Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

  "Nope. I mean, I am going out. But it's just with a group of friends I hang out with."

  "Boyfriend?"

  "Not since May."

  He took a sip from the bottle in his hand, and for a moment I thought I'd seen him extend his pinkie as if he were holding a cup of tea.

  "You know," he said, "most kids your age who are about to start college are scared right now, too."

  "I guess."

  "Except for the drama jocks. Nothing scares a drama jock."

  "I don't act."

  "And there will be a lot of drama jocks at Bennington, won't there?"

  "Mom told you where I'm going?"

  "It did come up. What are you scared of, may I ask? Is it making friends or doing the work? Or is it, I don't know, just being away from home?"

  I thought for a moment. "I'm not sure."

  "I can tell by the way you just introduced yourself to me that you're a real shrinking violet," he said, rolling his eyes. "Clearly you'll never meet anybody."

  "Kids are different."

  "Yeah, they're younger. And here's the big secret about colleges: They only try and accept people who can do the work--especially a place like Bennington. Those incredible dullards in admissions? Well, one of the few things they're actually very good at is figuring out who's going to make it and who isn't. The last thing they want is for someone to fail. Besides," he went on, "I can't imagine you have any problems in the classroom."

  "My mom's biased."

  "Your mom and I have never talked about your academic strengths or weaknesses. I just have a good feeling about you," he said, and then he did something that in hindsight seems pretty minor, but at the time was one of the more astonishing things an adult male had ever done to me. He touched my hair.

  "You wear your hair a bit like your mother, don't you?" he murmured, and with the fingers of only one hand he fixed the barrette, which had fallen askew. "So many young girls insist on a Barbie do. But short hair becomes you. You have such a lovely face--just like your mother."

  Had any man in the world other than Dana touched me that way, I would have felt it was a come-on. I would have felt threatened. And given the fact that this man was my mom's friend--perhaps even a man she was interested in--it's likely I would have been pissed.

  But none of those thoughts passed through my mind at that moment. I was simply flattered that this attractive older man thought my face was lovely. And I was glad that a person who apparently thought about hair felt I'd made a good decision with mine.

  It was, in some way, as if one of my mother's close female friends--one of the women she'd known since Middlebury, and whom I'd known my whole life--had complimented me. The small remark was meaningful. Powerful. Reassuring.

  "Thank you," I said.

  He shrugged. "No problem. Girl can't have a barrette with a mind of its own."

  I was home that night in time to help my mom load the dishwasher.

  "You didn't mention you were inviting your teacher," I said as I emptied wineglasses into the sink. I tried to sound casual.

  "I didn't know I was until yesterday. It was very spontaneous."

  "Did you invite anyone else from the class?"

  "Most of the other students are nineteen and twenty. They're closer to your age than mine."

  "Not that doctor you told me about. Not the woman who works for the phone company."

  She placed a sheet of Saran Wrap over a glass bowl filled with couscous. "I guess I could have invited them. But I didn't."

  "You like him?"

  "Who?"

  "Dana!"

  "Sure, I like him just fine. That's probably why I invited him."

  "Do you like him as a friend? Or as something more?"

  She placed the couscous in the refrigerator and closed the door with her hip. "Too early to tell."

  "I like him."

  "I'll sleep easier."

  "He likes you."

  If I'd said something like that to a girl my age, she would have been unable to resist asking me how I knew such a thing. But my mom had a generation on me, and merely nodded unconcernedly as she reached over my shoulders for the sponge at the edge of the sink.

  "He grew up in Miami. Did you know that?" I asked.

  "I think I did."

  "He went to school in Massachusetts--Hampshire College, he said--because he wanted to be as far away from home as possible."

  She wiped the crumbs off the counter she'd cleared, and turned to me. I was pleased that I'd finally said something that had gotten her attention. "How in the world did that come up? How long were you two chatting?"

  "Not too long. But we talked about college."

  "Personally, I've never been wild about Florida. I can't blame him for going to school in New England."

  "I think it was more about his parents. He didn't say anything about Miami one way or the other."

  "Your father once had a job offer from a station in Gainesville. I guess you were five or six," my mom said, clearly hoping to steer the conversation away from Dana. She never liked talking about the men in her life until she'd made a decision about them one way or the other.

  I considered letting her off the hook, but it was a Friday night--almost Saturday morning--and I was having fun watching her sweat. And so I plowed ahead.

  "Want to know why he picked a place in the Berkshires?"

  She rinsed the sponge. "Sure. Tell me."

  "Because his nearest relatives would be a thousand miles away in Atlanta, and his mom and dad would have to change planes at least once if they ever wanted to visit. Getting there would be a major ordeal."

  "Well, then," she said, "I guess I should be flattered that you're only going to be two or three hours away."

  "Want to know something else about him?"

  "You're dying to tell me, aren't you?"

  "He thinks you're pretty. And he likes your hair."

  She smiled and gave me a small hug. "I'm happy you like him," she said, her voice serenely maternal. "Really, I am. But right now we're just friends. That's all. If it ever becomes anything more, you'll be the first to know. Okay?"

  Her hands were wet from the sponge, and the back of my shirt grew damp.

  "Okay," I said.

  As we pulled apart, I found myself looking carefully at her mouth, and I wondered if I'd ever be brazen enough to dab someone else's lips with a napkin.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Monday, September 24

  BACKGROUND AUDIO: The sound of teacups on china saucers, the clinking of spoons. Small murmurs of conversation.

  CARLY BANKS: Montreal's majestic Hotel Pierre sits across from an entrance to Mount Royal, the elegant park designed by Frederick Law Olmstead in the midst of Quebec's largest city. Here the International Association for Gender Diversity is holding its annual conference, this year themed "Trans-Am: In Praise of Gender Expression Across the Americas."

  Raymond and Vanessa Packard are two of the nearly eleven hundred conference attendees who have arrived in Montreal. They've been married for five years--a demographic detail of little distinctiveness.

  What makes their marriage unusual, however, and what has drawn them to Montreal is the fact that until six years ago, Vanessa was a man.

  RAYMOND: Oh, I knew she wasn't a "genetic" female the night we met. But she'd been on hormones awhile, and it was about as close to love at first sight as I believe you really get in this world.

  BANKS: Raymond, forty-one, owns an automobile dealership in Oak Brook, Illinois. Vanessa, thirty, is an accountant just outside of Chicago. You would never guess today that this slim young woman in a blue blazer and a beige business skirt was genetically male at birth, and had lived the first two decades of her life as a boy and a young man.

  VANESSA: We met at a bar, just about seven years ago now. Ray was taking two salespeople out for a drink after work, and I was there with a friend. You know, unwinding.

  BANKS: Raymond say
s that despite his immediate attraction to Vanessa, the notion never crossed his mind that he might be gay.

  RAYMOND: I never, ever viewed Vanessa as male. Not for a second. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not an idiot: I understood the plumbing, I realized she had a penis. But I could also see there was a beautiful woman inside there, and she was working her way to the surface.

  VANESSA: The night we met, I was wearing a black stretch velvet dress that fell to my ankles. It had long sleeves and a princess seam--a little formal for that particular bar, as I recall, but when you're trying to pass, you don't want to cut any corners.

  RAYMOND (laughing): See what I mean? Even then, she was ALL woman!

  Chapter 2.

  dana

  HOW DO YOU SPEAK LIKE A WOMAN?

  I've read all the books and I don't know how many articles. A lot. I've read all about adverbs and qualifiers (women, supposedly, use lots more of both than men) and how females are more likely than males to phrase a statement in the form of a question:

  "Shall we go to dinner?"

  "Aren't those shoes lovely?"

  "Have you ever seen such a gorgeous day?"

  And while I've made small changes here and there, I don't believe I've really done anything especially significant. I speak the way I always have.

  And I don't believe I speak like a transvestite or a transsexual struggling to pass. I don't think anyone ever left one of my lectures on Flaubert or George Sand and murmured, "That professor sure talks like a fruit."

  Or, these days, "That professor is so butch."

  The fact is, I've always been female and so I've always had a natural inclination to speak a bit like a woman--but not, I believe, like a caricature of a woman.

  It's just that simple.

  I've never liked caricatures of women. I've never, to be honest, liked the way a transvestite looks--which is probably among the main reasons why I chose to go through such a precariously short period of pre-operative transition. The medical standards of care for transsexuals suggest that a patient spend a year living as the opposite gender before undergoing the final surgery, but I limited myself to barely three months.

  That was it: twelve weeks. The last thing I wanted was to be perceived as a guy in a dress. And while my therapist wasn't pleased with the length of my transition, not for one single moment did she doubt either of our diagnoses, and she wrote all of the necessary referrals and recommendations. She'd known me for years, and there wasn't a question in her mind that I was indeed (and I've always loved the phonetics of this expression) gender dysphoric. Same with my surgeon. He knew what I was the moment we met, and I am quite sure he assumed I had spent more than a season--though a season is still, of course, sufficient time for whole ecosystems to transform themselves completely--in transition.

  I think the fact that I was never a public cross-dresser was a big reason why my family was always able to convince themselves that my gender dysphoria was some kind of phase. Maybe a brain fog that would eventually lift. Go away. Disappear.

  After all, as a teenager I was never caught in one of my sister's miniskirts or a blouse, and I wasn't hiding waist slimmers or lace brassieres in my closet. It's not as if I was concealing breast forms in my bureau. The five or six times I tried dressing up, I was so incredibly disappointed by the results that I'd wound up even more depressed than I'd been before I had crawled inside a pair of panty hose and a dress.

  And I wasn't brazen enough to try shaving my legs until college.

  Moreover, I always had girlfriends. In Florida. In Massachusetts. In Vermont.

  Before I went through with the surgery, a gay friend of mine in the Sociology Department who knew my sexual history would shake her head and sigh. "Oh, good, Dana," she'd say. "Just what the world needs: another lesbian in a man's body."

  In my late twenties, I had a therapist who was always trying to convince me that my interest in women was a sign that I shouldn't be considering surgery. But whenever I fell in love, it just reinforced in my mind how much I was missing, and I would fall into a funk as deep as the moat that had surrounded my adolescence.

  Ah, but then I started on hormones, and it was amazing. The glimmer of heaven, the Northern Lights. Three months on estrogen and progesterone and a testosterone blocker, and I had flushed my antidepressants down the toilet. I was happier than I'd ever been in my life.

  And it seemed as if my body hair was just melting away. Even though I was on a pretty low dosage of everything, I spent less and less time plucking, and the electrolysis grew considerably less painful. I took this as further proof that I was making the right decision: My body knew well what it wanted.

  Still, sometimes Allison would ask me if I hated my body--meaning, specifically, my genitals. We talked about that often in the months before we flew to Colorado for the operation. One autumn night when we were at her house in Bartlett, maybe a month and a half after Carly had left for college, we were lying in bed after making love, and she wrapped her fingers around my limp penis. "Do you really hate it that much?" she asked.

  We had had an exquisite Indian summer that year: Even though it was October, it was so warm at night that we were actually sleeping with the windows open a crack, and I could feel the moist, evening air on the small, wondrous hillocks that were just starting to rise from my chest.

  "I don't think hate is the right word," I said.

  "Because I have to tell you, it works really well," she said, a tiny quiver in her voice. Allison had only known my plans for a couple of weeks then, and she was still a little wobbly.

  "Thank you."

  "I mean, I've been with a lot of men. Maybe not a lot. But easily seven or eight. And trust me: You use yours very well."

  "You can't count the college boys."

  "Have you ever ..."

  "Yes?"

  "Have you ever had trouble getting an erection?"

  "Around women? God, no."

  "Never?"

  I squeezed her. "Well, the female hormones have begun to make them a little less common. We've both noticed. But before I began hormone therapy? No, never. I've always been a bit of a rarity in that regard: a relentlessly horny trannie."

  She cupped my bottom with her free hand and pressed her long fingers between my cheeks. "You're getting hard now," she said.

  "Tell me about it."

  "If you don't hate it ... then why do this?"

  Why? It has been the question of my adult life, hasn't it? I've answered it for my parents and my sister, I've answered it for doctors and counselors and friends. I've explained it to therapists. To cousins. To acquaintances who are particularly bold.

  Interestingly, I was never asked why by a college administrator. Perhaps they feared their questions might trigger the sort of grotesquely unpleasant sexual harassment suit that generates all manner of bad press. Or maybe they simply thought they were supposed to be open-minded.

  Personally, I think I just gave them the creeps: Dana Stevens, the tenured transsexual.

  "Why?" Allison asked me again.

  "Because," I told her, "I'm a woman. And a woman isn't supposed to have a penis. I'll be much happier when it's gone."

  She stopped fondling me and kicked off the lone sheet that was resting upon us. For a moment I feared we were going to have a fight, or a scene like the one we'd had when I first broke the news to her. But then I understood she was simply going to show me, once more, that she loved my penis enough for the both of us, and was about to give me the blow job of the millennium.

  Chapter 3.

  carly

  MY MOM'S FILM COURSE MET ON TUESDAYS AND Thursdays. Dana asked her out for the first time right after the class that followed my mother's party.

  "Are you the matchmaker who encouraged him?" my mom asked me at breakfast the next day, a Wednesday, as she painted her toe-nails red.

  "Nope."

  "Well, I hope you're pleased. We're going out to dinner Friday night."

  Breakfasts were strange that summer,
because I had a job to get to and my mom didn't. As a schoolteacher she had the summers off, and so we had grown accustomed to strolling through our summer mornings together in slow motion.

  But that summer my mom was always up and dressed with me, as if she felt a motherly responsibility to see me off to my high-powered job watering baby lilac trees. Of course, dressed for her at six forty-five in the morning usually meant shorts and a bulky T-shirt: Although I had to be at the nursery by seven-thirty, Mom didn't have to be anywhere ever seven days a week.

  Still, my mom can make ugly shorts look good. She has long slender legs that a lot of girls my age would kill for. I have them, too, but between field hockey and lacrosse, throughout high school they were usually swollen somewhere or bruised.

  And while my mom seemed to begin the day that summer in shorts, at some point she would slip into a sundress, because she had invariably changed her clothes by the time I would come home from work.

  "In Burlington?" I asked.

  "Yup."

  "Can I have some friends over, then?"

  "Sure. Just the usual rules."

  The usual rules meant no drinking, no drugs, and no identifiable proof that anyone had had anything that even resembled sex. And no more than a half dozen kids.