Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (3 page)

What makes their marriage unusual, however, and what has drawn them to Montreal is the fact that until six years ago, Vanessa was a man.

RAYMOND:
Oh, I knew she wasn't a "genetic" female the night we met. But she'd been on hormones awhile, and it was about as close to love at first sight as I believe you really get in this world.

BANKS:
Raymond, forty-one, owns an automobile dealership in Oak Brook, Illinois. Vanessa, thirty, is an accountant just outside of Chicago. You would never guess today that this slim young woman in a blue blazer and a beige business skirt was genetically male at birth, and had lived the first two decades of her life as a boy and a young man.

VANESSA:
We met at a bar, just about seven years ago now. Ray was taking two salespeople out for a drink after work, and I was there with a friend. You know, unwinding.

BANKS:
Raymond says that despite his immediate attraction to Vanessa, the notion never crossed his mind that he might be gay.

RAYMOND:
I never, ever viewed Vanessa as male. Not for a second. Don't get the wrong idea, I'm not an idiot: I understood the plumbing, I realized she had a penis. But I could also see there was a beautiful woman inside there, and she was working her way to the surface.

VANESSA:
The night we met, I was wearing a black stretch velvet dress that fell to my ankles. It had long sleeves and a princess seam--a little formal for that particular bar, as I recall, but when you're trying to pass, you don't want to cut any corners.

RAYMOND
(laughing): See what I mean? Even then, she was ALL woman!

Chapter 2.

dana

HOW DO YOU SPEAK LIKE A WOMAN?

I've read all the books and I don't know how many articles. A lot. I've read all about adverbs and qualifiers (women, supposedly, use lots more of both than men) and how females are more likely than males to phrase a statement in the form of a question:

"Shall we go to dinner?"

"Aren't those shoes lovely?"

"Have you ever seen such a gorgeous day?"

And while I've made small changes here and there, I don't believe I've really done anything especially significant. I speak the way I always have.

And I don't believe I speak like a transvestite or a transsexual struggling to pass. I don't think anyone ever left one of my lectures on Flaubert or George Sand and murmured, "That professor sure talks like a fruit."

Or, these days, "That professor is
so
butch."

The fact is, I've always been female and so I've always had a natural inclination to speak a bit like a woman--but not, I believe, like a caricature of a woman.

It's just that simple.

I've never liked caricatures of women. I've never, to be honest, liked the way a transvestite looks--which is probably among the main reasons why I chose to go through such a precariously short period of pre-operative transition. The medical standards of care for transsexuals suggest that a patient spend a year living as the opposite gender before undergoing the final surgery, but I limited myself to barely three months.

That was it: twelve weeks. The last thing I wanted was to be perceived as a guy in a dress. And while my therapist wasn't pleased with the length of my transition, not for one single moment did she doubt either of our diagnoses, and she wrote all of the necessary referrals and recommendations. She'd known me for years, and there wasn't a question in her mind that I was indeed (and I've always loved the phonetics of this expression) gender dysphoric. Same with my surgeon. He knew what I was the moment we met, and I am quite sure he assumed I had spent more than a season--though a season is still, of course, sufficient time for whole ecosystems to transform themselves completely--in transition.

I think the fact that I was never a public cross-dresser was a big reason why my family was always able to convince themselves that my gender dysphoria was some kind of phase. Maybe a brain fog that would eventually lift. Go away. Disappear.

After all, as a teenager I was never caught in one of my sister's miniskirts or a blouse, and I wasn't hiding waist slimmers or lace brassieres in my closet. It's not as if I was concealing breast forms in my bureau. The five or six times I tried dressing up, I was so incredibly disappointed by the results that I'd wound up even more depressed than I'd been before I had crawled inside a pair of panty hose and a dress.

And I wasn't brazen enough to try shaving my legs until college.

Moreover, I always had girlfriends. In Florida. In Massachusetts. In Vermont.

Before I went through with the surgery, a gay friend of mine in the Sociology Department who knew my sexual history would shake her head and sigh. "Oh, good, Dana," she'd say. "Just what the world needs: another lesbian in a man's body."

In my late twenties, I had a therapist who was always trying to convince me that my interest in women was a sign that I shouldn't be considering surgery. But whenever I fell in love, it just reinforced in my mind how much I was missing, and I would fall into a funk as deep as the moat that had surrounded my adolescence.

Ah, but then I started on hormones, and it was amazing. The glimmer of heaven, the Northern Lights. Three months on estrogen and progesterone and a testosterone blocker, and I had flushed my antidepressants down the toilet. I was happier than I'd ever been in my life.

And it seemed as if my body hair was just melting away. Even though I was on a pretty low dosage of everything, I spent less and less time plucking, and the electrolysis grew considerably less painful. I took this as further proof that I was making the right decision: My body knew well what it wanted.

Still, sometimes Allison would ask me if I hated my body--meaning, specifically, my genitals. We talked about that often in the months before we flew to Colorado for the operation. One autumn night when we were at her house in Bartlett, maybe a month and a half after Carly had left for college, we were lying in bed after making love, and she wrapped her fingers around my limp penis. "Do you really hate it that much?" she asked.

We had had an exquisite Indian summer that year: Even though it was October, it was so warm at night that we were actually sleeping with the windows open a crack, and I could feel the moist, evening air on the small, wondrous hillocks that were just starting to rise from my chest.

"I don't think hate is the right word," I said.

"Because I have to tell you, it works really well," she said, a tiny quiver in her voice. Allison had only known my plans for a couple of weeks then, and she was still a little wobbly.

"Thank you."

"I mean, I've been with a lot of men. Maybe not a lot. But easily seven or eight. And trust me: You use yours very well."

"You can't count the college boys."

"Have you ever ..."

"Yes?"

"Have you ever had trouble getting an erection?"

"Around women? God, no."

"Never?"

I squeezed her. "Well, the female hormones have begun to make them a little less common. We've both noticed. But before I began hormone therapy? No, never. I've always been a bit of a rarity in that regard: a relentlessly horny trannie."

She cupped my bottom with her free hand and pressed her long fingers between my cheeks. "You're getting hard now," she said.

"Tell me about it."

"If you don't hate it ... then why do this?"

Why? It has been the question of my adult life, hasn't it? I've answered it for my parents and my sister, I've answered it for doctors and counselors and friends. I've explained it to therapists. To cousins. To acquaintances who are particularly bold.

Interestingly, I was never asked why by a college administrator. Perhaps they feared their questions might trigger the sort of grotesquely unpleasant sexual harassment suit that generates all manner of bad press. Or maybe they simply thought they were supposed to be open-minded.

Personally, I think I just gave them the creeps: Dana Stevens, the tenured transsexual.

"Why?" Allison asked me again.

"Because," I told her, "I'm a woman. And a woman isn't supposed to have a penis. I'll be much happier when it's gone."

She stopped fondling me and kicked off the lone sheet that was resting upon us. For a moment I feared we were going to have a fight, or a scene like the one we'd had when I first broke the news to her. But then I understood she was simply going to show me, once more, that she loved my penis enough for the both of us, and was about to give me the blow job of the millennium.

Chapter 3.

carly

MY MOM'S FILM COURSE MET ON TUESDAYS AND Thursdays. Dana asked her out for the first time right after the class that followed my mother's party.

"Are you the matchmaker who encouraged him?" my mom asked me at breakfast the next day, a Wednesday, as she painted her toe-nails red.

"Nope."

"Well, I hope you're pleased. We're going out to dinner Friday night."

Breakfasts were strange that summer, because I had a job to get to and my mom didn't. As a schoolteacher she had the summers off, and so we had grown accustomed to strolling through our summer mornings together in slow motion.

But that summer my mom was always up and dressed with me, as if she felt a motherly responsibility to see me off to my high-powered job watering baby lilac trees. Of course,
dressed
for her at six forty-five in the morning usually meant shorts and a bulky T-shirt: Although I had to be at the nursery by seven-thirty, Mom didn't have to be anywhere ever seven days a week.

Still, my mom can make ugly shorts look good. She has long slender legs that a lot of girls my age would kill for. I have them, too, but between field hockey and lacrosse, throughout high school they were usually swollen somewhere or bruised.

And while my mom seemed to begin the day that summer in shorts, at some point she would slip into a sundress, because she had invariably changed her clothes by the time I would come home from work.

"In Burlington?" I asked.

"Yup."

"Can I have some friends over, then?"

"Sure. Just the usual rules."

The usual rules meant no drinking, no drugs, and no identifiable proof that anyone had had anything that even resembled sex. And no more than a half dozen kids.

"What time do you think you'll be back?"

"It won't be late. We're meeting at seven o'clock. So I'm sure I'll be home by ten-thirty or eleven."

"There might still be a few kids here then."

"That's okay." She dipped the brush back into the bottle for the last time and screwed on the top. "Are you coming home tonight after dinner with Dad and Patricia?" she asked.

"I doubt it. But I'll call if I change my mind."

She nodded. "Will Michael be here Friday?" She tried to sound casual, but Michael had become a pretty loaded word in our house. My mom thought I'd made a tremendous mistake when I broke up with him back in May. She certainly agreed we should separate before college, or at least come to what she called an accommodation, but she also feared I had dumped him for no other reason than a desire to get the inevitable over with early on.

Not true. I had broken up with Michael because I didn't want to spend my last summer before college like I was married. I didn't want to feel a moral obligation to spend every minute with the boy when I wasn't wheeling shrubs in and out of the sun.

Besides, it's not as if there was this incredible spark. Michael was just a nice guy who was always willing to use a condom. Sometimes, I think, my mom liked him more than I did.

"Probably not."

"Miss him?"

"Nope."

"Well. Good for you."

I swallowed the last of my juice and gave my mother a quick kiss on her forehead. And then I left for the fast-track world of philodendron.

My mom lives in a tri-gable ell that was built in 1885. It has three stories, a Queen Anne porch with fish-scale trim on the clapboards, and a set of bay windows on both the first and second floors. It's been white for at least as long as I've been alive, and the shutters on the windows are green.

My dad's house is a two-story Greek Revival cottage that dates all the way back to 1851. It has its original slate roof, gingerbread trim, and stained-glass windows around the front door. These were added toward the end of the nineteenth century. The house is a very light yellow.