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. He took Jake and me, then aged seven and six, to several games that autumn, including the much-anticipated match against perennial rival Michigan State.
The game began with a successful touchdown drive by the Irish that sent the capacity crowd into paroxysms of glee. As Jake and I jumped up and down in celebration, I felt hands wrap my waist and lift me high into the air, across the tops of heads, over the crowd. Long before crowd-surfing or mosh pits became common, the fans of Notre Dame Stadium had a tradition of lifting people into the air and passing them handover-hand above the crowd. Just as I was losing sight of my family and beginning to feel afraid, I felt a hand firmly grasp my ankle, pulling me back. Without a word, Dad gripped my waist and placed me back down beside him in the stands, but I caught him nod and cross himself in the direction of Touchdown Jesus, the larger-than-life mural painted on the side of the campus’s main library building visible beyond one end of the field.
Every morning during the 1971–72 school year, I paused to take in the imposing facade of Thomas Jefferson Elementary in South Bend before walking up the steps and entering my second-grade classroom, unaware that my school was embroiled in a desegregation battle between the US Department of Justice and public schools in Indiana. That August, Indiana Public Schools had been found guilty in federal court of practicing racial segregation. My school was desegregated for the first time that school year, and many opposed it vehemently. I was only aware of its effect on my friendships with Cedric and Ramona, two black kids in my class, because no one seemed to want us to spend time together.
Our teacher, Mrs. Gruber, worked diligently to separate us, even when we tried to team up for group work in the classroom. She repeatedly concocted reasons for why this wasn’t acceptable—the three of us weren’t close enough in height, we needed to be all girls or all boys, we needed to make friends with other kids “like us,” we needed to be at the same reading level. It went on and on. None of the groups Mrs. Gruber formed mixed black kids with white kids. I sensed she didn’t like me; more than once she had referred to me as a “troublemaker.”
One morning after recess, Cedric, Ramona, and I ran into the classroom laughing, talking about the basketball game we’d just played. A few days earlier, Mrs. Gruber had placed our desks in side-by-side rows instead of traditional columns, and the novelty hadn’t worn off yet. I ran in front of the desks, then vaulted over mine to sit down instead of taking the few extra steps to circle around the row. She descended on me like a lion on a hyena, wooden yardstick in hand. She wrenched me by the collar to the front of the row, bent me over, and shoved my face into my desk. She screamed out to everyone, “Class! This is what will