Olivia Werth: Episode I: The Gender Menace

Turmoil has engulfed the Werth 

Household.  The length of a child’s

Hair to start school is in dispute.

Hoping to resolve the matter with a

Blockade of toys and obstacles, the

Obstinate child has tried to run away

And hide where she can’t be found

While overwhelmed with caring for

A newborn baby and unable to deal with

These difficulties, the Supreme Mom has 

Secretly dispatched two Grandparents, the 

Final Word of Law, to settle the conflict…

Hello again, and welcome to the second part of my story.  In the previous episode, I talked about how my egg broke in 2020. (For any of you who may not be familiar with the term, an “egg” is a trans person who has not yet realized they are trans.  That moment when they begin to realize it?  That is referred to as their egg breaking.)  And I discussed some of the struggles I went through over the next nine months before I finally found myself staring into the abyss and, for the first time, found the strength to say the words “I think I’m trans” out loud.  

But we will come back to that statement, and all the ways in which it changed my life, in a later installment.  Instead, today I want to take us backwards, back to when all of this really began for me.  Yes, 2020 was when my egg finally broke for good, and the transition began which got me to this point.  But what I would come to realize was that what I had broken out of was more superglue and duct tape than eggshell.  Because this was not the first time my egg had broken.  So let’s go back to when it really did “break” for the first time.  To when a young “boy” is ripped from the only life he knew, forced to accept a place destined for him by birth, and taught to suppress a large part of himself, lest it lead to the Dark Side.

A long time ago (1981)...

Ronald Reagan is sworn in as president at the beginning of the year, the first taste of federal power for a patriarichal white Christian nationalist movement that is still seeking to remake America to this day.  Tennis player Billie Jean King reveals her relationship to another woman in March, making her the first major openly gay athlete.  In June, the first official reports are released about a new epidemic that is spreading through the country, a disease that would later come to be known as AIDS.  And in July, Diana Spencer marries Prince Charles of the United Kingdom.

In a galaxy far, far away (Des Moines, Iowa)...  

Yes, it is a city, but nowhere in Iowa is far removed from the cornfields.  In the 1980 census, over 90% of the reported population was white.  I can not remember ever having more than one non-white student in any of my classes until I was in high school.  And as for gay or trans people?  Yeah, that was not a thing.  I did not meet my first openly gay person until I was in college in the mid-1990s.  When I was growing up, where I was growing up, if there was an LGBTQ+ community, it was not visible to someone like me.

There are three characters in this scene.  The first, a little kid of five years old.  A kid whose life has, up until this point, been effectively limited by family and church.  How close was the family?  My mother’s parents lived ten or fifteen minutes away from us, in a house they shared with another of their daughters.  And their son and his wife lived right next door to them.  Every holiday would be spent with the extended family.  Trips across the country were sometimes taken with the grandparents.  We went to church every Sunday at a church two blocks away from my grandparents’ house, a church where they held positions of authority.  And remember, this was a world before the internet.  We didn’t have cable tv.  All of my media consumption was then (and would continue to be for many years) strictly regulated by my family.  There was essentially no opportunity for me to learn about anything that was not considered good, wholesome, Christian, by my family.  So, as far as being exposed to queerness, I might as well have been growing up on Tatooine.

The other two characters?  Those grandparents I mentioned, there to help my mother who was trying to deal with two rambunctious children while also caring for a nine month old baby.  It was late August, summer coming to a close.  I was excited, for it would not be long before I began a new era of my life–school.  Yes, I had gone to preschool, but now I was about to start kindergarten.  This was a whole new thing, an exciting opportunity to learn and experience new things.  But, I had just found out, it came with a very negative thing–a haircut.  So, let’s join our show already in progress as this moment plays out:

Me: I don’t want to get a haircut.

Grandfather: You need to get a haircut

Me: Why?

Grandfather (exasperated):  Because you are starting school, and boys need to have short hair for school.

Me (confused):  But I’m not a boy.

And, we’ll cut away here, as the scene fades to black in my memory.  I can’t help but wonder what they thought when I said that I was not a boy.  I imagine that they probably thought I was just being a brat, saying anything I could to get out of that haircut.  I like to imagine that they thought that.  That maybe they were ignorant of the idea that people could be trans.  (It had been over twenty-five years since Christine Jorgensen’s surgical transition was on the front page of papers across the country, and over a decade since the Stonewall Riot.)  I don’t want to think that they understood what I was telling them, and yet chose to respond the way they did anyway.   

But I do know how I was feeling when I said it.  Note the confusion in that last stage direction.  But how could I have been confused, you may be asking right now.  I was five years old, how did I not know that I was a boy?  Yes, I was wearing shorts that day, not a dress, but most of the women in my life spent more time in pants and shorts than in dresses.  Yes, I played with Star Wars figures not Barbie dolls, but everyone loved Star Wars (and seriously, how can Barbie compete with Princess Leia anyway?)  Maybe it was just my own personal obliviousness, but nothing I had experienced up to that point had made me feel like I was a boy.  

And why didn’t it?  Because everything inside of me was telling me I was a girl.  It’s not about what I was interested in, or what I wore, or what I played with.  It was just the way things felt.  The thought “I’m a boy?”  If it had ever crossed my mind, I would have laughed at the thought.  I was a girl, and I hadn’t learned enough yet to understand that the world might not agree with me.

But now, here I was, confronted by someone actually saying to my face that I was a boy.  And I could not understand it.  What could my grandfather possibly mean by saying that?  I mean, I was obviously a girl, yet for some reason he was saying that I was not.  Was it a joke?  No, he clearly did not appear to be joking.  So, I did something I was never supposed to do–I contradicted my grandfather, and told him that he was wrong. 

And this is where things go blank in my mind.  Besides not knowing what he or my grandmother thought when I said that, I also don’t know exactly what they did.  At this point, a giant hole appears in my memory.  A couple of different therapists have speculated that this (and a lot of other missing memories from my childhood) are symptoms of PTSD, responses to some form of abuse.  And I can see that being the case.  Maybe they struck me, or maybe they just ripped into me verbally enough to leave me traumatized for life.

The exact nature of what took place at that moment is really not important.  What is important is how this conversation changed my life.  The lesser of the two consequences was how I felt about my grandparents.  I was afraid of them, terrified that if I slipped in any way and let people know I didn’t feel like a boy I would be punished.  This fear never went away, even after they died when I was in high school.  Remember how I told you how close the family was, how we spent so much time with my grandparents?  I know that because of what I have been told by other family members.  I have only two other memories of my grandfather (neither good) and none of my grandmother, all of those constant interactions swallowed into the gaps of my trauma.  And I have realized, as I wrote this, that I cannot remember what either of them look like, even in this moment.  I can see them there, but they will not become clear to my eyes.  

But the more important consequence was how I felt about myself.  Based on that conversation, I knew something new about myself–I was broken.  Something was fundamentally wrong with me.  Because, after that day I was forced to accept that I was a boy, despite the fact that it never felt right.  The fact that I still felt like I was a girl when I wasn’t?  I was sure that no one else had ever felt that way.  Which meant that I was not normal–I was a freak, a monster, an abomination.  And I could never let anyone see that.  Because I knew, even then, what the consequences would be if my brokenness was ever discovered–broken toys ended up in the trash, not the toy box.  From this moment on, I had one mission in life–to make sure no one ever suspected that I was not just like all the other boys.

But how does one do that?  I watched my father, I watched the other boys at school, I even (for a while) watched my three year old brother, trying to understand what boys were like.  I developed an obsession with sports, because boys loved sports.  (I played baseball, basketball, and soccer.  I wanted to play football, but my parents would not allow it because it was too dangerous.  They did let me play flag football, but one year was enough to convince me that was not a good fit for the me I was pretending to be.)

I did a project on World War II in the second grade, and learned everything I could about the Roman Empire, because men seemed obsessed with military history.  My favorite band?  Whatever band the other boys in my class talked about during recess that week.  I played with Hot Wheels, and toy guns, because that is what the boys my age were playing with.  I did not take piano lessons because boys did not do that.  I read whatever my dad was reading, watched whatever movies or tv shows he watched.  I did not do any of these things because I liked them–I did them because I was trying to learn how to hide myself.  (I did enjoy some of the books I read, and some of them would have an impact on me I’m still coming to terms with, but the reason I picked them up in the first place was that they were my dad’s books.)

It was exhausting.  While the other boys in school just got to be themselves, I had to study them, then try to remake myself to be one of them.  And it was isolating.  I could not let myself have any close friends, because if anyone got too close they were more likely to see through my disguise.  But I also could not be a complete loner, because then I would be picked on by the other kids, and anything like that could threaten my existence.  (How would I respond if the other boys in my class called me a girl?  I could not let myself find out.)  So I had to place myself on the edge of groups of kids in my class, close enough to be considered one of them, yet far enough that no one ever looked at me too closely.  That balancing act was a lot to manage for a five, six, seven year old.

And on top of that, I began to hear the message that would dominate so much of my childhood–the script for my future.  It was made very clear to me early on that no matter what I may have wanted, I was going to go to college and graduate with a degree.  But, we were poor.  So in order to make that happen I had to earn scholarships.  Which meant I had to focus on school and any other activity that might help me earn a scholarship.  (Talk about exhausting.)

So there I was.  I was beginning the training that would turn me into the person everyone wanted, expected, me to be whether I wanted it or not.  I was learning to suppress my feelings.  Though I could not see it, I had started on the path a wise Jedi master would later describe:  “Fear leads to anger.  Anger leads to hate.  Hate leads to suffering”.  It would be years yet before the anger, the hate, the suffering would find me.  But the fear had come…