The Riddle of Gender - Deborah Rudacille [134]
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,