Good, she said, this is progress, yellow on the spectrum is halfway between the blue and the pink. I thought that was very stupid, Neanderthal stupid, Cro-Magnon stupid, but I swallowed that back and didn’t say it. Maybe this isn’t for me, I thought.
As to the other question, I told her, I never had a train set. My brothers had one and I watched them play, though they were too old for toys. Also Scalextric cars, it was embarrassing, I mean, grow up. I was the much younger half brother, you see. Me, I had a pair of sandalwood animals to put in the bath because water released their perfume. A sandalwood elephant and a camel. I made up adventures for my sandalwood friends and each night there was a different bath-time story. What the elephant hid in his trunk, why the camel hated the desert, and so on. Maybe I should have written them down. I don’t remember most of them now. So, in answer to your questions, I suppose, if the choice is dolls or trains, well then, sandalwood animal dolls. I never dressed them up, however. I only told them stories and got them wet.
So we went on, she pushing, I pushing back. At a certain point I told her the story of my stepmother and the keys to the house. I admit it: the worst thing I ever did. I told the Professional so. I told her my regret. She wasn’t interested in regret, she went down the same road Riya was on when we had our fight and I got out of the car. Hatred was not enough to explain why I did that, she said. In the end we got to it. Suppose I suggest, she said, that you wanted to be the lady of the house. Suppose that I suggest that that was at the bottom of it. What’s your immediate reaction to that. So my immediate reaction was, boom!, I’m out of here, this isn’t going to work, and when I’m almost at the door she asks, quietly, what are you going to do instead, and I stop, my outstretched hand falls away from the doorknob, and I come back and sit down and I say, I guess maybe you’re right. So what does that make me. Who am I.
That is what we’re here to find out, the Professional said.
Chapter Two. I ask some more about the toys and colors. Once upon a time, I say, if a boy liked pink and dolls his parents would be afraid he was homosexual and try to interest him in boy stuff. I’m saying they might have doubts about his orientation but it wouldn’t occur to them to question his gender. Now it seems you go to the other extreme. Instead of saying the kid’s a pansy you start trying to persuade him he’s a girl.
Okay, she said, then are you gay? Are you physically attracted to other guys? No, I said. This is maybe the only thing I know I am not. Good, she said. So let us stop trying to untangle the motivations of imaginary parents and focus on the task in hand, which is you. If you are not a male homosexual are you a female homosexual?
What, I said.
Are you a lesbian, the Professional asked.
I’m not yet in transition and I am living with a heterosexual woman, I said.
In the first place we are not discussing your lover’s sexuality which may also be complex and which you may be simplifying to make it serve you better, but this is not the subject. And in the second place the question does not have to do with what you are doing but with who you are. It’s the difference between saying, I work as a pizza chef, and I’m a person who loves good food.
You’re weird, I told the Professional.
I am not the subject, the Professional said.
How can I be a lesbian, I protested, it’s physically impossible.
Why.
For obvious reasons.
So, two questions. The first question: have you ever felt attracted to a lesbian woman? To a woman who prefers to make love with other women?
There have been occasions, I said. One or two. I did not pursue them.
Why.
For obvious reasons. They would not have wished to sleep with me.
Why.
Oh come on.
Very well. Second question. What is a woman?
This is a mystifying question that suddenly makes me feel extremely foreign. I cannot imagine it being asked in most of the countries of the world. Is this something Americans have become confused about? Are you going to ask me about toilet facilities? Are you going to recall the banning of The Vagina Monologues at Mount Holyoke College?
Is this something you are confused about.
I know what a woman is. I just don’t know if I am one. Or if I want to be one. Or if I have the courage to become one. I am very much afraid I do not have the courage. In general, I am very much afraid.
Of what are you afraid.
The nakedness of the change. Its drama, the extremeness of the alteration, its appalling visibility. The gaze of others. The judgment of others. The injections. The surgery. The surgery above all else. This is natural, correct?
I don’t know the meaning of that word, natural. It is a word that has been misused for so long that it is better not to use it. Another such word is the word sex.
I live with someone who would agree with you.
Allow me to propose a sentence to you. “There is no such thing as a woman’s body.”
By which you obviously do not mean to say that there is no such thing as a woman’s body. Because there are women, that can’t be denied, and there are bodies, this is also objectively true, and the one is contained within the other. Ergo…
You have grasped my point, even as you argued with it. We exist and so do our bodies and we inhabit our bodies but we are neither defined by them nor confined by them.
And so we arrive at the mind-body problem. You propose that we should reject the idea that there exists one unifying reality, substance or essence, and so the separation of mind and body is impossible. This is monism and you don’t like it? You prefer Descartes and his duality. But is woman, then, or even female, a category of the mind alone? Is there no physicality to it? And is this noncorporeal gender, this disembodied nonphysical thing, incapable of change, even though by reason of being nonphysical it ought to be as mutable as smoke, as the breeze? Or are we in religious, or perhaps Aristotelian, territory, and gender, like mind, is a quality of the soul? I have been doing my reading. But this is hard for me to grasp.
I will put it simply. To be born with female genitalia and reproductive organs does not make you a woman. To be born with male genitalia does not make you a man. Unless you so choose. This is the proposition to which I am asking you to respond. That there is nothing definingly female about a vagina. Nor are you excluded from the female if you possess a male member. A trans woman with a penis is still a woman. Can you agree with this or not?
You mean I might not need to have the surgery.
The castration.
Even the word hurts.
Not unless that is what you choose.
So we’re back at this choosing.
I could propose you call it freedom. I could say, this is your right.
I know something about choosing. I am from a family that chose to transform itself. I chose the name by which you call me. I chose to leave the world that made me to come to a world in which maybe I could make myself. I’m in favor of choosing. I have already been transformed once by this choice I made. But.