A few miles north of us was New York Harbor, filled with the masts of tall ships. As I lay there watching the fireworks light up the sky, I thought, What a beautiful night it was, what a beautiful country.
Tad and Lois and I all had our arms around one another. I hadn't been cured by love yet, but at that moment I felt as if I might be, if only I sat there long enough.
Conundra, or The Sick Arab
The best piece of writing ever published on the subject of transsexuality bears the title
“Conundrum,”
a clever Latinate word meaning “a puzzle whose solution involves a joke or riddle.” I am referring here
not
to Jan Morris's classic 1973 narrative of her own transition, but to the even more classic trashing of same by Nora Ephron, collected in a sprightly Ephronasaurus published by Avon in 1984.
Of the many autobiographies published by my gamy and tawdry colleagues, none reached quite so large an audience as Morris's. This is, perhaps, because as James Morris, she was a widely respected travel writer; her work on Venice remains one of the best books ever written on the subject. She also emerged at a time when the culture, American culture anyhow, was first turning its attention toward the issue of civil rights for gays and lesbians. The time had come to add transsexuality to the rock pile, and add it she did.
Conundrum
was an instant smash; it was reviewed on the front cover of the Sunday
New York Times Book Review
; it became one of the standard texts in hundreds of college courses examining gender; it remains the one book on transsexuality that has been most frequently read by persons who otherwise would prefer live burial to “gender studies.”
Morris showed that a transsexual can be mature, wise, dignified, and literary. Single-handedly her book demonstrated that transsexuals as a
people
were not lurid, crazy, or marginal, at least not necessarily.
Conundrum
generated (and continues to generate) tremendous respect. Jan Morris did more to advance public understanding of transsexuals than any other figure, including the pioneer of this odd domain, Christine Jorgensen, the former GI whose groundbreaking surgery in the 1950s shocked the Eisenhower administration into bombing Korea.
For all that, it's hard not to be amused by Ephron's trashing of
Conundrum.
“I always wanted to be a girl, too,” writes Ephron. “I, too, felt I was born into the wrong body, a body that refused, in spite of every imprecation and exercise I could imagine, to become anything but the boyish, lean thing it was. . . . I wanted more than anything to be something I will never beâfeminine, and feminine in the worst way. Submissive. Dependent. Soft-spoken. Coquettish. I was no good at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand I am not half bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year-old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old
Cosmopolitan
girl.”
I personally do not know how Morris feels about
Conundrum
now, nearly thirty years after its publication. Like most former transsexuals, she seems to be interested in being judged now more for what is between her ears than between her legs. (A well-regarded writer friend of mine who attempted to interview Morris for a book she was writing received the terse, one-sentence rebuff “When I hear the word
gender
I reach for my pistol.”) My guess is that she is proud of the work for the huge step forward it marked in the public's understanding of transsexuality. At the same time, I wouldn't be surprised at all if Morris felt that
Conundrum
reflected a sensibility that wasâand I do mean this generouslyâsomewhat adolescent.
Transsexuals going through transition resemble nothing so much as gawky, wonder-struck teenagers, amazed and perplexed by their bodies, startled by an awareness of themselves as men or women, as if they have invented the whole business single-handedly then and there. This book of mine, in fact, almost surely commits this sin again and again, for which I can only say I am truly sorry. It does no good to tell a transsexual that this is all old ground and to get over yourself, any more than it does to tell this to a fifteen-year-old.
There is nothing as annoying as someone for whom the world is new. At least to those for whom the world is old.
For most forty-three-year-old women, many of the trappings of womanhood have long lost their wonder. One friend of mine said, “You know what it's like, Jenny? It's like gum that's lost its flavor. By the time you're forty, c'mon, let's face it
âthe party's over.”
For me, of course, the party was just beginningâand I refer, of course, to the experience of being in this body, not to the accompanying losses and grief, which were anything but a
party.
I wore makeup on Sundays. I wore skirts when most other mothers were wearing yesterday's blue jeans. I put polish on my toes. I read fashion magazines. Other women, especially Grace, looked on all this activity with annoyance, and who could blame them, or her? Indeed, I did, at times, not seem intent so much on being a woman as on being a
girl.
A transsexual's womanhood is examined, considered, and criticized much more relentlessly than that of other women. In my early days, people would often look at me and conclude, if my clothes were too feminine, for instance, that this was because
I just didn't know what
I was doing,
and of course in many ways they were correct.
Yet plenty of other womenâincluding forty-three-year-oldsâ behave in ways much more embarrassing than I did. Women
born
women are given the right to define womanhood on their own terms. Dolly Parton and Janet Reno, to name two, represent different interpretations of the fact of womanhood, and while one might question either of their sartorial styles, no sane person would ever conclude that Dolly and Janet are not
women.
Male-to-female transsexuals, on the other hand, have begun their lives as boys, and many of the things that partly define a woman's lifeâmenstrual cycles, pregnancy, and an oppositional relationship to menâare things that we know nothing about. For many people, transgendered or not, womanhood is thought, wrongly, to be synonymous with femininityâwith makeup and stretchy T-shirts and an obsession with Brad Pitt. None of this has a damn thing to do with it, of course, and in the long run, a transsexual who hopes to build a life around high heels and sponge cake is in for something of a disappointment.
I moved forward into transition not in order to be Dolly Parton (or, for that matter, Janet Reno), but in order to be Jenny Boylan. There are aspects of me that are feminine now, but I was feminine when I was a man, for that matter. I still retain a number of masculine affects that I am not ashamed of, and which many other women possess as well. I like to drink beer on a hot summer afternoon; I like to watch baseball, at least late in the season; and I still like to hike in the Maine woods and go camping. I prefer music to be loud; I like to tell jokes; and I have been known to swear like a Barbary pirate. Had I been born female, no one would remark upon these thingsâbut since I was not, any masculine affect is considered a vestigial link to a previous life; conversely, any feminine affect that seems excessive can be hauled out as evidence that I, like Morris, have arrived at middle age just in time to be fourteen years old.
As time has gone by, I have become more mellow about the whole damn business, content to let the primary concerns of my lifeâchildren, teaching, music, my relationship with Grace, friendships with Russo and Zero and othersâtake up my attention. Whether these things are masculine or feminine is not particularly important to me anymore. They are simply what I do.
Most of all, perhaps, I have let go of constantly trying to explain what this is all about. Early in transition, it was essential to me that everyone understand the condition of transsexualityâthat they grasp the horror of the dilemma, that they understand its medical components, that they know I had done all I could to remain the person they had known and loved, and so on. I had an answer ready for every objection.
What I have come to realize is that no matter how much light one attempts to throw on this condition, it remains a mystery.
Worse, it is a mystery that everyone has an
opinion
about. “Hey, man, cutting off your arm doesn't make you Lord Nelson,” said one helpful academic. My sister said, “Why can't you just wait until Mom is dead?”Another friend said,“I don't see why you get to be a woman just because you think you are. I mean, what if you thought you were a cat? Would you walk around with little paste-on whiskers and a tail?”
All I could say to such comments, in the end, was, “Well, I'm not a cat.”
Quite frankly, there are times when I think about transsexuality and I just have to shrug. I'm sorry I can't make it make more sense to you, I told Zero. But it is what it is. Whether I “really” am a woman, or whether I “had a choice” or not, or whether
anything,
no longer matters. Having an opinion about transsexuality is about as useful as having an opinion on blindness. You can think whatever you like about it, but in the end, your friend is still blind and surely deserves to see. Whether one thinks transsexuals are heroes or lunatics will not help to bring these people solace. All we can do in the face of this enormous, infinite anguish is to have compassion.
As Dr. Schrang said, “I'll tell you one thing. These people who object to transsexuality. They wouldn't like it, either, if they were the ones who had it. They wouldn't like it one bit.”
As a teacher and a writer, I found the inscrutability of the topic absolutely frustrating. I am used to being able to convince people of something I believe to be true, if only I have a few minutes and the proper rhetorical argument at hand. That there was nothing I could say to make this dilemmaâwhich for me was so huge and all-encompassingâclear to people was an absolute frustration.
Furthermore, I am above all else a skeptic. There are very few things, I think, that should be exempt from satire. The domain of the transgendered struck me as a land where one had to be so serious and respectful and empathetic that one more often than not found oneself having to sit there straight-faced while someone says things like “Actually I believe my âtrue' self to be a two-year-old baby.” (Yes, someone really did say this to me.)
“That's hard,” I'd have to say. “That's so hard.”
“Just tell me this,” said my friend Tim Kreider. “When you started in on hormones, was irony the first thing to go?”
I no longer hope that everyone will be able to understand what this condition is about. It seems to elude an accurate description. It is a medical condition, but it is not solely medical; it is a behavioral condition, but it is not solely psychological. Whatever it is, it is widespread. Professor Lynn Conway at the University of Michigan estimates that there are forty thousand transgendered male-to-females in this country, and that counts only the ones who have
already had
the surgery.
According to Professor Conway, that makes the condition more common than cleft palate and multiple sclerosis. This figure revises a statistic generated at Johns Hopkins decades agoâand still constantly quoted in the mediaâthat the number of transsexuals is astronomically small. But by almost any measure, it's not.
So why don't we see more transsexuals in our daily travails? Why are those who suffer from the condition thought to be such rarities? Simply because most transsexuals look unremarkable; having resolved their situation as best they can, they then proceed to essentially vanish off the radar. Unfortunately, the public's primary perception of transsexuals as a population is defined by the extremely small fringe of the community that feels driven to behave badly on
The Jerry
Springer Show.
In the meantime, tens of thousands of other extremely well adjusted individuals have gone about the business of their lives, doing their jobs, raising their children. Remarkably, they seem to have done so even without the benefit of anyone else's theory about their existence.
As Zero wrote me once, “It must be hard, Jenny, to have to keep proving to people that you exist.”
I wrote back, “I don't care about
people.
I would settle for you.”
Toward the end of transition, I found myself reading Katherine Anne Porter's “Noon Wine,” a short novel about a farmer whose failing farm is resuscitated by the sudden appearance of a hardworking Swedish migrant worker. After several years, a bounty hunter named Hatch appears, claiming the Swede is a wanted man. The farmer tries to get between his man and Mr. Hatch and winds up murdering the bounty hunter; the Swede disappears. In an ensuing trial, the farmer is found innocent by reason of self-defense, but in the years following, he spends his life suffering from the fact that his neighbors no longer think of him as “one of us.” He drives around in his pickup, from farm to farm, trying to “explain how it was,” to assure them that not only was he
found
innocent, he
was
innocent.
His neighbors don't want to know about it.
In the end, the farmer shoots himself in the head with his rifle, just like my friend John Flyte.
It's a cheerful little story.
What I've taken away from this, however, is the way in which we can become obsessed with clearing our good name, even after our innocence has been established. It is a very human impulse, but it's ultimately fraught with peril. The more we feel compelled to keep explaining ourselves, the less like others we become. As Zero said to me, rather late in transition, “Listen, Jenny, I don't mind you being a woman. But don't you think you could shut up about it once in a while?”
In the end, the best thing seemed to be to keep my head high, to maintain a sense of humor, and to be forgiving. I was treated as a woman by most people and basked once in a while in the glow of their love. Everyone was nice about it, even if occasionally they betrayed the fact that my extraordinary history made them uneasy. I felt like Jim in
The Adventures of Huck Finn
, who is disguised by the duke in order to prevent him from being carried off into slavery. “Blamed if he warn't the horriblest looking outrage I ever see,” writes Huck. “Then the duke took and wrote out a sign on a shingle so: