Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (6 page)

The next day, Allie and I met for coffee after school, and when she broke down sobbing in the little bakery cafe on Main Street, I realized we really were finished. She insisted I hadn't done anything wrong, which was a sure sign. She said she just didn't love me the way she had when we'd met, and we'd probably gotten married too soon. We'd been, pure and simple, too young.

It was most likely a defense mechanism of sorts, but I decided she was probably right. I said so to myself, and then I reached across the little glass table and took her hands and agreed with her. I stared for a long time at her wedding ring, and then at mine.

The fact was, I'd spent the last year or year and a half unreasonably angry at something I never could quite identify: My mother's losing battle with Lou Gehrig's disease. The construction firm that was behind the radio station's new home and was constantly finding reasons to go over budget. The station's board of directors, who seemed to want me--a very young and green station president--to listen to every whiner who sent in his twenty-five-dollar annual membership check.

I was even squabbling with my older brother that year, snapping at him without reason whenever we'd speak on the phone. I was giving him parenting advice that he certainly didn't need, and telling him how I thought he should deal with the building contractor who was adding a couple of dormers to the west wall of his house--and, because he was only working on the project every third or fourth day, had been at work on it all summer long. The scaffolding had been there since Memorial Day, making whole rooms shady even at noon.

Given my attitude, I decided right there in the bakery that perhaps it was time to try something new. Maybe, like Allie, a part of me longed for something more.

Or, perhaps, somebody else.

Maybe that would even be best for Carly. It can't be healthy to watch your parents snap at each other like angry turtles in a terrarium, or to see your mom sad.

This is, of course, what every parent in the midst of a divorce says to himself. At least every decent one: I'm actually doing my kid a favor by leaving. In the long run, she'll be happier, right? Right?

A little more than a decade later, long after my ex-wife and I had settled into a pretty terrific friendship, I think I began to understand what Allie had been feeling back then. And while I didn't believe I was especially morose the summer that Allie started to see Dana, I probably wasn't a great blessing to be around. I was growing so desirous of being alone that instead of going straight home after work, some evenings I'd stop and park at a patch of dirt just beyond the high wire fence that marked the edge of a runway at Burlington Airport, and I'd watch the planes swoop down just above me. I'd tell myself I'd only stay for one more Saab 340, one more Dash 8, one more Boeing 737--a jet that seemed absolutely massive, compared to the commuter planes, with their primitive propellers, that linked Burlington with Boston. But I never kept my word to myself, and some nights I would get home half an hour or forty-five minutes late.

One evening when Patricia asked me how work was, and I mumbled--as I did always that summer--that it was fine, she accused me of being incommunicative.

"Why do you say that?" I asked.

"Because your own radio station reported the battle you had with protesters today over your tower on Mount Chittenden!" she answered, referring to the hikers who were complaining, yet again, about the radiation from our broadcast tower on a mountain that was a part of the state's Long Trail.

"Oh."

"Well?"

"Well, what?"

"How was work?"

I shrugged. "It was fine," I repeated, and on one level I was telling the absolute truth. I'd been president of the station since I was thirty-one. It would have taken an earthquake that brought down the building for work to be anything but fine.

Looking back, it's easy to see that I, too, was ready for a change--at work, maybe, or perhaps at home. Maybe simply in bed.

Of course, I didn't see it that way at the time. I merely assumed I was going through a phase.

Chapter 6.

dana

THERE ARE TWO WORLDS OF PEOPLE AROUND ME. There is a world in which everyone knows I was born a man, and there is a world in which no one has any clue whatsoever.

Sometimes the two orbits will overlap, and a person will discover rather suddenly my history with gender. If that person is particularly brazen--or, it seems, a reporter--he (and yes, in my experience, more times than not it has indeed been a
he)
will ask one or both of two questions:

Does it work? (Translation: Do you have orgasms?)

Did I ever assume I was merely a homosexual? (Translation: Isn't this just about penetration? About wanting
to be
penetrated?)

The first question is actually much easier to answer than I imagine it is to ask. Yes, I can answer honestly, it works just fine. (Translation: Touch me right and you'll have to peel me off the ceiling.)

The second question is more complicated, and it seemed to me that some of the folks from NPR--one engineer in particular--were always coming back to it. It was clear they were trying to be tolerant and open-minded, but their inquiries implied they suspected that I'd been driven to my decision by an army of unbearable homophobes.

Always, of course, they were forgetting completely one teeny-tiny detail: I
was
gay! I just happened to be a gay woman.

Now, in all fairness, I had indeed toyed with the notion that I might be a gay male at different times in my life, but it was always a desperate, and increasingly pathetic, fantasy. After all, even in
this
world it's a hell of a lot easier to be a gay male than a transsexual.

But three times I had sex with men, and each event was an almost unimaginable disaster. The fact is, I simply wasn't attracted to men or interested in gay male sex. To be perfectly honest, I had always been the sort of man who would absolutely dread his prostate exam for days in advance, so the whole idea of anal penetration was going to be problematic for me at best. It was only after a trio of homosexual liaisons failed to elicit a single ejaculation--regardless of who did what to whom--that I figured I'd had my three strikes and was out.

More important, that second question assumes that gender is all about sex, or that sexual preference is at the core of our gender. I can't speak for other transsexuals, but there is no way on God's green earth I would have become a born-again woman just so the sex would be hot. No orgasm in the world is worth all that electrolysis.

Truthfully, I became an external woman because I have always been an internal woman. That's all there is to it. And I've known this most of my life. I think I had the first solid clue when my sister was born. I was five, and my parents put her in my arms on the couch in our living room, and I was absolutely enchanted. I told them I couldn't wait to have a baby emerge from my tummy, too.

Quickly--almost curtly--my father reminded me of the few, rudimentary biological imperatives I had been taught during the preceding nine months. My mother rubbed my back.

Outside our living room was a screened-in porch with a small pool, and outside the porch was a wall of lush tropical foliage that separated us from our neighbors. I handed my sister to my mother, stood up, and went stamping my feet outside into our backyard. I clawed my way into the brush, found a spot in the dirt to curl up in, and then I started to cry. Soon I was howling like a toddler.

"It's not fair!" I screamed over and over. "It's not fair!"

And while my parents took comfort in the notion that my tantrum was simple panic because I had lost a monopoly on their attention, I knew the awful truth. The things I wanted most in the world were going to be forever denied me.

Worse, when I started elementary school, I learned that even small manifestations of femininity would be out of the question, too, and that my desires were, apparently, perverse. Yes, I wanted someday to have a real baby and real breasts, but at six, I would have been pacified with a plastic doll that looked like a newborn, and a couple of pretend diapers.

I knew, however, not to speak up.

I knew not to ask for dolls that were babies, and I knew not to ask for dolls that looked like Amazon models with eating disorders. I knew not to ask for dress-up clothes and little-girl makeup, I knew not to pretend I was a princess or a mermaid or a bride. I knew not to be a girl.

At least I knew not to in front of my family or friends.

Sometimes in my room, however, when I had shut my door for the night, I would go to the store. I placed my desk chair behind my toy chest and put my plastic cash register upon it. And then I would be the sales assistant one moment and Dana the customer the next, and I would pretend to buy a frilly dress with pink floral edging along the collar and sleeves. I would purchase a handbag, long shiny hair like my mother's--a chestnut-colored apron my parents never used would suffice--and I would leave the emporium shaped like an hourglass Barbie. Then I would crawl back into bed and press my little penis and my little balls deep behind the fat on my six-and seven-year-old thighs, and finally I would fall asleep.

Some nights I'd be crying. Some nights, not.

Sometimes I would take off my pajama bottoms and sleep in only my pajama top, pretending the loose shirt was actually a little girl's nightgown.

Invariably, my last thought would be the hope or the prayer that when I awoke in the morning, I would discover it had all been a dream. I would wake up clothed in a cotton nightdress covered with flowers, and my room would be draped in all manner of pink and lavender and rose. My closet would be rich with dresses and skirts, and my mother would help me get ready for school by brushing the tangles from my hair, and slipping a colorful barrette in place. Maybe that afternoon I'd have ballet class.

I stopped hoping and praying when I turned nine. I didn't know the word
deviant
. But I knew the word
bad
.

Jordan was on hormones, and so were Pinto and Marisa. Pinto and Marisa were lovers. Pinto was the only one in the group on male hormones, and the only person who planned, someday, to have the artists in Trinidad or Palo Alto sculpt a penis from forearm and calf muscle.

The first time I went to a meeting, I offered Pinto my penis and suggested we simply swap genitalia, but of course they aren't doing transplants yet.

The rest of the group were cross-dressers, drag queens, and a few conflicted souls who talked a lot about hormones and surgery, but admitted they weren't sure what they should do. I recognized two young folks from the university, and they recognized me. We promised not to tell anyone our little secret until we wanted it out in the open.

Altogether, there were about thirty-five of us in the Green Mountain Gender Benders, but there were usually no more than fifteen or twenty in attendance any given week. I'm a case in point. The whole time I was a member, I don't think I went to more than a dozen meetings: I went five or six times before I started on hormones, and five or six times after. I only went once after I met Allison.

We gathered in a party room at the back of a very tolerant bar on Colchester Avenue, but there were no windows and the place always smelled like keg beer gone bad. On the bright side, the room was dark--it actually had wallpaper that was supposed to look like wood paneling--which meant that most of us looked better than we had any right to.

I'm not sure why the group wasn't as helpful as Dr. Fuller thought it would be. Part of the problem may have been configuration. I don't have the same problems as a heterosexual man who likes to pass in women's clothing in public, or a gay man who likes to parade for the world in drag.

Okay, I had some of the same problems: Finding a pair of dress sling-backs that fit a man's size-nine flippers. Discovering a chenille sweater broad enough for my shoulders.

By and large, however, we probably would have been better off with three separate support groups. But in a city as small as Burlington, Vermont, that just wasn't going to happen. There weren't enough of us for three different groups.

At least there weren't enough transsexuals.

Still, I did get something out of the meetings. It was through the Benders that I found my electrologist, a woman who wasn't flustered by the challenges posed by a man in her chair. That was nice. And I'm sure it was healthy to be reminded that I wasn't the only human being on the planet who'd had a miserable adolescence, or who'd been born the victim of a howling chromosomal error. And it was probably very helpful to see how much the basics in life were huge to people like us: Pinto's desire to pee standing up; Marisa's yearning to wear a B-cup without padding; Jordan's hunger to fall in love with a man, and for that man to fall in love with her as a woman.