6. The 11 O’clock Never Comes
Grandma taught me to crochet. One of my earliest memories of being in her house was when I crocheted a green circle the size of a small plate. I still have it somewhere. She also taught me to knit. I can follow a pattern and make functional stuff. Most of Gran’s knitting patterns are old-lady style so I would change the colours around or wear things backwards.
I liked carrying on the tradition of crafts. Poor Gran just wanted to hand down her knowledge to somebody. Vic wasn’t learning ‘girlie stuff’ even if he was interested, which I doubt he was.
‘Your grandfather would be proud,’ Gran often said when I finished a scarf.
I wonder if he’d be proud of Finn.
‘Thanks Gran.’ Sometimes I call her Grandma, sometimes Gran and other times Bev. She’s the same person. If I can cope with name changes, shouldn’t others be able to? I’m still me, whatever label you use.
***
The thirteenth arrived, finally. Once again I was in an unfamiliar part of town in an unfamiliar waiting room, with a vaguely medical smell and decor. This visit was the next step. Dr Snell would refer me. She had to.
I’d taken special care with my appearance today. The guys online had suggested I bind my chest – it would help convince the doctor that I was serious about transitioning. I’d finally finished my spandex binder, taking in the sides a centimetre at a time until it was tight like I wanted.
They judge you on appearance because they don’t know you and often don’t know much about transgender people at all. They just do referrals. Try to look as male as possible – bind with anything you can find, except for duct tape – hurts like hell when you pull it off! Don’t ask me how I know, LOL. - Corey
So far I’d only worn my new binder around the house when no one was home. It felt awesome to have no breasts, well not visible ones. I jumped around to music and nothing wobbled. So liberating! I got out of breath quite fast though, something I wasn’t used to. My invisible breasts had to go somewhere; now they fought it out with my ribs and lungs for space.
Out in public, it was different. The whole bus ride, I felt like the other passengers were watching me. Like someone was going to stop me at any moment and say, ‘What are you trying to do? You’re not a boy.’ That had never happened when I didn’t bind and was a butch girl, but I was becoming paranoid. Was that normal to feel? I’d have to ask in the forums when I got home. I never cared what people thought of me before all this. Was I going crazy? Would hormones fix it? Was my personality just a recipe of hormones? How did I know when I got the ingredients right?
I presented myself to the front desk, handing over my health services card so I didn’t have to say my name out loud.
Sitting down to wait, it hit me how important this visit was. What if she said no? It would all be over before it had even started. She had to say yes. I couldn’t change my hormone recipe without some medical help.
‘Skye?’ a short, plump woman with dark-rimmed glasses and long wavy hair called out. Nervously, I got up and followed her down a hallway. She waved me into the first room.
‘Have a seat.’ She plonked herself down at the desk and opened my file. I wondered what was in there, since I’d never been here before. Blank sheets?
‘So, how can I help you?’ she asked without smiling. This lady sure took the ‘friendly’ out of ‘trans-friendly’.
‘I, ah, well, I want to transition. To male.’ There was a pause while we stared at each other.
‘I see. Are you living as male? I notice you have a female name.’ Almost an accusation. This was harder than I’d expected. I felt defensive.
‘I haven’t changed my name yet ...’ I took a deep breath. No idea what I was supposed to say, so it may as well be the truth. ‘I’ve only told a couple of people. I live with my parents and they don’t know yet.’ I sat back in my chair so she could see that I had bound my chest. My voice I couldn’t control, but that breathlessness was just nerves.
‘So what do you want to happen here?’
Didn’t she know? ‘Um, I’d like a referral to get on hormones.’ I felt like a junkie asking for drugs. I was desperate, but not like that. Desperate to make progress.
‘Do you understand what will happen to your body on hormones?’
Of course. But wasn’t I supposed to have things explained to me? That was her job. I was the patient.
‘I’ll get ... hair and a deeper voice.’ Explaining male puberty to a doctor. Well, at least she wasn’t a male with personal experience of male puberty. She waited. ‘And I won’t get my period any more.’
‘Right. The vocal changes are irreversible. That’s one reason why we want to be sure that you’re serious about this.’
She pulled a writing pad towards her and scribbled some notes on it. Did I need to say anything else? I sat in silence, scared.
Dr Snell ripped the page off the pad and put it on top of my file.
‘You’ll need a psychiatric assessment before commencing any hormone program. I’ll refer you to a psychiatrist who does these regularly, Doctor Edward Carter.’
So I would have to have the assessment, just like Jono said. But what about Greer? Didn’t that count for something?
‘I’m already seeing a gender counsellor.’
‘Oh? Who?’
‘Greer Knight.’
‘Don’t know her. Is she a psychiatrist?’
‘I don’t think so.’
‘Well, you might need fewer sessions, but that’s up to Doctor Carter. Be sure to mention it.’
Dr Snell put her pen down and looked at me closely, running her gaze up and down my body. She took in my attire – collared shirt, men’s jeans, leather boots. Probably still looked like some punk kid to a doctor.
‘Psychiatric assessments are very thorough. The doctor takes into account how much effort you’re making to live in the role. So you might need to do something about your hair.’
Was she serious? Were we living in the 1950s? Startled, I forgot I was scared. ‘What do you mean? Do I have female hair?’ I blurted out.
‘It’s long in places. It doesn’t matter to me, but it may to them.’ Multiple psychiatrists now? I imagined a panel of men in white coats pointing a bright lamp at me. My eyebrows rose with my heart rate.
‘I’m doing you a favour – forewarned is forearmed. They’ll judge you on your appearance, to gauge your sincerity.’
Dr Snell shuffled my papers together and stood up. ‘You should hear from them within a month.’
A month! I couldn’t wait a month. But this was a kind of progress. I stood up and thanked her and went out the door. It closed behind me. This visit felt so unfinished, like I should thank the doctor some more for referring me, but she was just doing her job. My visit was so significant for me, but was probably just another day for her.
Things were moving. There was no turning back now. My details were in the system. It was official.
I called Robert when I got home. I felt strung out and needed to hear a friend’s voice.
‘What’s up? You sound sort of ... crap.’
‘Oh, nothing. Had a weird day, that’s all. Do you want to hang out tomorrow?’
‘Yeah, okay. What do you want to do? There’s an all-ages show on at the high school hall.’
‘Nah, let’s go to a movie or something.’ I wanted to talk to him, and the early teen mayhem of an all-ages show wasn’t the right backdrop. A movie gave me time to plan it out and work up to it. Plus I didn’t want to see people who knew Skye. The city was big enough to hide me for a day.
‘Okay then, meet you on the eleven o’clock bus?’
‘Righto. Peace out,’ I said in a deep voice, being silly. I heard a chortle down the line as Robert hung up. Since Robert agreed about saving fossil fuels, he didn’t expect lifts.
***
Mum and Dad were slack about family meals since Vic moved out, except when he visited for dinner. We still did the kitchen table thing, but with less rules, like not waiting for everyone to be served before you started eating. Even when Vic came we still didn’t use the good silver or the polished dining table. The table wasn’t used for anything except laying out dress patterns when Mum occasionally sewed. Seemed like such a waste of a room when I had to hike across town to go to band practice.
Vic wasn’t visiting tonight so I served myself pasta and sauce from the two steaming bowls on the bench. Dad had already started.
I’d decided to leave the binders on and see if Mum and Dad noticed my shape had changed. I sat down opposite Dad.
‘Hungry?’ asked Dad. ‘Want another helping?’
‘Jeez, Dad, I’ve just started,’ I replied.
‘Well, you’ve got to get some meat on your bones.’ He wasn’t looking at the meat on my actual bones though, only chewing and gazing intently at his plate.
Mum wandered in and served herself a bowl. ‘Hello, Skye!’ she said brightly. Dad lifted an eyebrow.
‘Hello, Frank,’ he said sarcastically. ‘How was your day? Well, I fixed two cars and cooked a lovely dinner ...’
Mum flicked his head with her finger as she walked past. ‘Enough from the peanut gallery.’ It was one of her favourite sayings. She smirked at Dad as she sat down at the end of the table. Mum was in a good mood. This might go well after all.
‘What are you up to these days?’ Mum asked me. ‘I’ve heard you playing guitar. You’re sounding really good.’
‘Thanks. We’ve got a show coming up. I wrote a new song.’
‘Oh, yes? You know, I can still have a talk to the restaurant owners anytime, if you want to earn some money for playing. I know you kids never make anything from your shows.’
‘Mum! We’re not kids.’ Ugh, parents! Mum worked at Flowers Plus, a florist shop that supplied restaurants. She was convinced that if she merely suggested that I play guitar to the owners, they would book me for a nightly recital and pay me hundreds of dollars.
‘Sorry, love. Well, you still should be paid. Artists need to make a living, too.’
‘Yeah, I know. It’s not about money, though.’ Were we going to have the ‘what’s punk all about’ conversation again? When were they going to notice my chest? I didn’t know how to bring the conversation around to it; I just hoped it would go there on its own.
‘We could use some help down at the shop. We’ve had some big orders come in. All those lovely spring weddings ...’
Her eyes glazed over as she leaned on her hand, fork in the air. If I didn’t say something soon we’d be planning my wedding – not quite the discussion about my future I was hoping for.
‘Sure, I’ll help out.’
Working in the shop was fun, when my hayfever didn’t play up. They kept plenty of antihistamines around for that. The money would be handy for a proper binder, too, if I could find someone with a credit card to order it for me.
‘Great.’ Mum narrowed her eyes and stared at my chest. ‘Have you lost weight?’
‘No, I don’t think so,’ I replied as non-defensively as I could. Indirectly or not, we were finally talking about my transition! My heart raced.
‘Hmm.’ She turned to Dad. ‘Did Ted come and pick up the Falcon?’
The conversation was permanently skewed towards Dad’s workshop. The moment I was anticipating had passed – I was off the hook. For once I wanted to be on the hook though, and I was annoyed that the real thing was yet to happen. Mum and Dad chatted away about friends whose cars Dad fixed while a great, amorphous blob of yet-to-be-discussed transgender issues seemed to hang above the table.
What had I expected? I guess it would have been great if they’d said, ‘You’re a female-to-male transsexual, about to go through the process of transition? Let us give you anything you need!’ Only if your mother was Greer. Maybe that’s how she knew so much; maybe she had a trans child.
***
The ‘eleven o’clock’ was something of a standing joke between me and Robert, but only because it never arrived at eleven. We used to think that was hilarious at thirteen or so. Now we laughed at different things. Robert lived further up the route from me and was up the back when I got on. He might be vocal at shows, but the rest of the time he didn’t say boo in case someone looked.
‘Duuude,’ he drawled, like a surfer.
‘Duuude.’ I tried to look neutral, distracted by the now-familiar mix of elation at being called male and disappointment that it wasn’t serious.
Robert sniffed and yawned. ‘So what movie are we going to? No Hollywood crap. There’s an indie one that looked all right. Small town America something or other.’
‘Sounds good to me.’ What I really wanted to say to Robert was lurking in the back of my mind and I pushed it as far back as I could. Just mates, hanging out, no big news.
‘I had this great idea for my zine,’ Robert said, with a smidge more life in his voice. ‘I could do these interviews with animals that were freed from farms, or, like, battery hens that are now free range. Then we could dress up as the animals and actually do the interviews on film and put them online! How cool is that?’
It was cool, I nodded. ‘Which animal am I? Or am I camera man?’
I deliberately said ‘man’, taking any opportunity to reference myself as male. Robert picked up on it.
‘Camera woman. And you’d be an emu.’
‘Man,’ I said, mock-glaring. It sounded like an exclamation.
‘Emu,’ he countered, eyes almost shut from glaring.
Yep, our conversations broke new barriers in useless.
The bus pulled into the depot. Pushing through crowds blocking the pavement, I felt so lost. Everyone has a gender but me. Not male yet, and no longer female, even if I still look it. I’m not even transgender, or sure of how I gain that title. No identity without a gender. Sometimes I think I see people like me; a girl with shaved hair, a teenage boy with soft skin. Then I see breasts or an Adam’s apple and it’s all over. They have a gender even if they look a little androgynous. I don’t.
In the refuge of the dark cinema I relaxed into the movie. American kids, like us but stuck in nowheresville, swept along by a series of weird events. Compared to what was going on in my life, it didn’t seem too far-fetched. Wouldn’t hurt to see a movie with some trans-guys, that doesn’t end in tragedy.
Too soon to go home, even without bombshells to drop. We wandered down to the river, poking around in the bushes for stones to throw in. Since others had obviously had the same idea before us and there were no stones, I picked up rubbish instead. My mind was miles away. This was it. I had to tell him.
Why now? Only because I had decided. And there was no one else around to interrupt or overhear. Robert was the one I had to practise the telling on. If he freaked, then nobody else would care enough to listen. The outburst at band practice didn’t count, except for upsetting Marla. I was really practising to tell my parents. That was the Big One.
‘Hey, how come I’m picking up rubbish? I just wanted to skip stones on the water,’ Robert complained.
‘I want to tell you something.’
‘So I have to pick up rubbish? What a bum deal.’ He threw an empty can on our growing pile. ‘You know, they hire people to do this. Daily.’
‘You can stop any time.’ I rummaged behind a flax and found a flat stone, and threw it over. ‘Here, stop your whingeing.’
Robert caught it with one hand, whipped around and flicked it onto the water in one movement. It bounced and spun more than halfway across then plopped in with a small ‘sploink’ sound.
‘All right,’ he said to the river, then turned around. ‘So what’s this you want to tell me?’
Ugh, why had I built it up so much? And why was it so hard? I sat down on the edge of a pinebark plant bed. Now or never.
‘I want to be a guy. I mean, I am a guy. On the inside.’ Time stopped. I looked up at Robert’s face.
‘Yeah, I know.’
‘You know?’
I’d stressed all day! How could he know? When did he? ‘Was it the name tag?’ I demanded.
‘Yeah, the name tag thing, then Marla had a rant in her blog last night. She didn’t name names but it’s pretty obvious now.’
So he had put things together. I guess I’m not the only sleuth around. I hadn’t checked blogs for a couple of days. A Marla rant was pretty normal, but not with me as the subject. That might be hurtful. And I wasn’t sure whether I wanted all the details.
‘Well ...’ Did I really have to do all the talking? ‘What do you think of it?’
For a horrible second I thought he might tease me about fishing for compliments, maybe even making the ‘reeling’ hand motion. Instead he shrugged.
‘Sounds cool to me. Is your name going to be, um ...?’ His eyes rolled back in his head and tongue poked out the side of his mouth as he exaggerated stretching his memory. ‘Finn,’ he exclaimed, pointing at my chest.
I grinned. He’d remembered, and now it was ‘official’ between us.
We didn’t talk much on the way home, but it was an easy quiet. The bus chugged along and light drizzle fell. Out of the silence Robert suggested I should wear a name tag all the time.
‘There’s a guy on the Net who’s worn one for years, he’s like this blogging marketing guru. He reckons it changed his life.’
I lifted an eyebrow. ‘I’m sure it did. I’ll think about it. D’you think I should get a name tag in blue or in pink? Just my first name. Or the surname, too?’
‘What about a middle name?’ Robert gave a grin, and then he punched me gently on the arm. ‘Stripes or maybe a star? Like a new fashion?’
He was sort of joking, but I immediately thought ‘political prisoner’, and it wasn’t fun for me anymore.
As soon as I got home I checked Marla’s blog. This time she must have used the spell check because the big words were correct.
You think you’ve got the coolest collection of strong women to fight male oppression in this patriarchal mess we call society. Then someone you loved and respected as an independent, creative woman goes and says they want to become a man. Well it might be very convenient to collect all the perks of being male, but it’s just a cop-out, leaving your sisters behind in their struggle.
Nice to read that Marla loved and respected me. She would never say that sort of thing to my face. She was obviously hurt. I felt so divided. There were men who supported women’s rights – of course I would be one of those. And I hadn’t even thought about male ‘perks’. It seemed so far in the future that I would even be seen as male. And yet I wanted to be male now.
Marla saw this as war and my situation was like a spy going over to the enemy. Like a traitor. Hurt at being left out, she was attacking me for more than not telling a friend first.
I added my own entry:
I know that not everyone understands what I’m going to do. They don’t have to, because it’s my thing, my journey. I have to do this, for myself. I know it’s selfish, but I’m pretty sure this is one of those times it’s okay to be selfish. I’m not a traitor.
I didn’t add my name because I wasn’t sure whether to be Skye or Finn. Well, that was one reason. They’d work out who wrote it, but probably not why. I’d gone public, anonymously.