In the Darkroom (20 page)

Hirschfeld's belief that identity divisions were not strictly binary and that desires were intermediary and limitless would find little resonance in Third Reich Germany—or, for that matter, in postwar America. In 1965, the U.S. Congress passed an amendment refining the 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act. The original act had banned immigrants with “psychopathic personalities.” The amendment explicitly applied that prohibition to “sexual deviation.” The law was upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1967 and remained on the books until 1990.

Twenty-first-century transsexuals still live in a universe bound by Harry Benjamin's protocols. His “Standards of Care” survive in the WPATH (World Professional Association for Transgender Health) Standards of Care, the widely followed guidelines for sex reassignment surgery. Obtaining the surgery under WPATH requires a year's worth of hormone therapy (approved by a therapist), a year of living full-time as the opposite sex, and, most crucially, two separate letters from two mental-health professionals who have independently determined that the patient is “eligible” for surgery. Without these all-important two referrals, WPATH's standards advise surgeons not to operate. Unlike any other “transgressive” group, transsexuals can't transgress without the consent of the authorities.

Altering sex organs means getting an operation, and getting an operation means convincing clinicians to sign off on a diagnosis. That diagnosis is derived from the presumptions and prejudices of twentieth-century “experts” whose claims were often thinly researched and whose suppositions have been vastly amplified in the echo chamber of a clientele eager to say whatever is required to obtain the magic wand of surgery. Since transsexuality first entered the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
in 1980 (seven years after gay-rights advocates finally managed to get homosexuality out of it), “Transsexualism” has become “Gender Identity Disorder” has become “Gender Dysphoria.” In 2013, under pressure to “destigmatize” the transgender population, the authors of the
DSM-V
removed the diagnosis from the “Sexual Dysfunctions” and “Paraphilic Disorders” chapters, albeit not from the manual itself. The practitioners have made endless but largely superficial refinements to the taxonomy, adding and subtracting symptoms and demarcating predisposing and associated factors, primary and secondary types and subtypes. The diagnosis remains a baggy, ill-defined condition, based on theories with tenuous connection to empirical data or actual patient histories.
^*

With no firm physiological markers to go on, the therapists who issue the all-important two letters must determine eligibility based not on what patients show but on what they tell, and how well they tell it. “Although transsexuality concerns the deliberate transformation of the material body more than any other category catalogued by the American Psychiatric Association's
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders
,” Jay Prosser, a literature professor and female-to-male transsexual, observed in
Second Skins
, “transsexuality does not symptomize itself in the subject's body, at least not visibly or reliably so. The diagnosis required for this transformation must instead derive from the patient's narrative: narrativization as a transsexual necessarily precedes one's diagnosis as a transsexual; autobiography is transsexuality's proffered symptom.” To proceed to the operating room, the patient must tell the therapists the story they want to hear, a story that has barely changed since Harry Benjamin issued his guidelines in 1966.

The tropes, code words, and set pieces this telling requires have long been traded in underground transsexual exchanges, and more recently on electronic forums and chat rooms. “To qualify for surgery,” a website for prospective male-to-female transsexuals that I read in 2010 instructed, be sure to emphasize that you suffer from a “persistent feeling of hatred for the male anatomical structures” and that you “absolutely dislike homosexual behavior.” In a 2014 online discussion about how to get approval from therapists for hormone treatment and surgery, a successful petitioner explains:

In
How to Change Your Sex
, Lannie Rose, a male-to-female transsexual, counseled others to resist “the urge to game your therapist,” while noting how it was done: “The game is simple: just read the stories on a handful of transsexual people's Web sites, and then concoct a story for your therapist that makes you seem similar to them.” This is a mode of literary composition that Prosser called replicating “the master narrative” of “transsexuality's classic plot.” Sandy Stone described the method more plainly as “learning to lie effectively about one's past.”

Concocting such lies, Rose admonished, is “doing your self a big disservice and missing a great opportunity for personal growth.” She believed that the strict requirements enforced by unsympathetic therapists were artifacts of the recent past and that, “today, being honest with your therapist should not prevent you from obtaining the treatment you need for your gender dysphoria, regardless of the particulars of your story.” Rose's book was first published in 2004, the same year my father had her operation. I wondered how my father had addressed her own particulars.

“Sometimes I wish Harry Benjamin had never existed,” Mel Myers told me. “It might have been better if they just let us trans girls suffer in the darkness.” Some months after Mel and I met at Coffee People to talk about my father's stay at Melanie's Cocoon, we met for dinner at a Thai restaurant called Miso Happy. “I manipulated my therapist,” Mel said over our soup, and elaborated. “I knew all the answers. I'd come out of there like, ‘Ha! I nailed that!' ” Maybe that wasn't such a victory, he thought now. “The doctors could have guided me better. I wish there were therapists available to help some of us
not
go all the way. Maybe I could've just learned …”

“Learned what?” I asked.

“To live with myself.”

“Do you think”—I hesitated—“do you think my father shouldn't have had the operation?”

“I can't say why Stefánie was driven to do it,” Mel said, “and she was too closed down for me to know.” He picked at the remains of a spring roll on his plate. “Of the hundreds of transsexuals I've met, I'd say ten of them probably should have done it. Not that they
shouldn't
transition, but it's just too hard for them. They are always going to have to live as a ‘trans person.' They are never going to pass.”

In the three weeks that my father stayed at Melanie's Cocoon, she did not impress Mel as someone for whom the transition would be easy. “Actually, I kind of hoped Stefánie wouldn't stay with me,” Mel confessed. “I felt kind of threatened around him,” he said. “Her,” he amended. “Something about her was”—he considered—“overbearing. But I had just opened my guesthouse, and I had to recruit customers. So I went into her hospital room and gave her my pitch. At first she was pretty defensive and looking at me like, ‘What sort of a scam is this?' But after a while, she started saying to the nurses, ‘Well, maybe I'll stay at Melanie's house.' ”

Mel called up some pictures of the Cocoon on his Palm Pilot. It was an airy wood-frame house with a wrap-around porch, ringed with palm trees and banana plants, high on a hill above the beach (high enough to make it through the December 2004 tsunami unscathed). Guests had their own rooms with a private bath. Melanie had decorated the common area with wicker furniture, eight clocks set to different time zones around the world, and inspirational art. The room's signature piece was an oil painting of a naked woman with long blond hair, gazing out a brightly lit window. “She is looking out into a new day,” Mel said. “Everybody who's stayed with me identifies with it.” Melanie prodded her guests into that new day with field trips to the beach, women's clothing boutiques, nightclubs, and the Phuket FantaSea Show, “The Ultimate Nighttime Cultural Theme Park.” (My father would show me the video she bought in the FantaSea gift shop, featuring the park's most popular attractions: a nightly “Cultural Illusion Show” where herds of elephants appear and disappear “at will,” a simulated thunder-and-lightning storm, and a photo studio that invited customers to get their pictures taken in “traditional” Thai costumes.)

Melanie's recruitment efforts at the plastic surgery wings of Phuket's hospitals that May paid off. She signed up a half dozen guests, all male-to-female transsexuals. My father was, by far, the oldest. She was also the “most alone,” Melanie said. “Stefánie seemed isolated, even more than the others. Maybe it was because of her culture or history, but the others couldn't relate to her. None of the other five wanted to visit with her. I had to push them. I talked her up as ‘The Great Hungarian!' ”

The other guests, who were in their twenties and thirties and came from the United States, England, and Australia, did not share the Great Hungarian's interests. “Your father arrived with all this equipment, a huge videocam, movies, computer, opera videos. Stefánie wanted to force opera on everybody. She was blasting German opera on these bad speakers. She had all these movies she wanted us to watch, and they were also in German. Stefánie said she'd translate, and I had to tell her not to, that people didn't want that sort of entertainment. And she had a lot of pictures on her computer that she wanted everyone to see, and people got tired of looking at them. At one point I even took her to this luxury hotel for brunch where German people stay, thinking maybe she'd like to check in there. But she stayed for three weeks. And she wanted all this attention.”

Mel shot me a self-deprecating grin. “Of course, that's what people accuse
me
of! Always wanting attention!” He laughed. “Transsexuals are … we can be wrapped up in ourselves.” My father's manner, though, put Mel's guests off for another reason. “Stefánie had this very
dominating
style, like a hammer coming down. I don't think she was being sensitive enough about the niceties of being a woman.”

I wasn't sure what this portfolio of “niceties” entailed. And I had surely hated my father's domination growing up. But I was somehow pleased that, whoever my father had become on the operating table, whatever category she'd hoped to join, she was already, incorrigibly, defying the template.

“When Stefánie was staying with me,” Mel said, “she talked to me once about being in the war.”

“Yes?” I asked, a little jealous that my father was reminiscing with Melanie, and also surprised. Had the butterfly poised to leave her chrysalis for a new life been revisiting his caterpillar past?

Two details had struck Mel. “She said she gave out fake birth certificates. And she said she had an armband with a swastika or something that she would wear, so they wouldn't know she was a Jew.”

Mel was dubious but intrigued. “I laughed and I made this remark,” Mel said, “and Stefánie gave me kind of an odd look. I couldn't tell if she thought it was funny or not. … I said, ‘So, you were a trans-Nazi?' ”

—————

Mel's account of my father's stay in the house where the painted lady “looked out on a new day” had brought my thoughts back around to my father's wartime past. On a subsequent evening in Portland, I paid a visit to a witness who'd known my father in that earlier time, someone my father had also recommended I contact. “Call Otto,” she said. “He knows everybody from our school.” Otto Szekely had been my father's classmate at the Zsidó Gimnázium, the Jewish high school in Budapest.