Always the odd man out, I chose to inject comic relief into the nativity play, creating new, uproarious spin-offs of the Christmas story each year. In a zany frenzy, I’d trip and skip through each year’s performance as some combination of Falstaff, Puck, Red Skelton, Tim Conway, and Sammy Davis Jr., doing my best to jazz up the age-old narrative. Jake and Katherine patiently allowed it, tenuously grasping my inability to take the play—or anything else—seriously.
One year, taking advantage of one of the few perks of being a principal, Dad borrowed several huge floodlights and three microphones from school for us to play with over the holidays and we used them to enhance our performance. That year, instead of the usual recreation of Mary and Joseph’s journey to Bethlehem, we performed a concert as Peter, Paul, and Mary—the singers, not the Biblical figures—where we belted out an unforgettable version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” along with several other of the trio’s songs, bathed by the bright, hot stage lights as our parents shouted “Encore!”
Another Christmas, when we were temporarily living in Indiana while Dad was pursuing a graduate degree, we drove to Florida. Dad bought a Starcraft tent trailer, and he was eager to test it out over the holidays while traveling the US Southeast. Our ceramic farm animals and crèche remained back home in storage in Calgary, so Dad fashioned a nativity stable out of palm fronds, weaving them expertly as he sat at our picnic table. Katherine, who was four at the time, contributed her Gumby, Pokey, and accompanying rubber friends to fill out the nativity players—Gumby as Joseph; Pokey as the pregnant Mary.
Somehow during that Christmas in our tent trailer in Key West, Katherine became very ill. She lay on the bed that converted into the kitchen table, sweating and shivering with a fever of a hundred and four. Jake and I could feel our parents’ fear as they hovered over her, Dad snapping his fingers in front of Katherine’s dull, vacant eyes as she stared into space, unresponsive. I don’t recall how she recovered, but she did, and that was the first time I feared someone in my family might die.
Katherine was a sweet, eager-to-please, sensitive little girl who loved to sing to herself and dance, with or without music. The idea that she might not live seemed horribly unfair and wrong to me. I looked back with guilt and shame on all the times I’d thought of her as a burden because she was younger and unable to keep up with the rest of the family. I struck a deal with God that humid Florida night, swearing to treat her better if only she would survive.
I made many such bargains with God over the years—it seemed greedy to ask for help without offering something of myself, like improved behavior. After my first confession, I understood the quid pro quo nature of the arrangement: I traded my sins in for acts of penance—at worst a few Hail Marys or Our Fathers—and all was forgiven. Surely, God could sort out some of my problems in exchange for a promise to be a better kid. I took to speaking to God directly each night in bed as I said my prayers, more out of habit than true belief.
I crafted a two-part nightly prayer. The first half was stock—a quick synopsis of all the people I loved and wanted Him to watch over for me, a list that rarely changed unless I added someone after careful consideration. Then, I’d move into the freelance portion of the prayer program. That part included whatever had come up on that given day that required specific attention. God, please let me pass my science test or God, please let me have a good race on Saturday. After Katherine’s Key West fever, my requests changed because it occurred to me that I could leverage my good wishes and behavior into rewards. God, please let me be a boy and I’ll be nice to Katherine forever. God, please let me be a boy and I’ll let Katherine play with my Hot Wheels.
God, please let me be a boy and I’ll do anything you ask me to.
2
THIS ONE LOOKS LIKE A BOY
(1969–1974)
MY PATERNAL GRANDMOTHER—a stout, first-generation German Canadian woman, mother of seven, and the widow of Grandpa Shenher—would gesture at me and say to whoever was in earshot, “This one! Look at this one!” as if I were some strange two-headed fish she’d pulled off the line. “This one looks like a boy.” She always said it as if I were a museum piece, a questionable stone sculpture, unable to hear, and I would think to myself, See? Even she can see it! What the hell is wrong with this world? She has about thirty grandchildren; she knows a thing or two.
My parents, brother, sister, aunts, uncles, and cousins uniformly ignored my Grandma’s outbursts, as they would a loud fart in a church service. She was lucid and alert in those days, but no one validated her words or the truth I knew she spoke, skipping past them like a flat stone on a still lake, moving on to other topics. Everyone heard. No one stopped what they were doing or saying and I have no memory of anyone meeting my eyes when she said these things. We all just moved on, pressed the lid back down over the boiling pot. That she saw something in me—this thing I sensed about myself—both validated and infuriated me. Since that moment back in kindergarten, I had sought out ways to distract myself from my secret struggle—knowing I was a boy, but living as a girl. The constant stress was a chronic condition, my “cross to bear,” as my sixth-grade teacher Mrs. Brassard used to say about every challenge my peers and I encountered in class. As crosses went, this one was a doozy.
What made me like this? I often asked myself. While my gender journey likely began while I grew in the womb, my birth was otherwise unremarkable, according to my parents. Growing up, I had no idea that psychologists were debating how to classify and treat people like me. It would be years before the diagnosis “gender identity disorder” was added to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and decades before the 2013 DSM-5 changed this diagnosis to “gender dysphoria,” defined as the “marked incongruence between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender.” Both incongruence and distress must be present. People continue to debate whether a diagnosis of mental illness should be required in order to receive medically necessary health care, not to mention legal and human rights protections.
What I did know was that I’d emerged at birth looking like an average female infant. I’m sure everyone assumed I would grow up without giving my gender a second thought, let alone entertaining the mental gymnastics of nature versus nurture to try to explain how or why I was like this.
I’ll leave the debate over why people like me feel that our birth-assigned gender is incorrect to the geneticists, endocrinologists, psychiatrists, and developmental psychologists and say only this: there has not been one waking moment since that day in kindergarten that I haven’t felt an all-encompassing, deep, intrinsic sense that I am male. I also would have given anything, anything, for this not to have been so—until I finally gave in and transitioned.
WHEN I WAS six, Dad took a paid sabbatical to attend the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana, and pursue a master’s degree in Religious Studies. We rented our Calgary house out to a group of young teachers, packed up the car, and drove south across the United States to our temporary new home: a large old three-story house with an expansive yard filled with huge trees. Beyond the long backyard was a steep embankment, on top of which ran a train track. Early in the morning and late at night every single day, a train rumbled past our home, waking poor Mom each time. On the other side of the tracks, quite literally, was the area of town where less fortunate whites and a sizeable black population lived. We were strictly forbidden to go there and were never told why.
Home to the famed Notre Dame Fighting Irish football team, coached by the legendary Ara Parseghian, South Bend was a football-mad town and Dad—a sports fan who’d taken us to Calgary Stampeders games all through our youth—had a line on tickets.
