by Rachel Gold
Next to Steve, three people had settled into a close circle of chairs. I thought they looked like men in dresses, with at least one trying very hard not to look like a man in a dress, then mentally kicked myself. I’d hate it if anyone thought that about me. And I probably looked like that sometimes because I was still learning how to sit and move. It wasn’t like I could practice sitting like a girl at home.
“Those two are just cross-dressers,” Natalie said. She indicated the third. “And she’s a little off-balance but super sweet and knows everything about the 1800s, so if you don’t know what to say, ask about that.”
Steve had moved closer to us when he heard Natalie say his name and cleared his throat, “‘Just cross-dressers?’ Nat, why do you have to be like that?”
He introduced himself to me and I told him, “You look great. Is that okay to say?”
“I never tire of hearing it.” He turned and called across the room, “Badri, come meet Emily.”
The short person who crossed the room to us wore a bright blue flannel and a gray fleece vest that reminded me of my dad’s collection of pocketed vests. Dark brown skin framed the kind of smile that made me feel we were already sharing an inside joke.
We introduced ourselves and I learned that Badri’s pronouns were “they” and “them.” I was going to have to practice that.
Then Steve said to Badri, “Nat’s being a transphobic trans girl again.”
“I am not,” Natalie insisted. “I’m only saying cross-dressing isn’t the same as medical transition.”
“You think I have it easier than you because I don’t take hormones?” Badri asked.
“That’s so not fair.” Natalie waved at the women in the chairs. “Those ladies can afford anything they want. They just don’t want to leave their wives and their comfortable lives.”
I had a flash of fear remembering how it felt when I thought Claire was breaking up with me—and we’d only been together months, not years.
“That would be so hard,” I said. “Loving someone and being together that long. I’d be so scared.”
“Transition doesn’t mean you have to leave anyone,” Natalie told me, softening as she said it.
“But sometimes they leave you or throw you out,” Steve said. “Even if they do, you find your people.” He put his arm around Badri’s shoulders.
Elizabeth called the meeting to order. We all went around and gave a few details about ourselves and what was going on in our lives. Renee had been at the same job for twenty years and still dressed as a man to go to work. She was trying to figure out how to talk to her HR department about coming to work as a woman. But she worked as a children’s librarian and was terrified, with good reason, that she’d be fired as soon as she came out.
I wished I’d had someone like her around when I was a kid going to the library.
Vivianna gave an update about her and her husband’s quest to adopt a child. She’d changed all of her records, updated them to “female” but was still afraid that if people found out she was transgender, they wouldn’t let her adopt.
When it came around to me, I tried to think of something intelligent to say. “I’m Emily,” I said, feeling ridiculous using that name with my deep voice and lanky body. “I’m in high school, and I’m trying to figure out how to talk to my parents. I have a good therapist and a really great girlfriend.”
There was scattered applause and welcomes.
“That therapist will really help,” Vivianna said. “I worked with one for almost a year and when I came out to my parents it was such a non-issue. I was in my early twenties and living on my own by then, but my parents said they’d always suspected and my mother said she always wanted a daughter. I have three brothers. I hope it’s like that for you.”
Steve spoke next. “Mine said they understood, but they keep screwing up my name and my pronouns. My mom asked me to shave and wear a dress to my cousin’s wedding. I didn’t go.”
“Oh that sucks so bad,” Natalie told him. “It’s so invalidating. And it’s ridiculous, you look like such a guy, no one would read you.”
To “read” someone was to assume they were trans, and it could happen even to people who weren’t. Being read as a trans person could mean real danger. Even if you weren’t trans but someone thought you were, you could get thrown out of places and beaten up.
Natalie was right that no one would see Steve as anything other than a guy. How embarrassing to look like a guy to everyone and have your parents call you “she.” And how cruel to get reminded in every sentence that these people who were supposed to love you didn’t want you to be yourself.
“I’m still working on forgiving my parents,” Badri said. “They didn’t formally throw me out of the house but they made it clear I wasn’t welcome if I wouldn’t do gender the way they wanted. I ended up homeless for a year. I’m so grateful for the Host Home Program here.” Badri looked at me and added, “It’s a foster program for queer and trans kids. My foster parents got me through college and now, I feel that I should forgive my birth parents, but I don’t know if I ever want to see them again.”
“You don’t owe them,” Vivianna insisted. “They should know how hard it is. Shame on them.”
“Yeah,” Badri said with a sad laugh. “Brown trans kids on the streets don’t have that many options. If white folks think I’m a guy, they’re scared of me, but if they think I’m a girl, it’s worse.”
Steve caught Badri’s hand and held it, muscles clenching in the side of his jaw. I felt so grateful for Claire and Dr. Mendel, for my home—and afraid of what I could lose if I came out to Mom and Dad. Was it worth it?
As the group broke into smaller conversations, Elizabeth sat next to me. “Was it helpful to come today?” she asked.
“It was good,” I said. “I have a lot of work to do.”
She looked me in the eyes. “You won’t regret it. If it’s what you want, you’ll never look back.”
“I know,” I said. “It just seems so hard.”
“Everyone has to go through a journey to become themselves. It’s just more of a challenge for some than others, but a greater challenge also means a greater opportunity.”
“Right,” I said, unconvinced.
She opened her purse and pulled out her wallet, sliding a small picture out from behind the credit cards. “I don’t show this to a lot of people,” she said. “But I think you need to see it.”
In the photo, a young man glared angrily at the camera, his hair hastily brushed to one side and his brows lowered menacingly. He’d set his lips in a tight line, but that didn’t disguise the full bow shape of his mouth and how it looked exactly like Elizabeth’s. I stared at her. The only similarities were the shape of her face, her lips and her nose. Anyone else would have assumed they’d been siblings.
“No,” I said. There was no way that had been her. I felt like an idiot for assuming she wasn’t one of us, and at the same time, I was thrilled.
“Twenty-seven years ago,” she told me.
“Wow, you think I could look like you?”
“No, I think you could look like yourself. You’ll be beautiful.” She took the picture back and put it away. “You’re welcome here anytime.”
“Thanks,” I told her, beaming.
On the way back to the car, Natalie asked, “Isn’t she cool? She went to Europe in the eighties to get the surgery.”
When I dropped Natalie off at her house, she paused and fished in her purse. “Hey, this isn’t really kosher, and I wouldn’t do this for anyone else, but with you stuck out there in the boonies and everything…” She handed me a small prescription bottle.
The label had her name on it. I turned it over in my hand. “How? You can’t give me yours.”
She smirked. “I told my doctor that I accidentally threw out my hormones when I was cleaning up and got a refill. That should last you a month or more. You might start with a half dose and see how you feel. Then maybe we can figure out how to get you your ow
n supply. I don’t think my doctor will go for the ‘lost it’ thing more than once.”
She clicked the clasp on her purse open and shut, staring out the window at the front of her house. “My mom would kill me if she knew about this. But I remember how bad it felt when everything about my body seemed against me, you know?”
“Uh, yeah.”
“Every day I was hairier and rougher and further from who I wanted to be. Maybe when I’d been a little kid, if I’d dressed in girl clothes and had a girl’s name, being seen as a girl would’ve stopped all that hate from building up. But I don’t see you getting to show up as a girl in your life right now, so this is what we’ve got. It might be different for you, but when I started on hormones, I started to like my body. I treated myself a lot better. I don’t think you should have to wait for that. You have to live in your body every day. It should feel like home.”
“Not like I’m stuck on Mars?” I asked and, hearing what I’d said, laughed.
“Mars, exactly.”
“Thank you so much.”
“Take ’em with a meal,” she said and flashed me a grin. “And for goodness sake, hide them well. It’s easier to explain hard drugs to your parents than hormones.”
I hugged her. “It’s wonderful, thanks.”
The whole drive back to Liberty, I imagined what it would be like to be able to go through my days without always having to remember to be a guy. Elizabeth transitioned twenty-seven years ago and she was only in her middle age now. She’d already lived more than half her life as a woman. What if I could be myself all the time?
When I got home, Mikey was watching TV with Dad. Mom was in the bedroom we kept as an office for paying bills and stuff. I went up to her and leaned on the filing cabinet. She sat at the desk sorting through a pile of mail with her hair messy like usual on weekends. She wouldn’t wear sweatpants around the house, but she had on a pair of loose terrycloth pants and a sweater jacket.
“How was your trip to the city?” she asked distractedly.
“It was cool,” I said. “I saw something unusual.”
“Hmm, what?” She dropped an envelope onto a short pile on the desk and opened the next piece of mail.
I’d thought about the right way to say this on the drive back. I couldn’t say “trans woman” or “a woman who’d been assigned male at birth.” That was way over Mom’s head and she’d want to know where I’d gotten that language. She’d know this wasn’t a casual, passing thing. Right now I had to keep pretending.
So I said, “A woman who used to be a man.”
“What?” she pivoted her chair to face me. “How?”
“I guess surgery,” I said, trying to sound super-super casual.
“How did you know?” she asked. Her eyes narrowed and her lips pressed together tightly at the end of the question.
“She told me. She said sometimes women get born into men’s bodies—”
“You were talking to strange…people?”
“In the middle of the mall, it was harmless,” I said. “I can take care of myself. I thought it was interesting that that’s possible.”
“Chris,” Mom said in her stern voice. “I don’t want you going into the city alone, and you certainly don’t need to spend time talking to freaks like that. If that happens again, you get up and leave.”
I managed not to flinch. Barely. I knew I should get out of this conversation now, but I had to defend something. “It was just a conversation, Mom, she wasn’t hitting on me.”
“You don’t know what people like that are thinking. You’re a good-looking young man and you need to be more careful. Promise me you’ll watch out for yourself.”
“Sure, Mom.” The metal shutters had come down the front of my body and I was back to being a robot.
She stood up and gave me a kiss on the cheek. “Don’t tell that to your dad, he would flip.”
“Okay,” I said. “I guess I’ll go work on my homework.”
I went upstairs and lay down on my bed feeling torn in half. One half was happy and excited about life. She’d gone to a support group meeting and got hormones and she had a girlfriend who loved her.
The other half was a papier-mâché shell that looked like a guy on the outside and was hollow within. His emptiness rang with echoes of my mom’s voice saying “freaks like that,” “you’re a good-looking young man,” and “your dad would flip.”
I fell asleep staring at nothing and dreamed that the papier-mâché man was choking me to death.
Chapter Fourteen
I took a fraction of Natalie’s hormone pill with breakfast the next morning. I didn’t expect to feel different right away, but I did feel lighter when I went to school. That was probably the placebo effect, or pure hopefulness. Yes, my mom thought transgender people were freaks—that wasn’t unusual for a woman who’d spent all her life in rural Minnesota. Not to mention that most of her life had been without Internet. She’d come around when she saw how happy I was. Right?
During science class, I imagined the hormones soaking into all the cells of my body, reassuring each little bit of me that everything was going to be all right. I sailed through the day. In psych class I gave Mr. Cooper the decoy paper that Claire had emailed me the day before. I’d changed a few details, but her story was very good at imagining what it was like to be a boy waking up as a girl. A lot better than my version.
The week waltzed by and on Thursday I met Claire after school to go to Dr. Mendel with me. I’d told Mom she didn’t need to come along to make sure that I was going. When that failed to convince, I added that I planned to bring Claire so we could talk about “boy-girl” stuff. That did the trick.
Claire and I sat on the couch in Dr. Mendel’s office. Claire’s fingers tapped out a pattern on the arm. She kept crossing her legs one way and then the other as Dr. Mendel closed the door and settled into the chair across from us. Claire might have worn extra black for the visit: she had on black cobweb earrings and black bracelets in addition to the usual black shirt, jeans and boots. I’d made it all the way down to sweater number six this week, a light tan, and Dr. Mendel was in a cream colored jacket over a plum shell and gray pants.
“Thank you for coming,” Dr. Mendel said to Claire. “I’ve heard a lot of wonderful things about you. And you also game together?”
“I play a paladin mostly,” Claire said. She thought Dr. Mendel asking me what kinds of characters I played was supercool, so I was glad Dr. Mendel started there again.
Dr. Mendel said, “It’s no wonder you’re Emily’s protector in the real world then.”
“You think so?” Claire asked. “That I’m a protector?”
“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 admitted.
“That’s natural. Emily had years to figure this out. You had to adapt to a lot of new knowledge in a few weeks,” 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 all 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. I wanted to know what questions she 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. “Like, lots of cultures seem to have had men who dressed like women, or who lived as women: ancient Sumer, Greece
and Rome, Native American cultures. And it sounds like some people are okay 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. First it’s important to remember historically that surgeries and hormones might not have been an option. We don’t know that people were okay only dressing as women or if that’s how their culture allowed them to be women. Many cultures have included other genders in different ways, using the medical knowledge they had at the time. Some cultures have not only third genders, but fourth genders and more.”
She paused, grinned and said, “Did you know Jewish law recognizes six genders? We have to be careful not to put our current beliefs about sex and gender onto other cultures.”
“Oh cool. I get that,” Claire said. She’d pressed her hands together, the way she did when she listened intently.
“Gender nonconforming is a much larger category than trans or people with gender dysphoria,” Dr. Mendel said. “It’s also how we prefer to label young children, rather than saying they’re transgender, because there are boys who love dresses and the color pink who don’t later identify as transgender. And there are plenty of girls who are tomboys.”
“Or who like cars,” I said and Claire grinned at me.
Dr. Mendel went on, “I think everyone has had some experience of gender nonconformity. When I went to college in the sixties there were quite a few people who felt that women wearing pants was gender nonconforming. I’m glad we got rid of that idea. 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 gender they were assigned at birth. And even gender dysphoria isn’t an unchanging condition. There are children who experience gender dysphoria but it doesn’t persist. Not every feminine boy or masculine girl is transgender.”
