Gender confusion. Gender dysphoria. Gender displacement. What today’s multisexual activists now call gender liberation arguably began with Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Susan B. Anthony, and Margaret Sanger well over a century ago before it found its contemporary embodiment with Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and the theorist Judith Butler. The twenty-first century has already produced yet a new generation of college trans-identity activists and their older pop models, bisexual Lady Gaga and the now transsexual publicity hound Caitlyn Jenner. The chaotic gender puzzle that conservatives long warned us about since they sentenced Margaret Sanger to jail for promoting birth control has reached new heights that were unimaginable just a generation ago. None other than the CIA, whose essential trade, like that of most espionage outfits, is identity replacement, now openly embraces and recruits transmen and transwomen, the most famous recent example being a Middle East expert whom the agency presented to the New York Times in 2015 under the cover name Jenny. It was no accident that the CIA chose the Times to promote its support of transsexuality: The newspaper long known as “the gray lady” of American journalism had itself already become a national leader in promoting transsexual rights and identities, not only through repeated editorials but as well by opening an entire online section devoted to personal transsexual coming-out stories. It is hard to become more establishment than being embraced by the CIA and the Times.
America, however, is far from alone. There is hardly a major newspaper or television news company anywhere in Europe or Asia that does not run regular reports on its trans population. Shanghai’s official Museum of Contemporary Art featured a major show of the pop-kitsch and heavily trans painters Pierre et Gilles in 2013. Thailand has long been recognized as the world’s busiest surgical ward for highly advanced transsexual surgery. Yet the pinnacle of trans notoriety most clearly arrived after Conchita Wurst, née Tom Neuwirth, a little-known sometime transvestite performer who delighted in provoking Austria’s neo-Nazi Freedom Party, won the 2014 Eurovision song contest.
When the Austrian public television channel ORF nominated Conchita, a self-described drag queen who wears a beard but performs in women’s wigs and clothing, as Austria’s official entry into Eurovision 2014, outrage erupted. More than thirty thousand hate messages piled up within days on ORF’s Facebook page. The vitriol went viral across Eastern Europe. Then when she took the Eurovision trophy, Russian president Vladimir Putin called the prizewinner an “abomination” and an insult to nature. Within a week a new anti-trans movement sprouted in Russia and its adherents started shaving off their beards—an option not available to the disgusted radical Muslims and orthodox Jews.
For the Russians, for much of Eastern Europe, and undoubtedly for thousands of silent Americans who dared not speak their thoughts, everything about Conchita Wurst (including the not-too-subtle play on words Tom Neuwirth had chosen for his nom de guerre) spelled out the worst of our era’s gender confusion. Had Neuwirth undergone surgery to remove his “wurst” he might have been less troubling. Gender reassignment surgery has gradually won acceptance even in deeply conservative zones, but that was not Conchita’s intent: Her message, both visual and verbal, is that all of us exist in a fluctuating spectrum of masculinity and femininity; the fixed-gender categories enshrined in the Jewish Torah, the Christian Bible, and the Qur’an are not only antiquated but probably never bore much resemblance to reality.
Transsexuality is a troublesome reality for almost everyone who has not lived inside it, myself included. “It gives me the creeps,” one longtime and very progressive straight friend admitted to me. “These people ridicule women; they hate women. They reinforce all the worst stereotypes,” a normally mild-mannered feminist friend exclaimed. Among middle-aged radical feminists, near hatred bubbles up not infrequently over the matter of transsexuality, as in Janice Raymond’s book The Transsexual Empire. “All transsexuals rape women’s bodies by reducing the real female form to an artifact, appropriating this body for themselves,” wrote Raymond, constituting a patriarchal suppression and violation of both the female body and women’s spirit. An angry argument broke out between two thoroughly masculine gay men when I asked for their thoughts about Conchita. “Ugh! It’s disgusting,” one of them spat out. “No, not at all,” said his husband. “Remember what she said in Copenhagen? ‘I just want people to be free to be who they want to be.’”
Queens. Transvestites. Transsexuals. Drag artists. Gender queers. The apogee of it all surfaced in 1979 with the creation of a San Francisco troupe who called themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Made up mostly but not exclusively of gay men, many with beards, they dressed as nuns, they mocked conservative politicians, and they undertook charitable missions for the sick and the homeless. Their primary mission, however, was the same as Conchita Wurst’s: to question the body and soul of all gender categories. They were mostly transvestites—men who dressed as women—not transsexuals; they had not undergone hormone treatment or surgery to change themselves into women. Their technique, in the language of the time, was to engage in “gender fuck” demonstrations and parades. Their most prominent leader called herself Sister Boom Boom, or more completely, Sister Rose of the Bloody Stains of the Sacred Robes of Jesus. Boom Boom ran for mayor of San Francisco. Born Jack Fertig, the son of a Jewish father and Christian mother in Chicago, she eventually converted to Islam. Chapters of the Sisters sprang up all over the world, including one in Paris that drew the support and sympathy of an otherwise conservative Dominican monk (who only wore robes in his monastery) whom I came to know. The “gender fuck” movement withered—at least in the mainstream media—as gay men and lesbians sought political respectability in suits, ties, and heels and gender scholars took on serious theory-making in the social science departments of major universities.
But what had been an amusing, and for some embarrassing, San Francisco performance act remained very real for an estimated seven hundred thousand Americans who either feel uncomfortable in the physical gender of their birth or actually have changed their apparent visible gender. While “transvestite” remained an act in clubs, transsexual and transgender became common entries in medical, psychological, and social work studies. Conchita Wurst as a “working drag queen” may not have qualified for any of those categories, but her stunning performance took the notion of gender uncertainty onto an undeniably global stage far from San Francisco, Paris, and Amsterdam.
A straight road runs tight between the Colorado River west of Moab, Utah, and a line of sand-burnished red, black, and ochre cliffs hanging high above. When I caught up at last with Candace and her two boys, they were just finishing a ten-day desert trek during their spring school break back in Salt Lake City. The boys—Will, fifteen, and Luke, eleven—were used to sleeping in tents on the cold desert floor since they were old enough to carry backpacks. They helped their father tote tripods and other camera paraphernalia in what had become a lifelong quest to document the trail of petroglyphs scratched into the ferrous and sandstone walls long before the soldier-explorer John C. Frémont attached his name to the river, after which the surviving natives had the name extended to them. The petroglyphs leave little doubt that the “Frémont Indians” were irrepressible storytellers. Their markings recount their journeys, the animals they encountered—and not least the part-human, part-fantasy creatures they appear to have encountered in their vision quests. Among those fantastical creatures are not a few whose gender seems far from clear or at least mixed, reflecting the two-spirit individuals in the Mojave, Navajo, and Lakota peoples.
Candace’s story isn’t easy to tell even though she seemed completely comfortable telling it. As I sat next to her in her mini-SUV, her sons bantering in the backseat, my mind wobbled. I could not decide whether to be submerged in the sublime red-rock landscape or to look intensely at Candace, at her very female exterior and the heavy, very male skeletal frame supporting it—or simply to focus my attention on what she was saying about the mystery of the petroglyphs, several of which she later pointed out also seemed to portray transsexual creatures. What images and thoughts, I wondered, were speeding through the prepubescent minds of Will and Luke, who appeared as much at ease as any two sons with their mother, or their father, of which Candace is both? Even the language fails in the space of proximity—hardly a novel insight, as Shakespeare taught us in a half dozen of his plays, notably in The Taming of the Shrew and Much Ado About Nothing.
My role was to listen. Candace first fell upon the Moab petroglyphs when as Scott, her birth name, he began venturing into the desert with a group of wilderness explorers. Later, those exploratory treks led him to form a non-profit called Wilderness Watch that gradually turned into a young white man’s own version of a Native American “vision quest,” the rite of passage through which each individual, or at least each male individual, went out alone into the night to discover the strength of his inner soul. “This is actually the twenty-year mark of that trip that started me down this road. Where we were camping last night—that was the place I lost myself. That was the place I found myself. That was the place I got back to myself. When I transitioned [from male to female], that was a time I tried to push my old self out, and allow this new person to come into existence, that inner struggle. It was really hard. Luke would have been three or four, Will was probably seven or eight.” She recalled her experiencing her first inkling of a “second spirit,” or at least a discomfort with her masculinity, when her mother bought the then three-year-old Scott “big boy” underwear—and he would turn up his nose and take it off, replacing the shorts with the old diapers. “I knew even at that age,” she said, “that it wasn’t right.”
These days pronouns—he or she, his or hers—are less and less a problem for Candace and the two boys. Luke easily learned to use female pronouns in speaking about his father, who, for a while, used the androgynous name Shannon. Candace has carried full breasts for most of Luke’s life. Will, who knew him longer as a man, seemed to avoid gendered pronouns altogether around the transwoman who is their biological father. Both sons are high performers in school. As a young adult Scott was a residential building contractor during the boom years of the early 1990s. He was a sturdy, muscular man. He had been a high school wrestler. He played soccer. He’d been sexually active with a number of women before he married and tried to settle into Salt Lake City as a young man in the Mormon church, on his way to what that religion calls the priesthood of the Latter-day Saints (LDS), a member of the all-male quorum through which the power of God is given to man.
We snaked alongside the river, searching for the petroglyph markings on the rock walls to the right, a hard, painful light bouncing off the river through the windshield. Young men, and a few women, were grasping onto handholds or dangling from ropes attached to the pitons they’d pounded into narrow crevices. Will sat in the backseat, also watching for the pictographs. “I had all these amazing things,” Candace continued. “I had the life that I think a lot of people want. I had a beautiful family. I had a job running a business. I had a non-profit organization and I liked going into elementary schools. We’d go out and adopt certain parts of wilderness. We’d do cleanups, teach the kids about Native American rock art. And yet there was this black hole that was still just devouring me inside.”
Nearly all the transgender people I have encountered speak of parallel torments and frustrations, most often beginning at or well before puberty. A sense of incompleteness, displacement, or otherness had seemed to gnaw at them from some uncertain direction while a few had violently resisted their assumed biological gender from near infancy. For many that “dark hole” began to lighten as they secretly began to dress in the clothes that seemed to make them feel more at home with themselves or as they began to use external hormones that led to a definitive “transition.” For thirty-year-old Candace the critical drive to change grew more intense after Luke, his second child, was born.
Scott had always wanted kids and a family: “Those were things I knew I wanted. It was just a matter of trying to find a way to keep pushing things out … to not let ‘this thing’ take control of my life.” Children might have driven the voracious black hole away, but they didn’t. Scott’s commitment to the environment, heading into the desert to clean up the trash left by others, might have displaced it, but that didn’t work either. Finally, two things converged while Luke was still an infant: deepening and recurring thoughts of suicide and confrontation with the visceral fear he experienced climbing the sheer face of a desert rock. “Climbing is where I really found myself,” Candace told me after the sons had gone off for a wander on their own. “I really learned a lot more about myself than [I knew] when I started down that path.”
For me rock climbing or even high balconies equal vertigo. My knees grow cold just watching rock climbers. Candace laughed and her earrings jangled. “I really am afraid of heights,” she allowed. “It scared the hell out of me. For some reason I just wanted to push past that. You get up above where your last piece of protection is. You’re fairly high. You are risking a potential fall. You learn how you operate under pressure. I learned I have a lot more courage than I ever imagined. I was able to pull myself through some really terrifying moments. And be very proud of that. That was the metaphor for what I was facing in myself.”
In a later conversation we delved deeper into the linkage between Scott’s fear of heights and Candace’s success as a doctoral scholar and public speaker on transgender issues. As he came to understand the structure of his multiple internal fears—be they the fear of falling, the fear of losing his family, the fear of rejection by his friends—the one fear that united them all was his fear of taking responsibility for his own life. It no longer mattered how or why he as a Mormon male and husband remained an unfinished person: His only choice was to act, to take the leap into an uncertainty where he would discover who and what he could become. That leap was not instant.
Not long after second son Will was born and Scott had left the Latter-day Saints, he found a doctor in Colorado who began prescribing the female-hormone estrogen doses that would slowly produce large breasts and lead eventually to the removal of his penis and testicles. When the breasts began to grow round and full and when finally Shannon/Candace returned from Colorado with a constructed vagina, that was more than Scott’s wife could handle—and more than Candace expected of her. “To be honest, she did not want to see me transition. She also did not want to see me hurt myself, which was becoming more and more possible. I think, in the end, we both loved and cared for each other a great deal and wanted to try to find a way it could work. But transition was not something that was going to work for her.”
“Were you surprised?” I asked. “No, if you want people to give you that kind of space, you also have to give other people the space to claim what is right for them. That only seemed fair.”
Candace’s exploration of her emerging life did not stop there. She had, more or less, developed the physical form of a woman. Yet her memories, her language, her education and training, the jibes and jokes made with contractor colleagues and secretaries, even the touch of the razor to the chin or knowing how to urinate properly, had been male. These intimate and often unconscious banalities of waking up and walking through the day count far more in the formation of personal gender than the growth of breasts or the pinning on of earrings. To have the form of a woman, to have female hormones coursing through the body, does not equal being female. Nor do long-buried or suppressed feelings brought to the surface by the surgeon’s knife constitute being a woman. These and other arguments permeate the exclusively “women born of women” sectors of radical feminism that have, for example, set the ground rules for the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, the so-called Women’s Woodstock, which since 1982 has drawn thousands of women every August to a small town in lower Michigan a few miles inland from Lake Michigan. It is a mass gathering of women who want to play, make music, dance, sing, and talk anywhere. Lesbians have long been welcomed to the festival as integral participants in the mostly heterosexual feminist program and membership. Transwomen, people born with a Y-chromosome but who through surgery or hormonal treatment present themselves and live as women, are, however, strictly excluded. They are seen as threats to the psychological peace and security of those people who from infancy were raised in what the festival’s leaders say are the patriarchal sufferings that no person raised as a male can ever understand.
Mark said grace as we sat down to mashed potatoes and roasted hen, each of us holding the hands of our neighbors and adding a personal amen. A two-foot-tall plaster Jesus watched over us from the sideboard in the adjacent den. Mark, fifteen, trim and athletic, faced two more years in high school before heading off, he hoped, to the Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs, following in the path of his older brother and his dad, Rick, a career pilot who flew helicopter rescue missions during the first Iraq war, called Operation Desert Storm, in 1990. On this night, as the table talk revolved around Mark’s latest basketball victories and how much longer the ski season would last, Rick and his wife, Sherry, were clearly strained, almost tense, their voices shaky. Rick’s earrings, which complemented the turquoise brooch hanging just above his cleavage, seemed to bobble with independent nervous energy. This night was to be the first time that Sherry and Rick, who at home preferred to be called Robin, would recount the story of how they had met, fallen in love, and raised three children and were now coming to terms with Rick’s transition to Robin. That transition was far from finished. Fairly quickly after the small talk about snow and my experience writing two books about apples, we decided to delay the serious talk until after dinner when Mark would go off to tend to his homework.
Adjourned to their L-shaped leather couch, Rick tried to find a starting point in his Vermont childhood when his Baptist parents converted to Mormonism. His eyes were watery, his voice still uncertain. Sherry took over.
“Do you mind if I give you just a smidgeon of my life at that point because that will tell you why we bonded so strongly?” she asked without waiting for an answer.
“I was managing a beauty school. I ran the night school. Okay? And Robin came in to have me do his hair. Pretty quickly he told me he wanted to take hairdressing classes.”
Not many Air Force men came to the salon or took her classes. During the day Sherry held down two other jobs while completing a degree at Weber State University. She spoke calmly and carefully. “I had recently returned home from my two-year Mormon mission in France. In Biarritz. While I was in France I had a fiancé, or I thought I had. My fiancé was from South America, but while I was on my mission, my mother started an affair with him. He and his mother, and his brother, moved in with my mother. My brother and my sister were also living there in the house. So we had this little ‘family unit’ that had moved into my house while I was gone.”
There is no piece of America where “family units” are as highly prized as in Mormon Utah. Utah claims one of the country’s lowest divorce rates. Family camps and personal church missions are nearly universal, and outside Salt Lake City nearly 80 percent of the population are regular practicing members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Everyone in Sherry’s new “family unit” was LDS.
“So when I came home, I found my ex-fiancé sleeping in my home with my mother, plus my brother was living there. My mother begged me to please move into the house with them because she wanted the neighbors to see that she wasn’t really having an affair with my ex-fiancé. She wanted to save her reputation. My life was in a lot of pain. I was twenty-five. I was the only person in the house who had a job—actually three jobs and I was going to school and supporting everybody.”
Dumbfounded, I asked Sherry if she still talks to her mother.
“Yeah,” she answered flatly. “I was a very strong person. Very strong or stupid. I was working those three jobs and going to school and trying to make sure that my family didn’t lose the house, because my brother and my sister would lose a home too. I was trying to support all of them. I was hurting a lot. I was pretty much at the end of my rope where I couldn’t see how I could get up and go on. And he—” she turned to Rick/Robin—“was the first person I could tell. I had tears. He was this amazing person. We’d become such great friends. We were the same age. He was someone I could trust to tell where my life was and the hell I was living in. And I trusted him.
“He said, ‘You don’t have to love your family that much. You deserve to have a life yourself.’”
Rick proved to be a good student in Sherry’s hairdressing class. For a long time they did each other’s hair. Hers is blonde in a bouffant twist. Rick’s, when it’s not put up, is as long as a braided blacksnake’s tail. Now they go to the same salon where, Sherry insists, no one notices the breasts that are steadily rising on Rick’s chest or the loss of his chin whiskers. Ready to start his own story, Rick breaks in.
“I wouldn’t mind saying a piece, and there’s a reason I want to say a piece. I did it by myself. And that’s not smart. I started taking medication … without a doctor’s supervision … ”
“Off the Internet,” Sherry adds. Rick somehow had attached estrogen patches on his ribs.
“You were not aware of it?” I asked Sherry.
“Yes, I was, and I was not happy with it. I was very worried.”
“Worried for my health,” Rick answered, tugging lightly at the corner of his blouse.
“There’s no way to measure it and know if it was safe,” Sherry pointed out.
“And your breasts began to grow?”
“Not so much … until … I kind of got permission to see someone and talk to him about it.”
That initial dilemma over estrogen and breast building took place a little more than two years before our chicken dinner. Finding a doctor in Utah proved challenging. Rick first found the name of a well-known California transsexual specialist, who referred him to other doctors at the University of Utah School of Medicine, but no one on the university faculty had any interest in taking Rick’s case; instead they handed him a list of private doctors in Salt Lake City but they offered no particular recommendation. He found it a chilly response from a university medical school. One of the private doctors on the list was Rixt Luikenaar, a Dutch doctor who had begun developing a specialty in transsexual issues.
“She showed the compassion, that you shouldn’t be judged, or be discriminated against, no matter whether people think it’s right or wrong. You serve people’s souls, and that’s what she does.”
Tears welled in both Rick’s and Sherry’s eyes.
Sherry had more to say: “We’ve never been a judgmental family or a prejudiced family. We’ve taught our kids to be very open-minded and nonjudgmental. When this all came about, that’s why it was so easy on our kids, because we already, they were already, very open-minded and nonjudgmental. We have three kids. Our oldest doesn’t know. He’s twenty-three and lives in Phoenix. He’s been in Phoenix for almost three years. He’s in the Air Force. Mark’s fifteen, and we have a twenty-year-old daughter, Elizabeth.
“How did the younger kids react?” I asked.
“We sat here on this couch,” Sherry said. “I asked them if they knew what ‘transgender’ meant, and they went, ‘Yeah?’” As though it were the latest software app.
“I cried because I was expecting the worst,” Rick said softly. “And Elizabeth said, ‘Robin, does that mean we can swap clothes and shoes now?’”
“He had a pair of boots she liked,” Sherry explained. Robin finished her wife’s sentence: “I already gave them to her.”
“I said to Mark, ‘This doesn’t mean that you’re going to grow up like me,’ and Mark said, ‘Dad, I would be honored to be like you.’ He’s a good kid.”
A long silence settled over the three of us on the couch as the plaster Jesus looked on. At last the voice attached to the long snake-tail hair and jiggling earrings spoke up as Robin. “I like Rick. He’s a good man. He’s done a lot of good. But at the same time you balance the selfishness of it.”
Rick/Robin turned to Sherry. “It’s not really who you bargained for, is it?”
“It took a long time to figure it out,” Sherry took over. “I don’t think he even knew himself what it meant. He wanted me to tweak his eyebrows and this and that. But why? We couldn’t figure it out … until when he retired from the Air Force and started wearing patches, I said, ‘Why do you want to grow boobs?’ I didn’t get it. Even when he started going to Dr. Luikenaar. I still didn’t know what it meant. I just knew he wanted to grow boobs. And that’s all I knew. I don’t think until two years ago, when she started adjusting the other hormones and stuff … and when they finally gave it a label, ‘transgender,’ that was when we finally got it. I’d never heard of it before.”
The story of Sadie and her daughter began when Sadie’s mother was on her death bed during the end stages of an irreversible cancer. Sadie was pregnant with her third child. “We were in the hospital with her,” Sadie told me, “and she so wanted to see the baby before she died. The midwife said, ‘Why don’t you get an ultrasound?’ She really wanted to know. It was a long ultrasound, and I was on my back in the eighth month. We found Silas. He was a boy. Then my mom said, ‘I really want you to have a girl.’ She wanted me to have the same kind of mother-daughter relationship that we’d had. I said, ‘Well, Mom, I’m going to have one more, so why don’t you order me up one?’ I think of that every now and then when I have my daughter … who I thought was a boy at the start and then very quickly came to realize that she was someone very special and very different than the brothers.”
Sadie’s first clue about her fourth child’s “difference” came when “Morgan” flatly refused to wear hand-me-down underwear printed with trucks from her older brothers. Morgan was eighteen months old when the underwear episode erupted, but that was not the only thing Sadie noticed that set him apart from the three older brothers. “Morgan did everything way earlier than anybody else. She would get her own snacks for school. All my boys were catered to—she just took charge of herself.”
The first violent showdown between Morgan and Sadie came during a shopping trip to Target in search of new underwear. Sadie had assumed that her youngest son just didn’t like wearing hand-me-downs; so she took him to buy new shorts, also with trucks and tractors and rockets printed on them in bright colors. Perched in a stroller in front of the boy shorts, Morgan started crying and then began screaming. So Sadie moved a few feet farther and said, “What kind of underwear do you want? You choose it. And she picked princess.” Pink and yellow bikini-type underwear with pictures of princesses on the front.
Mother and son went home and Morgan was content. A little later when Morgan entered nursery school the clothing issue broke out again. “That year she wore pajamas all year long to school. Then that Christmas her grandmother sent her a robe, a green robe with a little monkey on it, and that became the coat she wore.” Often the robe and pajamas weren’t warm enough in winter and the school would send Morgan home or out to play with spare outer clothes they had on hand. The children could choose the clothes they wanted to borrow. Morgan picked a pink-striped long-sleeve shirt, which on a small child almost seemed like a dress. On another occasion Morgan chose a light lavender hoodie to wear home and asked if she could keep it. “Every day, she was kind of stealing clothes from the clothes bin. And they were all girls’ type clothes, mostly pink and purple.”
“Why pink and purple?” I asked.
“Because that was what she’d see looking at TV, or cartoons. It’s amazing how many things are gendered. I had kind of noticed, I’d shopped at specialty toy stores and geared my shopping toward toy blocks. Little hideout tents. I’d get scarves. And costumes for dress-up before I even knew I had a transgender kid.”
By the end of our initial conversation, it was time to go collect Morgan a few blocks away at the grade school where she was pulling down top grades. Nine years old, her hair was long and silky, falling midway down her back. She and another curly-haired girl were playing on swings and a push-me-round; the other girl, who also had been born a boy, was there with her mother. To anyone who didn’t know, they were both cute, energetic young girls. A third trans child had already gone home. Soon all three parents would decide whether to have their pediatricians administer puberty-blocking hormones to their kids until they reached age sixteen. The hormones, generally considered to have minimal side effects, essentially delay pituitary activity in the brain that comes to girls between ten and twelve years old and to boys after age twelve; these so-called puberty blockers inhibit the body from expressing conventional secondary sex characteristics—Adam’s apples and genital growth in boys and breast development and menstrual expression in girls. Once the hormones are stopped, their effects are fully reversible.
Morgan was then on the cusp of that first decision. Legally those decisions rest with the parents. Morgan, on the other hand, was a precocious child who was eager to talk and engage directly in all the choices that lay before her. In her school she had become a prolific writer and autobiographer. She asked me if I’d like to read one of her pieces. I asked her instead if she might like to read it aloud as we sat at the pink Formica counter in the kitchen while Sadie was washing supper dishes. The story recounted the first time she had confronted her parents with how she saw her sex.
I hopped into bed and pulled up my covers. My mom … walked into my room and hugged me.
“Mom, I’m a girl now,” I explained after years of trying to show them by wearing princess dresses and using girly stuff.
“OK,” my mom said nervously, like she was about to throw up. “When your dad gets home, tell him that you’re a girl now.” My mom walks out of my room and there I was in the dark, waiting for any sounds outside.
I walked silently out of my room and went down the stairs. Each step sends a little sound through the wall. I finally step on the smooth wood of the house. I looked out the window and saw my dad’s car. I ran to the door.
The story Morgan had written years earlier in preschool didn’t scan quite so smoothly for her parents, Sadie told me after Morgan had gone to bed. “She’d say, ‘I’m a boy.’ She’d pee standing up, but she was in the bathroom trying to put on my makeup. You can say, ‘My sweet boy, my sweet boy, boys have a penis and girls have a vagina.’ That’s what we teach! That’s how we categorize them. So they’re little concrete thinkers at that age, and they don’t know that there’s another possibility unless you tell them. I’d ask every now and then, and she’d say, ‘I’m a boy.’”
When Morgan was five, Sadie went to a transgender conference for parents of transgender kids. It proved to be a turning point for her as she listened to hours of testimony by one parent after another. “These moms were supportive and all that but these moms didn’t understand who their kids were, but there it was and it hit me like a ton of bricks. I cried and cried. It was just streaming, streaming, streaming. I couldn’t wait to get home and ask Morgan really what she was, whether she was a boy or whether she was a girl. I got home. She was in her room. It was in April, dogwood season. I said, ‘Morgan, I had lunch with some people today who were really interesting. There are people whose bodies don’t match their inside mind and spirit. They just don’t match up. I just have to ask you a really important question. It won’t matter what you say, I’ll still love you, but I have to ask you, are you a boy or a girl?’
“She looked up and said, ‘I’m a girl.’
“I couldn’t just leave it like that. I looked down and said, ‘There’s a difference between wanting to be a girl, you like their toys, you like their clothes better, you like pretty things, and then actually feeling like you’re a girl. And she looked up with a little more annoyance in her face and she said, ‘I’m a girl.’ I said, ‘okay,’ and I grabbed her up and said, ‘I’m so sorry I didn’t understand before.’ She grabbed my face, gently, and said, ‘That’s okay Mom.’ And we just hugged.”
Dr. Rixt Luikenaar had traveled from The Netherlands in 1994 from the medical school at the University of Groningen to spend a season with Robert Jarvik, the famed inventor of the artificial heart, at the University of Utah. Before she returned to The Netherlands she’d already started dating an ex-Mormon she calls “this American dude,” who returned with her to Groningen for her training in obstetrics and gynecology. Groningen was not only known for ob-gyn; it was also well established for addressing “gender variance” issues, including the care of people going through gender transition. Holland is a world center in managing transsexual transition. Luikenaar and the “wild dude”—actual name William—who became the father of her children bounced all around the world together, from Curaçao to New Zealand to West Virginia, while William fashioned himself into what he identifies as a “primativist” sculptor. On their eventual return to Salt Lake City, where William had family, she began an obstetrics practice at the university medical school, steadily growing closer to Utah’s [LGBT] Pride Center to build her patient base, and that, little by little, drew her to more and more people who wanted to undergo a transsexual gender shift.
“There was such a need for it,” she told me during a break between patients in her office. “I remember a patient in 2004 [when she was still at the university] who wanted a hysterectomy in order to become a man. I tried to see if the university would take [her] as a charity case to do the surgery. I thought that since sometimes they will do free surgeries for refugees that come from other countries because they’re poor and that since this was a person in need psychologically to change his body … I tried to get it approved. It was cut off immediately by the faculty of the ob-gyn as being ridiculous.”
That was her first sign of the university’s hostility to addressing transsexuality. Still, she continued seeing transsexual patients until, in 2011, she ran into trouble with one of her colleagues, whom she only describes as a senior-level Mormon and former Army doctor. “I told him I wanted to take on this LGBT population and transgender patients. He was very angry about it and he didn’t want to talk to me after that. He didn’t support me in it but I did it anyway. So for about a year, while I was at the university I did a clinic once or twice a month for a whole day, so they wouldn’t have to sit with other patients in the waiting room. But I knew I wanted to be away from the university.”
Unlike Brigham Young University, which is a wholly owned property of the Mormon Church, the University of Utah is a tax-supported public school. She said she found supportive colleagues there but “never a whole department, generally only one or two people. The chairs of the departments are usually Mormons. The whole administration is Mormon. The department chair of ob-gyn is Mormon. I did research for him in the nineties. When I kept coming back to him, wanting to help transgender patients, he wouldn’t have it.”
Next she was invited to join a private clinic in Salt Lake City with two midwives and two other doctors. They at first were excited to have a younger, female doctor bring her own caseload into the practice. “I started working with that group on March 1, 2013. I brought my patients there. My clinic was doing really well. After one month there, one of my partners, who was LDS, said he was going to leave [the practice] because of my transgender patients. He couldn’t deal with it. His wife couldn’t deal with it. His patients were making comments when they were sitting with my transgender people in the same waiting room. He had patients who were really important people here in Utah. I don’t know what changed his mind to first say it was okay and then not. Maybe it was his wife …” She laughed and shook her long, bright red hair. “Now that I have my own clinic, he’s been telling my [ob-gyn] patients that I do transgender health and maybe these patients would consider switching to him … because the care I provide can’t be right. Because I do transgender health. He’s talking to my pregnant LDS patients. He made a point of talking to my patients encouraging them to switch.”
Most of Rixt Luikenaar’s obstetrics patients stood by her, she said, while her forthright commitment to transsexual people steadily drew attention across the Western Rockies region—bringing patients from Wyoming, Nevada, and Arizona. Two females on their way to becoming transmen had come into the waiting room while we were speaking. They invited me to sit in on the consultation. Each of them had slight facial hair, one a goatee and the other a mustache, but it wasn’t clear on first sight in which gender direction each was moving.
“Me, I stay in my pit,” said Max, the shorter of the two, who had been taking hormones for several months and had grown a black goatee. Luikenaar asked each of them about their moods and feelings. “The pit—it’s my room. I stay in my room. I don’t leave it. It’s in the basement. They—my parents—say they support me. They say they love me. But they don’t even try. They don’t try to use the correct pronouns.”
Max is thirty-two. He explained that he had always seen himself as “a man. I always have. Since I was knee-high to a grasshopper. But my mother, she doesn’t want to see it. Because she grew up in the LDS religion. So as far as that religion goes, it’s just a challenge you have to overcome. If you have the feelings, then you have to overcome it. I believe it’s part of any Christian religion. You have these gay feelings. You have these transgender feelings. You have to overcome them or else you’re going to hell.”
Max’s friend, Simon, interrupted to explain the Mormon notion of hell and how it differs from the usual Christian version where the damned burn in endless flames. The LDS hell comes in two forms. The first, lesser hell is a psycho-spiritual state of pain, guilt, and anguish, a so-called “spirit prison” where bad or wicked people go after death until “final judgment” or when they are resurrected through prayer by living Mormons—or, if they had never been Mormons, by posthumous baptism (which is how everyone from Cleopatra to Shakespeare has been converted to the LDS). The second and much graver hell is understood as an “outer darkness” into which a very few are cast in perpetuity.
Homosexual acts or acting on transsexual feelings and undergoing a gender conversion, they both explained, would cast them into the outer darkness. Not surprisingly both Simon and Max had left the LDS church. Max had gone so far as to have his name permanently erased from LDS records. Both had been taking testosterone injections to accentuate their masculine features under Luikenaar’s supervision for several months, affecting their menstrual periods, which in itself frequently produces mood swings.
“How are your moods?” she asked Max.
“They get better when I’m not at my parents’ house. When I’m at my parents’, they’re more down. It’s like a win-lose, lose-lose situation. You know, I feel better when I’m on my meds, than being stuck there where it’s constantly thrown in my face, ‘Well you’re not a man, you were born a girl.’ And hearing that evil name that I was given when I was born.” He and Simon both laugh. “Don’t laugh. It’s hard when it’s in your face twenty-four seven. And so it puts me back down. It puts my mood back down.”
“So what do you do?”
“Go hang out with Simon.”
“What do you do at home?”
“Play video games. Look for jobs … ”
Max and Simon met when they were both working as security guards—jobs they said they couldn’t continue once their hormonal transitions began, largely, they said, because of the hostility they met from other guards. Max had returned to his parents’ home once his money ran out.
“Have you noted it’s harder to find a job when you’re in transition as a transman?” Dr. Luikenaar asked him.
“I really don’t want to say yes,” Max answered, “but the coincidences are just too much. A couple years ago I was applying for jobs, and I could get interviews but now that I’m avoiding that gender question, now I’m getting more and more rejection letters, when it’s basically the same jobs I was applying for a couple of years ago. So, the coincidences are staring you right in the face. You don’t want to scream discrimination … when all these companies are claiming to be EOEs [Equal Opportunity Employers]. But if these companies are equal opportunity employers, why are we still filling out these questionnaires? About gender. About age. About race. Why does it matter? Why do these questions matter?”
Simon added: “They don’t ask religion. But gender they ask. Race they ask. Age they ask. If they’re equal EOEs, why does it matter?”
Simon’s family story was little different from Max’s. He and his father had descended into a bitter dinner-table conversation the previous summer. “One of the last statements he made to me was, ‘You can dress up a pig as much as you want, but it’s still a pig.’ And I answered, ‘I’m done.’” He had not spoken to either parent since then and was living on small disability payments due to other health problems.
Having no job, Max had no health insurance and because he was unemployed he found he didn’t qualify for coverage under the Affordable Care Act. He was still waiting to hear if he could get minimal care through Medicaid, though in Utah Medicaid is mostly restricted to the aged, the blind, pregnant women, children, and certain approved caregivers, and almost no American health insurance program covers treatment for men or women transitioning to another sex. Luikenaar often provides care to poor patients free or for minimal charges, and she advised Max that certain Internet sites offer discounted analysis of blood draws.
Neither Max nor Simon have addressed the matter of changing their sexual organs through surgery, nor, at the time I interviewed them, could either of them imagine how to pay the fifty to seventy-five thousand dollars it normally costs.
There is little about the trans world that is not contested, neither the psycho-physical reality of transitioning from one body profile to anther nor the language and pronoun choice any given person may insist upon nor the terminology people find agreeable at any given moment. One single 2014 post on Tumblr.com opened a debate over use of the prefix trans or trans* as the correct descriptor. The use of “trans” alone, many felt, was more restrictive than “trans*” in what both specialists and activists have come to understand as a rapidly expanding spectrum of life possibilities. After some 350 heated exchanges quickly surfaced, the site attached a “triggering warning” advising that the whole discussion risked provoking profound distress and hostile denunciation among the Trans*users who signed in.
Since 2007 Stephanie Brill and Joel Baum have coordinated an annual summertime conference called Gender Spectrum in Berkeley, California, for families and kids facing gender questions. Brill, a midwife and family counselor to same-sex parents, has long worked with parents of gender-variant children at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital Oakland, while Baum grew up Jewish in Salt Lake City and worked for many years as a grade school teacher. Neither identifies as gender variant but through their work with kids as counselor and teacher, they both came to see gender uncertainty as a rapidly expanding concern among American families. From a handful that gathered in 2007, Gender Spectrum’s summer conference has grown to more than twelve hundred participants in 2016. Both Brill and Baum keep busy schedules counseling parent groups and schools across the United States on everything from adjusting restrooms for trans kids to formulating new guidelines for athletic teams to confronting violence and harassment directed at transgender students.
Baum cited a recent experience he had in a racially and economically mixed middle school in a West Coast city. “A child was transitioning from female to male. The child was assigned female at birth but had been living as a boy most of his life—except at school, where he continued to be seen as a girl. He was in the seventh grade. He was having sleep problems and health problems. He was already in puberty. We worked with the family and did a training in the school, all in preparation for the kid ‘coming out’ as a boy in school. I was in the class where this kid was, and he chose to stay there while we were doing the training.”
Addressing the boy’s classmates, Baum began, “We talk about democracy and diversity, and by the way, there’s another thing: All you who know Jennifer is actually transgender; Jennifer would prefer to be called Joseph and be treated like all the other boys and go by ‘he.’ First two or three kids said, ‘That’s so cool,’ and another one said, ‘Hey, you want to play ball after school?’ Next came restrooms. The training was on Wednesday. By Friday, it was all a nonissue. There were a couple of calls from parents asking why there was a girl in the boys’ locker room, but that was it.”
During the school training one male teacher spoke up about a pair of leather sandals he’d bought in Panama. “I like wearing them,” the teacher said. “They’re really comfortable, but I have to think twice about where I wear them. People say to me, ‘Oh, you’re wearing those. They’re pretty girly.’”
Looking back on his own youth thirty years earlier, Baum, a straight married parent, grew both wistful and worried. “You remember thirty years ago and ‘free to be you and me?’” he asked me. “We’ve become lots more rigid and reified [about gender] in the last ten years. Now it’s all very rigid what you’re supposed to be as a boy or a girl. Making fun of how people dress, particularly men, is still a big go-to punch line.” Baum’s concern, however, was more complex. Even the “trans” dialogue distresses him. “So much of this now focuses on ‘trans issues’ when what we really need to be talking about is gender diversity for everyone. What it means for you to be a guy or a girl or something else. A lot of times people think it’s just a question of switching the boxes.” The media obsession with trans issues, rather than opening up a world in which each and all of us might explore our own masculine and feminine fluidities, had instead generated just another category of being. Categories by definition are the enemies of fluidity and internal exploration. By focusing on the search for a singular biological key that would “explain” transgender being, the movement seemed to be blocking both children and adults from examining their internal impulses as they vary from hour to hour, day to day, and across a lifetime—in short how to move within the spectrum of genders that we all confront.
Switching the gender boxes particularly annoyed Utah rock climber Candace, some of whose friends wondered if after surgery she would feel more at ease having sex with men, a question that at first seemed shocking to her. “I was never interested in having sex with guys. I was always drawn to feminine things,” she said. Candace has lived with a biological woman for several years, a woman who identifies herself as a lesbian. “I got together with her when I was homeless. I went through the process of losing cars, my job, my home, sleeping at one or another friend’s place. She was one of those friends.” Candace’s mother was also supportive after the transition: She kept looking for men her new “daughter” might like, but it took her longer to accept Candace as a lesbian than it had to accept her sex transition.
Language, most of us are told in our earliest school years, is what distinguishes people from all other animals. Dogs, cats, foxes, and chimps can exchange vocal signals with each other, but they are not capable of language. And even though they appear to possess memory, as any dog owner who returns home after a long time away knows, they cannot tell stories. Our gift of language frees us to explore and to learn not only about the worlds beyond our skin but still more about the potential worlds within ourselves that we might find and develop. Candace took more than two decades to identify and grow into her inner world and make it public. Morgan found herself even before she could speak. At the same time the specificity and concreteness of language can just as easily cover up fluid uncertainties within. To my knowledge, Miss Vernace, the strange tall woman in my childhood who plowed the fields on her tractor and went to the men’s barbershop, never spoke about her internal complexities, though she also never tried to hide them.
When Vladimir Putin, the current hero of the ultra-rightist movements in both the United States and Europe, spat out his denunciation of Conchita Wurst as “an abomination,” he may have just been playing an opportunistic game to win favor with his Slavic base across Eastern Europe. Or he may have genuinely believed that Conchita, Sister Boom Boom, Candace, and the half dozen transgender Mormons I met in Utah pose a genuine threat to human progress and civilization. Those who fear gender fluidity and uncertainty are not, however, restricted to rightist authoritarian circles. Although it has been fashionable since the 1990s to lump lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and transgender people under the same LGBT umbrella, the alliance has nearly always been an uneasy one—for those gays who increasingly insist on their uber-masculinity, for feminist lesbians suspicious of a false femininity, or for bisexuals who cringe at the thought of altering their bodies.
My own reactions underwent upheaval a quarter century ago during several visits to Naples, which at the time was reputed to possess the most joyously perverse set of sexualities in Europe. Two Neapolitan friends, Claudio and Marcello, agreed to be my guides to these perversities, centered in quartieri spagnoli (the Spanish Quarters), where the so-called femminielli worked the streets at night and often took care of professional families’ children by day. The femminielli were famous, a distinguished gentleman on the train to Naples advised me, for their beautiful legs, their sumptuous breasts, and their large penises. Among street workers, as one wag told me, they offered a full-service menu of sexual options. The real femminielli had begun to age when I was in Naples, increasingly displaced by bigger, tougher Brazilian so-called she-males. Yet for older Neapolitans, the femminielli held a special place in the city’s cultural history stretching back to the ancient Greeks, who had ruled southern Italy two millennia earlier.
One spring I went to visit Domenico Scafolio, a noted elderly anthropologist at the University of Salerno. Professor Scafolio, who was neither homosexual nor transsexual, had spent his life studying the myths of Pulcinella, the double-sexed creature who might be called the pagan patron saint of Mediterranean fertility. Pulcinella was capable of fertilizing himself and giving birth via the hump on his back. Around Professor Scafolio’s office in a once-grand seventeenth-century palace was his collection of phalluses. Some were on his desk. Some were mounted on the walls. Others were propped up on sideboards. One double-ended phallus had seven heads emblematic of Pulcinella’s seven lives. The largest of them all, made of wood and painted red and blue, was suspended from the ceiling by thin wires. For contemporary Neapolitans, the femminiello, he instructed me, was nothing more than the ancient figure of Pulcinella incarnate, recalling the tribal dream of male parthenogenesis in which the first human is a male who himself gives birth to the first child. It’s an idea rather central to the book of Genesis in Eve’s emergence from Adam’s rib. A young man I’d met a day or two earlier regularly went with femminielli, because, he said, to be in their presence is an ingrippo, to be gripped by a magnificent obsession that opens the door to the mysterious.
Exoticism in image and collective perception have long been celebrated in the life and myth of the Neapolitan people, one of many cultures that abhors rigid categories. Although the followers of Vladimir Putin may not know it, femminielli-like people, and dual-sexed gods, have existed throughout time and across the earth, from the Hijra of South Asia to the Oyamakui and kami spirits in Shinto belief to the burrnesha virgins of Albania, to the Mwari god of Zimbabwe and a panoply of mixed-gender spirits in Ghana, to Malyari and Bathala in the pre-Christian Philippines to the two-spirit berdache of tribal North America, to the machi double-gender warriors of pre-Colombian Chile and many of the pre-Colombian peoples across South America. Castration has equally been used from imperial China to Vietnam to Byzantium, frequently to convert a surplus of males into symbolic females, who, once the procedure was complete and the victim had survived, were usually thought to possess special and sacred powers, just as femminielli were thought to hold in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Naples. Very often their betwixt/between qualities afforded them not only special vision but special status in the world—and condemnation by Spanish conquistadores and their Jesuit allies.
Like trans or trans* people, all these beings bore some sort of linguistic identifier, a label that suggests their special status. In the older traditions, the label very frequently simply suggested a broad possibility of being. In our era of medicalized identities, the language of difference has become more specialized even to the extent that when American Medicare authorities decided in 2014 that they would pay for transgender reassignment surgery, the definitions, labels, and rules of identity had become as fixed and rigid as an aerospace engineer’s workup for an intergalactic missile.
In our last conversation in Salt Lake City, not far from the famed Mormon Tabernacle, Candace had her hair tied up in a sort of messy bun as we were speaking about labels. She admitted that while most of the old gnawing within had gone away, not all of it had. She had come to find the term “trans” itself problematic now that she was finishing her doctoral degree on the subject and regularly lectured in college classrooms and to community groups.
“We put those labels on certain people,” she said, “when in fact they’re just being who they are. For me it was just discomfort with my body, dysmorphia. The problem is using a person’s genitalia to identify them in a way that doesn’t feel right to that person. ‘Trans’—transition, transgender, transsexual—is just a manifestation of people trying to put others back in a box. We are ‘trans’ only to the extent that we are becoming more and more—not less of anything—in transition to discovering that there are so many more gender possibilities than most people acknowledge.”