Clothes are but a symbol of something hid deep beneath.
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando
For eight months, I worked part time at a popular museum in downtown Los Angeles. The customer-service work was simultaneously mind-numbing and exhausting, but the staff was amazing, and you couldn’t beat the atmosphere. Our clientele consisted largely of families, school groups, and college students on second dates.
One morning, my coworker Yolanda tapped my arm to point out a particularly dysfunctional family, the two youngest members fleeing in all directions as their parents burned with embarrassment. The mom took a firm line while the dad observed. She got everyone regrouped.
“You know who wears the pants in that relationship,” Yolanda remarked with a grin.
“But they’re all wearing pants,” I said. “Even the children are wearing pants.”
We laughed the hollow laugh of minimum-wage employees and got back to work.
Yolanda knew my jibe had intended to diffuse the stereotypical phrase, and I, knowing my friend, understood that she meant the comment as praise. She was admiring the woman’s focus and grit in the face of unruly kids and an unhelpful spouse. But putting “the pants” on the wife insinuates her behavior as unnatural or unfeminine. Look at that woman acting like a man! The joke relies on the gender stereotypes surrounding the roles of men and women in a heterosexual relationship.
It may seem like a ridiculous piece of overthinking, picking apart the situation this way, but when piled on top of each other, vignettes like this add up to something bigger, and even more ridiculous.
At seventeen, if one of those wayward kids at the museum had kept asking me “Why? Why? Why?” on the subject of gender or gender roles, I’d struggle to turn up anything except an exasperated “Because!”
“So do you have a penis now?”
The question came lazily out of my friend Jerry’s mouth, as if he was asking for a piece of gum. I was seventeen, newly out at my boarding school, and completely unprepared for the prying minds (and eyes) of my peers.
We were hanging out on the set of a classmate’s final photography project, a series of portraits. The sheer screen, hot lights, and tripods made me feel even more on the spot.
“I—I haven’t had surgery yet,” I stammered back.
“Oh,” he said, with something like disappointment. “Are you going to?”
By coming out in my dorm, and subsequently my classes, I had made my gender public information. My protective dorm head, Mrs. A., had warned me as much.
“Tomorrow morning the kids will all be texting about it,” she said, the sentence a peak specimen of 2011.
For most of the community at the Loomis Chaffee School, in Windsor, Connecticut, I doubt my coming out caused an immediate shift in the way they saw gender; rather, I was an exception. They cared about me as an individual, and honored my wishes by respecting my name and pronoun change. And although they did respect me, it was entirely within their power to willfully disregard my request. I was nervous every time the subject of my gender came up because I deeply felt this vulnerability. While I had given my classmates the straightforward information they needed to respect me, I had also given them the information they needed to hurt me.
A high school friend of mine who later came out as trans recently posted a Facebook status about his difficulties with this dynamic. He was having trouble at his job. “I’m tired of having no control over who knows I’m trans, over who knows my birth name, and how they use that information,” he vented. “Apparently trans people don’t get the luxury of privacy.”
Today, people I hardly know ask me about my birth name, my sex life, or my surgical history. Trans people commiserate about these things, because no matter how different we all are, the questions we get are often the same. And while now I accept that being a visible trans person means having to deal with spam, back in high school I had no idea why people suddenly felt they had an all-access pass to scrutinize my anatomy.
Let’s get back to my penis.
Unlike “What was your girl name?” asking someone “Do you have a penis?” is a bit . . . bolder. It has the dizzying effect of being alternately very intimate and very depersonalizing. Intimate because it asks about your literal intimates, and depersonalizing because it speaks to only that part of you, not to you as a whole.
Unless you are romantically or sexually involved with me, or treating me for a life-threatening penis-related emergency, you shouldn’t ask me if I have a penis.
Jerry was the first person to ask me the penis question, an honor that I haven’t ever let him know about. While now one of the most vocal LGBTQ advocates I know, at the time he was a sophomore at Loomis, a fifteen-year-old operating with understandably limited information about what “trans” meant. I still genuinely believe his inquiry was part curiosity and part small talk. What do trans people care about? What does my trans friend care about?
During high school, I navigated the overwhelming emotions surrounding my gender with a limited amount of skill and information. I felt like a first-year college student who accidentally wanders into the wrong classroom and gets mistaken for the professor. As I mention in another essay, this feeling of being the sole ambassador for an identity or a subject—and being completely unprepared for it—is terrifying and isolating. I could speak to my personal experiences, but I couldn’t contextualize them, I couldn’t diffuse inappropriate questions or even understand why they were inappropriate.
“[Being] trans does not come with a diploma,” my cousin Oscar once wrote, “although that would be nice.”
When Jerry asked me if I had a penis, whether he realized it or not, he was experimenting with a way of looking at me. Through various reactions of my friends, my family, my professors, I began to piece together an outside picture of what I looked like. I wasn’t just discovering what it meant to me to be trans; I was finding out what being trans meant to the people in my community.
“Have you had . . . ?” the nurse nodded down at her own nether region, apparently too much of a professional to say the phrase “dick surgery.” I recalled that Monty Python sketch. Nudge nudge, wink wink.
It was Halloween my sophomore year of college, and I lay stiffly in a small bed, wearing a hospital gown. The room wasn’t really a room but one of those curtained-off ER cubbies. I had a distinct fear of losing consciousness and being unable to fend off nurse “Margie’s” curiosity. I regretted, and still do, not asking a friend to come with me.
“You know,” Margie continued, “I never would have known.”
She effortlessly broached my gender but stopped short of naming it, of using any of the words. I was in pain, around a 6 on that emoji pain chart (the face that looks constipated), and my politeness shield was slipping. I wanted to play dumb and force her to spit it out. You never would have known what? What the fuck do you want from me?
But instead I said, “Oh, thank you.”
My haunted maze began hours earlier, when an abdominal pain caught my attention during French class. I thought I might be hungry, because I’m always hungry, so I waited out the period. But by the time class ended, the pain was so severe I couldn’t stand straight. A friend accompanied my mysterious ailment and me to the health center, where, finding no answers, the staff quickly had campus police drive me to the around-the-block emergency room. Expecting appendicitis, I found the actual diagnosis even more startling: a ruptured ovarian cyst.
At the time of my ER visit, I had yet to have top surgery, and without my binders (two compression vests I wore), I felt totally exposed. Over my billowy gown, I bunched up the bed sheets for camouflage. The orderly who wheeled me in for an ultrasound sensed my trepidation.
“You know, I had one of those cysts a few weeks ago, in my stomach,” he said kindly, “Had my ultrasound here too. It’s not that unusual.”
I wondered if the nurses had asked him about his penis.
We think of bodies as being distinctly sexed under “male” or “female,” but in the medical sense, I was neither. I found myself occupying a strange no-man’s land in the hospital’s system. In this situation, it was essential for me to come out as trans in order to receive proper, efficient treatment. And unlike many trans people, I did receive proper, efficient treatment. Despite Margie’s initially probing questions, no one asked me to strip unnecessarily; no one conducted non-essential examinations or touched me inappropriately.
In the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force’s 2010 survey of 6,450 trans and gender-nonconforming people, 19 percent reported being denied medical treatment because of their gender identification; 28 percent reported “harassment” in medical settings. One of my mentors once recalled being loudly summoned by his birth name in front of the waiting room of a new doctor’s office. Some of my closest friends have experienced traumatic medical consultations and appointments they will never speak about.
I was released from the ER that night, and after the pain subsided, I trick-or-treated with my friends in Beacon Hill and then went out for burgers. The physical ordeal was officially over, but it set in motion a troublesome, non-penis-related train of thought: Did I want my ovaries? Did I want my uterus? Did I want biological children? Did I have other questions beyond that I had neglected to confront? And, perhaps most immediately, did I want to risk another adventure like this?
My decision to pursue a hysterectomy my senior year of college was personal, based on my individual relationship with my body, my organs, and our future together. I had been out as trans for almost four years, maintained hormone treatment, and in 2013, the year prior, I processed a legal name change and underwent top surgery. I had come a long way to understanding what being male meant to me. For the first time, I truly grasped that there is no right way to be trans, that there is no right way to “feel” any gender. So at this point in my life, I didn’t believe that having a uterus impeached my masculinity. I didn’t want the surgery because these were “female” organs and I, a guy, wanted them gone. Rather than feeling dysphoric with my reproductive system, I began to feel that my reproductive system was dysphoric with me. I began to feel that those parts of my body were unhappy and, in a way, unwelcomed.
The ER doctor suggested that testosterone might have contributed to the development of the ovarian cyst. It terrified me that the same hormone treatment that improved my quality of life so much might now be threatening my well-being. I cannot know for sure that this was the cause, only that polycystic ovaries are an occasional risk with trans men who take hormones.
I was, and still am, conflicted over the fact that I had to choose between my future health and my ability to have biological kids. It’s the choice I resent more than the having-kids thing. I know I can have an incredible family of my own, and that it will be no more or less real. Many trans people who undergo hysterectomies will extract a sample of their genetic material beforehand or save one ovary for later.
It is in the midst of difficult decisions like this that I am struck by everyone’s continued preoccupation with dicks and vaginas. The national conversation has diversified, but even in the transmasculine community, having a “penis” is a massive topic, a measure of manliness. Trans and non-trans people alike will often assume that surgery, specifically the downstairs variety, is a desired endgame, if not the endgame.
A college administrator once recommended me to a trans group in the Boston area, and prior to my top surgery I set up a meeting with its coordinator to get advice about insurance. Completely unsolicited, he recommended me to a phalloplasty surgeon, even offering to pull down his pants and show me the results up close and personal.
“Not even the doctors can tell,” he bragged as I mentally plotted my escape.
I spent winter break of senior year recovering from a total hysterectomy in my cousin Oscar’s basement.
The “hysto” involved only four tiny cuts instead of the long abdominal incision many patients still endure. The technical name for this surgery is “laproscopically assisted vaginal hysterectomy (LAVH),” which really means “two surgeons and their little camera take all your reproductive organs away.”
The recovery, as my primary surgeon, Dr. T., described, is like having “the period from hell.” I would argue it actually is more like the aftermath of an “ab workout from hell,” but aside from the core soreness and bloating, I felt tremendous joy and relief. Completing the hysto meant clearing a major medical hurdle, counteracting the threat of further cysts as well as ovarian and cervical cancer.
“All your intestines will move about two inches down after the procedure,” Dr. T. explained, “to take advantage of the new space.”
His words evoked a reality-TV couple celebrating their housing renovation: We demolished the downstairs bathroom, and you wouldn’t believe how far the kitchen expanded!
After my top surgery the summer prior, I was constantly bumping into things as I got used to my new sense of equilibrium. But that winter, my body was doing most of the adjusting on the inside. The next two weeks were made of molasses. I moved slowly, sat and reclined even slower, and couldn’t lift anything. I prematurely fretted about people hugging me too strongly when the break ended.
Oscar made this amazing iced tea with like a hundred ginger tea bags and dark honey, and I drank it constantly, pouring it greedily out of a little green teapot. During Oscar’s school days, I slept late, went for short walks, and read. At night, we watched The X-Files and ate popcorn. It was a sleepy, hobbit-like existence. Incredibly, the recovery felt like a holiday.
The long hours of quietude allowed me to eulogize all the busy ones that preceded them. Waves of nostalgia permeated my Oxycodone daze, hung over my morning toast, clouded up my two o’clock showers. I thought about being a person in perpetual translation of himself, and about the world that was constantly translating me. I thought about penises and vaginas and happy trails and pierced ears and letters on driver’s licenses and passports. I thought about haircuts and painted fingernails and cologne samples and late nights at the gym.
Since coming out at Loomis almost exactly four years prior to my hysto, I had relentlessly schemed and organized to make my life as Donald possible. Now all of it was over. My “transition” wasn’t over, but this specific part of my journey was. The closest thing I can compare it to emotionally would be my high school graduation.
I had so much to return to at Emerson College, in Boston: my first choice of classes, a wonderful network of friends, a fraternity, being part of an RA staff and having my own room. But a piece of me was scared now that I filed and sealed the paperwork and removed all the gauze. I worried that being trans was the only thing that I was. I worried that without all the prescriptions and consultations, I was empty and directionless. I found myself somehow believing that “trans” was everything good and bad about me at the same time.
I occasionally fixate angrily on the idea that my personal identity “accomplishments” are solutions to problems I should never have had. I shouldn’t have had to remove my ovaries because I shouldn’t have been born with them in the first place. I shouldn’t have had to orchestrate a medically induced puberty; I should have been born male. This line of thinking brings out the worst in me, and I find myself regressing to crude ideas of men and women, penises and vaginas. I feel nothing but bitter and hateful towards the queer parts of myself, when really I am grateful for all the ways being trans has expanded my life. Bitterness and hate are motivators, but they won’t make a body strong, and they won’t care for it day in and day out.
At Emerson I had the opportunity to pursue a minor in women’s and gender studies. I took classes where, for the first time, I learned about feminist theory, gender theory, and sexuality in depth. My academic work expanded my awareness and responsibility, but it was during that sleepy week of post-op at Oscar’s house that I really put everything together.
I wasn’t synthesizing scholarly arguments about what gender is and isn’t. I was fully confronting the experience of being thrust into an emotional and physical space where gender was the primary totem of my existence. For years, it was all I thought about, and all I thought other people thought about when they looked at me or talked to me (or about me). I was exhausted because it was exhausting.
So where was my mother in all this? And why have I used the word “penis” thirteen times?
In coming out to my mom, and sharing my plans for medical treatment with her, I was navigating two major areas of conflict. The first was my mother’s difficulty with the concept of “trans” as it applied to me, and the second was her deep parental attachment to my physical self.
As a single parent, my mother’s position was compounded by the intensity of her bond with an only “daughter.” It had been us against the world for so long. Not only did my coming out essentially call into question everything my mother knew about me as a person; it also felt like a rejection of what she had given me: my body, my name, my role as daughter.
“It’s like you’re asking me to be in the room when you shoot yourself,” she said, weeping, during one of our earliest conversations.
In changing my name, cutting my hair, throwing out old clothes, starting hormone replacement treatment, undergoing top surgery and then a hysterectomy, I imagined that, to my mother, J. died by degrees. It’s taken me a while to realize there wasn’t a single moment when my mother “lost” her daughter but a period of four to five years when every time she saw me, something was gone or had changed. I wasn’t, broadly speaking, a different person, but my signs were different.
Aside from my grandmother, most of my family is what I’d called Holiday Irish Catholics. Some of us go to church sometimes, but “religious” is not one of our top identifiers. Yet when I came out, many of my mother’s fears seemed to come from a deeply Christian place. She told me, on more than one occasion, that to undergo hormone treatment and surgery would be unnatural, against God in some way. Despite all our progress together, despite her agreement that my decisions have improved my quality of life, we still clash on the “physical changes” front.
Much like that of my schoolmates, the Collinses’ overall reaction to my transness happened on the individual-as-exception level. They tried to change the way they referred to me because it mattered to me, not necessarily because they believed my masculine identity. I don’t want to suggest that the individual approach isn’t important; it’s essential. You don’t have to have far-reaching or radical ideas about gender to call someone the right name. But because I was dealing with larger issues, including creating my identity and surviving the process, I began to become impatient with my family’s response. My mother, aunts, uncles, and cousins were trying to understand, struggling. I just couldn’t manage their discomfort and my own at the same time.
By the time I had top surgery, in my junior year of college, I had been on testosterone for around three years. “T” is a naturally occurring hormone that appears in varying levels in all biological sexes. A monitored schedule of T injections aimed to trick my body into halting the production of estrogen as its primary hormone, and adjust my secondary sex characteristics accordingly. T launched me into a second puberty. My voice dropped; I began to redistribute weight and muscle and grow facial hair. My appetites changed; I sometimes slept for ten, twelve hours at a time. I’ll admit I found myself unable to cry for almost a year and unable to remember dreams at all. My daily moods reached a more constant, upbeat elevation.
The morph in physiology through hormones is the most known arc in the trans-guy narrative, even more than the penis stuff. It’s the moment when people think of trans boys as becoming Real Boys, or at least looking like them. And for a long time, I believed testosterone made me real too. What it actually did was give me a real relationship with my body for the first time, a connection that spurred me on to a love of fitness and cooking, and improved my sense of personal style. Not everyone needs hormone treatment for this to happen.
While the “concept” piece of my trans identity was at the center of our disagreement during high school, the “physical changes” argument between my mother and me ramped up freshman year of college. I began my testosterone regimen, which segued into a six-month semi-estrangement. We exchanged a few terse e-mails but didn’t speak to or see each other, despite being only a two-hour drive apart. My mom didn’t feel emotionally capable of seeing me or having me stay with her if I was taking hormones. The full extent of all our distances from each other reverberated back and forth unpredictably.
We reunited the summer before my sophomore year in my hometown of Alexandria, Virginia. I was working with friends at a summer camp and living with my stepfather. The reconciliation was tentative and quiet. The disagreements continued, but this time so did the communication.
It’s horrifying when something that gives you great fulfillment has the exact opposite effect on someone you care about. For every answer you demand to find in yourself, there is a complementary question directed outward: If they really loved me, why wouldn’t they be happy for me? Don’t they trust me to make the right decisions? Is their love conditional? Am I really hurting them or are they choosing to react this way?
Reconnection and believing in reconnection seem simple, but they aren’t things you can schedule or predict. It’s hard, and there are no guarantees.
My grandmother used to say (and still does; she’s ninety-two) that if we could just “keep the lines of communication open,” my mom and I would one day understand each other a little better. Like two busy people just blindly ringing each other up, timing always wrong, after hours or on hold, until one day we connect. And this connection doesn’t mean forgiveness or acceptance or even agreement of any kind.
It just means two people who are finally ready to be on the phone.