Being Emily (17 page)

“Yeah,” I said without waiting for Dr. Mendel to answer. “I’d be in a lot worse shape without you around.”

“But I kind of freaked out there at the start,” Claire said.

“That’s natural. Emily had years to figure this out. You had to adapt to a lot of new knowledge in just a few days,” Dr. Mendel told her.

“When you put it that way, I guess I am pretty awesome,” Claire responded with a grin. “So, what do we do here?”

“I was hoping I could help answer any questions you have so that Emily doesn’t have to field all of them, and then if we have time I’d like to hear more about Emily’s early experiences of
herself
, and I bet you would too.”

Claire looked at me and then back at the doctor. “Totally,” she said. She uncrossed her legs and put her hands on her knees.
“Questions, hmm.
I read a ton of stuff and it’s still jumbled up in my head, so I’m sorry if I don’t say things the right way.”

“It’s okay,” I told her and squeezed her shoulder lightly. I wanted to know what questions she still had and Dr. Mendel was right that I felt grateful not to be the only one to answer all of them.

“What’s the difference between transgender and transsexual and gender nonconforming?” Claire asked. “Lots of cultures seem to have had men who dressed like women, for example, ancient Sumer, Greece and Rome, some Native American cultures. And it sounds like some people are okay just dressing as women or living as women but not having all those surgeries. How do you know what’s what?”

“I don’t want to just cross-dress,” I said.

Dr. Mendel held up her hand before I could go on. “Emily, let Claire have her questions. It’s a good question. There’s a difference between gender nonconformity and gender
dysphoria
. Many people feel that their gender expression doesn’t fit the cultural norm for their gender and when that’s the case, most of the time, they may choose to identify as transgender, which is a broader category than transsexual.”

She went on, “I think everyone has had some experience of gender nonconformity. When I went to college in the ’60s there were quite a few people who felt that women wearing pants was still gender nonconforming. I’m glad we got rid of that idea. And when my husband took a few years off teaching to raise our children and research a book, he really had to struggle with cultural opinions about a man staying at home with the children.”

“My mom thinks my
goth
look is gender nonconforming because I don’t wear bright colors and show off my boobs and paint my face,” Claire offered.

“Precisely,” Dr. Mendel said. “Now, gender
dysphoria
specifically refers to the distress a person feels when their gender identity doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. And even gender
dysphoria
isn’t an unchanging condition. There are children who experience gender
dysphoria
but for whom it doesn’t persist. Not every feminine boy or masculine girl is necessarily transsexual.”

“Aw, I was just about to go around diagnosing my other friends,” Claire said with a grin.

Dr. Mendel smiled back at her with genuine humor. “I did a lot of diagnosis from the sidelines when I was in school. I do want both of you to know that if gender
dysphoria
is present in childhood and persists into adolescence, there’s a very high chance that it will remain into adulthood unless treated.”

“Mom shouldn’t wait for me to grow out of it then,” I offered.

“Neither should you,” Dr. Mendel said.

I thought about that. “You’re right, there’s still a part of me that keeps thinking if I do the boy thing enough it will stick.”

“There are plenty of transsexual women who’ve joined the military or taken up extremely masculine professions to see if they could get maleness to stick to them and not have to come out as women born into male bodies,” Dr. Mendel said.

“I don’t want to do that,” I told her. I felt a chill shudder down my back just under the skin. In junior high for over a year I was really convinced that I wanted to go into auto mechanics when I grew up. What a disaster that would have been.

“Why don’t you talk about what you do want,” Dr. Mendel prompted.

The rest of the hour was great. I told Claire more of the stories from when I was little, like dressing up in Mom’s clothes and playing with the girl who lived down the street as if we were two girls.

***

Maybe it was all the talking and support that made me feel bold that weekend. I didn’t plan
ahead,
I just got in my car on Saturday and started driving in the opposite direction from the Cities until I ended up in Annandale. I pulled over in a residential area in front of a house that looked dark, and got the duffel out of the back. It now had Claire’s makeup kit in it as well. It took me over half an hour to change in the car and do my makeup in the rearview mirror. I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t very well go into either gender of bathroom as a man and come out as a woman.

The other problem was that I really didn’t have any good shoes. I had some black boots that were more punk than anything, so I’d thrown those in the car with me and they’d have to do with the long skirt. They looked vaguely stylish. Also I only had a hat for my head. The good news was that my hair had grown long enough in the back to hang down past my collar in a few thick curls. The bad news was that it still looked too short for my taste, but I couldn’t do anything about that now.

I tried to get a good look at myself in the mirror, but it’s hard to see how you look from a two-inch-by-six-inch reflection. If I turned to the right, I looked pretty girlish, but from other angles, not so good. If I kept my eyes down, I should do pretty well. I’d shaved my face to within an inch of my life that morning and the foundation was thick enough to cover any lingering trouble there. Plus I felt like the estrogen was softening my skin already, though it was probably way too soon.

I figured I’d try a really quick trip into a store and see how I did. I went to
Walmart
. There were enough people there that I could blend in, and I thought I should get a purse before I went anywhere else.

I walked in and across the store without actually taking a full breath. My shoes sounded loud on the floor. Out of my peripheral vision, I thought I saw a woman turn and look at me, but I didn’t stop to find out. My heart was beating against my breastbone like a person pounding on a door.

In an empty aisle of purses I had to stop and make myself fill my lungs a few times so I wouldn’t just pass out. The store smelled like lemon cleaner and the dark musk of leather. I smelled like iron-edged fear.

I tried to make myself look at the individual purses, but my hand shook when I took one off the long metal rack. I put that one back, it reminded me of my mother’s, and grabbed a small, plain black purse on my way to the cash registers. Then I paused. I was supposed to buy control top pantyhose. Someone online said that was the key to “tucking” successfully. I had no idea what size or where to look, but the store had only a couple dozen people in it and so far no alarms had gone off and no one was staring at me as far as I could tell.

I followed the signs to lingerie and found myself staring at a long, long aisle of pantyhose. Tiered row after row of white, gray and tan packages with colorful labels stretched into the distance. This would be a good time to ask for help, I thought, except that I hadn’t worked on my voice enough. I couldn’t actually say anything without giving myself away.

Good Lord, I was an idiot. I took a deep breath and then another.

I walked down the row until I saw “control top” and then tried to read the sizing chart on the back. I had a few options, so I took one of each and made for the registers.

I picked the one with a young, dark-skinned girl with a head-scarf. She looked like she’d come over from a foreign country recently, and I was hoping I’d seem like just another American oddity to her. “Good morning,” she said in heavily accented English and rang up the items. “That’ll be twenty-eight fifty-three, miss.”

My heart soared. I unfolded two crumpled twenties from my palm and handed them to her. The change went into my new purse, the stockings into a bag, and I stepped out into the fresh, cold air.

“Miss” reverberated in my head all the way back to the car. I’d done it! For the first time I was out in public as a woman and at least for a few minutes, I passed. The elation mixed with the caffeine from the bottled depth charge cold coffee drink I’d sipped all the way out here and it seemed like my heavy boots floated inches above the ground. I felt goofy about being so excited, but after years of having “boy” and “son” land like shrapnel in me, being called “miss” felt amazing.

I downed the rest of the coffee and drove the next two miles to the little mall in Annandale. Now that I was out in public, I didn’t want to have to change back into my boy clothes and go home.

Okay
, I told myself in the mall parking lot,
this has got to be a quick exercise; I’m going to walk through and out because I can’t actually talk to anyone.
I was going to have to practice with my voice a lot more in the near future. Maybe I should take voice lessons. I wondered if Mom would go for that.

It wasn’t noon yet and the mall’s main corridors looked almost empty. Two women with babies in strollers walked along one side of the main corridor, and I picked the other side so I could avoid them. An old woman holding onto the arm of an old man passed me but didn’t look up at my face. I went from one end to the other and then started to stroll back. I really needed new shoes. Through the windows I looked at a few pairs. They had a DSW, which was a discount shoe warehouse that skimped on staff to keep their prices low so you had to pick out your own shoes and try them on without assistance. I should be able to try on something in there without having to fend off a salesperson in pantomime.

Quickly I found the section of women’s boots, but I didn’t know much about women’s shoes and had no idea what size I was. I should have brought Claire with me. I put two different shoes next to my foot and guessed that I was a size eleven or twelve in women’s sizes, but I wasn’t nearly comfortable enough to take off my boots and try one on. What if someone came up to me? Would I end up running out of the mall with my boots in my hands?

With a sigh, I gave up and headed back in the direction of the car. Claire wasn’t terribly fond of shopping, but if I threw in a movie, she’d probably come with me. Three junior high school kids walking in front of their parents stared at me as I passed and my heart started thrumming hard against my breastbone. Did they know? I turned away from them and kept walking. I should have waited until I could do a better job at this. Thank goodness no one here knew me.

Unfortunately, my racing heart along with the huge bottled coffee meant that I had to pee so badly that it hurt. All the people in the mall were down at the other end where the better shops were. This end just held the administrative office and the restrooms.

I paused in the hall to the restrooms and waited for a few long minutes to see if there was anyone in the women’s restroom. No one came out. I really wanted to see what I looked like in something larger than a rearview mirror, and I was literally hopping from one foot to the other. If I went out to the car, I’d have to wait until after I changed and then go find a restroom at a crappy gas station.

I ducked into the women’s restroom and looked at myself in the mirror. The hat looked cute and so did my makeup, but my eyebrows were terrible and the whole size and ratio of my body still looked wrong. A passerby might think I was a girl, and then again might not. It all depended on what their sense of reality included; I either looked like a very boyish girl, or a boy very much in drag.

The outfit was good because it avoided the loud and dramatic, but I really needed to work on my ability to walk and to speak. For the first time out, though, it was a huge victory.

I turned toward the stalls. There were so many of them and no urinals. This was for sure the first time in my life that a restroom actually made me happy.

You don’t have time
, I told myself sternly.
What are you going to do if someone comes in? Go.

I quickly stepped into a stall and sat down to pee. It was so clean in here. Not just the floor but the walls of the stall were almost bare. I’d never been to this mall before, but in Liberty’s two tiny malls both of the men’s bathrooms were covered with disgusting graffiti. I didn’t have anything against
graffiti,
it was the subject matter that disgusted me. The scrawls tended universally toward anti-gay sentiments, woman bashing and bragging about sexual prowess. In this stall there was a sticker about breast cancer awareness posted on one side and on the other in looping handwriting the message, “You are really beautiful.”