Daily Excerpt: From Deep Within (Lewis) - Ben and Bella
Excerpt from excerpt from From Deep Within (Lewis)
Ben and Bella
My
office was on the seventh floor. Practitioners who rented office space in the
large brick building nicknamed it ‘therapy row’ since it was occupied by so
many therapists.
My
square office was to the right of the elevator. I had two black leather chairs
that reclined, with a tinted brown glass table between them. In the corner was
a plain pine desk with file drawers, a clock and a phone. Healthy green plants
were placed around the office, and pictures of nameless Caribbean islands lined
the four walls.
Bella,
who described herself as transgendered, walked into my office. She was a mixed
race black woman dressed to the T. The paisley dress she wore was a mix of red,
blue and green. She wore striking red pumps. I noticed her feet were large and
out of proportion to her small frame. She was transitioning from a man to a
woman, and some of her feminine qualities were still muted. She had the shadow
of a beard covered with a heavy base of make-up. Her handshake was powerful.
She was wearing an attractive, deep brown wig with wispy bangs that flowed over
her shoulders and looked expensive.
When
Bella and I first met, she told me that after appealing several denials for
support, she had finally received Social Security Disability from the federal
government. “I can’t work. I get so depressed I can’t physically get to a job.
I lie in bed for days,” she explained. As we discussed her more recent jobs, I
recognized her seeming inability to listen. No matter what I suggested, she had
a retort. She knew better. I wondered if this quality made it difficult to get
work.
When
we started working together in 1990, she seemed capable of working. Her habit
of getting fired seemed more due to an inflated attitude. Annunciating
carefully, she would stare into my eyes and say, “You know Dr. Dear [her title
for me], I am a member of the Mensa society.”
The
Mensa International is the
oldest and largest high IQ society
in the world. The organization is open to people who score at the 98th
percentile or higher on a standardized supervised IQ measurement test. I was
impressed.
Although
Bella had been taking Spironolactone, a feminizing hormone, her breasts were
still small and her voice retained a male tone. She explained that she was
feeling depressed and frail. The town where she lived was growing, and at
lunchtime, construction workers sat on their perches eating while eyeing the
passing traffic and making wolf whistles at passing females.
Each
day, Bella passed the men on her way to public transportation. In the winter,
her coat was pulled up to her chin and her face wasn’t visible below the
layers. She wore warm boots that reached to her knees and looked more like an
arctic explorer than a transgendered woman. In warmer temperatures, however,
she was more exposed. Sometimes she wore a hat to cover her face and walked
with her head tilted. She told me that as she passed, the men would whistle and
then yell at the top of their lungs, “That’s a man!”
“Dumb,
shit assholes with the intelligence of plants,” Bella said.
She
was reluctant to tell me how deeply the comments hurt, but pain was written on
her face. When she came to my office and told me the men had made comments
again, my heart ached.
Who was this woman? I wondered in those early days, and where had she come from? What struggles
had she fought and what had led her to me? She loved being bright and being
recognized as such. She felt others were below her, lacking skills, talents,
not to mention an awareness of the world’s problems and their solutions. She
laughed often, a sound deep and resonant. She breathed in, swallowing air, and
the sound that came out was like a rapid hiccup.
During
the fifteen years we worked together, Bella would at times complain of feeling
depressed, and wouldn’t get dressed, shower or eat. She would often laugh at
herself, so I had trouble gauging the depth of her feelings, but she would also
speak of hopelessness, and at times lose the will to fight and live. The
process of changing genders was overwhelming, and progress was slow.
“I
am neither a man nor a woman,” she would sometimes remark, “in between being in
between.”
When
she expressed feeling suicidal, I asked whether she had a plan, time frame and
method, and whether she needed psychiatric hospitalization to keep her safe.
She said she could keep herself safe. It was my judgment that determined how we
proceeded, but you did not want to
disagree with Bella. When we talked about this less attractive quality of hers,
putting others down without reprieve, she laughed.
“I
know,” she would chuckle. “That’s what makes me so lovable.”
Talking
with her about her transition made me wonder, what was it that made me a woman?
The answer seemed convoluted. And what did I know about being transgendered?
During the process of transition, was the person both male and female, or
neither? How did one know when the transition was complete? Was the knowing
internal or external or both? Would some people spend the rest of their lives
convincing others who they were?
To
update and expand my knowledge, I read voraciously and consulted with
colleagues. At the time, there was little written about undergoing a sex change
from an informed perspective, although
one case stood out. Psychologist and sexologist Dr. John Money specialized in research into sexual identity
and biology of gender, and he was the first scientist to study sexual
confusion. Money stated that gender was learned rather than innate. He
conducted research on an infant who had a botched circumcision
that left him without a penis. Money convinced the baby's parents that sex
reassignment surgery would be in their son’s best interest and that they should
raise him as a girl. The baby had a surgery in which his testes were removed.
Money subsequently reported what he called, “successful female gender
development,” in research papers.
In
1997, however, David Reimer, the
subject of the operation, wrote a book telling his story. He said he never
identified as female and that when he was between the ages of nine and eleven,
the feelings of being more male than female became overwhelming. At fifteen, in
desperation, Reimer transitioned from living as a female to living as a male,
and even reversed the prior surgery. He married and adopted children, but he
never pulled out of his deep despair. In 2004, he committed suicide at the age of 38.
When
Bella and I began meeting, she had been receiving hormone therapy for five
years. In my past experience working with transgendered clients, many talked
about feeling that they were born into the wrong sex as early as five years
old. I assumed the same was true for Bella. It wasn’t.
Bella
was born in 1942 in Georgia and was the oldest of her siblings. Her father was
in the army and the family only remained in the south a short period of time.
When she was three, Bella’s great-grandfather had been lynched, and Bella’s
mother, grandmother and great grandmother decided that it was safer to live up
North. The family moved to a five-room apartment in the railroad flats in
Harlem, New York.
Bella,
who at the time was named Ben, lived in an apartment with three generations of
women. Many cousins visited his home, and when Ben was five, his cousins
dressed him up in girl’s clothes, including painting him with make-up. Bella
said she remembered being surprised that he felt so comfortable in girl’s
clothes.
When
Ben was ten, he watched a television program about Christine Jorgensen, the
first male-to-female transgendered woman to become widely known in the U.S.
after having sex reassignment surgery in Denmark.
Bella
recalled the impact the program had on her.
“I
was intrigued by her having thrown off her male body,” Bella said. “My family
was watching the story as well, and they told me she was the spawn of Satan.”
In
junior high, Ben was sent to an all boys’ school in an attempt to help him
improve his study habits and focus. As a young boy, beginning puberty, he
seemed slight and perhaps feminine to the other boys. Bella said that at
recess, the boys formed single file lines and then rubbed their genitals
against whoever was in front of them.
“I
hated that display of sexuality,” Bella said.
At
fifteen, Ben left the boy’s school to attend public school, but he quit six
months before graduation.
“I
was so depressed and had conflicts with my mother at home that messed with my
head,” Bella explained. She felt belittled by her mother, and under constant
threat of being thrown out of her house and becoming homeless.
“My
mother thought I had a smart mouth, which wasn’t true. The only reason I got to
stay in the house was because my mother had my sister and basically ignored
her. She would leave her wailing in her crib for hours. I took care of her, fed
her, changed her diapers, and bathed her. My mother just abandoned her. She was
mean to all her kids. I don’t know why she had them. One of my brothers was a
drug addict. He was found dead in an alley and my mother never commented about
his existence again.”
Bella’s
mother married three times, had nine children, and apparently never paid
attention to any of them. With her first husband, Bella’s mother had two children,
Bella and her brother. Bella said her brother ran away when he was sixteen and
she never saw him again. Her mother then remarried and had five more children.
Her second husband worked on an oil tanker in Texas. While in the Gulf, his
ship collided with another and he was killed at 38. Bella’s mother then married
a childhood sweetheart and had two more children. Over time, Bella’s love-hate
relationship with her mother grew more hateful.
“I hated my mother but still wanted to be like
her. We used to take baths together, and I slept in her bed until I was an
adult. That messed with my head for sure,” Bella said. “When I married Jen, my
mother couldn’t be bothered to come to the wedding.” Bella commented, “I
thought to myself, well why be in touch ever again?”
Ben
lived at home until he turned 21. He was not motivated to seek employment and
lived an isolated existence in his mother’s house. “My mother kept threatening
to throw me out of the house. Her comments crippled me. I spent my twenty-first
birthday at Rockland State Hospital, where I remained for six months.”
She
recounted that, at the time, she had been seeing a counselor who had
recommended hospitalization for her depression. “I didn’t get any help there
and felt like a walking zombie from the medication,” she commented. “No one in
the family gave a damn where I was. They never came to visit me.”
Since
the 1920s, Harlem had been known as a major African-American
residential, cultural and business center. Ben was surrounded by something
great, but didn’t experience it that way.
When
Ben was released from the hospital, he was isolated. His therapist encouraged
him to create a network with people. He thought that if he became a member of a
fundamentalist church, it might be easier to meet others and become a member of
the community.
As
she entered her late teens and early 20s, Bella began to notice women’s
clothing in stores and it sparked her first awareness that she wanted to
transition. Bella, aware of the bubbling and impending eruption of her
conflict, spoke with the minister in her church, looking for some guidance. The
response was strident condemnation. Ben was told to be the best man he could
be.
As
I listened, it felt tragic that everywhere Ben turned for support and
understanding, he was rejected. I was impressed that she continued to seek out
help. I wasn’t sure I would have had the courage or stamina.
Transgendered people in general were invisible as
Ben grew up. Meanwhile,
Ben was keenly aware of being different. He had become fascinated by a three
part series in the National Inquirer
about a man becoming a woman. During this era, gender was presumed as fixed.
When someone was expecting a child or a newborn, the first question was “What
sex is the baby?” In the culture of the time, Ben had no one to talk to and it
was risky to share his internal world.
Ben
pursued work primarily as an opportunity to increase social contacts, but this
too was a disappointment. He had taken vocational courses in keypunching, and
he found his first serious job through his grandmother, who was a kitchen
helper in a sandwich shop. Ben became the facility’s clerk typist. The shop
owners argued a lot, and each would tell Ben to do something different from the
other. He was in the middle of an on-going power struggle, and with this and
the gloom of depression lingering on the periphery, he quit. In Ben’s further
efforts to secure employment, he was hired in the mailroom of an agency on Madison
Avenue.
After
intensive investigation, Ben found an underground society for people who were
either transitioning between genders or considering it. By this time, he was
sleeping in nightgowns that were “frilly and pretty,” as he put it. On
weekends, these individuals would secretly meet at each other’s homes to share
war stories. Bella recalled a meeting on Cape Cod where the attendees who went
were pre-op or post-op transsexuals and transvestites.
“I
had already begun the transition internally and I decided to do myself up for
the evening to see how it felt. I put on make-up, but I didn’t know what I was
doing, so I started with a base liquid and didn’t know what to apply next. I
looked awful. Looking back, I am horror-struck. I cringe at my
presentation.”
In
the late seventies, Ben was re-hospitalized with the depression that weaved
throughout his life. He was already taking hormones prescribed by a psychiatrist,
beginning his transition. Bella told me that the hospitalization saved her
life. During the physical examination, the medical staff discovered Ben had a
blood clot in his leg. At the time, she assumed that the hormones were the
cause and could have killed her, so she stopped taking them. She slowly
returned to the biological gender of male.
Before
this, Bella spent hours trying to figure out a name for herself as a woman and
decided on Kim, but in stopping the hormone therapy she dropped the new name.
Her breasts subsequently disappeared, and her enormous head of hair receded.
Ben came to believe he would never transition to being a woman. He threw out
all his books about transitioning, leaving a barren bookcase.
In
the mid-1970s Richard Raskind was a successful heterosexual male,
ophthalmologist, tennis player, author, husband and father. One day, Raskind
walked into a New York City hospital for surgery, and three days later she left
the hospital, not as Dr. Richard Raskind, but as Dr. Renée Richards.
From
early on, tennis was a huge part of Raskind’s life. While at Yale University he
was captain of the men's tennis team, and while serving in the Navy as a medic,
he won the All Navy Tennis Championship. Around the time Raskind transitioned
to Richards, the US Open was welcoming amateur players. Raskind had played in
the US Open several times, but when Richards applied for entry, she was told
she would not be admitted because she was a man. Dr. Richards, with the support
of tennis great and champion of sexual equality, Billy Jean King, brought a
discrimination suit and won. Richards
made history when she walked out onto the Centre court in 1977 as the first
transgender woman to play in a major tennis tournament. To Bella, this provided
hope.
But Bella was still struggling to become whole. Her
desire to be a woman was constantly in her thoughts, but the relationships with
which she could express herself never materialized. Bella spent so much time
alone and depressed that her social skills were lacking. She didn’t know how to
reach out. Yet Ben desperately wanted to be held and nurtured. For Bella,
reconciling this disparity has been a life long struggle.
Our therapeutic relationship was often turbulent,
and it sometimes felt like we battled each other more often than we talked. I
wondered if this way of relating was Bella’s blueprint, written long ago. At
moments, I wanted to pull my hair out, or pull Bella’s wig off, but she came
each week without fail. Clearly we were connected, even if it was in conflict.
Bella’s relationship history paralleled our own
therapeutic relationship. Despite desperately wanting to be in a relationship,
she criticized others mercilessly. Ben was thirty years old before he had his
first sexual experience. Bella told me the first attempt was a disaster. Ben
was impotent and unable to take part in the pleasures of intercourse. The struggle to find closeness and
feeling, coupled with the feeling that it was beyond his reach, led Ben to
another psychiatric hospitalization for depression. His continued isolation was
an albatross, and his psychiatrist encouraged him to go to groups to meet
likeminded others. To this end, he suggested Bella attend a church known for
it’s welcoming attitude toward diversity.
The
Arlington Street Church sits at the corner of Arlington Street and Boylston
Street and is a welcoming Unitarian
Universalist church whose focus is on values, dignity, equity, compassion and
acceptance for all. It was, and continues to be, welcoming to everyone who
walks through the doors. For Ben, it was a far different experience from the
fundamentalist group that had condemned him years before. He met a woman there
and slowly became involved.
“She had scoliosis, you know, the hunched back.”
Bella said. “I was so in love with her. When we were together, it was so
wonderful. The sex was wonderful because it was passionate and I felt present
and loving during the experience, not disassociated. We cuddled. I wanted to
get married and have a daughter that I was going to name Rachael.”
As Bella described this relationship, I assumed it
had gone on for an extended time. I was surprised to hear that it lasted only
four months. Ben was filled with anxiety that something would break them up.
The anxiety smothered him, and eventually the relationship ended.
Ben soon got involved with a married woman. That
relationship was a disaster. “Her husband worked on the floor below me and we
knew each other. I just couldn’t continue to see her.”
Still searching for that human connection, Ben
plunged into yet another relationship. This relationship was the longest – a
year. Bella felt she had met her soul mate. “We completed each other,” she
said. I was not surprised to hear that Bella could get that close to someone so
quickly, but he wasn’t able to sustain a long-term commitment. It seemed to be
a repeat of the relationships of her childhood. Pulling someone in very close
and then not being able to maintain that level of intimacy. When Bella told me
that Ben’s girlfriend became pregnant, I was shocked. It never occurred to me that Bella would want
to have children, whether she identified as a man or a woman. Bella then
explained, in a deep forlorn voice, that Ben’s girlfriend decided on an
abortion. There was never further discussion of children.
As we talked of Bella’s past, I was often struck by
how far behind her it often seemed. It was as if we were talking about another
lifetime, a different person. I never knew Ben, and by the time I met Bella, he
was long gone.
Ben had, at one point, gotten a decent job. He had
worked in the insurance industry. For nine years he was the clerk responsible
for processing death certificates and matching them to the death benefits owed
by the insurance carrier.
“It was the most money I ever made, $25,000,” Bella
quipped with a grin.
It was at the insurance company that Ben met Jen,
the woman he married. “I really loved her,” Bella said, but Jen’s spending
habits put them in debt. Bella described Ben as a passive man. She thought, in
retrospect, that he should have placed more limits around spending for them.
Instead, he meekly agreed to all that Jen wanted.
Ben also loved going clothing shopping; in
particular, buying Jen beautiful dresses. He would sit in Lord and Taylor’s and
watch her model them, wishing he was the one wearing them. “When I was shopping
in the men’s department, I felt like an imposter,” Bella said.
“In the beginning, it was wonderful. We sat in our
living room reading the Sunday New York
Times together. I had told her about my previous hormone therapy and my
desire to have surgery to be a woman. Without any judgment, she simply asked me
if I was done with that. I lied and said yes.”
Ben was in love with being in love, and his thoughts
about relationships were high blown romantic fantasies. When reality set in,
and the fantasy attached to a person was dispelled, the relationship dissipated
as well. During the last two years of the marriage, Jen spent a great deal of
time away from home trying to put her ideas for a new business into motion.
While home alone, Ben began dressing as a woman for longer periods. He not only
wanted a divorce from Jen, but from Ben as well.
Before the ink on the divorce papers was dry, Ben
was laid off and evicted from his home, and he began hormone therapy. He told
his new internist about the blood clot he had previously suffered and his
concerns that he could never take hormones. His doctor disagreed and prescribed
Premarin, a feminizing hormone, in low dosages.
One afternoon, Ben dressed in feminine clothing and
went to an unemployment office to apply for benefits. After finishing his
application, where he marked off the gender as male, a woman kindly asked him
if that was how he wanted to be identified. “No, it isn’t,” he responded,
changing what he checked off. With no drum rolls or cymbals to mark the
occasion, merely a soft-spoken no in a non-descript unemployment office, he had
discarded a part of himself that was painfully dissonant.
Bella’s family never met her, but news of her
incarnation, which was what Bella called her transition, reached her family.
“It was par for the course they didn’t get it or want to know anything about
who I had become,” Bella said softly when we met one afternoon. “I envy the
girls whose families stood by them or whose spouses supported their change and
remained in the relationship.”
Soon after, Bella reconnected with the friends she
had spent time with in the 1970’s while on Cape Cod. The group now called
itself Tapestry.
“It was a group of trans where we could go and be
ourselves,” Bella said. It was also a clearinghouse for information. “Given my
desperate financial situation, I had put up a sign looking for a roommate. I
found another trans woman to live with. That was a treat.”
One of the group members also took Bella shopping
and taught her how to apply make-up and how to walk, talk and move like a
female member of society. “But I still had my big hands and feet,” Bella said
with a laugh.
The 1990s were a time of public awareness and
change. Feminism began
to focus on dispelling the myths of gender role expectations, and replacing the
one-size-fits-theory with more attention paid to different races, classes and
sexual categories. The general public
was exposed to this way of thinking in mainstream movies. In 1990, the
documentary Paris is Burning was
released. It followed African-American
and Latino people of various gender identities who competed in New York’s
glamorous balls. The Crying Game
released in1992 was also one of several mainstream films that challenged the
stereotypes of trans people. The film’s softer side elicited empathy from the
audience and Priscilla, Queen of the
Desert, released in 1994, followed a transsexual woman, a transvestite and
a drag queen across the Australian outback to resurrect their old cabaret act.
Although
the release of the films suggested a developing openness, there was no
appreciable increase in individual tolerance. In 1993, transgender youth, Brandon Teena, was raped and murdered
in Humboldt, Nebraska. This hate crime brought widespread attention to
transgender discrimination and violence, and became the subject of the
award-winning film, Boys Don’t Cry.
By
then, Bella’s transition was progressing, but she was still having trouble
relating to others. While working as an office assistant, she informed the
other office staff of a better way to not only manage the paper storage but
also their filing system. When she railed about how stupid the employees were,
I cautioned her to keep her thoughts to herself. She was fired.
I
was privileged to witness Bella’s transformation to a woman. She had received
her GED in 1972. In 2000, she petitioned the board of education to reissue the
certificate in her new name. Social security also changed her name. Now, in her
eyes and those of her world, she was Bella.
Although
her income was limited, she spent as much as she could on facial electrolysis
and experimented with make-up. She got pedicures and manicures in a vibrant
shade of red. Her eyebrows were gently shaped, and the clothes she wore were
feminine and colorful.
In
one sense, Bella was one of the lucky ones. After puberty, the male body
settles into a testosterone driven shape that often includes a prominent Adam’s
apple. Because Bella’s wasn’t pronounced, she didn’t need surgery. However, she
didn’t have the financial means to hire a vocal instructor, and the hormones
used in male-to-female transitions have no effect on the vocal cords. As a
result, even after a cosmetic and surgical transition, the male-sounding voice
can keep a transgendered person linked to her old identity. Still, Bella worked
hard to attain a passable female voice, and as she became more comfortable with
her developing femininity, her mannerisms, voice and tone all followed in
synchrony.
When
we talked about Bella’s male genitalia though, she would scrunch her face in
disgust. She wanted her penis to be used to create a vagina, but the surgery’s
cost was prohibitive.
“My
mother told me to wear clean underwear every day in the event there was an
accident and I was rushed to the hospital. Well, what if I am rushed to the
hospital and they find that thing?” She would ask, pointing to her genital
area.
“Look
both ways before you cross the street so that never happens.” I answered. I
also pointed out that if she were injured, the emergency room staff would
likely be more concerned about her injury than her penis.
When
the issue of surgery came to the forefront, Bella went on a tear to find a
doctor who would perform the final procedure. She contacted various offices,
requested brochures and sought physicians in Europe. Each search ended in
disappointment due to the exorbitant cost. In the end, Bella had an orchiectomy, which removes the testicles but leaves
the penis and scrotum intact. The orchiectomy
also stops most of the body's production of testosterone, and thus allows for a
significant increase in the necessary dose of female hormone, allowing her to
taper the Premarin to a lesser dose.
At
times, Bella experienced tension headaches, neck and shoulder discomfort and
insomnia. I wondered if the cause might be sexual tension and suggested
masturbation might provide some relief. Anyone listening would have thought I
suggested she put arsenic in her morning coffee. Once again, Bella’s discomfort
was with what her penis represented. She felt it was an albatross to carry, and
she would be damned if she acknowledged its weight. Yet, over the years, we
quelled her hatred of her own anatomy.
After
her transition, she had two sexual relationships with women. She identifies
herself as a lesbian. Changing one’s gender has little to do with sexual
orientation.
Meanwhile,
Bella and I spent hours in conversation as she sought to understand what it
meant to still have male genitalia as a female, especially once she began to
study Judaism. She spent hours consulting with the rabbi at her temple and
getting to know her new congregation. The studies were arduous and took years.
Bella persisted with an unwavering focus. She went to temple on the high holy
days, learned Hebrew, and immersed herself in her new religion. Her solitude
took a back seat to meaningful interactions with different members of the
synagogue. Following her Bat Mitzvah, she faithfully attended services on
Friday and Saturdays.
“I
hate those awful kids I see at Saturday services,” Bella said. “They’re noisy
and irreverent. I can’t sit there without grimacing and moaning as they fudge
their way through the Torah passage. I feel like I have pins in my eyes.”
In
the Jewish religion, a traditional ceremony takes place in a Mikveh, a ritual bath representing
joining in the Jewish faith and signifying purification. The person steps into
the water naked. When Bella received the instructions, she became worried about
what would happen. She had heard there might be women in the room whose job it
was to make certain she was pure before she entered the water. That meant no
make-up, perfume, jewelry and clothing.
Bella
was worried, first about the make-up, and then that people would see her penis.
“I’ll have to make my groupies leave the room,” she said jokingly, but she was
clearly worried. She decided to tape her penis out of sight and hope for the
best. The actual event was conducted without anyone in the room, and those
outside the room recited the prayers with bowed heads.
“It
was a good thing, because there was a tape malfunction.” Bella said with a
laugh.
Bella’s
worries were not about her choice to become a woman, but about other people’s
judgments or comments. A day rarely passed when a stranger didn’t make a
disparaging comment, exacerbating her worry that she would be identified as a
transgendered person. As a result, she railed against, “the assholes of the
world.”
I
suddenly noticed how easy it was for me to go for a walk, attend the theater or
have dinner out whenever I wanted without being unduly noticed. What would it
be like to continually worry about being singled out when the main desire was
to remain anonymous?
For
Bella, each morning required a meticulous ritual preparation of make-up,
wardrobe and mirror checks to make sure every detail was in place before
walking out of the sanctuary of her home. I could wear a skirt or pants if I
chose to; Bella never wore pants, ever.
Eventually,
Bella took a job in one of the smaller neighborhood libraries near where she
lived. It was a perfect match for her. She read voraciously, worshiping the
books. The library also had a room where she could listen to her beloved Mozart
and Beethoven, her Brahms symphonies and sonatas, her Chopin etudes. In this
world of old, she came to life.
Ben
grew up in the depths of poverty, and although he lived in New York, cultural
jewels like the Met (opera), theater and concerts were out of his reach, but when
Bella finally grew up and emerged, she became a lifelong student of music and
culture. She took classes at the Boston Architectural College and aspired to
become an architect, until she got into an argument with one of her
instructors. Still, she knew the styles of buildings and enjoyed the opera and
the symphony. She reveled in art, knew despair, and could distinguish between
loss and losing. She was a risk taker and an entrepreneur. She fought against
odds for what was important. As the years passed, I recalled with some
nostalgia the hills we ascended and the pits we labored out of.
Since
the unveiling of Caitlyn Jenner has put transgender issues in a new light, I
hope Bella, and others, can finally benefit. As Bella has said, “If you look
like a duck, walk like a duck and talk like a duck, asshole, you’re a fucking
duck.”
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Julia Aziz, signing her book, Lessons of Labor, at an event at Book People in Austin, Texas.
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