by Rachel Gold
He left. I curled deeper into the clothes pile, wishing it would all go away. My head felt crushed. My eyes and sinuses burned with a damp fire.
Dad came back a few minutes later. I was still crying, but not so hard. The tears rolled down my face whether I tried to stop them or not. Dad had a stack of washcloths, bandage pads, tape and a bag of ice that he put on my right knuckles once he had a washcloth in place to stop the blood. He cleaned up my left hand and then very carefully ran a damp cloth over the right.
“Shit,” was the one word he said during this process. He opened a couple of sterile bandage pads, pressed them over the knuckles and taped them loosely.
Then he helped me pull one of his baggy sweatshirts down over my head. I didn’t realize how cold I was until he put the shirt on me. I started shivering uncontrollably.
He looped an arm under my shoulders and helped me across the room to my bed. Dragging my desk chair across the room, he sat next to the bed and put the ice pack on my bandaged hand. I struggled to come up with words but before any came I fell into an exhausted sleep.
Chapter Twenty-Four
When I woke up in the late morning, my right hand had a swollen lump that joined the knuckles together in a puffy, blue-purple mass. As loose as the tape was on the bandage, it still strained from the swelling. I gingerly pulled up one edge and peeked underneath. A line of scabs crossed my knuckles where the skin had split and torn. Most of the skin that should have been on my middle knuckle was gone, leaving a raw, red patch.
It hurt with both throbbing and burning pain. I couldn’t close my hand. I went and stood in the shower for a long time, holding the bandage out from the spray and wondering if I could leave home now. I could get in my car and drive to the Cities and find a job doing something stupid, but I’d be a kid from the sticks with no high school diploma.
Back in my room I put on jeans and a T-shirt and then listened to the sounds of the house, trying to figure out where my parents were. I was hungry enough to feel my stomach growl, but not hungry enough to walk into the kitchen if Mom was there. I noticed that Dad had cleared out the remnants of my torn up clothes from the night before and moved the desk back to where it belonged. The bolt on my door had torn its casing out of the molding, leaving two ragged holes where the screws had been. The casing hung off the end of the extended bolt at a ridiculous angle. I pulled it free, dropped it on my bed, and pushed the bolt back along the door.
My parents weren’t making any of their usual Sunday noises. After ten minutes I began to worry that they were sitting in the kitchen waiting for me to come down. I wasn’t going to give them the satisfaction. I’d starve myself first. I lay back on my bed and folded my left hand behind my head, staring up at the white ceiling.
After a while, Dad’s footsteps came up the stairs, heavy and slow. He knocked on my door. “Chris?”
“Yeah,” I said.
He pushed the door open. “You coming downstairs so we can talk?”
I shrugged. “Is Mom going to rail on me again?”
“No.”
He sounded so tired that I sat up and looked at him. His carpenter pants and shirt were as wrinkled as if he’d slept in them, and his face was deeply lined, eyes sunken and dark.
“Okay.” I stood up more because of his face than what he said. I cared about him, and I felt a little afraid of him, but today he looked as beat up as I felt, so I figured I’d stick with him, at least until things got ugly.
I followed him downstairs and into the kitchen. Mom sat at the table, hands wrapped white-knuckle tight around a cup of coffee. If I decided to spend the rest of the day in my room, this would be my one chance today to eat something. I got myself a bowl of cereal before sitting down at the far end of the table, away from Mom. She looked at Dad.
He settled into his usual chair and said, slowly, “We think you should go see someone again. Someone who can help you.”
“You’re the ones who stopped the visits with Dr. Mendel,” I pointed out.
“We want you to go back to Dr. Webber,” he said.
If I hadn’t cried myself out the night before, I might have started yelling at them about what a jerk he was. But I was so tired and worn out, and I wanted to know my options. I had nothing left to lose here. If it didn’t get better fast, I was leaving.
“What’s in it for me?” I asked.
“A chance to be well,” Dad said.
I rolled my eyes. “I know what’s wrong with me. That is not going to make me well.”
Mom sighed. “Honey, would you try to have an open mind? Maybe you’re wrong about all this, have you thought of that?”
“What if I’m not? How long are you going to make me prove myself?”
They looked at each other. Dad shook his head and Mom frowned. “What is it you want?” she asked.
This was clearly not the time to bring up surgery or going out dressed as a woman. “I want to see an endocrinologist, to go on hormone therapy,” I told them.
“What is that?” Mom asked.
“It’s part of the process of transition…to a woman,” I explained. She opened her mouth, but I said, “Listen. I’d start taking hormones for a year or two and the effects are reversible. If it turns out I’m wrong, I can stop.”
I wanted to tell them how much better I felt when I was taking the hormones, more like myself and in charge of my life, less angry and hopeless. But then I’d have to admit I’d been taking someone else’s prescription and that would get both me and Natalie in trouble.
“You want to take women’s hormones?” Mom asked, her voice rising sharply at the end.
“You will when you hit menopause,” I said. “Lots of people take hormones.”
“I’m a woman,” she said harshly.
“So am I,” I shot back.
The three of us lapsed into cold silence. I wondered where they’d stashed Mikey and if he was going to pop out of the other room at any moment and shout “fag” at me or if he was upstairs again trying not to cry. Then it occurred to me that they must have left him over at his friend’s house so they could have this talk with their unfortunate “son.”
“All right, look,” Dad said abruptly as he stood up from the table. He put his palms on the tabletop and leaned in toward both of us. “I’m no good at this shit and I’m sick of it. Chris, you’re going to see Dr. Webber for the next month, and Sharon you go with him if you want. At the end of August if you still want to go, I’ll take you to a hormone doctor and we’ll see what he says. I don’t want to hear any more about this.”
He stalked away from the kitchen and a moment later the slam of the garage door echoed through the house.
Mom went upstairs. I washed my cereal bowl, dried it and put it back in the cupboard so it looked like I’d never been in the kitchen. Then I put on my coat and boots and left. Let Mom tell me later if I was still grounded.
I drove around for a while and then went to the public library to update my friends online about everything that had happened. I wanted to see Claire, but I was afraid that when I did, I’d start crying again. I sent her an email instead. Then I went home to a very quiet dinner.
Monday morning, Mom and Dad went off to work as usual. I watched Mikey in the early part of the day, but then he went over to a friend’s house. I drove to the nearest Home Depot, which wasn’t all that near, and bought a new piece of molding for my doorframe. Then I went over to Claire’s house. She put her arms around me as soon as she saw me in her doorway and dragged me to the couch. She didn’t let go for about three hours.
* * *
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 came 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 the doctor was going to say. His hair was still closely cropped and neatly combed 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 seemed 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 could sit up straight and relaxed at the same time. I never saw her trying to sit up straight; she just did it. Dr. Webber swayed and caught himself, straightened up and shifted his shoulders into place like he was always trying to find a midpoint and missing each time.
I told him, “Actually, things got better for a long time, and then my parents freaked out, and since then it’s pretty much sucked.”
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. “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 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. 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, propping him up even straighter. “How old were you then, five, six? What was going on in the home at that time?”
He directed that second question 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 very 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 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.”
She and Dr. Webber were the ones living in a fantasy with a super simplistic notion of biology and sex and gender. I could’ve explained so many problems with his thinking to her, but she’d never listen. She’d heard what she wanted to.
“How many times do we have to go?” I asked.
“As many as it takes until you become the man you were meant to be.”
I stared out the window. That would be one hell of a long wait. I’d be out of the house in a year anyway.
When we pulled into the driveway, I said, “I’m going over to Claire’s.”
I slammed into my car and left before she could protest. At Claire’s house, she said what a jerk Webber 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.
Chapter Twenty-Five
By the next week, I was ready to change my mind on that last point. 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 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.”
“What about it?”
“Your mother tells me you have a girlfriend.” He leaned forward, slipped a mint into his mouth and held the tin out to me. I wanted to smack it out of his hand, so I ignored it.
“Yeah,” I said.
“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? 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 a whim?”
“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 t
o 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 questioned what I was really thinking about. But there was no way in hell I was going to talk to him about it.
* * *
I was already watching Mom obsessively, wanting to stay out of her path as much as possible. Some days hearing, “You look so handsome today,” felt stupid, but the more I saw Dr. Webber, the more Mom’s compliments felt like kicks aimed at me. She didn’t mean it that way. She was trying to encourage me. But it felt like I’d opened the lid of a box, started to climb out and she was determined to kick me back in.
She took me shopping for more guy clothes. Wanted to know if I needed a gym membership so I could stay in shape for swimming. Kept making eggs and steak for breakfast. Was letting me know in every way what body I was supposed to feel at home in, what body I was supposed to want. Like I didn’t know. Like I hadn’t already tried all of this.
But I did some of it. She bought me short-sleeve Henleys because apparently the Henley is the most masculine of all the shirts, according to an article she’d read. And of course they were steel gray and army green and one raglan style that managed to combine two boring gray colors that looked worse together and terrible on me.
I wore them. And rolled the sleeves and tried to pretend I was a 1950s butch, which worked not at all.
I started watching Dad too. Could there be anything to the idea that I didn’t want to be like him? I didn’t like how silent he could get, unreactive, but I respected it and found it calming. I wanted more emotions. Did that make me a girl or was that because I already was one?
By the end of the third Dr. Webber visit, I felt shaky inside. He said more things about “arousal” and got anatomically specific in ways that creeped me out. He seemed to think that my attraction to girls was the reason I wanted to be one. Never mind that billions of straight guys could be attracted to girls without wanting to be women. And never mind all the lesbians and bi women in the world.
