And again, nobody ever talked about this. My penis was bandaged up. I had a Foley [catheter] in for the longest time. It was just unspoken. It’s very reminiscent of the way women were treated if they had breast cancer. This was a big secret. In the Jewish community it’s called a “shanda,” a shame. You don’t talk about it. You go hide. You take care of it but you don’t talk about it. My grandmother died of breast cancer. She was so ashamed that she did nothing about it. It actually infiltrated her skin. I had to go to Africa to see the disease’s natural history like this! This happened in the United States of America fifty years ago. And it’s like that kind of silence … “This is sexual and so we’re not going to talk about it.” And nobody talked to me about it. I didn’t even have psychiatric consultations. Nobody. It was ignored.
Q: Did you in some way connect your feelings about being a girl and think that it was somehow related to this physical problem, like it was a punishment?’
Well, it was more of a religious thing. I thought this was a punishment from God for my feelings. I remember my parents bringing me my homework and I had half-Hebrew and religious studies and half-secular studies, and I’d work even harder to try to get it better. There’s a phrase in the early-morning prayers that the Orthodox still say: “Blessed art Thou, Lord our God, King of the Universe, for not making me a woman.” Somebody said once, I don’t remember who, that having to repeat that on a daily basis was like swallowing crushed glass. And here I am, top of my class, and I know all the rituals and routines, and I’m being forced to say this but I know that I’m living a lie. But I couldn’t talk to anyone about it. They would have totally freaked out. You just didn’t discuss these things.
But those three weeks in the hospital were hellacious. I felt like I was bad and that there was something very wrong with me. Luckily, my way of coping was just to work harder. I never did drugs, I never did alcohol. And I grew up in that era [the sixties]! I was a control freak; that’s how I dealt with it. I was scared to death at letting myself go because I saw what was happening with my friends, and they looked happy and carefree and so on but they would say things when they were stoned that they would regret later, and I couldn’t let anybody find out about this. I couldn’t let anybody know. So I became sort of like Newt Gingrich—very uptight, very serious. I grew a mustache and, after a couple of years at Cornell, in the early seventies, I let my hair grow. But for the most part I’ve been in deep cover, protective coloration, all of my life. I couldn’t let on. I’ve never smoked grass, can you believe it? I smoked opium once, in Thailand, and it did nothing for me. I had to do something because my wife was provoking me. I was too straight.
But get this, the surgery didn’t work. A month later, I was bleeding again. I got out of the hospital in June. I finished the year at school. I was thirteen. I had my bar mitzvah. I was actually bleeding during my bar mitzvah. I came out, and because of my illness my parents hadn’t made any plans for the summer. I had been going to day camp, which was very common in Queens in those days, and they had to hustle to get me in, and because it was late there were no slots in my age group, so I was in a group of fifteen-year-olds instead of thirteen-year-olds. Boy, you talk about somebody who just went through this profound surgical/medical experience relating to sexuality and getting thrust in with kids two years older! The girls … I lusted to be like them, but I couldn’t. I was just this little nerd, you know, who was getting picked on by the guys all the time because I wasn’t with it, and I had a small penis, and everything like this.
Q: They teased you about your penis ?
Oh yes, because we had to undress; we went to public swimming pools and we had to get undressed.
Q: So after everything you’d just been through, you had these older boys mocking you?
And I wanted to be with the girls, and I couldn’t. Because if you’re a boy, you don’t go with the girls. And I had to go to the boys’ locker room to change. We had to go three times a week, and I wanted to die every time. I remember they had a high board, and I used to be a pretty good diver, and I’d think, “I just want to do this wrong just so I don’t have to do this again.” It was awful. I remember standing with my body turned so that nobody could see me. Because I had my scars and stuff too. It looked bad. And I think it [the penis] was relatively small anyway, but I was post-op. And then I had to go back to that schmuck and get that treatment again! And I guess it worked that time, because it [the bleeding] stopped by the end of the summer. It was the most hel-lacious summer … year of my life.
But I coped. I had to cope. And I became a control freak and I became an academic superstar and a topflight surgeon and everything, and I kept on till I was thirty-eight, and then I crashed.
But at that time, I came out of it and I went to junior high and then high school. The whole time I felt like “I don’t belong. This isn’t me.” I had girlfriends. Back in those days, we used to pass each other notes, and if a girl signed it L-O-V-E, it meant it was time for sex, and if she signed it L-U-V, that meant “you’re a good friend.” And I had lots of LUVs. And I liked it, but I knew that I was supposed to be doing better than that, and I couldn’t.
I remember an incident when I was fourteen. This was when I first knew that I was transsexual. My religious school, the yeshiva, had an annual trip to Washington, and they take a photo of the entire group on the Capitol steps. I still have it somewhere in the basement. So I had a girl “friend.” She was a friend because we were the two tallest kids in the class and we always sat in the back, and we were friends for six years. And it was sort of understood that, well, we’re getting sexual, people, it’s time to take this friendship to the next step. So I would try to hold her hand, and she might hold my hand, but there was no chemistry. And we sat together on the trip, because you paired off, and I figured, “Well, I need to kiss her.” People are looking at me, they’re expecting this of me. The boys and the girls, and it didn’t work. I kissed her, but she pushed me away, and it didn’t work. And I was devastated that I was a failure.
At one point I didn’t want to leave the bus. We were touring the city and the class got off and went wherever they were going, and I stayed on the bus and just hung around, and I remember crying. Well, I’m one of those people that’s such an avid reader that I can’t sit still without a newspaper; I just have to be reading something. And I picked up a teen magazine—I forgot the name—and I was just leafing through it. Nothing that really interested me because I was more interested in Scientific American at the time, but there was an article titled “Sixteen— and I Had to Change My Sex.” It was like a sledgehammer. I devoured that in an Evelyn Wood—like speed-reading experience. I was like, “That’s me!” My God! I had been hiding it. I didn’t want anybody to know. And then all of a sudden, it was this kind of combination of exhilaration and fear. Sort of like the way I feel now. The possibilities. The knowing. Of course it wasn’t a medical article and the term “transsexual” wasn’t used in it. It was a like a lot of cross-dressing fiction, where there’s an element of coercion because you can’t admit that this is what you want, so this article was like “these girls caught me in panty raid and these girls forced me into it.” I don’t think it was quite that pornographic. But it was the name that captured me: “Sixteen—and I Had to Change My Sex.”