“You can’t call it intermediate, necessarily. A lot of men live their lives like that. They go on taking the estrogen until old age, sometimes.”
“So Fatima might have fit that shemale category? She might not have intended to go through with the operation, except in very favorable circumstances?”
Dr. Surichai frowned, tapped his desk. The desk was almost the only part of the office that wasn’t white or beige. Even the curtains on the windows were beige, the walls were white, Dr. Surichai wore a white coat and his sculpted plastic chairs were white. The desk was light too, of some kind of varnished pine, and the picture rails were picked out in gold. The clinic achieved perfectly the intermediate condition between a modern hospital and a world-class hotel.
“Look, I know what you’re getting at, but what can one do? This is the age of access to knowledge, the Internet. More and more people come already knowing the answers to the questions-they’ve looked everything up on the Net and they know all that I’ve just told you. So someone like Fatima is bound to say: Yes, I first wanted to be a woman at the age of three, and when I cross-dress I don’t go to the clubs to show off, I just go for a stroll in the park.”
“But Fatima was a street kid, a male prostitute with little education?”
Dr. Surichai shrugged. “If you’re asking do I think she was coached, the answer’s yes.”
“By whom?”
“Who d’you think? Like you say, she was a street whore, there was no way she was going to be able to afford me without help. The only way these creatures get the kind of medical treatment she got is by finding a sponsor. Thailand is the world capital of GRS-that stands for gender reassignment surgery. We have the microsurgery here, and some of the best surgeons in that field. People come from all over the world. Montreal is good and there are some fine hospitals in the States specializing in these techniques-Johns Hopkins is world class, of course, but the Anglo-Saxon world is terribly hung up and confused about this sort of thing. The psychological tests are terrifying and last three months. The whole induction process normally takes two years in the U.S. People don’t necessarily want to expose themselves to the men and women in white coats for that length of time, so they come to us. As a result we get the practice. We do a thousand operations where an equivalent clinic in the West would do only a hundred. Naturally our surgeons are more practiced. Also”-a smile-“Thai doctors are rather good at cutting people up. We’re the neatest in the world. Must be those Asian genes. All of which makes our clinic rather expensive to locals-dirt cheap to Westerners of course. Generally, the local business from the street goes down-market to one of the other clinics. The results in those places can be hit or miss.”
“You met him, then?”
This was the first question that seemed to surprise the doctor. “Met him? You mean the marine? You’re not kidding I met him.” I raised my eyebrows. “I saw more of him than I saw of my patient. When he wasn’t here consulting me, he was calling me up on the phone. I made the mistake of giving him my mobile number. I got calls in the middle of the night, as if I was some kind of G.P. or something.”
“Is that unusual?”
“The intensity was unusual. He was a very intense man. A perfectionist. Sometimes he didn’t seem like a soldier at all, but then I would think, Yes, that’s exactly how the very best kind of professional soldier would be, attending to detail, never letting anything slip by him. He had an eye, though, which you don’t usually find on a soldier. My god, he had an eye. He practically designed her, and I have to admit that by the end of the process, he got the perfect product. Without a doubt Fatima is my finest creation.”
“Also his creation?”
“Yes, that’s correct. He looked everything up on the Net, he got professional-class software for his damned computer and would come out with stuff I’d hardly heard of. He mastered all the medical Latin, understood every detail of the skin inversion technique I just told you about, and about the voice stuff too.”
“The voice?”
“That’s the real problem. Sexual organs are not so complex, they hardly vary between us and the other mammals, they’re one of the oldest organs, been around ever since God divided the world into male and female and we know a hell of a lot about them. They’re also rarely modified for social reasons. The voice is something else. I’m not a shrink, but if you want my opinion, the voice is far more important as an identity than whatever you’ve got between your legs. I could cut your bits off and make you the most wonderful pussy, but you wouldn’t be happy if you sounded like a man every time you opened your mouth. The Adam’s apple can be shaved-in Fatima’s case only a little shaving was needed, just a local operation with the teeniest little incision on the anterior neck.”
He pointed to his own Adam’s apple and moved a thumbnail down it for a quarter of an inch. “She was a natural really, hardly much of a bulge at all. I left her with the teeniest, weeniest concealable scar-she wore necklaces at first to cover it up, but it really did fit with the natural creases when it healed. I don’t think anyone would necessarily notice, or know what it was even if they did see it. But that didn’t deal with the voice, of course, only the cosmetics of the anterior neck. For the voice you need therapy, perhaps combined with a rather tricky little technique called ‘indirect cricothyroid approximation.’ Basically, you tighten up the vocal cords to produce a slightly higher range.”
A pause while Dr. Surichai seemed to examine my neck. “It’s a misperception that a woman’s voice needs to be higher than a man’s to sound womanly, however. Some women have very deep voices and manage to sound wonderfully female. Gender identification through voice is something we start to do from an early age, there are a million subliminal instructions we absorb. It’s the voice which really tells the world who and what we are, far more than genitals or even dress. Your voice, for example, Detective, is exactly modified for the purposes of your profession. You are polite and firm, you can intimidate without raising your pitch, I bet you know how to terrify merely by introducing a certain ice into your speech, no? Teaching someone to project the opposite sex through speech without sounding phony or like a drag queen is the most difficult task. Fortunately, it’s not a surgical problem.”
“Fatima speaks exactly like a woman, there’s nothing male about her voice at all.”
“Correct. You really have to admire Bradley for that above all things. Frankly, on the surgical front he was a pain in the neck. He got exactly the tits he wanted, but it took about twenty hours of discussions, drawings, diagrams, e-mails of nipple details-would you believe? To do a really good breast job you have to follow the natural contours of the torso-it’s really an aesthetic problem, so you need an artist’s eye. Bradley thought he was the only one who understood the laws of beauty, I was just a glorified butcher. He got on my nerves, frankly, although I have to admit he knew what he was talking about. With the voice, though, that was different. He put in a lot of work himself, used a tape recorder and sent her to a voice therapist after we tightened her vocal cords a notch. I think that’s where she learned such good English, the therapist was an American. Mainly, though, either the therapist or Bradley, or probably both, understood the aural contours of the female identity and transmitted it to Fatima. That’s her real secret, which people don’t usually spot. They’re fixated on her long legs, perfect tits and Afro-Modigliani face-they don’t realize that the full force of her sexuality doesn’t hit until she opens her mouth. That’s the trigger and the reinforcement, the signal which says: ‘This is a real woman.’ It still gives me a thrill when she speaks, that Negroid texture, and very, very female.”