Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (40 page)

JFB:
Right, and I’m the straightener in the house.

DFB:
I’m a terrible housekeeper, which has always been funny because Jenny is so energetic and her energy can be really wild—

JFB:
I’m the crazy one.

DFB:
Right, the crazy manic energy, so she must be really messy, right? And I’m a little bit more steady, less flamboyant, but I’m actually the slob. I’m a total slob. Jenny picks up behind me all the time. And Jenny’s still the breadwinner. In her Colby career, her teaching career, her work in academics, her publishing has always brought in at least twice as much as my work as a social worker.

JFB:
Which isn’t to say you don’t work as many, if not more, hours a week than me.

We were talking about the kids before; I just wanted to mention that in my experience of, by now, the thousands of other transgender parents, the ones that are most able to keep a good relationship with their kids are the ones who go through transition and go public when their kids are small, and the ones who have the hardest time are the ones who come out when the kids are in the heart and the onset of puberty and adolescence. It’s funny, we often think about adolescence as opening up to the world—

DFB:
—but it’s not. The cultural experience, the social experience of adolescence is actually that things get much more narrow.

JFB:
What being a man or being a woman means, exactly, it narrows, in so many ways.

AQ:
Well, I really want to talk about that, because I have two sons and a daughter. I was horrified when my boys were born and I realized that, in some ways, the straitjacket that we defined as masculinity was even worse than the old straitjacket we know as femininity. People had such stereotypes about what they were going to be. “Oh, little boys! Oh, they’ll run you ragged! Oh, they’ll want trucks! Oh, they’ll hit and bite.” And none of it happened to be true of the particular little boys …

DFB:
 … that you raised. Or that you got.

JFB:
That’s the question, isn’t it? Got or raised? We had some friends over to my mom’s house yesterday, and they had two sons who were—I believe the term is
roughhousing
, in the pool. They were splashing each other, kind of pushing each other around, stealing things from each other and not letting the other have it back. And our boys, I wouldn’t say they’ve never done stuff like that—

DFB:
Oh, they do some of that, but it’s not as …

JFB:
Their interactions are less … oh, help me out with this, Deedie. They seem …

DFB:
They’re less overtly physically competitive with each other.

JFB:
They’re not feminine boys, whatever that means.

AQ:
There we go with “whatever that means.” I mean, at some level, gender was clearly very, very important to you [
JFB laughs
], and at another level, given the fact that the person who was Jim seems very much like the person who is Jenny, it raises all sorts of questions about how permeable that gender membrane is for our kids. And how the pernicious thing is to force them into a series of little boxes that the world out there has defined as narrowly as possible, yes?

DFB:
I agree with you.

JFB:
Every parent who has more than one child has the experience of raising the second child, and the third, and the fourth, if there are that many, using more or less the same basic techniques. And yet, children from the same family, as we all know, can be wildly different characters. And so we’ve wondered, what is it that caused that? And our
boys, the ways in which they’re stereotypically masculine are that they are competitive, they are … well, Sean, in particular, is an athlete. Sean has always loved sports. But Zach takes fencing very seriously. Does fencing count? Zach is the co-captain of the fencing team. But they are not stereotypically masculine in that they each have a certain gentleness of spirit. But even as I say this, I’m like, so wait, gentleness? Women are like that?

AQ:
When you’re talking about competitiveness and athleticism, you’re describing my daughter.

DFB:
I was a competitive athlete.

AQ:
Certainly your experience, Jenny, raises interesting questions about nature versus nurture, because the book indicates that from the earliest possible age you kept thinking right wine, wrong bottle.

JFB:
I was going to call the book, originally,
Same Monkeys, Different Barrel
.

[
AQ laughs
.]

JFB:
What I wanted to change was a physical body. It just didn’t feel like home. But the great surprise through all this has really been how much like my male self I am. And I think that’s a thing to celebrate. I think one of the things that Deedie and I were struggling with back when I was going through this was the question of whether I was about to become a stranger. I often meet transgender people, male-to-female people, who say, “When I was young, I wanted to play with dolls, and I love to bake cookies.” And I want to say, “For heaven’s sake, make cookies! You don’t need a vagina for that!”

AQ:
But it also sounds like what you’re saying is that for certain people, perhaps people who are unhappy with their lives, there’s the sense that “I will change genders and be a whole different person!” And what you’re saying is, “You’re the same person, but with a different gender.”

JFB:
I think that’s true. One of the things that is different, I think, there’s less free-floating anxiety and moodiness. Yes?

DFB:
You mean for you? [
Both laugh
.] I think that’s mostly true.

JFB:
I used to get these stomachaches. Every other month. Serious,
just, what do you call it … when someone is having a physical reaction …

DFB:
Somatic?

AQ:
Hysterical?

[
All laugh
.]

JFB:
Such a girl word!

I would have these terrible stomachaches because of everything I was keeping a secret, and everything I couldn’t put into words. They’re gone. I haven’t had one of them in twelve years.

AQ:
That was some secret!

JFB:
You know, the fact that I kept it secret from Deedie for ten or twelve years is still something I carry around. I guess you never really get over the guilt of that.

We got married with my thinking, I will be able to keep this locked up. It was a private calculation, and it was a miscalculation. It’s kind of a mild word to use for something so large.

AQ:
Have you had these kinds of conversations with your sons? Or is it too soon? Is it too much?

JFB:
Conversations about what?

AQ:
Conversations about the spiritual and psychological underpinnings of what you went through.

JFB:
No, not really.

DFB:
They’re not there yet.

AQ:
Let me ask this in a different way, then. Have they read the book?

JFB:
They have read the book. Zach read it I think three years ago, and Seannie read it last summer. When I asked them what they thought, Zach’s biggest reaction was, “I didn’t know how hard it was for Mommy.” Meaning Deedie.

AQ:
But obviously you were able to insulate them from that when they were very young, because it was clearly a period of some tension during the transition.

DFB:
There was a lot of other turmoil going on at the same time. My sister was dying of ovarian cancer at exactly the same time. And
the kids were so young that there was a way in which I couldn’t even imagine splitting up our family, even if it meant I was going to be married to this crazy woman.

AQ:
And now you are married to this crazy woman.

JFB:
How’d that work out?

[
All laugh
.]

DFB:
I know! And I still am! But part of it was they were really little and part of it was that my sister was dying, and I had to spend a lot of time and psychic energy with that and with her. I really needed Jenny to look after the kids while that was going on, and to keep the home fires burning, and to let me go when I had to go, and to let me come back when I had to come back. Because of all the different things that were going on, it actually bought her a lot of time. We needed each other tremendously at that moment. I needed her support, and she was able to support me. And she and my sister were very close, so that was …

JFB:
It’s funny, because your sister was one of the few people to think that my becoming a woman was, like, one of the best things ever. She was the one who said, “I’m so glad it’s only that you’re a woman. I thought it was something serious.”

AQ:
I love that line.

JFB:
Are we going to talk about menopause? I only mention that because what I’m facing now, at age fifty-three, is the question of, at what point do I stop taking hormones? Because for one thing, they’re not feminizing—I hate that word—they’re not feminizing me anymore.

AQ:
So if you stop taking the hormones …

JFB:
I’ll go through hot flashes. I’ll go through a pretty uncomfortable few months. I’ll be grumpy. Maybe I’ll get over it. So one of the things we’ve talked about is whether or not, when Deedie’s all done, whether I should be all done too.

AQ:
Boy, you two have some interesting issues. So how do you introduce one another to strangers? “This is my …”

DFB:
I usually say “spouse.” Jenny usually says “partner.” And there are times where I’ll say we’re married, imagine that! Figure that out!

JFB:
As people came into my mother’s memorial service, Deedie
and I were at the door, shaking hands. Well, there were a lot of my mother’s old friends there. I know most of these people, and Deedie knows about maybe half of them. So I’m shaking hands. “Thank you for coming, and this is Deedie.”

AQ:
And what would you say, Deedie?

DFB:
“I’m Hildegarde’s daughter-in-law.”

AQ:
That’s good.

JFB:
That’s dodging a bullet.

DFB:
Or I’d say, “I’m Deedie, I’m married to Jenny.” I said that several times.

JFB:
The introduction is often about what the space is. When I went through transition in 2000, I was uncomfortable with saying
wife
, because I thought if Deedie’s my wife, I’m her husband. Ooh, awkward.

[
DFB laughs
.]

JFB:
And now, there are so many examples of two women together. It’s funny though, if I say
wife
, people think we’re lesbians, which we’re not.

DFB:
But who cares?

AQ:
But we’ve moved so far that we’ve passed into an entirely new country. Now there are transgender kids who want to be seen as transgender. In other words, they don’t want to claim a nation-state of male or female, they want to be something completely different.

JFB:
I understand that as a philosophical and emotional sensibility. I think I’ve told you before that I’ve been protested four or five times over the years. And about half of those times when I’ve been protested, it’s been by transgender people who are—

DFB:
—disappointed in your polarity?

JFB:
Disappointed that I’m not more radical.

DFB:
That you wanted to be a soccer mom and drive the minivan. Except you aren’t.

JFB:
Yeah, that’s right, because you’re the soccer mom.

DFB:
You never went to those soccer games! I coached the team!

JFB:
I went to a couple! But when they say they want to be free from gender, a lot of young people mean they want to be either completely androgynous or that they want to be completely fluid so they can be
masculine one day and feminine the next. And that’s fine. But for me, freedom from gender means waking up in the morning and not having to think about it. I just kind of put my blue jeans on and go downstairs and feed the dogs. I don’t really want to fight the gender fight every day. I don’t have anything more to prove. And also, that there are as many ways of being trans as there are of being gay, or lesbian, or straight, or Irish, or anything else.

AQ:
Deedie, when you look at Jenny, do you ever see Jim?

DFB:
[
Pause
] That’s a good question. We’ve just spent the last month going through the loss of Jenny’s mother. There are all the pictures, and all the albums, and the lifetime Jenny had before I came into her life. I don’t look at Jenny and see Jim. But we do have photos across both decades of our marriage. We were talking about this yesterday with friends of ours from Wesleyan who were looking at …

JFB:
The wonderful photograph of one of our first dates that your sister took. And I was looking at that young Deedie, and I realized, you know, everybody goes through transition. The transition from young Deedie to … uh … less-young Deedie—

DFB:
Fifty-one-year-old Deedie. From twenty-seven to fifty-one.

JFB:
—is every bit as profound. You’re the same person, but, of course, you’re also not the same person. Can’t remember if I wrote about this, about the ship of Theseus, in
She’s Not There
. Theseus has a ship and he replaces the sails, he replaces all the planking on the decks, and after ten years, someone’s been saving all the pieces that were replaced and has built them into another ship. So now there’s two ships: one of which has all the original pieces, and one that Theseus now sails. So this is a Philosophy 101 question: Which is the true ship of Theseus? And it’s usually defined as the ship that Theseus sails. So if you had the twenty-five-year-old Anna Quindlen here, right now, I mean, I’d love to talk to her, but …