Routes of Power

It amazes me how no one seems to notice the problem with sexually segregated bathrooms, when bathrooms are the torture chambers within the larger battlefield of life. Most people have never done a triple-take on the sign on the door, checking first their body, then their clothes, and otherwise performing a general reality check before attempting a bathroom break. Most people do not skip breakfast and lunch to avoid a trip to the bathroom during the school day, or ignore classmates washing their hands because they are too furious to speak and too ashamed to make eye contact. Then again, most people are not men who are categorized as girls.

I was a spacey toddler, absorbed in books, lifting rocks to find bugs and playing with toy dinosaurs. With difficulty I put on my clothes backwards and inside out. I was never aware of anyone else’s presence. A daycare attendant fretted to my parents that she thought I didn’t know how to speak. I wasn’t autistic, just oblivious. At the end of the year we were assigned, with parental guidance, a project on our favorite animal. It is the only thing I remember about daycare because I was so excited to finally have a chance to write something.

I always had a sense of being ahead of people, yet stunted in the social conventions that ought to have been painfully obvious. Despite a deep sense of knowing, I felt myself a stranger to the human and the technological culture: these buildings, buses, and electric lights, animated constructions my baby sister believed to operate by God’s will, but which I felt were unnatural for me.

In an early memory, the car is parked in the grocery store lot, and my mother is talking to another mother of a boy toddler. They refer to the boy as "he" and to me as "she." The pronoun grinds into me, already humiliating, already connoting a doll-like display that is to be the value of my life forevermore. At three years old I know it is a stigma meant to cause me to forget my true self, uttered by people who cannot see who I am on the inside. It is a harsh word that says I am not as valuable as a boy baby. I crouch on the scorching vinyl carseat and bury my face, unable to look up, to understand why I deserved this treatment.

Over a decade later I would meet a female-to-male transsexual who claimed to remember when he chose the body he would be born into. He said he had forgotten the justification for choosing the female body that would cause him so much pain, but he was certain there had been a reason.

I remember the dilemma I posed to myself when, at age five, I attended the wedding of a relative. I looked at the groom standing at the altar. I looked at the bride marching slowly and artificially down the aisle, hidden in a mountain of white tulle. Thinking of my own future wedding, I wasn’t sure if the benefits of having a husband outweighed the humiliation of having everyone stare at me in a dress. I never decided to forgo marriage altogether, but after that day, I worried constantly about how I would survive the ceremony.

My parents occasionally put me in a dress, but at least initially, dress-up wasn’t the worst thing that could happen. At least it promised long-term social acceptance, something I knew I would not be earning on the basis of my charms and conversationalism. Complaining was never my forte, anyway; I always felt guilty for wanting anything other than what my parents expected of me, and blamed myself for my own embarrassment in a frilly party dress with pastel hearts. I believed my parents when they told me that I just didn’t understand myself yet, that I should stop worrying, enjoy my childhood, and when I was ripe my gender would make sense. I truly believed that the golden key to Sexuality and Gender would fall into my open palm the day I turned fourteen. Debbie Gibson, the pop singer, I decided was fourteen, and when I was fourteen I would look just like her. All I had to do was wait.

At twelve I began writing poems about a special kind of entity called a "girl-child," a name I invented to describe her repressed, sorrowful consciousness. When I discovered a few years later that this word belonged to The Feminists, I spat it out. All the anger seemed already to have been claimed by women who, for some reason, wanted to empower themselves as women instead of turning away from womanhood. I saw no room for progress as a woman. Femininity, it seemed to me, was all about being a doll.

The more I grew out of my childish oblivion and became dimly aware of a social culture, the more I dissociated myself from my body. As I approached fourteen, dress-up was an increasingly harrowing experience because I was conscious that I was no longer merely a doll but also a sex object. Dragging me around the synagogue after services, my mother showed me off to her friends, who commented approvingly on the way my clothes delineated my hips and bust. I had to say "Thank you" or else I was Not Polite. If I declined to participate in the cattle auction and requested pants, my parents refused to take me anywhere. If I showed up in pants anyway, they said I was an embarrassment, with a tone of voice that made me feel as if I had paraded naked down the street or blown up the neighbor’s tool shed.

Eventually the grand program of compliance fell apart. It could not last when my value as a human being was dependent on clothing, on embracing hollowness and projecting a facade. I did not earn social acceptance through she-ness. At nine years old, the harder I worked to be a girl, the more I was ridiculed. Fat, ugly, smelly, scary, lezzie. I was none of those things, but part of the girl program was letting other people define you. So I listened to them. It became apparent that just being a girl was not enough to buy social acceptance. You had to have the magic charm too, the lacquered hair and the popularity mystique. The second reason why the girl program failed was that when I reached the age of fourteen, nothing happened. The enchanted realm of womanhood was supposed to envelop me and wrest control of my brain so that I would behave correctly. I had counted on a total personality change at puberty. This had been promised to me and I had been cheated.

All the girls around me suddenly began acting like women as if it were second nature to them. I had always been years ahead of everyone intellectually, and I had no intention of admitting my incompetence in this area. I subscribed to several glossy fashion magazines and read them cover to cover, determined to internalize and assimilate these emotions. There was also the effort I’d invested in the girl project. The other girls hadn’t been half as polite, half as sweet, half as obedient, half as quiet as I had been. It should have been getting easier for me, if practice were any index of worthiness. But it was getting harder.

My parents threw me a Bat Mitzvah party when I was thirteen. I had already gone to two dozen other Bar Mitzvahs that year (in Hebrew school it was mandatory to invite your classmates) and I dressed up for every single one. I invited sixty kids I didn’t know to my spring party. I asked my crush to dance and he declined. What is the point of throwing a party and wearing a poofy red dress, if your own guests won’t dance with you? Although I could identify no glaring problems in the mirror, I felt like the porcelain doll with the fractured face.

Sometimes my emotions were jumbled and I couldn’t talk sense. I cut out every single news brief >about gay people. I moped. My parents were clear on their goal for me: "You need help so you can make the feelings go away." Exactly what "the feelings" were, I wasn’t quite sure, but it seemed to me that it was a euphemism for my personality; for whenever I broke the silence of my daily existence, I was accused of having feelings. They sent me to a therapist, whom I gave the silent treatment for what seemed like a limitless succession of months, having too much pride to pay someone to be my friend. My animosity towards therapists was yet another feeling; therefore, my parents sided with the therapist when he said he needed more time (and money) to work with me to overcome my feelings. My parents even went so far as to procure zombie pills for me. Fortunately, having read a science fiction story similar to Brave New World, one of my literary heroes was a boy who concealed the culturally mandated zombie pills under his tongue and later spat them into the sink. It may have been only a small heroism on my part, but at least I still had feelings.

I had reached the age where I was supposed to stay in the room when my mother and her friends discussed women’s health issues, including breast cancer. On one occasion my mother dropped a blank greeting card in front of me (nice girls write cards for every occasion) so I could write something to an old woman I knew who was undergoing a mastectomy and reconstruction. I knew that to be envious of a mastectomy was absolutely wrong. Apparently women were supposed to mourn the loss of their breast as they mourned the loss of an infant. However, I considered my chest protrusions to be nothing more than warts. Chicken tumors, I called them, suggesting that they were not of human origin. A fat chest was no better than a scarlet letter of a chastity belt. I would have torn it off with my bare hands if I could. I tried to think of something to write to this woman (I am sorry about your breast I hope you like the new one) but all I could think of was how lightweight and free she would feel after the operation, and how horrifically grotesque was the prospect of having her newly pure chest inflated again. I thought about the dismal prospect of waiting until middle age until I, too, could hope to qualify for a mastectomy.

In my freshman year of high school I dated a boy who was three years ahead of me. I had selected him because he was bisexual and I mistakenly thought that meant he would love me as a man. He would not pay for me in the food court at the mall, he controlled the car radio all of the time, and took personal insult from my lack of conversational skills. He said he wanted to marry me. Most days, I made him drive me to the mall to gaze at the Christmas decorations and the giant red sign of the Wonder Bread factory. Immersed in a glitzy consumer paradise I could look at the images of male models, male products, male desire, and imagine it was me. But sometimes, passing by parked cars in the lot, I would catch a reflection in their windows of a long-haired, smooth-faced person and realize, with horror, that it was me, and that this meant I could never be happy. My boyfriend told me to get over myself.

When I realized that fourteen was no longer the magic age, I set my clock forward and pined for eighteen. I trekked through the high school halls with pink and purple pens in my knapsack, stuffed animals and air fresheners in my locker, thoroughly disoriented.

I remember the day when I found myself amidst that mess. I was in the library, reading through cryptic scribbles in my journal. I always used vague words and sometimes outright lied to hide my feelings from myself. Despite my efforts, one truth valiantly emerged, written over and over every day: I was deeply, firmly certain that it would be impossible to fall in love unless I were loved as a man. I re-read this recurring sentiment and was amazed that I had never before considered that I didn’t have to be a girl.

At once I knew my destiny clearer than I knew the fundamentals of rational thought. But I was a freshman in high school and I didn’t know where to begin.

We were rated the best public high school in the state of Massachusetts. 98% of graduates continued their education. We managed this even with unstructured free time, free range, and permission to eat during classes, something incomprehensible to the principal of the neighboring town where they had a problem with dropouts.

I don’t remember a thing that happened during my first few years there. All I knew was that I wasn’t a girl, and I repeated this mantra hundreds of >times daily, letting the poison of my anger spread through my head. I never said anything out loud. I hated the sound of my voice. I just muttered to myself. There was only one direction for me to take and I couldn’t take a single step, because I was underage for decision-making, and a girl at that.

Enough people were Jewish to justify canceling school on Yom Kippur. Everyone’s parents voted Democrat, but if you think that says anything about how people with gender confusion are accepted, it doesn’t. Rather, not necessarily. No one is going to outright tell you that you are evil. Instead they just ignore you. And in some ways, that’s actually worse. Most days I longed for someone to scream at me so I could hear and see and embrace the anger I had internalized. I would have seen a piece of myself reflected in their hate, even if only the worst part of me. Being ignored was a continuation of invisibility; invisibility was half-existence; half-existence was insanity.

To be fair, I can’t say that I was ready to see myself. Once I brought some girls over to my house to work on a project for school. Poking around my room, one of them found a large cardboard-backed object leaned against the wall and she tilted it. She saw it was a glass-framed poster and laid it back to rest. She finally asked where the mirror was. I pointed her to the bathroom.

All the glass plates I owned were turned away or covered. The easiest way to ruin a relaxing evening was to catch a glimpse of myself undressing. The shock would cause the thermostat in my body to plunge. Trembling turned to shaking, and like a child who stays outside too long and huddles into a frozen ball rather than going back in the house, shaking turned to painful spasms. All the blankets in my closet could not help. But at the same time, I wanted to visualize myself as a teenaged being who was present at high school. Whether I saw someone else ripping me apart or whether I saw an affirmation, I would have liked to see myself in the mirror. But I was not ready yet. I planned to wait it out for all four years and solve the problem immediately after graduation--an extension of the girl program, renamed the transsexual program. This was the impetus inside me to be free, the directive to change my life. It meant I was going to fix my chest and I was going to get the testosterone my brain was starved for. My so-called life was an obstacle that I was going to correct. With the exception of Christine Jorgensen--a male-to-female transsexual whose gender transition half a century earlier was mentioned in my home encyclopedia, with special emphasis on her 1,000 hormone injections and seven surgeries--I believed I was the only transsexual in the world. In 1997 Ellen DeGeneres Came Out on national television. All the gay kids in my high school were holed up in our basements that night, joined to the old television set. The script for the episode assigned Ellen the misfortune of stumbling in front of an airport microphone at the moment she said those two small words: "I’m gay."

But that’s not the solution. It’s not even a superficial Coming Out; it’s just plain Not Coming Out. Because if >you phrase yourself that way, you’re out of the closet and still inside the girls‚ bathroom. At least that’s what it’s like for transgendered people.

In the fall of 1997 I was a senior in high school and not as strong as I had expected I would be. I was hungry from skipping meals to avoid bathroom trips, my lungs were cramped with too much chest binding, and my heart pumped irregularly on the verge of explosion. There was still no bathroom for me.

Having happily been out of therapy for several years, I sought out a transgender-friendly therapist who was willing to diagnose me with Gender Identity Dysphoria. I still refused to feel comfortable with anyone whom I was paying to listen to me, but a diagnosis of GID is required to proceed with hormones and surgery. In fact, the only known "cure" for this condition is to transition to the desired sex, and therefore it is, for transsexuals, the happiest psychiatric diagnosis. My parents were all too delighted to pay for the therapy they believed I desperately needed. They had no idea that I was scheming to get a particular document out of the bargain.

The therapist did come in handy after all, as it was she who helped explain the situation to my parents and recommended educational resources for them. They listened to her as they had never listened to me. While they seemed quite miserable at first, they quickly got over it, as they now possessed the ability to describe transsexuality in terms of a medical condition and not psychological corruption. I did not make time to allay their concerns--I considered myself ten times more miserable than they, and I was angry at them for not having noticed sooner. They got over their frustration themselves.

My parents‚ way of dealing with fear of the future is to take control of >it. They dragged me to two gender specialists in New York.

"Look," they demanded of the therapists, "is this child transgendered?"

"Are you transgendered?" the therapists asked me.

"Yes," I said.

"Yes," the therapists said to my parents, and my parents shelled out for two-hour sessions.

Or at least that is how I remember it happening. At any rate, once I was officially diagnosed with transsexualism, my parents realized that I was going to start testosterone as soon as I graduated and they frantically searched out an endocrinologist for me.

At school, I informed my teachers via typewritten document that I was sick of being a girl. That’s it--no sexuality problems brought into the bargain--I just wasn’t going to be able to make it to graduation in the stupid girl game. I was going to grow a beard and they were going to deal with it. I expected half of them to ditch me and pass me on to other hapless teachers. In my self-pity I underestimated their kindness.

All my teachers had the same reaction when interacting with me for the first time after that letter. I would raise my hand to answer a question. They pursed their lips, their cheeks puffed slightly, their eyes grew round, and they called on someone else. When there was no one else to call on, they paused for five seconds and finally called me by the name I had asked to be called by, in the same tone in which a condemned man utters the command that will fire the bullet into him. Then I would answer the teacher’s question. Everyone blinked, and nothing changed.

The tacit liberal acceptance emboldened me as far as bathrooms were concerned. Wide-eyed boys ran in and out as I washed my hands. Someone, I never found out who, reported my alien presence and suspicious activities to the administration. Following that incident I was offered the nurse’s bathroom. The principal probably thought it was a generous and equitable, if not downright magnanimous, gesture on his part; it seemed to me he was making the point that transsexualism was a social disease similar to halitosis. Tapping into the girl power of silent obedience, I did not comment on his patronization. I just proudly refused to use the nurse’s bathroom. Except on a few occasions when I felt that facing the gendered bathrooms was even worse: other girls would see me walk in, interpret it as an admission of gender identity, and then attempt to converse and piss simultaneously, which I was convinced men never did.

In first grade I had befriended a girl named Julia. In fifth grade we had endured the shouts of "lezzie" in solidarity when I made the mistake of giving her a piggy-back ride during recess. We shared an early crush (she got him; he sensed that my girlness was artificially flavored). We shared a music stand for cello in the school orchestra through eighth grade. We stayed in touch through high school, when she confided in me that she thought she was a lesbian.

When Ellen DeGeneres Came Out, Julia, having just admitted her feelings to herself, deliberated hard over whether she too should Come Out. When the secret became too explosive to bear, she told her parents, who took it surprisingly well. For one week, she enjoyed lightness of spirit. Then, facing a visit from her grandmother, she remembered that her grandmother didn’t know yet. Julia looked as though the world had played an awfully cruel trick on her when she told me: I thought you just Came Out once and that’s it. From then on, she memorized a list of those who knew, those who could guess, those who probably didn’t want to know, those who would find out if she told a friend of their friend. No one gets a microphone on national television, and no one gets applause. Ellen DeGeneres lied.

But did I envy Julia’s situation? Sure. This suburb of Boston was enlightened enough not to dispatch lesbians to the men’s room. She still had her bathroom and no one stumbled over her pronouns of choice, as they did over mine.

I remained angry during my senior year. I was convinced that being a transsexual was the most ostracized and most difficult life to lead (failing to understand how much of pain is self-chosen), and, because I was alone in my misery, I fancied myself morally superior. I thought I was hot stuff because I believed in freedom of gender expression, which was, to anyone with enough sense to acknowledge the obvious, the only issue worth caring about.

I remember meeting an acquaintance of an acquaintance, both girls, during the course of my normal roamings around the school, and I invited them to the cafeteria for a turkey sandwich with me. The new girl informed me that she was a vegetarian.

I was taken aback. I entertained myself with my emotional problems and she entertained herself with a altruistic moral issue. That wasn’t fair because it made me feel inferior. I was the man, I said what was what, and I was going to say that vegetarianism was untenable. Whoever heard of not eating meat? Meat was food.

"But your shoes are made of leather," I blurted self-righteously.

"Actually, they’re fake," she said sweetly.

I stomped off alone to the cafeteria to get my comfort food. I wasn’t going to listen to what anyone else had to say, especially not girls, until I was happy.

The best thing that happened to me during senior year was Nate. I was sitting in the mailroom when I saw him for the first time. He was equal to my height with a paunch and a full goatee that made him appear older than his years. I thought that he must be new to the school, or I would have noticed him before. Before I could catch my breath, he had taken the mail out of his box, spun around, and headed out the door. I unlocked my body from the chair and followed in pursuit. I saw him disappearing down the hall.

"Matt!" I hissed at a boy with whom I attended Hebrew school, interrupting his conversation. "Who is that?"

Matt tried to identify the backpack and sneakers at the other end of the hall. "That’s Nate."

"What year is he?" I demanded. Matt didn’t know.

Mailboxes were listed alphabetically by year. I looked under all four classes until I found a Nathaniel among the sophomores.

I wrote him a note introducing myself. The point wasn’t so much to say anything in particular, as to feel free from the tangles of my past, to feel ordinary with ordinary people in the ordinary world. On paper I was just a name and pure words. Nate wrote back.

He found me in the halls during short passing periods and talked to me. I would freeze against the wall. My face plastered itself with a smile that, I feared, he associated more with hysteria and mental deficiency than with friendliness. But I couldn’t do anything about it. When he launched into long narratives, I nodded until my neck muscles thoroughly numbed themselves.

He was an actor with an interest in medieval history and contemporary British comedy. He had a 2.0 grade point average. He was a vegetarian. His father listened to Bob Dylan and had been the road manager for the Lovin’ Spoonful before moving to the suburbs.

One afternoon I called him. He was thankfully still talkative on the phone. He told me about his trouble in school, his theatre groups, and most memorably, his family: he thought his dad was attractive for his age and recalled with admiration how he had shaved his head when he realized baldness was inevitable. Nate said he wished he could look as good as his father when he got to be that age. He feared, incidentally, that he was "plain."

I lay on my back on the couch and held the phone rigidly against my ear, to prevent it from falling from my stunned hands. No one of the male persuasion had ever told me anything quite so personal.

We continued to see each other at school. I began to believe that he thought I was normal, that he didn’t know there was anything wrong with me. I thought this was my first honest relationship in which I could be myself (if I ever managed to melt my facial muscles enough to talk).

It was an entire month before he asked me, "You’re not really a boy, right?"

I did not look at him for some time. He waited patiently for a few moments. I always needed extra time to unlock my voice when I hurt. Finally, I managed the irreverent question: "Do you think I look more masculine or more feminine?"

Nate was not about to play an emotional manipulation game. He did not sway one inch. "You realize that’s an unfair question to ask me, because I don’t know how you want me to respond," he said, more adult than any adult had ever been.

Nevertheless, my opinion of his perfection was severely compromised. I was bitter that I had misled myself into thinking naively that Nate alone could identify my gender while the rest of the world was incompetent. At the time, I thought I had deluded myself into thinking I had a normal friendship and I resented Nate for being overly polite. And yet I respected him in a new way. Nate never told me I was a girl. That was not implicit in his words. Instead he left my identity open for me to determine and even implied that he cared what I wanted him to think about me. For the first time in my life, someone actually was going to listen to what I said.

I still followed him around school--more than he knew. I copied his schedule between the lines of my schedule, and peeked into his classes whenever I had a free period. He invariably slept with his head in his hands.

One fall morning there were yellow posters indicating a new men’s chorus. Women are girls, but men are always men. "No auditions necessary," it stated in bubble letters. I wasted no time getting to the music room.

Twenty-one boys already on the signup sheet. An a cappella CD played as background music. The chorus director took me in her office. I told her I wanted to sing. Her answer: "Obviously not." She told me, "A more appropriate place for you would be a men’s discussion group or support group. You could join that. But we can’t have you singing here, it just isn’t right."

I didn’t have to be told that my presence wasn’t right. I thought it was unfair for a high school chorus, especially one that asked no auditions, to reject a student based on his face, or perhaps his pre-operative chest. She hadn’t even asked me to sing a note. She ought to have known that self-esteem is more of an issue in high school than musical talent. Besides, as I learned later, this group struggled to sing Beach Boys with anything that resembled a harmony--I could only have been an asset. So my voice was a bit higher than most other boys--okay, an unambiguous soprano--but that’s Diversity for you. Well. What I call Diversity, conductors call cacophony. I could respect that.

I got over the rejection, because, the director had said, I could join a men’s discussion group. The fact that one did not exist in the high school was only a minor issue.

I told Nate about this incident in a note in his mailbox. He politely refrained from telling me that he sang in the Men’s Chorus. I found out during the course of my usual tracking and spying during the school day. I felt I had a right to watch the chorus, since I had been denied a chance to sing, but I didn’t have a good view through the crack of the door to the music room.

I sat alone in my living room and tried to sing, but no sound came out.

Within a few days there was a new poster in the halls. It advertised the "Young Men’s Leadership Club," apparently originating as a mirror group to the Young Women’s Leadership Club which had originated a couple years earlier. That group was famous for their fall retreat in which they went somewhere and said some things in their pajamas and got to know each other. No one knew whether it was really a leadership club or just a big slumber party.

But here was the men’s leadership club. This is exactly what the chorus director said I should join. This club was invented for me. The chorus director had prophesied it.

All the boys got a yellow flyer in their mailbox. Peeved at the omission of mine, I pulled a flyer out of the trash. It consisted mainly of a joke about male bathroom scenarios (If >Urinals 2 and 6 are occupied, which one do you choose? Answer: 4.) and offered a discussion group to talk about such pressing issues of sexuality and gender as they related to our personal lives. I agreed that bathrooms were a serious topic.

I showed up at the first meeting. Thirty nervous boys sat in a classroom. Mr. Unobsky from the History department, who was married to the woman who founded the Young Woman’s Leadership Club, and Mr. Forster from the Language department coordinated it. Both of these men were young, married, and it was a well-known fact that they were nervously expecting their first babies. The group’s first retreat would feature caving. The adventure would be followed by a slumber party, but young male leaders are not supposed to emphasize that.

Mr. Forster described the purpose of the group with great enthusiasm. To talk about the anxieties of young manhood. To talk about our hopes and dreams. To celebrate our Diversity and hear a variety of viewpoints.

I sat up proudly, shoulders forward, flabby chest sucked in. This group was mine. I had earned it.

Several days later, Mr. Unobsky invited me for a discussion. I trotted happily alongside him and tossed pleasantries back and forth. Behind closed doors, I unwrapped my daily turkey sandwich and applied the extra mayonnaise. Mr. Unobsky suggested that I wouldn’t like the Young Men’s Leadership Group.

I would.

He suggested that I didn’t know what it was for.

I did.

He told me that some boys had addressed him after the organizational meeting and complained that they didn’t feel comfortable sharing their feelings when I was in the room, and that they would not go on the retreat if I went. If I insisted on showing my face, the whole group would become dysfunctional and fall apart, and it would be my fault for ruining the project that he had worked so hard to coordinate. I ought not to be selfish and respect their discomfort with me.

For a history teacher, I thought his sense of justice was pretty appalling.

Finally, he told me point-blank: "No one is going to accept you because you’re different."

So much for Diversity. Of course, it wasn’t fair of Forster and Unobsky to call out the word Diversity as if it were hot air, but many people don’t worry about playing fair--otherwise this conversation would never have had to happen.

I told him I thought I had a right to participate in the group. I searched his face for any thread of kindness that might open his heart and cause him to grant me that right. All I saw was fear.

After an hour he announced that the discussion was not getting anywhere, that we were talking in circles, and that he was sorry I couldn’t see it his way. I left because I agreed it was dragging on and because I was starting to dislike him very much. I prized discussion highly when it came to gender issues, but this was not a discussion.

A week or two passed. The men’s group did not meet. Mr. Unobsky wanted to have a second "discussion" with me, and I agreed to entertain his concerns. If there’s one girl value I internalized, it’s politeness. In this "discussion" Mr. Unobsky triumphantly informed me that he had sought the advice of a lawyer, and the lawyer confirmed his suspicion that I did, in fact, not have a right to participate in the men’s group. If I insisted on tagging along, I was a liability.

Duh, I thought. I should have known that an American history teacher would hear the word "right" and immediately think of legal rights. When I said, I have a right to be here, I was really saying, I am a human being too. I never would have made a legal argument. There is no possible legal argument on my behalf.

Mr. Unobsky thought he could defeat my spirit when he informed me that the law does not recognize my existence. I already knew that. People like me live outside the law. I live outside the law every time I choose between public bathrooms. When people like me seek our "rights," we seek a kind gesture from some brave soul who is willing to stretch a healing hand outside the legal system that protects their reality and denies ours. It is hard for some people to do this because if they reject the authority of the law over matters of gender, they realize it might have been their gender that was denied.

There was almost something funny about it. This shy, bald-headed, baby-faced father-to-be, who seemed profoundly embarrassed in his own body, turned to a higher authority for help in handling a high school student. Was he too afraid to hear my voice? Did he mistrust the maturity of his own argument? Had he panicked?

It doesn’t matter. At least on soap operas, calling a lawyer is code for the discussion between us is over. But even for soap opera villains, it seemed, it was protocol to inform the person before you called a lawyer on them.

For one white-hot moment I imagined stealing his dress jacket from his office and cutting it up into limp triangles with orange-handled scissors, and then I censored myself, bewildered by my own thoughts. I was not the same person I had been under my boyfriend’s control during my freshman year.

To release myself from anger, at least enough to function at school, I had to accept that there is a difference between things I am allowed to do and things I can do. I was not going to be allowed to do much of anything while at school. So I would focus on things I could do, such as graduate. Once Nate and I drove into the city for a movie and we stopped at a sub shop, which seemed a decent enough place to me. I waited to see if he was really going to order vegetables. He did.

I had an unusual red-meat craving for steak and onions. "I’m going to be a vegetarian too," I told him, swallowing gobs of blackened flesh. Nate kindly said nothing, and an enormous resolve was growing within me to be as kind as he was. My soul lifted above the strip mall into the stressful sky thick with Boston exhaust.

On the ride home he told me lots of stories. He even told me things about myself. "I was talking to my father about you. I told him that I had met this cool person at school, and that she--"

He gasped. "I didn’t mean to say that. I don’t really think of you as a girl."

"It’s all right."

"No, I’m really, really sorry. I got confused."

No one had ever apologized for offending my gender. Therefore I considered him a saint and absolved him of all further obligations to apologize.

He didn’t accept my absolution and slumped convulsively against the passenger door with his head in his hands, uttering the first curse I’d ever heard from him. "I don’t want to ruin the whole day," he said. "It’s very hard to offend me," I reassured him. "You’d have to make a huge effort."

Certainly no one had ever apologized to me so sincerely. No one had ever cared what I thought.

When we reached his house, to my surprise, he invited me inside. There were unframed posters and tapestries in the living room, and on the wall beside the kitchen table, a stack of Bob Dylan tapes. Peace pervaded me. I knew this house. I felt I had lived with these people in a past life or was going to live with them in a future life. A fat cat rubbed against my ankles. Nate showed me his bedroom, sparsely decorated with a poster of a male comedian and a photograph of his theater group.

In a few moments his father came in and sat on the floor. They each crossed their legs, placing their feet on their thighs, and stretched out, talking to each other about their reactions to their school and work days.

I sat silently, disoriented by the experience. My parents never came into my bedroom to discuss my feelings. In fact, I wasn’t sure my father had ever been inside my bedroom at all. When I left the house, Nate’s father placed his hand on my shoulder.

At school one day I dressed in a brown plaid flannel suit that I had bought for fifty cents at a secondhand thrift shop. It was intended for a tall, obese person, and I had no belt. But just to wear it, as it was, as I was, I felt like a million bucks.

Immersed in the sound of my own footsteps, I walked down a well-lit hallway towards a glass door. According to the reflection in the door, a devastatingly attractive man was walking directly behind me. I straightened my shoulders and ran my hand nervously through my hair. The man in the glass touched his hand to his head.

My parents had heard enough medical advice, all in my favor, and as they had no counter-arguments, I began testosterone in January. When I grew a beard, no one at school argued at me. Clearly, an unspoken rule dictated that I couldn’t grow a beard, but I did anyway, because I wanted to. I illuminated the difference between allowed to do and can do. Everyone shut up.

Maybe no one else thought so, but I believed I was starting to look halfway decent.

I asked Nate to my senior prom via one of my written notes in his school mailbox. It was a good bet, since he was a sophomore and didn’t have a prom of his own to attend. It took him an unfathomable twenty-four hours to call me, but he was willing, provided there were no romantic implications. He was not ready for a relationship with anyone, he said. Unable to swear to him that romance was so far from my mind I couldn’t even comprehend it, I simply gave him a long string of "Not at alls." He agreed to go with me.

I had always dreamed my first tuxedo would find me with a flatter chest. To my delight I had passed as a man in the tuxedo shop (who would assume a woman?) but, as the tailor wrapped his measuring tape around various places on my body, he pointed out that my chest measurement was disproportionately large. I had to settle for a jacket that was a few sizes too big. Dressing for the prom with my body as it was, I felt I was defacing the rental garment.

Contrary to what Seventeen magazine always advised girls, I avoided thinking about my prom fashion preparation plans until the last minute. The scraggly whiskers on my neck were bad prom form, but at least they supported my right to wear a tuxedo, and besides, I wasn’t sure if the uneven patch would grow back in time for graduation if I shaved it.

I also planned to pick up Nate at least an hour late, just to prove to him how thoroughly I was not emotionally invested in this event.

A few minutes before I planned to leave, I had to call him to explain the scenario with my pants. The tuxedo rental shop had mistakenly given me pants with a waist measurement five inches too big. This scenario could have been avoided with the judicious use of Seventeen magazine’s advice, but I had elected to join the ranks of >stupid men. I had to ask Nate what his pants size was. He was the same size as I, but he regretfully did not have any black pants to lend me, not even black jeans.

When my father came home from work, he showed me how to pull the buckle to tighten the waist. I called Nate back to inform him that my pants did, indeed, fit.

His parents came to his front door, one standing behind each shoulder, ostensibly thrilled that I was taking their son to the prom. I didn’t know whether to be shocked or proud.

Nate had shaved. His pants fit him.

Inside my parents‚ red Beetle, he told me I looked nice. I accepted the compliment quietly and said nothing in return. He was clearly out of his mind.

If I could let the evening slip by on its own, if I got through this night as an observer, then I could absolve responsibility for any mistakes I made. I had not actually Come Out yet; I had only shyly admitted my existence. If prom night could successfully pass me by, I would graduate, and then I would be truly free. Free from twelfth grade schoolwork, free from the suburbs and my parents, free from Unobsky and Forster and everyone who thought he could dictate my gender, free to be an adult male. Maturity was immanent. Freedom was just around the corner. I suddenly forgot how to drive.

"Is this a car that stalls?" Nate asked.

"No," I trembled, my foot falling like ice on the clutch as I again attempted to leave his driveway and turned the car towards Boston. A gray stormcloud, wide as a mountain, tore open above us and flooded the streets.

Boston is an old city and its streets were never constructed with automobiles in mind. That is always my excuse. We had to stop at Boston University in the rain and ask directions to the other side of the Charles River. Nate was concerned about our tardiness. I was delighted to be alive.

At the prom I resolved to stand firm and establish my space. That was my only aspiration. When Nate asked me to slow dance on three separate occasions in front of my entire senior class, it seemed that he was giving me as a gift that which I hadn’t been able to win for myself in battle.

I graduated high school Class of 1998. Hebrew school festivities preceded the public school event. After presenting selections from our twelfth-grade papers to the congregation, the class--most of us together since nursery school--packed into cars like sardines and sped to a local pancake house to have the last midnight pancake, and stopped at the penny candy store gazebo for the last gaze at the duck pond. I had planned to stay home but they showed up in my driveway. Because of the freedom and openness of the night sky, I was happy I came along, even though I had never felt close to the childhood I was saying farewell to. Never in my life had there been a time without Hebrew school. This could be the beginning of something worthwhile.

Julia was going to a women’s college with her girlfriend. I was going to change the sex on my birth certificate and then go to a university where I could use the men’s bathroom (the only goal I had for my education at the time).

I thought about Nate and how he composed himself amidst this mess of teen angst. If he had problems, he never showed them. As a beacon of sanity, he was indestructible. Yet our relationship, hovering on the brink of separation, was fragile.

I was allowed to graduate in a blue robe while the girls dressed in white. The principal authorized my preferred name change on my diploma even though it had not been legally changed yet. Everyone knew it was going to happen anyway, and there was no dissent. These were welcome surprises since I had always expected to be absent >from my graduation on account of the differentiated robes. Part of me wanted to hate the school, but it is hard to hate an institution that throws you a going-away party in blue.

Sometime that summer, I ate my last piece of meat. With orange-handled scissors, I sliced up my old compression vests into ribbons. Masking tape turned into surgical tape; surgical tape lifted, and I walked around with no shirt on, stepping into my ultimate fantasy of triumph. I tossed away the objects that had held me back, and as I did so, I felt that my hands were finally adult hands. High school was miles and miles away though the building was still in the same town, merely dormant for the summer, preparing to receive another class in the fall. Two months later, I arrived at college and on my desk I placed a five-inch mirror on a plastic stand, so that I could see the movement of my shadow every time I sat down to write a paper or read electronic letters from my friends.

As long as people talked at me instead of with me, no matter what information I had given them about myself, this was not Coming Out. Coming Out was not when I felt victimized. It certainly was not when others feared me. They feared me because they did not know me; they did not know me because I had not yet Come Out.

Prom Night was the night that Nate Came Out as a straight man. He showed the entire graduating class that he could be friends with a transsexual, even touch him in a caring way, and still be a straight man. My identity was still caught up in the tuxedo, the layers of tape underneath, the superstitious cultivation of the black whiskers on my neck, even in just showing up at the prom and stepping tentatively on the dance floor to prove that a normal person was willing to be seen with me. I was just barely existing; I had not yet Come Out in my glory. Maybe no one else noticed Nate dancing with me. Maybe Nate didn’t think he was making any kind of statement about himself. But I admired his strength and his fearlessness, the way he walked independent of the common conviction that one false step would cause his whole identity to come crashing down. I couldn’t decide whether this lack of self-conscious censorship was adorably innocent or profoundly mature. I always felt that it was both at the same time.

That summer marked a whole year after Ellen DeGeneres Came out on national television. When I dredged the last poison drops of anger out of my veins and convinced myself that I was never going back to high school--that I was really free--then I began to pity the adults there. I felt that the Unobskys and the Forsters of the world were desperately in need of liberation. They do what they do because their identity as a man is dependent upon proving me to be a not-man. They have not yet Come Out as their own men. It is tempting to swing between vulnerability and self-righteousness, but sometimes I just wait patiently, let it go, and hope that they can let go of their reactionary fear because they will be stronger if they do. They will be stronger because they will be allied with all the other human beings who have Come Out and who are no longer terrorized by the darkness of other people’s otherness.

After high school I found I had more to say than "I’m not a girl," and, contrary to my recurring fantasies of what the future was going to be like, I measure the quality of my life by more than the fact that I can pass in the men’s bathroom. I could attribute it to the fact that I finally went through puberty (real puberty is a testosterone-flavored controlled substance delivered by intramuscular injection). Or I could attribute it to the fact that, having gotten my diploma signed and my body fixed, I no longer am forced to set up others as the gatekeepers of my freedom.