Being Emily (16 page)

We met at a little brunch place and had a bite to eat before going to a stocky brick community center building. Inside it looked like a mutated school with long corridors branching off each other, filled with thick wooden doors.

She knew where she was going, so I followed. “This group is a little weird,” she warned. “My shrink told me I have to go once a month. But the facilitator is great. And some of the women have really interesting stories.”

“What do you mean a little weird?” I asked.

“You’ll see,” she said. “It’s a general TG support group, so we get all kinds.”

She wasn’t kidding. There were about fifteen people in the room when we walked in. Natalie introduced me to the facilitator while I was still getting my bearings. She was a woman about my height with a halo of blond hair and bright eyes. She had the smallest nose and I felt a pang of jealousy. Natalie said she was some kind of psychologist, and I wondered how she ended up facilitating a group of transgender people. How did regular people get interested in us? Did she know someone or were we just research to her? Or could you actually make money with a psychology practice aimed at the transgender community? Maybe in the Cities it was possible.

“Elizabeth,” she said, holding out her hand.

“This is Emily,” Natalie said.      

“Glad to have you, welcome.”

We had a few more minutes before we started, so Natalie introduced me to more people with a dizzying array of descriptors. I met Renee, a woman in her mid-fifties who had begun her transitioning process recently and looked like someone’s plain grandmother with the hands of a lumberjack.
Vivianna
was half-Asian, half-Spanish with the body of a ballet dancer. Natalie assured me twice that she’d been born male, though I found that hard to believe. Steve was an average-sized guy with short brown hair and a goatee.

“Shouldn’t he shave?” I asked quietly, thinking about how I couldn’t stand my own facial hair.

“He’s FTM.”

My brain took a second to translate: female-to-male. He’d been born with a girl’s body. I took another look. It was impossible to tell.

There was another female-to-male member of the group, Mark, who looked like a teenager but dressed like he was older. Then there were a couple of people who very clearly looked like men in dresses. And one who looked like a man in a dress trying very hard not to look like a man in a dress but failing. “Those two are just cross-dressers,” Natalie said. She indicated the third. “And she’s just a little off-balance.”

Elizabeth called the meeting to order and we all went around and said something about ourselves and what was going on in our lives. Renee had been at the same job for twenty years and still dressed as a man to go to work. She was trying to figure out how to talk to her HR department about coming to work as a woman.
That’s going to be mind-bending for them
, I thought. Steve wanted a girlfriend but wasn’t sure he’d find someone to accept him for who he was.
Vivianna
gave an update about her and her husband’s quest to adopt a child.

When it came around to me, I tried to think of something intelligent to say. “I’m Emily,” I said, feeling slightly ridiculous using that name with my deep voice and monstrously lanky body. “I’m in high school, and I’m trying to figure out how to talk to my parents. I have a good therapist and a really great girlfriend.”

There was scattered applause and welcomes.

“That therapist will really help,”
Vivianna
said. “I worked with one for almost a year and when I came out to my parents it was such a non-issue. I was in my early twenties and living on my own by then, but they said they’d always suspected and my mother said she always wanted a daughter. I have three brothers. I hope it’s like that for you.”

Steve spoke next. “Mine said they understood, but they keep screwing up my name and my pronoun.”

“Oh that sucks so
bad
,” Natalie told him. “It just feels so invalidating, doesn’t it? You really look great, though, no one would read you.”

To “read” someone was to see that they’d been born the other gender from the one they were presenting to the world. Natalie meant that no one would see Steve as anything other than a guy, and I thought she was right.
How embarrassing to look like a guy to everyone and still have your parents call you “she.”

“My parents threw me out,” Mark said. “I was seventeen, and I ended up homeless for a couple of years. I’m working on forgiving them, but I’m not sure I ever want to see them again.”

As the group was breaking up, Elizabeth sat next to me. “Was it helpful to come today?” she asked.

“It was okay,” I said. “I think I have a lot of work to do.”

She looked me in the eyes. “You won’t regret it. If it’s really what you want, you’ll never look back.”

“I know,” I said. “It just seems so hard.”

“Everyone has to go through a journey to become
themselves
. It’s just more of a challenge for some than others, but a greater challenge also means a greater opportunity.”

“Right,” I said, unconvinced.

She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet, sliding out a small picture from behind the credit cards. “I don’t show this to a lot of people,” she said. “But I think you need to see it.”

I looked down at the image of a young man glaring angrily at the camera, his hair hastily brushed to one side, and his brows lowered menacingly. He’d set his lips in a thin line, but that didn’t disguise the full bow shape of his mouth that looked exactly like Elizabeth’s. I looked up at her. The only similarities were the shape of her face, her lips and her nose. Anyone else would have assumed they’d been siblings.

“No,” I said. There was no way that had been her. I felt like an idiot for assuming she wasn’t one of us, and at the same time, I was thrilled.

“Twenty-seven years ago.”

“Wow, you think I could look like you?”

“No, I think you could look like yourself. And I think you will look beautiful.” She took the picture back and put it away. “You’re welcome here anytime.”

“Thanks,” I told her, smiling.

On the way back to the car, Natalie asked, “Isn’t she cool? She went to Europe in the eighties to get the surgery.”

When I dropped Natalie off at her house, she paused and fished in her purse. “Hey, this isn’t really kosher, and I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, but with you stuck out there in the boonies and everything…” She handed me a small prescription bottle.

The label said Spironolactone and had her name on it. I turned it over in my hand.
“How?
You can’t give me yours.”

She smiled. “I told my doctor that I accidentally threw out my hormones when I was cleaning up. There are two kinds in there, the Spironolactone is an anti-androgen, it blocks testosterone production, and the round blue ones are
Estrofem
. You shouldn’t start with that whole dose of that. Break them up and do a quarter of a pill for a few weeks and work up like that. That should last you a couple months and maybe by then we can figure out how to get you your own supply. I don’t think my doctor will go for the ‘lost it’ thing more than once.”

“Thank you so much.”

“Take ’
em
with a meal,” she said and flashed me a grin. “And for goodness sake, hide them well. It’s easier to explain hard drugs to your parents than hormones.”

I laughed and hugged her. “It’s wonderful, thanks.”

I drove back to Liberty trying to imagine what it would be like to be able to go through my days without always having to remember to be a guy. Elizabeth transitioned twenty-seven years ago and she was only in her middle age now. She’d already lived more than half her life as a woman. What if I could just be myself all the time?

When I got home,
Mikey
was watching TV with Dad. Mom was in the bedroom we kept as an office for paying bills and stuff. I went up to her and leaned on the filing cabinet. She was sitting at the desk sorting through a pile of mail with her hair messy as it usually was on weekends. She wouldn’t wear sweatpants around the house, but she had on a pair of loose terrycloth pants and a sweater jacket.

“How was your trip to the city?” she asked distractedly.

“It was cool,” I said. “I saw something unusual.”

“Hmm, what?” she asked as she dropped an envelope into a short pile on the desk and picked up the next piece of mail.

“A woman who used to be a man.”

“What?” she pivoted in her chair to face me.
“How?”

“I guess surgery,” I said, trying to sound super-super casual.

“How did you know?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together tightly at the end of the question.

“She told me. She said sometimes women get born into men’s bodies—”

“You were talking to strange…people?”

“In the middle of the mall, it was harmless,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I just thought it was interesting that that’s possible.”

“Chris,” Mom said in her stern voice. “I don’t want you going into the city alone, and you certainly don’t need to spend time talking to freaks like that. If that happens again, you get up and leave.”

“It was just a conversation, Mom, she wasn’t hitting on me.”

“You don’t know what people like that are thinking. You’re a good-looking young man and you need to be more careful. Promise me you’ll watch out for yourself.”

“Sure, Mom.”

She stood up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t tell that to your dad, he would flip.”

“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go work on my homework.”

I went upstairs and lay down on my bed. I felt torn in half. One half was happy and excited about life. She’d gone to a support group meeting and got hormones and she had a girlfriend who loved her. The other half was a papier-mâché shell that looked like a guy on the outside and was hollow within. His emptiness was full of echoes of my mother’s voice saying “freaks like that,” “you’re a good-looking young man,” and “your dad would flip.”

I fell asleep staring at nothing and dreamed that the papier-mâché man was choking me to death.

I started taking the anti-androgen and the first fraction of an estrogen pill with breakfast the next morning. I didn’t expect to feel different right away, but I did feel lighter when I went to school. That was probably the placebo effect, or just pure hopefulness. Yes, my mom thought transsexual people were freaks—that wasn’t really unusual for a woman who’d spent all her life in rural Minnesota. She’d come around when she saw how happy I was...right?

During science class, I imagined the estrogen soaking into all the cells of my body, reassuring each little bit of me that everything was going to be all right. I sailed through the day. In psych class I gave Mr. Cooper the decoy paper that Claire had emailed me the day before. I’d changed a few details, but her story was very good at imagining what it was like to be a boy waking up as a girl.
A lot better than my version.

The week waltzed by and on Thursday I met Claire after school to go to Dr. Mendel with me. I’d told Mom she didn’t need to come along just to make sure that I was going and that I planned to bring Claire so we could talk about “boy-girl” stuff. That did the trick.

Claire and I sat on the couch in Dr. Mendel’s office. Claire’s fingers tapped out a pattern on the arm and she kept crossing her legs one way and then the other as Dr. Mendel closed the door and settled into the chair across from us. I thought Claire might have worn extra black for the visit because she had on black cobweb earrings and black bracelets in addition to the usual black shirt, jeans and boots. I’d made it all the way down to sweater number six this week, and Dr. Mendel was in a cream colored jacket over a plum shell and gray pants.

“Thank you for coming,” Dr. Mendel said to Claire. “I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about you. And you also game together?”

“I play a paladin mostly,” Claire said. She thought that Dr. Mendel asking me what kinds of characters I played was supercool, so I was glad Dr. Mendel started there again.

“It’s no wonder that you’re Emily’s protector in the real world then.”

“You think so?” Claire asked. “I mean, that I’m a protector?”