Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders

by Jennifer Finney Boylan

  IF THERE WAS a single person in the world who thought that my changing genders was a brilliant idea, it was Deedie’s sister Katie. Twelve years older than my wife, Katie was a United Church of Christ minister who had recently come out as a lesbian. It was Katie who had married the two of us at the National Cathedral in Washington back in 1988; it was Katie who had come to sit at Deedie’s bedside when the children were born. She had a mercurial, passionate, intense personality, and she was as quick to laugh as she was to dissolve in fits of bereaved, self-pitying tears. She had always been a big fan of mine, though; I think she saw in me an example of what she hoped a man could be—sensitive, emotional, and involved with his sons.

  Katie knew that something was up with her sister and me in the months following our return from Ireland in late 1999. She heard the strain in Deedie’s voice; she could tell that we were holding something back. When at last I spilled the beans, her first reaction was one of relief. “Oh thank goodness it’s only that you’re a woman,” she said. “I was afraid it was something serious.”

  Oddly—or perhaps not so oddly—Katie’s support for my transition (you really had to call it enthusiasm) wasn’t exactly what Deedie needed. (Quite frankly, at that point in her life, I think Katie thought it would be great if everybody became a woman.) But talking to a sister who thought that her husband’s transformation was an occasion for celebration wasn’t of much help when what Deedie needed most was sympathy and support. And so, fairly soon in the process, Deedie turned to her oldest sister, Susie, for support. Susie, fourteen years Deedie’s senior, lived in Oklahoma, and while no one could consider her a conservative (all the Finneys had inherited the progressivism of their father, Tom, a major Democratic consigliere to Kennedy, Johnson, and Clark Clifford), she was certainly less thrilled for her sister at the prospect of her finding herself suddenly legally married to another woman than sister Katie was. Susie’s favorite expression was “Wellll …,” drawn out in a loving Southwestern twang. Susie’s “Wellll …” was a soothing, loving sound, an expression of both hope and humor, kind of the Oklahoman version of Tony Soprano’s “Whaddya gonna do.” It was this phrase, more than anything else, that helped Deedie negotiate the awkward, heartbreaking early months of her husband’s transition from male to female.

  DEEDIE: Susie, what am I going to do? The man that I love is a beautiful woman.

  SUSIE: Wellll …

  And so each of us got our own Finney sister—Katie for me, Susie for Deedie. The fourth Finney sibling, Todd, was kept in the dark for now. Why was it that I failed to share our secret with him, a man who, in the long run, turned out to be as loving as a brother could be? Was it that, given the death of Deedie’s father, he was the closest thing to a father-in-law I had? He had given his sister away at our wedding; he had given the toast at our reception. Was it that, even as I exchanged my citizenship papers from the land of men for those from the land of women, I still felt the tug of the patriarchy?

  Or maybe I was just afraid he’d drive over to our house from Vermont (where he lived in a cabin he had built himself) and beat the crap out of me. Todd Finney, a pacifist and a forgiver by nature, had—so far as I knew—never taken a swing at another living soul. But the way I figured, there was probably a first time for everything.

  In the months that followed, Katie acted as my Sherpa to the world of women. She took me to Northampton, Massachusetts, for a long weekend—about as trans-friendly a town as can be imagined—where we stayed at an inn and I got some heels-on-the-ground experience in walking around in the world. She was endlessly patient with me, serving as my chaperone as I got my hair done, and we went shopping in hippie boutiques for clothes and earrings. We had plans to go out to dinner, but she was plagued by a stomachache that had been bugging her off and on for months. On the last day, minister Katie held my hand and said a prayer. I was a man again, just about to get in the car and drive back to Maine.

  Make us servants, she said, her eyes closed, unto thy will.

  I STARTED THERAPY just after New Year’s Day 2000. By that summer I was taking hormones and going through electrolysis. I tried to share the transition with Deedie, as best I could, and told myself that we were considering its various milestones together, as a couple. And yet transition was not something we could easily share; it was, almost by definition, a process that was taking the man Deedie loved away from her. I tried to get us to have conversations about it all, to ask her just how far down this road she imagined I could go without losing her, and yet the only thing she really wanted was not to have to have this conversation at all.

  “What do you want?” I would ask her. “What can I do for you?”

  Deedie sat at the dinner table, tears coursing down her face. The boys were in the next room, watching Rugrats.

  “No matter what happens from here,” she said, “I lose. Either I stay with you, and I lose the man I love most in the world, or I leave you, and I turn my back on the person I love right at the moment she most needs me.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Maybe there’s some kind of middle ground?”

  “Where?” she said, slapping her hand on the table. “Where’s this middle ground, between the man I know and the woman you need to be? Where?” She looked at me with fury.

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  TEN YEARS LATER, the thing my son Sean remembers most clearly about this time is that I began to smell different. It didn’t frighten him—at age five—that my hair was growing longer or that I had gotten my ears pierced. “Those things weren’t deep-down,” Sean told me later. “What really made me know you were changing was your smell. That’s what I remember that made me think that something was happening way down deep.”

  “What did I smell like?” I asked him. “How would you describe it?”

  Sean, who grew up to be a wry, brilliant man, reminiscent of my own father in his fondness for understatement and irony, just smiled elusively.

  “Different,” he said.

  I WENT DOWN to the post office in our little town and mailed my “transition letter” to my colleagues at work, a delicately worded document that told the other professors at Colby what was up with Professor Boylan and begged somewhat piteously for compassion and understanding. (It also announced that I was working on a book about the journey, a text that at the time I was calling “Same Monkeys Different Barrel.”) When I got back from the post office, I found Deedie on the phone, talking to Katie. Her face was ashen.

  She hung up and ran to me, putting her arms around me and beginning to cry. Katie had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer.

  When she died, less than a year later, Deedie and I were standing at her bed in the hospice in Ithaca, New York, along with her lover, Mary Jo. We took petals from all of the flowers that had gathered in the room and covered her body with them. She looked beautiful lying there, at peace at last, surrounded by flowers. But of course, we would rather have had her alive.

  During the year between the diagnosis and her loss, Katie’s illness was by far the greater of the two traumas our family faced. My gender transition seemed a whole lot less important compared to Katie’s mortal illness. As it turns out, there is actually a big difference between changing genders and dying.

  I read a poem by Galway Kinnell at Katie’s funeral. The last line was, “Maybe a life is just an interlude. Before, and after, all that singing.”

  After the funeral one of Katie’s parishioners came up to me. “Now remind me,” she said. “Which sister are you?”

  I HAVE WRITTEN elsewhere about the details of the transition from male to female—the electrolysis and the therapy and the surgery and the trips to the large-size shoe store—and I am truly sorry to disappoint readers who are hoping to hear about all of those thrilling details one more time. My reluctance to revisit that aspect of things stems not only from having told that story before; it’s also that, at this late date, I grow weary of stories of transsexuals always being stories about a trip to a hospital; it’s as if ever
y story about Jews in America always had to be a story about a bris. The surgery is not the most important thing about any transgender person’s story, dramatic and astonishing as it might be. The surgery is just one day, and the key player is a doctor whom in most cases the patient barely knows. That’s not what being trans is all about. Being trans—and sustaining a family—is about everything that comes before that moment, and everything after. That’s where the story lies.*

  My own memories of the trip to the hospital are of being given remarkable drugs that made everything feel safe and warm. And, more important, of being surrounded on all sides by people who loved me—Tim Kreider, and Russo, and Deedie. Mostly, I felt happy, and adored. I went to sleep singing “I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Out of My Hair.” A few hours later I woke up, and there I was, finally home at last. More than anything else, what I felt was relief.

  I blinked in and out of the painkillers. At one point I woke to hear Deirdre talking to our friend Liz on the phone. Liz, the maid of honor at our wedding, and one of our best friends, was one of the people who had initially suggested that the best step for Deedie, in the wake of my news, was to phone up a lawyer and find a new boyfriend. She’s changed her heart about this in the years since, but at the time, the idea of her friend Deedie’s husband becoming a woman didn’t seem to her like a great development in our relationship.

  “No,” Deedie said. “She’s still asleep.” Bright sunlight filtered through the curtains. I looked over at the bed of my roommate, Melanie, whose experience could not have been more different than my own. Melanie had come here alone, and had nearly died after her procedure. Her bed was empty now.†

  “I tell you what, Liz,” she said, “the thing is, I was approaching this whole thing like it was ‘part two’ of this horrible year, like first Katie dying and then my husband having a sex change. But the thing is, I guess this experience is actually totally different. I mean, it makes me want to talk to Jenny’s sister, who’s totally cut her off, who won’t even have a conversation with her. I want to explain to her that having your sibling die is actually a lot different than having a sibling change genders. I mean, for God’s sake, Jenny’s not dead, she’s still here, and whatever anyone thinks, she is a remarkable person and you have to be glad she’s alive. Just sitting here with her, it’s impossible not to see how happy she is, and to be grateful she’s here.

  “She keeps forgetting what we’re talking about, and it frustrates her; she wants to be part of every conversation. I don’t know, I’m afraid when the anesthesia wears off she’s going to be in real pain. But I don’t know. I wish her sister could see her.

  “No matter what else you say about my husband, she’s an amazing woman.”

  IT WAS THE loss of Katie, the sister we both loved, that, more than anything else, returned Deedie and me to each other. It wasn’t that she was suddenly thrilled about being married to a woman, and it wasn’t that I, for my part, was sanguine about being married to someone who had mixed feelings about me. But as we weathered that hard time together, we were reminded that there are a lot of things that entwine lovers together. If in the end we lost physical intimacy—at least the kind we had enjoyed as husband and wife—it also occurred to us that physical intimacy may not be the most important kind. And if it’s true that Deedie’s love helped me traverse the ocean between men and women, then it’s also true that my love for her helped her traverse a sea of her own—the one between mourning and solace.

  The night after Katie’s funeral, I had gone to sleep in a lake house near Aurora, New York. The sounds of the wind whipping across Cayuga Lake permeated my dreams.

  I saw Deedie’s sister Susie standing on the porch of the cottage. The wind screamed across Cayuga, shaking the rafters, filling the house with unceasing moans and sighs that built to a crescendo and died away and rose again. Susie had a music stand in front of her, and the wind tore the pages from her book and they blew away toward Lansing and Ithaca. In one hand she held a baton. She was conducting the howling winds like an orchestra. Susie turned and looked at me over her shoulder.

  “The howling augments the grief,” she said.

  ONE DAY I came home to find Sean patting Lucy on the head. He looked thoughtful. “Are you all right?” I asked.

  “Yeah,” said Sean. He was playing with Thomas the Tank Engine. His favorite engine was number five, red James.

  “What are you thinking?”

  “Daddy,” he said. “It used to be you and me and Zach, the three boys, on one side, and Mommy and Lucy-dog on the other. We were, like, a team.”

  “I know,” I said, feeling my heart clench.

  “Now it’s Zach and me on one side, and you and Mommy and Lucy-dog over there.”

  “I’m sorry, Sean,” I said. My voice was barely a whisper. “I’m so sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” said Sean. “The boys are just outnumbered.”

  * For the curious—as well as to serve as a guide for others with the same condition—a short list of available resources, both online and upon the shelves of libraries, is appended at the end of this memoir. You can also e-mail me directly at jb@jenniferboylan.net and I will try to help you as best I can.

  † I’m aware that my own story as a trans person is unique, at least in part because many things that could have gone wrong failed to do so, and I have worried over the years about the many ways in which my tale may have given false hope to some readers; my story is surely only that, and is almost certainly the particular result of circumstances unique to my life. The story of my roommate Melanie, which formed the centerpiece of Richard Russo’s afterword to my book She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, provided an important counterweight to my own narrative. The tenth-anniversary edition of that memoir provides, among other things, an update on Melanie, at whose wedding, years later, I served as matron of honor.

  We were sitting around the kitchen table, the four of us, eating dinner. Zach gave me a look.

  “What?” I said.

  “We can’t keep calling you ‘Daddy,’ ” he said, shaking his head. “If you’re going to be a girl. It’s too weird.”

  “Well,” I said to my sons, “my new name is Jenny. You could call me Jenny if you want.”

  Zach laughed derisively. “Jenny? That’s the name you’d give a lady mule.”

  I tried not to be hurt. “Okay, fine,” I said. “What do you want to call me?”

  “The important thing, boys,” said Deedie, “is that you pick something you’re comfortable with.”

  Zach thought this over. He was pretty good at naming things. For a while we’d had a hermit crab named Grabber. Later on, we’d briefly owned a snake named Biter.

  “I know,” he said. “Let’s call you ‘Maddy.’ That’s like, half Mommy, and half Daddy. And anyhow, I know a girl at school named Maddy. She’s pretty nice.”

  Sean considered this. “Or ‘Dommy,’ ” he added.

  Then we all laughed at Dommy. Even Seannie laughed. Dommy! What a dumb name for a transsexual parent! After the hilarity died down, I nodded.

  “Maddy might work,” I said.

  IT TOOK LESS time than we had feared for our family to begin to seem normal to us again. I was in charge of waking everyone up and making breakfast and straightening the house and getting the boys to practice their instruments: Seannie on French horn, Zach on the three-quarter-size tuba. Deedie was in charge of dinner and shepherding the boys through their homework and coaching Seannie’s soccer travel team. After a time, Deedie and I even began to seem familiar to each other again, and the things that had changed in me seemed, incredibly, less important to Deedie than the things that had remained the same.

  In the fall we picked apples. In the winter we skied and sat around the fireplace in our living room afterward, drinking hot chocolate. In summer we fished on Long Pond, and Zach landed one giant large-mouth bass after another. Most of the time we forgot that there was anything extraordinary about our family. Were we really so strange?

&n
bsp; Even though we seemed to have made the leap across the inscrutable chasm of gender in one piece, a nagging, unsettling question would return to me, usually at night when I found myself awake in the wee hours. What kind of men would my children become, I wondered, having been raised by a father who became a woman?

  I’d hear the sound of the grandmother clock ticking downstairs as I lay awake in the dark. I’d think about my own precarious boyhood and wonder how I was going to help my sons become themselves. I’d hear a voice in my heart demanding an answer to the same question my harshest critics had asked of me: What about the children? the voice said. What about the boys?

  ON A SUMMER afternoon in 1967—the Summer of Love—I drove a Sears riding mower back to my parents’ garage in Newtown Square, Pennsylvania, and parked it between the blue and white ’64 Pontiac on the one side and the green ’58 Buick on the other. Then I pulled the throttle to the off position, and the engine slowly died. I sat there on the tractor for a moment, still feeling the inertia of the blades spinning beneath me. The garage was full of the smell of gasoline, of freshly mown grass. Then I walked into the house and opened the refrigerator and stood there for a while feeling the cold air drifting around my neck and my bare grass-stained legs. I reached in and pulled out a tall green bottle of Wink, poured it into a glass my father got at the Esso station, the same one that promised to put a tiger in your tank. On my way back outside, I grabbed a Ring Ding. It went well with Wink.

  Nick Strachman and his older brother were playing baseball in the block beyond our house. The ball made a sharp socking sound as it landed in Nick’s mitt. Years later, Lou opened up a clothing store for men, out on West Chester Pike, but it didn’t stay open long. As for Nick, he wound up as a purveyor of frozen steaks. Thirty-five years after we’d been in elementary school together, he called me up one Sunday out of the blue, from Nebraska, wanting to know if I’d be interested in buying a side of beef.