The Darker Side

them to be happy.'

'Tell me about Lisa,' I prod her.

Because that's what she really wants to do. That's why I'm here. She wants to make me see Lisa, to care for her. She wants me to understand what's been lost, and to feel it.

She closes her eyes for a moment. When she opens them, I can see the love. This is a strong woman, and she'd loved her child with all of that strength.

'I'll use the name Dexter first, because that's how he started. Dexter was a kind, beautiful boy. I know all parents think their children walk on water, but Dexter really did not have a mean bone in his body. He was small and slight, but never weak. Gentle, but not naive. You understand?'

'Yes.'

'I suppose the stereotype would have him as a momma's boy, and that was true to a degree, but he didn't hide behind my skirts. He spent his time like any boy--outside, in the sun, getting into various types of trouble. He played in Little League, started learning the guitar when he was ten, got into a fight or two with bullies. No reason to think or assume he was going to do anything other than grow up to be a wonderful man. I rarely had to use his first, middle, and last name at the same time.'

She assumes I know what she means, and she's right. It's universal mother-speak. Every child knows, when Mom uses your first and last name together, you're in trouble. First, middle, and last? That particular triumvirate is reserved for the worst offenses, the greatest angers. Duck, cover, and hold.

She looks at me. 'How old was your daughter when she died?'

'Ten.'

'That's a great age. Before they start keeping secrets from you.'

She sighs, but it's more wistful than sad. 'I thought I knew Dexter inside and out, but of course, no mother really knows her son once they hit puberty. They begin to get distant. Horrified by the idea that Mother might know they masturbate about women--Mother is a woman after all. I was prepared for that, it's the way of things, but Dexter's secrets were different than my assumptions.'

'How did it come about? Realizing he had a problem?' I stop myself. 'Sorry--is it wrong to call it a 'problem'?'

'That depends. To those who oppose the whole concept of a transgendered person, it's the change that's the problem. To the transgendered, the problem is that their body doesn't match their interior sexual identity. Either way, I suppose 'problem' is accurate enough. To answer your question, Dexter probably felt ill at ease as a boy for a very long time. He first started . . . experimenting when he was fourteen.'

'Experimenting how?'

Those hands, shaking again, finding each other in her lap. She doesn't speak for a moment, and I see the struggle.

'I'm sorry,' she says, 'it's just . . . Dexter's personality, the things I loved so much about him, were so evident in the way he handled his first forays into exploring his gender identity. It was bras and panties, you see.'

'Wearing them?'

'Yes. I found them one afternoon in the bottom of his underwear drawer, buried and hidden. My first assumption was that they were mine, but they weren't, which is what I mean about his personality. You see, we gave Dexter an allowance, and he also did odd jobs in the neighborhood. Mowing lawns and so on. He took his own money and bought his own underthings. Do you understand? He was fourteen, he was conflicted about what was happening, I know from later conversations that he felt guilty, dirty--but he simply didn't feel it would be right to steal my things. He felt the only honorable thing to do was to take his money, walk into a Kmart or some such and buy them himself. He was very embarrassed about it, he told me that later, but he was stubborn with himself when it came to right and wrong.'

I can see it in my mind. A young, slight boy, buying a pair of panties and bra, cheeks burning as he did it. Doing it because it just wasn't right to steal from his mother.

I picture myself at fourteen. Would I have been that straight arrow, if I'd been him? Embarrassment before dishonor?

Uh-uh. Hell, no. Mom would have lost a set of underwear.

'I understand,' I tell Rosario. 'What happened then?'

She grimaces. 'Oh God. Three terrible years, that's what happened. You have to understand, I come from a Mexican-American family. Catholic, very conservative. On the other side of that, I was a lawyer, used to rules and structure--and keeping secrets. The first thing I did was keep this between Dexter and me.'

'Understandable.'

'Yes. It took me some time to pry it out of him, and to be fair, it was pretty formless for Dexter. He was confused, still sorting through what was happening himself. He told me that he felt 'weird' sometimes, like when he looked in the mirror, he wanted to see a female body, not a male. I was scandalized. I confiscated the underwear and the bra and sent him packing to a psychologist.'

'But things continued to change.'

'The psychologist said that Dexter had gender dysphoria, also known as gender identity disorder. Fancy words meaning that Dexter strongly identified with the opposite sex.'

'I'm familiar with the subject. It can range from a light obsession to a certainty the individual is the opposite sex trapped in the wrong body.'

'That's right. He 'treated' Dexter. He wanted to use psychotropics as a part of his therapy, but I forbade it. Dexter was bright, considerate, alert, kind, he was a straight-A student who'd never been in trouble with the law--why in the world would I let him be drugged?' She waves a hand. 'It was all useless. Treatment boiled down to assigning the label and working with him to 'behave against the compulsion.' It changed nothing.'

'When did he decide to go the route of sexual reassignment?'

'Oh, he told me about it when he was nineteen. But I imagine he'd decided before that. He was simply trying to figure out how to do it so that it would hurt his father and I the least. Not that we made it easy, regardless.' She shakes her head. 'Dillon went ballistic. We'd kept this from him for so many years, and he was enjoying the political game so much. It blindsided him in the worst way.'

'How did Dexter handle that?'

She smiles. 'He was calm. Calm and ordered, with that quiet certainty.' She shrugs. 'He'd decided and that was that. His father's strength.'

Yours too, I think to myself.

'Go on.'

'He told us that he understood this was going to be a problem for us, particularly for his father, and that his solution was that we publicly disown him. He said that it was important to him that his decision impact us as little as possible. Can you imagine?' Her voice is full of grief and amazement. 'I remember, he said: 'Dad, what you do is valuable. You help a lot of people. I don't want you to have to give that up for me. But I'm not going to give this up for you either. This is the best compromise.' I think that's what got through to Dillon. That his son was willing to be publicly castigated so that his father could continue doing what he loved. I'm not saying it was smooth sailing, but . . .'

'Dexter got through.'

'Yes.' She looks at me, and all I see now is a deep, deep pain tinged with regret, maybe a little bit of self- loathing. 'The details aren't important. What's important is that like the good political family we'd become, we did exactly what Dexter proposed. We set up a trust, and he moved out. When he began to actually live as a woman-- do you know about that part of the process?'

'Part of the procedure for getting approval for the surgery is living for a year as the sex you are becoming-- something like that?'

'Exactly like that. You don't get to have any surgical alterations done until you've lived as a woman or a man for a full year. For Dexter that meant attending work dressed as a woman, going out in public, etc. It's designed to ensure that you're certain.'

'Makes sense.'

'I think so. So did Dexter, for that matter. Anyway, when that began, we gave our wonderfully perfectly worded statement. About how we still loved our son but couldn't agree with his choices. It was a masterpiece of