This is not an autobiography.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
This is about hormones, germs, and cancer.
And gender. And sex.
But it's not an autobiography.
My mother tells me that her hormones will make her susceptible to breast
cancer. They say, she repeats, that she has too many female hormones.
She should, she says, have been born man. She adds that she's asked the
doctors over and over again for male hormones but the doctors say that
male hormones will not work for my mother's susceptibility to potentially
malignant cysts. She says that she just has too many female hormones.
I'm about eight. Hormones cause cancer. I don't know anything else about
hormones, except that they come in two kinds, male and female, and that
it seems to be better to have male hormones when you’re a woman.
My mother doesn't say anything about it, but I start to wonder if it wouldn't
have been better to have female hormones if you’re a boy. I don't
really feel like a boy, anyway, or don't know what feeling like a boy
would feel like. I don't know anything else about sex or sexual difference,
either, at about eight.
My mother is terrified of her hormones.
From the time I'm six onwards, my mother will have surgery to remove cysts
from her breasts every year or so. Each operation will be accompanied
by my mother's saying that she wishes she'd been a man or at least had
male hormones.
When I'm ten, she tells me she will be going through menopause, which
doesn't mean anything to me, except that my mother uses it to explain
why she has been so exceptionally vicious. She picks on, will continue
to pick on, my posture, my gestures, my movements, all of which are effeminate,
she says, she will continue to say. Menopause is somehow connected to
her hormones, my mother repeats, because she can't take the female hormones
she now needs because of her tendency to cysts, caused by her hormones.
Cysts can lead to cancer. All her friends have been taking female hormones
and menopause won't have to be a problem for them, she says.
My mother is terrified of cysts.
My mother is terrified of cancer.
My mother is terrified of hormones.
My mother hates effeminacy. I don't really understand why I am so effeminate,
will continue to be so effeminate. How and why can everyone else tell?
When I start primary school when I'm six, before the first week is up,
almost the entire class will have surrounded me to shout "Sissy!
Sissy!" at me. My mother, who will have come to fetch me from school,
will have seen the group around me and will have asked me what has happened.
"Nothing," I'll lie. Somehow I will know that lying will be
a way out, will go on being a way out. But I'll never really go back long
enough for the kids from primary school to pick on me again. My mother
will see to that. Somehow she will have known I lied, and that will make
her pick on me for being so effeminate.
My mother is terrified of germs, too, another terror to be added to everything
that scares her.
Which is why, she tells me, she never ever breastfed me but had raised
me on formula instead: formula doesn't have germs, like breasts. Years
later I will understand "germs" to be a code word for what scares
my mother about herself, about her breasts, about cancer, and about hormones.
Hormones, germs, and cancer link my mother's trouble with her breasts,
her behavior to me, and the mystery of what being effeminate means. Hormones,
germs, and cancer will be, will continue to be, will have been, the forces
that govern my mother's world, into which the mystery of effeminacy will
have slipped, like another germ, like one more cyst, like something to
do with hormones.
When I turn sixteen, I will have told my mother I am gay.
She'll say that the next thing I’m going to announce will be that
I need a sex-change operation.
More than sixteen years later, a year after my absent father's death,
my absent father who doesn't feature in this thing that is not an autobiography,
I will have told my mother that I'm transgender and not gay.
This time, she won't bring up the sex-change operation.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
She'll still be scared of hormones.
She'll still be scared of cancer, which she'll continue to call "The
Big C."
This, despite my father's long and terrible death from ALS, which seems
much worse than anything my mother will ever have imagined as cancer.
This, despite the death because of AIDS-related illness of almost all
the people I will have known, will continue to know.
My mother will still be scared of hormones.
This will have been more than twenty years after her double mastectomy.
But now I have gotten ahead of myself.
Because my mother is terrified of germs, she'll decide to keep me at home,
away from germs and the people who carry them, the same people who will
also have called me "sissy."
Because I will be kept away from germs and the people who carry them,
when I do go to school, I'll immediately get ill, since I'll have no resistance.
I will stay ill and receive home schooling for seven years.
Home schooling will happen before puberty—another ambush of hormones,
only I get ahead of myself once again, because at the time I'll have no
idea what is taking place and my parents will never talk about sex to
me. Home schooling will happen before my parents decide to make up for
the seven years of home schooling by sending me to an all-boys boarding-school
at the age of thirteen, where I will get raped by a sixteen-year old boy
in my first quarter.
Hormones. Germs. Sexual violence. Gender violence.
I'll stay the high school fag, the high school sissy for five endless
years, and I won't tell anyone about the rape until many years later,
by which time I will have been raped again, more than once.
But now I'm getting ahead of myself.
And this is not much of an autobiography.
This is as flat as a case report, an everyday story of germs and sex and
violence.
I will only have told my mother about the rape a year after my absent
father's death and after I will have told her that I'm transgender and
not gay as I would have said many years before. I'll only tell her about
the rape after she'll have said that, even though we have never talked
about anything to do with sex or my gender, she knows everything about
me, has always known everything about me, will continue to know everything
about me. Without our ever having talked about anything about me. This
is not an autobiography.
I'm really far ahead of myself.
When she will have said that, I'll be beside myself and will tell her
about the rape as a kind of belated revenge, for knowing nothing about
me, for ignoring that I would have been so glaringly the high school sissy,
for thinking that five years' incarceration in a boarding school would
have set me straight, for having left me to sink or swim in a sea of hormones
and germs.
As I'll expect, my mother will have nothing to say about the rape, except
that she's sorry for me. It will have been more than sixteen years after
the fact, and since this is not an autobiography, everything happens either
ahead of itself or after the fact. Too early or too late.
Before the rape, before the boarding school, when I'm twelve, my mother
has a double mastectomy.
She'll say that she's relieved.
She'll tell me that now she's flat like a boy.
Once I will become the high school fag, I'll soon make friends with older
drag queens and transsexuals whom I'll sneak out of school to meet. When
I'm fourteen, my best friend is Penny, the first transsexual I'll ever
have met. Her grandmother is paying for her hormones and surgery. Penny
tells me that every day she stands in front of her mirror, looking at
herself down there and wishing she were flat down there. Flat like a girl,
she says.
From my mother and from Penny I infer that sex is somehow flat. And that
gender is somehow flat, too. Will be flat, will continue to be flat, will
have been flat.
Flat like sex, flat like gender. Nothing will have proved different since
age fourteen.
So for an autobiography, this is really simply too flat.
The first night that my mother is back from the hospital after her double
mastectomy, my absent father and my mother will have the worst fight that
I'll ever have to witness between them. My father will tell my mother
that every time she comes back from the hospital, she's a little crazier
than she was before.
My mother demonstrates the point by screaming all night.
We will be living, at that time, when I'm twelve, just before boarding
school, before my first rape, before I meet my first transsexual and before
I realize that I will always have been transgender, in a lower-middle-class
all-white suburb. In lower-middle-class all-white suburbs, when I'm twelve,
a white woman screaming all night will be remarked but not commented on.
The last time I will see my absent father, he'll be very ill with ALS,
his muscles will have atrophied, and he'll be almost entirely bald. Suddenly
we will look alike for the first time, since I'll be thin and will have
a shaved head then.
When I will have come back from the visit, I will start to have myself
tattooed, so that I won't look like my father. I'll be scared that if
I were to go back to cross-living, I'll look like my mother. So tattooing
will become a way out, for the time being, of looking like either of my
parents, of carrying their images in my body.
The same summer that I will come back from what will have been my last
visit to my absent father, a girlfriend will decide to get breast implants
in addition to the female hormones she'll have been taking. She will do
this to make her gender transition from male to female irrevocable in
some way.
She'll have been taking hormones for a few years.
This will be almost thirty years after my mother tells me that female
hormones will give her breast cancer. I'll be terrified of cancer, of
course, although this will happen after AIDS and after ALS, so I'll ask
my girlfriend, once, what medical studies exist about breast cancer in
male-to-female transsexuals.
Of course, there won't have been any medical studies.
I won't get hormones or breast implants.
I'll get tattoos.
So at least I won't look like either of my parents anymore.
When I have my ears pierced, many years before I will get tattooed, my
mother starts fretting about the dangers of cancer of the earlobe. After
my tattoos, she'll be convinced about the insidious cancers that can spread
from the tattoo ink, and cover my skin like a second web of design, a
visible mesh of the germs and cancers that will have terrified my mother
all my life. Because, even after AIDS and ALS, like my mother, I'll continue
to be scared of hormones and cancer.
I won't look like my parents anymore, not my absent father, who will have
been dead for several years now, nor my mother, who will still be, who
will continue to be afraid of "the Big C."
Seventeen years after I will have told my mother that I'm gay, nineteen
years after I meet my first transsexual friend, and some seven years before
I tell my mother that I'm transgender, the queen of queer theory, Judith
Butler, will declare that people who live in their assigned sex roles
have, in fact, sworn off desire for the parent of the same sex, and then
have adopted the sex identity of that parent. They no longer desire that
parent because they have instead become that parent, internalized that
parent. That, Butler'll proclaim, is where the conventions of gender come
from, these internalized invisible parents of the same sex controlling
one's every move, showing through only as the ghostly conformity of sex
to gender. Like burying your parent of the same sex deep inside you, in
the only place the gender police will never look, only to be haunted,
possessed by that parent's gender.
This is not my autobiography.
There are no inner children. We're not children inside, we're dead parents
inside.
This is not an autobiography. It’s the mystery of the missing parents.
You've killed your mommy—if you're a girl---and your daddy—if
you're a boy, and buried them—what better place?—inside you.
Butler will say that lesbians and gay men and drag queens somehow escape
this process but also show up its workings by their not following the
equation of sex with gender with sexuality. Gender performs, doubles,
and stands in for sexuality. To argue this must mean that Butler will
never have come across a straight-acting gay man. Nor will Butler ever
have met a lesbian who looked like her mother. And for Butler, drag queens
will be the sad clowns of the mourning show of sex.
Butler gets confused about transsexuals.
Butler doesn’t mention bisexuals.
Gender, for Butler, will be something like melancholia for Freud.
Drag queens show everyone else that everyone else is really in the drag
of her or his dead parents of the same sex, Butler will argue: Gender
is dead peoples' clothes. "Dead peoples' clothes" is what my
mother calls of the thrift store clothes I'll start wearing at fourteen.
When I will meet Butler, before my father will have died, before I will
have told my mother about the rape, before I will have become tattooed,
and when I will still be cross-living, I'll give her a Queer Nation sticker
that reads: "IF YOU'RE IN CLOTHES, YOU'RE IN DRAG." It will
already be a cliché at the time. Butler will look at me as if I
have cooties, perhaps because the slogan will show up the limits of her
argument by mimicking it so precisely, by reducing it to sloganeering.
But maybe she'll just be scared of germs.
Butler's story, which starts to sound like some version of the old Oedipus
story, will never have been my autobiography.
But I'll meet her before she'll have spelled out her ideas about gender
as melancholia.
My father is dead and I will never have loved him.
My mother may soon die and I won't have loved, perhaps will never have
loved her, either.
Still, my body will feel like a cemetery.
I'm falling behind myself.
In Psycho Norman Bates dresses as his mother to kill
women and hides the mummified body of his mother in the fruit cellar.
He becomes the mother he's killed to escape her influence. Which makes
him into her.
Most non-organic fruit is now modified, saturated with growth hormones,
alluring and tasteless and unpredictable as any apple from a wicked stepmother.
My lover jokes that we're all so full of hormones because of genetic farming
that we'll all already have changed whatever our hormonal sex may have
been, without our even knowing it. She laughs and says that thanks to
growth hormones the world will be one big Transgender Nation.
In the Whole Foods store in Boulder, Colorado, where I live, for a while,
produce is categorized as “organic,” “conventional,”
and “transitional.” “Genetic” is one of the markers
used by transgender people to distinguish non-transgender people, and
this classification calls up that distinction for me; simply, I’m
amused by this taxonomy. Perhaps I'll always have been “transitional,”
like some fruit or vegetable of dubious origin.
At the end of some prints of Psycho, Hitchcock superimposed
the image of a skull on Anthony Perkins's face, as if the dead mother
were no longer in the fruit cellar, but showing through Norman Bates.
In the cellar, the mother looks like some dessicated apple doll.
My mother sees Psycho, so she'll tell me, when she is
eight months pregnant with me.
My older brother and my father tease her, she'll tell me, that the movie
will traumatize the fetus, which would have been me.
I'm as old as Psycho.
This is not an autobiography. Neither Butler nor Hitchcock will have given
me any story.
The first time I see my father's penis, I won't know what it is. I'll
never have seen an adult's penis.
The second time I'll see it, I'll to masturbate without his seeing me.
That explains nothing. This'll lead nowhere.
Gender stays as vague and scary as germs.
As ubiquitous as carcinogens.
This is not an autobiography.
Everything will have taken place many years before I find a psychiatrist
to whom I can tell what, always, I have already known from the outset,
the punchline of the joke that everyone’s already guessed, the denouement
that you’ve seen coming a mile off, the story that the whole world
has read before, elsewhere, someplace else. What I'll have told my psychiatrist
is what I'll always have known (no recovered memories here, only ones
that are retold when it’s too late): my mother sexually abused me
when I was four years old.
Since this is not an autobiography, that explains nothing, casts no lurid
light of retrospection, retroactivity, on anything. This, I have to keep
reminding you, is not an autobiography.
It's everywhere and nowhere, like germs and hormones, in the fantasy of
my mother, will have been, will continue to be.
It follows failure.
It's as flat as sex, flat as gender.
It's as sad as sex, sad as gender.
And it'll have grown over years, like some kind of unattended cyst.
But I've gotten so far ahead of myself that there really is no point in
going back.
There really will be no point in going back.
I'll have gotten away from myself.
Everything's over before it started.
Everything will anticipate something that will already have happened.
And this will not have been an autobiography.
This will have been a disappearance.
Works
Cited
Butler, Judith. Bodies
That Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex”. New
York: Routledge, 1993.
---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity.
New York: Routledge, 1990.
Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” Trans. Joan Riviere.
Therapy and Technique. New York: Collier-Macmillan, 1963.
164-79.
Hitchcock, Alfred, dir. Psycho. 1961.
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