But every now and then a story came out.
I remember him describing the final minute before the amphibious boat landed. The English coxswain manning the boat stopped and wanted the men to jump into neck-deep water. Some fellow soldiers had already drowned because of the combination of current and waves and carrying one hundred pounds of gear. He refused to guide the boat any closer until an American officer on board put a gun to his head and said he would blow his brains out if he didn’t get closer to shore.
My father said that did the trick.
The other story wasn’t a story. It was a small and rectangular black and white photograph he took after his Ranger company had been sent to assist in the liberation and dismantling of the Buchenwald concentration camp in April 1945. It was the image of a railroad car flatbed piled five deep with the emaciated and naked bodies of victims like stacks of cordwood.
My father showed me the picture as a young boy. I did not understand why. It was completely uncharacteristic of him and far too extreme for any child of nine or ten to process. But it ultimately helped me to understand him, how his periods of silence were caused by things he had seen as a young man that he would always see for the rest of his life. It made him emotionally detached, a trait I would have in my own life.
Some people mention the word bravery in my transition from Bruce to Caitlyn in the spring of 2015 at the age of sixty-five. It is flattering. I certainly don’t mind hearing it, and I appreciate the sentiment. But when compared to what my father and so many others went through, there is no bravery in becoming your authentic self. For me it was a form of cowardice to wait so long.
My father was a kind soul, even after all he had experienced during the war. He harbored no bitterness about anything or anyone—I am the same way in never harboring a grudge. I often wonder what he would have thought were he alive today. He loved my success in sports as I was growing up. His pride was indescribable when I won the Olympics. He reveled in my becoming an American hero. I often imagine the conversation we might have had. The reaction. The words he might say or not say. The look on his face. The one thing I never wanted to do was disappoint my dad. I always wanted him to be proud of me. He would not have understood my transition in a million years. He would not have been able to process it. Nobody of his generation would have understood it just as many millions today cannot grasp that transitioning from a man to a woman or a woman to a man has nothing to do with your sexual preference and everything to do with the gender that is embedded within you from birth regardless of your physical characteristics.
I know there would have been initial shock. But I believe that once he got over it and started to see the good I could do in a very marginalized community, he would have been as proud of Caitlyn as he was of Bruce. I know he would have wanted me to be happy. And maybe it would have made him happy to know that the turmoil in my life was finally over.
But it would have taken him a long time to get to any kind of acceptance. My mom, who knew him better than anyone, wonders if he would have ever come around on the idea at all no matter how he acted outwardly.
You have that image of your son, and that’s the image you have, and then it’s Caitlyn? Who is that? What is that?
I still would have wanted to tell him.
I never got the chance.
My dad went back to the tree business after the war, ultimately starting his own company and servicing some of the great estates of Westchester County and Connecticut. He was frantic to be a good family man, and he was. We did everything together as a family growing up. My parents dedicated every weekend to their children, my older sister Pam, then me, then Burt, and ultimately Lisa.
Our lives were pleasantly predictable, a two-week vacation every summer camping in the Adirondacks, a trip to the farm in Ohio where my mother grew up. I went to New York City exactly once before I left for college, even though it was less than an hour away by train, and that was only because of a school trip. I didn’t meet a single African American until I was in junior high school. The outside world was largely viewed through Look and Life magazines. The idea that several years later I would travel the world over as an acclaimed athlete was nonexistent. The idea that there is a woman inside me was beyond nonexistent.
As I grew up I exhibited no outward signs of “femininity.” I know that was puzzling to my mother and sister Pam after I told them I was transitioning. How could they live under the same roof with me during my childhood and adolescence and not see a single thing to suggest anything about me that was different besides perhaps an aloofness and discomfort with affection? Because there wasn’t anything. I never felt feminine, but I did identify as female. What is femininity anyway? It is entirely what anybody wants it to be. Because I continue to love car racing and motocross and motorcycling, does that somehow make me less feminine? It is only our tired and backward definitions of male and female characteristics that may make it seem so.
When I was growing up, I hated having my hair cut. I hated going clothes shopping. Looking back, I wonder if these issues were an early sign of my gender dysphoria.
Or maybe I just hated having my hair cut and going shopping. There are some things in life you just hate because you hate them.
What I do know is the overwhelming insecurity I felt as a child was because of the difficulty I had reading aloud in school and the constant fear of being ridiculed. I always felt self-conscious, as if I didn’t quite fit in, a social awkwardness that, while a thousand times better today, is still within me. I crave friends, which sometimes makes me do desperate things.
My father’s pride and joy was his Army Ranger uniform. It hung in the closet, a row of medals across the breast of the jacket, including the Bronze Star. One day Pam, a year and a half older and about seven at the time, clamored for him to wear it. He went to the closet and took the uniform out, only to discover that the medals were missing. I hung tough under interrogation. It took me a long time to crack before I confessed that I had taken the medals and given them to someone whose friendship I yearned for in return for some ducks I could raise in the backyard. Tragically, the medals could never be located.
The ducks didn’t last long, either.
Adding to my insecurities were the inevitable comparisons that were made to Pam. I idolized her. She was poised while I was not. She easily made friends while I did not. She easily blended into a crowd while I did not. She studied five hours a day to make straight As, while I studied five minutes a day to scrape by with Cs just so I could remain academically eligible for sports.
There was something distant about me. I was there but somehow not there, afraid of real emotion. I skimmed the surface because that was the only level I was willing to reveal because of what lay underneath, a sensation and desire pleasing and perplexing and puzzling. I was terribly at odds with myself, consumed by failure because of dyslexia and massive reading difficulties, and my poor self-image was only reinforced when I flunked second grade and had to repeat it. My mom went to school conferences frequently to figure out what was wrong. But no one was interested in trying to diagnose the problem, much less render a diagnosis of dyslexia, which in my educational setting was unheard of back then (a lot of things in my life were unheard of back then). It wasn’t until junior high that a school counselor mentioned the word, then after ten minutes sent me back to class. Which left me with two enormous areas of my life that were undiagnosed growing up: dyslexia and the issue of my gender.
Teachers simply thought I was stupid. Or lazy. I did my best to be the teacher’s pet, the goody-goody with or without an apple, so they liked me but still thought I was stupid and lazy. I dreaded going to school because of the fear that I would be called on to read and everyone would laugh at me.
There was also something else.
I was about ten.
The curiosity would not go away.
The object of it was in our second-floor apartment in Sleepy Hollow Gardens, a sprawling complex of sturdy and simple red brick at the
south end of Tarrytown by the foot of the Tappan Zee Bridge, built in the postwar boom.
My mother’s bedroom closet…
I was too young to even remotely figure out why I was so fascinated by its contents. While I know now that my issues went to the core of my gender identity, I sometimes wondered if I was somehow trying to emulate Pam. Because I idolized her, maybe that also led to envy and wanting to be like her. I was clearly grasping for explanations. All I know for sure is that I was powerfully drawn into that closet and the feeling didn’t go away.
I was smart about this. I waited until I knew my parents and sister would be out of the house for an extended period of time. I slid the white particleboard doors open. I walked into my mother’s closet. It was small because the apartment was small, just two bedrooms with a table in the kitchen where we ate most of our meals. My sister and I shared one of the bedrooms with a divider down the middle.
My mother’s closet…
It seemed enormous although it was not. I looked at the dresses and the skirts and the shoes. I brushed my hand over them so I could feel the cloth and cotton. I glanced around to make sure I was alone. I heard nothing. I picked out a dress. I used a piece of paper to mark its exact position so I could put it back in the same place. I went to a drawer to get a scarf. I watched the way it was folded so I could fold it exactly the same way when I was finished.
There were no wigs around and my hair was cut fifties style, a patch of lawn down to a quarter inch. So I took the scarf and wrapped it around my head and tied it under my chin to make it look like a wig. My mother’s shoes were too big, so I used my sister’s. I probably stretched them out a little, but I was not too worried: not even Pam, as smart and savvy as she was, would ever suspect. I used a spot of my mother’s lipstick. If she were to discover something amiss and I somehow got drawn into it, I had a plan for this as well:
Pam stole it.
It was the first of a thousand times I would have a ready-made excuse in case I got caught.
I looked in the mirror. Even then I felt the sense of freedom that I would experience thirty or forty years later in hotel rooms and lobbies. Something was right about this. But I couldn’t tell anybody, so there was also more loneliness and isolation than I already felt. Even at the age of ten my life had become a sealed box, and over time, the sides would become even higher and ultimately impossible to scale.
Staying inside was not enough. I had to do more.
I left the apartment, checking for signs of human life. It was dark, because there was no way I would do this in daylight. I stayed within the confines of the complex, walking around the block once, up a hill and back down, then ran back to the apartment. The opportunities were rare, once every six weeks or so. I never saw anyone else when I went outside, except for this one time I walked down the hill and a car crept along behind me. I had my little dress on and my little scarf and I could feel the headlights. But then it went by me.
I just got away with it.
I don’t know why.
The only point of reference I have is Christine Jorgensen, the former army soldier who went to Denmark to have surgery and came back a woman. Outed by the New York Daily News in 1952, she fascinated the entire world. It was the prurience that intrigued the public as well as the medical advancement, a man becoming a woman, as if this were the next iteration of Frankenstein’s monster, aberrant, abnormal, weird, wacky, secretly titillating to many who would never admit it.
I glean what I can about Jorgensen. But I am too young to make any direct link to what I am feeling. I only know it feels so right. I only know it feels so wrong. I have no life outside school, and school too often is something of a disaster because of my dyslexia. My self-consciousness is like a second skin. Now add wearing a dress and scarf belonging to my mother. I haven’t even made it to eleven yet.
Cue the accordion.
With the exception of schoolwork, which I pretty much suck at except for math and mechanical drawing later on in high school, the accordion is the first thing I ever really try to do. I have two friends who have formed a little band together. One plays the guitar and the other the accordion. I cannot think of anything cooler than being in a band. But being uncool, I have no idea what cool really is. I love all the buttons on the accordion and the way you have to let it breathe in and out like a pumping heart. The guitar with those six lonely strings seems boring to me. So I go with the accordion, although in hindsight I now realize it would have been cool only if you lived in Sicily.
I tell my parents I want to play the accordion. I don’t think this activity is quite what they have in mind as a hobby for me. But they are happy I want to engage in something, worried that I have already become a lost soul. An accordion is expensive.
So they go to my sister Pam:
Our parents came to me privately. Here I am, ten years old, and they said, “Bruce isn’t doing well in school. He has this interest in playing the accordion and we want to encourage that because he needs to be successful in something.” I could see this coming. Christmas is right around the corner. And they said, “You know, things are tight financially so we’re wondering if you would not totally give up your Christmas but no big present for you this year because we need to spend several hundred dollars on this accordion.” I was firstborn. I never did anything wrong. But inside I’m saying “hell, no.” But what I said to them is, “okay.” To this day I hate the sound of the accordion. To me it’s like fingernails on the blackboard. And I had to listen to him practice.
It is painful at first, every sound like somebody wheezing to death. I have a fine teacher. I keep at it. I give a mean concert recital in my Cub Scout uniform. It is a pivotal moment, a glimpse that I can achieve something if I put my mind to it, actually be good at something. But rock and roll is beginning to take hold in the late fifties and early sixties, Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis and Chuck Berry and of course the Beatles. None of them would be caught dead with the accordion. Here I am, playing oompah music, with a possible career on the polka party circuit. It gets to the point where I am afraid to tell anyone I play the accordion for fear it will just become another source of ridicule. So I quit.
As I said, there is a reason for everything in life. The hand of God takes you in directions you never consider, even when it involves the accordion. Looking back, I am happy I played it instead of the guitar. Had I chosen the guitar because of its cool factor, my guess is that I would have tried to get as good as I possibly could and would have become consumed with it at least through high school. I would have made it my calling card.
By giving up the accordion and concluding that a life in music was not for me, I was forced to find another outlet.
The one that saved my life.
June 13, 2015
“I was living in la-la land”
I am walking up to the front door of a home in Vista, California.
I am meeting with a mother and father whose teenage transgender son killed himself because of harassment and bullying on social media and in school, combined with severe depression.
I am trying to imagine the torment the teenager was in, but I cannot. He was fourteen years old. Fourteen. I am trying to imagine the pain of the parents and his sister, but I cannot.
I was admittedly living in la-la land the first few months after transition. I was in such euphoria becoming Caitlyn that the massive problems facing our community really did not register. I began to read studies. But statistics only show. They do not tell.
It is only when you look into the eyes of a mother whose transgender son committed suicide, listen to her ask what she could have done differently when there was nothing she could have done, that you begin to understand how becoming a trans person affects not just the individual but the entire family. The age of the person transitioning doesn’t matter, because tragedy can happen at any age. What does matter is that for all the raising of public consciousness, there is still a marathon to be run, and I don’t think it will be finished in my l
ifetime.
I need to listen to those who have been so terribly impacted. I need to say I am sorry, although the word has such little meaning. I need to shed tears of my own. It renews my commitment to change.
Which is what brings me to the front door of the home in Vista. I am greeted by Katharine and Carl Prescott. It was their son Kyler who took his own life in the bathroom of the family’s home on May 18, 2015. According to his mom, it wasn’t just depression and repeated cyberbullying that made life such hell for him; it was also adults who refused to accept Kyler or address Kyler by the correct pronoun even though he had legally changed his name and his gender marker.
I worry about transgender teens the most, although I am buoyed by the number of programs for gender-variant, gender-nonconforming, and transgender children and youth that I have made a point of seeing all over the country. But still I worry.
Statistics are useful: in a recent study 51 percent of transgender youth reported thinking about suicide, and 30 percent said they had attempted it. There has historically been a lack of acceptance of the LGBTQ community, and this has only been amplified by cyberbullying. Today it’s even more awful than a group of kids in the school hallway gossiping about someone, because hurtful and malicious words posted online by cowards who hide behind the Internet never go away. By way of example, all you have to do is go on my Instagram account and see the comments to understand the level of vicious hate that is out there. When I write something positive about the trans community, I am met with comments beyond comprehension by transphobics, homophobics, and racists.
Kyler had tremendous courage. But courage is not enough. There has to be tolerance initiated by adults. The instant there is any cyberbullying on a social networking site, it is incumbent upon the powers that be to not only immediately remove the posts but also ban the users. This is not an issue of free speech. This is an issue of freedom of choice and self-expression and potentially preventing suicide.
The Secrets of My Life Page 3
