Far From the Tree

by Solomon, Andrew

  • • •

  Bettina and Greg Verdi both come from traditional Italian Catholic families in the Northeast. Greg works as an airline ground mechanic and Bettina as a preschool teacher. When Greg was hired by Lockheed Martin, they moved south of Atlanta. Their second child, Paul, preferred pink toys at three months; at two, he would drape a shirt over his head to mimic long hair and wear one of Bettina’s tank tops as a gown. When he was two and a half, Bettina agreed to get him a yellow, flowered dress at a garage sale. “I figured at home at playtime, what’s the harm?” Bettina said. Greg was not entirely comfortable with the dress, but like Bettina, he assumed it was a phase. When their older son, Eric, was four, his preschool had a visiting day for siblings, and Bettina took Paul. “Families were coming in with girls in frilly dresses, and Paul gasps, ‘Mom, I want that dress,’” Bettina recalled. “All the moms were giggling.” Bettina told her pediatrician that Paul headed for the girls’ section at every toy store. The doctor said, “Well, then, say no.” Greg said, “Paul would say, ‘If I can’t have the girl toys, then let’s get out of the toy store.’”

  At five, Paul said to Bettina, “Mom, I want to go to school as a girl, dress like a girl, have a girl name, have girl toys. I want to be a girl.” Bettina was terrified. They went back to their pediatrician and asked what he thought about GID; he told them “those children” mostly committed suicide, so they should go to the Christian bookstore, read up on it, and pray. Bettina found a therapist in Atlanta and made an appointment to go in with Greg. “I was prepared to make this happen without Greg,” Bettina said. But on the drive home, Greg said to Bettina, “Okay, let’s do it.” Bettina called a good friend whose kids were the same age as hers and suggested a playdate. “I told her, ‘We want you to call her Paula.’ She said, ‘Oh, Bettina, I don’t know. The kids are going to make fun of him.’ I said, ‘Can we try it?’” So they went. The older son said to Eric, “Uh, how come your brother is dressed like a girl?” Eric said, “It’s called transgender. It means when a boy wants to be a girl or a girl wants to be a boy. I don’t really want to talk about it.” The boy said, “Okay, let’s go play.” The younger one never even noticed, probably because Paul had always acted like a girl.

  Bettina went to see the religious education director at her Catholic church. “I was so emotional about it. She was like, ‘Okay, do you want her to attend as Paula? We’ll just change the paperwork.’ So we transitioned at church.” Next, Bettina told the school, and the principal said, “We provide a safe, friendly environment for all our children, and yours is no different.” Paula would have to use the nurse’s bathroom, but otherwise, she would just be Paula. Bettina’s family was supportive from the start. Greg’s parents, already in their eighties, accepted it the first time they saw Paula.

  But Greg and Bettina did not reckon with their community. “Suddenly, we’re in the Bible Belt,” Greg said. Bettina notified the neighbors. “I had gone to the bus stop with this one guy every morning for two years, and I felt like he was my friend,” she said. “The first week of school he would meet me at the end of his driveway with papers he downloaded about how evil this was.” One brother and sister put their hands on Paula’s head on the school bus and prayed to turn her back into a boy. Paula came home and said, “I didn’t really mind, but does this mean they’re not going to be my friends?” Bettina went to see the mother of the praying kids. “She’s telling me, ‘God doesn’t make mistakes.’ I’m telling her, ‘Look, if God doesn’t make mistakes, then your son doesn’t have a vision problem and doesn’t need glasses.’ ‘Well, that’s not the same thing.’ ‘Why is it not the same thing? It’s a body part. What’s the difference?’ I just said, ‘Look, you’re a really good mom, and I know in my heart of hearts, if you were in my shoes, you would do the same thing. You would listen to your child and make your child happy.’”

  Bettina works at the preschool where her children were enrolled, and she informed everybody there about the situation. She warned her boss that there would be a backlash. A month later, her boss told her, “A parent questioned your ability to teach. I said, ‘You cannot find a better teacher. What she does in her home life doesn’t affect what she does at work. Your child is lucky to be in her class. Bettina would be willing to sit down with you and answer any questions. So I’m going to hang up. Why don’t you write down your concerns and call me back?’” The parent never called back, and the parent’s daughter remained enrolled.

  I first met Greg and Bettina at a trans conference in Philadelphia. Soon, a beautiful little girl came over with Greg’s courtly parents, who presented the deceptive air of having attended trans conferences for decades. Paula shook my hand, a little somberly, then skipped down the hallway, her grandparents in pursuit. Bettina said, “This conference is more for us than for her. She knows what she’s doing. We’re clueless.” I asked whether they thought Paula’s identity would, over time, be trans or simply female. Bettina said, “Greg doesn’t see her as transgender anymore, but that’s partly because he doesn’t give her a bath every day.”

  Bettina and Greg showed me the “safe folder” they take with them at all times. Many parents of trans kids keep one: paperwork to be shown in the event of trouble, as law enforcement and the medical system can be unfamiliar with or hostile to gender variance. A folder may include letters from the child’s pediatrician and a psychotherapist confirming the child’s gender identity; letters from at least three friends or family members and, if possible, a pastor or minister or other prelate that testify to the parents’ sound parenting skills; videos or snapshots of the child displaying atypical gender behaviors throughout life; copies of birth certificates, passports, and Social Security cards that reflect a change of gender or name; a home study documenting family stability, if available; and a Bureau of Criminal Information report that shows that the parents are not child abusers.

  I asked whether Bettina’s advocacy perspective made it easier for her than for Greg, or the other way around. Greg began crying. “I just struggled,” he sobbed. “Because it was my little boy. I want my child to be happy. But I found the pictures of us as a family before all this, and I miss that little boy. Just once in a while, it still hurts.” I asked Bettina whether she ever felt that way. “No,” she said, after a minute’s thought. “What I regret is that time with Paula that I didn’t have. I missed my daughter’s infancy, spending all my energy on someone else who never existed.”

  • • •

  Many parents of trans kids described to me grieving for the child they had lost, even as they gained another. The mother of one transman observed, “The same-sex parent experiences a certain kind of rejection—a rejection by one’s child of membership in a tribe—that the opposite-sex parent doesn’t.” I met one father at a trans conference who said, “I accept it intellectually, but I still have emotional prejudice against my son—and even saying son sticks in my throat.” He had an autistic daughter and a deaf wife. “Autistic and deaf were easy. No one blamed me. But this—people laugh at me. Why can’t he just come to terms with his handicap privately? We all have handicaps and disabilities, and we learn how to live with them.” This father’s son said to me, “I knew from the time I was an infant that I had something to hide, and for a long time I didn’t even know what it was. But I immediately knew who I was not—and then who I am is what was left.”

  One father fought against using feminine pronouns for his trans daughter and ended up in counseling. “Finally our therapist asked—is it making him happy for you to insist on calling him a boy? Of course the answer was no. But when he asked me if it would make my son happy if I called him she—the answer was a clear yes. He then asked what was more important to me than my child’s happiness. I started to cry. My fear of ridicule coupled with my fear of the ridicule he would suffer was causing me to deny him true happiness.”

  The Bettelheim-like notion that the child’s gender-inappropriate behavior is symptomatic of the parents’ gender transgressions determine
d treatment for most of the twentieth century. In the 1940s and ’50s, the psychologist John Money posited that gender is a learned set of behaviors and attitudes. He believed that health required strong gender identification and favored giving girls every encouragement to be girlish, and boys every inducement to masculinity. Money’s theory was explicitly tested on David Reimer, one of identical twins whose penis was burned off during a circumcision. Money proposed to Reimer’s parents that they raise him as a girl, oversaw infant sex-reassignment surgery, and instructed them to give him only girlish clothes and toys. The parents were told that they must never tell David what had happened. For years, Money published fraudulent articles about the great success of this experiment, thereby encouraging others to attempt similar therapies, which damaged thousands of people. Only in the late 1990s did David Reimer give an interview to Rolling Stone, which eventually grew into the book As Nature Made Him: The Boy Who Was Raised as a Girl. Reimer’s childhood was the antithesis of the one Money had portrayed, filled with rage and misery: he insisted on urinating standing up and despised Money and the dolls and frilly dresses that were forced on him. His behavior at school became so violent that his parents finally broke down and told him the real story when he was fourteen. Reimer had penile reconstruction and lived as a man in later life, but the damage done was enormous, and he committed suicide at thirty-eight.

  Recent science suggests that successfully raising genetically programmed boys as girls is almost impossible. A study from Johns Hopkins looked at children born with cloacal exstrophy—a condition in which they have XY (male) chromosomes and testes, but no penis—who were castrated and assigned female gender at birth. Many chose to live as boys or men as they grew up, and all had “moderate-to-marked interests and attitudes that were considered typical of males.” William G. Reiner, who authored the study, said, “These children demonstrate that normal male gender identity can develop not only in the absence of the penis, but even after the removal of testicles or castration at birth, and unequivocal rearing as female. Their identity and gender role seem to have developed despite a total environment telling them they were female.”

  Kirk Murphy was treated for childhood effeminacy at UCLA in the 1970s under the auspices of O. Ivar Lovaas, the theoretician who developed the reward-and-punishment behavioral treatments for autism to which some autistic people have vigorously objected. Kirk’s mother was coached through a one-way mirror to reward him for masculine behavior and to ignore feminine behavior. Though he became so upset during these sessions that he would scream, his mother was reassured that she was doing the right thing. At home, a token system much like that used with autistic children was put into play. He was given blue chips for masculine behaviors; a certain number of these meant he got a treat. He received red chips for feminine behaviors and was beaten by his father with a belt when he had too many of them. The effeminate behavior eventually ceased, and for years the work was written up as a success.

  The experimenters changed Kirk’s name to Kraig for their publications and made him an avatar for the pliability of behavior. George Rekers, the therapist who had worked directly with Kirk, became a founding member of the Family Research Council, a religious organization that lobbies against gay rights; he was ultimately revealed to be gay himself. Kirk joined the air force and lived as a masculine man—until he hanged himself in 2003 at thirty-eight. His mother and siblings went public in 2011 to talk about how the therapy had destroyed him. His sister said, “The research has a postscript that needs to be added. Kirk Andrew Murphy was Kraig and he was gay, and he committed suicide. I want people to remember that this was a little boy who deserved protection, respect, and unconditional love. I don’t want him to be remembered as a science experiment.” Phyllis Burke’s Gender Shock, published in 1996, documented with considerable horror that many of the techniques that destroyed Kirk Murphy were still in use—and still receiving government funding. Indeed, some are in use even as I write.

  • • •

  Tony Ferraiolo showed such pronounced masculinities all his life that doctors who examined him when he was still called Anne thought he must be intersex. When I met him, Tony was in his forties. His father had not spoken to him in five years; his mother saw him occasionally and continued to call him Anne. “They’re missing out on a really cool guy,” Tony said to me.

  At five, Anne and her twin, Michelle, were playing football with their brothers, Frank and Felix, and Anne took her shirt off. Her mother said, “Girls don’t take their shirts off.” Anne began to cry and said she was a boy. “She never played with dolls,” Tony’s mother, big Anne, remembered. “She never wore a dress. She wouldn’t carry a pocketbook. I surmised she was going to be a lesbian.” Three early behaviors are often taken as indicators of fixed identity: what underwear the child selects; what swimsuits the child prefers; and how the child urinates. “I remember trying to stand up and pee as a little kid,” Tony said. “I never wore girl underwear or bathing suits. I didn’t even know that people had intercourse, but I knew that my gender was male.” When Anne was in fifth grade in a New Haven elementary school, the teacher asked what each pupil wanted to be when he or she grew up, and Anne said she wanted to be a boy. The class erupted in laughter. By eleven, she was self-injurious. “You’ve got a little kid that’s outside for recess, taking a piece of glass, cutting themselves,” Tony said. “I’d gouge and gouge, then take dirt and try to get an infection, to hurt myself as much as I could. My parents knew it. No one did anything.” Anne’s sister, Michelle, identified as a lesbian early on, but she was a jock, as popular as Anne was marginalized.

  Anne’s father, Anthony, was abusive, and big Anne, addicted to Valium, was passive in the face of that. Adolescence is a trauma for most trans people, and for Anne, doubly so, as she had organic surges of both male and female hormones, despite showing no anatomical or genetic markers for intersex. “My facial hair and boobs are growing at the same time. What the hell’s going on here?” By the time Anne was thirteen, she was shaving every day. “I took up drugs and drinking; I was suspended more than I was in school.” From age thirteen, Anne was being sexually abused by a neighbor who was a good friend of her father’s. The neighbor would call and ask Anne to help him with something. “If I didn’t go, I got punished. If I went, I got raped.” She finally told a neighbor what was happening, and the neighbor told her parents. “Two days later, my father had the guy over for a beer. From that day on, I didn’t trust anybody,” Tony said. Her father often refused to speak to her; when she was sixteen, he threw her out of the house. She walked fifteen miles into New Haven and moved in with a girlfriend; when that arrangement failed, she was homeless for a month. “Then I called my mother and asked to go back home,” Tony recalled, hanging his head. “I went back into the bullshit.”

  Through her twenties and thirties, Anne was a club promoter and threw huge parties for hundreds of lesbians; she started a band called Vertical Smile. But she never felt like a lesbian. She started using Tony, spelled Toni in a concession to the family. “I used to pray to God that I was a butch lesbian,” Tony said. “But a butch lesbian wants breasts and a va-jay-jay. A transgender person wants a penis.” In his mid-thirties, Tony was in a car accident and received an insurance settlement. His family suggested he buy a house. He spent the funds on a double mastectomy.

  Tony was not interested in bottom surgery. “That part of my body isn’t public, so it was never an issue. The boobs were public. When the doctor unbandaged me, my knees just buckled. When I took my girlfriend, Kirsten, to the beach, I said, ‘I’m experiencing everything for the first time.’ I haven’t shaved since. I fuckin’ love my goatee. When I look in the mirror, I see the person that was always supposed to be there. I used to take sleeping pills so I wouldn’t have to live much of my life. Now all I want is to stay awake.” When I saw Tony, he’d lost more than sixty pounds. “You can’t love your body if you hate your body. Now, I eat healthy. I work out.” Tony credits his therapist, Jim Collins, fo
r much of his psychic transformation. “I was an angry lesbian,” he said. “I didn’t want to be an angry man.”

  Tony’s younger brother, Felix, said, “My sister’s my brother now, and I’ve never seen him happier in my life.” Felix’s kids switched naturally from “Aunt Toni” to “Uncle Tony.” Tony’s father and his brother Frank were not supportive. Big Anne was distraught, and they did not meet for a full year after the surgery. “Then she just said, ‘Well, I’ll come over,’” Tony said. “I thought, is she going to open the door and pass out? So, she came in and she was like, ‘Oh, my God, you look just like my dentist.’” After Tony’s surgery, Michelle began calling herself Nick. “At first, I was pissed,” Tony said. “The first thing I do alone as a twin, he’s got to stand on my fuckin’ coattails. But I can see his sadness that he’s not who I am yet. He still has breasts. He doesn’t pass. People were like, ‘You’re sure he’s not doing it because you did it?’ I said, ‘I need to support him no matter why he’s doing it.’”

  When I asked big Anne if she could see that Anne had become Tony, she said, “Once in a while, I say ‘Tony,’ but mostly it just comes out ‘Anne.’ Really down deep, it’s my daughter. When I look at ‘him,’ I still see her.” She turned to Tony. “You always had that angry something that was bothering you inside. But I didn’t know anything about this back then. I was stupid, in a way.” Tony put a hand on her arm. “I don’t think you were stupid,” he said. Big Anne said, “I watched things on television about it. I started understanding more. It’s not that you wanted to be this way.” She turned to me. “Her being unnatural, I was upset by it at first. But I understood more how they felt inside. Now she does all this activism. That’s very good.” Big Anne turned back and forth. “You’re still my child,” she said to Tony. “I still love her,” she said to me. “You know what I mean. Him?” I asked Tony whether he minded being called “Anne” and “she.” He said, “Andrew, she thinks I’m a straight girl going through a phase. But I had to realize that my mother’s my mother. My mother can call me ‘them,’ and it wouldn’t bother me. What bothers me is that I still see her just four or five times a year.”