Being Emily (Anniversary Edition)

by Rachel Gold

  Emily wiped off her lips. “You might be trying too hard,” she said.

  “All the time,” Claire replied as she wiped off her makeup.

  “Movie?” Emily asked.

  She’d turned to the screen and picked up the remote, but Claire saw the flash of sadness in the dark of her eyes. If girls together took turns, it was definitely Claire’s turn. She pushed off the couch and got in front of Emily, fingers on her jaw, tipping her face up. She put her lips on Emily’s, kissing with increasing pressure until Emily’s hands went to her waist and pulled her down to the couch.

  This time no sticky lip gloss got in the way. For the first few minutes of making out, part of Claire’s mind stood apart from the experience, waiting to see if anything felt new in a bad way. Emily smelled sweeter than Claire was used to and her kisses felt more tentative, but that was easy to understand.

  Claire’s favorite parts of the experience hadn’t changed. She still loved strong hands on her back, and it didn’t matter if those were a boy’s or a girl’s. She appreciated being kissed carefully and thoughtfully. And she loved the feeling of melting into another human being that she cared about. She let her whole mind dissolve into that.

  So much so that an hour later, she almost didn’t hear the garage door going up. At least Emily had. She lunged off the couch and into the bathroom to get her makeup off. Claire scrambled back into her shirt and clicked on a movie, fast-forwarding it to the middle so her mom would think they’d been watching it.

  The downside to that, she hadn’t realized, was that Mom now expected her and “Chris” to watch the second half of the movie together, with Mom at home. Upside: she’d hastily selected Transformers, so at least Mom didn’t try to join them. Emily had already seen it with Mikey, but she settled in next to Claire and took her hand, entwining their fingers.

  Nodding at the screen, after Mom had gone into her room to change, Emily whispered, “Is this your first attempt at a trans joke?”

  Claire blinked at the image of car turning into a robot. “It is now,” she said. “Maybe you can use this with Mikey when you tell him.”

  “He’ll expect me to have super powers.”

  “Don’t you?” Claire asked and leaned into Emily.

  “If turning from a robot into a person counts, then yes.”

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The big day was coming. I’d gone back and forth about when to come out to my parents—but I solidified my resolve when I started seeing the bottom of the pill bottle around the few remaining hormone pills. I’d started taking them again in May and the last few weeks I’d felt a difference in myself. I wasn’t so angry all the time and on the darkest days, the fierce edge of the blackness seemed to dull.

  More exciting was the fact that my skin softened all over my body. As I let the hair grow back in on my arms, it seemed lighter than it had been. I could begin to understand how much my body would change in this process, how I really could stop trying to be a man altogether and become the woman I knew myself to be.

  Homework at Claire’s for two months had brought my grades into the B-to-A range. And going out with her—no, not going out, but coming back to her house, her making out with me like she used to—gave me strength.

  I told Mom and Dad that I had something I wanted to talk to them about and asked them to come see Dr. Mendel with me that Thursday. They looked alarmed, but agreed to come with me when I refused to say more. Dr. Mendel said she’d set aside a couple of hours in case it took longer than our regular session to talk to them. I had stashed a few books at her office the week before that I thought would help them understand.

  I was so nervous on the way over that I couldn’t sit still. Dad drove and Mom kept turning around in her seat to squint at me as I wriggled in place.

  “I don’t know why we have to do this in her office,” Mom complained. “Why can’t you just tell us?”

  “It’s okay,” I said for the hundredth time. “It’s easier this way.”

  “Did you get Claire pregnant?” she asked, apparently her worst fear.

  “No, Mom, we’re not having sex, honest.”

  I willed the car to move faster, though Dad was a speedy driver to begin with. At the same time, I wondered how long it would take Mom to get to the right question. I worked out the math in my head. She was asking a question about every ninety seconds, which was about 960 questions a day, except that we’d need time to eat and sleep, so let’s assume 480 questions a day, or 2,880 questions a week. With Sunday off, would that be enough for her to get around to asking if I was a girl in a single week? Probably not.

  “Are you sick?” she asked.

  “No, Mom.”

  “But you needed an appointment to tell us about this?”

  “Yes.”

  We finally pulled into the parking lot, and I ushered them through the doors and up the stairs to the second floor lobby. I almost knocked on Dr. Mendel’s door I was so eager to get this over with, but she opened it less than a minute after we rounded the corner.

  “Come in,” she said. “Mr. and Mrs. Hesse, it’s good of you to come today. Please have a seat.”

  Mom and Dad sat on the couch, so I took the comfy chair on the end. Dr. Mendel sat in her usual spot facing the couch. Everyone in the room had dressed up for this appointment. I’d put on my darker jeans and a light blue button-down shirt. Mom was in one of her work outfits with slacks and a V-neck sweater that made her look younger and pretty. She even had on earrings and makeup, though she’d been home from work long enough to take them off if she wanted to. Cleaned up from his construction outfit, Dad wore khakis and a long-sleeved pullover shirt with a collar. And Dr. Mendel was actually in a long, gray knit dress with pearls looping down over her ample bosom and hanging in delicate silver drips from her ears. I bet she’d dressed more stereotypically female so that she’d have more authority with my parents about gender-related topics. Good call.

  I tried to take a deep breath, but my chest didn’t expand, so the attempt ended up long and shallow. Okay, what was the worst that could happen? They could throw me out. I’d 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 or maybe reminding me I didn’t want to be called by that name the rest of my life. We’d 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, and braced my hands on my legs. “Thanks for coming. So, ah. Well, I don’t know how to say this so if it comes out funny I hope you’ll 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, glancing back and forth between them and my hands. Dad’s eyebrows were 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 played along, but I’ve always known I was a girl.”

  “No you’re not,” Mom repeated. “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. “Sometimes kids get born with the brain of the other sex. It’s called being transgender. It 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.

  Dad’s hand, resting on his thigh, twitched open and closed. Dr. Mendel sat like a rock and watched them, her face calm but intense. 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 over the last few months, more self-expression for Chris has led to greater confidence, better grades, less depression.”

  Dr. Mendel very diplomatically avoided using pronouns in her statements. 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 insisted. She sat back against the couch and folded her arms tightly against her chest. Her eyes narrowed to hostile slits. “He needs to learn to live that way, not have his head filled with this nonsense.”

  Silence stretched out again until Mom stood up.

  “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 sex characteristics, and in some cases, that difference is so pronounced that the child knows that he or she is the other sex from the body he or she was born with,” she said in her grandmotherly tone. “It’s called 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 over a million people like Chris living in America. Many of them choose to transition their outward appearance to align with their gender identity, and live the rest of their lives 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 very bright and socially well developed. Considering what Chris has had to live with, she’s 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 she 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 to the ice sculpture of her face. I wanted to ask Dr. Mendel to rescue me, but I figured that wouldn’t help much. What could she do beyond what she already had?

  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. It’s natural for children to be curious about the other sex, to wonder what it’s like, but I think you’ll agree that having a persistent sense that you’re a girl over ten years or more is something very different from curiosity or a child trying on various roles.”

  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. “I still like girls.”

  “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 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 told me. “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 reassured 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 back seat, they didn’t say anything at all or look at me; the silence held all the way home. It held even when we picked up Mikey from his friend’s house down the street. He knew something was wrong and didn’t chatter on like he usually did.

  In the house, 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 and Mikey ran into the living room to turn on the TV.

  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 short 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. 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 put my hand on his shoulder. “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? 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, 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.”