Trans

It’s hard to hate my father. It’s harder still to love him.

When my younger sister shared with me the news that my dad was offered the opportunity to serve as Director of our local medical school, my first reaction was one of pride. I recalled the times I spent in his private office mentoring residents. Like my grandfather before him, who was also a surgeon and a teacher, my dad loves to teach, so it’s not surprising that teaching loves him back.

Once a week, it happens to be on Mondays, I gather the supplies:

1. Alcohol wipes
2. 1 mL syringe
3. 18- and 22-gauge needles
4. Vial of testosterone
5. Mini sharps container
6. 16-year-old child

My diagnosis launched me into a world where everything felt foreign, even my own reflection in the mirror. But little did I know that that reflection would ultimately help me discover myself.

At first, self-discovery was the last thing on my mind. At age 39, I was facing Stage 4 endometrial and ovarian cancer, and, with it, my own mortality. As I focused on making it through each day of chemo, while struggling to heal from the surgery that had plunged me into instant menopause, I was more concerned about making it to the bathroom than about who I saw in the mirror once I got there.

With tears in my eyes, I burst out of the classroom, seeking refuge from my teacher’s and classmates’ endless verbal battering of me. We were mired in a debate about whether the canon of religious music should be omitted from public school choral groups’ repertoires to “appease” students who felt uncomfortable with such music. The discussion was framed with a particular implication—that because of a squeaky and unreasonable minority, the majority of students were deprived of critical singing opportunities.

My 18-year-old grandson was born with female genitalia and was assigned female at birth. He never felt at home in or at peace with his body, and he had shared ill-defined feelings of discontent with his father from an early age, before he had any vocabulary or knowledge about gender identity. As an early teen, he declared himself bisexual; perhaps this was a flare he sent out to test the family response. He went through a brief phase of “they/them” pronouns, before firmly settling on “he/his.” From his mid-teens on, he identified as transgender.

As the shower water heats up, I help my eighteen-year-old trans son remove the post-surgical compression vest he’ll be wearing for the next six months. I unzip the front, unhook each of three hooks, and unstrap the velcro from each shoulder and take it off.

During a recent trip to Manhattan, I attended a matinee and found a survey from the theater taped to my seat.  As I carefully filled it out, the woman seated next to me—a senior citizen like myself—loudly took exception to a question on it about gender identity. “There are only two genders,” she proclaimed, “female and male.  These ‘binary’ or ‘trans’ choices are nonsense.” I perhaps should have confronted her about her closed-mindedness, but I remained silent.

Dear readers,

I adapt slowly to new things. I’m skeptical of new technologies, the latest fashions and the most recent fads. While I like to think of myself as progressive when it comes to matters of politics and social justice, the truth is my gut is often conservative about interpersonal matters and the stuff of daily life.

So in recent years, I’ve been astonished at the rapidity with which something that was invisible when I was growing up–a person changing their gender–has become commonplace.