Female-To-Male Transsexuals : Part 2

Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites with Attitude
by Amy Bloom

(Page 2 of 2)

The inside of the trailer looks familiar; it is the Montana twin of my late mother-in-law's home in northern Minnesota. Sturdy, slightly bowed Herculon love seat and matching recliner in shades of orange; copper mallards hanging on the opposite wall, arching over the TV. The three of us finish two pitchers of iced tea during the afternoon's conversation, and Lyle and Jessie allow themselves to be sad and occasionally puzzled by their own story, but not for long. All their painful stories are followed by moments of remembered grief but end in the genuine and ironic laughter of foxhole buddies; they know what they know, and they are not afraid anymore.

Lyle is older than I had thought he would be - he's an adult. He was a patient of three of the people I've already interviewed - Dr. Donald Laub, a preeminent plastic surgeon known especially for female-to-male sex change surgery; Judy Van Maasdam, the counselor at Laub's surgical center in Palo Alto; and Dr. Ira Pauly, a noted psychiatrist and when they told me about Lyle, they all focused on how young he was at the time of transition, much younger than most people who apply for surgery. Even though I knew better, I had half expected to meet a teenager. He was fourteen when he began hormone treatments, with medical approval, fifteen when he had his mastectomies, but twenty-three before he and his parents had enough money for the phalloplasty, the "bottom" surgery. (That's what the guys say about their surgeries - "my top," "my bottom.") I was horrified when I first heard the stories about this kid, and I imagined meeting his parents and clinically evaluating them as misguided, covertly sadistic, or perversely ignorant, acting out their own unhappiness on their helpless child.

We should all have such parents.

When Lyle entered puberty, his mother and his late father took him from doctor to doctor, looking for explanations for Lyle's unhappiness and fierce resistance to being treated like a young woman. An endocrinologist who had worked with Don Laub recognized Lyle as possibly transsexual, and Ira Pauly and Judy Van Maasdam confirmed the diagnosis. Then, after extensive hormone treatments, Laub performed the first surgery and the family moved to another state, to allow Lyle to enter high school as a boy. Later, they nursed him after his hysterectomy and his phalloplasty, and used all their savings, and then some, to pay his medical bills.

Jessie says, "I want everyone to know who reads this that this wasn't easy - it was a really terrible shock. I didn't understand. I said to the first endocrinologist, 'Where did we go wrong?' and he said nowhere, it was biological. I called every single - I'm not kidding you - every single insurance company in the USA, and they said, 'No, it's cosmetic.' "

Lyle interrupts - the only time I'll see him openly angry. "Yeah, right. Like I wanted a nose job. Cosmetic. Well, it was only my life."

Jessie makes soothing hand gestures, reminding him that it's all right now. "And of course, the money," she says. "Our other kids resented it. I understand. But what could I do? What could we do? If your child has a birth defect, you get help. We understood - we understood even when he was little that something wasn't right. And we knew, when the doctors told us what could be done - we just knew what we had to do. When the doctors said he was transsexual, I felt that I knew that."

After hearing Lyle's stories about his hated girl name, his astonished, frightened tears and protracted battles over party dresses, Mary Janes, and even girl-styled polo shirts, and his deep, early sense of male identity - the same stories I would later hear, with minor variations, from almost every transsexual man I spoke with - I ask him about life since the transition. He gives me a glossy friend-filled account highlighted by a two-year romance with an older woman (twenty, to his seventeen) and a successful football career cut short by an ankle injury.

And after high school?

Finally, a bit of trouble: "I had a little money problem and a little drug problem. I got some counseling, came back from Las Vegas, started college. Now I'm taking classes, paying off my bills, working for the state. Eventually, I'll get my bachelor's."

He sighs, and Jessie says quickly, "That's all right. Lots of older kids are in college these days. Aren't they?" I say I know quite a few, and we sip our iced tea.

Copyright © 2002 by Amy Bloom. Excerpted by permission of Vintage, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

About the Author

Amy Bloom is the author of A Blind Man Can See How Much I Love You, Come to Me, and a novel, Love Invents Us. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly, and Harper's Bazaar, among other publications, and in many anthologies, including The Best American Short Stories; Prize Stories: The O. Henry Awards; and The Scribner Anthology of Contemporary Short Fiction. A practicing psychotherapist, she lives in Connecticut and teaches at Yale University.