Читать книгу This One Looks Like a Boy - Lorimer Shenher - Страница 11

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RENÉE

(1975–1979)

THE HEADLINE SCREAMED: “WOMEN’S WINNER WAS A MAN!”

I huddled over the evening sports section as I read, afraid someone in my family would notice my keen interest. Devouring the sports section wasn’t unusual for any athletics-minded twelve-year-old and no one in my family batted an eye, but I was so scared of being discovered that I grabbed the paper and ran with it into the bathroom, locking the door. Eyes wide, I absorbed the details of the story: A successful middle-aged New York doctor had voluntarily gone through sex reassignment surgery from male to female and then competed in the 1976 La Jolla Tennis Tournament Championships as a woman. There are other people like me.

My breath came in short gasps. I needed to know everything about what Renée Richards had done. That night and the next, I did not sleep. Determined to learn more, I decided to search the library for information. Our junior high school library contained a substantial and varied collection of books; maybe I could find something there. I searched, using the Dewey Decimal System card catalog as I’d been taught, but information on Renée Richards eluded me. I had no idea what words to use in my search other than her name. Shame dogged my every step, and with it a misguided worry that Melvil Dewey—the man my peers and I had learned created the system—would be disturbed that I was using his book classification system to find writings on such a sordid topic. My familiar sense of myself as unlovable and downright wrong hovered nearby, accompanying me whenever I allowed myself to think too much about pursuing a sex change.

The librarian, an older woman I’d always found to be helpful in the past, approached me in the stacks.

“Can I help you find something, dear?” she asked.

“No, thank you,” I answered, thinking, Would you call me dear if you knew about me?

“Is it about sports?” she persisted gently, as we stood in front of a shelf of sports books.

“Yes! Hockey!” I exclaimed. “I’m looking for a book about Bobby Orr.”

“Hmm. Let’s see.” She picked through several books before pulling out Bobby Orr and the Big Bad Bruins. “Here’s one.” She handed it to me. I pretended to study it carefully, although I’d read it before.

“Perfect. Thank you.” I followed her back to the circulation desk.

“I think there’s a newer one about him out, but we don’t have it. Check the bookmobile, though. It comes tomorrow.”

I slept fitfully that night, reliving my failure over and over in my mind. I knew I should have asked her if she had anything on sex changes, but felt certain she’d know it was because I wanted one. I formed a plan and slept for a couple of hours.

The bell rang and I ran out to the bookmobile, which came to our school once a month with its ever-changing variety of books. The converted yellow school bus repurposed as a library on wheels was jammed full, with little space for browsing. I summoned my courage and approached the librarian, a younger man of about thirty. I blurted out my prepared statement.

“Um, I’m doing a project in school about discrimination in sports and I saw this story about a man who changed into a woman and how they let him—her, I guess—play in a tennis tournament. I’m wondering if her life story is here?” I allowed my eyes to meet his. “Her name is Renée Richards.”

“That’s a toughie,” he answered, walking down the aisle, looking up and down. He stopped and thumbed through a section of books. “These are the sports biographies, and I don’t see anything here on a Renée Richards, but …” he walked to another section and pulled out a hardcover book. “This might give you some good information,” he said, passing it to me. I read the title: Christine Jorgensen: A Personal Autobiography. I frowned, looking at the cover, which featured a photo of a woman’s face, framed by the remnants of a torn piece of paper. It felt as though he were passing me a message in code. I thought he might tap the side of his nose like I’d seen in a spy movie once. He didn’t.

“Okay, I’ll take this one.”

Huddled underneath the covers in bed that night, flashlight in hand, I read the story of Christine Jorgensen, a Danish American former US Army serviceman and one of the first people to undergo gender reassignment surgery, in the early 1950s. I don’t know what shocked me more: that such liberation was possible or that it had happened over twenty years before I read about it.

I closed the book. I lay there, a Catholic kid in mid-1970s Calgary, tears streaming down my face. I can never do it. This will never happen for me. I berated myself silently for opening this can of worms, for picking this scab, for allowing myself to hope—even for the briefest of moments—that my life could be set right. It felt like I’d opened a gift meant for someone else. I couldn’t figure out which hurt more: enduring the jolts of disappointment after glimpses of happiness or burying my dream of living the life I wanted.

MADAME DUBOIS COUNTED out rectangular name plates made of card stock and handed them out to the rows of students in my French class. I sometimes imagined Madame Dubois being the same person as my maternal grandmother, Marie Antoinette Royal, or “Toni,” as she was known to those closest to her, who had died of cancer when I was six. I vaguely remembered her kindness toward me, her teaching me French words. Still, I didn’t pick up much French before she passed away. Most of us in this class were beginners, but we had learned the basics, such as colors and numbers, quickly. Soon, the paper cards made their way down the rows, and I took mine.

“Alors, students,” she began, “we will now make ourselves name plates to announce our French names.” Murmurs of excitement and uncertainty filled the room.

“Ah, bon,” she smiled. “It is exciting, non? You will address each other in this class using only the first name you choose for yourself today. This is your French name. Votre prénom Français.” She walked to the overhead projector and turned it on to reveal a slide of French names—one list of boys’ and another of girls’. Immediately, the name “Sebastian” drew my attention. Just as quickly, I realized I couldn’t choose it. Resignedly, I focused on the girls’ list, hoping for a neutral name like Kelly or Lindsay, but there were none to be found. My friend Lynn leaned over and whispered in my ear.

“Hey, you can use ‘Lorraine.’ You’re lucky.” I shook my head, indicating I disagreed. “How come?” she frowned.

“I’m gonna go for something different,” I said casually. Internally, I recoiled the way I always did at the mere sound of my first name, which I’d informally shortened to Lori years before. My parents had often told the story of how they’d been certain throughout Mom’s pregnancy that I would be a boy and had already chosen Peter for my name. When I was born, they’d briefly considered Joanne—Dad’s name was Joseph and Mom’s was Suzanne—or Josephine, after Dad’s twin sister. But, in one of those name-your-baby parenting fails, they inexplicably settled on Lorraine, despite neither of them knowing anyone named Lorraine.

I wrote “Renée” on a scrap of paper and passed it to Lynn. She raised her eyebrows and nodded approval. She wrote on the paper and passed it back to me. I opened it to read “Brigitte.” I gave her a thumbs-up.

Our family friends, the Smiths, had a daughter named Renée far younger than me. A shy, quiet blonde, she struck me as a girl I should model myself after—except for the blonde part, since my hair was sandy-colored. My plan also didn’t work in another key way: Renée Smith wasn’t into sports.

I made an executive decision that my Renée would be a sporty girl. In the ’70s of my youth, it was clear to me there were very rigid definitions of girl and boy; female and male, but I didn’t fit into either of them. I observed others working hard to fit into them, and I saw a few examples of boys in my class who were brutally treated because they were “soft” or “weak” in comparison to the rough and tumble “normal” boys. There was no space to be a sporty girl or a sensitive boy in those days. Gender roles were etched so deeply into my peers and me from birth that I still carry many of those attitudes with me today and have to work to confront them.

While I knew that hobbies and activities didn’t make a person a boy or a girl, as a boy going through life as a girl I felt I had to pick my spots. Making my Renée sporty was a political move, my stab at a world I thought should exist for me to test out, even if ultimately it might not end up a fit for me. Negative attention made me intensely uncomfortable and aware of my thin skin, and I feared that if I acted like myself, I’d be discovered as the imposter I was. On the other hand, I had a sense that I needed to act bravely so I could feel less miserable in those days of severe gender rigidity, and sports were my salvation. Such was the balancing act of my young life.

“Renée” would be my alter ego; I would become Renée. She would represent the girl I wished I could be, the girl comfortable in her gender—comfortable as a tomboy or as androgynous—who would make all the female puzzle pieces fit and take away my longing. I wrote “Renée” on the card and added a small drawing of a horse, the way I’d seen other girls in class do. As Renée, I would fake it until I made it.

THE DESMONDS WERE my parents’ good friends and went to our church. Mr. Desmond worked as a school principal in the Calgary Catholic School District along with my father. The two eldest of their five children—Kerry, a close friend and classmate of my brother Jake, and their only daughter Laura, a year behind me—went to our school. I didn’t know any of them well, but what I did know was that they were always kind, circling the periphery of my community and family. I’d never had reason to give them much thought until one Sunday at church.

The midcentury modern architecture of St. James Church appealed to me. I imagined the smooth, white vaulted ceilings, skylights, and few ornate furnishings to be the result of the mysterious Second Vatican Council I’d heard my parents discussing at various times—an apparently tectonic shift in papal ideology that I didn’t grasp, nor care to have anyone explain to me. I did know that it had loosened some of the rules we were supposed to live by—we seemed to have fish less frequently for Friday dinner, for one. The Church remained a puzzle to me and older, dank, traditional cathedrals only reinforced the feeling of darkness and mystery surrounding the religion I was born into.

I thought religion was supposed to be a comfort in people’s lives, but ours didn’t feel like that to me. Shadows and dark corners lurked everywhere, literally and figuratively, a powerful energy I sensed whenever I entered those “holy” confines. The musty smell and the slight chill in the air gave the impression that these interior spaces were not for exploration by outsiders. Even as a very young child, I knew I was an outsider.

The Desmonds sat in their usual pew one section to the left of where my family regularly sat. While some parishioners never strayed from their preferred places, we drifted around a general area about a third of the way back from the front, with no strong preference for either side—squatters among the permanent pew residents.

I felt a small pang of annoyance as I watched the altar boys, some of them friends of mine, lighting candles. I found church excruciatingly boring. I hated figuring out what to wear and thought perhaps wearing the cassock of the altar boys would get rid of that hassle, as well as saving me from boredom during Mass. Our church didn’t allow altar girls, which I thought was stupid, because other Catholic churches in Calgary did. But what I really wanted was to be an altar boy.

“Did you see Laura’s new haircut?” Mom whispered to me during the opening hymn. I located the Desmonds and saw Laura sporting a short, stylish cut—the sassy wedge many young girls and women had recently begun to wear, popularized by figure skater Dorothy Hamill. My stomach tightened. Sitting there with my shoulder-length, quasi-shag mop, reminiscent of mid-1970s David Cassidy, I knew exactly where this would go. For the rest of the service, I stole glances at Laura, my newly-appointed nemesis. It took exactly four seconds into our drive home for my mother to mention it.

“That is a really smart haircut Laura has there,” she said. Faint, distracted murmurs of affirmation came from the others.

“Mm-hmm.”

“You see a lot of girls with that sexy, short pixie these days,” she went on. I cringed. My mom had used the words sexy and pixie—horrifying in and of themselves. Pixie reminded me of some fairy or sprite and sexy sounded plain yucky referring to a girl my age. I waited for what I knew had to be coming. She turned in her front passenger’s seat to look at me in the back.

“You should get your hair cut like that,” she said with authority. “It would draw attention away from your chin.”

“I like mine how it is,” I replied. And what’s wrong with my chin? I refused to give her an opportunity to tell me. The truth was, I didn’t love my hairstyle; I wished it were shorter, but people already frequently called me him and he. This frustrated and upset me, not because they were wrong, but because I knew they were right. If I cut my hair short, I’d look so much like a boy that the shame I felt over the universe’s big screwup would kill me. Renée wouldn’t cut her hair that short.

Shame and embarrassment burned on my face enough as it was. I don’t want to be seen as a girl who looks like a boy, I want to be seen as the boy I am. When others acknowledged that boy in me, a split second of euphoria gave way to a crushing weight of disappointment and injustice. It seemed easier to avoid being put in that position and try my best to look like a girl, since my parts seemed to dictate that that’s what I was.

“It’s smart and sporty; you’d find it much easier to take care of,” Mom pressed.

“Yeah, no thanks.” She turned back to face the road.

“I think a pixie cut would really suit you,” she continued. I stared out the window, a giraffe in a world of barnyard animals.

Over the next year, I saw Laura Desmond and her haircut everywhere. Her hairdo bore the hallmark of my failings, looming large as the symbol of my gender dysphoria. If I saw her in the school hallway, I’d duck into the washroom or linger in the gym to avoid her. Her hair became the token of all that I feared because I knew that cutting my hair the same way would reveal my hidden shame to the world. It seemed so pointless. There’s nothing I can do to fix this.

“Do you want to go to Mass tonight with me or tomorrow morning with Dad?” Mom asked a few weeks later. Saturday evening Mass was a welcome recent development, giving me a fifty-fifty chance of avoiding Laura Desmond each week. I began my mental calculations. Were the Desmonds likely to be there? How often have I seen Laura at Saturday Mass? Is it better to go with Dad because he never mentions Laura’s hair?

“I think I’ll go tomorrow,” I replied.

“I thought you liked going on Saturday.”

“I do, it’s just that …” I glanced at the dog lying in his usual spot on the floor. “Riley hasn’t had a walk today and I thought I’d take him before dinner.” Mom frowned slightly at the dog.

“Fine, as long as you go to church.” She grabbed her purse and walked down the stairs and out to the garage.

THE ANNUAL BACK-TO-SCHOOL shopping trip with my mom to Calgary’s Chinook Centre Mall filled me with anxiety and despair, and featured more than a few shouting matches in the clothing aisles over what clothing was appropriate for me to wear. We both agreed that this year, the summer before tenth grade, would be the last time she would take me shopping. Next year, I could go on my own and choose what I wanted.

Secure in the knowledge that I only had to get through this one last trip, I endured Mom’s snide remarks and sarcastic comments about the wrongness of the clothes I preferred, focusing on my pending freedom. Mom patrolled one side of the aisle separating boys’ and girls’ wear, me the other, each defending our chosen theater of war. As I picked out boys’ Levi’s and sweaters, Mom spoke up, her tone overly practiced and a little shrill in an attempt to sound casual. “We should probably get you a little training bra, something with some support,” she said, eyes avoiding mine as she fingered some lace blouses.

“Uh, I don’t have any breasts,” I answered truthfully. “I don’t need one.” My body had been very slow to develop and I hadn’t even had a menstrual period yet. I wouldn’t until I was eighteen. This one. This one looks like a boy.

For the last several weeks I’d cursed myself daily after asking her why my chest hurt. I’d been climbing over a fence during a hide-and-seek game on our street—an intensely competitive nightly battle involving at least ten kids, spanning more than five summers—when my chest pressed against the wood as it always did and I felt some tenderness, a bit like sore muscles. Her excitement had shocked me. “Oh, that means you’re getting breasts,” she practically sang.

That same joyful, celebratory propaganda had dripped from a thinly veiled ad they showed us in school called “Now You’re a Woman” or something like that, made by Kimberly-Clark. All of the sixth-grade girls had been herded into a room to watch it, separated from the boys, who watched their own film. We were strictly warned not to talk to the boys about our film and they weren’t to discuss theirs with us. We were given sample packs of menstrual pads at the session’s end. Watching the film, I’d felt as grossly out of place as I now did in the women’s foundations department.

“Don’t be silly,” Mom scoffed. “You go pick one out—try it on first, you can’t tell by looking—and I’ll meet you over by the leotards.” She pressed twenty-five dollars into my hand and hustled off before I could protest. I stood there, frozen, certain her request was as ludicrous as sending my little sister off to buy a jock strap. It felt that foreign. Finally, I convinced myself that if I just sucked it up and grabbed a bra, I’d be out of there and she would be appeased, and I would never actually have to wear it.

I crept into the women’s foundations department like a ninja on an assassination mission, certain someone would stop me and demand credentials proving I was female. I imagined a salesperson calling the police, who would haul me, the creepy boy in women’s foundations, off in handcuffs. If I could have belly-crawled to avoid drawing attention, I would have. Women’s foundations? What the hell is a foundation other than a concrete structure holding up a building, or a charitable organization? I whispered under my breath. It’s underwear. It’s just frigging underwear.

I skulked around the bras—big ones, padded ones, flowered ones—and tried to find something intended for someone who didn’t need or want a bra. Glancing around me, I saw women—many at least sixty years old—with huge breasts to restrain, sifting through bins and boxes of undergarments. I imagined within this secret society there existed some mother/daughter bra-shopping ritual, and I swore I would never participate in this with a friend, let alone my own mother. Get me outta here.

Deciding the buxom grandmas were not going to lead me to training bras, I struck out for another wing of women’s foundations. With fewer mushroom colors and more bright tones, this seemed like a better place to find something my mom would approve of. Within minutes, I found myself in line waiting to pay for a tiny piece of white cotton sporting one microscopic flower between two minute triangles that were intended to cover breasts—thirty-two inches, no cups to speak of. I held it tucked under one armpit, dreading the moment I would have to speak to the cashier. I felt sorry for the aged woman in front of me as she struggled with her purse; hands shaking, back stooped, blue veins visible. Why can’t we hire people to do this? I was next up.

I heard two voices whispering behind me in line. Until now, I had deliberately avoided eye contact with anyone, but I glanced surreptitiously behind me to see who was speaking. As I strained my peripheral vision in ways I previously hadn’t known possible, I heard one of them say to the other, “What does he need with a bra, anyway?”

“I don’t know,” her friend—or more likely daughter—answered with a sniff. My cheeks burned from the fire of embarrassment and misunderstanding. I stepped up to the clerk, who eyed me with suspicion. Note to self: women’s foundations is a snake pit.

“Yes?” she raised her eyebrows at me, not looking at the mini Maidenform number in my sweaty hand.

“I’ll take this one,” I choked out.

“Is this a gift?” she asked with a smirk, pretending to be helpful.

“No.”

“Because if it is, I can give you a receipt so she can return or exchange it if it isn’t right,” she persisted, seeming to delight in my growing discomfort.

“It’s fine,” I said, handing her the scrunched-up twenty-dollar bill, avoiding her eyes and trying not to give her the satisfaction of knowing she got to me, although I’m sure I was unsuccessful. I grabbed my change and walked away quickly, shame boring a hole in my breastless chest as I prepared to meet my mother and endure her delight over my purchase.

Bonding over traditionally female activities—the “sisterhood,” as I thought of it—soon claimed most of my girlfriends. Backyard adventures and tennis matches with Melanie and Lynn changed to “talks” in their bedrooms, despite my unsuccessful efforts to steer the activities outside and toward sports. They preferred lounging around, sampling the newest Lip Smacker flavors, dabbing Love’s Baby Soft behind their ears, while thumbing through the latest TigerBeat magazine with its full, glossy, poster-sized inserts of the Bay City Rollers and Donny Osmond. Gone were the days when my friends wanted to sing like Laurie Partridge or shake a tambourine like Tracy; now everyone wanted to be Keith’s girlfriend. This sea change left me strategizing to maintain my cover.

Writing those words now, I’m struck by how conscious, how calculating my actions sound in hindsight. The tug of war between being my true self and fitting in with the group of girls to which I belonged—unfathomably, it seemed to me—raged constantly in my head. The effort to suppress my male self burbled like molten lava under the surface of my consciousness, consuming an enormous amount of my energy, but I had never known anything else.

“Have you got yours, yet?” Lynn asked me one day as we luxuriated in her room.

“My what?” I asked, lazily tossing one playing card after another at her garbage can.

“Your period—or, as Jolene likes to call it, ‘the curse.’” She nodded in the direction of her sister’s bedroom.

“Uh-uh, you?”

“Not yet.” Lynn sat up on the bed, pulling her legs in close to her chest. “I don’t really get the girls who act all excited about it, you know?” She frowned, shaking her head. “Like, you bleed all over the place once a month for the funnest years of your life. How is that exciting?”

“I dunno,” I mumbled. “It doesn’t seem too great to me, either.” I thought of my mother’s promise to get me “a little belt” when the time came, referring to the uncomfortable belts that had been used to hold the sanitary pads of her era. Mom was suspicious of tampons, which were new to the market. She expressed vague concerns about infections and protecting a girl’s virginity, both of which I discouraged her from elaborating on. How would I run or play in a belt? I had never summoned the courage to ask her, instead hoping I would magically be spared my period when the great cosmic error of my gender was discovered. I envisioned medieval buckles and locks, metal clanging against me as I skateboarded.

“Do you think other girls don’t want it?” Lynn asked earnestly.

“For sure,” I said, but the only person I was sure of was me. “I’d rather not get it at all.” But Lynn had made me aware of something I’d never considered: If regular girls like her didn’t want their periods, could there be more people like me than I realized? “Do you ever wish you didn’t get boobs?” I ventured.

“No way!” Lynn shouted, bounding off the bed to stand in front of her large mirror. She eyed her chest—already a 36C—appreciatively. “I’ll be able to nurse a whole family with these suckers!” Lynn often spoke of her wide hips and large breasts as perfect for childbearing—an unfathomable act I couldn’t imagine myself ever doing. I slumped deeper into the beanbag chair I sat in. She glanced at me, an afterthought. “Do you not want to get boobs?”

“I don’t really care either way,” I lied, trying to sound casual. “At this rate, it’s looking like I won’t, anyway.”

“Oh, you’ll get them,” she said reassuringly. “Every girl does, eventually.”

I sought solace with my boy friends, feeling secure in the way I belonged with them. Where other girls didn’t seem interested in playing with them, the boys continued to include me and never spoke badly of girls in front of me or made me feel like they didn’t want me there. I felt very protective of girls, knowing how it felt to go through life treated as one, even if I secretly wasn’t one. Some of the other boys in our neighborhood didn’t treat girls as kindly.

One year, Melanie and I shared a paper route. Every weekday after school and on Saturdays, we’d gather around our route manager’s garage awaiting the delivery of the Calgary Herald before loading our bags with papers and walking our routes under their heavy weight. All of the other paper carriers were boys, while Melanie and I were a team of two. I noticed how different these boys were from my friends when several of them dominated the conversation, spoke poorly of girls, and stuck to other off-color topics.

When I hung out with my friends who were boys, we’d ride Sidney’s backyard half-pipe for hours, hanging around talking skateboarding and trying new tricks. But as my middle school years drew to a close, so, too, did my place with the boys. One Sunday afternoon, I walked out of Sidney’s house after using the washroom and right into the middle of a conversation.

“Then she just …” Donald stopped mid-sentence when he saw me. Donald and I were neighbors, school peers, and church-mates and had played together since we were babies. Our siblings were friends and our parents close. He shuffled awkwardly, glancing at Rob, another lifelong friend and schoolmate. Sidney skateboarded rhythmically up and down the sides of the half-pipe, staring fixedly at his feet.

“What?” I asked, grabbing my board and standing on it. I knew he hadn’t been talking about me because there’d been something a little lurid in his tone, a gleam in his eye I knew I could not be responsible for.

“So, anyways,” Donald stammered, “there was a—well, so that’s what I’m gonna do my project on.” Rob nodded enthusiastically, playing along.

“Cool. That sounds rad!” he said.

“You think his school project is rad?” I asked. They nodded, too vigorously. I knew they hadn’t been talking about school. This was a weekend, and these were thirteen-year-old boys. My throat clenched a little and I felt like I might cry if I thought any more about what they could possibly be excluding me from. And so I got on the half-pipe. Sidney stepped off to watch me as I rode as if possessed, climbing higher and higher up the plywood, moving from fakies to rock-to-fakies to rail grabs and stalls. I pulled off moves I’d never nailed before.

“Whoo! Give ’er, Lor!” Rob yelled. I heard the others hooting their approval. They’re such good guys. They didn’t mean to exclude me; they have no idea I’m really one of them. My board thundered up and down the ramp, and I grabbed the top rail so often my hands became sore, my thighs burning. Still, I rode higher and harder. This is it, I thought. Nothing’s the same, everything’s changing. Finally, I began to slow, no longer fighting for height, resigned to gravity and my own physical limitations. Accepting what was.

“Holy, that was wicked,” Donald marveled as I stepped off the ramp. “You’re sweating like crazy!”

“You shredded,” declared the usually laconic Sidney.

“Yeah,” I shrugged sheepishly, grateful I was no longer on the verge of tears. “I should probably get going.”

“Me, too,” Donald said, kicking up his board. We said our goodbyes to the others and walked the several blocks back to our street, our conversation easy and uneventful. Almost like normal—but I knew it would never be this easy again.

That summer, the hormonal magma of my loosely associated group of boy and girl friends collided, creating new bonds and solidifying others. The games we played morphed from Easy-Bake Oven and football to truth or dare and a kissing game we dubbed “Races” where a pair of one boy and one girl would run around the yard we were gathered at and kiss when out of sight of the group. The pair would run off for a minute or two—from the backyard to the front and then back again—while the remainder of us sat around and talked, arousing no suspicion if a parent were to come outside for any reason.

No one forced anyone to participate, although, looking back on it, the game was rife with teenage peer pressure and performance anxiety. I may have been the only one who cared about running fast in between the make-out portions of the game. I once suggested we time the racing couple, but the others laughed it off, not believing I was serious. Lynn raced with Rob, Melanie with Donald, and I was paired with Alvin, a nice—albeit quirky—lifelong member of our gang with poor handwriting but surprising kissing prowess.

Until then, I had felt neutral and resigned about my own sexuality. Kissing Alvin produced a strange throbbing between my legs, but still, nothing about the experience made me want to be his girlfriend. I noticed boys and found them attractive, but much of my admiration lay in wanting to look like them. I really liked Donald, but this was based far more on mutual interests than attraction. When the time came, though, it seemed to me that he would be the logical boyfriend choice.

I was so sexually repressed and convinced that my attraction to girls was really admiration of their femininity that it never occurred to me that I might be a lesbian—I didn’t even realize that was a life option. I understood enough to know that lesbians were women who liked women, but I felt sure I was destined to become a man and a husband to a woman one day. My sexual longings were all focused on an imaginary future where I existed in a male body.

At that age, my friends and I were inhibited, sheltered Catholic kids. Sex rarely came up in conversation, even among my closest friends. We had no language to describe sexual orientation, that there might be options in terms of who we were attracted to, gender-wise; nor did we have any way of describing gender identity, one’s internal understanding of one’s own gender. Gender was never questioned; it was seemingly immutable for everyone but me. Lezzie and fag were slurs I occasionally heard in the schoolyard, but more as general insults than loaded put-downs.

I had never paused to consider what the life of a lezzie or fag looked like or meant for such people romantically. My imagination held them fixed in the schoolyard into infinity, stuck in a kind of purgatory of junior high taunting. In the Catholic, conservative Alberta of my 1970s youth, nobody talked about gay people, let alone any LGBTQ role models.

Meanwhile, transgender people were strictly the stuff of circus acts.