hair smelled like green apples.
“You order anything yet?” Gretchen asked. “Want to share an appetizer?” The waitress came, and I ordered a pink lemonade and my usual turkey club and we got some mozzarella sticks to share.
While we waited for the food to come I played with the wrapper from my straw, rolling it up into a tight ball. I wondered when I’d gotten so quiet. Then I remembered: I’d always been a little shy. It was my friends who were outgoing.
“So,” Gretchen said finally. “You’re a senior, right? Do you know where you might want to go in the fall?”
I told her about State, and track. It was easy to deflect the conversation from there, and ask Gretchen about Syracuse. She was a psychology major, and was minoring in women’s studies.
“Isn’t that kind of ironic?” I commented.
“What, because we’re not ‘real women’?” She made air quotes. “Why aren’t we real women—because we don’t have uteruses? What about women who have hysterectomies? Or mastectomies? One of my favorite AIS quotes ever is from a woman named María José Martínez-Patiño: ‘Having had my womanliness tested—literally and figuratively—I suspect I have a surer sense of my femininity than many women.’” I startled in recognition at the name. That was the Spanish hurdler I had read about.
Since I had alluded to AIS, Gretchen seemed to think it was fair game. “Maggie said in her email that you just found out about your diagnosis. How’s it been, knowing?”
I shrugged. “Sometimes I wish I’d been one of those girls whose parents just told them they had a tumor on their uterus.”
“You think so?” Gretchen asked. “You think it’s better being lied to, and not knowing what’s really going on with your body?”
“What difference does it make? I would feel less like a monster. I mean, it’s better than people knowing I had testicles.”
Gretchen looked confused. “Um, how would anyone ever know that?”
I glanced around. The tables next to us were crowded with kids. Was mine really a story for a family restaurant? I swallowed. “I can tell you the whole story later. But, long story short, my entire high school found out.”
I’d gotten used to seeing disgust on people’s faces. Anger, too, and pity. But in Gretchen’s face all I saw were shock and understanding.
“Fuck me,” she said.
“Exactly,” I said.
“Do you have a boyfriend?” I asked Gretchen. “He must know because he read the article, right?”
“I don’t have a boyfriend.” She dipped a mozzarella stick into the marinara sauce and took a bite, her mouth forming a secret smile as she chewed. “But I do have a girlfriend, Julia.”
“Oh,” was all I said, which sounded kind of lame, but I’d never met a lesbian before. At least not one who was open about it. “I’m sorry I assumed you were straight.” Then I did that thing where you go back over your conversation to see if you said anything offensive.
“It’s okay,” Gretchen said easily. “I get it all the time.”
Before I had the chance to filter myself, I blurted, “How long have you known that you were gay? Is it something that only happened after you learned about the AIS?”
“Good lord. Are you afraid that having AIS means that you’re a lesbian?”
“Not really,” I said, embarrassed. “But sometimes it sounds easier. Like, girls would be more likely to understand. Most guys would probably freak out, knowing about the boy parts.”
“Good luck deciding to be lesbian,” Gretchen said. “And let me tell you, some of the most insensitive people I know are women.”
“I know,” I said, thinking of Vee. “It just sucks always having to wonder what other people see when they look at me. Don’t you ever just want to be normal?”
“Well, yeah, I used to tell my mom that all the time. But whenever I did, she always asked me the same question: ‘Do you know what another word for normal is?’” Gretchen reached out for another mozzarella stick and ate it while I racked my brain for synonyms.
I was horrible at this game. The only word I could come up with was typical.
“That’s not the one my mom always told me,” she said.
“Then what was?” I asked impatiently.
Gretchen picked up her glass of water and looked into it. Her lips formed a perfect kiss around the straw as she took a sip.
“Average,” she said.
After we paid our bill, we drove over to a half-deserted park and I told her my story.
She was a good listener. The only time she reacted negatively was when I told her about my gonadectomy.
“Wait, you called the urologist asking for surgery?” she asked. “And she let you go through with it without making you see a psychiatrist first?”
“I wanted it.”
“But you were still wigging out over your diagnosis. That is so not the best time to go ahead with something like that.”
“I know, that’s what she said too, but I needed them out.” I stopped for a second. “Wait a minute. Does that mean you still have them?”
“Have what?” Gretchen asked, smirking.
I blushed, and gestured toward my groin. “You know.”
“Oh,” she said loudly. “You mean my testicles?”
I couldn’t help myself. I looked around to see if anyone had noticed, but the nearest dog walker was several hundred feet away.
“Yes,” Gretchen said firmly. “I still have my testicles.”
“How can you s
tand it?”
“What is there to stand? Whatever higher being you believe in made me what I am. I heart my gonads.” She laughed. “But remember, I had years to come to terms with my AIS. You had to deal with other people’s reactions to your diagnosis before you really had time to process it yourself.”
We were sitting on a bench deep in the park, next to a pair of empty tennis courts with their nets taken down. A few joggers ran by, then a couple who were walking their German shepherd. They strode by arm in arm, and you could see the air fill with little clouds from their conversation.
“How long did it take you to . . . process it all?” I asked.
“I mean, years. Maybe I still haven’t.”
“You outed yourself to all the readers of Seventeen magazine!”
“That was part of processing it, you know? Coming out on my own terms. Plus, hiding who I was had started to suck my soul.”
Hiding who we were sounded like a luxury. “Do you still think of yourself as a girl?”
“Most of us with AIS do, though some identify themselves as ‘intersex women.’”
That’s what Dr. Cheng had said, and it’d driven me crazy trying to parse out what it meant. “But what does that mean, to ‘identify’ as a girl? Just because you feel like you’re a girl doesn’t mean that you really are.”
Gretchen cocked her head. “Some people would disagree with you about that. Gender is totally a social construct.”
“That’s right, you told me,” I said. “Women’s studies minor.”
She laughed. “Guilty as charged. It’s all true, though. The biggest difference between boys and girls is how people treat them—what color parents think their kids should wear, and what kind of activities they sign their kids up for.”
I thought about the pink estrogen pills as Gretchen went on. “Screw that gender essentialism bullshit. Men have as much of a right to care about clothes as women. Girls can like sports and cars and guns too. So why does it even matter if you identify as a girl, a boy, or as neither?”
“It matters because we live in the real world,” I said with a heat that surprised me. “I don’t want to be some poster child. I just want to get through high school in one piece, graduate from college, and have a family.”
“With a boy?” Gretchen interrupted.
“Yes, with a boy,” I said painfully. “And if that makes me repulsively”—I searched for the word that I’d heard one day on an episode of Dr. Phil—“heteronormative to you? Well, you can suck it.”
Gretchen’s eyes opened wide. “That’s right! Because you’re a hermaphrodite, so you must have a penis!”
We both burst out laughing, and God it felt good. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d had a good, old-fashioned belly laugh, the kind where you can barely breathe and your eyes start watering.
“Well,” Gretchen said, “that was cathartic.”
Catharsis. At the end of that first session, Dr. LaForte had used the same term. She’d said that one of the reasons I was so depressed was that I’d been bottling up my emotions. “You might find it helpful if you shifted from inward repression of your feelings to outward expression,” she explained. Then she gave me a little notebook with a Monet painting on the front, and told me to start a journal. “I don’t expect you to show it to me, Kristin—I just want you to get things out there—your anger, your fear, your confusion and sadness. The goal is to release your emotions in a structured manner.”
So far, the book had stayed blank. But the night after I met Gretchen for the first time, I dug it out of the bottom of my book bag. I tried to write down everything I remembered from our conversation, tried to tease out the tangled web of theories and ideas and come up with something I could live by, in the real world.
One last thing that Gretchen said just before we parted ways stuck in my head:
“I’m not saying that you have to become this Übermilitant Intersex Warrior. I’m just telling you to be careful of letting other people define who—and what—you are.”
They were words to live by. Yet, like so many things in life, easier said than done.
CHAPTER 30
I started running in the evenings, mapping out a new route to avoid the park, where Sam ran and sometimes played basketball. There were some woods behind my neighborhood, with a thin trail developed enough so I could keep up my pace without worrying about twisting my ankle.
It felt weird starting up a new routine. Disconcerting. At first, I experimented with the timing of my run to avoid seeing too many people, and it made my workouts seem less about the running itself and more about the path I took. The key was to leave my house at four thirty, well before rush hour, to avoid the strings of cars and after-work dog walkers. Evening patterns weren’t as predictable as mornings, though, and it kind of drove me crazy. Then, one day I bumped into Darren.
I had just entered the woods and was so focused on the ground that he was almost past me before I heard him shout my name. I could tell he was near the end of his loop because he had that slump-shouldered gassed look, but he slowed to a walk when I raised my hand at him.
Usually when I pass people I know while I’m in the middle of a workout, I’m a nod-and-wave person. Especially when I’ve just started my run. But when someone stops for you, the polite thing to do is to chat for a while, and so I did. The motto on his running tee made me grin: I’M TOO XC FOR THIS SHIRT.
“Hey. You always run here?” Darren asked, slightly breathless. “Haven’t seen you before.”
“Just trying out something new.”
“Which path are you taking?”
“There’s more than one?” I asked.
“Yeah, this is the perimeter trail. Good for speed. But there’s an offshoot that takes you up some hills.”
“Really? Where?” Short hills were good for strength. Perfect for hurdlers.
“There’s a fork about four hundred yards down. Here, I’ll show you.” Darren turned around and started to jog back into the forest. I almost protested that he was tired at the end of a run, but I knew no cross-country runner worth his salt would ever complain about having to go an extra mile. So I followed.
It felt bizarre running with a boy other than Sam. We weren’t close to being in sync; Darren was so tall his stride was almost a foot longer than mine. The trail was barely wide enough for the two of us, and I had to duck a lot of branches and steer clear of bushes. At one point I stumbled as my sneaker caught on an enormous root, and Darren shot out his hand to steady me. I flung out my arms for balance, and caught on to his forearm, feeling his sinewy muscles tense as he braced my fall.
Our eyes met. His were a shifting hazel, dark and deep. I felt a flicker in my chest, and let go of his arm, taking a long breath before I resumed my run. Darren let me run a little bit in front of him, and I noticed him cutting back his stride to match my post-surgery pace.
By the time we reached the top of the hill, the sun was just above the tree line. I climbed on a rock at a little overhang and looked south over our town: The manicured sea of the golf course. The streetlights lining the way downtown. The crisscrossing roads that were already starting to crawl with normal people living out their happy, average lives.
Darren clambered up beside me. “It gives you some perspective, doesn’t it? To look out there, see thousands of houses full of thousands of people, and know that there are a thousand more cities out there with just as many people. I started writing my application essays, you know, and sometimes I get freaked out: What makes me different from every other schmuck out there who wants to get into their dream school?”
“You’re, like, in the top five in our class.”
Darren shook his head. “Oh, I know I’ll probably get in somewhere good. But sometimes I remember that, in the grand scheme of things, I’m just a little speck of dust in the universe.”
“My aunt Carla always says that every person is a unique snowflake.”
“Yeah. And let’s hope colleges think that this snow
flake is more unique than others.”
I stopped myself from reminding him that sometimes being able to differentiate yourself wasn’t what it was cracked up to be.
The sun dipped below the trees. “It’s getting dark,” Darren said, sliding off the rock. He put his hand out to help me down, and even though I didn’t need his help, I took it. The air was chilly, so his hand was cool, but his grip was strong.
Dr. LaForte had told me to ask myself, “Who am I?” The night before my appointment with her, I sat in my room with my Monet book, staring at a blank page.
Who was I? I played so many roles: daughter, friend, babysitter, runner, girlfriend.
I’d been proud when I was elected team captain, but now I wondered who my teammates had thought they’d voted for. And who my classmates had thought they’d elected Homecoming Queen.
Sam had said that I was someone who smiled at people in the hallways. In my birthday card just a month ago, Vee had thanked me for always being there to listen. My junior yearbook had been full of notes using words like nice and sweet.
But if that was who I was, how had people turned on me so quickly? Take away the people around me, and who was I? Just another smiling face? There had to be more.
In the margins of my Monet book I doodled a set of ten hurdles, and drew a finishing tape at the bottom of the page. Freshman year before tryouts, Coach Auerbach had introduced all the newbies to the different track-and-field events. She told us that each discipline had its own personality. Sprinters were the divas of track, long-distance runners were the patient workhorses, throwers were the loose cannons, and jumpers were the free spirits.
Hurdlers were a breed of their own.
When Coach Auerbach talked about the hurdles, she cautioned us that the event wasn’t for the faint of heart. “Hurdling has the steepest learning curve, and probably the most painful. It’s all about technique, so there’s a ton of practice involved. A lot of hitting your knees and face-planting. They say that hurdlers need three things: speed, flexibility, and courage.”
Within the first day of learning how to hurdle, I knew she was right to warn us. I looked at my sprinter friends and was totally jealous of how easy they seemed to have it. But at the same time, I loved being hard-core. That’s who I was: a hurdler. And hurdlers were never afraid to fall.
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