Being Emily (23 page)

I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest wouldn’t really expand, so the attempt ended up long and shallow. Okay, what was the worst that could happen? They could throw me out. I had turned seventeen in April, so I was almost old enough to make all my own decisions legally. I could probably stay at Claire’s for a while and finish school, or at least that was a nice fantasy. I’d hold on to that one.

“Chris,” Dr. Mendel said as if introducing me. We agreed that I had to tell them, rather than her. She was there for support, but I had to do this.

“Um,” I said, rather inelegantly. “Thanks for coming.
So, ah.
Well, I don’t really know how to say this so if it comes out funny I hope you’ll just hear me out. It might not make a lot of sense right away, but I think with time it will make a whole lot of sense.”

“You’re gay,” Mom blurted out.

“I’m a girl,” I said.

Dead silence.

“No, you’re not,” Mom said.

“Yes, I am.”

“Christopher,” she said in her low pitched warning tone.

“Ever since I can remember, I’ve known I was a girl,” I said, looking back and forth between them and my hands. Dad’s eyebrows were both tilting out at angles, and Mom’s mouth disappeared into a thin line. “When I was little I tried to hang out with the other girls, but everyone said I was a boy and so eventually I just played along, but I’ve always known I was a girl.”

“No you’re not,” Mom said. “You are very clearly not a girl.” She turned toward Dr. Mendel and demanded, “What on earth have you been telling him?”

Dr. Mendel remained silent while I took another long, shallow breath. “Mom,” I said as firmly as I could manage. “There’s a condition called
transsexualism
where a kid gets born with the brain of the opposite sex. That means that although I have a boy’s body, inside I really am a girl.”

“So you like to wear dresses?” Dad asked. He looked confused and incredulous. His normally tanned face was as pale as parchment.

“Well sort of,” I said. “But that’s not the point. The point is that I feel like a woman inside, and I want the hormones and surgery so I can live my life as a woman.”

“Oh,” he said.
“Oh God.”

The room fell silent.

 From where it rested on his thigh, Dad’s right hand twitched open and closed. Dr. Mendel sat like a rock and watched them while I shifted in my chair and failed to find a position where I felt like I wasn’t about to get hit by lightning.

“If this is a joke…” Mom started.

“Mrs.
Hesse
, it’s not a joke,” Dr. Mendel spoke up. “Your child has a rare but treatable condition. I think you’ve noticed that as Chris is more self-expressed, there’s a corresponding rise in happiness.”

I noticed that she was very diplomatically avoiding any pronouns in her statements, which I appreciated. At this point I think female pronouns would have sent my mom through the roof, and male pronouns would have made me feel like crap. Yeah, I had a good doctor.

“Chris is a boy,” Mom said. She sat back against the couch and folded her arms tightly against her chest. Her eyes narrowed to hostile slits. “He just needs to learn to live that way, not have his head filled with this nonsense.”

Silence stretched out again until Mom stood up abruptly.

“We’re leaving,” she declared.

“No,” I said. “We’re not.”

She looked at Dad to back her up. “Let’s hear all of it,” he said grimly as if he were talking about a list of war casualties.

Mom sat back down and crossed her arms again with her hands in fists. “All right, but I don’t believe it.”

“It’s scientifically proven,” I said. “And besides, what really matters is that when I get to be a girl, I feel like myself. All these years I’ve had to pretend to be someone I’m not.” My voice rose. “Don’t you want me to be happy?”

“Chris,” Dr. Mendel warned before anyone else could answer. I tried to calm down. She was right, this was a bad time to ask leading questions of my parents before we brought them up to speed on the whole thing. She’d warned me last week that I’d had years to research this and they were probably hearing about it for the first time in their lives.

“Sorry,” I offered.

Dr. Mendel picked up the conversation.  “Sometimes a child is born whose internal sense of their gender does not match their external sexual characteristics, and in some cases, that difference is so pronounced that the child knows that he is the opposite sex from the body he was born with,” she said in her grandmotherly tone. “It’s called Gender Identity Disorder, or gender
dysphoria
. This is what happened for Chris. While everyone around assumed Chris was a boy,
which
is quite natural, inside Chris has always felt like a girl. There are thousands of people like Chris living in America, and most of them make a successful transition to the gender they feel inside and live the rest of their lives that way as productive, well-adjusted members of society.

“You brought Chris to therapy because you noticed, quite rightly, that your child was struggling with mood problems. The good news is that your child is actually very bright and socially well developed. Considering what Chris has had to live with, she is an outstanding individual. This is not about anything you did or didn’t do. It’s a biological condition determined before birth. You have a child you can be proud of. Chris has been very strong in the face of considerable adversity and some of that is due to the values you’ve instilled. Now Chris needs your support, more than most kids do, to take the last few steps to adulthood.”

Dr. Mendel sat back in her chair. I wanted to bottle that speech so I could listen to it every day for the next year or two.

“Are you done?” Mom asked coldly.

“Yes,” Dr. Mendel said.
“Though we have a few pamphlets and books for you to look at if you’d like.”

Mom looked at me.
“Anything else?”

I didn’t know what to say. Her face looked like an ice sculpture. I was tempted to turn to Dr. Mendel and say “rescue me” but I figured that wouldn’t help much.

Dad broke the silence. “There are other kids like this?” he asked Dr. Mendel.

“Yes,” she said.

“How do they know?”

“There’s a persistent sense of being the wrong gender that lasts for years, sometimes life-long. It’s natural for children to be curious about the opposite sex, maybe even wonder what it’s like, but I think you’ll agree that having a persistent belief that you’re a girl over ten years or more is something more than curiosity or a desire to avoid manhood.”

He looked at me. “You always did cry a lot. I thought you were a sissy. But you toughened up.”

“I’ve been pretending,” I said.

“So you want to be a woman…does that mean you want to date guys?”

“No,” I said. “Actually I still like girls better.”

“Jesus Christ,” he said and all but rolled his eyes. “That makes no sense at all.” He picked up a pamphlet from the side table, stood up and crammed it into his pocket. “All right, I’m done with this.
Chris, you coming with us?”

“Sure,” I said and stood up with a wide-eyed look at Dr. Mendel.

“Would you two wait outside just for a minute?” she asked.

After a final glare from my mother at Dr. Mendel, they walked through the door and shut it loudly behind them.

“That sucked,” I said.

“Give them time,” she said. “They’re going to go through stages. They’re in shock right now, and then they’ll be in denial for a while. Try not to let them blame themselves, and if they get too angry…if you’re afraid, call me and get out of the house, okay?”

“Yes.”

“Promise me you won’t try to tough it out if it’s more than you can handle.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You can do this,” she told me. “You have me and Claire and Natalie, lots of people supporting you. Let your folks know that you love them and you’re being honest with them.”

I nodded and thanked her, then headed out the door. Mom and Dad were already in the car with the engine running.

When I got into the backseat, they didn’t say anything at all or look at me; the silence held all the way home. When we walked in the air felt icy compared to the warmth outdoors, and it wasn’t because of the air conditioning. Dad made a beeline for the garage.

Mom dropped her purse on the table with an angry clatter.

“What the hell are you trying to pull?” she yelled at me.

“It’s the truth,” I said.

“You want to be a
woman
? That’s ridiculous. Look at you!”

Into the pause in the tirade
Mikey
yelled from the living room, “Fag!”

Mom turned toward him. “GO TO YOUR ROOM!” she screamed louder than I’d ever heard. He leaped to his feet and tore up the stairs.

She dropped her voice, which didn’t help much because now it sounded like a butter knife trying to saw through bone. “Being a woman isn’t going to solve anything,” she said to me. “It’s just going to make your life hell. Look at
you,
you’d make the ugliest woman I can imagine. You’d be a freak. You need to drop this bullshit right now, young man. I don’t want to know what put this crazy idea in your head, but you are grounded until you come to your senses. No more
computer
, no more trips to the city, and I’m going to find another doctor for you. Now you go to your room too.”

I ran for my room. I logged on to
GenderPeace
and quickly posted a message that my mom had lost it and I might not be able to get online in the near future. Then I sent Natalie a quick
note,
and an email to Claire saying I was going to need help.

Moments after I hit send, Mom threw the door open.

“Get off that,” she said.

I stepped back. She yanked the cords out of the wall and picked up the whole computer, carrying it out of the room. A minute later she came back and took my phone. Then she slammed the door behind her.

I waited. The house was quiet. No, I could hear her in the garage yelling at Dad.
Then him yelling back.
I couldn’t tell what he was saying and I thought about putting my ear to the floor, but I didn’t really want to know. Instead I snuck out into the hall and tapped on
Mikey’s
door.

“Yeah,” he said softly.

“It’s me.”

He opened the door. His eyes were red and he sniffled a few times, trying not to cry. “I didn’t mean it,” he said almost in a whisper. “Why is Mom so mad?”

I shut the door behind me and sat on the edge of his bed. He had a Batman bedspread, though I’d heard Mom tell him he was getting too old for it. Right now he looked pretty young even for nine. His brown eyes were huge and red with the effort of not crying.

“Mom’s not mad at you,” I said. “She’s mad at me.”

He sat on the foot of the
bed,
one leg tucked up under his other leg, and idly rearranged the action figures beside him. “She said you want to be a girl?” he asked. “That’s weird.”

“Yeah,” I said. “I do.”

“Am I going to turn out like that too?” he asked.

I smiled. “No. I’ve always wanted to be a woman. You don’t. You’re a boy.”

“I am,” he said with gusto. “Girls are gross. I don’t know why you want to be one. Does this mean you’re going to turn into my sister?”

I tried to read his face to see if he was going to use this against me later, but his pale skin and tight lips looked genuinely scared and concerned.
“In a few years.”

“Can they really make you into a girl?” he asked. “I never heard of anything like that. What do they do?”

I didn’t know how much to tell him, so I stuck to the basics. “It takes surgery and hormones. They don’t just zap me with a laser.”

He laughed a little, as I’d intended. “That would be a funny power to have. What would you call that superhero?
Girl Man?
I’d zap Zach, he deserves it.”

He’d started to grin, and I smiled back. “I think maybe we should only turn people into girls who want to be girls,” I warned. “Otherwise it’s not fair.”