by Amy Bloom
Acclaim for Amy Bloom’s
NORMAL
“Amy Bloom’s wonderful eye and ear are evident.… She cares for her subjects but retains her objectivity; her great skill is in extracting and weaving from the specific stories her own original thesis about sexuality and gender. This is an important work.”
—Abraham Verghese, author of My Own Country
“As Amy Bloom walks us through her adventures in genderland, she draws compulsively readable pictures of the folks she met there.”
—Out
“Wonderfully written, thoughtfully and compassionately told.… A mind-opening, spirit-enlarging book.”
—Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand
“A moving examination of the variety of gender and erotic preferences.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Bloom dares the reader to be willingly confounded by her always engaging, frequently humorous interviewees while also airing her own reactions.… An accessible, nonsensationalistic introduction to a fascinating and controversial subject.”
—Library Journal
“Bloom’s understanding of gender changed radically after her remarkable odyssey into the hidden worlds of female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual cross-dressers, and hermaphrodites, and so will her readers’.”
—Booklist
“Such is Bloom’s skill as an interviewer and a writer that she removes the sensationalism from the subject.… She is an excellent writer and a sensitive listener.”
—Deseret News
AMY BLOOM
NORMAL
Amy Bloom is the author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Come to Me, and a novel, Love Invents Us. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper’s Bazaar, among other publications, and in many anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories, Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards, and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.
ALSO BY AMY BLOOM
Come to Me (stories)
Love Invents Us (novel)
A Blind Man Can See
How Much I Love You (stories)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, SEPTEMBER 2003
Copyright © 2002 by Amy Bloom
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, in 2002.
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Portions of this work were originally published, in different form, in The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Random House edition as follows:
Bloom, Amy.
Normal : transsexual CEOs, crossdressing cops, and hermaphrodites with attitude / Amy Bloom,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-679-45652-X (alk. paper)
1. Transsexualism—United States. 2. Transsexuals—United States—Portraits. 3. Transvestism—United States. 4. Transvestites—United States—Portraits. I. Title: Transsexual CEOs, crossdressing cops, and hermaphrodites with attitude. II. Title.
HQ77.95.U6 B58 2002
306.77—dc21
2002068222
Vintage ISBN: 1-4000-3244-X
eBook ISBN: 978-1-58836-208-7
Author photograph © Sigrid Estrada
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
IN MEMORIAM
MALCOLM KEITH, MY TEACHER
1923-2001
CONTENTS
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PREFACE
THE BODY LIES: FEMALE-TO-MALE TRANSSEXUALS
CONSERVATIVE MEN IN CONSERVATIVE DRESSES: HETEROSEXUAL CROSSDRESSERS
HERMAPHRODITES WITH ATTITUDE: THE INTERSEXED
AFTERWORD: ON NATURE
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I have been thinking and talking about gender, sex, sexuality, culture, health, and illness for the last eight years, and I could not have completed this book without the advice, insights, and writings of the following people, whose help was even greater than I have indicated in these pages: Mariette Pathy Allen, Kay Ariel, Ray Blanchard, Cheryl Chase, Ken Corbett, Dallas Denny, Holly Devor, Mickey Diamond, Mark Doty, Alice Domurat Dreger, Peter Edidin, the Fairfaxes, Lori Fox, James Green, Philip Gruppuso, Judith Halberstam, Suzanne Kessler, Don Laub, Arthur Lavin, Gail Lebovic, Steve Levine, Merissa Sherrill Lynn, Donald Moon, Angela Moreno, Esther Newton, Rachel Pollack, Marc Rubinstein, the Rudds, Leah Schaefer, SPICE, and Sydney Spiesel.
A number of people preferred not to be identified; to all of you who helped me gather information, clarify my thoughts, and better understand things that are not so easy to understand, thank you.
To my agent, Phyllis Wender, extraordinary mix of dear friend, fearless watchdog, and Natty Bumppo, and to my editor, Kate Medina, who believed in this project from its inception and guided me through it with her usual rare deft grace and high standards, I am able to convey only a fraction of my appreciation.
I was also helped by the intelligent conversation, suggestions, and observations of my three dearest critics, Alex, Caitlin, and Sarah, and by the unending encouragement and support of my best reader, editor, and beloved, Joy Johannessen.
PREFACE
A great multitude of people are continually talking of the Law of Nature; and then they go on giving you their sentiments about what is right and what is wrong: and these sentiments, you are to understand, are so many chapters and sections of the Law of Nature.… [Such and such an act, they say,] is unnatural, that is, repugnant to nature: for I do not like to practise it: and, consequently, do not practise it. It is therefore repugnant to what ought to be the nature of everybody else.
JEREMY BENTHAM,
Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation
(1789)
Why is it so hard for us to face that our truths are often fantasies? How can Jeremy Bentham, hardly a guy to be riding in the float at the head of the flamboyant, the shocking, and the spit-in-your-eye crowd, still be telling us from the eighteenth century what we don’t yet know in the twenty-first?
Normal is about people widely considered not normal: female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and the intersexed, sometimes known as hermaphrodites. I originally wrote the first essay, “The Body Lies,” for The New Yorker. “Isn’t there anything you’ve wondered about and never understood?” Tina Brown, then the editor, asked me. “Whatever it is, write about that.” There was, and is, a long list of such things, but people who had chosen to have traumatizing surgeries to change their gender permanently, and men adamant about desiring both women and their clothes, were at the top of it, since in both cases I could not imagine what kind of people these would be. I didn’t know enough about the intersexed even to wonder.
My ignorance was outstripped by my presumptions and assumptions. Surely, transsexuals were either severely delusional and easy prey for unscrupulous doctors, or else they were just victims of our nutty, gender-obsessed society. No, as it turns out. Surely, heterosexual crossdressers were closeted gay men whose innate femininity was expressed through the wearing of women’s clothes. No, as it turns out. Surely, those unhappy intersexed people were crazy, even self-destructive, to suggest that intersexed babies were not served by early surgery. No, as it turns
out.
It is true, as physicians and scientists and novelists know, that pathology teaches us something about health, as unhappiness teaches us something about happiness and loss teaches us something about what we have. It’s also true that there is, in all of these dichotomies, more of a continuum and a mix than we sometimes think.
In spending time with people whose circumstances have forced them to think hard about issues of identity and gender, of the public and the private, in ways that most of us can shrug off if we wish to, I learned as much about our culture’s blind spots as about their habits, and as much about the commonality of human needs, no matter how uncommon the costume or the physical package. The female-to-male transsexuals pushed me to think, as I had not, much, about what makes a man, and why, and why we care; the crossdressers, about the nature of marriage and marital happiness and the ties and binds of femininity; the intersexed, about medical practice and its great advances, and great failures, and about the real damage of shame and silence and the process and costs of change.
And all these people became, not the transsexuals, the crossdressers, the intersexed, but Michael and Luis, Dixie and Rebecca, Cheryl and Hale. People. People with stories and wishes and good luck and bad, and as much as their stories are filled with intriguing details and terrible ones, with really funny, and really awful, encounters with the world, they are the stories of people whose hopes and needs, however foreign or familiar, teach us about ourselves as well as about them, and whose difference calls upon the rest of us to examine where the real differences lie.
There are shelves and shelves of academic, clinical, ideological, and autobiographical books on one or more of the subjects I address here. I didn’t want to add to them; I wanted to tell the stories of the people I met and how it was to be with them, to offer readers a chance to see what I saw, perhaps to see further and better, and to see into these particular worlds and back out to the larger one we all share.
The names of many of the people in this book, and some identifying details about them, have been altered at their request.
THE BODY LIES
FEMALE-TO-MALE TRANSSEXUALS
What would you go through not to have to live the life of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa? Not to realize, early in childhood, that other people perceive a slight, unmistakable bugginess about you, which you find horrifying but they claim to find unremarkable? That glimpses of yourself in the mirror are upsetting and puzzling and to be avoided, since they show a self that is not you? That although you can ignore your shell much of the time and your playmates often seem to see you and not your cockroach exterior, teachers and relatives pluck playfully at your antennae with increasing frequency and suggest, not unkindly, that you might be more comfortable with the other insects? And when you say, or cry, that you are not a cockroach, your parents are sad, or concerned, or annoyed, but unwavering in their conviction—how could it be otherwise?—that you are a cockroach, and are becoming more cockroachlike every day. Would you hesitate to pay thirty thousand dollars and experience some sharp but passing physical misery in order to be returned to your own dear, soft, skin-covered self?
Approximately two people in every hundred thousand are diagnosed—first by themselves, then by endocrinologists, family doctors, psychiatrists, or psychologists—as high-intensity transsexuals, meaning that they will be motivated, whether or not they succeed, to have surgery that will bring their bodies into accord with the gender to which they have known themselves, since toddlerhood, to belong. Until a decade or so ago the clinical literature and the unreliable statistics suggested that for every four men seeking to become anatomically female, there was one woman seeking the opposite change. Now clinical evaluation centers report that the ratio is almost one to one.
In twenty years of practice as a clinical social worker, I met men who liked to wear women’s clothing, women who preferred sex in public conveyances to sex at home, men who were more attracted to shoes than to the people in them; I didn’t meet any transsexuals. I encountered transsexuals only the way most people do: in Renee Richards’s story, in Jan Morris’s Conundrum, in Kate Bornstein’s books, and on afternoon talk shows, where transsexuals are usually represented by startlingly pretty young women, sometimes holding hands with their engagingly shy, love-struck fiancés, sometimes accompanied by defensive, supportive wives turned best friends. I wondered, in the middle of the afternoon, where the female-to-male transsexuals were. Even if there were four times as many male-to-female transsexuals, there still had to be a few thousand of the other kind somewhere. But not in mainstream bookstores, not in magazines, not in front of talk-show audiences of middle-aged women standing up to applaud the guests’ ability to “look just like the real thing.”
I thought there must be a reason female-to-male transsexuals were invisible. I wondered if their physical transformations were so pitiful that no one could bear to interview them, if women who wished to be men were less interesting, less interview-worthy than men who wished to be women, or if these people were so floridly disturbed that even the talk-show hosts were ashamed to be seen with them.
Much of the early psychiatric literature about transsexuals, from the pre–Christine Jorgensen 1940s until the late 1970s, leaned heavily toward psychoanalytic explanations and toward clinical descriptions that, however sympathetic to the unhappy patient, emphasized the bizarreness not of the biological condition but of the conviction that there was a biological condition. The next psychiatric wave emphasized “personality disorders” as the root of transsexuality, specifically the popularized borderline personality syndrome, with its inadequately formed sense of self and frightened yearning for symbiosis. In The Transsexual Empire (1979), Janice Raymond dismissed the biological reality of transsexuality and attacked transsexuals as agents and pawns of the patriarchy. Her overwrought theories about the meaning of transsexuality and the training and practice of surgeons who perform transsexual procedures read like the feminist equivalent of some of the Mafia–CIA–White Russian conspiracy theories of Kennedy’s assassination, but her essential point, that transsexuals are psychologically unstable victims of a society that overemphasizes the roles of sexual insignia and gender difference, made sense to me. If the people involved were less nuts and society were less rigid, it seemed, neither transsexuals nor the surgery they seek would exist.
Most of us can understand a wish, even a persistent wish, to belong to the other gender. History and fiction are full of examples, many charming, some heroic, of women who dressed as men throughout their lives. It’s the medical procedures that make transsexuals seem crazy: six months to two years of biweekly intramuscular injections of two hundred milligrams of Depo-Testosterone, which cause an outbreak of adolescent acne, the cessation of menstruation, and the development of male secondary sex characteristics; then a double mastectomy, in which most but not all of the breast tissue is removed, the nipple saved, and the chest recontoured for a more masculine, pectorally pronounced look; and then, a year to ten years later (depending on the patient’s wishes and financial resources), a hysterectomy and one of two possible genital surgeries: a phalloplasty (a surgery to create a full-size phallus and testicles) or a metoidioplasty (a surgery that frees the testosterone-enlarged clitoris to act as a small penis). In short: multiple, expensive, and traumatic surgeries to remove healthy tissue. Who would do this?
Lyle Monelle, a burly man of twenty-eight, lives with his mother, Jessie, in a trailer park in suburban Montana, a state in which I’d never imagined suburbs. The trailer park is neatly laid out beneath a shocking cobalt sky, and all the culs-de-sac have their own blue-and-white street signs, none of which are bent or rusted or facing the wrong way. The careful hand of people who are used to making do, doing without, and trying again is everywhere. Jessie and Lyle are watching for me from the trailer’s little porch, and they come toward the car like a couple of welcoming relatives.
The inside of the trailer looks familiar; it is the Montana twin of my late mother-in-law’s home in no
rthern Minnesota. Sturdy, slightly bowed Herculon love seat and matching recliner in shades of orange; copper mallards hanging on the opposite wall, arching over the TV. The three of us finish two pitchers of iced tea during the afternoon’s conversation, and Lyle and Jessie allow themselves to be sad and occasionally puzzled by their own story, but not for long. All their painful stories are followed by moments of remembered grief but end in the genuine and ironic laughter of foxhole buddies; they know what they know, and they are not afraid anymore.
Lyle is older than I had thought he would be—he’s an adult. He was a patient of three of the people I’ve already interviewed—Dr. Donald Laub, a preeminent plastic surgeon known especially for female-to-male sex change surgery; Judy Van Maasdam, the counselor at Laub’s surgical center in Palo Alto; and Dr. Ira Pauly, a noted psychiatrist—and when they told me about Lyle, they all focused on how young he was at the time of transition, much younger than most people who apply for surgery. Even though I knew better, I had half expected to meet a teenager. He was fourteen when he began hormone treatments, with medical approval, fifteen when he had his mastectomies, but twenty-three before he and his parents had enough money for the phalloplasty, the “bottom” surgery. (That’s what the guys say about their surgeries—“my top,” “my bottom.”) I was horrified when I first heard the stories about this kid, and I imagined meeting his parents and clinically evaluating them as misguided, covertly sadistic, or perversely ignorant, acting out their own unhappiness on their helpless child.
