Adi

 

BY DAVID WEINSTOCK

ou never forget your first femi-
Ynist. Mine was Deborah Lyons,

who as early as 1972 got me to
stop saying “chick.” And one day, when I
uttered the phrase “opposite sex,” she
mused, “Opposite sex? I prefer to think of
it as the adjacent sex.” V

Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir
Shes Not There, in which a 40-year-old
man takes a gigantic side-step into the
adjacent sex, is an important book for
several reasons.

First, it is a first-hand account by
an accomplished literary artist, not a
ghost-written bio. Renee Richards’ mem-
oir Second Serve was “with” John Ames;
Georgina Beyer’s memoir was “as told
to” Cathy Casey. Christine Jorgenson,
America’s first famous male-to-female
transsexual, employed two different

ghostwriters for her “autobiography,” one _

of whom quit in a huffi historian Susan
Stryker told me.

To find a comparable book,
you’d have to go back to Jan Morris’
Conundrum. But Boylan is from a new
generation, one that wants‘ different things
from both manhood and womanhood, and
alters the meaning of sex-change as well.

. And second, it’s a true story, told
with honesty that does not spare the teller.

Boylan, both before and after the
transition from James to Jennifer, is an
acclaimed comic novelist, a tenured col-
lege professor, a husband and a father.
Her memoir enlarged my already-great
respect for the author, for transsexuals,
and even for Oprah Winfrey.

Say what you will about Oprah,
she called this one exactly right. Devoting
her entire May 6 hour to Jenny Boylan,
she titled the show “The Husband Who
Became a Woman,” which nails it: of the
several life transformations Boylan dram-
atizes in She is Not There — boy into man,

' man into woman, daddy into “Maddy,”

private person to out-there activist — it is
the relationship with wife Grace, with all
the wrenching strain his changes brought
to her and the family, that provides the
book its drama and poignancy.

Born in 1958, James Boylan
grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. By
age three, he “knew” he was really a girl
— but greeted that knowledge with fero-
cious skepticism. “The awareness that I
was in the wrong body, living the wrong
life, was never out of my conscious
mind,” Boylan writes in the memoir.
“And at every moment I lived my life, I

countered this awareness with an exasper- I

ated companion-thought, namely, ,‘Don’t
be an idiot. You are NOT'a girl. Get over
it.’ But 1- never got over it.” C
Young Jim fantasized about tak-
ing a rocket ship,_to “Girl Planet,” where

boy astronauts automatically change gen-
der and became happy. More realistically,
he only ever saw one possible way out of
his private fix.

One day, at age 10, while taking
a big figuring-out walk along the Jersey
shore, he climbed out on a jetty to watch
a hurricane blowing up. “And then I ,
thought, ‘Maybe you could be cured by
love.’ Even then I was aware of how
corny this sounded. Still I believed it. If I
were loved deeply enough by others, per-
haps I would be content to stay a boy.”

Then and there, he vowed to
hold out for love, and kept the vow until
he could no longer. Though cross-dress-
ing privately throughout adolescence and
his twenties, he made no moves toward
gender reassigmnent, rejecting the advice

. of two therapists who felt it would be the

acent

The Journey fro

 

careers, had two sons, and seemed to the
entire world to be the most fortunate of
couples. Grace became a therapist; James
became a celebrated author and a popular,
tenured professor at Colby College.

But, as the therapists had warned
James, being transgendered doesn’t sim-
ply go away. It persisted, and became
more insistent. When James finally decid-
ed, at age 40, that he could go no further
as a man, he felt he had to act.

Boylan, both before and after the
transition from James to Jennifer,
is an acclaimed comic novelist,
a tenured college professor,

  a husband and a father.

sanest path.

Afier college, he worked in pub-
lishing in New York City, then took a
graduate degree at Johns Hopkins — and
kept looking for the love-cure. This hope
of love sustained him, but also raised the
stakes on his eventual, and inevitable,

I transformation.

Finally he met Grace, fell in

_ love, abandoned _his stash of women’s
clothing in atrash bag outside his

Baltimore apartment, and married, with a
sense of redemption and relief. The cou-
ple moved to Maine, established their

Jim attempted to tell Grace about
his situation. At first — we don’t know
exactly because he properly draws a cur-
tain of privacy over the exact words of
some key conversations — he couldn’t
quite tell the whole truth, apparently
revealing only that he wanted to cross-
dress. No biggie, she seems to have
responded, everybody has a hobby, let’s
go shopping. Soon James owned a few
outfits that looked nice on him, things he
can wear in private and with Grace, who
is remarkably tolerant.

But transsexuality is no hobby,

 

fsex:

and cross-dressing satisfied neither his
inner woman nor his need to be honest
with his soulmate. When he told all,
Grace was crushed and broken.

Is it any worse to lose your hus-
band to gender change than to death, or
garden-variety divorce, or even being A
gay? We all know couples who split up
because, in some sense, “You’re not the
one I married.” But clearly, gender
change is worse, for all parties, and the
memoir lays bare the reasons why.

Boylan tells her own story, and
that of her family, in a sequence of dra-
matic scenes. James, Jennifer and Grace
are vivid, attractive-characters; young
sons Luke and Patrick are quirky and
adorable. Boylan’s closest male friend,
the no;/elist Richard Russo, becomes part
of the family, traveling with the Finney A
Boylans to Dr. Schrang’s clinic in
Wisconsin, and helping Boylan under-
stand all he is going through. (Russo pro-
vides an afterword to the book,
“Imagining Jenny.”)

The memoir is gripping; Oprah
read it in a single sitting, and so did I.
The scenes ring true, although a few bear
unmistakable marks of novelistic inven-
tion. Details have been altered, both to
sharpen the tale and to cushion the enor-
mous impact on several bystanders in
Boylan’s life. Much is hidden, but what is
revealed is more real pungent, poignant
real stuff than we are usually privileged
learn about one another, and it sheds light
on our own.

To hear Boylan tell it, wanting to
be a woman was an issue of gender iden-
tity, and was never about sexual attraction
to men. Yet, looking forward, she cannot
rule that out. Her new apparatus, she
finds, is functional. “Dr. Schrang’s hope
that I would be orgasmic, post-surgery,
had been fulfilled. The sensation — which
I’d cautiously, curiously produced all on
my own — was like nothing I’d experi-
enced, and yet sure, it was familiar.
...[W]hat it reminds me of, more than .
anything else, is the difference between
Spanish and Italian.” .

There’s adjacency for you. We
all wear bluejeans, we all cook dinner,
we all havejobs, we all care for our chil-
dren. It all needs to be done and we all do
it all, regardless of gender. If male breasts
are only one gram of Premarin away from
female breasts, if an inside-out penis
makes a serviceable and orgasmic vagina,
what’s the diff‘? What’s the big deal?

But of course, it’s still a very big
deal. And if you want to learn more about
the terms of the deal, read Shes Not
T here. 7

David Weinstock lives, writes and teaches
in Middlebwy.