The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [132]
Q: So your parents’ response wasn’t “What’s going on with you? Why are you doing this?” It was “We’re going to put you in a mental institution “?
Yeah. “We don’t want to deal with this.” And then I started menstruating—this painful urination and hematuria—and I tried to hide it from them because I knew what their response was to this sexual thing, and stuff that comes out of the penis is sexual, and what the-hell do I know? I’m in a fever talking about God, and fearing God. I was preparing for bar mitzvah. And I remember one day I painted my nails, and my father freaked out. I wasn’t as bad as many, okay? I wasn’t one of those hypermasculine overcompensators or anything. I just learned to blend into the woodwork, just do my work at school and manage.
So this is going on, and I started bleeding even between urinations, and I had to try to wash out my underwear, and it’s so hard to get blood out, and I’m stealing money from my mother’s pocketbook to buy more underwear so she doesn’t see it. Eventually, I couldn’t keep it up. I was only twelve. What could I do? And they caught on. And they took me to a urologist, an Austrian fellow with a very heavy German accent, and he made some sort of diagnosis. The only thing that’s come down to me is the urethral meatal stenosis. No questions about DES, so far as I know. This was ’64, and I go to this urologist and he decides to treat me with this bizarre treatment that I have never in all my years as a physician been able to elucidate any better than I’m going to tell you right now. When I describe this to urologists today, they say, “What the hell was he doing? What was that?”
He had me lying down on a table, strapped down, with what I now know to be a fifty-cc syringe with a long cannula on it, filled with some sort of viscous black material. Viscous gook that he would then insert into my penis. And then he would just stand there, this big German guy—and remember, I’m only twelve; I haven’t had my growth spurts or anything, and he’s standing there injecting this into me. This was the most painful thing imaginable. And there was no sympathy, no nurse there, no feminine energy in the room. No explanation. Nothing. I went through this for four months. My parents have since pointed out that this was an attempt to expand my urethra. But they were never in the room; they were always outside. And there was no sympathy. None whatsoever. They never talked about it. “How do you feel? Can we get you some ice cream?” Typical stuff that kids would get if they were getting their tonsils out, but never anything. And I went through that for four months. And it didn’t work.
I’ve blocked most of this stuff out. It was just awful. I don’t want to think about it. And the German accent didn’t help. I was learning about the Holocaust at the time, and even though he was Jewish, that didn’t help. And of course, there were all those sexual associations that I was making, and that I guess everybody else was making, but no one talked about it. And I’m praying to develop breasts and I’m menstruating, and here they’re doing this to my penis. And finally they decided that they had to operate. So I was taken to surgery and operated on. I don’t know what was done, but I have a scar the length of my penis, along the dorsum of my penis. I think I was basically filleted open. I developed septic shock during that procedure. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother said, “We came back to see you after the surgery and you were missing and then we tracked you down and you were in the ICU and you had a fever of 106 and we thought you weren’t going to make it.” They freaked out. Of course, I don’t remember anything because I was in shock. I was in the hospital for three weeks, on IV antibiotics and eating lousy hospital food. It was the only time in my life that I ever developed an aversion to water. Forcing fluids. “You’ve got to drink the water.” I remember hating it, becoming nauseated by water.
And again, nobody ever talked about this. My penis was bandaged up. I had a Foley [catheter] in for the