March 28th, 1995:
I sit in my tub, meticulously shaving my legs. I think about why this action is so important to me. I carefully stroke the razor across my right leg and with each stroke, I shed a little skin as well as hair. Each stroke wipes away a portion of an old identity and an old way of life. Every slice of the razor is, in a sense, a new sort of freedom for me.
When I was a child, I was brought up to be male and frequently criticized for any aspect I presented which wasn't decidedly such. I've always had very "feminine" eyelashes and, at puberty, I found that while I started growing "male" patterns of hair, I also developed some very "feminine" breasts which got me sent to multiple doctors appointments and stigmatized beyond belief. I remember sitting in an office with a pediatrician talking to my parents about what he called my "enlargements" and explaining to them how I didn't need to be worried about anything and about how I was "not turning into a girl." He then turned to me and explained that this "problem" would be more likely to go away if I "were to take care of that weight problem." I was taught that these were things to be ashamed of and hide whenever possible.
I've known I was transsexual for many years, although I found it very difficult to face on a direct level. I've spent most of my life being what many people might call "obese" or "overweight," and this was a major issue for me. I grew up in the 1970's. Images of women popular at the time included Twiggy, Brooke Shields, Carol Burnett and Jane Fonda. While it was acceptable to have a Dom DeLouise or Jackie Gleason from time to time, we didn't have any Roseanne's or Kathy Najimys. Women of real size were practically invisible in the popular media.
So when I looked in the mirror I could not see a girl, even though I knew she was inside there somewhere. This wasn't because I wasn't feminine. In fact, I was very much so. It was because I wasn't thin.
Being both Italian and Jewish, I had a natural level of hairiness which developed when I hit puberty. From the age of 13 I had a mustache. From the age of 17, I grew a thick beard. These were masks. They were faces to hide behind. I developed an affinity for baggy clothes-- wearing those, I wouldn't have to look at my body. Even now, when I think about those times I find myself feeling depressed, as though a severe weight is sitting on my shoulders and I just can't pull myself out from under it.
I'm sure that much of this despair is a result of many issues from my childhood. I grew up in inner city Detroit, and was one of the whitest people in my neighborhood. I felt consistently singled-out for this. During high school I moved to a small town in Upper Michigan. I found myself to be one of the darkest people within a one-hundred and eighty mile radius and then found myself singled out for that feature as well.
I do not know what to make of all this. I've been mistaken for at least twenty different races. When I lived in Detroit I was taken for Lebanese by the people who owned the local grocery store and they thought I was "one of their own." When I was in Upper Michigan, I was consistently thought to be an exchange student from a wide variety of places including Mexico, Spain, anywhere in Latin America, South America or Southern Europe. A friend of mine, someone I'd known for close to a year, once turned to me and asked "How did you learn to speak English so well?" Being an awkward teen, I didn't have the composure necessary to come up with the appropriate response of "as opposed to what?" so I just sat there flabbergasted at the question.
The first time I went to College, it was in a very small private liberal arts school in the middle of Wisconsin. The school felt like a glass bubble within a glass bubble. The town was the birthplace of the arch-conservative Senator Joseph MacCarthy and while I was in school there it became the national headquarters for the even more paranoid and rabid John Birch Society. Given the vast, for lack of a better term, "whiteness" of this town, I was routinely taken for a Greek exchange student. I had short hair and a thick beard back then and I wore almost exclusively clothes that were gray, white and dark blue.
It was sometime during that time that I first started to consciously acknowledge my own transsexualism. However, I still had what I would consider a "weight problem" and my own image of women was still restricted to people who were thin and pretty. So I found it impossible to imagine myself in that role.
The summer after my first year in college was the last Summer I ever spent living in Upper Michigan. I found myself spending most days hanging out with a group of friends and doing whatever possible to detach myself from my own body. Many of my friends smoked pot regularly and though I had spent most of my childhood avoiding any sort of drugs, this time I decided I wanted to try it. However, I never found myself getting high or even experiencing the slightest buzz. I tried several times a week for most of the Summer and not once did I get myself anywhere except stuck in my own miserable body.
At least, not through the pot. The times I wasn't hanging out with friends I found myself sitting in my room either writing or meditating. The meditation, oddly enough, succeeded where the drugs had failed. I found myself achieving states of transcendence that I still carry with me. I don't know whether this is fantasy or real. I make no metaphysical claims about the nature of the universe. All I know is that in the course of that summer I learned to experience things that by our physical laws simply do not exist. I would sit for hours and watch the walls melt in my room; or drift my way into other lives and gain new experiences. Not having been interested in direct sexual activity in years, I found myself suddenly fantasizing about friends of all genders.
While I loved my friends dearly, I knew many of them to be openly homophobic. There was no one with whom I could share these feelings. I experienced a certain joy at understanding them but once again, I was taught very quickly that they were things that I was expected to be ashamed of. The world around me was once again yelling at me to slice aside those parts of myself that they didn't accept.
Despite this, I was sad to say good-bye to these people when the Summer ended. They had been closer family to me than the people who had raised me from birth and they had actually cared about me and shown caring for me that few others had.
When I went back to school I found that several friends of mine were in their own process of coming out of the closet and others were reacting positively to this. I realized that at school I had the opportunity to do the same. At first slowly, and then later quite vocally I found myself coming out of at least one of my shells. Although I wasn't sexually active at the time, being one of the only out of the closet people on campus in a small Wisconsin town was probably not the most safe thing to do. However, I found myself more willing to enjoy myself because at least one part of my life was no longer closed to my own mind. It was that year that I started wear clothes of a wider variety of colors and started to let my hair grow longer.
Life continued to make itself more complicated around me. I developed relationships with people but my own fears about my body kept me from being willing to go much deeper than close physical contact and intense kissing. While I enjoyed this physical contact, for some reason anything close to real "sex" felt like it was off-limits and totally inappropriate for me. Fantasizing about it didn't bother me, but the idea of actually engaging in it was relatively horrifying.
I eventually dropped out of school for a variety of reasons. I was going through some rather bizarre and intense personal problems. My own depression about myself was pulling me deeper inside itself and I fell victim to panic attacks and serious despair.
It was that summer that I moved to Rhode Island, my current home, and found myself actually starting to deal with my own internal issues.
I'm not sure exactly what happened at the end of that Summer, but many of my emotional problems reached a sort of a climax. I was living in a cooperative house and I found myself one night unable to sleep in my room. I left my room and laid down on the couch in the kitchen and tried to sleep for four hours to no avail. I got up about four in the morning and looked at the mess around me (such messes are rather typical for cooperative houses) and decided to focus all my pent-up rage and anxiety on that mess. I found myself throwing silverware into the sink from across the room. I dealt with every item in the kitchen with some of the most brutal raw force I'd ever experienced. I rinsed every dish and lined it into the dishwasher and cleaned everything I could for the next hour.
And then there was only one item left. A knife. Sitting in the middle of the table.
I grabbed that knife with my right hand and without thinking, without knowing, I found myself simply pressing it against my left wrist.
And time froze. I stood there for what must have been seconds but felt like hours and simply wondered if I was going to live or die. I did not feel as though it were my choice whether or not to push the blade deep enough to cause wounds. It was just a force that was there on top of me.
Strangely enough, I had woken no one with my clatter of dishes and clanking of silverware. The room was suddenly silent and the silence filled my head.
And then I remembered.
I remembered how when I was a child there was so much pain that I would deliberately inflict wounds upon myself to focus the pain on something external instead of the internal screams.
I remembered the fear, the intimidation, the threats I had faced as a child for not "fitting in." I remembered the weapons with which beatings were threatened. I remembered the taunting about my size and my shape. I remembered the fear that came every time I had to shower with other children because I knew they'd see that I had breasts and how terrified that made me. I remembered when a group of kids tried to toss me into a locker and leave me there.
And the knife dropped.
I fell to my knees and tried to scream but no sound came out of my voice.
Within days of that, I found myself taking a bus out to the Lincoln Mall to see some bargain matinee or another. While I was at the mall I bought shaving cream and disposable razors.
The next shower I took, I shaved my entire beard and mustache for the first time in my life. Nobody in the cooperative house recognized me when I came down to dinner.
The very next one I took, I shaved my arms and chest and then shortly thereafter my legs.
I don't know what was making me do this, but I just wanted to see what it felt like. It was shortly after that when I realized that Halloween was coming up. I finally started to acknowledge my desire to "crossdress" and talked to some friends about it. One of them had known several transsexuals before and we had a long talk about weight and image. She pointed out to me that a lot of male-to-female transsexuals who are heavy-set actually are better off because the hormones tend to distribute body fat quite well.
It was at that moment that I might actually be able to do something real with the ideas that were inside of me. Somewhere in there, I also began to realize that I was not a thin person and did not need to be a thin person and that being a woman did not equate with thinness. Finally I was beginning to feel like there was something positive and enriching I could do for myself.
Then I discovered a setback.
I went out with a friend to search local stores for "women's" clothes that would fit me. I found very few. Skirts were almost entirely too small to fit around my waist and blouses were a complete nightmare. I finally found a few wrap-around skirts that, alone, were too small, but when combined worked fine.
For years, as a male, I had tried to think of myself as a "feminist guy." I had worked on being politically correct and understanding sexism and not buying into it. But never in my life had I ever really experienced what women go through on a day to day basis. The simple process of trying to shop for clothes that did not fit me (and finding that every item in the discount rack was sizes "s" and "xs") was the first time I'd ever experienced direct misogyny first-hand. Until that point, I don't think I'd ever really had a clue.
With some work and some of my clothing problems solved (many of them by seeking out clothing of a specifically non-American style) I bought makeup and gel for my hair. I found myself approaching the upcoming Halloween celebrations with a great deal of zeal.
I made myself up in what I could call nothing but "Ultra-Femme" mode and I had a great deal of fun with the whole experience. I think I shocked a lot of my friends at first, but most of them got used to it. I think what confused them the most was that I was no longer ashamed of the fact that I had natural breasts, something they expect from someone they perceive as "a man."
This was four-and-a-half years ago. My own perspectives have changed considerably in the meantime. My hair is now longer than it's ever been and I've experienced amusement in changing its colors whenever I feel like doing so. I delight in feeling the long curly lanks slip down along my back. In the summertime, I wear little but shorts and tank-tops and am interpreted as female relatively often. In the winter I wear sweat pants and sweatshirts and very frequently hear the phrase "sir... uhm... miss... uhm..." followed by a look of confusion. What I've learned is that my own body is just an obstacle to overcome. For whatever reason, there is some drive inside me to make myself as female as is medically possible. While I am saddened that I will never be able to bear a child inside myself, I know that medically I can have my genitalia altered and my physiology altered to match what I know inside is right for me.
None of this is any longer a deterrent from my living the sort of life I want to live. I know that eventually, thanks to electrolysis, my body will no longer grow hair where I don't want it to and that through hormones I can have control over my own contours and body shape and can choose to do what I want with myself. The only true barrier to any of this is frightfully mundane-- finding sufficient income to deal with it.
In the meantime, I've found that my own gender identity is no longer a function of how my body appears or what it looks like as much as it is my own attitude. I think in this process, I've learned a lesson that I think many women need to learn (and, fortunately, quite a few have): that being a woman does not mean being thin nor does it mean fitting into specific social standards. It does not mean wearing high heels or makeup and it does not mean shaving one's legs, though these are things I may do at times.
What being a woman means to me now is being myself, the best that I can be, in my own way and my own style. And finally, after all these years, I feel I am hiding behind nothing and living my own life in my own way. I have felt cuts and burns and blades and knives in my life. I have been scarred and hurt on occasions too numerous to list. It is possible now that what I am experiencing is a changing of hands. These knives that have been used against me are no longer weapons. I now hold the blade and rather than using it to escape I am using it to embrace. Rather than a tool of violence these knives are now a tool of sculpture.