I crept into the women’s foundations department like a ninja on an assassination mission, certain someone would stop me and demand credentials proving I was female. I imagined a salesperson calling the police, who would haul me, the creepy boy in women’s foundations, off in handcuffs. If I could have belly-crawled to avoid drawing attention, I would have. Women’s foundations? What the hell is a foundation other than a concrete structure holding up a building, or a charitable organization? I whispered under my breath. It’s underwear. It’s just frigging underwear.
I skulked around the bras—big ones, padded ones, flowered ones—and tried to find something intended for someone who didn’t need or want a bra. Glancing around me, I saw women—many at least sixty years old—with huge breasts to restrain, sifting through bins and boxes of undergarments. I imagined within this secret society there existed some mother/daughter bra-shopping ritual, and I swore I would never participate in this with a friend, let alone my own mother. Get me outta here.
Deciding the buxom grandmas were not going to lead me to training bras, I struck out for another wing of women’s foundations. With fewer mushroom colors and more bright tones, this seemed like a better place to find something my mom would approve of. Within minutes, I found myself in line waiting to pay for a tiny piece of white cotton sporting one microscopic flower between two minute triangles that were intended to cover breasts—thirty-two inches, no cups to speak of. I held it tucked under one armpit, dreading the moment I would have to speak to the cashier. I felt sorry for the aged woman in front of me as she struggled with her purse; hands shaking, back stooped, blue veins visible. Why can’t we hire people to do this? I was next up.
I heard two voices whispering behind me in line. Until now, I had deliberately avoided eye contact with anyone, but I glanced surreptitiously behind me to see who was speaking. As I strained my peripheral vision in ways I previously hadn’t known possible, I heard one of them say to the other, “What does he need with a bra, anyway?”
“I don’t know,” her friend—or more likely daughter—answered with a sniff. My cheeks burned from the fire of embarrassment and misunderstanding. I stepped up to the clerk, who eyed me with suspicion. Note to self: women’s foundations is a snake pit.
“Yes?” she raised her eyebrows at me, not looking at the mini Maidenform number in my sweaty hand.
“I’ll take this one,” I choked out.
“Is this a gift?” she asked with a smirk, pretending to be helpful.
“No.”
“Because if it is, I can give you a receipt so she can return or exchange it if it isn’t right,” she persisted, seeming to delight in my growing discomfort.
“It’s fine,” I said, handing her the scrunched-up twenty-dollar bill, avoiding her eyes and trying not to give her the satisfaction of knowing she got to me, although I’m sure I was unsuccessful. I grabbed my change and walked away quickly, shame boring a hole in my breastless chest as I prepared to meet my mother and endure her delight over my purchase.
Bonding over traditionally female activities—the “sisterhood,” as I thought of it—soon claimed most of my girlfriends. Backyard adventures and tennis matches with Melanie and Lynn changed to “talks” in their bedrooms, despite my unsuccessful efforts to steer the activities outside and toward sports. They preferred lounging around, sampling the newest Lip Smacker flavors, dabbing Love’s Baby Soft behind their ears, while thumbing through the latest TigerBeat magazine with its full, glossy, poster-sized inserts of the Bay City Rollers and Donny Osmond. Gone were the days when my friends wanted to sing like Laurie Partridge or shake a tambourine like Tracy; now everyone wanted to be Keith’s girlfriend. This sea change left me strategizing to maintain my cover.
Writing those words now, I’m struck by how conscious, how calculating my actions sound in hindsight. The tug of war between being my true self and fitting in with the group of girls to which I belonged—unfathomably, it seemed to me—raged constantly in my head. The effort to suppress my male self burbled like molten lava under the surface of my consciousness, consuming an enormous amount of my energy, but I had never known anything else.
“Have you got yours, yet?” Lynn asked me one day as we luxuriated in her room.
“My what?” I asked, lazily tossing one playing card after another at her garbage can.
“Your period—or, as Jolene likes to call it, ‘the curse.’” She nodded in the direction of her sister’s bedroom.
“Uh-uh, you?”
“Not yet.” Lynn sat up on the bed, pulling her legs in close to her chest. “I don’t really get the girls who act all excited about it, you know?” She frowned, shaking her head. “Like, you bleed all over the place once a month for the funnest years of your life. How is that exciting?”
“I dunno,” I mumbled. “It doesn’t seem too great to me, either.” I thought of my mother’s promise to get me “a little belt” when the time came, referring to the uncomfortable belts that had been used to hold the sanitary pads of her era. Mom was suspicious of tampons, which were new to the market. She expressed vague concerns about infections and protecting a girl’s virginity, both of which I discouraged her from elaborating on. How would I run or play in a belt? I had never summoned the courage to ask her, instead hoping I would magically be spared my period when the great cosmic error of my gender was discovered. I envisioned medieval buckles and locks, metal clanging against me as I skateboarded.
“Do you think other girls don’t want it?” Lynn asked earnestly.
“For sure,” I said, but the only person I was sure of was me. “I’d rather not get it at all.” But Lynn had made me aware of something I’d never considered: If regular girls like her didn’t want their periods, could there be more people like me than I realized? “Do you ever wish you didn’t get boobs?” I ventured.
“No way!” Lynn shouted, bounding off the bed to stand in front of her large mirror. She eyed her chest—already a 36C—appreciatively. “I’ll be able to nurse a whole family with these suckers!” Lynn often spoke of her wide hips and large breasts as perfect for childbearing—an unfathomable act I couldn’t imagine myself ever doing. I slumped deeper into the beanbag chair I sat in. She glanced at me, an afterthought. “Do you not want to get boobs?”
“I don’t really care either way,” I lied, trying to sound casual. “At this rate, it’s looking like I won’t, anyway.”
“Oh, you’ll get them,” she said reassuringly. “Every girl does, eventually.”
I sought solace with my boy friends, feeling secure in the way I belonged with them. Where other girls didn’t seem interested in playing with them, the boys continued to include me and never spoke badly of girls in front of me or made me feel like they didn’t want me there. I felt very protective of girls, knowing how it felt to go through life treated as one, even if I secretly wasn’t one. Some of the other boys in our neighborhood didn’t treat girls as kindly.
One year, Melanie and I shared a paper route. Every weekday after school and on Saturdays, we’d gather around our route manager’s garage awaiting the delivery of the Calgary Herald before loading our bags with papers and walking our routes under their heavy weight. All of the other paper carriers were boys, while Melanie and I were a team of two. I noticed how different these boys were from my friends when several of them dominated the conversation, spoke poorly of girls, and stuck to other off-color topics.
When I hung out with my friends who were boys, we’d ride Sidney’s backyard half-pipe for hours, hanging around talking skateboarding and trying new tricks. But as my middle school years drew to a close, so, too, did my place with the boys. One Sunday afternoon, I walked out of Sidney’s house after using the washroom and right into the middle of a conversation.
“Then