From the cabin came the sound of skirling mandolins and fiddles.
My son looked at me, incredulous. “You’re crying now?” he said. “About me getting bitten by an imaginary snake? In Australia? In the future? You’re actually crying?”
“A little.”
I wiped the tears away and we got out of the car. The sun was almost gone now, sinking behind the mountains.
We walked toward the cabin. The music grew louder. His teacher was playing a reel. “Farewell to Erin.”
In the twilight it was hard for me to see the stairs. I paused at the bottom step, unsteady on my old legs, uncertain.
My son turned to me. He took me by the arm. “Come on, Mom,” Zach said. “I got you.”
SAME MONKEYS, DIFFERENT BARREL—
Joyce Ravid
[A Conversation with Jennifer and Deirdre Boylan]
BY ANNA QUINDLEN
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s account of her transition from male to female, She’s Not There: A Life in Two Genders, has become a touchstone not only for people who are transgender but for all those interested in exploring what it means to be male and female. As James, Boylan published several critically acclaimed novels; as Jenny, she has also written I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted and the Falcon Quinn series for young readers.
Constant throughout it all has been Boylan’s work as a professor at Colby College in Maine and Deirdre Finney Boylan, known as Deedie, the woman Jim married in 1988 and the mother of their two sons, Zach and Sean. In 2003 Anna Quindlen wrote in a Newsweek column about the acuity and humor of She’s Not There, beginning a relationship with the Boylans that resulted, one summer afternoon, in this conversation about motherhood, marriage, and masculinity. In the spirit of Jenny Boylan’s writing, there was extraordinary honesty on the part of both partners, and lots of laughs. Below, an edited version.
ANNA QUINDLEN: Deedie, I actually want to open the conversation with you. It’s been more than a decade since the pivotal events of She’s Not There. I think most readers would have two questions: How have your boys’ reactions changed as they’ve matured, and what has your journey been like?
DEEDIE FINNEY BOYLAN: I think in some ways it’s easier to talk about the boys, obviously. Over time, I think the boys continue to see Jenny as the parent that they’ve always loved. Because they were so young during transition, the youngest one doesn’t really have clear memories of Jenny as a male, of Maddy as Daddy. We have pictures, and we talk about things. I think they still continue, in the way that most teenagers do, to have very, very little interest in talking about their parents to their peers, in terms of “Why do you have two women parents?” Zachary wears his heart on his sleeve and Sean is an enigma to us most of the time. But, you know, if you say to them, “Do you ever wish our family was just like other families?” I think they don’t necessarily understand the question. And then they’ll say, “Well, it’d be nice if we didn’t have to explain things to people,” but it doesn’t worry them. I don’t think they worry about bringing a new friend over to the house. I don’t think they worry about what the neighbors will say, or what will peers say.
JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN: I hope that having me as a parent, having us as parents, has made them more accepting of people who are different. More openhearted. It’s hard to imagine what our lives would be like otherwise.
AQ: You pose the question “Do you ever wish our family was more like other families?” But in most ways that matter, isn’t your family just like other families?
JFB: Yeah, I think mostly that is totally true. I don’t know, sometimes I think what makes us different is the fact that we … um …
AQ: Are still married? [Laughs]
JFB: Of the dozen or so people that we knew in the mideighties when people were coupling up and getting married, I think we might be the only couple that’s still together. [Laughs] My friends from high school, my friends from college. I do sarcastically say sometimes that if more husbands became women, more couples would stay together.
DFB: But I think that goes back to what my greatest fear was at the time of transition, that I didn’t think I wanted to be married to a woman. I was afraid that this was the end of our marriage, and our family.
JFB: Can you say confidently that you do want to be married to a woman?
AQ: Well, the point in the book is she wants to be married to you.
DFB: Yes. Although my first visceral reaction, was, “Thank God we have two houses.”
AQ: But the other visceral reaction that comes through loud and clear in She’s Not There is a sense of a loss of control. That you basically have no say in this. Did you lose that feeling of helplessness after a while?
DFB: Yes, I did lose that feeling after a while. But, especially at the heart of transition, when things were changing very, very fast, I felt like I was on a train, and if I stayed on the train I might be ripped off, and if I jumped off, I’d be killed. I was hanging on for dear life and just had to wait and see what happened. I didn’t have any control. And it had nothing to do with me. What I did get to decide is that I still do want to be married to Jenny. We do still love each other and we have a life together which is rich and rewarding. Our family is very close and very happy and very successful, and everybody appears to be doing what they want to do. As you know, with teenagers sometimes it’s hard to tell [laughs], but the boys are thriving, our lives are rich and rewarding. We live where we want to live and we do what we want to do, and we’re doing it together as a family. And that’s not something that I feel trapped in, it’s something at this point that I totally embrace and am happy with. At first I didn’t know if I could be sustained in whatever new incarnation of our life was going to evolve. And I think the thing that is most surprising is perhaps how little has really changed, in the foundation of our relationship, in the foundation of our family and the way we operate. It seemed like that was being dynamited at a certain point, but in fact, those sorts of connections and values and beliefs and shared things are still the same.
JFB: Also, within the context of a good family, as a father, I think I was playful and loving. I was around a lot. As I went through transition, I don’t think they ever felt the fundamental building blocks of the family were being torn apart. The transition may have seemed like a superficial difference to them.
AQ: And the two of you already had what sounds like a pretty egalitarian marriage.
DFB: I think it was fairly egalitarian. We joke that our division of labor is that when I cook Jenny cleans, and when Jenny cooks Jenny cleans. That’s remained true. Jenny does the dishes.
JFB: Deedie does the laundry, I’m sorry to say. To me it’s not the laundry, it’s the folding. Dear God, the folding! And also, I know I never do the folding right. You turn to me and say, “Oh, that’s not how you fold that!”
DFB: That’s true. [Laughs] Again, we do the same things we always did. I do most of the grocery shopping. I do most of the cooking. But Jenny has things she loves to cook and cooks every week. Jenny makes pizza on Fridays.
JFB: Right, and I’m the straightener in the house.
DFB: I’m a terrible housekeeper, which has always been funny because Jenny is so energetic and her energy can be really wild—
JFB: I’m the crazy one.
DFB: Right, the crazy manic energy, so she must be really messy, right? And I’m a little bit more steady, less flamboyant, but I’m actually the slob. I’m a total slob. Jenny picks up behind me all the time. And Jenny’s still the breadwinner. In her Colby career, her teaching career, her work in academics, her publishing has always brought in at least twice as much as my work as a social worker.
JFB: Which isn’t to say you don’t work as many, if not more, hours a week than me.
We were talking about the kids before; I just wanted to mention that in my experience of, by now, the thousands of other transgender parents, the ones that are most able to keep a good relationship with their kids are the ones who go through transition and g
o public when their kids are small, and the ones who have the hardest time are the ones who come out when the kids are in the heart and the onset of puberty and adolescence. It’s funny, we often think about adolescence as opening up to the world—
DFB: —but it’s not. The cultural experience, the social experience of adolescence is actually that things get much more narrow.
JFB: What being a man or being a woman means, exactly, it narrows, in so many ways.
AQ: Well, I really want to talk about that, because I have two sons and a daughter. I was horrified when my boys were born and I realized that, in some ways, the straitjacket that we defined as masculinity was even worse than the old straitjacket we know as femininity. People had such stereotypes about what they were going to be. “Oh, little boys! Oh, they’ll run you ragged! Oh, they’ll want trucks! Oh, they’ll hit and bite.” And none of it happened to be true of the particular little boys …
DFB: … that you raised. Or that you got.
JFB: That’s the question, isn’t it? Got or raised? We had some friends over to my mom’s house yesterday, and they had two sons who were—I believe the term is roughhousing, in the pool. They were splashing each other, kind of pushing each other around, stealing things from each other and not letting the other have it back. And our boys, I wouldn’t say they’ve never done stuff like that—
DFB: Oh, they do some of that, but it’s not as …
JFB: Their interactions are less … oh, help me out with this, Deedie. They seem …
DFB: They’re less overtly physically competitive with each other.
JFB: They’re not feminine boys, whatever that means.
AQ: There we go with “whatever that means.” I mean, at some level, gender was clearly very, very important to you [JFB laughs], and at another level, given the fact that the person who was Jim seems very much like the person who is Jenny, it raises all sorts of questions about how permeable that gender membrane is for our kids. And how the pernicious thing is to force them into a series of little boxes that the world out there has defined as narrowly as possible, yes?
DFB: I agree with you.
JFB: Every parent who has more than one child has the experience of raising the second child, and the third, and the fourth, if there are that many, using more or less the same basic techniques. And yet, children from the same family, as we all know, can be wildly different characters. And so we’ve wondered, what is it that caused that? And our boys, the ways in which they’re stereotypically masculine are that they are competitive, they are … well, Sean, in particular, is an athlete. Sean has always loved sports. But Zach takes fencing very seriously. Does fencing count? Zach is the co-captain of the fencing team. But they are not stereotypically masculine in that they each have a certain gentleness of spirit. But even as I say this, I’m like, so wait, gentleness? Women are like that?
AQ: When you’re talking about competitiveness and athleticism, you’re describing my daughter.
DFB: I was a competitive athlete.
AQ: Certainly your experience, Jenny, raises interesting questions about nature versus nurture, because the book indicates that from the earliest possible age you kept thinking right wine, wrong bottle.
JFB: I was going to call the book, originally, Same Monkeys, Different Barrel.
[AQ laughs.]
JFB: What I wanted to change was a physical body. It just didn’t feel like home. But the great surprise through all this has really been how much like my male self I am. And I think that’s a thing to celebrate. I think one of the things that Deedie and I were struggling with back when I was going through this was the question of whether I was about to become a stranger. I often meet transgender people, male-to-female people, who say, “When I was young, I wanted to play with dolls, and I love to bake cookies.” And I want to say, “For heaven’s sake, make cookies! You don’t need a vagina for that!”
AQ: But it also sounds like what you’re saying is that for certain people, perhaps people who are unhappy with their lives, there’s the sense that “I will change genders and be a whole different person!” And what you’re saying is, “You’re the same person, but with a different gender.”
JFB: I think that’s true. One of the things that is different, I think, there’s less free-floating anxiety and moodiness. Yes?
DFB: You mean for you? [Both laugh.] I think that’s mostly true.
JFB: I used to get these stomachaches. Every other month. Serious, just, what do you call it … when someone is having a physical reaction …
DFB: Somatic?
AQ: Hysterical?
[All laugh.]
JFB: Such a girl word!
I would have these terrible stomachaches because of everything I was keeping a secret, and everything I couldn’t put into words. They’re gone. I haven’t had one of them in twelve years.
AQ: That was some secret!
JFB: You know, the fact that I kept it secret from Deedie for ten or twelve years is still something I carry around. I guess you never really get over the guilt of that.
We got married with my thinking, I will be able to keep this locked up. It was a private calculation, and it was a miscalculation. It’s kind of a mild word to use for something so large.
AQ: Have you had these kinds of conversations with your sons? Or is it too soon? Is it too much?
JFB: Conversations about what?
AQ: Conversations about the spiritual and psychological underpinnings of what you went through.
JFB: No, not really.
DFB: They’re not there yet.
AQ: Let me ask this in a different way, then. Have they read the book?
JFB: They have read the book. Zach read it I think three years ago, and Seannie read it last summer. When I asked them what they thought, Zach’s biggest reaction was, “I didn’t know how hard it was for Mommy.” Meaning Deedie.
AQ: But obviously you were able to insulate them from that when they were very young, because it was clearly a period of some tension during the transition.
DFB: There was a lot of other turmoil going on at the same time. My sister was dying of ovarian cancer at exactly the same time. And the kids were so young that there was a way in which I couldn’t even imagine splitting up our family, even if it meant I was going to be married to this crazy woman.
AQ: And now you are married to this crazy woman.
JFB: How’d that work out?
[All laugh.]
DFB: I know! And I still am! But part of it was they were really little and part of it was that my sister was dying, and I had to spend a lot of time and psychic energy with that and with her. I really needed Jenny to look after the kids while that was going on, and to keep the home fires burning, and to let me go when I had to go, and to let me come back when I had to come back. Because of all the different things that were going on, it actually bought her a lot of time. We needed each other tremendously at that moment. I needed her support, and she was able to support me. And she and my sister were very close, so that was …
JFB: It’s funny, because your sister was one of the few people to think that my becoming a woman was, like, one of the best things ever. She was the one who said, “I’m so glad it’s only that you’re a woman. I thought it was something serious.”
AQ: I love that line.
JFB: Are we going to talk about menopause? I only mention that because what I’m facing now, at age fifty-three, is the question of, at what point do I stop taking hormones? Because for one thing, they’re not feminizing—I hate that word—they’re not feminizing me anymore.
AQ: So if you stop taking the hormones …
JFB: I’ll go through hot flashes. I’ll go through a pretty uncomfortable few months. I’ll be grumpy. Maybe I’ll get over it. So one of the things we’ve talked about is whether or not, when Deedie’s all done, whether I should be all done too.
AQ: Boy, you two have some interesting issues. So how do you introduce one another to strangers? “This is my …”
> DFB: I usually say “spouse.” Jenny usually says “partner.” And there are times where I’ll say we’re married, imagine that! Figure that out!
JFB: As people came into my mother’s memorial service, Deedie and I were at the door, shaking hands. Well, there were a lot of my mother’s old friends there. I know most of these people, and Deedie knows about maybe half of them. So I’m shaking hands. “Thank you for coming, and this is Deedie.”
AQ: And what would you say, Deedie?
DFB: “I’m Hildegarde’s daughter-in-law.”
AQ: That’s good.
JFB: That’s dodging a bullet.
DFB: Or I’d say, “I’m Deedie, I’m married to Jenny.” I said that several times.
JFB: The introduction is often about what the space is. When I went through transition in 2000, I was uncomfortable with saying wife, because I thought if Deedie’s my wife, I’m her husband. Ooh, awkward.
[DFB laughs.]
JFB: And now, there are so many examples of two women together. It’s funny though, if I say wife, people think we’re lesbians, which we’re not.
DFB: But who cares?
AQ: But we’ve moved so far that we’ve passed into an entirely new country. Now there are transgender kids who want to be seen as transgender. In other words, they don’t want to claim a nation-state of male or female, they want to be something completely different.
JFB: I understand that as a philosophical and emotional sensibility. I think I’ve told you before that I’ve been protested four or five times over the years. And about half of those times when I’ve been protested, it’s been by transgender people who are—
DFB: —disappointed in your polarity?
JFB: Disappointed that I’m not more radical.
DFB: That you wanted to be a soccer mom and drive the minivan. Except you aren’t.
JFB: Yeah, that’s right, because you’re the soccer mom.
Stuck in the Middle with You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders Page 26