For
going on fifty years, I have been trying to figure out what I could have done
better at the time I first knew I was transgendered. I am sixty-three now, and I was eleven going
on twelve when I realized I was dramatically different from every other kid I
knew or had ever heard of.
I'd been
reasonably OK up through 7th grade; then my parents moved us out past
the edge of the suburbs. At my old
school, I'd gotten along pretty well, notwithstanding underdeveloped social
skills and close-to-zero athletic ability.
In fact, I liked school, liked learning stuff.
It took
about three days at my new school for a consensus to form that I was the Geek
of the Year. I was so clueless that I didn't
even see it coming. The standard guy thing is to fight back, get
the crap hammered out of me, and then be accepted, but I didn't want to
fight. I just wanted to find someplace
safe, where I wasn't every morning pushed and tripped and punched and taunted
with words like "fairy" and "faggot" . neither of which I understood! In short, I had all the wrong moves and no
friends.
A
consequence was that I had plenty of time to think. What I knew was that my world had turned
upside down. What I concluded was that
if only I were a girl, I could have kept on doing the things I liked (including
being conspicuously smart), it would have been OK to be lousy at team sports,
and I would have had friends. Without
anyone's help, and still not knowing what a "fairy" or a "faggot" was, I worked
it out that God had made a big mistake; I .should have been a girl..
Did I
share this insight with anyone?
Nope. There were a couple of
teachers and a next door neighbor who I think would have listened
sympathetically if I'd opened up. If
they.d known me better, they might have opened me up. I worked up the courage to ask my Mom what "a
fairy" was, and she failed the test miserably.
(My parents. quaint belief was that the less a kid knew about sex, the
less trouble he.d get into.)
I coped
as best I could. That was before
contraceptives and women.s lib, way before gay rights and the Internet. At the library, the books about human
sexuality were locked up behind the librarian.s desk. As time went by, I learned some male survival
skills, like not raising your hand when you know the answer, and letting jocks
copy answers off your test paper. When
school started again in ninth grade, it was no longer automatic social death to
talk to me. However, I didn't have a
girl friend and I dressed hiding in a corner of the locker room at gym class,
embarrassed by my laughably inadequate genitalia. Weekends, if my parents went to a party and I
was securely alone in the house, I'd head straight for my Mom's closet. Did she really not notice that her things had
been tried on? I wonder.
By tenth
grade, I was one of the mainstream kids.
By eleventh grade, I'd found my extracurricular niche as iconoclastic
school newspaper editor, started dating a Catholic girl who thought French
kissing was the direct route to Hell, and mounted a respectable run for student
council president. In twelfth grade, a
bunch of other kids who passed in those days for wierdies
and I formed our own clique, and I fell really and truly in love.
Believe
it or not, I had had sex before I discovered the joys of masturbation. I mention this only to emphasize what a
straight arrow context I came from. Long
before I learned how to find solo relief, I would lie in bed spinning elaborate,
comforting fantasies. In my half-waking
dreams, my parents recognized my unspoken need and allowed me to experience
girlhood, at least for a while, at least until the unmistakable stigmata of
maleness were undeniable. In those days,
where I was, there was not the possibility of looking forward to femininity.
Four
years later, I was no closer to figuring it out. In college I fell into a pattern that has
persisted . 75 percent of my conscious life ostensibly a male striver, 10
percent denying my condition and 15 percent closet transgender person. Trying to make sense of my situation and
confirm my attractiveness to other women, I let
I ducked
law school, rationalizing that I couldn't bear to take my Dad.s money for
another three years. I had an
alternative " the US Foreign Service " and in the Kennedy years, that was
pretty exciting. Politics and
international relations fascinated me. Should
I mention that back then women weren't taken seriously as diplomats or as
lawyers? I remember thinking that if I
were in fact a woman, I would not be able to work at what I wanted to do . not
that ever being a woman seemed possible, anyway.
So, I
entered a profession that over the years became much less hostile to women but
remained very hostile to non-traditional sexuality. It.s clear with hindsight that I was trying
to do was construct a situation that prevented me from expressing my longing to
be female. I hoped it would "go
away". I hoped it was just a phase. Of course, it didn't and wasn't.
At
twenty-six I married. At thirty-one and again
at thirty-four I was a father. I moved
up through the ranks and in time I was caught up in a web of family and
professional obligations from which there was no honorable escape. And still I fantasized, bungled many
interpersonal (especially male-male) relationships, and failed to live up to my
professional potential.
People
like me . that is to say, transgender people of my generation . necessarily
spent many long hours in search of truth, paging through whatever came to hand,
from sleazy porn to tracts like Harry Benjamin.s paradigm-redefining
research. As time went by, it became
clearer and clearer to me that I'd missed the bus. Endocrinology had made it possible to live
credibly as a transgendered person.
In my
mid-fifties, about the time I was facing an honorable but deeply depressing
retirement from my career as an American diplomat, I .came out. to my
wife. It was bad for both of us. She couldn't deal with the idea . enough
said. Most people can't. And by then I myself
knew the notion was preposterous. The
full-size, balding, big-footed, square-shouldered man I saw in the mirror,
however tastefully dressed and carefully made up, could only pass for female by
the grace of other people's lack of imagination.
My wife
and I are still married, still life partners and still very much in love, and I
am not going to ruin her life or my kids. security by an overly late eruption
from my closet. Often in life, one has
to settle for second choice and it.s not entirely bad. Still, I look back, and believe that as a
woman I would have been far happier and achieved much more . perhaps as a
crusader for transgender rights. I also
know that I never knew enough soon enough nor was brave enough to be a pioneer,
and so what I have lived was just half a life.
If I
could go back to being twelve and miserable in my realization that .God made a
mistake,. of course I would try to change the course of my life. There's nothing like hindsight . in my case, knowing
there was an alternative to being stuck in the wrong gender . to make you
regret the tough choices you never made.
You kids
. whether you are genetic boys who are mentally girls, or genetic girls who are
mentally boys . are riding a bus that.s way out of control. It is going over a cliff. Adults should quit debating whether you were programmed to be this way because of
some endocrine aberration. You don't
need a reason to feel the way you do. It
is enough that you feel, down to your belly button, that God screwed up in your
case. If you have that feeling, it isn't
going to go away, and the only thing that is certain if you do nothing is that
puberty and all the rest of the baggage that goes with "growing up" will come
clanging down on you.
If you
are one of the maybe 5000 American pre-pubescent kids each year* that face the
reality of being gender-dysporic, it isn't fair that
you should have to deal with this now and alone. That is, however, the way it is. Parents love you but hope and pray that your
sexual confusion will go away. Teachers,
social workers, pastors and other caregivers are pulled this way and that by
regulations, research and their own sense of what.s right. If you give them your problem and ask them to
solve it for you, they are going to diddle around for months and years. The longer they diddle around, the harder it
will be for you to make a good and graceful escape from the gender that doesn't
fit you.
It.s not
fair, but if you are going to survive and be happy, you yourself have to take
charge of the issue of your gender. You can
do it. You are scared but smart, or else
you wouldn't have found your way to this website and be
reading this advice.
Given a
chance to do it all over again in 2006 instead of 1956, here's what I would do:
Talk to
adults. Don't be embarrassed or intimidated. Don't worry that some jerk might laugh at
you. Make it unmistakably clear to
anyone that you believe cares for you that your life has gone down the toilet
and that you are trying to deal with a very big, life-defining problem.
Look
around you . can you talk to your parents?
Who can help? Do you need an
advocate, someone who can help you talk to your Mom and Dad? Are there teachers or guidance counselors who
seem to be approachable?
Be ready
to lay it out to the psychiatrist. As
soon as you confess your gender issues, someone (parents, school, social
workers, whoever) will refer you to a psychiatrist. State law and school policy probably says they
have to. The shrink is likely going to
look up gender dysphoria in his copy of DSM-IV-TR,
which defines all the recognized mental aberrations. Find those criteria on the web (for example, http://www.behavenet.com/capsules/disorders/genderiddis.htm)
and consider your testimony. If your
conscience allows, make up some stuff about being aware that you were already
mentally of the other sex when you were three or five. Don't admit that just putting on a dress (or
jock strap) will make you happy. If you
give the .right. answers, it will be it much easier for the shrink to do what
he knows he should do, i.e., certify that you have real problems.
Cut a
deal, the best you can. Minimally, you need
to buy time to get your head and emotions in order. That means being allowed to take hormones
that arrest your adult male or female development until you are ready to go
forward. Probably you can find people
who will help you advocate for putting puberty on hold. If your parents can't
agree, if they are that deep into denial, that.s child abuse in my opinion. Don't give up on your parents, but don't
surrender to their view either.
Argue
that the earlier you transition, the more likely you.ll be able to put it all
together and be the person your parents dreamed you.d be. Help them understand that unlike in the past,
yours is now a solvable problem. Pills, surgery, presto, change-o. Sad Sam is now happy Sue, or the reverse.
As soon
as you are allowed to start on hormones, concentrate on getting good grades
again. Pay attention to your personal
grooming and be some help around the house.
This will send your parents and other care-givers an unmistakable signal
that they made the right decision.
.Happy.
is what most parents aspire for their kids to be. Help them understand what happiness is for
you, step by step. Give them a list of
websites to browse late into the night. Start
with AntiJen.s.
If you.ve
tried communicating but still hit nothing but walls where you live, maybe you
need to move away from home, to a school where you can be yourself and (this is
fundamentally important) hang up a bunch of A.s. Who do you know that can help you . a relative,
or a friend of Mom and Dad?, perhaps just an
acquaintance in a .blue state. with more liberal laws? Foster care is a last resort. You won't have to go into the closet or onto
the streets if you are up front and persistent in saying that you have a
problem that the system needs to deal with now,
not later when your mental issues have fully blossomed.
Be
realistic about how far and how fast you can go. Don't scare your caregivers by insisting on
acting out in public. Your first
objective should be to stop puberty while you and the people who love you work
out a plan. Parents, shrinks and other
authority persons will have a real hard time agreeing to irreversible
steps. Stopping puberty is by
comparison a no-brainer. Once they.ve
agreed to that, started you on pills and seen your mental health improve
dramatically, you can have a rational dialogue with adults about changing your
gender presentation.
People
who love you may argue that gender identity is no big deal, just a side-effect
of raging hormones, or whatever. They
may say that you can have a perfectly good life living as God designed you. They.ll worry that you.ll be treated like a
freak, as though you haven't been already. If their own self-esteem is low, they.ll worry
that people will laugh at them.
Take it
from one who knows . if you got the wake-up call at eleven or twelve, you will
never get back to sleep. Don't let
anybody tell you different. And tell those
who love you that now, in the 21st century, there is a win-win
solution, and its name is drugs that postpone puberty while you work things
out.
Finally,
if by bad luck and lack of courage, like me you never escape from your gender-dysphoric dilemma . being in the wrong places, at the wrong
time, after the bus has gone . it is not fatal, it just means your life is
going to be more of a challenge. I have raised
two loveable kids with a generally wonderful but non-accepting wife. I.m a responsible, self-supporting, aware
citizen of the world. I'd grade myself a
B for doing the best I could under the circumstances.
But no kidding, if the circumstances had been
different, if I'd hit puberty in 2006 instead of 1956 and known what you now
know, I'd have done exactly as I advised you to do.
Wishing
you better luck than I had and love to you all, Sincerely, David
* 5,000 is my guess, aware that there are 300,000,000
Americans, assuming that each year five million kids reach puberty, and that at
least one kid in 1000 is gender-dysphoric.