Trans-Sister Radio (2000) (32 page)

"And it was at that dinner that you concluded he'd be good on the radio?"

"It was," I said, nodding. I didn't volunteer the information that we'd spoken three times since then on the telephone, including once in the middle of the day when Allie wasn't even home.

NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

All Things Considered

Thursday, September 27

DANA STEVENS:
What was I feeling? Guilt, mostly. But not completely. I was angry, too.

I think I was angry that I was being made to feel guilty.

Chapter 29.

dana

WHEN LINDSEY LESSARD AND DAN HEDDERIGG were transferred into Carolyn Chapel's class, and when Audrey LaFontaine's parents withdrew their daughter from the public school, I offered to move out.

I volunteered again when Allison lost a little girl she liked very much named Chrystal. But Allison dug in her heels and insisted I stay. It became, in her mind, an act of principle.

"I really don't care about principles," I told her. "I care about you being happy. And you're not. You're miserable, and it's entirely my fault!"

"It's not," she said. "I don't want you to go anywhere. I'd be even more miserable if you left."

But the attrition in her classroom made her heartsick, and she was shattered by the mean-spirited way that Glenn Frazier and the school superintendent and even Carolyn Chapel were refusing to defend her. I think the idea that Carolyn didn't stand by her was particularly dispiriting. Carolyn had been at the school for six years, and she had sufficient tenure there that she could have stubbornly refused to take in any more kids. The fact is, that's what the teachers association wanted her to do, and I think that's what they assumed she would do. Show a little solidarity. A little support. A little spine.

"I'm only trying to do what's best for the kids," she said to Allison. "I don't want to see Lindsey or Dan home-schooled. I don't think it's in their best interest."

I wanted to pick up the phone and tell her that it wasn't in the kids' best interest to grow up in a community of small-minded bigots either, but I held my tongue.

And so Carolyn got two more students, and the teacher's aide she had Tuesdays and Thursdays started coming five days a week. Somewhere the school board found the extra money in the budget. Imagine. And when the McCurdys and the Duncans heard that Carolyn Chapel now had a full-time aide, they had their children transferred into her class, too. It was appalling. I hate to even speculate about what the kids who were left with Allison must have been thinking. They'd seen a third of their class vanish into their homes or the room across the hall.

"Would you like me to write the superintendent? Or those people on the school board?" I asked Allison. "Teach them a little about gender dysphoria, maybe? Explain to them that I'm not some evil child abuser?"

But she said no, she couldn't believe that would help. Nor would she let me write letters to the editors of the local newspapers.

"In that case, maybe I should go to the next school board meeting," I suggested. "Maybe if we all had a chance to talk in person, they'd see that I'm not so bad. They could ask me questions."

But she declined that offer, too. She didn't say that my speaking out on her behalf would make things even more difficult, but it was clear that she felt that way.

"I don't think they'd listen to you," she said simply. "They'll see you in a dress--"

"I could wear slacks."

"They'll see you in women's clothes, and they won't hear a word you say. Whatever small part of their minds that might still be open will close up completely."

Meanwhile, some lackey from the superintendent's office interviewed the four parents who had chaperoned a field trip to the Lake Champlain Maritime Museum back in September--September, for God's sake!--to see if Allison had been encouraging the kids to swim the length of the lake in their Nikes and then strip for some prepubescent orgy. It was ridiculous, but the parents were interviewed separately over the course of a week. Then, when this mangy fellow was done with the parents, he started nagging the bus driver and some poor museum docent.

The purpose was evident: Stretch the "investigation" out as long as possible, and thereby inflict maximum torment upon the teacher. Make her so mad, perhaps, that she'd take that leave of absence and just go away.

But Allison was certainly not going to budge. And why should she? She hadn't done anything wrong! Her lawyer--whom she finally called and met with at some length--reassured her that she was on solid ground and she couldn't possibly be compelled to take a leave of absence against her will. At least not because of her transsexual girlfriend. She--Allison's lawyer--didn't believe the field trip would result in any sort of disciplinary action either, but she cautioned Allison to wait and see what the superintendent did next before responding. For all we knew, after talking to the parents who'd been with the kids at the lake, everyone would see that she'd acted responsibly and the trip had been harmless.

Inside our home I did what I could to make her happy, and that, at least, gave me some pleasure. I tried to make her house a secure little oasis in which she was pampered and pleasured and cared for. I wanted her to feel every moment that she was living with a person who loved her madly and saw her as the most beautiful creature on the planet.

Some days and nights, I think, I actually succeeded. Not all, but some. I think there may actually have been weekend mornings and weekday evenings when she was able to forget the way her professional life was unraveling. Of course, that may be a fantasy of my own. I'll never know for sure whether she was honest with me those nights when she would say she was fine and allow me to rub her back till she fell asleep, or whether she was just being kind.

I stopped going out in public in Bartlett. I thought that might help Allison.

I started doing the grocery shopping in Middlebury instead of at the Grand Union within walking distance of Allison's house. The Middlebury supermarket was exactly 17.4 miles from the edge of the driveway, and I never left once without checking the odometer so that my anger at the world would be fresh when I squeezed peaches and tossed toilet paper into the cart.

I no longer used the Bartlett post office or the hardware store, I no longer went to the local pharmacy. I had my prescriptions for my hormones transferred to the drugstore beside my new supermarket. I no longer even filled up my car at the gas station in town, or stopped there for mints or a magazine. I no longer went to the video store.

The damnedest thing was, by Valentine's Day I'd started to look pretty good. That's an awful thing to admit, but it's true. One morning when Allison was at school, a day or two before Valentine's Day, I finally had the courage to swing open the full-length mirror on the back of the closet door in our bedroom and stand before it bare naked.

Not buck naked, obviously. This is a semantic difference of some importance to me.

But I stripped off my sweater and my blouse and my leggings, and I pulled off my panties and my bra. And then I surveyed the goods.

I knew my vagina was coming along nicely, because I saw enough of it every day during dilation. It had the dreamy, flowery look of endive, or the abstruse but beautiful edging of the bud vase that might come with a Middle Eastern princess's breakfast tray. My biggest--only, really--concern with it aesthetically? In the little thicket of pubic hair that was returning I had counted a half dozen gray strands. Not quite thirty-six years old, I thought, and I have to start thinking about hoary pubes.

Certainly there were other things that I knew about my transformed body, too. I could see my arms were ungainly for a woman--not chimpy, but a tad longer than I would have liked. I understood that my feet were large, though my ankles were oddly, unexpectedly exquisite. And I knew that I now wore a B-cup bra, because I'd bought Allison and me some new lingerie at the end of January to cheer us both up.

But I hadn't really studied my breasts, or considered them in the context of my whole physique. I hadn't explored my new body
in toto
.

I'm sure there are myriad reasons for that, but the big one was fear. Pure and simple, I'd been afraid to strip and stand nude before a mirror and really examine how I looked post-op. After all, I'd done virtually everything I could now with the unit I'd been given at birth, I'd gone about as far as possible. Oh, there might be minor surgical alterations, there might be forays into the health club (though sure as hell not the one in Bartlett), and there might be diets. But this was pretty much the body that was going to take me through middle age and then start to sag and fall apart.

As Valentine's Day approached, however, I finally decided to take the plunge. The little holiday would fall on a Friday, and it crossed my mind that it might be as good a date as any to allow Allison to touch my new vagina--that is, of course, if she had any inclination. Though I'd been making love to her for almost a month, it was only in the last week or so that my own libido had returned, and my Meehan-made vulva had come of age and was now ready for its metaphoric deflowering.

And so I peeled, prepared for all manner of disappointment and emotional devastation.

Instead I was pleasantly surprised. Really. I noticed instantly that my nipples were much smaller than a genetic woman's, and the areolae--though a shade of bay that was not unlike Allison's--were flatter. Flatter in dimension, and flatter in shade. But my breasts were a delight. They were--dare I say it?--downright perky. Let's face it, they were as new as a teenager's and so they had an unfair advantage over their generational peers. They floated before me just below the yoke of my collarbone, two happy orbs still oblivious to the ravages of gravity.

I didn't have womanly hips--which, ironically, would probably have made some genetic females jealous of me--and so a part of me would have liked a few extra inches down there. My figure was slender, but it wasn't the hourglass I'd been trained to worship.

My tummy was flat and firm, and my legs were hard-body luscious. Long, too.

I liked what I saw, I realized, I liked it a lot. Really, I did. I looked good: Womanly. Feminine. Ladylike.

And sexy as hell. Honest to God.

Forgive me, but it's an amazing sensation to feel for the first time that you are an object worthy of some desire. Especially when you don't feel such a thing until you're knocking on the door of thirty-six.

There were people who stuck up for Allison. All those parents who kept their children in her class showed their support. A lot of them may have signed that despicable petition--most of them, actually, a legitimate majority--but they weren't about to give up the chance to have their kids taught by Allison Banks.

And there were the now-over-the-hill, former hippies. Allison and Will were only two of the dozens of Middlebury and UVM graduates who'd settled in Bartlett. The hippies had begun arriving in the late 1960s and early 1970s, a decade before Allison and Will, and lots of them had chosen to stay. They'd taken their prestigious degrees and gone back to the land on the defunct dairy farms in the area. They'd built geodesic domes, they'd married, they'd divorced and married again. They'd faced middle age, usually with rebellious teens of their own, and then had to figure out what it meant to grow up and old all at once. Few of them worked in Bartlett, but almost all of them had impressive jobs in Burlington, Montpelier, or Middlebury. Some were successful entrepreneurs, and some were lawyers. Others opened funky clothing boutiques and trendy restaurants. Some became architects.

And, bless their hearts, many of them defended Allison Banks's right to live with a transsexual lesbian. They wrote letters to the school board and to the despotic pinhead who ran her school, and they started a petition of their own--copying exactly the first paragraph from the original petition:

We, the undersigned, believe that teachers are role models. Their behavior in the classroom and their behavior in their community influences the children in their care.

We therefore support teachers like Allison Banks: Teachers who are tolerant and open-minded; teachers who have the courage of their convictions; and teachers who are receptive to the many kinds of beauty that can be found on this planet.

The wording in the second paragraph was a little too goopy for my taste--a little too peace-love-and-tie-dye--but the sentiments behind it made me weepy. I was very, very happy for Allison.

Allison, on the other hand, had decidedly mixed emotions about the petition. A big part of her was extremely uncomfortable with the notion that her name was in it. Certainly she knew she was a
cause celebre
, especially after that noxious doctrinaire of a principal had suggested in the school's newsletter to parents that she was getting obscene hate mail in her own classroom. But at that point she still didn't want to see her plight become any more public than it already was, and clearly she didn't want to be viewed as some standard bearer for gender tolerance. The personal, in this case, was anything but political, particularly since she'd first fallen in love with a person she had assumed to be male.