Being Emily (26 page)

***

Mom got us in with Dr. Webber as soon as possible. It was only two days later that I took a short, silent car ride to his office. She said she wanted to come in with me, so we ended up in that dreary office, with her on the couch and me in a chair. I sat back, crossed my arms and waited to hear what he was going to say. His hair was still closely cropped and perfectly done as if it hadn’t grown at all since the last time I saw him six months ago. He looked like an actor playing the part of a psychiatrist in a commercial for an antidepressant.

“Chris, I hear things have gotten worse since I saw you last,” he said with a slight, tense smile.

Now that I hadn’t been to Dr. Webber in months I saw him differently, even through my anger. On the surface he looked so perfect from his distinguished graying temples and close trimmed nails to his sharply creased pants. But the overly tense way he sat in his chair made him always off balance. Dr. Mendel actually sat up straight and relaxed at the same time. I never saw her try to sit up straight, she just did it. Dr. Webber swayed and caught himself, straightened up and shifted his shoulders into place.

“Actually, things got better for a long time, and then my parents freaked out, and since then it’s pretty much sucked,” I told him.

Mom sighed loudly. “He wants to be a woman,” she said.

Dr. Webber turned his chair more fully toward me and leaned forward. “Is that true?”

“Close,” I said. “Actually, I am a woman, on the inside. I’d like my body to match my internal sense of myself.”

“How do you know you’re a woman?” he asked.

“How do you know you’re a man?” I asked back. “It’s a feeling you have, a sense of yourself. I’ve just always known I was a woman—or a girl, when I was a kid—and I was confused about why everyone always
stuck
me with the boys.”

He swiveled his chair back toward my mom and this started another sway, shift, straighten sequence. “Did you notice effeminate behavior in Chris when he was younger?”

“No,” Mom said, “not really. He’s always liked cars and girls and adventure games. He likes being outside a
lot,
and he’s been on the swim team since he started high school.”

“Chris, when did you start thinking you wanted to be a girl?” the doctor asked.

“I didn’t start thinking it one day. Actually, what I remember is being surprised that other people didn’t treat me like a girl. Mom, remember in first grade when I wanted a girl’s name?”

“Aha!” Dr. Webber said. His hands pushed down on the seat of his chair, popping him up even straighter.  “How old were you then, five, six? What was going on in the home at that time?”

That second question was directed to Mom who gave him a half shrug and raised her eyebrows. “I’m not sure I can remember.”

“Was there any instability in the home?”

“I’m sure there was some. Money was really tight. I’d just taken a
job,
my husband was out of work for a while.”

“Interesting,” he said. “Well, Chris, I think we can work on this. I suspect what happened is that you’ve idealized women and degraded men, probably having to do with that stressful time in your early childhood. You saw your mother as capable and your father as helpless and decided it’s better to be a woman. You may also have had some trouble bonding appropriately with your father and decided that you wouldn’t make a good man. What we need to do is to rewire these patterns.”

I sat very still and tried hard not to roll my eyes. He went on, “I’m going to come up with a treatment plan for you. Now what is important for you to understand is that this problem of yours is not physical, although it may seem that way, it is psychological. To attempt to treat it
physically,
is to go in the wrong direction. You can take hormones and get plastic surgery, but a ‘sex change’ is a misnomer. You will never be able to change your biological sex. You need to think about what kind of person you really want to grow up to be.”

He turned his awful attention toward my mother. “You and your husband need to set a good example for Chris of a well-balanced marriage with strong masculine and feminine poles. I’d like the two of you to come see me, and I’d like Chris to come see me on his own next week.”

Mom said something in agreement and thanked him. I wasn’t listening. I hated him with a black, hopeless rage.

“See,” Mom said when we got in the car. “He believes you can be cured psychologically. You don’t need to go through all this craziness to become a woman. You can be fine the way you are.”

“Mom,” I said, letting out the words that came to my mouth without censoring them for once. “If I can’t be a woman, I’d rather just die.”

“Chris, don’t talk that way! My God, you’re just trying to shock me, aren’t you?”

“No, I’m not. Just forget it. I’m going over to Claire’s.”

As soon as we got home, I drove over to her house and told her all about it. She said what a jerk he was a few dozen times, but was surprisingly quiet for Claire. Her eyes had a hard, dark look to them.

“I’ll hurt him if I have to,” she said at last. “I don’t know how, but I’ll find a way if he keeps treating you like that.”

I felt comforted, and a little scared. Claire was scrappy and had a healthy disrespect for authority, but I didn’t want her to get herself into serious trouble over me.

By the next week, I was ready to change my mind on that last point. Mom had basically lifted the social restrictions on my grounding. Mom and Dad went to see Dr. Webber and after they came home, we started having family dinners together every night where Mom would try to get Dad to talk about his day and
Mikey
would interrupt every two minutes with a story from school or a TV show he’d seen.

I confronted Dr. Webber about it when I was back in his office. “Do you really think all that family dinner stuff is going to make a difference?” I asked.

“I understand that you have a lot to be angry about,” he said. “But you have to understand that people can change. Your parents can change and you can change. Now, Chris, I have a delicate subject to bring up with you, and that’s your sexuality.”

“Yeah, what about it?”

“Your mother tells me you have a girlfriend.”

“Yeah.”

“Are you sexual with her?” he asked.

“We make out and stuff, we haven’t had sex. Why?”

“But you enjoy it?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I love Claire.”

“Then why would you want to be a woman? Don’t you understand you’ll become a lesbian?”

I must have stared at him for a whole minute before I could get my incredulous lips to move. “Look, Dr. Webber, do you think I’m stupid or something? Of course I know that. Do you think I haven’t thought this whole thing through, over and over again? Do you think it’s just a whim or something?”

“What do you think of when you think about being a woman?” he asked.

“I think about going to school,” I said. “Same as now, except I’m a girl.”

“Do you think about going into the girls’ locker room? Looking at the other girls?” he asked.

“Not particularly.”

“But you think about yourself, dressed as a girl. Do you ever find that arousing?”

I shrugged. There was no way I was touching that land mine.

“There is a condition that some people develop which causes them to be turned on by the idea of themselves in the clothing of the opposite sex, or even having a body of the opposite sex. Do you get turned on thinking about being made love to as a woman?” He didn’t pause long enough for me to answer, for which I was deeply grateful. “Because you’re a normal heterosexual male, I think this might be what’s happened with you. You’re aroused by women and by the thought of yourself as a woman, and we need to rewire that to fit a normal heterosexual male pattern.”

“I am a woman,” I said, but with less emphasis than I intended.

“Chris, I want you to pay attention to what you think about when you imagine yourself as a woman, and what role arousal plays in that, and come back next week prepared to talk about that.”

I did the first part of that assignment. I couldn’t help it. Once he suggested it, every time I thought about being a woman, I was questioning what I was really thinking about. But there was no way in hell I was going to talk to him about it.

CLAIRE

Chris was going downhill visibly as far as Claire could tell. After the second trip to Dr. Webber that summer, he stopped telling her what the appointments were about, but he was as upset as she’d ever seen him. He curled in on himself and stopped talking in full sentences when one-word answers would do. She dragged him out to movies, where he would slump down in the seat like a bag of sand. She couldn’t tell if he was really watching the movie or brooding on what the doctor had said that week.

Since he wouldn’t talk to her, she started doing research,
trying to figure out what the doctor could be saying to him. Obviously, Dr. Webber thought
transsexualism
could be cured, but how? What she found made her feel sick and miserably confused. She could understand why Chris looked like the undertaker of a medieval village struck by plague.

First there was a bunch of confusing scientific jargon that took her about four days to wade through. It proposed that there was a difference between men who got turned on wearing women’s clothes, women who were born into male bodies, and men who got turned on by thinking about being women. That was enough to make anyone miserable, but then she found the Christian Medical Fellowship stuff.

Apparently some groups, mostly self-identified as Christians, believed that
transsexualism
and homosexuality arose when a child failed to bond properly with the parent of the same sex as themselves. This
unbonded
kid then became defensive toward all people of the same sex as themselves and in adolescence turned the distance between themselves and people of the same sex into desire for a loving bond. Which explained the group’s perspective on gays, but she didn’t quite see how that made any sense in Chris’s situation.

If she had to make up an argument based on this crap, she would say that he failed to bond with men and had decided he wanted to be a woman, which sounded like what Dr. Webber was saying. It just felt wrong to her. First, she knew that Chris loved his dad and admired him, and he didn’t seem to have trouble hanging out with the guys on the swim team. It just bothered him that everyone thought he was one of them.

More looking showed that reparative therapy for homosexuality had a pretty abysmal success rate. It might seem to work for some gays who were fundamentalist Christians or really hated themselves, but for everyone else, it did a lot more damage than “repair.”

She was more interested in the Christian arguments, which went that God and Jesus’s relationship with humanity was one of a groom to a bride, and that heterosexual marriages were a mirror of that and therefore represented God’s plan for humanity.

That made her angry. They seemed to think that God’s plan for humanity looked like 1950s America. How many of them had really studied what it was like in Biblical times when women were largely considered property? Men could take multiple wives, and marriages were essentially arranged by families, not by individuals.

And if you were going to interpret literally the idea that God’s relationship to humanity was a groom’s to a bride’s, then wasn’t everyone a woman in God’s eyes? When had it become so important who was a man and who was a woman? It felt to Claire like a perversion of the beauty of God’s love for humanity to make the relationship with God into something so constricting. But she also understood how, in her own life, discipline made creativity possible. Was it possible that these people could be right that God had a plan?

She shut down her computer and rubbed her eyes, her questions no more resolved after a week of research than they’d been when she started. She just wanted Chris to be okay, whatever that meant.

It was still light outside, because of the length of the summer days in Minnesota, and the air held the heat of the day. A half-mile from her house, a small stream wound its way between two thinly wooded banks. Claire headed there and walked along the stream until the trees started to thicken and she could sit, unnoticed, on a big rock at the edge of the water.

The highway wasn’t far, and she heard the rush of cars behind the sound of the water, but she liked to sit here anyway and watch the leaves flutter and reveal palm-sized bits of sky. The trees didn’t worry about the kinds of things she did. They just grew, and they seemed to know how to grow. They reminded her of the verse in Matthew:
Consider the lilies of the field,
how they grow; they neither toil nor spin, yet I tell you, even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these
.