Life Worth Living (5 page)

So the gynaecologist used the week between my first and second visits to gather as much information as he could. The plan was that I would go to his office, he would contact my parents, they would come and see him, and we would have a calm and constructive airing of the problem. I was very clear about what I wanted, and the doctor was in agreement. I should cease functioning in the masculine gender, and begin functioning as the female I really was.

Luck, however, was not on my side. When I sneaked out of the house for that second appointment, our cook saw me leave. Terrified at what might happen to her if she did not report me, she did. Owen, our head gardener, was sent to fetch me back. For a split second, I thought of disregarding the instruction to return home, but, being obedient, I turned around and took my first steps into the hell I had glimpsed at the onset of puberty.

Now that the subject was out in the open, and my parents realised that I was distressed by my predicament, they attempted to find the best help available. Daddy took over the management of the whole problem, proving to me that my grandfather had been right when he used to say, ‘The way to hell is paved with good intentions.’ To Daddy, the gynaecologist, who would have been the best person to handle the matter, was too untried to deal with such an important issue. So he personally took me to our family doctor, who was an old friend of both my parents. As the doctor and Daddy discussed the question of my gender over my head, making a wealth of inaccurate assumptions which I was not allowed to challenge – every time I tried to do so I was informed that I was only a child and had no say in such a crucial matter – I began to get the strong feeling that things would never go my way if no one even wanted to listen to what I had to say.

Sure enough, in the ensuing days and weeks, things went any way but mine. Daddy adjudged me too young to merit being provided with even the most rudimentary scraps of information about what steps were being taken to help me. The contrast between the way he and the gynaecologist dealt with me was so great that I sensed the true reason for the secrecy was that plans were being laid to treat me in a way in which I did not wish to be treated. Anxious to the point of collapse, I asked to be restored to the care of the gynaecologist, only to be told the family doctor was arranging for me to receive the best treatment available. In the event, my case was turned over to a German husband-and-wife team.

He was an internist, she a psychiatrist. Neither knew the slightest thing about the field into which they were now delving
as if they were experts. That did not stop them from confidently putting forth opinions which impressed my father no end. The wife was especially capable of bedazzling my intelligent but authoritarian father. Highly articulate, and blessed with the plausibility that used to be the speciality of Freudian psychiatrists, she asserted that gender was not an absolute to which you either belonged or did not (a claim now disproven by recent findings concerning the differing size of gender zones in male and female brains). She told him that it was a series of habits and learned responses. The reason why I wanted to live as a female was not because I was female, but because I was rebellious. She supported this breath taking claptrap with the contention that the tussles which Daddy and I had been having over my scholastic performance for the previous three years were manifestations of the same rebelliousness. Adding insult to injury, she claimed that rebelliousness was a symptom of maladjustment, and that I was obviously maladjusted, otherwise I would not wish to swap the gender I was being raised as. People who wanted to exchange one gender for another, she advised, were invariably ill. My dissatisfaction was understandable, she explained. Someone who was expected to function in the masculine gender should look the role, which I did not. Two weeks short of my fourteenth birthday, such evidence as there was of puberty was not masculine. My voice was high-pitched; I was smooth of face and body; I had budding nipples. I was also thin, being five foot four and weighing only eighty-four pounds, although I had a good appetite. Her recommendation was that Daddy should permit her to hospitalise me, allow her husband to shoot me full of male hormones for the month I was out of circulation, and begin the process of masculinisation which would give me a body I could be proud of. Meanwhile, she would administer daily an intensive psychiatric treatment to break down my resistance and restructure my personality to be better adjusted and less rebellious – that is, more accepting of the masculine gender.

When I was released from hospital, the process would continue, with the help of medication from her husband, therapy from her, and visits to the gym so that I could build up my muscles. Although I would need to be on male hormones for the rest of my life, she had no doubt that this was the best course of treatment – infinitely preferable to altering my gender. That would involve extreme awkwardness. Not only would I be the centre of unwelcome attention, but I would have to familiarise myself with an entirely new role. And what would happen if I could not cope with the pressure, or disliked my new gender? The insanity of what she was advising might be apparent now, but in 1963, when the medical profession knew less about gender, and when psychiatry, especially Freudian psychiatry, enjoyed a better reputation than it does today; when the surgical skills for dealing with genital malformations were still in their infancy and when scandal was a horror most people would do anything to avoid, it was reassuring and plausible.

But in truth her recommendation amounted to the essential destruction and reconstruction of my personality against my will. No human being with empathy or compassion could have devised such a stupendously cruel approach to a medical problem, and sure enough, within minutes of meeting her, I took a definite dislike to this sadist even though I had no idea what
she had in store for me. She was a caricature of German womanhood, with a manner better suited to the role of guard in a Nazi concentration camp than to encouraging people to trust her with their most personal considerations. When she informed me at the end of our meeting that I should prepare myself to be hospitalised the following day, I asked her if she was aware that the day after that was my fourteenth birthday. ‘I know that from my notes,’ she responded coldly.

‘But surely I could go in the day afterwards,’ I said. ‘I’m supposed to be having a party.’

‘There are other priorities now,’ she told me, leaving me with the impression – accurate, as events proved – that she had deliberately chosen the date to show me who was boss. It was the first sign I received of her cruelty, and it put me on my guard.

Forewarned is forearmed, and I was full of foreboding as Mummy drove me home. Every fibre of my being screamed out that something awful was going to happen, and though I hoped against hope that I was wrong, I knew in my bones that I wasn’t.

The following day, Mummy drove me to the hospital, which was run by nuns. It was loaded with significance for me. It was where Aunt Flower, Daddy’s sister, was taken for shock treatment every time she ‘went off her head’. She was not really mad, but prone to depressions which were a result of having been prevented by the family from marrying the man of her choice. As she was no great beauty (hence the nickname pretty as a flower), no one else had ever wanted to marry her, and over the years the loneliness and frustration had taken their toll.

So began the most terrifying three weeks of my life. Much of that time is lost to me, for the psychiatrist’s methods were unorthodox, to say the least. Not once did she conduct a session without first knocking me out with sodium pentothal. Although I did not know that her aim was to brainwash me into accepting a role I did not want, I was sufficiently sensible to know that she was doing something I did not wish her to do, otherwise she would not have had to resort to such subterfuge. She also put me out every time her husband ‘treated’ me. Your guess is as good as mine as to what his treatment involved, for they never did any of the tests, such as chromosomal or ketosteroid tests, which were appropriate to my problem. The result was that I was unconscious for much of every day, Saturday and Sunday excluded, and hovered between being hung over and depressed or apathetic when I was awake.

As I was normally high-spirited and enthusiastic at the worst of times, this was a new and unwelcome experience. I did not like it in the least, and, from that day to this, I have hated not being in possession of my faculties, hence my distaste for any form of intoxication.

In the late afternoons and early evenings, I usually had a lot of adult company. Mummy invariably came; Daddy often dropped in on his way home from work, and various aunts, uncles, and good family friends such as the Countesses Kobylanska and Potworowska all visited, bringing white grapes and commenting
on the quantity of flowers in the room. My brother, sisters and friends were banned, however, and nights were lonely after everyone had left for dinner, as there was no television or radio. I was therefore reliant on books to an even greater extent than usual, but they offered no relief from boredom or loneliness, I can tell you, especially when I’d been so shot full of drugs that I could barely concentrate or feel anything but the numbness which the psychiatrist had induced.

One morning Mummy dropped in unexpectedly just as the nurse was about to administer the knock-out injection for yet another brainwashing session. Caught off my guard, when she asked me how I was, I burst into tears and asked her if she couldn’t get the doctor to stop doing whatever it was she was doing to me. She tried her best to soothe me, then said she must leave before the psychiatrist came for her morning session.

Unbeknown to Mummy or to me, the doctor had overheard most of our conversation from the passage. She waited until Mummy had left my room before accosting her and banning her from visiting again. She was encouraging my rebelliousness, the psychiatrist said, and the treatment would fail unless her harmful influence was neutralised. This was her big mistake. Although she did succeed in keeping Mummy away, she had sown the seeds of her own eventual destruction by gaining a well-placed opponent. In the short term, however, I still had to withstand what had now become overt sadism.

‘You are a spoiled brat,’ she told me. ‘But you don’t have your Mummy’s skirts to hide under any longer. You will learn your lessons. The first one will be tomorrow morning, when you will have your first shock treatment. And you will keep having them until you learn that resistance is pointless.’

Terrified as I was, I retorted, ‘And you are nothing but a stinking bully. I hate you, I hate you, I hate.’

The following morning, the doctor appeared bright and early, brandishing a syringe filled with liquid. This in itself was unusual, for my private nurse always administered the injections.

‘Good morning, George,’ she said pointedly.

‘My name is Georgie,’ I replied quietly.

‘No, it is not. It is George from now on.’

‘You don’t have the right to name me. You are only a doctor.’

She turned puce, pulled up a chair to the right-hand side of the bed, sat down, and said, ‘Please present your right hand.’ Present? For God’s sake, I thought, you really are quaint, and I started to laugh. She grabbed my arm, and as she tied a rubber tube above the elbow, she said, ‘You think you’re so superior, don’t you? You smug, spoiled little brat. Vell, before I’m through with you, I’ll vipe that smile off your face.’

She took my fingers, doubled them into a fist, pointed the needle at the upturned part of my hand and stabbed at it. Whether her failure to find a vein was due to incompetence, anger or because she was deliberately trying to hurt me I cannot be sure, but she stabbed at those veins seventeen times after I started counting – and I didn’t begin until about the third or fourth attempt, when it dawned on me that it might be intentional.

I was left with the distinct impression that her message was: ‘You had better watch how you challenge me, for I have an armoury of weapons for bringing you to heel.’

The rest of my stay in hospital is a haze of drugs and abuse. Unless you have been through it yourself, it must be hard to imagine what it is like to feel your true self being battered down by brainwashing, drugs and shock treatment. Certainly I was frightened; certainly I wanted a way out. But what was the way? I was not going to give in and say I wanted to live my life as a male, because that was palpably wrong, and would have been a betrayal of myself. Having been brought up to have integrity and the courage of my convictions, I did not see why I should now go against my parents’ upbringing as well as my own identity just to satisfy the doctor.

Meanwhile, the husband’s ‘treatments’ were having the desired effect. My voice started moving down the scale from soprano to contralto. My neck developed two small lumps. Blond down appeared above my top lip. And my nipples shrank. I can remember the second I realised that they were altering me physically. That terrified me in a way that all the mind games did not, for what would become of me if they altered my appearance so that I stopped looking feminine, and started seeming to be masculine?

The time had come to get out of the hospital; to grow up, to learn the lesson these medical sadists were unwittingly teaching me, which was that life is not ideal, that people can be terrible, and that the way to beat them at their own game is not necessarily to show your true colours, but to play the game by their rules, and beat the bastards by playing better than they can.

So I began greeting the psychiatrist pleasantly, speaking to her before she put me under for my shock treatments or brainwashing sessions. I would tell her I had come to realise she was right, that it would be much better for me to remain in the role assigned to me, and that I was now prepared to give things a go. The fact that the blithering fool fell for such a rapid and total
volte face
only goes to prove that she never once used those sessions to probe my psyche. Otherwise, under the influence of sodium pentothal, I would have revealed how deceptive I was being.