Q: Well, they put DES in pregnancy vitamins …
I know. That’s one of the issues we have to deal with now, when we ask people, “Did your mother take DES?” and they ask their mothers and they say, “No, they just gave me lots of vitamins.” But that’s what they called them; that’s how they marketed them to women. “Oh, these are just vitamins.” Some of them were more honest in saying, “This is to prevent miscarriage.” But some women were given DES who hadn’t even miscarried, in vitamins and so forth.
I was born and, supposedly … my father hates talking about this, but when I blasted them for the DES thing years ago he just sat stone-faced, no response, while my mother broke down and cried and wailed. But about twenty-five years ago—I was twenty-five at the time—he made a comment that during my circumcision, during my bris, they had noticed that there was something different with me.
Q: No more details than that?”
No. And they may not have had any more details because it is still the common procedure of pediatric urologists, which is the group that usually deals with this, to hush this up and to oftentimes not even speak to the parents and to make whatever corrections need to be made.
Q: But your parents were not aware that you had any surgery or procedure afterbirth?’
No. But I have scars, and have had urogenital problems my whole life. DES causes a host of problems, so I don’t know what they saw. And you’re talking about a bunch of older Jewish guys looking at a penis, so what do they know? They don’t look closely, they’re not doing an exam, so I don’t know. And there are many like me who just don’t know. There are scars, there are whispers, and that’s all you have. There are no records. They still don’t keep very good records. In some cases, they’ve burned the records. So, there’s a real problem.
My first physical problems manifested when I was twelve, in 1964. When I began bleeding on urination, and the hematuria [bleeding from the penis] progressed. It started off microscopically—obviously I didn’t know that—but it became a gross hematuria. I urinated blood.
Q: All the time, not periodically ?
All the time. And eventually, I got caught and my parents had to deal with it.
Q: You must have been scared to death?”
I thought I was menstruating, actually.
Q: Because by that point you were already aware of the gender issue?”
Yes, and I was twelve, and that’s what girls start doing. So I thought, in my confused mind, that I was menstruating. It turns out it probably was because I have a partial uterus, so it is biologically reasonable to think that at times I cramped and bloated and menstruated. Talk about bizarre—but this is intersexuality, so who knows? But a lot of this was during urination, and how many times do you urinate a day? Four or five times? You can imagine the fear. There was the anxiety and anticipation of pain that was worse than the pain.
Q: So this was also a painful urination?’
Extremely painful. It turned out, the diagnosis was urethral meatal stenosis, which means that the opening of the tip of the urethra was scarred down, closed down. It could have been scarred because of surgery that had been performed much earlier or it could have been some sort of overgrowth of tissue in that area due to DES. This has been recorded [in the data]. And I let this go on because I was scared to death about it. I had started cross-dressing when I was about eleven or so. I first felt like a girl, or like I should have been a girl, when I was about seven, but when I was eleven I started praying that my breasts would start growing and wearing my mother’s clothes, which finally fit me. I was her height, five-six or -seven, and I was just getting to the height where I could wear her clothes. And I would do that, and then forget to put them back exactly the same way, intentionally so that someone would notice. And they finally noticed and said, “You never do that again, or we’ll have you institutionalized at Creedmore.”
Q: So your parents’ response wasn’t “What’s going on with you? Why are you doing this?” It was “We’re going to put you in a mental institution “?
Yeah. “We don’t want to deal with this.” And then I started menstruating—this painful urination and hematuria—and I tried to hide it from them because I knew what their response was to this sexual thing, and stuff that comes out of the penis is sexual, and what the-hell do I know? I’m in a fever talking about God, and fearing God. I was preparing for bar mitzvah. And I remember one day I painted my nails, and my father freaked out. I wasn’t as bad as many, okay? I wasn’t one of those hypermasculine overcompensators or anything. I just learned to blend into the woodwork, just do my work at school and manage.
So this is going on, and I started bleeding even between urinations, and I had to try to wash out my underwear, and it’s so hard to get blood out, and I’m stealing money from my mother’s pocketbook to buy more underwear so she doesn’t see it. Eventually, I couldn’t keep it up. I was only twelve. What could I do? And they caught on. And they took me to a urologist, an Austrian fellow with a very heavy German accent, and he made some sort of diagnosis. The only thing that’s come down to me is the urethral meatal stenosis. No questions about DES, so far as I know. This was ’64, and I go to this urologist and he decides to treat me with this bizarre treatment that I have never in all my years as a physician been able to elucidate any better than I’m going to tell you right now. When I describe this to urologists today, they say, “What the hell was he doing? What was that?”
He had me lying down on a table, strapped down, with what I now know to be a fifty-cc syringe with a long cannula on it, filled with some sort of viscous black material. Viscous gook that he would then insert into my penis. And then he would just stand there, this big German guy—and remember, I’m only twelve; I haven’t had my growth spurts or anything, and he’s standing there injecting this into me. This was the most painful thing imaginable. And there was no sympathy, no nurse there, no feminine energy in the room. No explanation. Nothing. I went through this for four months. My parents have since pointed out that this was an attempt to expand my urethra. But they were never in the room; they were always outside. And there was no sympathy. None whatsoever. They never talked about it. “How do you feel? Can we get you some ice cream?” Typical stuff that kids would get if they were getting their tonsils out, but never anything. And I went through that for four months. And it didn’t work.
I’ve blocked most of this stuff out. It was just awful. I don’t want to think about it. And the German accent didn’t help. I was learning about the Holocaust at the time, and even though he was Jewish, that didn’t help. And of course, there were all those sexual associations that I was making, and that I guess everybody else was making, but no one talked about it. And I’m praying to develop breasts and I’m menstruating, and here they’re doing this to my penis. And finally they decided that they had to operate. So I was taken to surgery and operated on. I don’t know what was done, but I have a scar the length of my penis, along the dorsum of my penis. I think I was basically filleted open. I developed septic shock during that procedure. Of course I didn’t know it at the time, but my mother said, “We came back to see you after the surgery and you were missing and then we tracked you down and you were in the ICU and you had a fever of 106 and we thought you weren’t going to make it.” They freaked out. Of course, I don’t remember anything because I was in shock. I was in the hospital for three weeks, on IV antibiotics and eating lousy hospital food. It was the only time in my life that I ever developed an aversion to water. Forcing fluids. “You’ve got to drink the water.” I remember hating it, becoming nauseated by water.