That July, a maintenance man in the Philadelphia airport called me “ma’am,” even though I was “presenting” as a man at the time. I wore a flannel shirt and blue jeans. I wondered if this was an isolated occurrence and went over to a woman selling peanuts in the concourse, directly opposite the ladies’ room. I asked her, “Excuse me, where is the rest room?”
She looked at me as if I were blind. She pointed across the concourse. “Turn around, honey,” she said.
I did.
“You see that sign right there that says ‘Ladies’?”
I nodded.
“Well, honey. That’s the rest room!” She laughed.
“Thanks,” I said.
So I walked across the concourse and into the room that said “Ladies,” and there were half a dozen women doing what women do, and no one looked at me with any surprise whatsoever. I went into a stall, then came out of one. I looked in the mirror. A tall, thin person with long blond hair looked back.
The fat migration that Dr. Strange predicted was the first and most dramatic effect of the estrogen. Like my father, I had carried much of my male weight in my chin and cheeks and belly. As the estrogen coursed slowly through my body, all that weight melted off my face and took up new residence on my hips and buttocks.
The strength in my upper body was another early casualty of hormones. Within a few months I found it hard to open jars or even lift up my children. In August, when Grace and I made our annual climb up Mt. Katahdin, I was amazed how hard it was to carry a backpack and ascend even an average mountain trail.
One afternoon I was playing a board game with Luke, and I rolled a pair of dice. As I did so, he started laughing, and I said, “What?” and he pointed to my upper arms and said, “Wibbly wobbly.” I shook my arm again, and there it was—the loose flab of the middle-aged female triceps. I remembered how my sixth-grade orchestra conductor, Mrs. Liesel, had flab on her arm that swung so freely, we feared the first violinist was going to get struck by it.
My breasts, too, changed fairly quickly. The nipples evolved first, expanding in diameter and changing in texture. The veins around them grew heavier and thicker. My chest ached.
When I began hormones, my measurements were 35–30–36. A year later, they were 37–30–38. When all was said and done, I was a C cup. And I still weighed exactly the same.
Estrogen and antiandrogens profoundly affected my libido. I certainly thought about sex a lot less often and with a different sensibility. As a man, my sex drive frequently resembled a monologue by a comic book hero succumbing to an evil spell. “Must—have! Must! Trying—to —resist! Getting harder to— Must have! Can’t—resist!”
I’d been driven to such delirium not only by the sight of breasts, but by the suggestion of breasts, even by the theory of breasts.
Now, when I looked at my own breasts, I had a simple sensation of, Well—there they are. My friend Curly, early in the process, asked me, “What’s it like? What’s it like to have boobs after all this time?”
“It’s not like anything,” I simply said. “They’re just there.”
Curly shook his head. “Man, Boylan, you are turning into a woman. One thing about women, they have no idea how interesting their tits are. They don’t think they’re all that remarkable at all. I mean, when I’m with girls sometimes I just want to say, How can you concentrate on anything, looking like that?”
“Sorry,” I said. “They’re great, but you know. The world doesn’t revolve around breasts.”
“Listen to you!” Curly shouted. “Of course the world revolves around breasts! What else would it revolve around?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know,” I said. “Like maybe the sun?”
Curly looked at me as if I were a stranger. “The sun, yeah, right.” He sighed. “I wish you could hear yourself.”
“Sorry, dude,” I said. “There are more important things in the world than breasts.”
My friend looked regretful.
“What?” I said.
“I’m trying to think of something more important than breasts.”
“How about family? Children? Relationships? Good health?”
“Traitor,” he said.
That fall, at Colby, as my body morphed, people knew something was up. Yet, perhaps understandably, imminent sex change was not the primary deduction. What they thought was that I was sick, fighting some disease I did not want to discuss.
When people asked me about my “weight loss,” I came up with a cockamamie story about how I had lost the pounds I’d picked up drinking Murphy’s in Cork. This seemed to satisfy people; at the very least, it ended the conversation. Privately, though, all of my colleagues at work were worried about me. At least now they say they were.
After six months of Premarin, I had another round of levels taken. I was found to have 59 nanograms of estrogen in my system. The average for an adult male is 6. The mean for females is 26.
Dr. Peabody nodded and said, “You’re doing fine.” In the fall he added an antiandrogen, which made my testosterone level go down. When people asked me, later, what the effects of the pills were, I cleverly said, “Well, the one pill makes you want to talk about relationships and eat salad. The other pill makes you dislike the Three Stooges.”
I noticed that I was more sensitive to stimuli now. I was much more aware of changes in heat and cold, and I was much more likely to complain that a car I was riding in was too hot or too cool, and I was frequently taking off sweaters or putting them back on again.
My skin grew softer. The hair on my arms and chest grew fine until it virtually melted away. The hair on my head grew fluffier, and I could feel it as it moved softly around my shoulders and neck. I shaved my legs, an activity that gave me exactly zero pleasure.
My moods began to shift capriciously. A friend sent me a “list of twenty-five reasons why it’s great to be a guy”; one of them was “one damn mood, all the damn time.” I used to cry at things like Pepsi commercials and It’s a Wonderful Life. Now I was less likely to cry at these things and was more likely to tear up when a dinner I had cooked didn’t turn out right, or when someone said something cruel, or when Luke put his arms around me and told me he loved me. I would sing an Irish song to a friend and suddenly become completely choked up, unable to finish. And when I cried, it wasn’t just the stoic silent leaking I was accustomed to. These were big, sobbing tears, and my body shook as they poured out. It felt great.
I liked the freedom of tears. But it was unnerving how close they were to the surface.
Above all, I was aware of a change in the way I occupied my body. I felt raw and vulnerable, exposed to the world. One day I was walking in a skirt through Lewiston, Maine, as rain fell and the wind howled around me, and I thought, There is nothing in a man’s experience that is like this, and I didn’t mean just the physical sense of cold wind on my legs.
The thing that I felt testosterone had given me more than anything else was a sense of protection, of invulnerability. I had never imagined myself to be particularly invulnerable when testosterone had free rein in my system, but this new world I was approaching seemed to have no buffers. Things that used to just bounce off me now got under my skin. There were a number of occasions when I wished I still had that male shield standing between me and the harshness of the world.
I began electrolysis of my beard that summer. Electro is a process by which one kills off hair follicles by placing a burning hot electric needle deep into one’s pores and basically deep-frying the roots of each individual hair like an onion ring. It was unbelievably painful, like being shocked and jabbed and barbecued all at the same time. It left my face looking like a Quarter Pounder, without cheese. I’d endure two and a half hours of this a week, for a year and a half, then I did it for an hour a week for another year. My electrologist estimated that I had about forty thousand follicles on my face. Each one had to be char-grilled four or five times. All told, I probably spent about 250 hours, over two and a half years, in the fryer.
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I also tried, on three occasions, the new “laser electrolysis,” which was performed by a plastic surgeon who scorched my face with something that looked like a Jedi light saber. It felt as if I were placing my face into one of those giant steel cauldrons one sees in foundries, a gargantuan bucket filled with white-hot molten lava. This left me beardless for a few months, then it all grew back again. I asked the plastic surgeon about this, and he said, “Yeah, that’s the problem.” Apparently you had to keep getting smelted, again and again.
I tried to explain the horrors of this process to a few people who knew what I was going through, but they weren’t particularly moved. Their attitude seemed to be, “Well, sorry you’re in such agony, but if you don’t want to be in such agony, stop having your beard burned off like an imbecile.”
Their attitude, toward electro as well as toward the entire condition of transsexuality, resembled the spirit behind an ancient Henny Youngman joke:
Guy goes in to see a doctor, he says, “Doc, you gotta help me, I get a terrible pain every time I go like this. What should I do?”
Doctor says, “Don’t go like that.”
I began to play regularly with a rhythm-and-blues band called Blue Stranger. The brains behind the band were a couple named Nick and Shell. Nick was the bass player, and his wife, Shell, beautiful and fearless, was the lead singer. She regularly charged out into the audience with her remote mike and danced on top of the bar.
It was a great band to be in; everyone was an adult with a job and a family, and we played only for the sake of having fun. For all that, they were excellent musicians. Playing music with Blue Stranger was more fun than almost anything else I could imagine, and best of all, we played only covers—no annoying original material whatsoever. We played “Brown-Eyed Girl” in seedy Maine bars for drunken working people. What could be better than that?
Shell, who could swear like a sailor when she was in the mood, was one of the first people to ask me directly about the changes in my appearance. “You look weird,” she said. “What are you on, the AIDS diet plan?”
“I’ve been losing some of the weight I picked up in Ireland,” I said.
“You’re not dying, are you?”
“I’m not dying.”
“’Cause if you are, and you’re not telling your friends about it, all I can say is Fuck you.”
“I’ll let you know if I’m dying,” I said.
“You’d better,” Shell said. “Or I’ll fucking kill you.”
Grace, of course, was also acutely aware of the changes in me, and they frightened her. The rapidity of my body’s response to estrogen, which was not entirely typical, further reinforced her sense that I was on a “runaway train.” It was true that I’d begun hormones, begun electrolysis, begun this transition, all with a sense of experimentation, to see, as Dr. Strange had suggested, whether being increasingly female in the world was what I had expected it would be. I still had the sense that I could suspend or reverse this journey at any moment, if I found that the world I was coming to inhabit was one in which I did not wish to live. Yet Grace didn’t see that, and if I said as much— that all of this was still on a trial basis—she did not believe it.
She, too, saw me as increasingly female, and as a result, she began to react to me as she might react to another woman, which is to say, as a close friend or relative rather than a lover. Her eyes no longer sparkled when I entered a room, and the embraces and kisses I gave her she endured rather than enjoyed. By the end of that summer, we were quickly becoming like sisters—sharing a home, a family, shepherding children, but without a physical relationship.
The last time we slept together we were at the lake house, in autumn. The dock had been pulled out of the water, the canoes were overturned in the boat rack, and the loons had headed south. The red leaves of the maples and the soft brown needles of the pines were fallen on the lawn.
We lay in bed after making love, lying back on our pillows, the sheet covering us at the waist. Grace was curled onto me, but her head was resting on a female breast.
I felt something liquid on my ribs, and I leaned forward to see the tears, flowing quietly from her face and rolling down my body.
“Grace,” I said. “It’s okay.”
She didn’t say anything for a long time.
“It’s just . . . ,” she said at last. “Each time we make love now, I’m afraid—it’s going to be the last time.”
“I’m not going anywhere, honey,” I said. “Don’t worry. I will always love you.”
But my words to her only made clear how little I understood what she meant. I had gone somewhere, whether I loved her or not. And the fear she spoke of, that each time together would be the last—was not the fear that I would lose my affection for her. It was the fear that she would lose hers for me.
Someone who did not know us, who might have looked through the window at us lying there, might have seen two women, curled in each other’s arms, one of them in tears. What a shame, such a stranger might have thought. I wonder what’s come to make those women so sad.
I saw a review in The New York Times of a film that had been the highlight of the New York Film Festival, Being John Malkovich. The screenwriter and co-producer was one Charlie Kaufman.
I thought of my old roommate on 108th Street, remembered us trying to catch the mice that lived inside the upright piano. The sound those little feet made as they sprang across the strings.
I gave Charlie a call at the last number I had for him in Los Angeles, and I got his answering machine. “Hey, Charlie,” I said. “I saw the review of your film in the Times, and I just wanted to say congratulations. Give me a call sometime if you want to be in touch.” I thought about explaining the whole sex change business, but it didn’t seem like the right thing to stick on an answering machine. I’ll tell him the story if he calls back, I thought.
He didn’t.
One day the doorbell rang unexpectedly when I was at the lake, and I looked out the window with apprehension. The unannounced visitor was what I always feared when I was there “as” Jennifer. Out in the driveway was a car I did not recognize, a boat on its trailer. A woman sat in the passenger seat.
A voice called from downstairs. “Hello? Anybody home?”
I decided, Well, here goes nothing, and went downstairs. I was wearing a green skirt and a T-shirt and a minimum of makeup.
“Hi,” said the visitor. “It’s me, Italo Calvino [not his real name]. I’m your neighbor?”
Italo had the house in back of us—he lived in New Jersey and always came up to Maine for a few weeks each summer.
“I’m Jenny Boylan,” I said.
“Hello. Are you Jim’s sister?”
I nodded. Okay, that was a good idea. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Jim’s sister, Jenny.”
“Well, listen, I just needed some help getting my boat in the water. Is Jim going to be back later?” he said.
“I don’t think so.”
“You’re his sister?” He looked at my breasts. “You ever read his books? They’re funny.”
“I’ve read them,” I said.
He reached forward to shake my hand. “I live up the street. We live in Jersey, come up here every summer.”
He looked out at his wife, sitting there in the car. “You married?”
“Yes,” I said.
He thought this over. “Well, you see Jim, you tell him I said hi. Maybe the four of us could do something sometime.” I tried to figure out which four he meant. Was he counting my husband? His wife? Of the four he had in mind, was I two of them?
“I’ll tell him.”
He shook my hand again and held it for a little too long, then he headed down the steps. As he did, I suddenly realized he hadn’t asked me to help with his boat. I guess the way he figured, being a woman, I’d only screw it up.
As he got to his car, I heard his wife say something. Italo responded to her with a phrase that seemed to seethe with diminution. “Naaah,” he said to her.
“It was only his sister.”
And the way he said this showed me exactly how little a person of importance he considered me to be. It hurt my feelings. I’m only my sister? I thought, What am I, chopped liver? I went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. An average-looking woman in her early forties stared back at me. I held up one finger and wiggled it like the possessed child in The Shining.
“Jimmy isn’t here anymore, Mrs. Boylan,” I said.
It was a sentiment that Grace increasingly shared, as the months went by and she watched her husband slowly disappear from sight.
Boygirl (Winter 2000–2001)
The Coffin House hadn’t changed much in twenty-five years. The steps up to the third floor still creaked, and most of the posters I’d hung on the wall in tenth grade were still there. The dog door still led into the kennel, although the dog had been dead twenty years. Everywhere there were framed pictures of the family—of my parents in their youth; of my grandfather, still sternly standing watch above the fireplace; of me wearing a mortarboard at Wesleyan graduation. The keyboard cover on the Cable Nelson in the living room still bore the scratches made by my fingers a long time ago. A low C still had a small chip in the ivory. That was where my tooth had hit the keyboard one night in eleventh grade, when I’d tried to play the low notes with my nose.
In the morning I would tell my buoyant mother that I was a transsexual.
I slept in the bed in which I had lost my virginity to Donna Fierenza in 1979, the same bed in which Grace and I had conceived Patrick. The bathtub where Onion had bathed was still there, although the walls of the bathroom had been painted a cream color. On a bookshelf was still the thick volume Art Masterpieces of the World. The pages still fell open to The Turkish Bath.
The house was just as haunted as ever. At night it groaned and creaked; soft footsteps padded through the attic above my head. The wind rushing through the drafty windows suggested the soft voices of whispering children.
I am not sure what time it was when I felt my father standing next to my bed, but when I opened my eyes, there he was, just as he had been in life.
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