Arts
Lucie Blue Tremblay:
Folk Concert Benefits Pride
The Adjacent Sex
Queerly Pursuing the Wiccan Path
Rocking and Writing Against Depression
Navel Gazing Author Predicts the 'End of Gay'
 | The Adjacent Sex: The Journey from Jim to Jenny |
Reviewed by David Weinstock
| She's Not There: a Memoir in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan Random House, 2003 |
You never forget your first feminist. Mine was Deborah Lyons, who as early as 1972 got me to stop saying “chick.” And one day, when I uttered the phrase “opposite sex,” she mused, “Opposite sex? I prefer to think of it as the adjacent sex.”
Jennifer Finney Boylan’s memoir She’s Not There, in which a 40-year-old man takes a gigantic side-step into the adjacent sex, is an important book for several reasons.
First, it is a first-hand account by an accomplished literary artist, not a ghost-written bio. Renee Richards’ memoir Second Serve was “with” John Ames; Georgina Beyer’s memoir was “as told to” Cathy Casey. Christine Jorgenson, America’s first famous male-to-female transsexual, employed two different ghostwriters for her “autobiography,” one of whom quit in a huff, historian Susan Stryker told me.
To find a comparable book, you’d have to go back to Jan Morris’ Conundrum. But Boylan is from a new generation, one that wants different things from both manhood and womanhood, and alters the meaning of sex-change as well.
And second, it’s a true story, told with honesty that does not spare the teller.
Boylan, both before and after the transition from James to Jennifer, is an acclaimed comic novelist, a tenured college professor, a husband and a father. Her memoir enlarged my already-great respect for the author, for transsexuals, and even for Oprah Winfrey.
Say what you will about Oprah, she called this one exactly right. Devoting her entire May 6 hour to Jenny Boylan, she titled the show “The Husband Who Became a Woman,” which nails it: of the several life transformations Boylan dramatizes in She’s Not There – boy into man, man into woman, daddy into “Maddy,” private person to out-there activist – it is the relationship with wife Grace, with all the wrenching strain his changes brought to her and the family, that provides the book its drama and poignancy.
Born in 1958, James Boylan grew up in the Philadelphia suburbs. By age three, he “knew” he was really a girl – but greeted that knowledge with ferocious skepticism. “The awareness that I was in the wrong body, living the wrong life, was never out of my conscious mind,” Boylan writes in the memoir. “And at every moment I lived my life, I countered this awareness with an exasperated companion-thought, namely, ‘Don’t be an idiot. You are NOT a girl. Get over it.’ But I never got over it.”
Young Jim fantasized about taking a rocket ship to “Girl Planet,” where boy astronauts automatically change gender and became happy. More realistically, he only ever saw one possible way out of his private fix.
One day, at age 10, while taking a big figuring-out walk along the Jersey shore, he climbed out on a jetty to watch a hurricane blowing up. “And then I thought, ‘Maybe you could be cured by love.’ Even then I was aware of how corny this sounded. Still I believed it. If I were loved deeply enough by others, perhaps I would be content to stay a boy.”
Then and there, he vowed to hold out for love, and kept the vow until he could no longer. Though cross-dressing privately throughout adolescence and his twenties, he made no moves toward gender reassignment, rejecting the advice of two therapists who felt it would be the sanest path.
After college, he worked in publishing in New York City, then took a graduate degree at Johns Hopkins – and kept looking for the love-cure. This hope of love sustained him, but also raised the stakes on his eventual, and inevitable, transformation.
Finally he met Grace, fell in love, abandoned his stash of women’s clothing in a trash bag outside his Baltimore apartment, and married, with a sense of redemption and relief. The couple moved to Maine, established their careers, had two sons, and seemed to the entire world to be the most fortunate of couples. Grace became a therapist; James became a celebrated author and a popular, tenured professor at Colby College.
But, as the therapists had warned James, being transgendered doesn’t simply go away. It persisted, and became more insistent. When James finally decided, at age 40, that he could go no further as a man, he felt he had to act.
Jim attempted to tell Grace about his situation. At first – we don’t know exactly because he properly draws a curtain of privacy over the exact words of some key conversations – he couldn’t quite tell the whole truth, apparently revealing only that he wanted to cross-dress. No biggie, she seems to have responded, everybody has a hobby, let’s go shopping. Soon James owned a few outfits that looked nice on him, things he can wear in private and with Grace, who is remarkably tolerant.
But transsexuality is no hobby, and cross-dressing satisfied neither his inner woman nor his need to be honest with his soulmate. When he told all, Grace was crushed and broken.
Is it any worse to lose your husband to gender change than to death, or garden-variety divorce, or even being gay? We all know couples who split up because, in some sense, “You’re not the one I married.” But clearly, gender change is worse, for all parties, and the memoir lays bare the reasons why.
Boylan tells her own story, and that of her family, in a sequence of dramatic scenes. James, Jennifer and Grace are vivid, attractive characters; young sons Luke and Patrick are quirky and adorable. Boylan’s closest male friend, the novelist Richard Russo, becomes part of the family, traveling with the Finney Boylans to Dr. Schrang’s clinic in Wisconsin, and helping Boylan understand all he is going through. (Russo provides an afterword to the book, “Imagining Jenny.”)
The memoir is gripping; Oprah read it in a single sitting, and so did I. The scenes ring true, although a few bear unmistakable marks of novelistic invention. Details have been altered, both to sharpen the tale and to cushion the enormous impact on several bystanders in Boylan’s life. Much is hidden, but what is revealed is more real pungent, poignant real stuff than we are usually privileged learn about one another, and it sheds light on our own.
To hear Boylan tell it, wanting to be a woman was an issue of gender identity, and was never about sexual attraction to men. Yet, looking forward, she cannot rule that out. Her new apparatus, she finds, is functional. “Dr. Schrang’s hope that I would be orgasmic, post-surgery, had been fulfilled. The sensation – which I’d cautiously, curiously produced all on my own – was like nothing I’d experienced, and yet sure, it was familiar. ...[W]hat it reminds me of, more than anything else, is the difference between Spanish and Italian.”
There’s adjacency for you. We all wear blue jeans, we all cook dinner, we all have jobs, we all care for our children. It all needs to be done and we all do it all, regardless of gender. If male breasts are only one gram of Premarin away from female breasts, if an inside-out penis makes a serviceable and orgasmic vagina, what’s the diff? What’s the big deal?
But of course, it’s still a very big deal. And if you want to learn more about the terms of the deal, read She’s Not There.
David Weinstock lives, writes and teaches in Middlebury.