“When I was a little girl . . .”
Half of adult humanity makes frequent use of that common narrative device as women share their respective personal histories. For transgender women who transitioned after their youth, these are words we are denied; our histories as wrongly embodied little girls are at best complicated and at worst awkward or painful. I’ve become adept at just saying “when I was young” and proceeding cautiously from there, but never without feeling a certain emptiness. What does it mean to be a woman who never had a girlhood? What does it mean to be a woman who had a boyhood (at least in some significant sense)? How does it feel for me when I watch a happy young girl unselfconsciously at play, simply being present in her girlhood? And for someone like me who is now (in my mid-sixties) the most attractive I will ever be as a woman, what must that beautiful twenty-one-year-old woman feel as she walks lightly by in her innocent but alluring sundress, a picture of feminine beauty at its apex?
Naturally, these questions aren’t new, and don’t only apply to transgender women. The question of any transgender person’s gender history quickly centers in on their core gender identity, even if situated for many years subconsciously. I would argue that Chloe’s personality, and in some ways even her beauty and femininity, were always present within Stephen. Still, it’s not comfortable for me to ponder Chloe’s existence across those many decades, deeply submerged, trapped, or otherwise constrained. I am secure in my knowledge that being Chloe wasn’t an invention dreamed up in my fifties, any more than decades of inhabiting Stephen’s persona was fiction. While transitioning required interventions that changed my voice and my physical body in so many ways, being Chloe required no lessons. I just needed a supportive and safe space to be; the rest flowed naturally. As I transitioned into becoming fully Chloe, many previously confusing or largely faded memories from my own history returned—sometimes vividly. Often such memories—even if just about a few moments in my past—are intense.
Among the earliest is a very strong image from a sunny and warm weekend afternoon in the late spring of 1959; I was enjoying a marvelous view from high up in a tall tree. Concealed amidst the leafy branches, I looked down on the large grassy yard that was shared by the families of the dull row of officers’ townhouses at Camp Pendleton Marine Corps Base in California. Between the leaves I enjoyed a clear line of sight to the festivities, as the screaming, giggling, dancing, and cavorting girls below held hands and wheeled around the birthday girl. She was my age, eight; she wore a beautiful pastel-yellow cotton dress embellished with a cute white sash in the waistline, with matching long white ribbons in her golden hair. I’m unsure if I even knew her name then, but I do clearly remember feeling that the extraordinary chasm that separated me perched alone in my tree and the girl space below wasn’t just physical. I can also recall how much I wanted to be part of that girl space, although at that time I could not have put that into words.
My childhood is replete with many similar images, longings, and memories, although it would be wrong to say I was miserable in my boy body. I did have fun playing with my brothers and friends, yet that year—1959—was my first conscious awareness that I was different from my brothers and from the other boys I knew. My parents tried to be accommodating in a number of ways, leaving me now to wonder in their absence what might have been going through their minds; foolishly, I never asked them when they were still alive. Each winter my parents had a habit of asking my three brothers (my sister arrived later) and me what we each hoped for as a special present for Christmas. That year I knew right away; I wanted a child-sized ironing board and an iron. My parents somehow obliged, and a brief 8mm movie clip still exists of me delighting in the bliss of exterminating wrinkles with my toy ironing set, which really did plug in and get slightly warm. Sadly, my passion for ironing did not persist into adulthood, but when I was eight it was what I wanted to do. More importantly, it may also have been an indicator of what—or who—I wanted to be.
I pushed my luck too far the next Christmas when I asked to be given a doll; my parents balked. In time they relented just enough to allow me a special doll-sized teddy bear with whom I instantly bonded. The day, however, came when I decided (with appropriate nine-year-old logic) that my teddy needed a bath. It was a fateful decision that led to the poor unwashable toy’s demise, and to my consequent period of protracted, anguished mourning. Later teddy bears followed, and over the next two or three years I would dress them in colorful clothing crafted out of construction paper and glue, and have wonderful tea parties and position them in colorful parades.
Nothing unusual about my boyhood, no.
During that period between eight and twelve years I found my way to small pockets of female space, although it was never called out as such. My parents indulged me in behavior that, in retrospect, probably generated much pillow talk between them. After the family left California and arrived in the Virginia suburbs of Washington, DC, I became my mother’s shadow in our small kitchen and fondly remember the two of us exalting over the arrival of the new avocado-colored refrigerator and oven. How could any appliances ever be more beautiful? My mom seemed entirely at ease to have me at her side when preparing meals or cleaning up, or the many times that I served as mother’s helper in taking care of my sister Barb (or “Bitsy” as we called her then) in her infant and toddler years. My parents were very sensitive too, as when they gently explained to me that no, I couldn’t be the “flower kid” for the wedding of the young couple who lived in the tiny rented apartment above our garage because that couple wanted a flower girl. The memory of that disappointment remains oddly poignant to this day, as it marked an end to a certain gender innocence.
Moving forward, my father and I spent more time together, and there were many talks between us about the manly virtues—talks that I can only imagine he initiated. As a US Marine Corps colonel, he was the exemplar of the “officer and a gentleman” kind of Marine, and not of the gravelly macho Hollywood variant. He never spoke of combat, although he had been active and—according to a letter of commendation he received—quite heroic in some of the most grueling battles of the Pacific campaign of World War II and later in the Korean War. He taught me, and I assume he taught my brothers too, how to be a gentleman. The social institution of “lady” was also very important to my father; his spouse adroitly and graciously met those challenging social expectations and took them to the next level as an officer’s wife, homemaker, schoolteacher, and mother to five children.
As mentioned earlier, at twelve years old my world changed dramatically. My father retired from the Marine Corps, and took up a second career as the commandant of cadets at a military academy just under thirty miles due west of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. One of the “benefits” that lured him there was free tuition for my older brother George and me, since we were both of eligible age to attend that school. What small amount of girl space I had been able to quietly and unselfconsciously enjoy completely vanished as I was placed into a hyper-masculine environment as a cadet. An unsightly stone monument at the middle of the campus bore a plaque that instructed us: “Don’t be a mollycoddle.” Many of my fellow cadets came from deeply dysfunctional families. My first roommate (who was frequently harangued by other cadets for having the unfortunate first name of Leslie) described to me how his father had chased his mother into a closet and then used an axe to break open the door, threatening to kill her. During that incident Leslie had called the police who had arrived just in time, but his father had retaliated in due course by dispatching him to the military academy. In time he ran away from the school; I don’t know whatever became of him.
In those two years my only refuge was among a very small set of gentle cadet friends, and by volunteering for acolyte duties at the Episcopal Church on the campus. I remember feeling considerable comfort dressed in the flowing robes that acolytes wore, and basking in the refuge of the litany, music, and ritual within the thick gray stone walls of Nobel Victory Memorial Chapel.
My other safe space was the dining hall. Subconsciously, I responded to my hyper-male environment by compulsive eating, rapidly gaining over fifty pounds and costing my parents a small fortune in new and ever-larger cadet uniforms. My defiance of the revered lean and muscular cadet stereotype had consequences; my obesity made my presence in the ranks look ungainly and unbecoming. Nowhere was this discomfiture more evident than at the Sunday full-dress parades, but being resourceful I volunteered to be on the cadet version of the military police. That choice allowed me to spend each of the parade afternoons helping to direct parents and siblings to their seats to watch my much thinner cadet colleagues as they marched by, resplendent in their swallow-tailed herringbone uniforms with cuffs and coat-tails and three rows of gilt bullet buttons. Since I was also too unfit to be on any sports team, they made me “manager” of the crew team, which only meant that I got to clean and care for the crew shells and scrub out the boathouse. I never once got to row in the shell; I doubt I would have even fit in one of them.
I carry within me the residue of many of the strange messages about girls that influenced the young male cadets. The otherness and sexuality of teenage girls was the frequent topic of conversation and ribald humor at the academy. Sadly, there was often a deep misogynistic streak to this humor, and a remarkable degree of misinformation. The campus was almost exclusively a male enclave, and any chance of learning about the sensibilities and realities of the lives of girls was distorted by sexualized exaggeration, boyish silliness, and isolation from girls. Perhaps more pernicious were some of the values that were inculcated into the minds of the “young men” about avoiding anything that smacked of softness or femininity, unless of course the “anything” was a young woman. Encounters with young women were strictly rationed and closely chaperoned, occurring only when neighboring academies for “young ladies” were invited to attend a dance at the military academy. (For some reason, we were never taken to their schools.) That was the occasion of my first date, arranged by the social director of the military academy, who happened to be my mother.
The event was the Midwinter Ball, and when we arrived at the assembly room my mother’s hand was evident. The room was beautifully decorated; she and the other faculty wives had clearly committed many hours and much imagination to the effort. The visiting young ladies, who had been duly bused in, now stood in a line, beautifully attired in a dizzying array of lovely gowns: beaded bodices, strapless tops, glittery embellishments, gauzy veils, foil ruching, sequins, open backs, chiffon, silk, pleats, lace, ribbons, and I haven’t even mentioned the shoes, makeup, or perfumes. Hair was either elaborately styled or long and simple, and each young woman had been issued a beautiful bouquet (whether by her school or my academy I never did find out).
All of the cadets were formed into our own line on the opposite side of the room. Our full-dress cadet uniforms were itchy and hot, but indisputably dashing, even for a pudgy cadet of my stature. There wasn’t a single brass button or shoe of any cadet that hadn’t been shined to a brilliant gleam. Each cadet scanned the opposing lineup, hoping to be matched with his first or second choice. The matching was largely arbitrary; only a few upperclassmen actually knew any of the young women and such relationships were respected. For everyone else, one of the military academy’s faculty members held up a list that my mother had prepared, and he bellowed out the names of each “couple” for the duration of the ball. Tension ran high, no doubt in both lines, and there were chuckles and quietly murmured rude speculations among the male ranks about who would be so ill-fated as to be matched with one particular young lady. She was morbidly obese, and nothing her gown could do could diminish her stature or erase the forlorn look in her face. The cadets all knew it was my mother who’d made the pairing decisions, and when the name of that heavyset young lady was called out, my name was immediately announced as her date. The cadet at my side discreetly elbowed me and wondered aloud but in a low voice what I’d done to deserve such maternal wrath.
Since my date was much too large and uncomfortable to dance, I escorted her to a table and there we sat for the evening. She was the daughter of a fabulously wealthy confectioner, but it was clear she had no real desire to be at the ball, although her consent had not been sought. Our conversation was halting and uneasy, but the time went by, and I did my best to be cordial. Throughout the evening I felt a certain affinity for this young woman, even if I lacked the words to articulate that feeling or the knowledge to discern what that might mean for me. I also found myself defending her when many other cadets, in the days after the ball, made off-color comments about her. They were unprepared for that response, and tried to turn that around to imply deeper improprieties on my part, which was even more confounding.
While the immature antics of young men infused with abundant testosterone is hardly a stinging critique of the hyper-masculine ethos of that military academy, I had expected perhaps a more honorable and measured example of masculinity from the faculty members. I was often disappointed. The most disturbing memory of such an incident came when I was summoned to the office of the “Officer on Duty” at the academy late on the evening of February 23, 1965. I was only fourteen years old, but the faculty member on duty called me into the wide hallway and informed me, in a flat monotone voice, that my grandfather had passed away. My grandfather, George Strawn Schwenke, had been very dear to me, and when I started to respond with just a few tears I was quickly and sternly reprimanded and told to control my feelings. “Men don’t cry. Your life will have many such happenings, and you need to be strong and deal with it.” He turned away abruptly, leaving me standing there, fighting without success to hold back my feelings. The deep emptiness and loneliness of that moment remains vivid. Boy tears or girl tears, my grandfather’s passing deserved nothing less.
Fortunately, the final three years of my high school were less stressful, as I attended the only public high school in Potsdam. In the very first semester there I lost all fifty pounds I had previously gained, and in my trimmed-down format I renegotiated my way into high school society. Again, however, I wasn’t like the other boys, although I did have a few very good male friends. In time I also had many female friends. Beyond that circle of friends I was largely a loner focused on my studies, until my father encouraged me to try out for the junior varsity football team. After two weeks of excruciating aches, pains, alarming bruises, and exposure to intensive boy space that deeply unsettled me, I dropped out. I knew I had disappointed him, but I also knew that I had to quit. Just knowing that was, in its own way, an opening for me.
Finding accessible girl space at the high school wasn’t easy. In those days, most of the girls wore dresses or skirts, and while my male friends were taking stock of the girls, I was admiring their pretty clothing or their hair. I found a particularly nurturing space within the school’s art program, where a very gifted and caring art teacher, Sherwood Smith, men-tored me and provided me a path that ultimately took me to art school in my freshman year of college. His art studio was the least gendered space in the school, and it felt a perfect refuge for me whenever time allowed.
Throughout this time, I perceived myself as a sensitive, artistic boy. My parents supported this interpretation, and were patient with me when I began a beautiful china teacup collection at home. There wasn’t any pressure to conform to any specific gendered expectations, but I also had the advantage of growing up in the 1960s when gender-bending and long hair were pervasive among teens. Still, one very gendered memory truly stands out.
My two best male friends from high school, Stanley and Pete, did not have access to cars. I did, and so I was often their chauffeur for after-school and weekend adventures. One warm Saturday night they asked me to pick them up, but they wouldn’t tell me what the evening’s plans included. Once in the Chevrolet Corvair, they directed me to a residential neighborhood, where we parked and set out on foot. In relatively short order we were crouched in the dark in the shrubbery in someone’s back yard. We could hear music, lots of feminine laughter and voices, and soon an unrivaled view through the sliding glass doors into the family room of a certain high school girl’s home. She was having a slumber party, and she and her friends were all in pajamas, doing what high school girls did at slumber parties in 1969. My two male friends took great delight in their voyeuristic adventure, but I was overcome by a sense that my place was in there with those girls instead of out kneeling out in the yard behind the bushes. Once again, ten years after the first instance, I was among the leaves experiencing the gender chasm. I still lacked the words for it, but the feelings were plain to me. I was in the wrong place, but I was decades away from the realization that I was in the wrong body.