“Then I would be really afraid,” said the mother. “But I would still love you.”
It was kind of a cross between Nanook of the North and The Velveteen Rabbit. When we finished reading the book, I asked Luke, “Okay, let me ask you this one. What would you do, Lukey, if I turned into a woman?”
He looked unsure. “I would . . . still love you?”
“Would you?” I said.
He thought it over. “Sure,” he said. “You’d still be you, wouldn’t you?”
“Uh-huh.” We sat together on the couch for a while.
“Have you noticed that I’ve been looking more and more like a girl over the last year?” I said.
“Some of my friends think you are a girl,” he said.
“That must be hard for you,” I said.
“Not really. I just tell them, ‘That’s my daddy.’”
“Lukey, I need to talk to you about something. I have a condition, it’s like when a person’s sick, that makes me feel like a girl on the inside, even though I’m a boy on the outside. Does that make any sense to you, that a person’s insides and outsides wouldn’t match?”
“Sure,” he said. “I know what that’s like.”
“So I’m taking some medicine that is slowly making my outsides more and more like a girl. After a while, I’m going to totally be a girl. I know that might make you sad, but it’s what I need to do.”
Luke gave me a big hug. “I won’t be sad,” he said. “You said you’d still be you.”
I hugged him back. “It’s a very complicated thing, this condition I have. You probably don’t want to know everything about it now. But you should know I’m not going away, and that you didn’t cause this. And that I will always love you. That’s never going to change.”
“I know,” he said. He picked up another book off the table. “Can you read me another story now?”
“How about if I sing you a song, one of my old songs, from Ireland?”
He crinkled up his nose. “How about another story?”
I kept a low profile at Colby that year—which was odd, because at the college I had always been one of the most visible and vocal members of the faculty. Many of my colleagues were still certain that I was fatally ill or bearing some kind of terrible secret sorrow. Later, another teacher told me, “You looked as if you were being slowly crushed in a vise.”
The president of the senior class called me up one night and said, “Congratulations, Professor Boylan. You’ve been chosen as the Professor of the Year.”
Terrific, I thought. Turns out the best way to get Professor of the Year was to have a sex change. I hoped it wouldn’t start a trend.
I had to give a speech as Professor of the Year, a big lecture in the student union, filled with students and faculty and the president of the college. I began my lecture by showing Groucho Marx playing Professor Wagstaff, president of Huxley College, in the movie Horse Feathers. As I spoke to the school, I got all choked up. It was an incredible honor, and I feared that when they learned the truth, they would feel I had let them down. As I stood before the audience, my breasts ached beneath my shirt.
“Whatever it is,” Groucho sang to the trustees, “I’m against it! / And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it, / I’m against it!”
One day Luke said,“We need to come up with a better name for you than Daddy, if you’re going to be a girl.”
“Okay,” I said. “Well, what name do you think would work? You know, I use the name Jenny when I’m a girl.”
“Jenny!” Luke said, bursting into laughter. “That sounds like the name of a little old lady!”
Trying not to be hurt, I said, “Okay, well, what else can you think of?”
Luke thought about it for a moment, then said, “How about Maddy? You know, like half Mommy and half Daddy?”
I just sat there amazed at the versatility and ingeniousness of children. Patrick, at this point, chimed in, “Or Dommy.”
The name Dommy made them all laugh some more. And I said, “You can call me Maddy if you want to.”
They started calling me Maddy then and there and within a month or two had changed pronouns as well.
I shifted genders so slowly and so gently around my children that when I finally appeared before them for the first time wearing a skirt and makeup, they hardly noticed the difference. On this occasion I had spent the day at the lake working, then went down to Freeport to do some shopping. I came home late in the afternoon to find that the baby-sitter (who had also been briefed on the situation) already had them in the tub. I walked into the bathroom to say hi to my children, and Luke looked up at me and said, “Hey.”
And I said, “Hey what?”
And he said, “You’re not wearing your glasses.”
I said, “Hi, Paddy,” waiting for him to give me his reaction.
“Maddy!” said Patrick, annoyed. He was holding a little plastic submarine.
“What?” I said.
“We’re trying to play a game here?”
“Oh,” I said. “Sorry.”
In the spring, Grace and I went out to breakfast one morning, with me as Jenny. It was a rough, up north kind of place with truckers in flannel making up most of the population. Grace and I didn’t feel very comfortable, and guys kept stealing looks at us, and at me. Was I being read as male? Was I just being checked out? Did they think the two of us were lesbians? It was impossible to tell what was going on, but it gave us the willies.
The next morning, we went out to a different place. This time I went as a male. We both felt a lot more comfortable this time. It was a relief to be a normal, heterosexual couple again.
At the end of the meal, the waitress came over. “Hi,” she said. “Can I get you ladies any more coffee?”
It was as good a sign as any that the period of boygirl was coming to a close.
The following weekend, Grace went to visit her sister and brought the boys with her. I went over to the Russos in Camden for dinner, and we sat out on their deck drinking wine. I was over there “as” Jenny, which by that time simply meant that I was wearing a skirt instead of jeans. We did what we always did, told stories and drank wine, but something in the air seemed melancholy. It felt as if we were working harder at something that used to seem effortless.
At one point Rick told me that some of the friends we had in common were relieved that Grace’s spirits seemed to have improved.
“She seems good,” Rick said. “She seems better than she’s seemed all year. I mean, last year at this time, it was like she was carrying a load of bricks. But now she’s laughing again. She’s engaged, she seems like her old self.”
“Yeah, she’s kind of come back to life,” I said. “I think around Christmas, maybe, she realized she was just going to have to take control over what was happening to her, and to the family. Since then it’s like she’s back from the dead. She’s talked to the boys, she’s talked to a lot of our friends, she even explains and defends me in some conversations with people.”
“That’s amazing, when you think about it,” Russo said. “Considering how much she hates what’s happening.”
“It is amazing,” I said.
“She is a strong woman,” said Rick.
Barbara Russo, who was sitting beside Rick, said quietly, “I think she’s the strongest woman I know.”
“After you, Barb,” I said. “I don’t envy the woman who has to put up with Russo twenty-four hours a day.”
Barb nodded. “It’s made me tough,” she said, smiling.
Rick filled my wineglass. “Maybe you knew how strong Grace was when you got married, Boylan. Maybe you chose her because you knew you’d need someone strong.”
“No, that’s not it,” I said. “When I got engaged to Grace, I really thought that the whole gender thing was behind me. It was like, finally, after years and years of struggling with it, I was cured. I threw out all the gear that I had, all the women’s clothes and makeup and all of it, and I felt like, from now
on, I get to just be one person. I never will have to decide to be a man again.”
“What does that mean, decide to be a man?” Barb said. “How do you do that?”
“Well, when I was a man, it was something I decided I’d do. It was something that I woke up every morning and convinced myself I could do, that it was something that I had to do. When I first fell in love with Grace, it was the only time I felt like I didn’t have to think about it. It was like, her love made my life possible.”
I was drunk now, and I wasn’t sure I was making any sense.
“But how can a person choose to be who they are?” said Barbara. “I mean, I don’t understand that.”
“Oh, I think a lot of people do that,” said Rick. “I think I did that. I know when I was a teenager, there was a time when I went out with a whole bunch of tough guys, and we busted up people’s mailboxes with a baseball bat and did things like that. One night we broke a plate-glass window at somebody’s house, and we all drove off laughing, and when I finally got home, I remember seeing my grand-parents, and thinking how incredibly ashamed they’d be if they knew what I’d done.”
“But you didn’t wind up like that,” I said. “How come you escaped Gloversville, New York, and wound up a novelist and an English professor? Did you choose to be who you are, or did it just happen?”
“I chose it,” Russo said. “I mean, odds were, I should have stayed in Gloversville and kept breaking people’s windows and I’d have wound up like most of the guys I grew up with, playing the lottery and working in a mill. But instead, I decided to be someone else.”
Barbara looked alarmed. “You mean you could have decided to be anybody?”
“Not anybody, but the person I became. I think we are who we are because consciously, or unconsciously, we choose ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, that’s what I’ve been struggling with,” I said. “Because I felt like I always had to choose to be James. Being Jenny, though, isn’t like that. I just am.”
Russo’s expression darkened. “Then why doesn’t it feel like that?”
“Feel like what?”
“Why doesn’t it feel like it’s natural?”
“It doesn’t seem natural?”
Rick looked at Barb. She looked away. “I don’t know, Boylan,” he said. “It doesn’t feel like you, though. Not to me.”
“But—this is me. I’m here. This is it.”
He nodded. “Okay.” His eyes shone. “If you say so,” he said.
We sat on the deck for a long time, not talking. In the distance I heard the sound of the buoys out in Camden harbor, the bells clanging as they swayed with the tide.
President William Adams (whom, shockingly, everyone called “Bro,” even though he was neither an African American nor a hippie) was new to Colby when I met with him; he’d been inaugurated only that fall. He had said, in his inaugural address, that the primary issue the college needed to address was diversity and that we had to commit ourselves to making Colby the kind of community where an increasingly wide range of people would feel welcome.
The wish is granted, I thought as I sat down in his office. Long live Jambi.
Bro didn’t raise an eyebrow when I explained my situation. I sketched out the issues as I saw them, assured him I would comport myself with dignity, professionalism, and a sense of humor, and handed him a copy of Brown and Rounsley’s True Selves. (I had purchased a dozen of these “transgender primers” from Amazon and handed them out like pretzels as I spoke with colleagues and administrators over the next several weeks.) I gave Bro a list of resources available in the library and on the Web should he or any other member of the community wish to learn more; I gave him a memo outlining the things that various college officers—particularly the deans of faculty and students, as well as the vice president of personnel— would need to know. And I showed him a photograph of me as Jenny, standing next to Grace and my children and looking more or less like a normal mother of forty-two.
Bro, a good-looking man with a square chin and a mop of black hair, said, “Listen, Jenny, it’s my belief that this will be a nonissue at the college. You’ve clearly given this all a lot of thought, and I’m grateful that you’ve given so much consideration to the implications of all of this for the institution. Ultimately, it’s a private matter. To the extent that it affects the college at all, we can only support you as a professional and a colleague.”
Then he smiled. “I will admit, though, that this is the first time I’ve ever had a conversation like this.”
With the support of the president in hand, I proceeded to move through the chain of command at the college. I met with the dean of admissions and the vice president of finance and the director of communications and the dean of students and the dean of faculty and the dean of the college and the vice president of development. Everyone was generous. The dean of students said she was looking forward to a newer and more intimate relationship with me as her “sister.”
The dean of faculty, a statistician and a neuropsychologist, went one step further. “You understand,” he said, meaning to be generous, “that this is going to have the beneficial effect of increasing the number of female faculty by an n of one.”
I looked at the dean, nervously. “An n of one?” I said. “You’re saying an n of one. That’s beneficial?”
He nodded.
“What’s n?”
“n, Jenny,” he said. “Stands for the number of persons being referred to.”
“Ah,” I said.
I was glad we’d worked this out.
As the number of people I talked to increased, it became clearer and clearer that the secret would not hold much longer. So as the date of my coming out drew near, I met with dozens of people each day. I met with the director of creative writing and the head of the English Department, and almost all of my colleagues in English. The last meeting I had was with a group of five younger professors. I met them in the conference room in the department; I felt as though I were being interviewed for a new job, which in a way I suppose I was.
On June 14, 2001, I composed an “e-mail bomb.” I had decided that coming out in the summertime was best, since it would give the news a chance to settle among the faculty first, before the students returned in fall. By then I hoped to be old news.
Dear Friends:
This letter is being sent to the people at Colby that I’m particularly fond of. Some of you may be surprised to find that you are on this list at all, since perhaps we have barely passed each other in the hallways, or been out of touch for a while. Others of you I count among the people I know, and love, best. In either case, I have been grateful for your presence in my professional life.
In the next week, you will be hearing some rather dramatic news about me. I’m going to attempt to be the one to break it to you myself. Thus, in the next day or two, you will receive a letter I’ve written, which will be delivered to your home address.
What I wish to share with you is not bad news, and I don’t wish for this melodramatic e-mail to stir up anxiety at your end. Still, my news will take some getting used to, and I will be eager to discuss it with you.
This e-mail, then, is basically a “heads up” note to let you know that something important is incoming. I’m grateful for your care, and for our ongoing friendship.
Best,
Jim Boylan
I hit send.
Then I picked up 113 copies of my coming out letter—which contained equal measures of Joseph Campbell, John Barth, and Ann Landers—and drove over to the post office in my small Maine town. It was a white clapboard building with a flagpole out front. The flag flapped in the strong wind. The manager of the PO, a kind, efficient Yankee named Val, nodded at me as I slid the envelopes through the brass slot for outgoing mail. Then I got back in the car and waited for the world to explode or to begin.
On the way back from the post office, I stopped off at Nick and Shell’s. My guess was, my days of playing piano in crummy bars were over.
“Yes,” I said.
“Well, I’m anxious to know what’s going on. For the last year you’ve been looking like you’re dying. You know everybody’s worried about you.”
“I know,” I said. “Actually, I’m all right. But I think this means the end of my playing with the band.”
“What does?”
So I told her about the whole woman business.
At the end of which she said, “All right, you want to know what I think?”
I said yes.
She said, “I think Fuck you if you think you’re going to leave the band.”
I laughed. Then she went on. “Listen, Jenny—I can start calling you that, right?—I saw some show about this on MSNBC. I think it’s cool. You seem like a pretty brave person to me. Nick and me, we’ve always been crazy about you. We’re just glad to know you’re okay. As far as I’m concerned, you’re you, no matter what.”
I told her I was surprised she was taking it so well.
Shell said, “Why? Because we’re not college professors, because we’re just like normal working people? Listen, you don’t have to be a genius to know how to be loyal to the people you love. Your problem isn’t going to be us. Your problem is going to be those prissy little office workers at Colby.”
Nick came in carrying a brown paper bag. “What’s up?” he said.
I just shrugged and said, “I’m having a sex change.”
Nick reached into the paper bag and put a fifth of Jameson’s Irish whiskey on the table. “Good for you,” he said.
“He’s not kidding,” Shell said.
He reached into the bag again and got out a six-pack of Guinness. He opened two and handed me one. “I know,” he said.
“Listen,” Shell said. “Can you show me what you look like? As a woman? Or does it take, like, cranes and backhoes and shit?”
“I think I can give you a pretty good idea,” I said. “I’ll be right back.”
I went into the bathroom and I took off my coat and my baggy overshirt and I let my hair loose and I put some earrings in my ears. I walked out of the bathroom and sat at the table again.
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