“This isn’t real.”
“Now you’ve got whatever you need.”
I’ve cried more in the last month than I ever want to cry again.
John touches my knee. “It’s all right, son. It’s gonna be all right.” He pats me and whispers it until there are no more tears.
Eventually I wipe my nose on my sleeve. “What if you need more money for bills?”
“I’ve got a little insurance, so that helps, and there’s plenty left after your check. Maybe even enough for a vacation with a lady friend. When I can use this arm better, that is.” He picks up his right arm with his left and shakes it at me, like he’s trying to get it to wave at me.
Another surprise. “Lady friend?” I’ve seen a car over here lately, but I haven’t wanted to ask.
His grin tells me it’s none of my business. “It’s not Cher. That’s all I’m saying right now. But I’ll bring her to Sunday supper at some point.” After he chugs more Pepsi, he looks around. “Those Ugly Children sure did a number on my house.”
Even a month later, there are still streamers all over the porch, and the GET WELL SOON sign is still planted in the yard where they pounded it in. I have to mow around it because John won’t let me take it out. The Elvis bust now has marker lipstick and a curly wig on, thanks to them, but they also brought John the cushy deck chair he’s sitting in, complete with a sign pinned to it: SIT HERE TO LISTEN TO MUSIC. They even put a banner on my house: WE HOPE YOU LIVE ON THIS SIDE OF JOHN. THANKS FOR BEING YOU. My dad made me take it down, but I hung it up in my room.
“So what’s up for this week’s show?” He takes the last swig of his Pepsi.
“All Devo, all hour.”
“The Ugly Children will divorce you if you do that. How about an all Barry Manilow show?”
“I’ll divorce myself if I do that.”
He grins. “If you want to fight, let’s scuffle about something important. Which band name is better—Mott the Hoople or Fountains of Wayne?”
And we argue and laugh until my mom comes home.
A Note from the Author
Dear Reader:
If you’ve reached this point of the book, you know Gabe is a transsexual. As you can gather from his story, he’s a guy in his brain, so he wants to take testosterone and have surgery to alter his body so it’s more like a man’s body. In case you’re wondering, doctors have been helping individuals match their brains and bodies up since the early part of the twentieth century.
But transsexuals are only one kind of people under the transgender umbrella. “The what?” you ask. “There’s a transgender umbrella? Like a rain umbrella?” Sort of. And you should know about it. Gabe’s not the only person standing there.
The transgender umbrella is a term created by people who study gender. It covers (like an umbrella, get it?) all the different kinds of individuals who express their gender differently than those of us who are comfortable in the man/woman gender binary. Transgender individuals aren’t new to the world, either. They’re a part of human history in cultures all around the globe.
The Latin prefix “trans” means (among other things) “across,” “beyond,” and “through.” We use the term “transgender” as an umbrella term because it can refer to anyone who doesn’t fit our traditional ideas of man and woman. When Gabe refers to himself as a trans man, it definitely describes him. However, individuals who are trans may choose to use more specific words to describe their bodies, brains, and lives, which is why he also refers to himself as a transsexual. Hopefully this little primer will help you understand Gabe and his real-life counterparts a bit better.
Before we start with the transgender distinctions, I need to clarify some definitions. In our world (and the world of the doctors Gabe will see someday), the word “sex” indicates internal and external sexual organs as well as chromosomes. The words that fit our human sexes are “male” and “female.” The word “gender” covers how we see ourselves related to the socially constructed categories of “man” and “woman.”
Gender and sex are not interchangeable. We are born with our sex. However, our society has created the roles of man or woman. “Man” and “woman” are not biological distinctions—they’re categories our culture made up—and what men and women do in the world are culturally defined. You know the assumptions that men go to work and women stay home with the kids (or whichever stereotypes you’d like to use)? We created those ideas—they weren’t handed to us by our biologies. Of course, our gender relates to our biological sex, but as you know from Gabe’s story, in some people’s experiences, our brain tells us one thing while our body tells us another.
A final term for our discussion is “sexual orientation.” You probably already know this, but sexual orientation has to do with who makes your heart go pitter-pat. A person can be gay, straight, bisexual, or somewhere in between those possibilities. Sexual orientation is unrelated to gender and sex (or to being trans).
Please also know that words can be very imprecise, and terms can change quickly. What I’m saying here might become outdated in five years. There may also be individuals who don’t feel they fit within any of these terms. We should never try to assign a label to anyone. We wouldn’t want a label assigned to us.
After all that explanation—finally!—let’s talk about the transgender umbrella.
People who are transsexual, as you know from Gabe’s experiences, are people who want to change their bodies to be more aligned with their brain’s version of themselves (in other words, they are moving across biological sex). Most transsexuals take hormones and plan to have surgery to alter both their internal and external sexual organs.
Females who are transitioning to males usually have oophorectomies (ovary removal) and hysterectomies (uterus removal) as well as mastectomies (breast removal). Some female-to-male transsexuals may opt for a phalloplasty (creation of a penis from skin grafted from other parts of their body, including an extension of the urethra). Males who are transitioning to females usually have orchiectomies (testes removal) and vaginoplasties (converting their penis into a version of a vagina). Males transitioning to females may also have other surgeries (on their face or Adam’s apple, for example) or procedures like full-body hair removal to help themselves appear more female. Individuals who are transsexual often take estrogen or testosterone, depending on the direction of their transition, and the hormones work both large and subtle changes on their bodies.
All transsexuals aren’t alike. Some transsexuals don’t choose surgery because they don’t desire it or they can’t afford it—the surgeries aren’t usually covered by insurance, so they are very expensive. Most transsexuals do choose hormones. Gabe makes the choice for both hormones and surgery, but those are his decisions only (well, my decisions). Another transsexual person’s story might be very different than Gabe’s.
Other individuals under the trans umbrella are people who use the word “genderqueer.” These individuals may choose to express themselves in both masculine and feminine ways, or they may dress in ways that don’t tell the rest of us what biological sex they are. They may choose to float between genders (masculine one day and feminine the next), or they may choose to express no gender, or both genders at the same time. “Genderqueer” can be hard to define. Some individuals may be interested in disrupting how society sees men and women. Other individuals who are genderqueer may simply be choosing a gender between man and woman because it’s what feels most comfortable to them.
Two other groups of trans individuals are drag kings and drag queens. Drag kings and queens are performers, and they perform in the persona of the opposite gender. Our culture is most familiar with drag queens (men dressing as women), but drag kings (women dressing as men) are also around. These individuals play with gender, but they may express a more congruent gender/sex/brain combination when they are not on stage in their d
rag persona.
Cross dressers make up another group of transgender individuals. Cross dressers used to be called transvestites, but that word is often considered rude. Cross dressers are usually straight men who enjoy dressing in women’s clothing and do so for personal satisfaction. Usually cross dressers will dress as women in private rather than in public.
A final group of individuals under the trans umbrella are people who are intersex. These individuals used to be called hermaphrodites, though that term is now also considered rude. These individuals have been born with a combination of male and female internal and external sexual organs. Individuals who are intersex have been treated unfairly and misunderstood by many people.
Intersex individuals used to be treated in negative ways by the medical community. In the not-so-distant past, doctors would alter a baby’s intersex genitals to make them identifiably male or female. However, sometimes the gender of a baby’s brain didn’t fit the biological sex a doctor had chosen for them, and the child grew up with a brain and body that didn’t match. Now (usually), if a baby is born with ambiguous genitals, the doctors wait until the child expresses her or his gender. Then the doctors perform surgery to help the child’s external genitalia match the child’s gender.
I hope these terms will help you make sense of how gender and sex interact in our culture. In case you’re wondering, I am a female and a woman. My body matches how my brain thinks about my gender. But I admire and respect individuals who are brave enough and strong enough to make their own gender expressions. That’s why I chose to create a character like Gabe. It’s a hard thing to say to the world, “No, these categories of man and woman don’t fit me. I choose another option.” That declaration takes mucho guts, and I like people with guts and self-dedication. I admire someone who shouts, “This is me—take me or leave me!” I’ll take them every time.
Thanks for checking out Gabe’s story, and thanks for reading this long public service announcement! I’m glad you’re here.
–Kirstin Cronn-Mills
Acknowledgments
This book took a village to bring it to life, and I’m blessed to have a very talented, kind village. My agent Amy Tipton believed in Gabe from the start, and I’m in her debt for it. Deep and humble love goes to Dan and Shae, for centering me, and to my Sisters In Ink, for making my work so much better. Thanks go to Johnny Hirschfeld, long-ago host of Beautiful Music for Ugly Children, for sharing the name with me, and also thanks to Dave Engen, for showing me how DJs do their jobs on tiny little radio stations like KMSU, where Johnny and Dave work(ed). Much gratitude goes to Bobby Ocean and Randal Morrison for helping me understand John, because they were part of radio when radio was king. Thanks go to Janet Reid, Joanna Volpe, Suzie Townsend, Stacey Barney, and Nick Healy, who helped with earlier drafts. Thanks go to Jenn Melby of the Coffee Hag, for allowing me to fictionalize her welcoming establishment. Of course, huge huge huge thanks and appreciation go to the folks at Flux: Brian Farrey-Latz, Lisa Novak, Bob Gaul, Sandy Sullivan, Steven Pomije, Marissa Pederson, and Courtney Colton.
Devoted thanks and love also go to my bio family, for teaching me that music is a joy and a necessity: Keith, Karna, and Kjell Cronn, Doris Cronn Patterson Nielsen-Eltoft, and Linda and James McGaffin.
My most profound appreciation goes to all the individuals who told me their stories so I could better understand Gabe. Without your generosity and trust, for which I am humbled, there wouldn’t be a book. This incredible crowd includes Katie Burgess, Rhys and Julie Gaffer, Jaded Kate, Dean Kotula, Sophie Mitteness, Natasha, Alex Jackson Nelson, Jack Phillips, Christina Rose, Tavis Roy, and Lance Worth, as well as everyone who attended the Thursday night gender exploration group, including Erin, Hazel, and others who never told me their names. A deep and abiding thanks also goes to Janet Bystrom, who trusted me enough to let me visit the group and who also reminded me that birthing a book is like birthing an identity—it’s slow and complicated, but we can’t give up.
About the Author
Kirstin Cronn-Mills’ first novel, The Sky Always Hears Me and the Hills Don’t Mind, was a finalist for the 2010 Minnesota Book Award for Young People’s Literature. She teaches literature, writing, and critical thinking classes at South Central College in North Mankato, Minnesota, where she lives with her husband and son. Music has saved her more than once. Find her on the web at kirstincronn-mills.com.
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