He told her he wanted to run tests to rule out some things. An abdominal X-ray and blood work to look at her hormone levels. And he scraped the inside of her cheek to perform a karyotype of her chromosomes. Ten days later she went in for the results.
He explained that they had expected to see a fuzzy ball of chromatin in every cell, which all females have. They didn’t see any fuzzy ball. They looked at the chromosomes themselves. She had one X chromosome and one Y chromosome.
Art opens his eyes. “What’d she say?”
“‘That means I’m a boy, doesn’t it?’”
Art whistles.
“The doctor told her that, technically, she was male. ‘But you were raised a girl,’ he said. ‘People think of you as a woman and you look like one. Genetically, you may be male, but physiologically and socially you’re female.’”
I can hear Art’s breathing, laboured, rattling.
“The doctor let that sink in and then he told her what it meant for her health. Her X-rays showed a bone age of someone much younger, as well as signs of osteoporosis in her skull, spine, feet, and hands. But despite having a Y chromosome, she had developed as a female, with female genitals. She had something called gonadal dysgenesis.”
“What’d she do?”
He said that there was good news and bad news. She didn’t have ovaries and that’s why she wasn’t producing estrogen. That explained the osteoporosis. The good news according to him was that hormone replacement therapy would correct that. She’d have to give herself a shot of estrogen every day.
“I’d hate to hear the bad news,” Art says.
“He said her undeveloped gonads were likely to become cancerous and needed to be removed. So they made two small incisions in Benny’s abdomen and cut out her streak gonads.”
I stand up. I reach for my shirt and begin to lift it. His eyes grow wide.
“Here and here,” I say, pointing to the two scars.
/
As soon as I jumped I knew it was over. My Rubicon, the cliff, the death sigh. It was the shock of the cold that changed me and made me what I am now. Like an oyster, my sex was changed by the cold water. I struggled for life. I was surrounded by frigid water, gasping for breath as wave after wave buffeted me. I didn’t much care. I had been struggling all my life.
The moment she ended, just as Benny hit that cold, cold water, was the moment my life began. I have not forgotten what came before — how could I? — but I am no longer her. I am me.
Arrival. Is there ever such a pure thing? Isn’t the journey, indeed all life, a constant coming and going like the tides out of which I emerged, reborn? My father had been born in Nova Scotia and here I was, coming home.
43
Forest Garden
I stand by his bed, with my shirt lifted to reveal my scars, waiting for his response.
“You?”
I nod. I’m waiting for a slap, harsh words, rejection. I try to be prepared, but it’s going to kill me if he bites. He’s all the family I have left. I listen to the tick of the wall clock and the sound of a television in a room down the hall. I pull my shirt down.
Once I was in the water, the shore seemed a lot farther away. I swam to a place where I could climb out. I was lucky to find a spot with smooth rocks that gradually rose out of the sea. I later found out this was Herring Cove. I took off the sweater and left it above the high tide mark in the open where someone might find it. I walked, then jogged, in an attempt to warm up.
—
In the hospital after the surgery I came out of the murk. I pushed off, hoping for the surface. I was made of stone and my muscles ached as I struggled to rise up. The first thing I heard was Dr. Wilson’s voice.
“. . . gonads were calcified,” he said. “Fortunately, there was no evidence of . . . We removed her fallopian tubes, to be sure. She has a hypoplastic uterus . . .”
Words were fluttering out of his mouth, falling to the floor around my bed. I couldn’t see who he was talking to.
“. . . not completely developed . . . only three centimetres long. She’ll never have children.”
It was that “only three centimetres long” that made it concrete for me. I began to cry, imagining the baby I’d never have trying to wriggle inside something the size of a fava bean.
When I came up and could comprehend what he was saying, he told me what he thought was more good news. My genitals appeared quite normal and with hormone replacement I would be able to have regular periods. I would never ovulate but — and I remember thinking I was mishearing this — he said I should be able to “function adequately sexually.”
Later an endocrinologist prescribed female hormones to replace those my body wasn’t making. I began taking estrogen and progesterone and the changes were rapid. I had regular periods every month. My cycle was always twenty-eight days long. I had been skinny when I began jabbing a 21-gauge needle into my hip every morning. The hormones gave me boobs, raised my voice, and changed the hair on my body.
—
A thousand years later, Art reaches for my hand. He takes it in his huge mitt and rubs my fingers under his calloused palm. He motions for me to sit on the edge of his bed.
“I was working in my yard one day,” he says, “slaughtering chickens, when two young fellas come up the driveway. I could tell something was up because Lucy snarled and ran up to them with her hackles up.”
“Like she did with me.”
“She always knows when someone fishy is coming.” He grins. “They’re both wearing white shirts, starched and pure as snow, with little black ties. Neat haircuts. I figured they was selling something. After our hellos the shorter one says, ‘Have you heard the good news? The world is a wicked place.’ Old Shorty did all the talking. ‘Have you noticed how there’s more violence, more wars and pestilence, and bad neighbourly feeling in the world in these modern times?’ I smiled. ‘You call that good news?’ ‘Well the good news is, the Lord sees fit to bless us sinners anyway.’ I put up my hand. ‘Hold on a second. Look over there.’ I pointed to the bay. The sun was sparkling on the water as it set. ‘Ain’t that a beautiful sight?’ He started to sputter again, like a rusty old lawnmower complaining, but I stopped him. ‘This world’s a miracle. We don’t need no saving. And I sure as hell don’t need yours.’ Then I lifted my axe, walloped the head clean off that chicken, and watched blood spurt all over those clean white shirts.”
I laugh through my tears. He stops talking and closes his eyes. His breath rasps, in, out, in, out.
“Son, the whole mess is buggered up and perfect just the way it is. We’re all buggered and perfect. You included.”
44
Forest Garden
I could say it this way: my consent feels like leaving home; God’s grace feels like coming home; the struggle to be faithful to a call feels like being outside in the weather.
— An Accidental Monk, Marylee Mitcham
It’s early morning. Still dark. A gentle rain falls. Ping! Ping! on the metal roof. I’m propped against the wall with the light from a candle illuminating my book’s pages. Middlemarch again. I’ve always loved Dorothea and her idealism. I root her on, hoping this time she’ll make her vision manifest. But, unlike my mother, I don’t identify with her. I know how to get shit done. Instead I think I’m like Casaubon, with his key to all mythologies. He had a longing to create one thing to justify his existence. I wanted to create something of value. A cleaner world, a small garden, a home.
Each night I have to make the choice between staying burrowed in blankets, hoping I can stay warm, or getting up to stoke the fire. Thunder decides she wants to go out. She is scratching on the door. Polar air wraps around my legs when I drop my bare feet on the plywood floor. I open the door and say a little prayer that the coyotes won’t get her. She stands in the open doorway, tail twitching, smelling the night air. When she feels comfortable enough to leave, she bolts off the door stoop, onto the rock that is my step, and along the path. I return to bed, rolling up in my
yellow and black blanket, rubbing my feet together to try to get them warm.
I miss the warmth of Lina’s body in my bed. Since I stopped taking estrogen I’ve lost a layer of insulating fat and can’t keep my feet warm. What haunts me is the way she affected all my senses. The pungent, arousing smell under her arms, her ticklishness when I nosed in there. The soft roundness of her body, the fullness of her breasts, of her belly. The way she tasted, of brine, wild, unfathomable. The smooth skin on the top of her feet and on her back. The curve of her neck, her tapered fingers. It’s all gone when I open my eyes, the way I can no longer see her tent from my cabin window when I wake up.
I created all right. The patriarchs in the Sinai, or whoever told the story of Genesis for the first time, must have been tired of seeing women creating, generation upon generation, miracle after miracle, and what did those men make? Diddly-squat. They grew barley, made wine, beat each other over the head with clubs, or formed the constellations into a hunter or a lion. Big fucking deal. So they made up the story of a creator who is the ultimate man, creating a creature in his own image out of dust and spit. Then the man falls asleep, loses a rib, and Eve is born. Everywhere around them the evidence insisted that the male always came from the female. It’s the only way it could happen, but they decided to turn things upside down. It’s the only way it could happen then and the only way it happens now.
The story I have been telling Art, my creation myth, is almost finished. Whether it’s true or not, I can’t tell. By force of repetition we come to believe the stories we relate, as a child can have a memory planted in his mind by hearing a tale repeated by his parents.
I know now what being faithful to a call means and where it leads. It means being an exile, erasing your previous life, living alone in the woods. It leads to conversing with ghosts.
The karyotype they did on me suggested, visually at least, that the Y chromosome Dad gave me is intact. But I suspected otherwise. Something had happened to it between Dad’s body and mine. Scientists had discovered a gene called the sex-determining region of the Y chromosome. SRY. It’s on the distal part of the short arm of the Y chromosome. When it’s introduced into female mice they develop male genitals. Male mice with mutated Y chromosomes appear female. I guessed that my SRY was damaged, and Leroy’s sequencing proved this.
All fetuses are female by default unless they get a signal to become male. The SRY gene is that signal, directing a fetus to develop testes instead of ovaries. If SRY is damaged or missing, the fetus remains female even if it’s XY. SRY by itself is capable of transforming a female embryo into a male. Or when it’s mutated, doing nothing of the sort.
I could never have had ovaries, fallopian tubes, or a normal uterus.
If my SRY gene hadn’t had that transversion mutation, my embryonic gonads would have developed into testes, they would have produced testosterone, there would have been development of Wolffian ducts, and I would have had male genitals. As it is, my gonads remained primordial and will never make eggs or sperm. Gonadal dysgenesis. Swyer syndrome. One nucleotide changed and I wound up with a vagina and a small uterus by default. I looked like a girl, so they raised me as a girl. I never have felt like a girl.
Being forced into this false dichotomy did not work. My parents raised me as a girl because I looked like one. But I never felt like a girl any more than I now feel like a boy. Once I had the choice I chose this — to live as a man to everyone but Lina and now Art — because it is expedient. I was able to stop the injections, which I hated, and I changed my identity in case the bacteria I released are ever traced to who I had been in New York.
I became obsessed with gender research the winter I spent in Halifax. I learned that to pass as a female in the 1964 Olympics, athletes were given a digital exam to prove that they had a vagina and no penis. I would pass this test. By 1968, athletes had buccal smears taken, looking for two X chromosomes. After the Olympics that year, a few athletes competing as females were found to lack a second X chromosome. There were others who had XYY or XXX. They were counselled to avoid embarrassment by feigning injury and withdrawing from competition. Their athletic careers were over. The test had the illusion of being failsafe, since it was believed that all females have two, and only two, X chromosomes.
My hero that winter was a Polish sprinter, Ewa Klobukowska. She failed the test, was stripped of her Olympic medals and world record, and was barred from competing at the international level because she was XXY. Despite her female habitus, she was judged male due to that Y chromosome.
To minds that crave binary order, and the simplicity of the male–female dichotomy, the study of gender can lead to despair. They say that women with Y chromosomes and men with two Xs are abnormal. But normal is just a word that gets thrown around when we try to make sense of biology.
A few years after the 1968 Olympics, Klobukowska became the first man in history to give birth.
*
I’m flipping through AM stations, passing over pop songs and the near-ubiquitous fundamentalist rants. According to the pastor from the Assembly of the Righteous, syndicated out of Philadelphia, Jesus will only return once the last tree standing is cut down. Apparently, in addition to homophobia and misogyny, Jesus approves of clear-cutting. The preacher also sees the loss of plastic as a sign of God’s wrath, and Armageddon around the corner. Preachers have grown even more confident about the impending Rapture with the latest stock market collapse, the difficulty of transporting goods without plastic containers, the lack of potable water in cities in the Northeast, and the blackouts. I find a news station coming out of Boston, crackling up the coast to my little radio. The lead piece involves the genetically modified bacterium responsible for the original loss of plastic. Long thought to have originated in a lab in New York, it has, they say, been traced instead to a Japanese pharmaceutical company. The US government is currently preparing a lawsuit against the company, as well as the Japanese government, claiming damages of $4 trillion. Japan’s bankrupt already.
Here, food may be a problem, but at least we still have drinkable water and trees for fuel.
*
The last time I saw Art I asked him if he knew how we were related. I told him my grandfather had been Stuart Mosher and that, after he died, my grandmother and father had moved to Williamstown in western Massachusetts.
“Stuart was my second cousin. Lived in Port George as a kid. He was a few years older than me. He moved into town to work at the lumber yard. Poor sap was killed when he was twenty-seven at Dieppe. His woman was pregnant at the time.”
With my father.
*
Scratching at the door wakes me again. It’s Saturday morning and the sky is beginning to blue. There are only coals left in the wood stove. I hop across the cold floor in bare feet to let Thunder in where there is warmth, security, and sleep for her. I pick her up, loving the feel and perfumed smell of her cold fur. She jumps from my arms and leaps onto the bed, curls up, and looks at me. I put on cold rubber boots and go out into the garden. The pumpkin leaves lie withered and dry, revealing the orange fruit they fed all summer. The tomatoes, miraculous and lush considering the thin soil they came from, are long gone.
I take the path to the depression of grasses where Lina’s tent was. The thin fingernail of moon is hovering over the spruce silhouettes in the blueing sky. Earthshine completes its circle. By tomorrow the moon will disappear for a few days. I watch the steam rise from my stream of piss as I squat. Frost covers the ground and sparkles in the air. The songbirds are all gone, the Vs of geese have headed south. The only tree with leaves is the lone beech in the garden. It hoards its dry russet leaves like an old miser counting his pennies. More than once I’ve been startled by footsteps as I smoke on the low wall and have turned to meet whoever is coming, only to see the small beech rustling in the breeze.
Orion is high in the sky. I’ve learned to associate those ten stars with the coming of winter and the killing of deer. For some of my neighbours a buck in the free
zer means the difference between having enough meat for the winter and going hungry. It is too early yet for the pond in my woods to be frozen, but I look forward to the new year, when I can skate again in the woods.
I blow on the coals in the wood stove and they glow. They are hot enough that the pieces of cedar shingle I use as kindling catch quickly. I put more wood on top of them, close the door, and climb, shivering, back into bed. I light a candle by my head. The wood screeches and pops. I won’t be able to sleep until the cabin is warm again. As I wait, I reach beside the bed for a letter Lina sent me from somewhere on the road in Alberta. Though I doubt she scented it on purpose, some of her rubbed off on it. I hold the paper up to my nose and breathe her in. It brings her back into my cabin as if I had returned from having sex with her in the woods and her scent was on my coat, my hands.
One Monday in the Dalhousie library, when the sun had set too early on a January afternoon and the snow piled up, I came across a clinical report of a woman who found out when she was forty-two that she had a Y chromosome. “She was married in 1954 and has functioned satisfactorily as a wife.” Did they mean she gratified her husband sexually? Was she gratified sexually? It was a cryptic comment shouting at me across the decades. As I looked at my reflection in the darkened window I wondered if a normal life might be possible.
The letter relates Lina’s daily activities. Places they’ve been, things they’ve seen. Her words make no sense. They use the same alphabet as the love letters she used to write to me but now they’re flightless. They are like a robin lying beneath the window that stopped its flight, wing broken and fluttering, blood oozing from its beak. Was I too much of a freak for her?
There’s something else I still can’t understand. Why does this world provide us with everything we need to live, then bend itself on our destruction? The trend toward chaos not only destroys us, it obliterates any record of us once we’re gone. Our bodies, the letters and photographs we cherish, and even our memories disappear. I try to keep the lost and the dead alive by saying their names on my living lips, but even these memories become shapeless with excessive handling. They are shards of shattered bottles, sunk to the bottom of the sea, rolled smooth by the ceaseless motion of the tides. They are sea glass, collected from a beach and put in a bottle on the sill of a sunny window to gather dust.
The Rest is Silence Page 23