The Riddle of Gender

the world today than there were fifty years ago?

CONVERSATION WITH DANA BEYER, M.D.

Dr. Beyer was trained as an ophthalmologic surgeon, though she no longer practices in that field. She currently serves as co-moderator of the DES Sons Network, founded by Scott Kerlin. I interviewed Dr. Beyer on two separate occasions; during our first meeting we addressed general issues and in the second, personal history. When I met Dr. Beyer early in the summer of 2002, she was still living as a man, though actively planning her transition. When we met for the second time, she had become markedly more feminine in her appearance, owing to estrogen therapy and electrolysis, and was preparing for facial feminiation surgery in January 2003 and genital surgery in June. At the time we spoke, Dr. Beyer was living with her second wife and two teenage sons. The couple later separated. What follows is a portion of the transcript of our second conversation.

Q: So what has changed since the last time I saw you?

I’m out with my wife and kids. I haven’t been doing anything differently since I last saw you, but she just finally came out of denial, even though I had transitioned and de-transitioned once before, nine years ago. But I didn’t have the strength to do it then. And it’s interesting now as I come out more and more, it’s such a relief. No matter how difficult this is, it is such a relief just to be myself. All of what you’ve been trying to project, express, what society demands of you, the role that you’re expected to play, the way you’re supposed to look and dress and behave. It’s complicated but it all comes down to denying your identity. And I would say that I’ve expended at least 50 percent of my life’s energy fighting this one way or another. All that energy needed to be a man in this society, when you’re not. You can’t imagine. I guess it’s like what it might have been like for some Jews to pretend to be Christian in order to survive. You’re constantly on guard, constantly aware that you are who you know you are but you can’t let it slip. Because when you are a child, if you let your feminine gestures slip, you’re spanked or slapped.

Q: Can you give me some examples of what sort of feminine mannerisms or expression of femininity you would have to hide or repress?

Many things. The trivial are usually the best example. I used to be pretty active with my hands, with hand gestures. Women do this all the time.

Q: Maybe you just need to be Italian? Italian men are pretty expressive.

Maybe, but I wasn’t. My family is Lithuanian and Ukrainian Jewish. We didn’t do that. And I remember my mother saying, “No no no, sit on your hands. Don’t do that.” It’s a trivial thing, really. What difference does it make? Now that I don’t care anymore, now that I’m coming out and I gesture naturally, it’s a relief. Or “don’t cry,” if you feel like crying. Or you have to go out for a sport, or “go out and play with the boys,” even if you don’t want to play with boys. “Go out and play with your friends.” Well, they’re not really your friends, and you know that they’re not your friends. And you know that they know that you’re different. And you keep trying to be more of what you know they expect you to be so that you can fit in and have friends.

Q: Some of the things that you’ve mentioned other XY individuals who feel comfortable being male might also wish to do or not to do—not playing sports, for example. So what’s the difference?

There are some people—and since I do DES work, I’m involved with the intersex community, and you know that I consider transsexu-ality to be a form of intersex—there are some intersex activists who believe that if we could reform society and destroy the gender binary, there wouldn’t be any need for transsexes. There are some very reasonable, caring, loving, intersex people who feel that is the case— because they don’t fit into either category, they don’t want to be in either category. One thing that I’ve come to realize … my wife says, “What kind of woman do you think you’re going to be?” and I say, “I don’t know.” And my son says, “Okay, you’re doing this. Are you going to be sort of froufrou and frilly and have dinner on time every day?” and I’m thinking that this is interesting, that this is what he imagines that women do—and this is 2002?

Q: And he has had a working mother?

Several working mothers! His grandmother barely did that! And yet this is what he imagines. And I said, “No, I’m going to be me.” And it made me realize that I have male parts in me. I have a male history. I can’t forget that. I wasn’t “pinked,” as the feminists say, and of course the Janice Raymond crowd says, “If you haven’t been pinked, you can’t really be a woman.” But I am doing something they have never been asked to do. I am renouncing male privilege. It just hit me about a month ago, just how intense that is. I was lying in bed one night and I go, “You know, I really am giving this up.”

Q: Can we talk about how this all began for you?

My mother was a New York City master teacher. She taught for twenty-five years, math. She took DES in 1951 because her gynecologist told her to. She’d had one miscarriage. I had an older brother who didn’t make it. But it’s kind of strange now, as a physician, to think after one miscarriage they would do this. I mean, one out of every three pregnancies ends in miscarriage.

Q: Well, they put DES in pregnancy vitamins …

I know. That’s one of the issues we have to deal with now, when we ask people, “Did your mother take DES?” and they ask their mothers and they say, “No, they just gave me lots of vitamins.” But that’s what they called them; that’s how they marketed them to women. “Oh, these are just vitamins.” Some of them were more honest in saying, “This is to prevent miscarriage.” But some women were given DES who hadn’t even miscarried, in vitamins and so forth.

I was born and, supposedly … my father hates talking about this, but when I blasted them for the DES thing years ago he just sat stone-faced, no response, while my mother broke down and cried and wailed. But about twenty-five years ago—I was twenty-five at the time—he made a comment that during my circumcision, during my bris, they had noticed that there was something different with me.

Q: No more details than that?”

No. And they may not have had any more details because it is still the common procedure of pediatric urologists, which is the group that usually deals with this, to hush this up and to oftentimes not even speak to the parents and to make whatever corrections need to be made.

Q: But your parents were not aware that you had any surgery or procedure afterbirth?’

No. But I have scars, and have had urogenital problems my whole life. DES causes a host of problems, so I don’t know what they saw. And you’re talking about a bunch of older Jewish guys looking at a penis, so what do they know? They don’t look closely, they’re not doing an exam, so I don’t know. And there are many like me who just don’t know. There are scars, there are whispers, and that’s all you have. There are no records. They still don’t keep very good records. In some cases, they’ve burned the records. So, there’s a real problem.

My first physical problems manifested when I was twelve, in 1964. When I began bleeding on urination, and the hematuria [bleeding from the penis] progressed. It started off microscopically—obviously I didn’t know that— but it became a gross hematuria. I urinated blood.

Q: All the time, not periodically ?

All the time. And eventually, I got caught and my parents had to deal with it.

Q: You must have been scared to death?”