The Riddle of Gender

Q: So after everything you’d just been through, you had these older boys mocking you?

And I wanted to be with the girls, and I couldn’t. Because if you’re a boy, you don’t go with the girls. And I had to go to the boys’ locker room to change. We had to go three times a week, and I wanted to die every time. I remember they had a high board, and I used to be a pretty good diver, and I’d think, “I just want to do this wrong just so I don’t have to do this again.” It was awful. I remember standing with my body turned so that nobody could see me. Because I had my scars and stuff too. It looked bad. And I think it [the penis] was relatively small anyway, but I was post-op. And then I had to go back to that schmuck and get that treatment again! And I guess it worked that time, because it [the bleeding] stopped by the end of the summer. It was the most hel-lacious summer … year of my life.

But I coped. I had to cope. And I became a control freak and I became an academic superstar and a topflight surgeon and everything, and I kept on till I was thirty-eight, and then I crashed.

But at that time, I came out of it and I went to junior high and then high school. The whole time I felt like “I don’t belong. This isn’t me.” I had girlfriends. Back in those days, we used to pass each other notes, and if a girl signed it L-O-V-E, it meant it was time for sex, and if she signed it L-U-V, that meant “you’re a good friend.” And I had lots of LUVs. And I liked it, but I knew that I was supposed to be doing better than that, and I couldn’t.

I remember an incident when I was fourteen. This was when I first knew that I was transsexual. My religious school, the yeshiva, had an annual trip to Washington, and they take a photo of the entire group on the Capitol steps. I still have it somewhere in the basement. So I had a girl “friend.” She was a friend because we were the two tallest kids in the class and we always sat in the back, and we were friends for six years. And it was sort of understood that, well, we’re getting sexual, people, it’s time to take this friendship to the next step. So I would try to hold her hand, and she might hold my hand, but there was no chemistry. And we sat together on the trip, because you paired off, and I figured, “Well, I need to kiss her.” People are looking at me, they’re expecting this of me. The boys and the girls, and it didn’t work. I kissed her, but she pushed me away, and it didn’t work. And I was devastated that I was a failure.

At one point I didn’t want to leave the bus. We were touring the city and the class got off and went wherever they were going, and I stayed on the bus and just hung around, and I remember crying. Well, I’m one of those people that’s such an avid reader that I can’t sit still without a newspaper; I just have to be reading something. And I picked up a teen magazine—I forgot the name—and I was just leafing through it. Nothing that really interested me because I was more interested in Scientific American at the time, but there was an article titled “Sixteen— and I Had to Change My Sex.” It was like a sledgehammer. I devoured that in an Evelyn Wood—like speed-reading experience. I was like, “That’s me!” My God! I had been hiding it. I didn’t want anybody to know. And then all of a sudden, it was this kind of combination of exhilaration and fear. Sort of like the way I feel now. The possibilities. The knowing. Of course it wasn’t a medical article and the term “transsexual” wasn’t used in it. It was a like a lot of cross-dressing fiction, where there’s an element of coercion because you can’t admit that this is what you want, so this article was like “these girls caught me in panty raid and these girls forced me into it.” I don’t think it was quite that pornographic. But it was the name that captured me: “Sixteen— and I Had to Change My Sex.”

But something happened to me because right after that, my classmates got back on the bus and I’m sitting there, I’m sweating. I had made this discovery that I couldn’t share with anyone. But something had changed for me. This other girl named Phyllis came and sat down next to me, and by the end of the trip we were making out! And about a year later Money made the news in Newsweek and Time about the Gender Identity Clinic at Hopkins and that they were doing sex-change surgery. I came out to my parents, and they mentioned Creed-more. It was not a pleasant place. It was where the bogeyman lived when I was growing up.

But I was liberated. Yet I could only go so far. After school ended I worked at a camp as a junior counselor, and I used to bike down to be with her [my girlfriend] and I remember thinking, “I don’t want to do this. I want to be her.” She wanted me to take off her bra, and I’m thinking, “I want to wear it.” I just couldn’t do it. I was mortified and ashamed and didn’t know what to do. So it ended. She thought I was weird, I guess. Guys are supposed to want it. But I didn’t.

In high school, I didn’t have any sex or any girlfriends till the end of my junior year, when I met my first wife. And we hit it off. We were both traumatized kids and we helped each other, we provided succor to one another. Sex was hard for both of us. Her mother was an extreme narcissist who used to play around with her friends’ fathers and had a bad reputation and so forth. So she had a tough upbringing.

But when I was eighteen we spent the summer right after high school in Israel, my first trip to Israel and her first trip back home, and in our apartment in Jerusalem in this Orthodox Jewish neighborhood, when my three best male friends were out, she and I were in bed together and with my heart racing at around 180 beats per minute and the sweat pouring off my body, I came out to her. And she accepted me. She told me subsequently that she thought it was weird and she didn’t know what to make of it, but she was going to try to help me, try to fix me.

Q: Did you want to be fixed at that point?’

Sure, what do I know? What was I going to do, come out and have surgery? That scared the hell out of me. I knew I was transsexual, but I kept thinking, maybe I’m just a cross-dresser.

Q: And you were aware of the distinction?’

Well, it wasn’t quite the academic distinction but I thought, “Maybe this will be enough.” And she went through the stage of “Maybe, if I’m more feminine, you won’t feel like you have to be.” So we went through that phase. But she had no sense that this was a perversion that she needed to run away from, which is interesting. But it made her feel less of a woman. She felt inadequate. I felt like I was perverted. Here I am, a high school student, a pretty bright one, at one of the best public high schools in the country, and I would go to libraries and search out all the literature I could find, and there would be nothing there. I didn’t find any of Harry Benjamin’s early stuff. I didn’t even discover the trans community. This is post-Stonewall already, this is New York! And I’m a New Yorker, I’m leaving from Port Authority [bus terminal] to go to Cornell…

Finally—I think it was my sophomore year of college—I had some time to kill and I get off at Port Authority at Forty-second Street and I’m just walking around and I come across Lee Brewster’s Mardi Gras Boutique. Of course, I didn’t know what an important person this was at the time but I was like, “My god, there are other people like me.” But I was scared to death that I would be seen. That’s where I was introduced to the pornography, which was exciting and degrading simultaneously, as pornography is. But there was no alternative, nothing to say to me, “This is a medical condition.” Because it was considered a psychiatric condition. It still is now; we’re still fighting this fight. I thought I might be gay, and you know, the gays are still saying, “Why don’t you just admit that you want to have sex with a guy? Come on!” And then, after that, every time I came home, I’d make a side trip there.

Q: Did you talk to anyone?’

No, because I couldn’t be found out. Then you start thinking, “I did that. That’s me.” How do you think that makes you feel? On the one hand, you’re going to this good school, and you’re going to go to medical school and become a doctor, and on the other hand, you’re skulking around town. You get no positive reinforcement. It’s all totally negative and shame-based. Now I didn’t know that term in those days, but that’s exactly how I felt. I was living in a pool of shame. And I would run away from it. I would tell my first wife, “I can stop,” and I would count the days down but I could never stop thinking about it. I could stop wearing women’s clothes for years at a time, but I realize now that it wasn’t the clothes that was the issue, it was the being. But that was the only way to express it in those days. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. What does it mean? Who am I?

Unbeknownst to anybody, I remembered the article about Hopkins, and I wrote to them and set up an appointment. I have a love/hate relationship with Hopkins. The love is that I do recognize that they did this. They were at the forefront in America. Harry Benjamin started it, and they picked it up academically. That’s how things work in medical culture. And they performed a service. Now, granted, it was completely twisted the way they went about it at the time. But they performed a service. Before you had to go where? To Casablanca? Thailand today is a mecca, compared to what Casablanca was like. So I appreciate that. John Money was part of it. He did the work when being a sexologist was not an easy thing to do. I can appreciate too how difficult it was for the surgeons to