Extra Terrestrial (Contains Nudity)

Some things are a long time coming.

When I was four-years-old my mother took me to the movie theatre for the first time. For a first flick my mom really couldn't have picked a better show: ET.

I was scared and thrilled out of my mind.

My mom has since told me that she was really afraid that she had taken me to see a movie that was too heavy for a four-year-old because I didn't say a word after it was over. I walked quietly to the car with her. Sat in my seat. Got buckled in. Deep in thought. She kept an eye on me in the rearview mirror (much of our relationship has happened through the rearview mirror). And it wasn’t until she saw me hold up my index finger and examine it at length then plunge my longest two fingers into my bag of left-over Reese’s Pieces and pull out a candy examine it and pop it into my mouth that she knew I was okay.

Why was ET so engrossing for me? I won’t feign the ability to step back into my four-year-old mind. It is a good movie. I like it to this day. There are a few obvious parallels to my own life: absent father, single mother, younger sister and a misunderstood youth. But, it was more than that. This is a movie that was at the core of my personal cannon as a child.

Why? I loved everything about young Elliot. Everything. I wanted his freckles, his blue jeans, his multi-speed boy bike complete with basket, his dark disheveled hair, his voice, his bedroom, his thermal undershirt and especially his zip-down red sweatshirt. How I pined for my own red sweatshirt. For six years of my life few things would have pleased me more than having thermal underwear and a red sweatshirt, like Elliot. I envied him horribly for having an extraterrestrial friend that understood him, for having a mother who cajolingly accepted his boyish stalwartness and for having an older brother whom he earned the respect, admiration and physical protection of. I wanted to be just like Elliot.

I wanted to be a boy.

My mom for a long time was at wits end with me because I begged her for a “boy haircut,” for “boy swimsuits” and for “boy sneakers.” I cut the hair off of all of my dolls. I gave them black and blue eyes with ball-point pens. I wanted a sailor’s outfit. I snuck off with her fancy silk scarves tied around my waist with a makeshift sword tucked in the knotted-side to play Sinbad.

My mom was very disturbed one day when I asked her whether it was more respectful to clean off your sword after cutting someone's throat or to leave the blood on it. I then went about slitting the throats of all my dolls (complete with lipstick blood) and only stopping to do the messy work of deciding which ones had merited a sword cleaning and which had not.

My birthday requests for cap guns, toy swords, baseball bats, boy bikes and GI Joes were always answered with Barbies, books, dresses, pink bikes and board games. I think she was scared to indulge my personal interests thinking she might encourage me to do things she would later have to break me of. I think, too, she couldn’t stand the thought of her daughter opening a treasure-trove of boyhood in front of all of her friends and family.

She walked a fine-line, indulging my interests in space and nature but over-riding my desires to play male-dominated sports, cross-dress and play war. At the clothing store I would stealthily cross over into the boy section. Avoiding the gaze of my mother and the other adults. I would secretly plant the boy clothes on the girl racks and pretend to come across them there, lift them up and exclaim something like “I found a 6x, mom.”

More than slightly terrified by me, I think my mom was grateful when I started Catholic School and had to wear the stereotypical jumper (as in a skirt) every day. It is hard to put this feeling, which I well remember, into adult words. I was humiliated, embarrassed and devastated. I have often thought that it may well be because of the years of being forced to wear a skirt with my sex constantly exposed to cold winds and lewd boys that I have such a strong aversion to dresses of any kind today. I even find myself losing interest in dating a particular girl once I see her in a skirt.

You can imagine how popular I was in school. Or maybe you can’t. The other children ridiculed me. The teachers taunted me. The rules degraded me.

I routinely got in trouble in school for the following:
1. Wearing illegal shorts or pants under my jumper.
2. Fighting (some people might call this self-defense).
3. Being too out spoken, especially in math and science class.
4. Refusing to participate in religious events.
5. Doing generally unladylike things. These usually were things that were tolerated for the boys.

In 3rd grade I was moved from the accelerated class into the "slow" class. This had nothing to do with my scholastic performance as I was routinely one of the top 5 students in my grade. It was strictly for behavior. I felt I had lost what little I had going for me in school, namely a class I was challenged to learn in. I found myself surrounded by kids who picked their noses and smelled each other's farts. One day a kid in our class stabbed another kid through the ear with a pencil for looking at him funny. I withdrew, literally. I would go to school and leave my coat on and zip it up over the top of my head. I would push my desk to the back of the room and draw fantastical pictures of dinosaurs and dragons. A classmate later told me she thought I was the coolest person in the world because in third grade I had already had enough and said fuck-all to this stupid school.

Unfortunately, I had to continue on in that stupid school until the end of eighth grade. I was regularly beaten up on the playground. My mom gave me private lessons in how to take a punch. And when I got sick of taking it I got in trouble for hitting boys (never did it matter that they had hit me first). I frequently had weekend detentions. I cannot say I ever had a friend in school after 3rd grade. Even my younger sister openly mocked me at recess. I am embarrassed to admit that I am crying as I write this.

The principal at our school suggested my mother get me psychological counseling. Instead she got counseling for herself. I am sure this helped us both, but I sometimes wonder if I might have been happier if I had someone to talk to, especially someone who might have become an informed ally.

I somehow managed to continue to be one of the top students in my grade. Sometimes I think it was through shear luck. I don't remember ever reading a single schoolbook or doing much homework. I read science fiction and historical fiction and I read science books and watched movies about boys. I guess I was just incredibly intuitive because I rarely got less than a 95% on any test or report card and I regularly scored in the 99th percentile on national standardized tests. This last fact eventually saved me from the slow class, though I honestly think that some of my teachers despised me so, and would have liked to see me turnout dumb.

Things continued to go badly through junior high school (which was in the same building). I couldn't understand boy/girl crushes and slept with some boys at a very young age purely out of curiosity. I didn’t know how to dress and we didn’t have much money anyhow. I was extremely competitive, especially with the guys in my class. I luckily got involved in athletics where I felt people genuinely valued my brains and my competitiveness. Towards the end of junior high I had disturbing dreams where I would be a man having sex with a woman or a man having sex with another man or I would switch back and forth from one gender to another in a dream where I was falling or flying and I would wake up thinking I was a boy who could bound over buildings . . . for a minute.

In high school I decided that I was just a radical feminist and that all of my gender problems had been caused by an overly religious society that placed too much importance on traditional gender roles and marriage. I was part right. High school was little bigger, instead of 50 people in my class there were now 100. Unbeknown to me at the time I won the admiration of a lot of people. As a top student and a successful athlete I had a lot of ins with the popular crowd, and though I was never invited to do anything with them socially I was so busy traveling to sporting events and competing for a spot on ever more prestigious teams that I hardly had time to worry about my lack of a social life. But I did worry about it. And I began to write about it in my journal.

The only place I ever felt slightly comfortable in school was in English class and art class where I could talk about my feelings in metaphors and allusions confident that no one understood. If it hadn't been for soccer and basketball where physical contact was mandatory and a little guy I babysat (who was also my best friend) I might have gone the whole four years without ever touching anyone outside of my family.

In the past year several of my classmates have written to me or come up to me someplace and told me how much they always envied ME. Just yesterday I went to the wedding of a gal I went to HS with and she introduced me to her Lesbian mother as one of only two people she had any respect for in HS. I was floored.

Things changed a little when I went to college. I became more adamant that gender stereotypes were harmful to society, but I never seemed to be in a position to actually do anything about it. As a college athlete I was scared of playing into the stereotype that all jocks are dykes. I had a terrible crush on a girl who treated me somewhat callously.

Then, I met KC. After my playing career ended I decided to major in the creative arts because I had this undying urge to say something about myself, but I couldn’t put my finger on what it was I needed so desperately to say. As a design student the projects I was given were conservative and focused on professional practices. But I wanted to talk about real things, about oppression, about loneliness, about compassion and kindness and social change. But instead I made a shitload of logos and business cards and websites. And worked, constantly.

And I dated KC for seven years. And we were not good together. And a large part of it is my fault for taking so long to turn around at look at myself and talk from my heart.

So this week I read this book, Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs. I don't know why I picked it up at the bookstore, really. I liked the cover. And I have a friend right now who is a transmale, female to male transsexual, and I think in part I wanted to understand him better. Not the best book in the world, but a personally significant one. There it was in story after story; A young girl who wants to play with tin soldiers, toy trucks, basketballs, who wants to be strong and brave, who is a boy.

And all of a sudden my brain cracked open and out came this little 7-year-old boy, in love with Elliot and stealing gold from dirty pirates. "Hey there, remember me? Remember how happy we were? Remember all the adventures we were going to have? Let’s play. On Guard! Off with your boobs!"

How many times have I written of this overwhelming feeling that I had been asleep for years? I am just now having my first real sexual experiences - as in my first honest sexual experiences. And my ex-partner, KC, who did have real flaws just like the rest of us, has always taken my ambivalence, my detachment and my lack of anything to say so personally, internalizing my own comatose emotional state and assuming it was some deep-felt dissatisfaction with her. But it was me. We would argue for hours without looking each other in the eyes. I had been sleep-walking through life. Feeling invisible, feeling as though I didn’t exist.

So here I am in my hometown again, 27-years-old, alone and just finally ready to go through a real adolescence.

This is Loren Cameron, a famous transsexual body builder, photographer and author. When I saw these photos my soul whimpered, ". . . and I could be like that, too." And it made me happy to not have to feel so envious of male bodies anymore, to know that if a day came when I wanted to work towards becoming something different, I could, but I don't have to, I can do whatever I need to do to be myself.

I resigned my job as a college and youth soccer coach this past week. Some parents had complained about my gender identity (and driven by my house and circulated emails about me and so on and so forth).

I met some nice people tonight. Smart, queer people, in Binghamton! It was a small miracle. And at the end of the night came the big Question. “So, please don’t take this the wrong way, but are you transitioning?” Am I transitioning?

I don’t know. It seems as though there are a lot of things settling on my mind. I don’t have a strong desire to go through hormone treatment and painful repeated operations. But, in a year from now, who knows? I may feel differently. I know a few things for sure though. I am done with this charade. I don’t feel the need to spare anyone else’s feelings anymore. I want my own feelings. I am going to be a boy and a girl. AND I am going to go to graduate school. I am going to work on projects about gender and some day, maybe, the young people I would otherwise love to be working with won't have to wait until they are 27 to find role models they want to emulate.