Tuesday, December 26, 2017

IV. TransGirl, Epilogue: The red-haired, green-eyed girl returns.

Reprinted and re-formatted from: https://medium.com/athena-talks/i-girl-begun-why-my-mother-raised-me-as-a-girl-3005132df0b8


That was the end of girlhood, and the end of this story, but I cannot leave her — me — lying there, on the cold locker-room floor. That wasn’t the end. She got back up, but it took another 17 years.
(Sometimes I write in the first-person. Sometimes she can only bear to tell her story in the third-. If you’ve just arrived, you probably want to go back to the beginning.)
There were OK years, and there were grim years. After that first, hideous year in the States, she found a refuge, and things were a little better for a while, but it was always complicated. A few years after the end of this story her mother died and her father threw her out. She was homeless for a time; let strangers take her home in exchange for a meal, a shower, a warm place to sleep. Alcohol and drugs and gender and hopelessness played their parts. She ended her life, several times, but continued nonetheless.
Eight years after being sent away, she found her way back to Europe, back home (but not); ballet and an Englishman played their parts. She found herself a stranger, a foreigner, lost her way, lost her man, everything; again. She relocated, again, hid, masked herself in society’s image, a ‘family man’, became ‘successful’; a Frenchwoman and a child played their parts. Thus she lost herself; again. Abandoned herself, really, as her mother had. She ended her life, but continued nonetheless.
But — she found her way back, eventually. Cast off the mask and became herself; again. In the end, the red-haired, green-eyed girl came back.
And here she is, at last: Seventeen years after being kicked to the floor, a girl no longer, but a woman —

Now, 56 years after her mother applied that first lipstick, she blots her own with a tissue, closing her mouth over a fold, just like her mum used to. It’s about the same shade, she thinks. Her green eyes have faded to hazel, and her red hair has thinned and darkened to brown; grey is beginning to appear at the temples.
Like that 12-year-old girl, she occasionally has that anguished dream, though rarely now. When she does, momentarily anxious upon waking, she checks herself, touches her vulva, cups her breasts; and begins her day with the most profound sense of relief. Sometimes she imagines herself sheltering that little girl in her arms, brushing the long, strawberry-blonde hair back from her shoulder, whispering in her ear —
‘Don’t worry, little one. It will all be OK. The dream came true, after all.’

III. TransGirl, Discontinued: How I was forced from my gender.

Reprinted and re-formatted from: https://medium.com/athena-talks/i-girl-begun-why-my-mother-raised-me-as-a-girl-3005132df0b8


I certainly couldn’t appreciate it at the time, but in retrospect I can imagine my father’s consternation upon my arrival in his house at age 14. The ‘son’ he had last seen as hardly more than a toddler must have seemed almost alien: a lithe, diminutive creature* with green eyes and red-blonde hair down her back and a distinctly foreign accent and vocabulary.
For my part, I did not know this man. He must have had very little interest in me when I was small; I had virtually no memory of him. Nor did I understand why my mother had sent me away. That she was leaving Norway, I knew, and also that it had something to do with her break-up with her then-boyfriend (it usually did; whenever we changed countries there was often a man involved). But this time we did not leave together, and this I never understood. Nor ever forgave her for. I felt abandoned, exiled.
Naturally, I assumed it was my fault. And perhaps, in a way, it was — whilst the changes in my body were mercifully late in coming, coming they were, and my insistence on continuing to present myself as female was no doubt causing my mother considerable anxiety. She probably felt guilt at having ‘allowed’ matters to go so far, uncorrected, and probably had no idea how to resolve the coming crisis. With the disruption in her own personal life, it was probably just easier to tell my father it was ‘his turn’, and pass the problem — me — off. As kind as she was to me, in so many ways, my mother was never one to face up to consequences head-on. I doubt she gave my father any warning as to what exactly was arriving on his doorstep. When he first laid eyes on me he must’ve wondered who this girl was. And what on earth to do with her. Him. Whatever.
I arrived only a couple weeks before the start of the school year. He took me to buy school things. And to cut my hair. Which I adamantly refused to allow. He drove me to the barber, but I would not get out of the car. He slapped me, but I would not give in. My hair was all I had left.


At my new school ‘physical education’ was a requirement. I was terrified. I had never spent much time around boys, and the gymnasium was nothing but boys. My father had bought me the required ‘gym clothes’, but I ‘forgot’ them the first few days, and got written up for it. The thought of changing clothes in front of dozens of boys was unbearable.
Unable to escape the inevitable, I thought to go early and change before anyone else arrived, but someone saw me enter the locker room, and boys followed me in. I stood petrified, clutching my things.
‘Hey, look who it is.’
I’m not sure how many of them there were, maybe four or five. I had already been teased about my name and my voice and my hair, mocked and shoved around in the hallways. This was going to be worse.
‘What it is, you mean.’
Laughter.
‘What is it?’
‘Hey, let’s find out.’
I was grabbed, hard, many hands; shoved and pinned to the wall. I felt my trousers and underwear being yanked down, my ankles tangled. I was tossed onto the cold concrete floor.
I tried to get up but was shoved down again, someone had hold of my hair and was using it to pull me down, a foot pressed into my chest. Someone kicked me, then brought their foot down in my crotch.
‘Well, now we know, I guess.’

‘Do we?’
Laughter.
Now many feet were kicking, stomping. My hair was released and I curled into a ball. The kicking continued, on my back and buttocks, another final blow aimed between my legs. The laughter receded and I heard the door slam closed.

Silence.
In a few minutes other boys would begin arriving. I recovered myself and fled.


I arrived home from school, far too early. My father looked me up and down with what seemed to be mild interest. I must’ve looked a sight.
‘What happened to you?’

‘Boys. Gym class.’

He looked disgusted, maybe amused, I couldn’t tell.

‘Well, what did you expect? Cut your hair.’

But I never would. It was all I had left.

II. TransGirl, Disrupted: How my body betrayed me.

Reprinted and re-formatted from: https://medium.com/athena-talks/i-girl-begun-why-my-mother-raised-me-as-a-girl-3005132df0b8

Except for certain awkward moments (and two horrific and blessedly brief school enrollments), I didn’t really think about my gender much. For eight years I was schooled at home by my mother and occasional tutors. I was ‘she’ and ‘her’, and so long as my mother plaited my hair and the neighborhood girls skipped rope with me, I didn’t worry about it too much. If my mother worried, I cannot say.

That is, until age 12, when I began to worry about it very much.

It was summertime. We were recently moved to Norway, and the weather was glorious. Children and ducks swam in the nearby lake, and girls my age were now covering themselves with shoulder-strap swimsuits, under which a few were beginning to ‘show’. I felt increasingly out-of-place, self-conscious. I wore a tee-shirt to swim, which made me stand out a bit. For the first time I was really beginning to feel ‘other’. I stopped swimming.

I became hyper-aware of my genitals and my chest. I began having an intense, recurring dream in which I would awake having been magically endowed with a vagina whilst I slept. It was so vivid that, when I did actually awake, I would immediately check myself, then start my day off with the most profound sense of loss. I became so obsessed that I developed a ritual each night before dropping asleep: I would press with my fingers on the spot where I knew my vagina should be and wish for the dream, wish for it to really work this time, wish for relief and a way out of my hideous predicament.

Needless to say, I discussed this with no one: I knew there was something horribly, horribly wrong with me.

Summer ended. After several months of intensive tutoring sessions to gain literacy in Norwegian Bokmål, and with great trepidation, I joined other children in school, essentially for the first time.
I was ashamed, certain that the teachers knew I was ‘really a boy’, but never really sure who knew what. It seems that there would have been painful pronouns, but I do not remember this; perhaps I blocked them out, or perhaps I was not mis-gendered — people tend not to question an appearance that meets norms, and in Norway my long blonde plaits were pretty normal. Mercifully, there were no school uniforms and no gym classes in the school I attended; no activities which separated boys from girls — here, even in 1969, girls took wood shop and boys took home economics. Girls now commonly wore shorts and jeans, so my clothing didn’t stand out. In all, I continued to pass as a girl, and was well treated.

My body was beginning to change, there were stirrings, my strawberry-blonde hair was beginning to darken toward red, and a few months into the school term my body did something odd: my nipples became very sensitive and hardened, and my chest began to grow — I, too, began to ‘show’. I find it difficult to describe the mix of emotions this brought up in me — the most extreme hope combined with extreme embarrassment. My chest drew comment and I took to wearing bulky pullovers. In any event, my magical wishing seemed, at last, to be working.

Despite my best efforts, my mother eventually noticed, insisted that I show her my chest, and became very concerned. She took me to a doctor. Who was quite perplexed.


We are in the doctor’s exam room. At my mother’s instruction I remove my top and the doctor looks me over. I am humiliated.

‘Madam, this is perfectly normal.’

My mother looks put-out.

‘How can this be normal?!’
Now the doctor looks put-out.

‘She is what, twelve years old? She is developing normally.’

My mother is struggling with her next words. She is looking straight at me and our eyes are locked and I am telegraphing my thought to her with all I have.

Don’t say it.

She says it.

‘She is a boy.’

‘Pardon, madam?’

‘She, is a boy.’

I am utterly mortified. I start to put my top back on, but the doctor recovers, with an odd look toward my mother, and inspects me again, more closely. Touches and squeezes where I want no touch and certainly no squeeze. I cover myself as soon as he pulls back.

‘Well, this is uncommon in boys, especially to be this far advanced, but not really abnormal. It will pass.’ *

My mother looks unconvinced. I am horrified by the thought of such a betrayal.


Mere weeks later the swelling subsided, as if my mother and the doctor had colluded to snuff out my last remaining hope. My nipples became less painful, softened, and shrank away, leaving me disconsolate. I refused to go to school, eventually refusing even to leave my room. My sleep cycle became disordered, so that I read books during the night, often till sunrise, and slept during the day. For the first of many times, I wanted out of my life.


My mother was now very concerned indeed.

I. TransGirl, Begun: Why my mother raised me as a girl.

Reprinted and re-formatted from: https://medium.com/athena-talks/i-girl-begun-why-my-mother-raised-me-as-a-girl-3005132df0b8



I said it was complicated. I said I was raised as a girl, but there was more to it than that.
Yes, I grew up as a girl, but not like Avery, on the cover of National Geographic. In my girlhood there was ambiguity, uncertainty, a certain stealth, and, inevitably, an end.

From age four, when my mother first began to appreciate the nature of my gender, and for the subsequent eight-plus years, my life floated within the norms of girlhood, albeit with occasional, painful caveats: a couple ill-advised and abortive attempts to enroll me in school, sometimes-awkward statements blurting from my mother’s mouth, strange looks when passports came out…
It wasn’t like she had a plan. She didn’t ‘understand’, in the sense that some parents today do. She didn’t have a name for my circumstance, a diagnosis to attach to me, any guide to follow. 

She was, herself, a free-spirit of a coming age, as evidenced by the made-up, vaguely feminine name she’d blessed me with at birth, in the way she allowed me to express myself through my appearance and behavior, and by our itinerant lifestyle, shifting from country to country as year by year we made our way across Europe; Spain, France, UK, Norway.


It is around three or four years of age that we become aware of our gender,* aware that we are more like one of our parents than the other, and that boys and girls are divided into separate lives. It is then that we make our move, or are moved. If there is a disconnect, it is then that we first make our stand, if we can. And it was then, just a couple years before my parents’ separation, that I made my move.

‘What are you doing, honey?’

‘Being a mommy.’

‘Are you, then?’

I was at her wardrobe. I had put on one of her blouses, which made for me a floor-length gown, and was clomping about in her red high-heels and a string of pearls. She gently lifted the pearls — a legacy of her great aunt — from me and replaced them with a faux-gold chain; surveyed the result. She took matching clip-ons from her jewelry box and attached them to my earlobes. They pinched a bit.
‘Wait there.’
She returned with her purse, from which she retrieved her lipstick. Her hand on my cheek to hold me steady, she applied color to my lips, blotted it with a tissue. She added a bit of blush to my cheeks from a compact. With her silver backed, boar-bristle brush she swept my strawberry-blonde hair past my shoulders, then handed me the matching hand mirror.

I distinctly recall the rush I felt upon seeing my reflection.
That was my mum.


It would be foolish to think that, in 1961, my mother understood that I was female in the most fundamental sense. It is unlikely that she ever completely understood this, and certainly not when I was four. But there was always something odd in the way she treated me, at least given the culture of that time: note my already long hair. A decade later, my father blamed my mother for what was ‘wrong’ with me, claiming that she’d always wanted a girl and that this was why she had raised me as she had, allowed me to be as I was, corrupted me. Perhaps he was right.

There was a precedent. Where my mother was odd, hyper-feminine, gentle, flexible, indulgent, and had wanted a daughter, her mother had also been odd, but opposite: masculine in appearance, harsh, strict, rigid, had wanted sons; a fact that she had impressed upon her three daughters. My grandmother was a strange, cruel woman; if, indeed, woman she was.

They were estranged, mother and daughter, and had been since my mother’s teen years. She rarely spoke of her mother, but did share a few, rather horrible stories; and a few of the facts were filled-in by my aunt, her sister, decades after their deaths. I never met my grandmother.

Evidently, grandmother had always worn trousers, and had done since she’d attended engineering school in the 1920s, where it was men-only and the dress code was suit-and-tie. She held to that dress code throughout her career as a civil engineer, she wore her hair very short, even for a man of her day, and certainly never a bit of makeup or jewelry. She had a pocket-watch.

This is not to say that grandmother was trans-masculine — clothes do not make the man — and there is, of course, no way to know. If she was, then it seems odd that she married and had three children, but this is not conclusive either. And she would not be the first woman to cut her hair and wear a suit to pass in a man’s world. She secured for herself a university degree and a career in a time when this would not normally have been possible.

And she was very cruel to her children. She gave her daughters crew-cuts and sent them to school in overalls, in America’s South, during the 1940s. She reminded them constantly that they should’ve been boys, and horse-whipped them when they crossed her.

My mother escaped her mother by deliberately getting herself sent to boarding school at age 14, whereupon she learnt to sew, acquired dresses, and grew her hair out. It is little surprise then, that a mere decade later, I had long, strawberry-blonde hair to go with my green eyes, and two simple dresses, of plain white cloth, which she had sewn for me.

As I said, it was complicated.