Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (13 page)

"Did you have friends then?"

"In high school? Certainly not boys. I wasn't into that compensation thing."

"Girls have boys who are friends."

"But those girls are still treated as girls! Or at least viewed as girls! Whenever I hung out with boys, they'd want to do boy-type things that didn't interest me. It had been that way my whole damn life. Let's play combat! Let's play race car! Let's go build a tree house! Oh, please. And it certainly doesn't get any better when you're a teenager. In fact, it gets worse."

"At least they're not playing soldier anymore."

"Hah! The soldier's just on leave now. He's got his four-day pass, or he's gone AWOL. But with all that testosterone coursing through him, he is still every cell the warrior. Of course, by then, even if I'd wanted to play football or drink beer or talk about some poor girl's hooters, the boys wouldn't have wanted me hanging around."

"Too ... effeminate?"

"I was considered quite the girly boy. Naturally."

"Well, did you have friends who were girls?"

"A few. And I always seemed to have a girlfriend, which at least gave me a little power in the eyes of the boys. But it was all very, very difficult. Especially when I was still trying to figure out what was going on. I'd see a beautiful girl, and I'd want her sexually, but I'd also be desperately envious of her. My sister said it's like this friend of hers, a man who can't walk, and she's absolutely right. That guy is incredibly jealous of people whose legs work, and sometimes he gets seriously pissed off at life. He was in some sort of accident when he was nine or ten, and now he's stuck in a wheelchair. It just doesn't seem fair."

"You'd desire a woman? And be jealous of her?"

"Still do. God, Allison, I look at your body, and I just want every part it, and I want it in every imaginable way. I wish my feet were as petite as yours, and I wish I could dab red polish on my toes while watching TV--just like you do. I wish my waist were your waist, and I wish I had hips--"

"Trust me, you don't want my hips."

"I do! And forgive me for confessing this, Allison, but half the time when I lick you, I'm turned on and resentful at once. After all, even when I have a vagina, it will never be as creamy as yours! I'll never be naturally moist! I'll never--"

"I get it," she said. "Thank you."

"I'm sure you do, but it's only because you're very intuitive and very smart. I haven't begun to tell you how shitty my years in high school really were. I haven't told you a thing about the eating disorders and the dieting and the vomiting--anything to prevent my body from bulking up and becoming a man's. I haven't told you about the times my mom would start crying when I would get drunk and try to tell her what I was feeling. Or the way my dad couldn't stand to be in the same room with me for more than five minutes--and, in fact, still can't. He's not mean to me: He just doesn't know how to deal with his pansy son."

"And your sister?"

"She's terrific. But she's five years younger than I am, so she wasn't much help two decades ago. When I was fifteen and sixteen years old, she was still in elementary school. So I would spend days and days alone in my room with absolutely no one to talk to, because, basically, I had nowhere to turn and no one to confide in."

I watched her drain the last of her wine. "I shouldn't have another glass," she said, "but I think I will."

"I have that effect on people," I said, and I motioned for our waiter to return.

When we were waiting for our check after dinner--long after we'd finally given in and ordered and finished a bottle of wine--Allison reached across the table for my hands and wrapped her fingers around mine.

"What will it look like?" she asked, the worrisome urgency of a mother in her voice.
Honey, do you really think a tattoo's a good idea? Do you really think you should dye your hair purple? Maybe you'd like to talk to someone about this self-mutilation thing?

Of course I knew exactly what she meant. I'd asked it myself of doctors in three states and in Montreal. And each time I'd used that very same word.
It
.

What will it look like?

Each surgeon had known instantly what I was talking about.

"Will it look like ... any other woman's?" Allison asked when I didn't answer right away.

I shrugged and then repeated what the surgeon I had chosen in Colorado had told me. "It will look exactly like what it's supposed to look like," I said, and then added what he'd said to reassure me. "Apparently, it will fool anyone but a gynecologist ... and even gynecologists, at first, will assume it belongs to a g.g."

"G.g.?"

"Genetic girl."

We had both had way too much to drink, but with the little reason that remained we agreed it was inadvisable for her to try to drive back to Bartlett. We decided instead we would leave her car in the parking lot of the restaurant, and she would spend the night in my apartment in Burlington.

There, at her urging, I showed her my special closet with my secret wardrobe, and then we made love on the bed. The next morning, I knew, we'd regret both decisions. But it was late and we were drunk, and we were just two chicks having the best time in fantasy land.

Our next three dates were very different. We went to dinner. We went to the movies. And then we went to our separate homes. We knew I was in my waning days in Jockeys for Him, and neither of us could cope with the notion that our passion might not survive my transition. My castration. My rebirth.

*

PART II

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Tuesday, September 25

CARLY BANKS:
Stevens says she honestly didn't know whether Allison Banks would accompany her to Colorado.

DANA STEVENS:
Really, I didn't. But I hoped she would. I wasn't afraid of the surgery--I was actually looking forward to it. But I wasn't sure I could bear being alone. I'd spent so much of my life as a male that way that I wasn't sure what I would do if I woke up as a woman and my world was as empty as ever.

Chapter 11.

carly

"GENDER MATTERS," DANA ONCE TOLD ME. "SEXUAL orientation doesn't."

And while that mantra makes sense to me now, the bombshells my mom dropped on me the night I came home from college had left me shaken. The fact that I thought Dana was a pretty good-looking woman Sunday afternoon didn't help. He'd come over for brunch, and I wasn't honestly sure what to expect, but I certainly hadn't anticipated a tall, attractive woman in jeans and boots and a sweater.

Dana was wearing more makeup than my mom wore, perhaps, but this was still no Cockney aunt from a Monty Python sketch.

Apparently, he hadn't always looked so good in women's clothes. The first time my mom had seen Dana in drag, she said there was no way he could have passed for a woman. This was despite their decision to meet in some dive on Colchester Avenue with rotten lighting. By the time I came home from college, however, my mom had had six or seven weeks to whip him into shape. They spent whole afternoons at the big-and-tall-girl shops in the strip malls outside of Burlington when my mom was done teaching for the day, and once they went to some big-and-tall-girl factory outlet near Montreal.

Dana was in heaven: racks and racks of dresses just his size.

I wasn't sure what to say when he arrived early Sunday afternoon, despite having lain in bed most of that morning trying to figure it out. Fortunately, Dana made it easy for me.

"It's my hair," he said, hanging his leather pocketbook along with his jacket on the coatrack just inside the front hall. "That's what's different. I've let it grow out." And then he hugged me, and I smelled his perfume.

It was only the three of us that afternoon, so my mom was probably more comfortable with Dana physically than she would have been had there been other people with us. Nevertheless, I was still struck by the way they touched each other. After he handed her a big wooden salad bowl he'd gotten down from a cabinet high above the oven, Dana swirled his hand on her back, like her back was a window he was washing. I saw my mom squeeze his fingers after she'd given him the corkscrew for a bottle of wine. And they must have kissed each other at least three or four times.

Once, I saw Dana kiss the tips of my mother's fingers where she had bitten the nails down to the cuticles and the skin was ragged and raw.

My mom, I knew from experience, wouldn't have been that physical with a regular boyfriend in front of me. Dana, of course, wasn't a regular boyfriend: He had some of the advantages of one, such as the height to get down the salad bowl without needing a stool, and a lifetime of pulling corks from bottles of wine. But he was softer than a man, and he moved more gracefully through a room. His jeans may have been androgynous, but his blouse and his sweater were very delicate. Once or twice when he moved quickly in the kitchen and his cardigan flared behind him like wings, he reminded me of a dancer.

And when my mom and he touched, it was like they'd been friends since childhood: just a pair of women who'd played tea party together at four and Barbies at five, now putting together a brunch on a lazy Sunday afternoon. Two women who'd been pals forever.

When we sat down to eat, the two of them were so busy asking me about college and the film I was making at the battery factory that for long periods of time I completely forgot the strangeness that loomed before the two of them. I complained about my roommate, my lack of sleep, and about the way so many kids at the college were from cities and suburbs and couldn't cope with rural Vermont.

I could have been talking to my mom and her friend Molly Cochran. In some ways, I could have been talking to Dad and Patricia.

By the time Dana left late that afternoon, I was actually more comfortable with the notion that Dana the Transsexual was going to move in than I'd been a few days earlier with the idea that Dana the Man was going to live with us. It wouldn't, I realized, feel like my mom's male lover was in the house when I'd wake up in the morning--my hair a rat's nest, my breath poison gas. Rather, it would seem like her roommate from college was there. Maybe a friend from childhood had arrived. Perhaps some female cousin she hadn't seen in years, but with whom she had once been very close, was going to stay with us awhile.

I understood something sexual would be going on when they disappeared into my mom's bedroom at night, the door closed when I was home, perhaps open wide when I was at college or at Dad's. But that no longer mattered--or, at least, it mattered less. When my mind neared the notion of my mom and Dana in the same queen-size bed, inevitably it would latch onto the realization as well that Dana was neither a female cousin nor a lesbian lover. At least not yet. And something about the whole equation would then make me shudder.

Mostly, however, I was reassured. I was fine. I'd watched Dana, and a big part of me had concluded that he wasn't completely insane. Maybe, on some level that mattered more than most, he really was a woman.

My father tried to put up a good front, but let's be real: His life was a natural disaster. At least it must have seemed that way to him, whenever he looked at the two adult women in his life. Patricia, it was clear even to me, wasn't wild about the idea of seeing a therapist: She thought it was only postponing the inevitable. And my mom, a woman he'd once been married to, was about to start living with--in his eyes--a man who wore makeup.

I'm not sure what he was fearing more as winter approached: the idea that Patricia would leave him and he'd be seen by the world as a two-time loser, or the fact that his first wife was involved with a transsexual.

The irony, of course, is that a big reason why Patricia was so unhappy was that she believed my dad was still in love with my mom. Despite the fact that they'd been divorced for over a decade, Patricia could see clearly that fall that my dad was still thinking about his "Allie" a good deal more than was wise for him or her or, no doubt, even my mom.

I stayed there Monday and Tuesday when I came home from college, and while the two of them were civil at breakfast and dinner, both nights they fought. Neither one yelled--no one in my family is a real screamer--but I could hear them hissing at each other in their bedroom while I tried to read in my bed.

"I don't know why you'd think that," my father insisted. "Do I talk about her? No. Do we have lunch? No. Do I even see her now that Carly's in college? No."

"And it's killing you."

"Killing me? Hardly."

"You drove past her house last week."

"I just wanted to see if her creepy boyfriend was there. I find it unfathomable that they're back together."