Trans-Sister Radio Page 17

  It is considerably more difficult to transform a penis into a vagina.

  Slice open the penis, beginning a scant two centimeters from the anus. Remember, the balls are no longer a buffer. By now they're in the container with the hazardous waste--though, interestingly, you will have preserved a good measure of scrotal skin, because this parchment will become both the new labia and a free graft to help lengthen the tunnel that will become the vagina.

  The incision will run the length of the penis (longitudinal is the word the surgeons prefer), extending all the way up to the glans. It is at the perineum where the cut is the deepest.

  You will then excavate all of the pulpy, erectile tissue beneath the skin, careful not to inadvertently hack the penile urethra. After the organ has been all but hollowed out, you may clip the tiny tube that links bladder with bathroom. Now, once and for all, sever the flap that is the cylindrical seat of one's life--axis, locus, hub, regardless of whether we are gay or straight, regardless of whether we are happy with the genitalia that accompanied us through our mother's vaginal canal or miserable with the little hermit crab who pokes out its head at the damnedest moments in time.

  With the penile skin put aside for the moment--though carefully preserved--you will insert a urinary catheter, a guest who will reside in your patient's groin for almost a week.

  At this point, you will shift from doctor to miner, though this may be, in fact, the most difficult part of the operation. It demands both patience and skill. You will bore a vagina, dissecting a crawl space between rectum and bladder. This is the part of the procedure where complications are most likely. There is bleeding. Tissue resistance. And it is easy here to nick the lower intestine, to pierce the fine and sensitive terminus of the hose line that weaves its way through so much of the torso. Fistulae are possible. Abscesses are not uncommon.

  Neither, I imagine, are pleasant.

  Once the cavity is complete, you will take the penile skin you have painstakingly conserved, and you will turn it inside out as if it were a sock. Bear in mind that though the penile and scrotal skin help line the tunnel, they alone do not determine the ultimate vaginal length. You may want to graft skin as well from buttock and thigh. Pare off a fingernail-size piece of the glans--sensitive, reactive, just bursting with nerves--and insert the rest inside the burrow before you.

  Next, take that section of glans and affix it upon a little bulb of spongiosum just above the vagina, as if it were a piece from a little box of Colorforms. This will be the clitoris.

  Now, remember that birch bark-like skin that once housed the testes? Pretend you're back in preschool and fashion from it a two-dimensional sugar doughnut. Make sure it's slightly more oval than round. Voila! Instant labia. Apply around the vagina like a life preserver, hooding the clitoris at the top.

  Finally, pack the vagina with antibiotic gauze. Be generous; this is no time to cut corners or costs. Expect to load it with at least ten feet, and be prepared to fill it with twenty. The last thing you want is a spanking new vagina that becomes infected or (worse, arguably) begins to narrow before your patient can begin her regime of postoperative dilation--the routinized use of dildos to prevent the tissue inside her from closing.

  You will want to sew the packing in place with heavy silk or nylon sutures. Don't fear: It will all be gone in six or seven days. Catheter, too.

  If the genital surgery has gone well, then proceed with the ancillary work. Enhancing her breasts. Shaving the trachea. Touching up her cheeks or her nose.

  Altogether, it shouldn't take more than a morning. It takes much less time to make a vagina in an operating room than in a womb.

  NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT

  All Things Considered

  Wednesday, September 26

  DANA STEVENS: Amazing, isn't it? A university with eight thousand students gives me absolutely no guff. Doesn't do a thing to complicate my life. But a little elementary school with two hundred and ninety kids? They practically run the transsexual and her paramour out of town!

  Chapter 20.

  carly

  ONE AFTERNOON BETWEEN CHRISTMAS AND NEW Year's, my boyfriend from high school told me he had a male cousin who'd had pillowcases and sheets with ballerinas on them when he was growing up. The boy had in fact had two sets, one that was yellow with blue dancers, and one that had pink dancers on white.

  "I think he turned out okay," Michael said. "I mean, he seems normal enough now. His family didn't come to our house for Christmas this week, so I haven't seen him in over a year. But he never seemed freakish to me as a kid. Maybe a little effeminate. But I always assumed he was straight."

  Nevertheless, his cousin's desire for ballerina bed linens had clearly become a part of that family's mythology. The boy had been five and six years old at the time, and he'd outgrown his interest in the sheets by the time he was in second grade. But it was, apparently, something that came up whenever Michael's family gathered as kin.

  I heard lots of stories like that while Mom was in Colorado. My friend Rhea showed me a picture of herself in a family photo album in which she was wearing a plastic army helmet that she had camouflaged with fallen leaves and small branches. She thought she was nine when it was taken.

  "It was just a phase," she explained. "War got pretty boring once I discovered boys."

  And Heather, who I really hadn't been friends with since seventh grade, insisted I come over to her house and into her bedroom. "Boxer shorts," she said, opening her lingerie drawer to me and pulling aside a top layer of bikini briefs. "I started wearing boxer shorts at college this fall."

  "Why?"

  "It turns me on."

  "No," I said, shaking my head. "Why are you telling me this?"

  She shrugged. "I thought you'd understand."

  Moreover, when my friends weren't sharing with me their tentative forays across the Great Gender Divide, their parents were volunteering their opinions about Dana.

  "I don't normally have time for those daytime talk shows," Rhea's mom said, "but when my foot was operated on a few years ago, I watched them a bit. They're addictive, they really are. And one day, one of them had on a group of transsexuals. They seemed very nice. They really did. But it's so clear they're no happier now than they were before they were changed. And none of them has the slightest idea how to dress."

  And, of course, the really frightening wolves came out of the forest en masse once my mom and Dana were gone. People I barely knew wanted to tell me what they thought.

  "He must know how inappropriate it is to dress that way around children," a teller at the bank told me. "Of course I cashed his check for him, but he made everyone in line very uncomfortable. Especially Joyce Lavigne. She came in with her little girl when your mother's friend was here, and when she saw him, she turned on her heels and left. And I can't blame her, Carly. Really, I can't. Can you?"

  A day later I was at the service station getting Dana's car inspected, since I knew she wouldn't feel up to it when she returned, and the fellow who worked there said he didn't think Dana should be allowed on the road.

  "And why not?" I asked.

  "If he had an accident and there was blood all around--his blood, I mean--it would be a hazard to the rescue folks. They shouldn't have to worry about such things."

  I explained that Dana wasn't HIV-positive, but I might just as well have been insisting that a moment earlier I'd returned from a magical land with a tin man who talked and a scarecrow who danced.

  And on New Year's Day when I wandered from Dad's house to the pizza parlor to get a slice mid-afternoon, an elderly couple I didn't know stared at me while I waited for it to be reheated. Finally the man got up from his booth and said, "Our granddaughter is in your mother's class at school. None of us are happy about that, you know."

  "No," I said, "I didn't know." But certainly I did. I'd been hearing that sort of thing for almost a week.

  I had never met my mom's new principal, but I knew she didn't like him. And so I didn't either
. I knew they'd had run-ins, especially over some field trip to Lake Champlain in early September.

  Of course, my mom had had run-ins with his predecessor, too, but I always had the sense that my mom and Mrs. Dixon liked each other. Mrs. Dixon was considerably older than Mom, and I think she viewed her as a sort of charismatic but renegade daughter. She was always telling Mom that she didn't understand the politics of her job, and it mattered when a parent complained--even if the complaint was unfounded. I remember one spring Mom did a unit on the homeless in Vermont, and she took the class to a part of the Burlington waterfront that hadn't been gentrified and then to the emergency shelter. She had a social worker and the manager of the shelter with her all the time, but you can't be everywhere every second, and a homeless person on the waterfront said something off-color to a couple of the kids. Inevitably, some parents protested, and my mom and Mrs. Dixon had one of their chats.

  But I'm certain that their chat was, in the end, pretty amicable.

  Even if my mom and Mr. Frazier didn't get along, however, I always tried to be polite when he called. He was, after all, my mom's boss. By the time he phoned the Friday after New Year's, I was half expecting his voice on the other end of the line. It had been that kind of week.

  "She's not here," I told Mr. Frazier as I surveyed the little mountain of clothes on my bed. I was trying to decide what should stay in Bartlett, and what should come with me back to college. My dad was going to drive me there later in the month, so I could pretty much take whatever I wanted. "Should I have her call you?"

  "Is she still in Colorado?"

  I hadn't realized he knew she was there, but I shouldn't have been surprised. The whole town seemed to know.

  "Yup."

  "Does she return tomorrow or Sunday?"

  "Sunday."

  "Well, let me think. Even if she gets an early flight out of--what, Pueblo?"

  "Colorado Springs."

  "Of course. Even if she gets an early flight out of Colorado Springs, she won't be home until dinnertime."

  "Actually, it will be after dinner. I think her plane lands around eight-thirty."

  "And that's if there aren't any delays ..."

  "Right."

  "I'll be up late. Would you ask her to call me, please?"

  "I'm sure I'll talk to her tonight. Want me to have her call you tomorrow?"

  "From Colorado? Yes, absolutely. That's a great idea."

  "Any message?"

  "No. Just have her call me. It's important."

  At dinner that night, I told my dad and Patricia that Mr. Frazier had phoned.

  "He sounded a little annoyed," I said.

  "I'm sure he is," my dad said, slicing a ravioli in half with his fork. "He's the new guy in town, he has to establish himself. And your mother's little escapade has made his life very difficult."

  "But don't worry, Carly," Patricia said quickly, "there's not a thing he can do."

  "Why is he angry?" I asked. "Because people are talking about Mom and Dana?"

  "Oh, some are doing more than talking. There's a petition going around. Some parents of her students started it when they heard your mother and Dana had gone to Colorado--and why."

  I felt my stomach get a little queasy, and so I stopped eating. "What kind of petition?" I asked.

  Patricia did something she almost never did: She took my hand. She put down her fork and she reached over and rested her hand gently on top of mine. "Your mother is part of the teachers' association," she said to me, looking me straight in the eye. "The school wouldn't dare do anything stupid. Between the association and the ACLU--between the association, the ACLU, and me--they would face considerable opposition."

  I nodded. "Is her job in jeopardy?" I asked.

  "Just your house, sweetheart," my dad said. "Just your house."

  "Will!"

  "That was a joke, I'm sorry."

  "It was an idiotic one," Patricia told him. "All I think your father meant is that Glenn said he thought your mother and Dana would be better off if they didn't live smack in the center of the village."

  "He wants us to move?" I asked, looking at my dad.

  "Oh, probably not seriously. But it's clear he doesn't want every parent in the community watching Dana prance around town in a dress and then go home to your mother's house," he said. "People rarely want their children taught by someone they think lives with a sexual deviant. And so Glenn's concerned--not without cause--that parents will get mad, and it will affect their kids' schooling. After all, if Mom and Dad don't approve of the teacher, what are the chances the kids will--especially at their age?"

  "That's nonsense," Patricia said. Her fingers were still upon mine.

  "Maybe," he said to Patricia, "but it's clear he'd prefer they lived elsewhere."

  "So your ex-wife and her partner should move twenty or thirty miles out of town--Allison should give up the house she's lived in for two decades--just to make Glenn Frazier's life a little easier? That's asinine. Completely asinine."

  "Well, that's how he feels."

  "But they won't fire her," I said. "Right?" I wasn't surprised by how nervous my voice sounded, but I wasn't pleased.

  "They can't," Patricia reassured me. "Not over something like this. They won't even try."

  "But her life is about to get even more complicated, Carly," my father said, "and you might as well understand that. There are a lot of parents who aren't happy about this, and I don't think it will end with a petition. Some are planning to come to school Monday morning. And Glenn--Glenn and the school board, really--will have to do something to appease them."

  "They will not," Patricia said.

  "Oh, maybe not legally," my father said before taking a big bite of the doughy pasta. "But politically they will. That's a fact."

  "What does the petition say?" I asked.

  "I haven't seen it," he said. "But I think it asks the school to insist upon a certain basic morality from the teachers it hires."

  "Allison and Dana have done nothing immoral," Patricia said.

  "I agree. Unnatural, yes. Immoral, no."

  "Will! What is your problem?"

  "Look, I'm every bit as appalled as you are. And, unlike you, I also have to live with the fact that I was the one who told Glenn where Allie was going--"

  "You told him?" Patricia said, and she glared angrily at my dad for a long second.

  "Yes, I did. But it wasn't like I was some confidential informant. I ran into the guy at the supermarket. I'd just seen Allie and Dell, and I happened to mention the trip in passing. I think I figured he knew."

  "You think?"

  "For God's sake, if he didn't hear about it from me, he would have heard about it from someone else." He turned to me and said, "The bottom line, Carly, is that there are some very conservative elements in this town. At the very least, every kid whose family goes to that fundamentalist church in East Medford is going to be home-schooled if Dana doesn't move out."

  I considered reminding him that Mom was an excellent teacher and had taught at the Bartlett school almost as long as I'd been alive. I considered mentioning that there had to be hundreds of people who would be vocal on her behalf--both parents of the kids she had taught, and the kids themselves, now grown into young adults.

  But those sentiments seemed both obvious to me and naive. Nevertheless, I decided that I'd talk to Molly Cochran after dinner and see what she could tell me. Molly was one of my mom's best friends, and she'd started teaching six-year-olds at the school almost the same year that my mom had started teaching the kids who were eleven.

  Then, once I knew what Molly knew, I'd call my mom in Colorado.

  We sat on the couch by the woodstove, and Molly showed me class pictures.

  "Lord, Chrystal's in sixth grade now," she said, shaking her head. "I adored Chrystal. Still do. She would bring me a drawing every day when she was in my class, including these absolute horrors she made with something called Blush Art."

  "Blush Art?"

&nb
sp; "It's just like it sounds. Little pads of cosmetic blush you pat on your paper. It comes with stencils, so the pictures are pretty generic. Unicorns. Cakes. Women with very big hair. The problem is that the stuff stains, and so the year I taught Chrystal, I had a dry-cleaning bill that rivaled the national debt. Humongous. Just humongous. But I love that girl, she is incredibly sweet."

  "And her parents are behind the petition?"

  "I don't know if they're behind it. But I promise you they've signed it."

  Molly lived in a house that had once been a barn, on land that had once been a cornfield. She lived about a mile and a half outside of the village, so I had borrowed my dad's car and driven there. And though I had called first, Molly and her husband had two boys in elementary school--one in the second grade and one in the fourth--and so their house was completely trashed, despite the warning they'd had that I was coming. Every time either of us moved, we were gored by one of the plastic aliens her kids had left in the cushions of the couch.