Third Month:
Intersex
By the time I met Jim I was already past being uneasy about my sexuality, but for some reason I still felt vulnerable, exposed, fragile even. I made up my mind to write him a letter and explain my issues before we had sex, a letter he kept for the rest of his life and that was returned to me when he died. The following is an excerpt of that letter. I’m skipping the heading, the closing, and a few things that skirt the central issue that prompted me to write it, the fear that Jim might be put off by me. Reading the letter will help you see how from the day I was born I was already saddled with the first of a series of inflictions that would make my life so problematic. What you can’t imagine, though, is how much happiness that infliction brought, which for such a long time I’d considered in a negative light. Even now, as I’m writing this, I’m stunned by something that’s just come to my attention. Something joyful and unexpected. But I’ll leave the details of that for the closing of my testimony, because when I penned this letter to Jim, I hadn’t the slightest inkling that there might be a compensation for all the heartache:
I was born with a sexual differentiation disorder. That’s the clinical term for it anyway. You’re probably more familiar with the layman’s term they use to define us: a hermaphrodite, or an intersexual person. Don’t you think I’ve ever been confused, though; I’ve always been a woman, since I was a little girl, even though I was educated as a boy. At birth, the doctors and my parents decided that I was a boy and so remained indifferent to certain ambiguous features. And my female organ, a half-formed uterus, wasn’t visible on the outside. I was sent to an all-boys school and raised in ignorance of the fact that for the first few weeks of my life, my sexual identity had been a source of confusion for the doctors. Until I turned twelve, my biggest troubles had to do with things like how I combed my hair, how I wore my uniform, how my teachers projected my future as a man.
But the older I got, the more I developed, and the greater the number of conflicts that began cropping up in other areas too—not just how I dressed and combed my hair, but the way my body was changing. I had low testosterone levels, but not enough to hinder the typical down that grows in puberty, as it did for the rest of my schoolmates, and the other visible changes that took place as my testicles began producing semen. All the simple superficial problems like clothes and hair started to morph into deeper problems until finally one morning it felt as though I had woken up in full costume. The most traumatic thing was that I couldn’t remove the get-up that I had been forced to wear. Like the web secreted from the belly of a spider, these external inflictions had trapped me inside of something I wasn’t. But I had range of movement from my spot in the web: my tiny penis responded to the stimulus of my left hand. The little masturbating bug explored the advantages of its new apparatus. But with the pasty milk like the membrane of an aquatic bird making a film between my fingers, I asked myself if this climaxing was going to be enough.
One day I considered self-mutilation. Then I started thinking about it more and more often. The thoughts could have just remained at that stage, as a sort of fantasy. So I was glad when the bomb actually made it happen. It wasn’t easy to look at the scar, and I did cry for weeks over losing the penis I had hated so much. For a long time I slept on my back because I missed the feeling of that little appendage rubbing between the futon and my leg. I used to imagine it to be a lizard’s tail that had been severed and was thrashing around, trying to reattach itself to my body. It wouldn’t have upset me as much to imagine something charred, inert, turned to puree; but instead I saw it wiggling around somewhere, looking for me in the ruins of Hiroshima like an eyeless lizard. It’s a recurring nightmare now, that blind, bewildered lizard.
It’s been so painful for me, Jim. Ten years. For ten long years I’ve felt like a derelict reptile longing for the twitch of a shunned tail. My feelings swung between relief that it was gone and the ache of castration; I was in a netherworld between wanting to mutilate myself and wanting the tail to regenerate into a different organ. And on the outside, I had a doll’s genitalia—neither a penis nor a vagina. The detonation had also affected my testicles; they were half their size in my scrotum.
Then I had my first period. It thrilled me to think that maybe the bomb had actually turned me into a woman, infused me with this fluid I’d dreamed of since I was a little girl, a means of expressing my true self to everyone. But I don’t dare call that blood menstruation now, because what started as a tiny stain every couple of months turned into bouts of abundant prolonged bleeding that at times lasted up to three weeks and left me anemic from iron loss, making it impossible to carry out even the smallest daily tasks. Just bending over the sink to wash my face in the morning was a huge undertaking. My menstrual cycle never balanced itself out, and the constant swing from a negligible to an overabundant flow only reinforced the fact that my body remained undefined.
By then I longed for motherhood. You’re a father, Jim. I know your daughter is alive, but right now, today, she’s lost to you and you suffer her absence. I was overwhelmed by the need to be a mother, what I felt was the worst kind of presence: the presence of what didn’t exist. I can’t compare your situation to mine, but believe me when I tell you how excruciating it can be to lose something you’ve never had. I followed the news of a group of women called the Hiroshima Maidens; they were disfigured by the bomb and selected to receive free plastic surgery in the United States. They made public statements, announcing how they could now become mothers thanks to their operations. Their scars healed, they regained their figures, and a country that had suddenly become the land of good intentions offered constant social and economic support. The Hiroshima Maidens were celebrated with balloons and applause.
I remember an episode of a television show called This Is Your Life. You might have seen it. Just another example of the countless humiliations a defeated Japan had to endure, though it didn’t diminish how jealous I was of the Hiroshima Maidens, not a single bit. This time it was Reverend Tanimoto who had to stomach the disgrace, since he had chaperoned the maidens on this U.S. tour. As the reverend stood with a frozen smile plastered on his face, the program host recounted the events of his life story, all the way back to infancy. I knew Mr. Tanimoto was there as a hibakusha, and like the rest of the television audience, I was anxious to hear his testimony. But the host held the spectators in thrall, building suspense with each new chapter of Mr. Tanimoto’s life only to break for a commercial selling a brand of fingernail polish whose name, like the reverend’s, had an ecclesiastical tinge: Hazel Bishop. It seemed utterly sadistic to me that they would advertise a cosmetic product called Hazel Bishop to an audience awaiting the painful testimony of a minister and Hiroshima victim. Afflicted, the reverend waited for the young woman to buff her fingernails and show off the hottest shades on the market—look, no flaking! Another element of intrigue was added to Tanimoto’s story besides the abrupt segues from his life to nail polish: a few minutes into the show, they presented the silhouette of a man hidden behind a translucent screen. The host spoke to the reverend concerning the surprise guest, announcing he was about to meet someone he’d never seen before. The silhouette finally uttered a few words and stepped from behind the screen: “On the sixth of August, 1945, I flew over the Pacific in a B-29. Destination: Hiroshima.” Turns out it was Robert Lewis, the copilot of the Enola Gay who—according to the host—was on set that evening to shake Tanimoto’s hand before thousands and thousands of spectators, in a gesture of friendship.
The reason I’m explaining all of this is to help you understand how passionately I wanted to become a mother, that not even insults like these were able to curtail my envy of the Hiroshima Maidens. When I was finally able to leave my foster family, I started undergoing a few of the easier procedures: breast augmentation, which I had to repeat a few years later because my body rejected the first implants, and a potent hormone treatment meant to soften my appearance and make me more feminine. I’d have to wait
ten more years to gather the money for a vaginoplasty and finally comply with the bomb’s verdict. Do you follow what I’m saying, Jim? I’m trying to explain—and it’s so frightening for me—that if after reading this you might still want to make love to me someday, it will likely be very different from anything you’ve experienced before. It’s terrifying to me. The idea that you might run away from me. I’m writing these lines because I don’t have the courage to wait for you to figure it out from my body.
I used up my savings on trips to Sweden for the procedures, since back then the United States was hesitant to authorize the kind of definitive operations I needed. I’ve already recuperated from the last round. Nothing hurts anymore. But I had to withstand a lot of pain, not only physical pain during the recovery period, but also just knowing that I’ll never have ordinary genitalia. I had to come to terms with the fact that penetration will forever raise questions about my sexual identity, and what’s worse, about my sense of self. The vaginoplasty was a complete success given the state of surgical techniques at the time, but not enough for a penis not to take issue with my vagina’s shape, texture, and size. Paleolithic penises wanted Paleolithic vaginas, holes with sizes and textures that fit.
I was pleased with the results of the first operations. Anorgasmically satisfied, since because the glans was no longer there, the doctors couldn’t construct a clitoris, though I found it psychologically less damaging than having orgasms with a member I didn’t recognize. Anyway, you should know that I do reach climax now, thanks to another procedure a few years later, in which they recovered what appeared to be, and was, the internal segment of my clitoris. So now I can say that I’ve had orgasms as both sexes. It was a long and painful process, but I was satisfied, though over time and as an adult I had to admit that the bomb had been a little hasty. If only it had been detonated ten years later, I could have enjoyed the presence of a child in my life. That loss still causes me to grieve today.
There’s something else I need to mention. After you have read all I’ve already written, this may seem petty to you, but it’s not minor to me. There’s a masculine feature the hormones couldn’t treat: baldness. By the age of twenty I had to wear a wig. I’ll never really know if my hair loss is due to premature male-pattern baldness or simply a side effect of radiation exposure. Whatever the case, it has always been a sign of decadence to me. I’m able to deal with it a little better now, though I never allow anyone to see me without my hair, or I guess I should say without some other woman’s hair.
It’s not just the sexual differentiation disorder that I find so hard to explain. I’ve long seen myself as a woman, and thanks to the hormone treatments and operations, I don’t think anyone finds ambiguity there. What I have trouble talking about is my body itself, from my hair follicles down to the marrow of my bones. How can I prepare you, Jim, to accept and desire me? And the hardest thing of all is something else. Something I’m still not sure how to articulate convincingly, for you to absorb not with your brain but with that other part of you, whatever it is, that allows us to empathize, to actually feel another person’s pain. What distresses me the most is that I’ll never be a father or a mother. I’ve been denied that forever. It’s a hard fact to swallow, so much so that it’s become a part of my identity, like a coarseness of the soul that I can pinpoint in my half-uterus, an organ whose dysfunction was decided in the first few weeks in my mother’s womb. In my case, a specific form of congenital adrenal hyperplasia arrested the indetermination of the hermaphrodite embryo that we all are in those early weeks. Neither male nor female. Both male and female. But beyond my biological makeup, there’s me, the woman that I am. I began aching for a child a few years after the bomb. At first it was just a wish, but over the following years a strong urge to get pregnant gripped me, and I still feel it today, feel it so powerfully that I’d exhaust whatever resources at my disposal to find a way to procreate.
For years I was called a hibakusha, but if I had to give myself a name it would be the nuclear parturient, because the morning that B-29 dropped Little Boy on my city and on me, I was impregnated with an atomic baby that I could feel but couldn’t see, the nightmare of a pregnancy that went beyond a nine-month gestation, one that lasted a lifetime.
I remember my days as an adolescent masturbating my penis for lack of a clitoris, and can’t help wondering if it might have allowed me to beget the desired child, since the penis was livelier than my ovaries. I had testicles, amenorrhea, mammary hypertrophy, and seminal vesicles, which meant I was designed to be a father. But the bomb exploded too soon and carried my penis away, my child, when I was too young to want to be a mother or a father. If I could go back in time, I think I would have chosen to be a father then, to be a father and then a mother.
I’m going to interrupt Jim’s letter here, now that I’ve touched on the most important points, to go back to something that happened with S, my friend, whom you’ll get to know in the coming pages. It took place in 2008, the last time I was in Japan, though I didn’t realize then it would likely be the last time I’d ever visit the land of my birth.
S and I had gone to see Okuribito, a film by Yojiro Takita. One of the first scenes struck me as being incredibly coincidental. The young protagonist, together with his teacher, was about to conduct an improvised nokanshi ritual. In Japan, the nokanshi is the person who prepares the body of the deceased following the Nokan ceremony, which involves caressing, massaging, and washing the body with a warm soft sponge and is meant as a double gesture of tenderness, at once a goodbye and also a welcoming. At the start of the film, the apprentice prepares the lifeless body of a beautiful young girl before the family. The young girl seems nearly alive, since she killed herself in a relatively gentle way, using carbon monoxide. The nokanshi admires the corpse’s face. He begins caressing it. But they weren’t just any caresses. We watch him softly press her eyelids, her cheekbones, her chin, as if to relieve the tension in the tiny muscles. Then he takes a wrist and pushes the rigid palm of her hand back, as if helping her stretch, preparing her extremities for physical exercise. Her body seemed to be relaxing, which made it hard to relate those exchanges with death. In fact he seemed to be preparing her for an awakening. The awakening of death, which is like the awakening of life. This is the manner in which Jim woke me up even before I had opened my eyes. The gentle touches that rouse someone from sleep are the same as those that encourage a rigid body toward death.
The next scene in the film contained the coincidence that surprised me so much because it referred so precisely to one of the chapters in my own life. The nokanshi covered the body with a kind of quilt, below which he removed the young girl’s kimono, always under the watchful eye of the family. This allowed him to place his hand below the quilt and wash the girl’s skin without anyone’s seeing the naked body. The nokanshi dipped a small sponge in a vessel of steaming water at the girl’s head, then introduced it below the cloth at chest level. He began washing the body. You could see the warm fingers working underneath the fabric, like a tiny animal stealthily burrowing a tunnel under the surface. But the hand stopped just below the belly. The little animal found something and palpated it, trying to identify what it was. Without a doubt it was a penis. The penis surprised the nokanshi, who looked in amazement at the unmistakable face of the young girl, her feminine features, the long hair. Suddenly he grasped why she had committed suicide.
I think that kind of wordless sudden comprehension of the rationale for a stranger’s suicide, arrived at merely through contact with the body, was the kind of awareness I’d always looked for. Instantaneous sensitivity like that would have saved me from having to write that letter to Jim, for example. I’m unable to communicate some things through words. They can be shared only nonverbally, perhaps by way of an endoscope. It’s not a metaphor. It’s an endoscopy. I open my legs and speak with my mouth shut. So I think about placing a camera inside a surgical tube inserted into my vagina up to my uterus. Everyone whose understanding I need—meaning you to
o, sir—are seated in a room. The micro-camera moves around the neck of my uterus, projecting an image on a domed screen all around us. We are the camera. Right now everything we see is pink. A pink tunnel. At the end of the tunnel is the resolution, the awareness of my conflict. But for now we wait. A pulse beats ever closer. The sound isn’t coming from my genitalia or from the monitor where I see the pink walls, but from on high; it’s the bomb cutting through the air as it falls. I see little numbers on the artifact indicating its weight—over four tons. I know the B-29 had difficulty at takeoff, and as a result the team had to arm the weapon in midflight. So I see the hand of the last man to touch it, Morris R. Jeppson. The hand doesn’t shake, but the man is afraid. Maybe Jeppson doesn’t recognize the umbilical cord that’s hanging from the bomb. Looking upward, I follow the umbilical cord. It’s very long, some 31,000 feet. It tickles my womb. On one side, there’s the bomb about to drop; on the other, there’s me, waiting. We’re all waiting along the umbilical cord suspended from the sky, from a bomb that is approaching and in its free fall through the air begins to make out a block of uneven streets. As it advances in a nosedive, it starts to comprehend Hiroshima. To comprehend me. So I want the cord to dock in my uterus. I see the epicenter of the detonation and understand the sudden incineration of the void: a baby’s spinal column sucks in everything around it with the tides of a vortex. A spine without marrow. Empty. Suddenly I comprehend the emasculating bomb, which fell to sever my penis, to cremate my desire, my child. It was Monday, the sixth of August, 1945. The bomb fell hard and fast, early, cutting through the sun-filtering clouds. At exactly 8:16:43 A.M. my newly deceased baby began to cry.
The Story of H Page 8
