The Riddle of Gender

by Deborah Rudacille

  Q: Can we talk about how this all began for you?

  My mother was a New York City master teacher. She taught for twenty-five years, math. She took DES in 1951 because her gynecologist told her to. She’d had one miscarriage. I had an older brother who didn’t make it. But it’s kind of strange now, as a physician, to think after one miscarriage they would do this. I mean, one out of every three pregnancies ends in miscarriage.

  Q: Well, they put DES in pregnancy vitamins …

  I know. That’s one of the issues we have to deal with now, when we ask people, “Did your mother take DES?” and they ask their mothers and they say, “No, they just gave me lots of vitamins.” But that’s what they called them; that’s how they marketed them to women. “Oh, these are just vitamins.” Some of them were more honest in saying, “This is to prevent miscarriage.” But some women were given DES who hadn’t even miscarried, in vitamins and so forth.

  I was born and, supposedly … my father hates talking about this, but when I blasted them for the DES thing years ago he just sat stone-faced, no response, while my mother broke down and cried and wailed. But about twenty-five years ago—I was twenty-five at the time—he made a comment that during my circumcision, during my bris, they had noticed that there was something different with me.

  Q: No more details than that?”

  No. And they may not have had any more details because it is still the common procedure of pediatric urologists, which is the group that usually deals with this, to hush this up and to oftentimes not even speak to the parents and to make whatever corrections need to be made.

  Q: But your parents were not aware that you had any surgery or procedure afterbirth?’

  No. But I have scars, and have had urogenital problems my whole life. DES causes a host of problems, so I don’t know what they saw. And you’re talking about a bunch of older Jewish guys looking at a penis, so what do they know? They don’t look closely, they’re not doing an exam, so I don’t know. And there are many like me who just don’t know. There are scars, there are whispers, and that’s all you have. There are no records. They still don’t keep very good records. In some cases, they’ve burned the records. So, there’s a real problem.

  My first physical problems manifested when I was twelve, in 1964. When I began bleeding on urination, and the hematuria [bleeding from the penis] progressed. It started off microscopically—obviously I didn’t know that—but it became a gross hematuria. I urinated blood.

  Q: All the time, not periodically ?

  All the time. And eventually, I got caught and my parents had to deal with it.

  Q: You must have been scared to death?”

  I thought I was menstruating, actually.

  Q: Because by that point you were already aware of the gender issue?”

  Yes, and I was twelve, and that’s what girls start doing. So I thought, in my confused mind, that I was menstruating. It turns out it probably was because I have a partial uterus, so it is biologically reasonable to think that at times I cramped and bloated and menstruated. Talk about bizarre—but this is intersexuality, so who knows? But a lot of this was during urination, and how many times do you urinate a day? Four or five times? You can imagine the fear. There was the anxiety and anticipation of pain that was worse than the pain.

  Q: So this was also a painful urination?’

  Extremely painful. It turned out, the diagnosis was urethral meatal stenosis, which means that the opening of the tip of the urethra was scarred down, closed down. It could have been scarred because of surgery that had been performed much earlier or it could have been some sort of overgrowth of tissue in that area due to DES. This has been recorded [in the data]. And I let this go on because I was scared to death about it. I had started cross-dressing when I was about eleven or so. I first felt like a girl, or like I should have been a girl, when I was about seven, but when I was eleven I started praying that my breasts would start growing and wearing my mother’s clothes, which finally fit me. I was her height, five-six or -seven, and I was just getting to the height where I could wear her clothes. And I would do that, and then forget to put them back exactly the same way, intentionally so that someone would notice. And they finally noticed and said, “You never do that again, or we’ll have you institutionalized at Creedmore.”

  Q: So your parents’ response wasn’t “What’s going on with you? Why are you doing this?” It was “We’re going to put you in a mental institution “?

  Yeah. “We don’t want to deal with this.” And then I started menstruating—this painful urination and hematuria—and I tried to hide it from them because I knew what their response was to this sexual thing, and stuff that comes out of the penis is sexual, and what the-hell do I know? I’m in a fever talking about God, and fearing God. I was preparing for bar mitzvah. And I remember one day I painted my nails, and my father freaked out. I wasn’t as bad as many, okay? I wasn’t one of those hypermasculine overcompensators or anything. I just learned to blend into the woodwork, just do my work at school and manage.

  So this is going on, and I started bleeding even between urinations, and I had to try to wash out my underwear, and it’s so hard to get blood out, and I’m stealing money from my mother’s pocketbook to buy more underwear so she doesn’t see it. Eventually, I couldn’t keep it up. I was only twelve. What could I do? And they caught on. And they took me to a urologist, an Austrian fellow with a very heavy German accent, and he made some sort of diagnosis. The only thing that’s come down to me is the urethral meatal stenosis. No questions about DES, so far as I know. This was ’64, and I go to this urologist and he decides to treat me with this bizarre treatment that I have never in all my years as a physician been able to elucidate any better than I’m going to tell you right now. When I describe this to urologists today, they say, “What the hell was he doing? What was that?”

  He had me lying down on a table, strapped down, with what I now know to be a fifty-cc syringe with a long cannula on it, filled with some sort of viscous black material. Viscous gook that he would then insert into my penis. And then he would just stand there, this big German guy—and remember, I’m only twelve; I haven’t had my growth spurts or anything, and he’s standing there injecting this into me. This was the most painful thing imaginable. And there was no sympathy, no nurse there, no feminine energy in the room. No explanation. Nothing. I went through this for four months. My parents have since pointed out that this was an attempt to expand my urethra. But they were never in the room; they were always outside. And there was no sympathy. None whatsoever. They never talked about it. “How do you feel? Can we get you some ice cream?” Typical stuff that kids would get if they were getting their tonsils out, but never anything. And I went through that for four months. And it didn’t work.

  I’ve blocked most of this stuff out. It was just awful. I don’t want to think about it. And the German accent didn’t help. I was learning about the Holocaust at the time, and even though he was Jewish, that didn’t help. And of course, there were all those sexual associations that I was making, and that I guess everybody else was making, but no one talked about it. And I’m praying to develop breasts and I’m menstruating, and here they’re doing this to my penis. And finally they decided that they had to operate. So I was taken to surgery and operated on. I don’t know what was done, but I have a scar the length of my penis, along the dorsum of my penis. I think I was basically filleted open. I developed septic shock during that procedure. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother said, “We came back to see you after the surgery and you were missing and then we tracked you down and you were in the ICU and you had a fever of 106 and we thought you weren’t going to make it.” They freaked out. Of course, I don’t remember anything because I was in shock. I was in the hospital for three weeks, on IV antibiotics and eating lousy hospital food. It was the only time in my life that I ever developed an aversion to water. Forcing fluids. “You’ve got to drink the water.” I remember hating it, becoming nauseat
ed by water.

  And again, nobody ever talked about this. My penis was bandaged up. I had a Foley [catheter] in for the longest time. It was just unspoken. It’s very reminiscent of the way women were treated if they had breast cancer. This was a big secret. In the Jewish community it’s called a “shanda,” a shame. You don’t talk about it. You go hide. You take care of it but you don’t talk about it. My grandmother died of breast cancer. She was so ashamed that she did nothing about it. It actually infiltrated her skin. I had to go to Africa to see the disease’s natural history like this! This happened in the United States of America fifty years ago. And it’s like that kind of silence … “This is sexual and so we’re not going to talk about it.” And nobody talked to me about it. I didn’t even have psychiatric consultations. Nobody. It was ignored.

  Q: Did you in some way connect your feelings about being a girl and think that it was somehow related to this physical problem, like it was a punishment?’

  Well, it was more of a religious thing. I thought this was a punishment from God for my feelings. I remember my parents bringing me my homework and I had half-Hebrew and religious studies and half-secular studies, and I’d work even harder to try to get it better. There’s a phrase in the early-morning prayers that the Orthodox still say: “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, for not making me a woman.” Somebody said once, I don’t remember who, that having to repeat that on a daily basis was like swallowing crushed glass. And here I am, top of my class, and I know all the rituals and routines, and I’m being forced to say this but I know that I’m living a lie. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. They would have totally freaked out. You just didn’t discuss these things.

  But those three weeks in the hospital were hellacious. I felt like I was bad and that there was something very wrong with me. Luckily, my way of coping was just to work harder. I never did drugs, I never did alcohol. And I grew up in that era [the sixties]! I was a control freak; that’s how I dealt with it. I was scared to death at letting myself go because I saw what was happening with my friends, and they looked happy and carefree and so on but they would say things when they were stoned that they would regret later, and I couldn’t let anybody find out about this. I couldn’t let anybody know. So I became sort of like Newt Gingrich—very uptight, very serious. I grew a mustache and, after a couple of years at Cornell, in the early seventies, I let my hair grow. But for the most part I’ve been in deep cover, protective coloration, all of my life. I couldn’t let on. I’ve never smoked grass, can you believe it? I smoked opium once, in Thailand, and it did nothing for me. I had to do something because my wife was provoking me. I was too straight.

  But get this, the surgery didn’t work. A month later, I was bleeding again. I got out of the hospital in June. I finished the year at school. I was thirteen. I had my bar mitzvah. I was actually bleeding during my bar mitzvah. I came out, and because of my illness my parents hadn’t made any plans for the summer. I had been going to day camp, which was very common in Queens in those days, and they had to hustle to get me in, and because it was late there were no slots in my age group, so I was in a group of fifteen-year-olds instead of thirteen-year-olds. Boy, you talk about somebody who just went through this profound surgical/medical experience relating to sexuality and getting thrust in with kids two years older! The girls … I lusted to be like them, but I couldn’t. I was just this little nerd, you know, who was getting picked on by the guys all the time because I wasn’t with it, and I had a small penis, and everything like this.

  Q: They teased you about your penis ?

  Oh yes, because we had to undress; we went to public swimming pools and we had to get undressed.

  Q: So after everything you’d just been through, you had these older boys mocking you?

  And I wanted to be with the girls, and I couldn’t. Because if you’re a boy, you don’t go with the girls. And I had to go to the boys’ locker room to change. We had to go three times a week, and I wanted to die every time. I remember they had a high board, and I used to be a pretty good diver, and I’d think, “I just want to do this wrong just so I don’t have to do this again.” It was awful. I remember standing with my body turned so that nobody could see me. Because I had my scars and stuff too. It looked bad. And I think it [the penis] was relatively small anyway, but I was post-op. And then I had to go back to that schmuck and get that treatment again! And I guess it worked that time, because it [the bleeding] stopped by the end of the summer. It was the most hel-lacious summer … year of my life.

  But I coped. I had to cope. And I became a control freak and I became an academic superstar and a topflight surgeon and everything, and I kept on till I was thirty-eight, and then I crashed.

  But at that time, I came out of it and I went to junior high and then high school. The whole time I felt like “I don’t belong. This isn’t me.” I had girlfriends. Back in those days, we used to pass each other notes, and if a girl signed it L-O-V-E, it meant it was time for sex, and if she signed it L-U-V, that meant “you’re a good friend.” And I had lots of LUVs. And I liked it, but I knew that I was supposed to be doing better than that, and I couldn’t.

  I remember an incident when I was fourteen. This was when I first knew that I was transsexual. My religious school, the yeshiva, had an annual trip to Washington, and they take a photo of the entire group on the Capitol steps. I still have it somewhere in the basement. So I had a girl “friend.” She was a friend because we were the two tallest kids in the class and we always sat in the back, and we were friends for six years. And it was sort of understood that, well, we’re getting sexual, people, it’s time to take this friendship to the next step. So I would try to hold her hand, and she might hold my hand, but there was no chemistry. And we sat together on the trip, because you paired off, and I figured, “Well, I need to kiss her.” People are looking at me, they’re expecting this of me. The boys and the girls, and it didn’t work. I kissed her, but she pushed me away, and it didn’t work. And I was devastated that I was a failure.

  At one point I didn’t want to leave the bus. We were touring the city and the class got off and went wherever they were going, and I stayed on the bus and just hung around, and I remember crying. Well, I’m one of those people that’s such an avid reader that I can’t sit still without a newspaper; I just have to be reading something. And I picked up a teen magazine—I forgot the name—and I was just leafing through it. Nothing that really interested me because I was more interested in Scientific American at the time, but there was an article titled “Sixteen— and I Had to Change My Sex.” It was like a sledgehammer. I devoured that in an Evelyn Wood—like speed-reading experience. I was like, “That’s me!” My God! I had been hiding it. I didn’t want anybody to know. And then all of a sudden, it was this kind of combination of exhilaration and fear. Sort of like the way I feel now. The possibilities. The knowing. Of course it wasn’t a medical article and the term “transsexual” wasn’t used in it. It was a like a lot of cross-dressing fiction, where there’s an element of coercion because you can’t admit that this is what you want, so this article was like “these girls caught me in panty raid and these girls forced me into it.” I don’t think it was quite that pornographic. But it was the name that captured me: “Sixteen—and I Had to Change My Sex.”

  But something happened to me because right after that, my classmates got back on the bus and I’m sitting there, I’m sweating. I had made this discovery that I couldn’t share with anyone. But something had changed for me. This other girl named Phyllis came and sat down next to me, and by the end of the trip we were making out! And about a year later Money made the news in Newsweek and Time about the Gender Identity Clinic at Hopkins and that they were doing sex-change surgery. I came out to my parents, and they mentioned Creed-more. It was not a pleasant place. It was where the bogeyman lived when I was growing up.

  But I was liberated. Yet I could only go so far. After school ended I worked at a camp as a junior counselor, and I use
d to bike down to be with her [my girlfriend] and I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I want to be her.” She wanted me to take off her bra, and I’m thinking, “I want to wear it.” I just couldn’t do it. I was mortified and ashamed and didn’t know what to do. So it ended. She thought I was weird, I guess. Guys are supposed to want it. But I didn’t.

  In high school, I didn’t have any sex or any girlfriends till the end of my junior year, when I met my first wife. And we hit it off. We were both traumatized kids and we helped each other, we provided succor to one another. Sex was hard for both of us. Her mother was an extreme narcissist who used to play around with her friends’ fathers and had a bad reputation and so forth. So she had a tough upbringing.

  But when I was eighteen we spent the summer right after high school in Israel, my first trip to Israel and her first trip back home, and in our apartment in Jerusalem in this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, when my three best male friends were out, she and I were in bed together and with my heart racing at around 180 beats per minute and the sweat pouring off my body, I came out to her. And she accepted me. She told me subsequently that she thought it was weird and she didn’t know what to make of it, but she was going to try to help me, try to fix me.

  Q: Did you want to be fixed at that point?’

  Sure, what do I know? What was I going to do, come out and have surgery? That scared the hell out of me. I knew I was transsexual, but I kept thinking, maybe I’m just a cross-dresser.

  Q: And you were aware of the distinction?’

  Well, it wasn’t quite the academic distinction but I thought, “Maybe this will be enough.” And she went through the stage of “Maybe, if I’m more feminine, you won’t feel like you have to be.” So we went through that phase. But she had no sense that this was a perversion that she needed to run away from, which is interesting. But it made her feel less of a woman. She felt inadequate. I felt like I was perverted. Here I am, a high school student, a pretty bright one, at one of the best public high schools in the country, and I would go to libraries and search out all the literature I could find, and there would be nothing there. I didn’t find any of Harry Benjamin’s early stuff. I didn’t even discover the trans community. This is post-Stonewall already, this is New York! And I’m a New Yorker, I’m leaving from Port Authority [bus terminal] to go to Cornell…