Trans-Sister Radio (2000)

by Chris Bohjalian

"Well, Dad and I have talked."

  "What does he think?"

  I shrugged, though my grandmother was so focused on the sidewalk she probably didn't notice. "You know, my sense is he isn't going to like anyone my mom likes," I said.

  "You're probably right. Your father enjoys his torch. He'll carry it to his grave."

  "Oh, I think he loves Patricia."

  "In a way, maybe. How is she?"

  "She and Dad seem to be at odds a bit lately."

  "What a surprise."

  "But I guess she's okay. Busy."

  "So, your father's met Dana?"

  "Uh-huh. But Dana wasn't wearing women's clothes yet."

  My favorite high-school English teacher and her family drove by, and she gave me a little wave. Somehow she recognized me under my wool hat and my scarf.

  "I'm glad I didn't know about them last night," my grandmother said. "I thought they were just friends."

  "You mean when we were at church?"

  "Exactly. I think if I'd known the truth, I would have convinced myself that every single human being in the sanctuary was staring at us."

  I nodded, and kicked a little piece of ice off the sidewalk. I didn't have the heart to tell her they were.

  Chapter 16.

  will

  THINK ABOUT IT, AND JUST IMAGINE THE POSSIBILITIES:

  You think you're a Caucasian trapped in an Oriental's body. You know for a fact that your hair is supposed to be blond, you know your chest is supposed to be a forest of tawny curling hair. A mass as thick as steel wool. And so you're miserable. Wretched. Perhaps even bitter. What do you do? You have cosmetic surgery so you look like a WASP. You dye the ebony mass on your head the color of straw, you have hair plugs implanted into your chest. You have your eyes rounded.

  But are you no longer Taiwanese? Chinese? Japanese?

  Of course not.

  Better still: You're convinced you're a black man imprisoned inside a white guy's skin; you're absolutely sure that a gigantic error's been made. Really, that's what you believe. And so you go to a dermatologist to find out what can be done to make you look black.

  Or walk with me a few generations into the future. You're a short man. You're barely five feet. And you are sick to death of being treated as ... small. Especially since you are so big inside. So tall. You know it. You sense it. You feel it. Perhaps when you were a teenager and no one was home, you once went so far as to sneak into your father's armoire, and you pranced around the bedroom in his suits. Forty-two longs. Trousers with an inseam of thirty-six.

  You looked ridiculous, and certainly all that fabric bunched up around your ankles and shins didn't do a whole lot to facilitate the illusion. But there was something there if you half closed your eyes and you gave your imagination free rein. It was a bit like visiting the fun house at the county fair and standing in front of the mirror that stretched you like a rubber band.

  Now, however, the science is there to build you a body that would get you a tryout with the Knicks. Make you the tall man on the outside that you know you are on the inside. And so you have the surgery. Or you take the drugs.

  Are any of these ideas stranger than the notion that with hormones and a knife we can change a person's gender? When I first met Dana, I didn't think so. To be honest, I'm not completely sure I do now.

  The fact is, no hormone was going to turn Dana Stevens's Y chromosome into an X. No surgery in the world was going to offer him the particular history that went along with growing up female. No procedure was going to give him the joys or the terrors that must accompany pregnancy--that must, for teen girls, make sex a walk over Niagara Falls on a tightrope.

  In my opinion, learning to mince through a mall didn't make him female, rouge didn't make him female, a barrette in his hair didn't make him female.

  You simply couldn't, it seemed to me, change a biological imperative.

  When I realized what Dana was going to do, I saw at best a parody of femininity. I saw the sort of man who could set the women's movement back decades. Look at me, the transsexual screams, I'm a girl! I'm wearing a dress!

  The problem? The male transsexual wants only to be as womanly as possible. He wants to be ultra-feminine. Half the transsexuals in this world would probably have looked right at home at a Junior League luncheon in 1961. The only giveaway? Their bigger hands would have been holding those teeny-tiny watercress sandwiches. Their bigger mouths would have been eating them.

  Dana, no matter what, was never going to know what it was like to grow up female. He was never going to be molded by the sorts of challenges that confronted Allie twenty and thirty years ago, or that face Carly right now. Dana was never going to be formed, at least in part, by the fears and frustrations a woman inevitably endures throughout her life. Nor, for that matter, was he ever going to know her real joys.

  I did my homework, and it struck me that Dana's problem was as much on the outside as it was on the inside. A big part of his predicament was his world. Instead of living in a place where it was perfectly fine to be a man who feels like a woman (or, for that matter, a woman who feels like a man), he was part of a civilization that would rather castrate certain men and remove the ovaries from certain women. We're just not very comfortable with people who, for example, lack that second X chromosome and therefore sport facial hair and a penis, but would rather wear stockings and a skirt than a pair of pants.

  And yet it wouldn't be that difficult to learn to be comfortable. What would it take? A generation? Maybe two?

  Look at me. I've changed.

  And even if we never, ever grew to approve of them, you have to admit: Tolerating them is far better than mutilating them. Chopping apart their genitals. Disfiguring their bodies.

  Here's an irony too good to pass up: The last name of the surgeon who in 1952 turned George Jorgensen into Christine?

  Hamburger. The guy with the knife was named Hamburger.

  The logistics of Allie's and my friendship are only complex when other people are involved. I don't think Patricia ever minded too terribly when I dropped in on Allie--or, at least, I was always able to convince myself that she didn't. For some reason, however, I was very uncomfortable the one time that Patricia and Dell, Allie's mother, were together in the same room. Some years earlier, when Mrs. Cronin had come north for a long Fourth of July weekend, she and Allie and Carly had all dropped by our house on a Sunday afternoon. I think Patricia felt outnumbered--she saw an ambush, three generations of women descending upon her from my ex-wife's family--and so it had been a very tense forty-five minutes.

  Consequently, the day after Christmas I went to Allie's house to say hello to Mrs. Cronin. I went late-morning, because Allie had told me that Dana would be in Burlington then, doing his last-minute shopping before they left for his big event in Colorado.

  The four of us had a very nice visit together, and I said nothing uncivil when Carly mentioned her mother's and Dana's trip. I simply nodded politely and reminded Allie to bring along Dramamine. Once, when we'd been married, she'd forgotten.

  Mostly we talked about Carly's growing interest in broadcast media, and the video she had completed about the battery factory in Bennington. That morning may also have been the first time that I heard the full details of the part-time job Carly would have in the spring at a little radio station in southwest Vermont. I was, of course, thrilled.

  And then I left. I went straight from Allie's to the Grand Union to replenish the pantry that Patricia's nieces and nephews had pillaged Christmas Day. It was there that I ran into the principal of our local elementary school.

  I did not, as some people probably believed at the time, call Glenn Frazier on the telephone. I did not make a special effort to see him, I did not tattle on my ex-wife.

  I simply bumped into him in the cereal aisle, our carts almost clanking together as we met. And at some point in our conversation--when we were beyond the holiday pleasantries, when we were done praising the original Shredded Wheat biscuit--the topic invariably
turned to my ex-wife. How could it not? People were aware that we were still friends, and people knew who she was living with now. People knew what she was doing with her life.

  And since Glenn seemed to know so much about her involvement with Dana, it was perfectly reasonable for me to assume that he knew as well what Dana was planning to do in a couple of days in Colorado. And that my ex-wife would be with him.

  Certainly I wish now I'd kept my mouth shut, because the last thing I ever want to do is to complicate Allie's life--or mine. (We seem to do that well enough on our own.) The fact is, when I opened my mouth and started talking about Allie's and Dana's trip, I had no idea that Glenn didn't know where they were going, or that he would have such a strong reaction to their travel plans.

  I had no idea that events, after that, would sprout beyond anyone's control--certainly beyond mine.

  It was all a bit like mushrooms in a wet summer.

  In a way, it was a bit like the transgender tapes. My station devoted a whopping twenty-two minutes to transsexuality over two days in March, and most of it was focused on Allie's battle with some local parents. Later that year NPR would see in the story five days of programming on the nature of love.

  At that moment, however, on the day after Christmas, I wasn't thinking about programming. I was merely making small talk in a supermarket. Nothing more, nothing less. To me, it was just a little grocery store banter.

  *

  PART III

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Tuesday, September 25

  DR. THOMAS MEEHAN: If you get beyond what some people consider the grisly details of the surgery, there's something very primal going on here, something very basic. A profound human desire. And that's my point. We--and I mean the doctors, but I guess the same could be said for the patients--are all playing Creator. Some of us do it better than others, some of us do more of it than others.

  But man has always wanted to remake man. Look at the Frankenstein archetype. Look at the whole history of bioengineering.

  Let's face it, right now we put the genes of arctic fish in tomatoes, we clone all kinds of mammals. You and I both know it's only a matter of time before we start cloning humans.

  And that's a big part of the enticement science has for the scientist--or, in my case, for the surgeon. That sense of creation. Of control. The whole idea that we're doing something that's never been done before.

  Hell, in that regard, what I do is nothing compared to a lot of my peers. Compared to them, I'm just a cut-and-paste pieceworker.

  CARLY BANKS: And yet like all surgeons who perform sexual reassignment, among Dr. Meehan's critics are those people who insist he is taking advantage of transsexuals--who suggest he is, in essence, preying on a mental illness.

  MEEHAN: Preying? God, no. I'm healing. Or at least trying to heal. I'm giving them their best shot at a normal, happy life. Therapy doesn't cut it with these people. Surgery does. That's the reality, whether you like it or not.

  Chapter 17.

  dana

  THE FIRST THING YOU SEE ARE THE HUAJATOLLA--Ute for "breasts of the world." You'll be driving south on the interstate, and suddenly you'll notice a pair of massive geologic hooters rising from the rough plains. The Huajatolla are northwest of Trinidad. Igneous rock. Twin mountains that tower well above twelve thousand feet. Ghost white in the winter, an almost neon green in the summer.

  There are tales that gold can be mined in the rivers that snake through them, but my guess is they're packed mostly with coal, just like the other peaks that circle the town to the south and the west and the north.

  I've met trannies who hated Trinidad and simply couldn't believe they had to go there for their surgery. I know one girl who actually chose Palo Alto for the sole reason that it was in California, and another who went to Portland, Oregon, just so she wouldn't have to spend a couple of weeks in a shell-shocked little mining town in southern Colorado.

  But I rather liked Trinidad, and I liked it for all sorts of reasons. Certainly the karma felt right. Not only does the approach to the city have mountain-sized mammaries to greet you, but the river that weaves through Trinidad is called the Purgatoire--an ever-flowing boa of water whose very name celebrates the betwixt. The between. The transgendered.

  And in ways the city will never admit, it likes the transsexual business. For a time, the town lived off the mines and the railroads, but no more. The last mine went belly up in 1995. And while there will always be boosters who will try to bring tourism to "historic Trinidad"--Gateway to the Rockies, Bat Masterson Territory, Kit Carson's Personal Rest Stop--the fact is, the town is in the middle of nowhere. Southeastern Colorado. Nearest city of any size? Pueblo, eighty-five miles to the north. And, as far as I can tell, lawman Bat Masterson only tried to keep the peace there for a year. He actually lost his bid for reelection as marshal, having taken the townsfolk for a thousand dollars each month playing cards.

  And while Indian fighter Kit Carson indeed visited Trinidad throughout his career, my sense is that coming in Trinidad mattered much more to him than coming to Trinidad. He'd struggle in after who knows how long on the Santa Fe Trail, and climb into a hotel bed with some company for as long as the money would last.

  Once, when the mines were thriving, a good thirty thousand people lived there. Now there's barely a third that many. For a time, the city had boasted a two-level Main Street that stretched four solid blocks, and the shops possessed lower floors that were accessible from the sidewalk. When the population dwindled, however, there was no longer a need for all that space, and the underground was buried in cement--literally drowned in mortar and sand and stone, and then paved over with asphalt. You'd never know it was there, except for a tiny section of one subterranean block that has been preserved--two dark store windows--and may be accessed by an unmarked flight of steps on the corner of Animas and West Main.

  Trinidad's big employers these days? A junior college. A prison. And the hospital where people like me come for our surgery.

  Certainly, there are upright citizens in Trinidad who don't approve of the surgeons who help the trannies who pass through the town, but most of the folks are tolerant and helpful and kind. They need us and we need them. The relationship is downright symbiotic.

  Allison and I landed in Colorado Springs just after lunch and arrived in Trinidad about three in the afternoon. Trinidad is 130 miles south of Colorado Springs, but the speed limit on the interstate is a glorious seventy-five, and the weather was fabulous: a cerulean blue winter sky, a balmy forty degrees. The driving was easy. And though there was plenty of snow on the mountains to the west, there was absolutely none on the ground in our strip of the state. All in all, it made Vermont seem positively glacial.

  And so we were settled into the Holiday Inn just south of the city by the time the sun had set, and we were wandering down Main Street hand in hand in search of a restaurant for dinner by six.

  The next day, Saturday, we went sight-seeing, and that must have killed a solid forty-five minutes. It isn't that Trinidad has nothing to see, but there isn't a whole lot that's open in December. Trinidad History Museum? Closed. Old Fire House Number One? Doors shut and sealed. The Archaeology Museum at the junior college? A vault. And the illustrious A. R. Mitchell Museum of Western Art? Boarded up--like a lot of the city, it seemed.

  Fully half the storefronts in the town were vacant, the glass either replaced by plywood, painted over by children as part of a school art project, or filled with some unrealistically optimistic real-estate agent's large lease or FOR SALE sign.

  In all fairness, the city does have a great many buildings from the early boom years that are absolutely exquisite, and practically the entire downtown--El Corazon de Trinidad--is a National Historic Landmark District. I especially liked nineteenth-century cattle rancher Frank Bloom's Victorian mansion, which I am quite sure was the inspiration for the home in which the kindly Norman Bates would live with his mother in Psycho.
r />   But my favorite structure, of course, was the five-story stone bank building where I knew Dr. Meehan had his offices. Arched windows, magnificent detailing along the pediments. My surgeon toiling away on the very top floor when he wasn't in the operating room at Mount San Rafael. The building was constructed in the 1920s, in the waning years of the Trinidad coal country heyday.

  Mount San Rafael, the hospital that would be my address for a little more than a week, was about a mile outside of town. Allison and I went there Saturday afternoon, and we visited the shrine on the small bluff above it. The Ava Maria Shrine. It looks down upon the two-story hospital. The Trinidad Ava Maria is inside a little white stucco chapel, rich with the exterior detailing we expect from our most cherished roadside art: neon lettering, a neon star, a life-size painted statue of a monk.

  The chapel was locked, but there was a little grotto beside it. Allison and I sat for a moment on one of the blue benches and looked at the icons of Jesus and Mary under glass. We were both quiet for a long moment, and then Allison asked me if I'd been praying.

  "No," I said. "But I will before we leave. I think I'd feel guilty if I left here without praying. And with major surgery in a couple of days, it seems to make perfect sense to hedge my bets. And you?"

  "Me?"

  "Praying: Were you praying?"

  "As a matter of fact, I was."

  "May I ask what for?"

  She stared at the plaster Christ on the cross and took my hand. She found it without looking.