Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (4 page)

On a Cold
February night in 1994, Deedie and I were watching
Brideshead Revisited
on the television in our little house in Maine. She was absolutely pregnant, her hands at rest on the vast Matterhorn of her belly. Snow was coming down outside, and our dinner dishes—now mostly empty—were sitting on the coffee table before us. I was a man then. I had made leg of lamb with garlic and rosemary. On the side there had been new potatoes tossed with olive oil and kosher salt and fresh mint.

It is fair to say we had no idea what the world before us might contain. We had seen plenty of our friends transform into parents by this time, and to be honest we hadn’t been thrilled by most of the metamorphoses. Not only was it clear that our former companions were a lot more interested in their squirming offspring than they were in Deedie and me—their friends of many years—but they seemed like they’d transformed into people less interesting than the ones we’d first befriended. Our friends—radicals and satirists, the kind of people you could have over for a martini and a model rocket launch—now seemed bland, exhausted, and unforgivably self-involved.

As we lost one set of lifelong friends after another to the state of parenthood, we joked that they were like the townspeople we frequently saw in science fiction movies, the ones whose minds are taken over by the aliens, who counsel their dwindling still-human friends by saying,
Don’t fight it. They’re smarter than we are. It’s good
.

Deedie and I were determined that we would be different kinds of parents. I think we imagined that having children would be a little bit like having Labrador retrievers. Sure, we’d train them, teach
them to read and drive a car and fetch, but we’d still be unmistakably ourselves—artists, Democrats, rocketeers. After all, we hadn’t embarked upon this adventure in order to become strangers. We had embarked upon it as an act of love.

As the snow drifted down outside that night, we were watching the scene in
Brideshead
in which young Charles Ryder first goes over to the rooms of the eccentric Sebastian Flyte. Middle-class Charles has never seen anything in his life like Sebastian or his friends.
But I was in search of love in those days
, Charles says,
and I went full of curiosity and the faint unrecognized apprehension that here at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that great city
.

“Uh-oh,” said Deedie.

On the screen before us, Charles looked at a large bowl of plover’s eggs gathered in a bowl at the center of an ornate table.

“What’s ‘uh-oh’?” I said. I picked up the remote and hit the pause button.

“I think,” said Deedie, “my water just broke.”

I still remember the silence in the house that followed these words. Our dog Lucy, half golden retriever, half beagle, raised her head bitterly and gave us a hard look. Outside, the snow was still drifting down quietly.

What possible response can any man give to the woman he loves in the wake of such a phrase?

“Okay,” I said. “I guess we should go to the hospital then.”

My eyes fell to the screen, and to our paused movie, where Charles Ryder’s hand was frozen, inches from the bowl of plover’s eggs.

Deedie took my hand. “Is it really happening?” she said. “Is this how it begins?”

I put my arms around her and kissed my love upon on the cheek. Sure, I wanted to say. It begins like this.

But this was not the truth. Whatever was happening to us, whatever journey we were on, had begun a long time ago.

I
FIRST LAID
eyes on Deedie back in college. She was onstage in a production of David Mamet’s
Sexual Perversity in Chicago
. In the play she was dating this other guy who I knew named Boomer Dorsey. Boomer was one of the college’s hot young actors. I’d seen him as Gloucester in
Richard III
a few weeks earlier, in a production marred only by the fact that the actor playing Richmond had the unfortunate combination of a speech impediment and an accent from deepest Brooklyn, which transformed the word
lords
into something that sounded like “wawds,” thus:

    
RICHMOND:
Cwy mercy wawds and watchful gentlemen,
That you have tane a tawdy swuggard here!

    
LORDS:
How have you slept, my lord?

    
RICHMOND:
Swept? The sweetest sweep, an faiwest boding dweams!
That evah entered in a dwowsy head,
Have I since yaw departchaw had, my wawds!

The Mamet was a lot better. Boomer—who years later opened up his own pretty damned great Irish bar on the Upper West Side—was playing the part of a blowhard named Danny. But I wasn’t paying any attention to Boomer Dorsey. My eyes were fixed upon this woman playing the part of Deborah. I could see her green eyes sparkle from the third row. Checked the program. Deirdre Finney, she was called. Named for Derdriu, the Irish Queen of Sorrows.

Would you believe in a love at first sight? Yes, I’m certain that it happens all the time.

Actually, I know that the line between love at first sight and creepy stalker is probably finer than anyone would like to admit. But I can honestly say that from the moment I first saw Deirdre, when I was twenty years old, I felt as if something had changed, as if I’d been living all my life in a dark room and someone had suddenly turned on all the lights.

Late in the play, Boomer and Deirdre—I later learned her nickname was Deedie—were lying in bed together naked. A single sheet covered their bodies.

    
DEBORAH
: What does it feel like to have a penis?

    
DANNY
: Strange. Very strange and wonderful.

    
DEBORAH
: Do you miss having tits?

    
DANNY
: To be completely frank with you, that is the stupidest question I ever heard. What man in his right mind would want tits?

    
DEBORAH
: You’re right, of course.

Sitting there in the dark theater, I had to agree. I didn’t want tits, not at that moment anyhow. What I wanted at that moment, more than anything else, was to be Deedie’s boyfriend.

I
GOT MY WISH
of course, but it would be nine years before I got it. In the meantime, I had to date—and then run away from—Rose, and Dora, and Felicity, and a host of others. I’d go out with these girls for a while, even live with them in some cases, but at all times the ghost of my female self shadowed me, as it had since childhood, asking me how much longer I intended to deny the truth about the nature of my character.

And at the moment this question arose, as it always did, sooner or later, there was nothing to do but break up. With one girlfriend, Allison, I went home one day and just erased myself. It was the kind thing to do, I thought. I’d been living with her in New York for three years, but we’d been losing steam. Quite frankly, I’d gone off to grad school in Baltimore partly so I could get away from her without having to have some whole big fight about it. The relationship had become like one of those balloons in the Macy’s Thanksgiving parade that starts leaking helium and the next thing you know Superman’s collapsed on top of the guys holding the strings.

I did love her, though, for a little while anyhow. That was the thing:
I still believed, on some fundamental level, that love would cure me. That if only I were loved deeply enough by someone else, I would be content to stay a man. It wouldn’t be my authentic life, but it would be all right. It was better, in any case, than coming out as transsexual, taking hormones, and having some gruesome operation and walking around like Herman Munster. An authentic life wasn’t very appealing. And so I allowed myself to be lifted off the ground by the levitating properties of romantic love. It was a nice effect.

Of course, nobody really gets cured by love, but transsexuals are hardly the only people who believe romance will lead them outside of themselves. You can’t fault a person for hoping that love will make her into someone else, someone better. The world is full of false hopes, most of them dumber than the hope of being transformed by love.

After my first year at Johns Hopkins, it was clear enough Allison and I weren’t getting back together. I spent a lot of time in grad school sitting in my apartment with the door locked and the shades drawn, wearing a wig that made me look like a run-down Joni Mitchell. Thus arrayed, I sat in my leather chair and read Borges and Poe and worked on a novel entitled
The Invisible Woman
. Eventually I told Allison I was coming up to New York to get my stuff and she said, fine, whatever. It wasn’t a surprise to her by that time. I drove to Manhattan in my Volkswagen Golf and loaded the last of my things into the hatchback while Allison was at work. There wasn’t much—some posters, a box of books, an autoharp. Then I put her apartment back the way it used to look before I’d moved in, three years before. She’d had a print of the painting
Girl with a Pearl Earring
by Vermeer over the fireplace, but I’d taken it down. That girl always gave me the creeps.

After I put Allison’s stereo back where it used to be, after I took my books off the shelves, the last thing I did was to put the Vermeer back above the fireplace. The girl in the painting looked at me with her accusing, liquid eyes, and said,
Klootzak!
In Dutch this more or less means “asshole.” She said it again as I left the keys on the kitchen table and then closed the door of the apartment for the last time.

Klootzak!

I
T WAS TEMPTING
, of course, to try to put it all into words. Usually people assume that the reason you wanted to change genders was because deep down you hated yourself, or that you were actually gay and just didn’t know it, or that you couldn’t figure out a way of being feminine in the culture while still being a man. None of that has anything to do with it, though, not that this prevents people who’ve never suffered from this admittedly peculiar condition from writing jargon-filled books about it. Critic Judith Butler describes my heartache this way:
If there is a sexual domain that is excluded from the Symbolic and can potentially expose the Symbolic as hegemonic rather than totalizing in its reach, it must be possible to locate this excluded domain either within or outside that economy and to strategize its intervention in terms of the placement!

Man, that is so true!

My transgender brethren and sistren are often not much more helpful. Even now, occasionally I meet trans people who say, Oh, I’m a woman too! I love to make cookies and play with dolls! To which I want to wearily respond: Jeez, if you want to play with dolls, play with dolls. You don’t need a vagina for that.

Most of the time I just have to resign myself to the fact that this whole business is beyond comprehension for most straight people. If you’re not trans, you’re free from thinking about what gender you are in the same way that white people in America are generally free from having to think about what race they are.

Back when I was a man, though, the gender business was something I fought against. The thought of going through transition and coming out, and launching into some sort of subversive identity—well, let’s just say it didn’t appeal to me. I didn’t want to be a revolutionary. A lot of the time, more than anything, I just wanted to be like everybody else.

I still want that, sometimes.

The women I knew in those days liked the fact that I had a feminine streak, that I seemed to be sensitive and caring, that I didn’t know the names of any NFL teams, that I could make a nice risotto. A lot of
straight women love a female sensibility in a man, an enthusiasm that goes right up to, but unfortunately does not quite include, his being an actual woman.

Until I started going out with Deedie in my late twenties, my romances didn’t last. Because, let’s face it: I was keeping the basic fact of my identity camouflaged. How was I supposed to fall in love when I was so frequently lying? How was it possible to be vulnerable with someone from whom I was, at that same moment, in hiding?