CHANGING SEX · HORMONAL EFFECTS · A PRECARIOUS CONDITION · SELF-PROTECTION · RULES
Our children were safely growing; I felt I had, so far as I could, honored the responsibilities of my marriage; rather than go mad, or kill myself, or worst of all perhaps infect everyone around me with my profoundest melancholy, I would accept Dr. Benjamin’s last resort, and have my body altered.
Nobody in the history of humankind has changed from a true man to a true woman, if we class a man or a woman purely by physical concepts. Hermaphrodites may have shifted the balance of their ambiguity, but nobody has been born with one complete body and died with the other. When I say, then, that I now began a change of sex, I speak in shorthand. What was about to happen was that my body would be made as female as science could contemplate or nature permit, to reset (as I saw it) the pointer of my sex more sensibly and accurately along the scale of my gender. Doctors, whose conception of these matters is often simplistic to the degree of obscurantism, have devised many tests for the determination of sex, and divided the concept into several categories. There is anatomical sex, the most obvious: breasts, vagina, womb, and ovaries for the female, penis and testicles for the male. There is chromosomal sex, the most fundamental: the nuclear composition of the body, which need not necessarily conform to the anatomy, but which is accepted as a convenient rule of thumb for such purposes as international sport. There is hormonal sex, the chemical balance of male and female. There is psychological sex, the way people respond to the world, and feel themselves to be.
I was not much interested in these criteria, for I regarded sex merely as the tool of gender, and I believed that for me as for most people the interplay between the two lay very close to personality, not to be measured by blood tests or Freudian formulae. All I wanted was liberation, or reconciliation—to live as myself, to clothe myself in a more proper body, and achieve Identity at last. I would not hurry. First I would discover if it were feasible. Slowly, carefully, with infinite precaution against betrayal, I began the chemical experiments by which I would lose many of my male characteristics, and acquire some of the female; then, if all went well, several years later I would take the last step, and have the change completed by surgery.
To myself I had been woman all along, and I was not going to change the truth of me, only discard the falsity. But I was about to change my form and apparency—my status too, perhaps my place among my peers, my attitudes no doubt, the reactions I would evoke, my reputation, my manner of life, my prospects, my emotions, possibly my abilities. I was about to adapt my body from a male conformation to a female, and I would shift my public role altogether, from the role of a man to the role of a woman. It is one of the most drastic of all human changes, unknown until our own times, and even now experienced by very few; but it seemed only natural to me, and I embarked upon it only with a sense of thankfulness, like a lost traveler finding the right road at last.
These events had been arcanely forecast to me. A Xosa wise woman, telling my future in her dark hut of the Transkei, had assured me long before that I would one day be woman too; and a reader of mine in Stockholm had repeatedly warned me that the King of Sweden was changing my sex by invisible rays. As you know, I had myself long seen in my quest some veiled spiritual purpose, as though I was pursuing a Grail or grasping Oneness. There was, however, nothing mystic about the substances I now employed to achieve my ends. Since the discovery of hormones early in the century, they had been successfully isolated and reproduced; and the pills I now took three times a day, as I started on my journey, were made in Canada from the urine of pregnant mares.
Dr. Benjamin prescribed them for me, and I took them with unfailing regularity for the next eight years, supplemented by artificial female hormones too. Hasty calculation suggests to me that between 1964 and 1972 I swallowed at least 12,000 pills, and absorbed into my system anything up to 50,000 milligrams of female matter. Much of this doubtless went to waste, the body automatically discharging what it cannot absorb; the rest took its effect, and turned me gradually from a person who looked like a healthy male of orthodox sexual tendencies, approaching middle age, into something perilously close to a hermaphrodite, apparently neither of one sex nor the other, and more or less ageless. I was assured that this was a reversible process, and that if after some years of trial I decided to go no further, I might gradually revert to the male again; but of course the more frankly feminine I became the happier I was, object of curiosity though I became to the world at large, and embarrassment I fear, though they never dreamt of showing it, to Elizabeth and the children.
The change was infinitely gradual. I felt like a slow-motion Jekyll and Hyde, tinkering with test-tubes and retorts in my dark laboratory; but the effects were so subtle that they seemed not to be induced at all, were not noticed for years by everyday acquaintances, and seemed to be part of the natural process of aging. Except that, fortunately, they worked backwards, and rejuvenated me. The first result was not exactly a feminization of my body, but a stripping away of the rough hide in which the male person is clad. I do not mean merely the body hair, nor even the leatheriness of the skin, nor all the hard protrusion of muscle; all these indeed vanished over the next few years, but there went with them something less tangible too, which I know now to be specifically masculine—a kind of unseen layer of accumulated resilience, which provides a shield for the male of the species, but at the same time deadens the sensations of the body. It is as though some protective substance has been sprayed onto a man from a divine aerosol, so that he is less immediately in contact with the air and the sun, more powerfully compacted within his own resources.
This suggestion, for it is really hardly more, was now stripped from me, and I felt at the same time physically freer and more vulnerable. I had no armor. I seemed to feel not only the heat and the cold more, but also the stimulants of the world about me. I relished the goodness of the sun in a more directly physical way, and for the first time in my life saw the point of lazing about on beaches. The keenness of the wind cut me more spitefully. It was as though I could feel the very weight of the air pressing on my person, or eddying past, and I thought that if I closed my eyes now the presence of the moonlight would cool my cheek. I was far lighter in weight, but I was lighter in motion too, not so brilliantly precipitate as I had been on Everest, but airier, springier. It was rather as though my sense of gravity had shifted, making me more delicate or subtle of balance. I dreamt frequently of levitation, and found it curiously more easy to slip around a corner when I observed some dour acquaintance approaching me up the street, as though for a moment or two I could levitate in real life.
All this helped to make me younger. It was not merely a matter of seeming younger; except in the matter of plain chronology, it was actually true. I was enjoying that dream of the ages, a second youth. My skin was clearer, my cheeks were rosier, my tread was lighter, my figure was slimmer. More important, I was actually starting again. It was as though I had slipped the gears of life, returning to an earlier cycle for a second time round; or had reached one of those repeats in a sonata which start identically, but end in piquant difference. Life and the world looked new to me. Even my relationship with Elizabeth, which soon lost its last elements of physical contact, assumed a new lucidity. My body seemed to be growing more complex, more quivering in its responses, but my spirit felt simpler. I had loved animals all my life, but I felt closer to them now, and sometimes I even found myself talking to the garden flowers, wishing them a Happy Easter, or thanking them for the fine show they made (“Was the whole process,” asked one of my publisher’s readers, commenting upon this passage in a first draft of the book, “affecting her mind a little?”—but no, I had been talking to my typewriter for years, not always in such grateful terms.)
At first people thought I looked inexplicably young, consulted Who’s Who to compound their bewilderment, or unkindly likened me to Dorian Gray (whose picture grew old while he stayed young, you will remember, until the dreadful reversal of the final chapter). I had presented in the past a figure not undistinguished in its slight way, and was accustomed to the respect which an educated Briton could expect, at least in those days, all over the world. People were not often cheeky to me, still less condescending. Taxi-drivers called me “Guv” sometimes, secretaries took their glasses off, and guests in my house, knowing my savage aversion to tobacco, sometimes hid behind trees for surreptitious cigarettes. Now things began to change. I noticed in the reaction of people something avuncular or even patronizing. Taxi-drivers were surprised when I asked to be taken to my club, and said it didn’t seem the place for me. Waitresses were motherly, and expected only modest tips. When Elizabeth and I dined together as often as not they gave the bill to her, and once when I was visiting one of my sons at Eton, and we were coveting a stuffed owl through the window of an antique shop (it stands beside me now), a passing school matron asked if it wasn’t time the pair of us were back indoors.
But after a year or two the character of my metamorphosis became more apparent, and I began to look not simply younger, but more feminine. Now not just the texture but the shape of my body began to change. My waist narrowed, my hips broadened rather, and my small breasts blossomed like blushes. My hair, which had been crisp and curly, now grew softer and longer, and my posture and demeanor, though I did nothing consciously to adapt them, became each month more womanly. I became a somewhat equivocal figure. Some people assumed me to be a homosexual, some thought me a kind of hybrid, some supposed me to be a woman already, and opened doors for me. I had reached a halfway mark, and probably looked on the outside more or less how I had always felt within.
Stripped of my clothes, I was a chimera, half male, half female, an object of wonder even to myself. I could no longer swim in our river at home, one of the great pleasures of my life, and I had to abandon my lifelong habit of plunging into whatever pool, lake, or ocean I came across in my travels. Sometimes, though, on fine summer days, I made a pilgrimage to a little lake I knew high in the mountains called the Glyders, in North Wales. There I could bathe alone. Early in the morning I would scramble up the hills, to where the lake stood sedgy and serene beside a gentle col. The light would be pale and misty, the air tangy, and all around the Welsh hills lay blue in the morning. The silence was absolute. There I would take my clothes off, and all alone in that high world stand for a moment like a figure of mythology, monstrous or divine, like nobody else those mountains have ever seen; and when, gently wading through the reeds, and feeling the icy water rise past my loins to my trembling breasts, I fell into the pool’s embrace, sometimes I thought the fable might well end there, as it would in the best Welsh fairy tales.
I found the androgynous condition in some ways a nightmare, but in others an adventure. Imagine if you can the moment when, having passed through the customs at Kennedy Airport, New York, I approach the security check. Dressed as I am in jeans and a sweater, I have no idea to which sex the policemen will suppose me to belong, and must prepare my responses for either decision. I feel their silent appraisal down the corridor as I approach them, and as they search my sling bag I listen hard for a “Sir” or a “Ma’am” to decide my course of conduct. Beyond the corridor, I know, the line divides, men to the male frisker, women to the female, and so far I have no notion which to take. On either side a careful examination would reveal ambiguities of anatomy, and I would be plunged into all the ignominies of inquiry and examination, the embarrassments all round, the amusement or contempt, the gruff apologies and the snigger behind my back. But “Sir” or “Madam” comes there none, and through the curtain I diffidently go, to stand there at the bifurcation of the passengers undetermined. An awful moment passes. Everyone seems to be looking at me. Then “Move along there, lady, please, don’t hold up the traffic”— and instantly I join the female queue, am gently and (as it proves) not all that skillfully frisked by a girl who thanks me for my co-operation, and emerge from another small crisis pleased (for of course I have hoped for this conclusion all along) but shaken too.
It is a precarious condition. One must live not for the day, but for the moment, swiftly adjusting to circumstance. During a journey in South Africa once I was told at lunchtime that I must wear a collar and tie in the dining room, at dinner that I must not enter wearing trousers. On a train from Euston to Bangor a man who had just been asking me if I had played cricket at Oxford was taken aback when the waiter, placing my soup before me, said, “There you are then, love, enjoy it!” In Denver a lady who began selling me a suitcase as a man developed doubts in the course of the transaction, and subtly shifting her sales technique, from the dogmatic to the confiding, ended by asking me if she couldn’t interest me in a new handbag too. Very unexpected people, like New York harbormen, or linotype operators, put their arms around my waist and declared their affection, but just as often I never did discover what sex people supposed me to be, and we parted on a plane of mutual mystification. My colleague H. V. Morton, when I called upon him for the first time at his house in the Cape, was told by his maid that a lady had come to see him, and likened me when I left to Ariel, insubstantial, ill-defined, and always on the move.
Reactions to my ambivalence varied greatly from nation to nation, or culture to culture. Among the guileless peoples the problem was minimal. They simply asked. After a flight from Darjeeling to Calcutta, for instance, during which I had enjoyed the company of an Indian family, the daughter walked over to me at the baggage counter when we had disembarked. “I hope you won’t mind my asking,” she simply and politely said, “but my brothers wish to know whether you are a boy or a girl.” In Mexico, after staring hard for several days, and eying my sparse traveler’s wardrobe with bewilderment, a deputation of housemaids came to my door one day. “Please tell us,” they said, “whether you are a lady or a gentleman.” I whipped up my shirt to show my bosom, and they gave me a bunch of flowers when I left. “Are you a man or a woman?” asked the Fijian taxi-driver as he drove me from the airport. “I am a respectable, rich, middle-aged English widow,” I replied. “Good,” he said, “just what I want,” and put his hand upon my knee.
Americans generally assumed me to be a female, and cheered me up with small attentions. Englishmen, I think, especially Englishmen of the educated classes, found the ambiguity in itself beguiling: as I became less apparently homosexual, and more evidently something more esoteric, I found their responses ever more agreeable, enlivened always by that instant flicker of amused attraction which every woman knows and no man can quite imagine. Frenchmen were curious, and tended to engage me in inquisitive conversation, neatly skirting the issues with small talk until the moment came for a swift oblique dart to the heart of things: “You are married, yes? Where is your—er—your wife—your husband, is it?” Italians, frankly unable to conceive the meaning of such a phenomenon, simply stared boorishly, or nudged each other in piazzas. Greeks were vastly entertained. Arabs asked me to go for walks with them. Scots looked shocked. Germans looked worried. Japanese did not notice.
But two classes of person put the puzzle into quite different perspectives. In all the Western countries young people did not seem to care which I was, expecting me it seemed to decide for myself, expressing no surprise, and treating me with equal familiarity whichever way I opted. And the black people of Africa, men and women alike, made me feel that there was to my condition an element of privilege. They viewed me with shining eyes. Close as they were to still stranger things, to music I could not hear, visions I could not see, they treated me as a lesser mystery, and cherished me. Old men held my hands for long thoughtful moments, as though they were deriving merit from the touch. Women bade me sit by them, not for any special reason, simply to share my presence. I was once walking down the steps to the wharf at Freetown, in Sierra Leone, where long ago the liberated slaves were disembarked to begin their new lives in the colony. I was pursued by a chattering and curious crowd of children, dogging my every step, laughing and kicking stones about the place. I liked their merry company, but at the quayside a tall watchman of the waterfront, constituting himself my guardian, shooed them all away. “Go,” he said, “go. This Person is Alone”—as though I was, in my strange isolation, not altogether corporeal.
I came to accept this unreality. In the only novel I have read about gender confusion, Geoff Brown’s tragic I Know What I Want, the hero/heroine at one point determines himself to be no more than a freak, “queer, miserable, hunched-up.” I was resolute never to think of myself in this way. The world could take me or leave me, and one day, I was sure now, I would emerge from this bizarre chrysalis if not a butterfly, at least a presentable moth. If life gives you a lemon, as an American sage once remarked, make yourself a lemonade. In the meantime, of course, I was sometimes wounded. I was not an exhibitionist by nature, and though scarcely a shrinking violet either, preferred to attract attention for more straightforward reasons. I was more easily wounded than I cared to admit even to myself, and my family often sensed it, and suffered with me. “That man’s staring at me,” my little Tom once said, squeezing my hand as if for reassurance; but I knew he was staring at me, and so I think did Tom.
It was in Kashmir that I first allowed my unreality to act as its own cloak around me, or more appositely perhaps as the veil of a Muslim woman, which protects her from so many nuisances, and allows her to be at her best or her worst inside. In that happy valley I found my status to be especially uncertain, and I seemed to grope my way through a web of misunderstandings, doubles entendres, and miscellaneous embarrassments. The water-peddlers who sidled past my houseboat in their punts, suddenly appearing over the rail or through the dining-room windows like amphibians of the lake, found me at least as startling as I did them, and my entrepreneur host did not know from first to last whether his guest was male or female, answering inquiries about me only with a discreet and baffled shrug. To protect myself against these perplexities I went transcendental, and for the rest of my stay in limbo I used the device often in self-protection.
Of course I caught it from Kashmir itself, where for generations wise men have turned to fantasy as a protection against unhappiness. In Kashmir I learnt to discount time, and dismiss truth for the moment. I answered questions as I liked. I let fall all those mental inhibitions which, though invaluable in most situations, were proving temporarily inadequate in mine. I abandoned the sense of shame which had driven me to so many exertions. I entered, I suppose, some other plane, and spent long restful hours in it, examining small water-weeds upon the deck of the houseboat, or deep in that other textbook of the Eightfold Path, Pride and Prejudice.
For you must not suppose that I had gone off my head. Far from it. I had entered this new state quite consciously, and having discovered it in Kashmir, developed it later as a technique. I was for the time being a kind of nonhuman, a sprite or monster, as you wish; so when the world oppressed me I left it, and wandering through other fields of sensibility, like the Moguls before me I insulated myself against misfortune. Harmless lying, I found, was itself a panacea. Either people believed me when I said I had a unicorn at home, or they thought me crazy, or they called me a liar, or they accepted the fancy for itself; and by offering them four distinct choices, the lie diverted their attention from mistier enigmas behind, and excused me too from specifics. After all, my life was one long protest against the separation of fact from fantasy: fantasy was fact, I reasoned, just as mind was body, or imagination truth.
I was not alone, anyway, in finding solace in this way. Half the world at that time was trying to soothe itself with drugs and hallucinations, and withdrawing ever more eccentrically from reality. In Kanpur, in India, I came across a man with whom I felt an instant affinity, so similar was his system of emancipation to my own. That he was deeply unhappy was obvious, but he numbed his misery by touching things. Day and night he wandered the streets of the city, earnestly and methodically touching windows, doorposts, lamp standards, apparently to a set of unwritten rules. Sometimes he appeared to feel that he had neglected the task, and did a street all over again, paying a still more diligent attention to the doorknobs, and I was told that there was scarcely an alley of the inner city where his busy activity was not familiar. I spoke to him one morning, but he responded only with an engaging preoccupied smile, as if to say that, though some other time it would be delightful to have a chat, that day he simply hadn’t a moment to spare.
I was sure now that in the end surgery would rescue me from these varied predicaments, and Elizabeth too viewed my fluctuating moods philosophically, knowing that they would reconcile themselves one day. I had learnt, though, that the few reputable surgeons who would perform the operation in England or America decreed strict preliminary conditions. The patient must not be psychotic. He must understand the procedures. He must be physically compatible to the new role. He must not be cruelly abandoning or betraying dependents. He must already have acquired, by protracted hormone treatment, the secondary female characteristics, and lost the male ones. Above all he must have lived for some years in the role of his new sex, and proved that socially and economically it was possible.
I did not greatly care whether my surgeon was reputable, but still these rules seemed sensible to me. I had heard of people who, in the despair of their predicament, had rushed all unprepared into what they called a change of sex, and by that violent wrenching of nature had made themselves only the unhappier. Most of the criteria, I felt, I satisfied already. Those thousands of pills had transformed my physique: if I was not a woman, I was certainly a strange sort of man. For all my ventures into another reality I was still not insane. My children were growing up in the knowledge of my ambiguity, and nothing on earth would persuade me to betray them. Economically it made no difference whether I was male or female.
The time had come, I thought, to move a stage further. I had reached the frontier between the sexes, and it was time for me tentatively to explore life on the far side.