The Transsexual's Sililoquy (Sorry William)

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune and remain a boy,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them? To die: to sleep;
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That the transsexual is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor's wrong, the proud woman's contumely,
The pangs of despised love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office and the spurns
That patient merit of the unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscover'd country from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience can make cowards of us all;
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action. - Soft you now!
The fair Woman! Nymph, in thy orisons
Be all my sins remember'd. 

Sorry William but I could not resist just a tiny 

little play on your words with the single greatest 

soliloquy ever written by the Master of masters of

the written word,

I can imagine myself saying this as people told me

you cannot be a girl because you are a boy and that

is just the way it is. Can I stay this road being 

hurt the way society scorns me? Should I live or 

should I die? Ending your life is a way out.  

It is a one way ticket with no assurance of happiness in its 

finality because if we truly had assurances that

death brought happiness everyone would kill themselves

but staying the course may bring that happiness or the possibility. 

Our will is tested but we must not 

give in.  We must fight on

The family members who don't understand that playing on

our conscience because they are hurt are cowards and we 

are cowards if we let them stop us. Find your resolve and 

march on and be the girl you should have been born.

I am open to any suggestions for changes to make it better.

I do so love Shakespeare!!! 

Flawed Studies on Transsexuals

I initially posted this as a response to some comments but I believe I would like to expand on my feelings and beliefs.

I guess my feelings about shrinks therapists and doctors is clouded by my experiences with them. As a child they treated me like I was some degenerate pervert and they actually told me I was more than once. Many of these shrinks pushed me into a position where suicide seemed my only option to stop the pain. The worst part is almost all of them knew where and how I could get help but that is another story.

Dr. Person was nice but her study with Ovesey was not aimed at understanding transsexuals but at effeminate homosexuals and what she described as homosexual transsexuals or kids like me that pressed the issue as children. Harry diagnosed kids like me as Type VI with total psycho-sexual inversion. Basically I believed I was a girl and I did even though in strict medical fact I was not.


I have friends that tell me I was intersex not transsexual but I if I was intersex I was also transsexual. I am unsure whether very low testosterone levels and elevated estrogen levels in a boy qualifies one as intersex. I do know the bits between my legs were boy and the neurons between my ears were all girl where that was appropriate. There was certainly no confusion over gender at birth but the rest of my body was decidedly different  from my brothers and other boys as I aged.

I faced a different kind of bias as I aged despite the face of basically a young girl from 10 on. I scored 1600 on the SAT exam when I was 12 and a shrink my mom had me in therapy with calmly said to me 'you cannot be a girl  because girls do not score 800 in Math on the SAT test' and I remember leaving that session so confused because I was a girl and then in the next session he said things that pushed me into another suicide attempt and he recommended I be committed. He should have lost his license.


The Person-Ovesey study has haunted transsexuals from the day it was published and it is flawed and a disgrace because it was not Research it was justification of personal opinions and prejudices spouted by certain individuals, Person included although she was a friend, that wanted to prove a connection between the so-called most intense effeminate transsexuals and effeminate homosexuality. If she had asked I would have introduced her to a friend that was my age and a possibly more intense transsexual as a child with the same feelings towards boys that was more block of granite than girl. They met with and interviewed those that fit the study and avoided anyone that broke the jello mold they wanted to fit kids like me in and in the process coined Primary transsexual with a definition that was so bizarre I have a letter from Harry where he posed the question what were they thinking???

Northwestern University psychology professor J. Michael Bailey and his work 'The Man who Would Be Queen' is simply a continuation and further perversion of the Person-Ovesey study and work by another hack researcher Ray Blanchard. If possible it is even more flawed which is amazing in itself. Bailey eventually resigned his chair amid controversy. Personally I believe even a fool has a right to their opinion but bad research is bad research.Without fail they cannot take criticism about their work but fail to follow one of the single most important principles of academia. Defense of one's thesis is when not being sure to remove your bias from research always brings about failure.

I guess I would be classified as a Research Engineer for much of my life with the added caveat I put my research into practical and sometimes very unpractical real-life application most often with human life a risk. If research is not impartial it will always be flawed. One can have a premise for one's research and a belief about what should result but the process involves both trying to prove yourself correct and trying to prove yourself WRONG. We thought of it as research integrity. I see absolutely none of that integrity when dealing with transsexuals. Everyone has an agenda and little has to do with helping transsexuals. They are more interested in proving themselves correct than the truth. If one is attempting to prove oneself correct impartiality is gone and it is nearly impossible to find yourself wrong if you are totally convinced you are correct.

We see classic examples of this with Ray Blanchard and his ilk with their bias. It all began with John Money the poster child for bad Researcher and his lies, deceptions, and half truths involving the David Reimer case and many more lives he probably ruined. Dr. Money is another person I have unfortunately met that I would like to forget.

They missed the entire point of Harry's book and his life. A transsexual is not the gender between their legs. A transsexual is the gender between their ears. It is really that simple and gender is pre-programmed into us and it cannot be changed. It is part of our being and is the essence of what makes us human. We learn to be women but we were born girls if MTF.

Unfortunately Dr. Benjamin was very old when I met him.  He lived past 100 and to his regret he thought Dr. Ihlenfeld would carry on his work and keep his office open but Ihlenfeld decided to return to residency and become a Psychiatrist so Harry's work was never carried on. Harry knew happiness was the most important thing for us. Ihlenfeld was a strange duck and I think a disappointment to Harry.

I had a strange encounter with him in the early 90's., My husband was off on business somewhere and I needed to redo my passport and could not find my letter from the surgeon so I called and he would not mail me one, he was an asshole, so I had to drive to the city. I had to drop something off at the Groton sub base so I decided to take the ferry to Long Island and drive in to NYC that way and for some reason I cannot remember I decided to drop by and take Ihlenfeld to lunch and when I was leaving he says to me next time you come make an appointment because I do not do free consultations and it was then I knew he was a typical money grubber because I paid for freaking lunch.  I will not repeat what I told him.

I have never regretted one minute of my life since surgery. I have had good times and bad times and have been hurt in love and happy beyond any dream I ever had in love but that is life. What these idiots forget is that all competent research shows we are 99% or higher delighted with our lives after the process is over. If we had mental issues this would not be true. No surgery can cure that.

I would like to think things are better today and in many ways they are but there is no Harry Benjamin to care about us and refuse money from kids or adults that could ill afford to pay for much of anything or to encourage transsexuals to hang in there and we will get through this or fly to Boston to talk to a child that had been raped because she was transsexual and he feared for her sanity or to open an office in San Francisco just to help us or to convince surgeons to lower their price for someone because it was the right thing to do or defend us without thought of personal gain but simply because he cared.

His book is the only truly honest look at us.  The rest are wanabes or frauds.

The other thing that needs to be added is he did not treat cross-dressers, transvestites, or transsexuals any better or worse based on the condition. Sometimes I wish I was a young again but then I would have missed Harry and that would most certainly have been my loss.

The Standards of Care, hormones, transition, and is this for real?

Well I guess it is time to post something controversial rather than small insights into my life and people I have known. Here is a reasonable explanation of how the current Standards of Care (SOC) are supposed to work and to be blunt the entire process is shocking because I realize I am out of touch but I am completely baffled by the process and the order in which the process works.

Real Life Experience (RLE) before hormones is so different from back in the "old days" I am not sure I understand the reasoning. Why would someone start living as a female before starting hormones? It is sort of contradictory isn't it? I understand how totally out of touch I am with how things are done today but RLE before hormones is sort of indicative they want proof the person is transsexual and the only way to prove it is to suffer by having to move into the female role without any feminization and walk into the real world baring your soul to everyone because there are few transsexuals ready for RLE without some feminization. Is it some kind of right of passage where being possibly clocked, read, pointed out, and harassed is the gauntlet that must be survived? It is almost like they want you to publicly fail.

I guess this is why I feel I have no right to tell anyone what to do when they transition and how to live during their transition and likewise after surgery. Is the SOC exactly how everyone does it today? I know the answer is that some do because I have found the blogs on T-Central quite interesting and informative and many have followed a pattern Harry would approve of which is contrary to the SOC. 

I have been enthralled by Shandy  on her blog because I think she has gone about the process amazingly well and in a manner Harry would approve of. She is ready right now when she decides to transition and in my mind ready for surgery whenever she wants it. She certainly has not followed the SOC.

Do they penalize transsexuals that do not follow the SOC?  Is this a result of the input loons like Blanchard and his cronies have had?

I guess I would like someone to explain the rationale behind why the SOC is the way it is?  Help!!!

Letters from Harry eins (1)

I mentioned in another post that my mom started writing Harry around September of 1958 when a physician at Childrens Hospital of Boston recommended she contact him over me. It took my younger brother 4+ years after mom died in early 2005 to send me the boxes mom had intended to give me. He is a lawyer, a politician, and not much of a fan of mine.

We were close until he got involved with Republican Politics and I was a major hindrance because lots of people back home remember me and that got in his way. The storage seals on the boxes were broken so I know he took a peek.  Unless his German has improved the only letters in there he could have read were the early ones from Harry to me starting in 1961 when I was a freshman in college.

They must have taught mom record keeping at Radcliffe along with her Linguistic skills because she was fastidious about cataloging her letters with Harry's responses.  She typed most of her letters on a German typewriter and carbon copied everything. She even carbon copied her hand written letters. I wish I could ask her why she made copies of everything she wrote but that will have to wait a while.

It is decidedly surreal to read about yourself from the perspective of your mother and the doctor treating you and little miss smarty pants, as in me, wasn't as slick as she thought she was. I let the letters sit there for quite a while after I initially opened the box because I did not realize they were cataloged by date and the second letter I opened and deciphered, my German sucked then, was quite disturbing because it involved the catastrophic event that almost destroyed me in May of 1963 and what was done to me that fateful summer.  I may or may not write about that because if there ever was a signature of what was done to some of us it was what happened from May 15, 1963 until August that summer. I went from a scheduled surgery with Burou in Casablanca in early January 1964 to nearly being destroyed.

My older brother Ray was after me to dig into the pile and translate the letters from the beginning. I told him I planned on it since I had decided to retire in early 2010 and would have time but I think I know the other reason. I nearly destroyed me during that period but I also almost destroyed the people that loved me. Without Harry I am not sure my family would have survived because Harry's advice to mom was not only about keeping me on the straight and narrow, not an easy thing to do, but how to keep my two brothers engaged so they were not harmed by me because it took a lot of mom's time to help me.

That may or may not be the basis of some of my issues with my younger brother today. He acted up in High School and was rejected by Harvard where all the men were supposed to go and he might have been the smartest of all of us. It worked out eventually for him but Harvard Law Review is better than pregnant girlfriend and Suffolk Law Review by anyone's standards.

The other interesting data in the cataloged boxes is all the records from every psychological evaluation and medical test I was given from childhood through to college. It is how I found out I had very low testosterone levels and elevated estrogen. The only testing where I knew the results were those given to me when I entered college.

I thought the reason my mother had to travel with me for freshman orientation was because I was 15. Well I did until we arrived at college. I was two weeks early for freshman classes and freshman orientation was only the Thursday and Friday before classes started. I need to add that this particular University was chosen over MIT, Caltech, and others because both the University and the Engineering School agreed to protect me because of my transsexualism. They knew everything and Harry and my mom chose this school for me. Actually Harry chose it and mom agreed to it.

Harry knew people at the University Medical School and I have a copy of the letter where my mom and Harry asked them to test me but to do it blindly so no individual testing me would know my name or gender. Harry wanted a blind test so even the doctors conducting the psychological tests did not know my gender to avoid as much bias as possible. Some tests are analytical but others are observational. I was tested for 6 days and I was exhausted when it was over. I was actually listed as Subject A.  Could there have been a Subject B like me?

The only reason I know the results of those tests is I was present when the Doctor talked with my mom and that was because Harry's friend was called away for an emergency. The thing I love about most doctors is when dealing with a kid they talk to the parent like the child is not even in the room and this was no different.

The doctor had two folders in front of him. One was thin and was my University admission stuff and the other very thick one was the results from 6 days of torturing me. The man turns to my mom and tells her that 'she' has normal testosterone levels and slightly elevated estrogen levels for a 15 year old and the psychological testing shows her to be a completely normal 15 year old girl who shows some signs of stress in her life but that is to be expected with girls her age. He then adds he had no idea why the University wasted all this time testing your daughter because they were not paid.

When the doctor looks up my mother didn't say a word and just points at the admissions records and he looks confused and she motions for him to open it. My admissions records of course have the accurate records of who I am and the gender Male and he sits there when he realizes what is up and starts muttering 'oh my, oh my, how can this be so' or something like that and I am sitting there thinking to myself why the heck did I just go through taking the same tests from multiple doctors for 6 days. I don't know about the normal part but I could have confirmed the girl part by myself.

It didn't end there. The next day we were scheduled to meet with the Chair/Head of the Engineering School and the President of the University. In their mind it was a coup to scoop even a freak like me from MIT and the other big name technical schools. Dr. Fawcett was University President and I liked him immediately.  He was kind and he talked to me along with mom. He had a sense of humor because he looked at me and said I guess you confused one of my top Research Physicians yesterday and he told me his door was always open if I faced any issues so don't be afraid to drop by. I'm thinking that is weird because nobody was nice to me like that. He was true to his word.

The Chair of the Engineering school was very nice also. Sitting with him was a Professor Eldis O. Reed who would be my adviser, watchdog, surrogate father, protector emeritus, and my confidant along with his wife during my undergrad and graduate studies. The first word out of Dr. Reed is she should go to school as a girl which brought a smile to my face but could not be for other reasons involving my full-ride scholarship.

Dr. Reed is one of the smartest and most down to earth people I have ever know.  He had the humorous Reed Eyeball Theory which states 'That if it doesn't look right the odds are high it isn't' which was primarily aimed at making students observant and not locked into strictly numbers and he was famous for his Mechanics classes because he started every year off with a movie showing the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse with the refrain if we make a mistake we don't get second chances and then asks everyone why it collapsed. Most think it is a resonance issue which simplistically it is but I told him it was some form of torsional flutter which is now called aeroelastic flutter which got me off on the right foot.

My mom was incredibly observant.  In a letter she wrote to Harry after returning from my University she thanked him profusely for finding this University for me and added that she had never seen her daughter that happy and that Dr. Reed and I seemed to immediately have a connection. Dr. Reed would have a profound influence on my life and was one of the reasons I survived the summer of 1963.

Mom also mentioned she had met Karen, who would be my dorm caretaker, and she was very pleased with her which I never knew about.  I recently asked Karen and she said she thought I knew. I was in the first coed dorms at the University and they decided geeks were the best people to try it with. I had the only private room in my dorm  pod because there was no way I could room with a girl then and I would have psychologically damaged most young boys if I was their roommate.

In a letter from the summer of 1959 when we returned from a family vacation in Scotland, England, France, Spain, and Italy mom tells him she took his advice and let me off her leash for a while and she had tried his recommendation of having me stay in her room with her. There was a prophetic comment where she told Harry that 'she really is just a little girl' when she talked about how I interacted with this Scottish boy and mom was no dummy because she said it was so natural she has to have a boyfriend back here and I think I know who it is. Jack from Ayr in Scotland was a nice boy but he blew my cover back home.

I always wondered why mom sort of caved on that vacation after the disaster of Immigration when we landed in London. Harry had told mom to let her be herself and observe.  Harry always used female pronouns even before he met me.

The scary part is I never realized the pressure she was under from some family members and several shrinks I had seen to Institutionalize me. Some thought I belonged in a nut house.

I have gotten to the point where I can read the German slowly and admit that I have jumped to letters from important times in my life. I have avoided the letters from 1963 because I am not sure I want to know certain things. They both thought I should not marry husband #1 because I wasn't really marrying him. I was accepting him as part of the deal to raise his baby daughter which for some bizarre reason he had sole custody of.

Mom knew how badly I wanted a child. I would have married Satan to have a baby and he wasn't that bad but it felt like it at one time. Why is it so many of us want children so badly? A friend says it is natural for young girls to want children but sometimes I wonder if it is brainwashing but she was and is a joy. Husband #1 shall forever more be known as certifiable asshole #1 or CA1 in shorthand.  I should have stuck to bad boys.

I have written about what he did to me but in a third person narrative which should give you an idea how badly CA1 hurt me plus it might be too explosive for this forum. I think I'll ask my friend Elizabeth from NYC if I should. Lord I still despise CA1 which isn't good.

I actually have my diagnosis from Harry which is interesting.  Even in 1960 he was using his Benjamin Disorientation Scale in some form. I did find out why he was looking for someone when we met.  Mom sent him a photo of me and he was looking for me that way.  I wonder if that counts as mom playing Harry a little because she knew I was going as a girl to our initial meeting. Well I can assure her it was the one and only time I ever put anything over on or fooled Harry.  I always felt I was an open book to him and he was just reading from the pages of my life.  He knew me better than I knew me.

Wow, I didn't mean to write this much but I can get lost but my baby wants a walk or he will eat one of the cats. I wonder if he will take a recommendation? Hopefully I will read some more letters and if anything interesting arises that I am willing to share part zwei (2) will be posted.

Liz

Memories from a not so lost childhood

After surgery in 1971 mom was after me to attend my 10th High School reunion in May of that year. Most of you are probably wondering why my mother would want her child to go back to a High School that had so many unhealthy memories but Harry agreed with her. I knew I had a lot of resentment and yes anger about the beatings I took but my mother thought I should face them as the real me and let them see the nice girl they tormented and mom added the caveat it doesn't hurt you are kinda hot which was weird coming from my mother which I am sure my brother Ray had something to do with.

Sometimes facing the demons of our past is helpful and maybe it would provide closure. I returned the RSVP and I was at the office in NYC a few days later and get a call from mom.  The facility where the reunion was to be held burned down and it was canceled and I thought that was the best karma I could think of and I must admit I had a chuckle about that.  Early in 1972 mom tells me it is rescheduled for May of 1972 and she had sent my RSVP invitation in.  Mom could be pushy and just to make sure I could not weasel out of it Uncle Al called me to Boston for a meeting which conveniently was on the Friday before the Saturday reunion.

I got played as they say today. Mom knew I loved coming home now because my grandmother had an epiphany and was so guilt ridden over her treatment of me she always wanted me to visit and to be honest I always wanted her love so it worked. So I made plans to head home for a 3 day weekend for the first time in over ten years where I actually stayed in my old home.

It was nearly an even more memorable weekend when this guitar player I was more than friends with flew in from London mid week and hid out in my home as he liked to do because neither the CIA, FBI or the KGB could get by my doorman and security so the photographers of the day were not a problem. We had dated off and on since early 1970 after being introduced by a mutual friend Andy and we were more than friends when neither of us was attached.  I told him I was having sympathy sex with him only because he was so cute and looked so forlorn and like a scorned puppy when he was dumped by a girlfriend. Ironically our friendship has survived over 40 years and he has long since lost cute.

He finds out I am going to my 10th or more accurately 11th reunion of my High School graduation and says he will escort me which I immediately shot down. First I reminded him we wouldn't get to the corner without being noticed and since he knew of the past I reminded him someone might dig when they see us together and I didn't want to be known as his pretty transsexual of the moment like several of his musician friends in London who were or had been running around with some famous ones.

I knew he would simply become intimately involved with writing music if in the mood or more likely Jim Beam Black, Jack Daniels, or my Johnny Walker Red because as I constantly told him his girlfriend was really nice and she wasn't the problem because he was and he knew it.  His problem was based in his insecurity, weird lack of self confidence at time, and his trips into drug abuse and too much alcohol. I knew all about insecurity and lack of self confidence so we were a pretty matched pair there but I didn't drink much or do drugs. He certainly fit my liking for bad boys because that was his deserved image at times.  Under different circumstances we could have fallen in love I believe.

The meeting in Boston lasted all of 30 minutes which I found hilarious and my Uncle gave me the keys to a Company car and I drove south of Boston towards my home town. I had asked him slyly if he was in on this and he smiled and shrugged his shoulders. For some reason I decided to head into the center of town before heading home and I drove by the Theater where that oh so special boy kissed me for the first time and the car seemed to drive itself to my High School and I parked across the street in the church parking lot where the Reverend Banks had thrown me out of Sunday School and church because I was a heathen or something along those lines.

I am sure some of you have done something like this after the journey is over but it seemed surreal. It is 11 years after graduation and I am 26 and quite successful and I am finally the complete girl I should have been born as. There is a news stand on a corner opposite the church that was still operated by a very kind old man who hid me when I tried to hide from boys looking for me.  He saved me from many a beating.

I walked across the street and when I walked in he recognized me immediately and it was hugs, smiles and a tear or two on my part.  He was one of the people that looked past the facade and saw the real me. It is a very busy street so I had to wait for the lights to turn my way to cross the street to the school and it just looked so big now. It was actually a massive granite building since it held over 2000 students but it had always seemed so small to me when I was there.

I was dressed as a young woman in business would dress with a skirt that wasn't too short, a white blouse, and a suit coat designed for the successful young woman of the day.  Nothing special just average girl next door business attire. It was lunch time and kids were sitting on the granite steps eating and talking and laughing on a rare warm spring day this close to the coast. The sea breeze off the Atlantic would kick in early in the afternoon like it always did this time of the year and temperature would drop 20 degrees in minutes.

I had not planned on going in but I was drawn to the past and I have no idea why. I had rose tinted sunglasses on and I could see all the teenage boys checking me out and getting hit on their arms by their girlfriends when I smiled at the boy. Not one time in my 3 years at that school had I ever dared sit where they sat. The kids who sat there were the ones that hurt me physcially and I had actually been shoved down those stairs several times after school. One time I had broken my arm and hurt my shoulder and the three boys told me if I told it would get worse so I tried to claim I fell down myself but they knew at the Emergency Room it was just another incident for me and mom had to rush to the hospital to calm down her hysterical child.

When I got inside I looked down the main corridor which went forever it seemed and was the gauntlet I dreaded if a class required me to use it. There was a Security Guard there and he asked for ID since I obviously wasn't a student and I quickly added I came to see Mrs Watson my homeroom teacher from high school and that I was here for the reunion. I wondered if that guard would have helped me when trouble happened years ago and somehow I knew he would not have.

I found my old home room and Mrs Watson was not there so I headed to the Library which was my Sanctuary in High School. I tutored students there for extra money before and after school and they often had to kick me out to close the school up. It was safer than trying to run the gauntlet to the train, subway or bus station to get home. Nothing bad ever happened to me in the Library.

When I opened the door and entered I felt the same excitement I felt in High School. There was all that knowledge in there and I wanted it all was what I thought when I tutored there and studied there. To the left was the area where one was allowed to work together and where I tutored students and where that special boy sat down to be tutored by me for the first time and the memory of how attracted to him I was and how scared that made me feel rushed into my head.

I remembered him asking me how old I was and his surprise at the fact I would not be 13 until December. He was a junior and as a sophomore had been all-state football and baseball.  He was a legend in the city because he had led them to the State Championship and football was big and a sophomore QB leading his team to the State Title over the invincible Brockton team was historic. Didn't mean a thing to me then because he was late and I told him not to ever be late again which was amazingly brave for me.

What memories I had there. He was the first boy that made me laugh and the first boy that said hello to me in the corridors. They needed me to teach him to study so he could stay eligible. I remember when we got up to leave he pulled my chair out and lord he was so tall.  I was 5'-8" and still am but he towered over me and was at least 6'-4".  I never noticed how kindly he treated me at first which was so weird because I was too scared to notice. I looked a lot like my profile picture so boy was not something I was very successful at.

I had to leave quickly or I would have started crying so I walked back to my old home room and the corridors were filling with students and it seemed surreal how eerie it felt walking those corridors with students and not feeling apprehension for what might come.

Mrs Watson was there as was a classroom full of students so I walked by and left the school and was going to go home but I decided to drive around a little bit. It had been a long time since I had been in this city. I made the drive toward the ocean and the area where we swam before I looked so unusual it wasn't safe to be there without my older brother and I stopped going because I knew it was eerie how I looked and I didn't want to embarrass him.

I parked at the south end of the beach near Black's Creek which was the entrance and exit for the sea into a massive tidal marsh area. I love the smell of the ocean and everything was paved now so I walked on the sidewalk over to the bridge that let traffic traverse the marsh entrance. It was a calm day and Wollaston Bay, as we locals called it, was like a sheet with nary a ripple on the massive protected bay.

I could see the Yacht clubs in the distance and the Squantum Yacht Club where my father taught us to sail and I could swim off the member piers and rafts safely until he died in 1956. I avoided looking down at the man made jetty that funneled the water in and out of the bay.  In those days it was the last memory I had of that special boy and it was a frightening memory.

On Thanksgiving 1959, which is late November in the US, I tried to commit suicide by jumping into the outbound flow from Blacks Creek. It was a miserable day and week for me with horrible confrontations at school, with a doctor, and finally my extended family on our most popular National Holiday and I had given in. Not even an Olympic swimmer could escape the vicious current created on an outbound tide and it was sure death with the water temperature in the 40's and the air temperature dropping rapidly. I was pulled off the rocks by that boy before I could go in and I could have killed both of us.

Even then I wondered what had happened to him but everything was so fuzzy and vague from that moment until August of 1963. I knew we liked each other a lot and I remembered the kiss and it was disturbing not to remember what I wanted to remember because I remembered everything basically.

I returned to the car without ever looking down at the frothing water because by its sound I knew it was outbound tide time and Blacks Creek was lethal then. I leaned on the hood of the car and remembered all the fun and good times I had here with my brothers. I was the one that made money tutoring as they played every school sport so I supplied the cash so we could scarf down the delicious fried strip clams at the beach front Howard Johnson eatery across the road from the water and then wash them down with one of their 28 flavors of ice cream along with a bottle of coca-cola.

How stupid we were cannon balling the jellyfish when we had the annual influx during summer vacation. Fishing in the salt water tidal marsh and how squeamish I was with worms and fish. Ray put the worms on and took the fish off and my rule was if I caught it we set it free. If they caught fish, usually flounder, they sold it to a fish shack near the Howard Johnson eatery. I caught a lot of fish and they all were released but one day I hooked a huge eel and I ran screaming for my life and Ray was laughing so hard he forgot to release it and it died. I felt so guilty.

I remembered looking at the girls on the beach and hating them because they had what I wanted but also envious of the curves they were developing and breasts which I wanted more than a breath. I remembered diving off the roof of our Yacht Club with Ray which got both of us in trouble and a few smiles from members. I remembered riding bikes to the beach and never having to worry about someone stealing them and the Granite Quarries we swam in when the tide was out and jumping off the granite quarry rims into the deep water without regard for life or limb. I had no fear of heights then and we regularly leaped from the 100 foot mark. There was usually 20-30 kids from all the surrounding towns and I was OK because I went off The Perch and few dared. I had an advantage they never knew about. I really did not care if I lived or died.

This entire day seemed like Captain Kirk had time warped me to my childhood memories. Sometimes it isn't easy to admit there were some wonderful moments when the painful ones dominant your existence.  I remembered walking down the beach with my mother as she recovered from paralytic polio and defied the doctors who told her she would never walk again. They had no idea how big her heart was. They told her to walk a mile so she walked 3 miles down the sandy beach and 3 miles back. They said it was a miracle but I knew better.

I remembered the regattas my dad raced in and little me excitedly asking which boat is daddy in and mom telling me he is the one way ahead of everyone. Not too bad for a man from a slag heap town in Wales who had never seen the ocean until Eaton. Almost like it was on a clock, Nature's clock actually, the wind shifted from a southwest zephyr to a gentle easterly off the water and gently picked up and the temperature began to drop. Nature's air conditioner was not welcome in spring but a godsend in the smarmy heat of summer.


I remembered the exclusive Country Club inland from here where dad played his beloved golf. He loved golf and played whenever he was home and able in rain, shine, cold, and heat he walked the hilly course built before 1900. Dad taught me to hit golf balls at the range when I was 8 because I sort of followed Ray around like a puppy dog. Even my 6 year old brother was stronger than me but I hit everything with a significant right to left turn and he said that is what you want and I never knew what he meant until later in life. I was really too young to play and the stogy old fools at the club didn't like children hogging the course so I never played a round on that course.

Golf would be a sanctuary from the pain of my failed first marriage in later life and I know he would have been proud of  how much I enjoyed golf and when I played my first round and beat both of my brothers I am sure he was smiling down as they screamed and yelled after every bad shot and I followed his mantra of hit it, find it, hit it again, and don't get upset because golf should be a game of calm.

Thinking of my dad my mind switched to my earliest memories of his involvement with the first radio Controlled planes in the area and how enthralled I was with those planes flying around under control until they ended in a tree and how quickly I could climb a tree and get a plane down. Long after he died I lamented that I wanted to be my daddy's little girl but in many ways I always was. He knew how I felt and in the worst times he would be there with mom to comfort me. He was so shocked by the first suicide attempt I think he held me for hours and told me constantly everything will be OK and I wish he could have been around to see how right he was. He would have adored my second husband Pete because he was a Navy pilot and I would have had to fight dad for the passenger seat in Pete's Stearman stunt biplane but it would have been dad's because he always wanted to fly and I loved him too much to deny him that pleasure.

Our home had a huge family room and in there was his greatest passion after his family. His 6 foot by 12 foot Brunswick snooker table. My dad was at one time considered the best snooker player in Great Britain as a young man in the 20s and  thirties before the war. Perpendicular to the snooker table was his regulation Brunswick pool table. Both tables had the smallest legal sized pockets allowed which meant going to other tables was easier. He would get a huge smile when he regaled us with stories of how a dirt poor Welsh kid had more spending money than all the rich snots at Eton because he took their money on the school pool tables and how none of them ever believed a "slag" boy could beat them.

My brothers had no use for the game since it wasn't baseball, football or basketball but I loved it. Every evening after homework we would play and I had a real knack for the game because it is angles, ball speed, cue ball english, and ball position and a snooker table essentially has square pockets compared to a normal pool table so using a rail to slide a ball into the pocket did not work. My grandfather loved pool so it was my sanctuary away with two people I loved. They built me a little box so I could play and I had to drag it with me for every shot.

I am not sure how it started but I remember the matches that were played in that room with pool players dad became acquainted with in the area to start with. Top players came to practice on the snooker table with my dad and my grandfather and soon games were played for coin as they said. Shorty Johnson came to practice on the snooker table because he was the World Nine Ball Champion and as he said he could not beat my dad unless he used the cue on him. Dad spotted the best cash Nine Ball player in the world the 8 ball and the break. It is so amazing to remember this. Shorty quickly learned the pockets on a normal table looked like caverns after playing on dads tables. Luther "Wimpy" Lassiter, Irving Crane, Rudy "Fats" Wanderone who claimed to be the fictional "Minnesota Fats", Jack Reed the Brunswick Representative for New England, and others played in our two table pool room every Saturday from late October through to mid-April if they were in the area. Willie Mosconi was a frequent visitor and I once watched him run 14 straight racks practicing on our regular pool table.

It was considered a privilege to be invited to watch some of the matches being played and most of the time unless dad was giving me a lesson the only noise that came from that room was the sound of balls being hit and the slap as they entered a leather pocket and the rattle of the balls when they were re-racked. If a big match was in progress it was like a tomb except when an exceptional shot was made. Sometimes these masters of pool would fool around with the amazing trick shots they did at exhibitions and then the room was filled with laughter as they tried to one up each other. 

They were always so nice to my dad and they were nice to me although more often than not they thought I was his daughter when we initially met but dad would take them aside and I was treated so well I welcomed other people into my life that didn't hurt me. When my dad and grandfather both died in 1956 my grandmother immediately sold the tables and got rid of the "heathens" from our lives. The house was like a morgue after that. My grandfather owned the house and it was a monstrous Victorian and we had our own private section of the house because grandfather asked us to stay there. It had to be 4500 square feet or larger.

I was jerked back to reality by a honking horn as a car pulled in next to me and it was hard to miss the stocky frame of George "Jeep" C. my neighbor's son and a dear friend who along with his family had tried to protect me. We had a warm hug and I told him why I was back and that got a little whistle of disbelief and I told him I had been thinking of a lot of the fun times I had despite the turmoil of being transsexual. He reminded me of the great cigar caper with his brother Richie, my two brothers and me. It wasn't hard to remember.

It was funny now but not when I went through it. George is a "made" man in the mob and Richie stole two stogies because he wanted to be cool like his older brother. I was dragged along as they went into the woods to smoke them but I refused. They had both cigars lit and were puffing away when George came calling and we ran like rats running from a sinking ship but he caught us and then proceeded to make all of us finish the cigars as punishment including me who had never touched them but was collateral damage or guilty by association.

My brother Ray was laughing himself sick and pointing at me because I was three shades of green and it was then he told George she never smoked them. Ray had started using female pronouns for me that summer when I was 10 and George took one look at me and picked me up and ran to his home looking for Mrs C, his mom in this case, to fix me because I was probably greener than new grass by then. I vomited a little and after a while my spinning world stopped spinning and George was happy I was not dying on him.

His mother had told me countless times I made a much better girl than I ever would a boy and their home was a sanctuary at times. She taught me to cook Sicilian Italian from home made sauce to my own home made pasta. I learned how to make a "real" pizza pie and when I asked she helped me learn to sew. When my next door neighbor Chuck tried to rape me in 1957 George's dad who was a mob boss threatened to have him killed if he hurt me again. When he did rape me in 1960 and almost killed me George's dad had that asshole brutalized multiple times until he came begging them to stop after circumstances prevented him from serving a day in jail.  From that day on he was terrified to even look cross-eyed at me.

We had a good laugh remembering the summer I was so enthralled with Shakespeare and then Chaucer that I walked around speaking like a character from a Shakespeare production and then would switch into the middle english Chaucer wrote in and people would wonder what the hell I was saying. George told me he thought I was the craziest 6 year old he had ever met when I did that. I was a little leery of telling him my grandfather and I often talked that way to each other.

I asked him what happened to Kevin and he was delicate reminding me he had died in Vietnam but never broached the subject of my relationship with Kevin. I sensed a deep feeling of loss but it just didn't register then why that was.

He reminded me of the great Roberta Fogo incident when Mr Fogo caught us playing house when I was 8 and I was dressed as her sister and how Mr Fogo had marched me to my house dressed as I was and told my parents this was unacceptable behavior so my dad bought me a chemistry set which was not the best idea my parents ever had because within a week I was making my own black powder and terrorizing everyone in the neighborhood with my home made firecrackers in the woods.

This brought to mind the great log disaster or never put off a firecracker near a nest of pissed off wasps and how my brothers, me, and his brother Richie had to jump into the rain filled creek to avoid the wasps and only after 10 minutes did we realize we set the entire place on fire.

We were both laughing and he reminded me of the fire in the school and said every time he hears the Talking Heads song "Burning Down the House" he thinks of me  almost burning down the new High School. I was in an advanced chemistry class demonstrating the differences in hypergolic fuels and normal rocket fuel and a fellow student had bumped the table spilling everything and the entire lab went up in flames and only because the Fire Station was one block from the school was the damage limited to that room. It was my senior year and that was so awesome.  It got everyone two days vacation from school and everyone enjoyed that.

It was approaching 2:15 in the afternoon and I wanted to see my old English teacher so we hugged again and the only thing I could think of saying was to tell him thanks for being a friend to a very scared kid when she very few.

As I started driving towards my old High School it hit me that my childhood had at times been hurtful but it was not lost. I just needed to look past the pain kids like me experienced and realize kids can always find ways to have fun even kids like me.

Now it was off to meet some teachers and then face my classmates tomorrow and a little bit of the dread was drifting away on that Easterly wind as the temperatures cooled. My anger was subsiding and now I began to wonder if some of them might actually like me better as Elizabeth.



More later.

Liz

When Harry met Liz

Unknown to me my mother had been writing to Dr. Benjamin beginning in September of 1958 based on her letters to Harry and his responses. I was 12 and she had taken me to Childrens in Boston for tests and a doctor there had given her Dr. Benjamin's name in New York City after the tests resulted in some surprises and several of the physicians that examined me said the condition that caused the condition I was in might best be resolved by him. It had something to do with testosterone levels and estrogen levels and they had been advised by my mother that I said I was a girl and was kind of persistent in my position.

It just might have been nice if someone had bothered to tell me.  What was driving me totally crazy was the thought I would turn into my two brothers because of puberty. I just could not live with the thought of being a guy. It took Dr. Benjamin nearly a year before he could convince my mother to let him meet me. Mom thought there had to be a cure for this silly problem.

A meeting was arranged by my mother with Dr. Benjamin with direct involvement of her childhood girlfriend whom mom had befriended when she moved to US and only spoke French which mom was fluent in already. It was such a critical time in my life and it was the first time I was really allowed to be a girl. It was done over a Christmas vacation and in a clandestine manner to avoid any issues with my maternal grandmother and my mom was not there. If my grandmother had found out in those years she could have used the family political clout to hurt Dr. Benjamin.  My uncle was still a major player in New York politics and I can assure you he thought I was some sort of weirdo freak and a family embarrassment which paled in comparison to him being in the pocket of organized crime in NY but that didn't count when dealing with a fruitcake like me.

I really had no idea why I was in this place at this time since I was totally in the dark about the planned meeting. I had been so upset by the meeting with mom and Mary when this trip was planned that it took them several hours to get me to agree to go. The only reason I went was because they would let me be a girl for the entire time and despite reservations I could not resist being able to just be a girl.

It felt like I didn't have to even think about being me. It was easy and i realized that on the long drive there. The interesting part was everyone immediately accepted me as a young girl and most thought my mom's friend Mary was my mom. Men that if they knew me in Massachusetts would have hurt me smiled at me. It was quite liberating. When we arrived at their Chalet I was very happy with my decision even if it was freaking colder and snowier than Eastern Massachusetts.

We were to attend a dinner on December 27, 1959 where I was to meet Mary's two brothers who were noted physicians. It was a fun evening.  I danced a  little and after a while Mary took me to meet her brothers who had arrived after us and were talking with people across the room. The minute I met them I knew they knew about me but for some reason I didn't feel uncomfortable and we had a short pleasant conversation.

After about 5 minutes she took me to meet some other people and one of them was a sort of curmudgeon with a slight German accent and he totally ignored me and seemed to be looking for someone else as he kept staring at people around the room. I thought he was less than pleasant with me because quite honestly I was a little euphoric with people telling me how nice I looked.  It was a lot more fun than what I received at home.

We had a table and I was back there with Mary's husband Kevin when I saw Mary talking with the man with the German accent and he jerked his head around and started staring at me and I could see him excitedly saying something to her and his eyes never left me. I wasn't dancing with that man was what I thought because he was too short. How quick we can become stuck up with a little praise after a childhood full of scorn.

Mary returned and she sat next to me and she dropped a nuclear bomb basically. She pointed to the man I didn't want to dance with and said he can help you. Help me with what was my first thought? When she told me he can help you be the girl you should have been born it took two of them to keep me there as I bolted from the chair and tried to run to him although my balance in heels would have been problematic since it was the second time I had ever worn heels. Running would not have been an option.

I couldn't take my eyes off him.  Mary said his name is Dr. Harry Benjamin and he is from NYC and he came here to meet you. Why would he come to this winter wasteland to meet me was my initial thought and how could he help me? There was food and I never ate any of it. I kept staring at him across the room and he kept staring at me.

This was a total shock because until this point in my life I thought there was no hope. Maybe a dozen shrinks had told me I was delusional, crazy, and obviously irrational over the nearly 6 years since my 8th birthday. I had been called worse names by doctors than people in general and in fact I learned what fag, drag queen, transvestite, and other names meant by looking them up in the Library at school after shrinks told me I would end up one if I didn't listen to them.

Around 9PM I was taken by Mary to a room reserved for the meeting and waiting for me was this Benjamin person. What I remember most was how kind his voice was as he introduced himself and he barely got his name out and I was in tears begging him to make me a complete girl.  When I get emotional or excited I talk fast and I was rattling questions faster than he could possibly answer them and then he did something he did with every girl I knew that was his patient.

He walked around the table and gave me a hug and told me everything will be OK and then he held my hands to calm me down because I was somewhere between hysterical and emotionally overwhelmed. I wanted to be a girl by tomorrow and I didn't understand why it would take so long. I was disappointed to learn I would not be able to get pregnant. When I asked him about that he smiled a little and shook his head. I really had no clue.

I actually fainted which was kind of embarrassing and when I told him I had not really eaten he went to the door and food arrived shortly since he had not eaten either. He told me I was a transsexual which was the first time I had ever heard that word in my life. As he explained the process I would go through with hormones and then a surgical procedure he must have sensed I was disappointed it would take so long and surgery was out of the question until I was 18 which was 4 years.

I did not understand why it took so long and when he finished explaining why I suddenly realized this doctor was taking a personal risk to meet with me based on the current political climate in the Medical World over people like me. I didn't really understand a lot of it because like most young transsexuals I was more interested in getting what I desperately needed today but no later than tomorrow and the absolute latest I could possibly wait was the day after tomorrow. We transsexuals can be very self-centered and selfish at times when it comes to getting corrected.

He asked my permission to give me a rudimentary physical and commented I would get a more thorough physical in two days which was freaking news to me but if he was going to help me he could poke me, prod me, and examine me every day if he wanted to. I could sense he was a little confused by my body which was not very boy and I had big aureoles more fitting girls breasts and after I was re-dressed he asked when I had started living as a girl.

I said it was yesterday morning and when I got back home next week I had to go back to androgyny which was OK just to have the freedom of being allowed to be me. He was a little worried about that part and didn't think it would be as easy as I thought it would be to  return to the status of "it" as I often called it. I commented that I didn't do boy very well and he basically said it would appear you do girl very well which made me smile.

I was with him for well over three hours and Mary and her family were there for the last 30 minutes or so. He knew I already had a boyfriend which was a big shock and there was not any hint of disapproval. Here I thought up until 3 days ago nobody knew I had a boyfriend and it now seems everyone knows and the only one that didn't know everyone knew was me.


I realized a lot of planning went into this meeting when Mary's Physician brothers talked with Dr. Benjamin about the meeting on Wednesday and  who had accepted the invitation and was flying in. I had this decided feeling I was some kind of freak and when he told everyone to leave so he could talk with me privately I asked him some questions about kids like me and it was then I learned not many kids like me ever made it to him and I was the second or third he had actually met which was a little disconcerting.

We got  back to the Chalet  they owned after 1 AM and I tried to get to sleep but I couldn't. I went into the main living area around 3 AM and got a glass of milk and was sitting there looking at all the snow and the mountains which had this eerie glow from the town creating a scene where a good Science Fiction fan like me fully expected the alien war machines to pop over the hill and destroy my hopes.

I had been hurt by so many doctors I actually was not sure I even trusted this man who said he would help me. I am sure I was crying a little because I was quite good at crying and Mary plopped down on the couch next to me and I expressed my doubts and fears which she knew all about because this is far from the full reason she wanted to help me.

She told me she had something and went to her bedroom and returned with a paper bag and inside were dozens of bottles of estrogen and I think provera and she said Dr. Benjamin and her brothers said these were for me and there was a note explaining what dosage I should take to start a slow change in my body.

So at 3:30 AM on December 28, 1959 I began my long journey to being me. It would take a little over 11 years and because of the times there would be joy, a horrible tragedy that nearly destroyed me, disappointment, delays, and some evil things done to me  in my life but Harry and my mom somehow protected me and helped guide me through events I could never have handled alone. There were times I didn't understand why things had to be as they were and I got frustrated and mad and sometimes very angry but they never once lost their faith in me and I guess they were right.

I need to add that things were a lot more complicated than this but I am not sure I want to open up about it all because it is extremely personal and in many ways very difficult to talk about.

Liz

In memory of a friend

When I left Houston and moved to NYC my life changed dramatically for many reasons. I was on my final pathway to me and at Harry's office I met Lana another girl like me and one who would be a lifetime friend. It was a sad day for Lana because she was distraught over the death of a friend of hers that was transsexual. It would not be the last one of us to die from unnatural causes.

Eventually there was a group of six of us that became friends. It was a diverse group but we were all young. In the 60's and early 70's kids like me made it to NYC or Frisco. It certainly wasn't for safety but maybe because there was a growing community of transsexual kids in our age range. All of us were in our early to mid to late 20's and had transitioned as early as 14 but no later than 17.  We had a lot in common but only 3 of us were Harry's patients.

There were rules one had to abide by with Harry. No dating straight guys if they do not know which of course begs the question are they straight if they will date us before which is another post I want to write. Lana and I were very close to Pamela who was a girl from some hayseed town in Ohio who had been run out of her home at 16 by her father and had headed for New York and had ended up on the streets in the sex trades.

She had started hormones when she arrived in NYC. If you needed it you could get it in NYC for the right price. She got herself off the streets and worked for one of the seedy peep show places that once dominated 42nd Street in midtown Manhattan and she had worked her way into managing the entire operation. She was desperately saving for surgery and was 28 with brownish auburn tinted hair and sparkling green eyes and just a bit taller than my 5'-8" height. She was a beautiful young lady.

We had the same dreams and aspirations in life and Lana, Pam and I became very close and I tried to convince her to see Harry but she was happy the way it was. Lana and Pamela would show up at my office at the construction site and we would go to lunch 2 or 3 times a week. She had a boyfriend that none of us had met but we assumed he knew because boyfriends never met us if they knew for privacy reasons.

On October 11, 1970 I was woken by my phone around 5 AM by Lana who was hysterical. Pam had been murdered in her apartment in the Village and Lana was listed at work as her call in case of emergency and the people where she worked became worried when she failed to arrive for work and she was found by the building super. I went with Lana to identify the body and my beautiful friend had been brutalized and the cop who took us to the viewing room found it necessary to add she had been raped with something not made of flesh and blood and did we know she was a man.

Lana got it out before I could that she was a beautiful young girl you stupid f*@k and then we both added check with the boyfriend. He murdered her because he found out she wasn't complete and his attorney was good and he plead to manslaughter and did maybe 3 years because the life of a tranny was worth less then than even now and there was half a paragraph in one of the local rags about her death and that was it. She was identified as a transvestite.

The worst part after her death was her parents were notified and she was taken back to hayseed Ohio to be buried. Her parents had her implants removed, her hair and nails cut and buried her as a boy just to add insult to her horrible death.

40 years ago today a beautiful life was ended by hate and nobody gave a damn except for her few friends and maybe the worst part of it is I sit here drinking a toast to a lost friend and the same assholes like him are still killing us.

I just don't understand that kind of hate. God bless your soul Pam.

Liz