Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (33 page)

We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading on the grass
.

That boy and girl ran down the road and disappeared. Light from the fireworks flickered off my sister’s face.

I wouldn’t be hearing the voices of those children again. It made me wonder where they’d gone.

*
In previous works, I gave her the pseudonym “Nora.” There’s a chapter about her in
She’s Not There
in which I describe the morning my aunt became convinced she’d died. My mother had recommended that the best response to this situation was for my aunt to drink a nice glass of milk.

DR. CHRISTINE MCGINN

© Lev Radin/Shutterstock

You cannot deny the biology of men and women. But where society gets it wrong is the binary. There are plenty of people in between. It’s a mystery, and I think it always will be a mystery
.

Dr. Christine McGinn
is a surgeon, a mother of two, a backup flight surgeon for the space shuttle program, and a transgender woman. As a man, she saved her sperm before transition; ten years later she used that sperm to have children with her partner Lisa. The two of them are both biological mothers of their son and daughter, and each mother was able to breast-feed the twins. I sat down to talk with Christine at her office in New Hope, Pennsylvania, on a hot summer day in 2011.

C
HRISTINE
M
C
G
INN:
Because I was a physician, I knew that you could freeze sperm and use it later. So that’s what I wanted to do. This was in the last few months before I started living as a woman.

At that point of my life, I was really afraid. I didn’t realize that the transition could be a success. It was like jumping off a cliff. The whole donation thing was very scary. I had to go down and do something that was very male in order to save the sperm. [
Laughs
]

It was totally opposite of everything I was working on at that time in my life. Producing sperm? I mean, please.

I found out that I had to do it, like, six or ten times. I started off trying to do it at home and race in, and it was so embarrassing. I ended
up finding a parking garage, because I would—I could just—I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it at the place, like, the sperm donation room.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN
: I had a friend who donated sperm for an in vitro. He said it was a strange experience to kind of be taken to a very professional environment, and then to close the door and to open the drawer and to find the copies of
Bouncy
and
D-Cup
.

CM:
Like that’s going to work? You know? I’m a woman. [
Laughs
] You should have, like, some chocolate here. And a candle.

JFB:
Maybe some Joni Mitchell. [
Laughs
] All right, so somehow, you managed to save your sperm.

CM:
Right. And then, for the next ten years, I just was freaking out. I would read conflicting studies about how long sperm can survive frozen. It was not the typical situation, but I had a biological clock. Because, apparently, the biggest danger to frozen sperm, or embryos, is ionizing radiation from the universe. [
Laughs
] Which you cannot—you, like, cannot shield against.

JFB:
Ionizing radiation from the universe?

CM:
Yes. These little particles that are zipping through the universe, and right through our bodies; we can handle the direct hits because we have a lot of different cells, but a sperm is, like, one cell. So the longer it sits, the longer it’s exposed, they don’t know if it’s going to work or whatever.

JFB:
And you didn’t have a relationship at the time?

CM:
Well, I was ending one. I was separated and still married, pending divorce.

JFB:
How many times have you been married, in all?

CM:
I’ve been legally married twice, and civil union once, with Lisa.

JFB:
When you were a husband—and I don’t know about you, I always find it weird to talk about when I was a man—did you and your—wives ever talk about having children?

CM:
Of course, because it was very important to me. I’ve always really wanted kids. It’s something I never had any doubts about. Ironically, both of my wives never had kids and had no interest in them.

JFB:
What kind of husband were you? What kind of father would you have been?

CM:
I think answering that question is just going to be kind of, like, making stuff up. [
Laughs
]

JFB:
Hey, man, there’s a great future for you as a memoirist.

CM:
I’m not playing games with you. I think I would’ve been exactly like I am now, minus the breast-feeding. [
Laughs
]

I mean, I’m a parent, you know. This whole mother/father stuff is kind of random.

JFB:
Is it a false binary? As someone who was a father, and who has been a mother, I’m finding that, in most ways, what I’ve taught my children are the same things I was going to teach them in any case. But as a man, I was a fairly feminine hippie thing. You know, I’ve never known how to throw a football. But you, Christine. I mean—you were in the navy? I’m going to guess you knew how to throw a football.

CM:
Yes. And I look forward to that now. I really do. Like, I cannot wait to take my kids fishing. But there are plenty of women who fish, you know. My sister is a perfect example. She loves to fish. But it’s like my brain lives in two worlds, the “Yes, you have to live in this society where these stereotypes exist about what is male and what is female.” Then there is me; I just do what comes natural to me, and sometimes it’s considered male by everybody, and sometimes it’s considered female by everybody, and I don’t really care.

Then there’s the scientist in me that knows that there is a difference, there is not a binary, but a gender spectrum. There are chemicals that are different in men and women. And when a transgender woman transitions, we are somewhere in the middle. Especially having gone through a simulated pregnancy, in order to breast-feed, I felt the changes of those hormones. I felt my milk let down when not only my baby would cry, but a baby on TV would cry, and even, ridiculously, when a door would close and make a squeak.

You cannot deny the biology of men and women. But where society gets it wrong is the binary. There are plenty of people in between. It’s a mystery, and I think it always will be a mystery.

JFB:
It sounds like you’re saying that males and females really are two different beings, with plenty of territory in between, but motherhood and fatherhood are social constructs, especially if we’re not
talking about giving birth, going through labor. Post-birth, is your relationship with the child the same whether you’re male or female?

CM:
I challenge people to define what is male and what is female, and I think you run into the same problem when you try and define what is mother and what is father. Especially now that we have science, and you can have an adoptive mother that breast-feeds.

So the mother produced the egg but didn’t deliver the baby. The definitions are changing.

JFB:
Is it a good thing, that the definitions have changed?

CM:
Yeah, I think so. There is nothing in my life that has compared to the amount of love I have for my children. Anytime there is that much love, it’s gotta be a good thing.

Ironically, for as much love as I have for my children, I see a lot of hatred produced by people who are not comfortable with that idea. Like the case of the “pregnant man” on TV a few years ago.

JFB:
That case kicked up a lot of dust. I get asked about it a lot. I try to take a middle path and basically say, “You know, whatever—here’s a family of people that love each other. How can you be against that?” But it is funny the way even transgender people are sometimes as uncomfortable as anybody with the idea of there being something more than two binary choices.

CM:
Right. You know, even though I can throw a baseball, I tend to be more of a binary person. I do get gender spectrum and gender queer. I get it all. But personally, that’s not where I fit. So I can become uncomfortable by that as well.

JFB:
I saw a T-shirt one time that said, “There are only two kinds of people: those who reject the binary, and those who don’t.”

CM:
That’s funny.

JFB:
Let’s back up. Eventually, you wound up with Lisa. Could you talk about your relationship? When did you tell her you were trans? She didn’t know when you first started dating.

CM:
It was our third date. We went out to dinner, and it was hard. She was assuming I had been married to a man. She was assuming I was one of these lesbians that wasn’t sure of their sexual orientation. She wasn’t taking me very seriously, because she thought I wasn’t, you
know, a true lesbian, a card-carrying member. What we call a gold-star lesbian.

And here I am, nervous, because I’m trying to, like, talk about my former marriages without being too specific. So it was really kind of funny.

JFB:
I find that the—sometimes, the simplest, most innocent questions that people ask me can demand that I either lie or else have a conversation that’s much more intimate than I want to have, simply in order to tell the truth.

CM:
Right, right.

JFB:
I’ll frequently meet other moms who will say, you know, “What does your husband do?”

CM:
And you don’t feel like telling them the truth. Like, you don’t feel like opening yourself up to their judgment.

JFB:
I remember one time I was doing a story for
Condé Nast Traveler
. I was having dinner by myself, as you often do when you’re a traveling reporter, in Nevis, which is a Caribbean island. And—

CM:
It’s also a lesion, in plastic surgery, that could be removed. [
Laughs
]

JFB:
[
Laughs
] Well—

CM:
How do you spell it?

JFB:
N-E-V-I-S.

CM:
Is it, like, a little red island or something? [
Laughs
]

JFB:
It’s next to St. Kitts. Somehow, sitting at the table I made the decision—I’d had a few drinks, and I just decided to be a widow. So I just told them, “Yeah, I used to be married, but you know, he died.” And so then I could describe the man I was married to as my former self.

CM:
I’ve had fantasies of doing that, but I’ve never had the guts.

JFB:
Well, can I say, don’t do it, because you immediately feel like a creep, because people are sympathizing with you and their eyes are tearing up over something that, in fact, never happened.