Fairfax, VA, USA. Once upon a time, and a very good time it may have been, there was a young mother coming along the sidewalk in Sacramento, pushing her year old infant in a stroller. Passing strangers would greet the young mother, telling her what a pretty young girl she had.

Mother would smile, look at the strangers and politely, but firmly say

She is a boy. Can’t you see he is dressed in blue?

Passersby would apologize. “The curls, the dimples, the pretty brown eyes …”

As easy as that, I would become a boy in the eyes of the world. My mother would tell me this story many times as I was growing up, laughing as if she was still embarrassed that I was often mistaken for a girl when I was young. Looking back, I suspect she always sensed the true nature of her oldest surviving “son” but, like most parents, preferred not thinking about it much.

In post-war Middle America, children were the sex annotated on their birth certificate. The course of your life was decided by a tired obstetrician in a baby-booming maternity ward.

It is a miracle that any of us survived.

When I was young and housebound except when my mother took me outside, the world I remember was Mother. My universe consisted of her and me. We were one and the same.

I did not think of myself as a boy or girl. For I had never seen a boy, there was only mother and me and I simply was. The subject of the sex markers on my birth certificate never came up.

When I was old enough to venture outside on my own, my natural playmates were the neighbor girls who were a few years older than I. They filled my world.

I begged my mother for a baby doll so I could play dolls with them. I would “nurse” the doll with a small baby bottle of water which would flow slowly into the doll. Afterwards, if I squeezed the doll’s tummy, she would wet her diapers and I would change them.

My doll had ebony skin. Skin color means nothing, but I remember my dolls. She was mine to take care of.

When the neighbor girls went off and back to school, I would play by myself until the older girls returned in the afternoon. I felt empty when they returned to school and would cry to myself in the backyard. I had no one to share my doll with.

As I grew, my mother would take me across the street to play with Jennifer. She was my age and we became best friends. When we were five, we entered Kindergarten together at All Hallows.

Sister Mary Adoreen was the first person I ever met who divided the world into boys and girls. Kindergarten was the first place I attended where half the world wore dresses and the other half wore slacks and shirts.

And I was in the wrong half, wearing the boy clothes my mother dressed me in.

The nun would refer to some of us as girls and the rest of us as boys. I learned quickly that she expected me to respond to boys when she was giving us directions. I always tried to do what she said and keep her happy.

She was twice as tall as I was and dressed in a flowing black and white dress. She wore some oddly confining hat around her face.

I did not want to upset her.

By the time I moved to the first grade, we all were in official school uniforms. The girls wore plaid jumpers with white blouses. I was made to wear brown corduroy slacks that whistled when I walked and a tan, open collar shirt and sit at the desk they assigned to me.

We were very much aware of being Catholic with a capitol “C.”

Who made us?
God made us?

Who is God?
The Supreme Being who made all things.

Why did God make us?
To show forth his goodness and share with us his everlasting happiness in heaven.

We memorized the Our Father and the Hail Mary. By the time we had reached Grade 8, we had memorized by rote most of The Baltimore Catechism.

We never talked about sex at All Hallows but at recess the boys were sent off to play in one area, the girls, another. I was expected to go with the boys and play the games boys played. I played them poorly and, when sides were being chosen, I was almost always the last one chosen or the odd boy out. I preferred reading and other skills and games more associated with the girls.

Who were over there. Where the nuns did not want me to go.

I have memories of the girls talking and playing in one corner of our playground and the boys yelling and playing in another. I am alone by myself.

In the classroom environment, when it came to learning or answering questions. I was as good as any girl and better than most. I would be the one the nuns would call on, me or Jennifer, when they became desperate for a correct answer.

I was good at school. I am good at school.

I tried to do all the things my nuns and the All Hallows pastor expected. I was an altar boy at seven, ran the safety patrol when I was thirteen. In eighth grade I even went out for the flag football team. I would have preferred to have gone out for the cheerleading squad.

Public school boys terrified me. They did things that I had no desire to do, things that scared me. They were rough and loud and wore their hair slicked back. They beat up strangers, or each other, whenever the opportunity arose. We heard that some even carried switchblades.

Gangs of public school boys would chase me and threaten to thrash me. Once I took refuge on the steps of the Nun’s convent and they reluctantly left me alone. Even public school punks didn’t want to upset the nuns.

Eventually I survived grammar school, as we all do, one way or another, and moved on to Christian Brothers High School.

An ALL BOYS high school at the time.

But that will remain a story for later.

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TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.

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