Magical Thinking - Augusten Burroughs [11]
I didn’t think much about transsexuals again until I was nineteen and working in San Francisco as a junior advertising copywriter. The receptionist’s name was Amber. She was six-foot-four, black, and had Diana Ross hair . . . except that she had been born a man, so her hairline was receding, and she looked like Diana Ross after a particularly brutal round of chemo.
My transsexual obsession was rekindled. Occasionally, Amber wore brightly colored stretch pants, and I couldn’t help but stare at her crotch because the fabric dented at the hole between her legs. It didn’t make any sense to me. Surely the surgeons could have closed up the hole better than this? Her vagina seemed so large, I could easily have stuck my fist in it. Maybe she needed to go back for a revision but couldn’t afford it? This was probably the case. She’d probably saved all her money for the big operation and couldn’t afford the finishing touches. In this way it was like buying a Jeep, stripped down until there wasn’t even carpeting or an AM radio.
Amber used to eat her lunch alone, downstairs in the vendingmachine room. Her lunch was always the same thing: a gigantic plastic tub of spaghetti with meat sauce that she brought from home and an entire bag of Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popcorn, which she microwaved and ate one kernel at a time with her long, slim fingers.
I couldn’t help but watch her gigantic Adam’s apple slide up and down as she swallowed. This seemed to me to be a dead giveaway. This, and the fact that she was six-four and balding.
I started reading every book I could find on the subject. I spent hours at night scrutinizing graphic photographs of postsurgical vaginas. I compared the clitorises created by the various doctors in America, Asia, and Europe. I learned that Amber could have a tracheal shave, where her Adam’s apple would be trimmed and made to appear more feminine. I learned that, indeed, many new women have to go back and have their new vaginas revised. And even if you have to finance it, every clitoris needs a hood.
I wanted to show Amber the articles I found but felt I better not do this, in case it upset her that she hadn’t “passed.” This is something else I learned about, passing. And it’s the goal of every transsexual.
A transsexual that doesn’t “pass” alarms people. I think this is because as a culture, we are uncomfortable with sex to begin with. So when we see someone who is toying with their own sex, it makes us want to grab our penises and cross our arms in front of our breasts. It threatens us in a deep, primal place in our brain stems.
One of my favorite transsexuals was named Caroline Cossey, also known as Tula. Unlike many male-to-female transsexuals, Tula didn’t look like a super-tall depressed guy in a matronly floral dress. She looked like Cindy Crawford. With a better body.
In fact, Tula was a Bond girl and a Seagram’s model before a British tabloid revealed the fact that Tula was once a guy. This horrified people, probably men who had previously engaged in erotic fantasies of the lovely Tula only to learn she had recently been some bloke named Hal or Martin.
When I turned thirty, I briefly flirted with the notion of undergoing sexual reassignment surgery. Once again, I was ready for a big change in my life. Plus, I was having a really difficult time meeting gay guys who didn’t seem gay yet were still caustic. So I figured, as a woman I would have a whole new pool of men from which to fish.
I decided that I would probably opt for the self-lubricating vagioplasty option. This was a more expensive vagina, because it was partially constructed from a one-inch band of mucoussecreting small intestine. The plus side of this vagina was that it was, like the name implies, self-lubricating. So I wouldn’t need to give myself away and reach for the K-Y. On the downside, it was always self-lubricating, so you had to wear a maxipad at all times, even at funerals.
I wouldn’t make