She certainly didn’t want it. What happened was that she wrote a letter to her parents, and somebody saw the letter and picked it up and sold it to the papers for two hundred dollars. She went into hiding for about six months, then thought that since there was nothing she could do about it, she might as well capitalize on it. She did a very good job of capitalizing on it. But also in the capitalization process, she went on with her career, working at movie studios, where she was a film editor. As a result, she got to know all the big stars. I’ll never forget, one night I was taking care of her dog while she was gone and all of a sudden, at two o’clock in the morning, her phone rang and I rolled over, half awake, and this voice says, “Christine?” I said, “No, Christine’s not here. This is Joanna,” and he says, “This is Uncle Milty. Tell her I called.”
She was an absolutely wonderful human being. I think that there was a part of her that was very lonely because of things that she had gone through. She realized that she had very good friends in the world, but a lot were just her “friends” because of who she was. For the first four or five years she worked very hard trying to answer letters that came to her, people saying, “I’m like you,” and so forth. Then she came to the realization that there were a lot of crazy people out there, and she would help who she could help. She of course knew Harry Benjamin really well, Paul Walker, some of the folks at Hopkins, John Money.
She loved to party. She would have her “Christmas in July” party every year. She put up a fully decorated Christmas tree that would stay up till after Christmas, then come down. At least twice a month she’d have a big party at her house. When I got involved with her she made me part of her circle, and I would go to her parties. Of course there was a lot of drinking, and I don’t drink. At two o’clock in the morning she’d go into her bedroom and pass out and go to sleep. I’d go home and get up in the morning and go over and clean the house for her.
I think she did. Even though there was a lot of pain in her life. I think she overall led a good life and had her good times and her bad times. The best of times and the worst of times. She chose to remember her good times. She wasted very little time on her bad times. She went to the colleges and universities and did her lectures. So did I, but I made a mistake because she got paid and Jude [Patton] and I went and did them for free. Eventually Jude stopped and I stopped. I still do one though, because I really like the professor. It’s at the Southern California Christian College, and he really prepares his class. They are all fundamentalist Christians, so it’s an opportunity to really go in and open minds. That’s probably the only reason I continue to do it.
I think spirituality is a very key component to success. Of course, there is a big difference between spirituality and religion. At the program where I work as a consultant, one of the questions I ask people is, “What is your relationship with God?” But most take offense to it and they are like, “I don’t need God.” They were raised in a very fundamentalist environment, and it was shoved down their throat that what they were doing was sin, and they just don’t want to deal with it. My response is, “I don’t care what your religion is. I’m concerned about how you’ve dealt with it. If you’ve decided that you’re not going to deal with it, rest assured that it will come back and haunt you.”
The real issue is that if the person going through the transition has a good spiritual relationship with the Creator, and realizes that the Creator loves them and isn’t condemning them to hell because of their feelings, they have the support they need to get through the difficult times. But to just close it out and say, “I don’t need this,” because of the bad experiences they’ve had, they don’t have closure. This is where you are going to see the problems, because it will keep resurfacing. In terms of finding a church where you can be accepted, it’s the same as the gay issue. As long as they don’t know about you, they are fine. If they find out, you’ll have problems.
I think Unitarians have been very accepting. But in reality it doesn’t matter what denomination it is. Every denomination is going to have a community that is really a community of God, that loves, that is not going to judge, that is going to accept you as a child of God, as you are. They are going to say, “Are you happier now than you were before? Yes? That’s all that matters.” And they’ll be supportive.
No, but I do look at myself as being blessed. There were times when I didn’t look on it as a blessing, prior to surgery and the misery that I inflicted on my ex. She never knew what was going on in my head, why I was standoffish. And yet, society forces us into roles that we weren’t meant for with no consideration that, by doing this, instead of hurting just one person, you’re going to wind up hurting lots of people. It’s tragic, and small wonder that so many suicides have occurred.
I was also blessed that when the time came that I had to finally acknowledge who I was and go for help, I had supportive parents. Dad told me that at first they didn’t understand so they went to see a psychiatrist, who told them, “I don’t know very much about the subject but I will tell you this: if your son is a transsexual, then get used to the idea that you are going to have a daughter, because she’s always been your daughter but has just worked overtime to hide it from you.” So Dad took the position that this wasn’t my fault, this wasn’t my choice, and he was very supportive. Mom had more difficulty than Dad but I think it was because of her family. My mother’s side was military and Republican and very straitlaced, and so it was hard for them. My grandmother was about eighty-two when I started transition and wanted nothing to do with me.
But she was a paraplegic and she would spend two weeks with Mom and Dad and two weeks with my aunt and uncle. I came home from the hospital the day she was to come back for her two weeks here. I had taken a shower and I was lying on the bed, changing my dressings, and she rolled into the room, saw me, was shocked and apologized, but she had this look on her face. She was curious as all get-out. And I said, “All right, Grandma. If you want to look, come over.” And my mother came in and said, “Oh, I’ll get Grandma out of here,” and I said, “No, it’s okay. Grandma wanted to see.” And I could see that mother wanted to see also. And so they came over to the edge of the bed, and Grandma leaned forward and she looked at me and she said to my mother, “She looks just like us.”
That was the first time she had ever used “she,” and from that moment on I was Joanna. And she never once slipped. And if anyone else slipped she corrected them.
ANSWERING THE RIDDLE
The various answers to the riddle of gender that have been proposed by scientists are no less culturally influenced than the answers proposed by religion or law. Scientific attempts to solve the riddle are determined not only by cultural beliefs about the different roles of men and women but also by the state of science itself—the kinds of questions that scientists are able to ask and answer in any given era. Milton Diamond repeated to me the old joke about the man who had lost his most valuable possession and was searching for it under a lamp on a street far removed from the place where he had lost the object. “Why are you looking here?” a passerby asks. “Because the light is better here,” the man responds. Scientists have searched for the solution to the riddle of gender in the place where the “light” of scientific inquiry has shone brightest in various eras—endocrinology, psychiatry, embryology, and neuroscience. Yet those searches have produced no definitive answer to the riddle, only more tantalizing questions.
Scientific responses to the riddle of gender have been used to police gendered behavior, but have also at times been helpful in liberating us from limiting beliefs about the nature of the differences we observe between males and females. It’s surely no accident that the birth of endocrinology coincided with the first wave of feminism, nor that the social construction hypothesis was generated by, and helped fuel, the second wave. It cannot be mere coincidence that gender-variant people became highly visible during those periods of “sexual anarchy,” when the scientific and social markers of gender suddenly became less fixed and less immutable. Gender, as distinct from sex, was defined during an era when many people hoped that biology was
