On those mornings when we weren’t lost in NASA rocket launches or Gender Heaven beauty tips, we were inspecting the images she’d assembled under “My Pictures.” Few of them were actually her pictures; most had been lifted from the Web. An exception was her Screen Saver image, a photo of a servant girl in a French maid’s outfit, a pink bow in her platinum blond curls. She had one white stiletto heel thrust out and was reaching down to adjust a stocking. The chambermaid was my father, who’d taken a selfie standing in front of a mirror.
Then there were the montages: images she’d pulled from various Internet pages, into which she’d inserted herself. All that long experience doctoring fashion spreads for Vogue and Brides had found its final form: Stefi’s face atop a chiffon slip originally worn by a headless mannequin. Stefi implanted on the long legs of a woman ironing lingerie in a polka-dot apron. (“I added the apron,” she said.) Stefi transported into an online Christmas card of a girl wearing a red ruffle around her neck and not much else. Stefi in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, captured in mid plié. Stefi in another maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots. The girl held the skirt up in back to reveal her frilly underwear.
“I did these before I had the operation,” my father said, “but it was too extreme. Transvestite pretension.”
The theme of “before” and “after” was a recurrent one in these viewing sessions. My father seemed intent on drawing a thick line between her pre- and post-op self, as though the matron respectability she’d now achieved renounced her earlier sex-kitten incarnations, made them into a “flamboyance” that she no longer needed or recognized.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a link she’d bookmarked called FictionMania. I was hoping for narrative relief from the onslaught of images. “Oh, people make up these stories about themselves and post them on this site,” she said. “We don’t need to look at that.”
“Stories?” I pressed. I’d look it up later: FictionMania was one of the largest transgender fantasy sites on the Internet, a repository for more than twenty thousand trans-authored tales, the vast majority of them sexual. A popular story line involved a dominatrix (often a female relative) forcing a cowed man into feminine undergarments, dresses, and makeup. The genre had a name: “Forced Feminization Fiction.”
“You know, stories,” my father answered, “like they’re little boys and their mothers make them dress up as a girl as punishment and then their mothers spank them. And they have illustrations.” I reached for the mouse to click on the link. My father pushed my hand aside. “I wouldn’t even share that with a psychiatrist.” Not that she had one; she regarded psychiatry as one of those “stupid things” best given a wide berth. I asked if she had ever posted a story on the site.
“No, I just used some of the pictures they have on here. For my montages,” pasting her face onto one or another costumed playmate. She’d done more than that, though. Her upstairs hall closet contained stacks and stacks of file folders of forced feminization dramas she’d downloaded from FictionMania and similar sites, in which she’d montaged her names into the text (Steven “before,” Stefánie “after”). Her stash showed a predilection for subjugation and domestic service, often set in Victorian times: “Baroness Gloria, the Amazing Story of a Boy Turned Girl” (in which Aunt Margaret in Gay Nineties Berlin disciplines her nephew into becoming a corseted “real lady”) or “She Male Academy” (in which Mom sends her misbehaving son to the Lacy Academy for Young Ladies, a “vast mansion designed in the Victorian Gothic manner,” where whip-wielding mistresses exact a transformation: “Steven will become Stefánie; his bold, brash and arrogant male self will be destroyed and replaced with the dainty, mincing and helplessly ultra-feminine personality of a sissy slave girl”). Along with the altered downloads were a few stories my father had written herself. Her character stayed true to form, submitting to the directives of a chief housekeeper while an all-female crew of iron-handed maids order “Steven” into baby-doll nighties, Mary Jane shoes, and a French chambermaid’s uniform.
At the computer, my father had moved on to another page of links. “I haven’t looked at that website for two years at least,” she said of FictionMania. “It was just a—, like a hobby. Like I used to smoke cigars, but I gave it up. This was all before.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m a real woman,” she said. “But I keep these pictures as souvenirs. I put a lot of work into them; I don’t want to throw them out.”
She hadn’t stopped montaging; she’d only shifted genres. She showed me a few of her more recent constructions. Now she was the lady of the house: Stefánie in a long pleated skirt and high-necked bodice. Stefánie with hair swept up into a prim bun and holding the sort of large sensible pocketbook favored by Her Majesty the Queen of England. This was certainly a persona shift from the “sissy slave girl” in Mary Janes, or at least an age adjustment. And yet, it seemed less a repudiation of her erotica collection than a culmination of it.
The sex fantasies and lingerie catalogs in my father’s file folders in the hall closet were commingled with printouts of downloaded how-to manuals on gender metamorphosis (“The Art of Walking in Extreme Heels”), many of them narrated by virtual dominatrixes: “This is your first step on your journey into femininity, a journey that will change your life,” read the introduction to “Sissy Station,” a twenty-three-step electronic instructional on “finding your true self” by becoming a woman. “You will be humiliated and embarrassed. Most of all, you will be feminized.” The journey required, in different stages, applying multiple coats of red toenail polish every four days, beribboning testicles, and practicing submission with sex toys before a mirror.
“There isn’t any one way to be a trans,” a trans friend cautioned me some years later. “I think of transsexuality as one big room with many doors leading into it.” My father’s chosen door was distinct. But the big room, like any condo, had its covenants and restrictions. A reigning tenet of modern transgenderism holds that gender identity and sexuality are two separate realms, not to be confused. “Being transgender has nothing to do with sexual orientation, sex, or genitalia,” an online informational site instructs typically. “Transgender is strictly about gender identity.” Yet, here in my father’s file folders was a record of her earliest steps toward gender parthenogenesis, expressed in vividly sexual terms. And here in FictionMania and Sissy Station and the vast electronic literature of forced feminization fiction was a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step. How to tease the two apart?
My father clicked the mouse and a greeting card popped up: Stefi’s visage pasted onto a frilled lace gown, hands clutching a bouquet, above the card’s preprinted message, “Wish I could be a bridesmaid on your Wedding Day!”
“You sent this card?”
“Not this one. I’ve sent others.”
“To?”