Girl Meets Boy II

[Editor's note: Yesterday, reporter Ryan Elias invited his transgender friends Gavin and Amy over for a curry dinner, to talk about their lives. Find that candid conversation here, including a primer on the pronouns used in this story (Gavin is referred to as 'they'.) Today, the conclusion to this two-part series.]

Gavin used to play volleyball, but fell out of the habit for a few years, about when they started experimenting with gender. They got back onto the court just recently at a drop-in co-ed session at a local community centre.

"It was fun, but I felt super awkward," they say, "It turns out men just act and interact differently on the court. There are different conventions for contact and different stances. I had to really pay attention and do my best to keep up."

"That's probably as good a segue as any to the issue of sex," I say. We're packing up the remains of dinner. I put on a pot of water for peppermint tea. "It's the thing I'm pretty sure almost everyone wonders about. How does sex work for trans people?"

Gavin and Amy agree that there are no hard rules; how a person is oriented sexually may or may not change as they transition, and how they have sex will vary widely both by preference and anatomy. When preparing for their initial consultation for hormone therapy, Gavin was warned that admitting to doctors that they enjoyed penetrative vaginal sex could disqualify them. But the physician they're seeing seems pretty open-minded, they say, and is more concerned with Gavin's self-perceptions than what they may or may not do in the sack.

"I'm just grateful that my junk is configured so that I can get off. It might not look quite like how I want it to, but at least it works," Gavin says, "At this point I'm not interested in putting myself in any sort of box where I have sex only in certain ways or only with certain types of people."

"If I somehow grew a stamen I would find a way to use it," Amy chimes in, agreeing.

The line between gay and straight can be blurry if you change your gender or get involved with someone who has. Gavin, who was quite strongly oriented towards women, had sex recently with a male transsexual and found it incredibly comfortable.

"It was nice. We understood each other's bodies. There was none of the uncertainty you get with some partners about what may or may not be off limits," they say.

So does that make them gay? Bi? Not even Gavin can say for certain, but it's not a question they lose any sleep over.

Family ties

"Let's switch gears and talk about your families," I say. Dinner's long done and we've retired to the living room, tea in hand. Gavin has stretched out on the couch; Amy is sitting cross-legged at my coffee-table. I take the ugly green armchair.

An only child, Amy's father committed suicide when she was six. She was raised primarily by her mother, Eleanor, with strong connections to their extended family. As a clan they're best stereotyped as professional caregivers and community leaders: educated, progressive and politically active. These factors do not always, Amy says, lead to acceptance for trans or even gay children. But in her case it did, especially after an uncle made a trip to Vancouver to discuss her transition with her and seemed to leave satisfied.

Her mother remembers well how Amy first broke the news to her.

"She invited me to sit down in her bedroom and said that she needed to tell me what was going on, that she was transgendered," Eleanor recalled for me over the phone. I've never met her in person, but Amy tells me they look very alike now. "My first reaction was shock and fear. I told her that I wanted her to know that I love her, and I had to figure this stuff out. Driving alone back to Kelowna I remember thinking 'Oh my God, my son's a freak'. But mostly there was fear for her safety, and how people would react to her... At first she didn't want me to tell anybody, and that made it very difficult, because I started into this whole grieving process."

"There are still things I don't understand," Eleanor said, "I guess one of the things I wonder and worry about is how long she'd been in pain, tortured, in the body she'd been in. But the bottom line is that, as a devoted parent, I want my child to be happy and fulfilled. And this was where she needed to be."

Eleanor said she now finds it "kind of fun" to have a daughter instead of a son. More surprising, Amy's Michigan-based extended paternal family ("much more conservative") also reacted positively to her transition.

Though they're certainly not being disinherited, Gavin has had a rockier time of it so far. Gavin says an aunt recently told them "I hope you're getting help. I hope you're doing what you need to to get better."

Their mother, Leslee, told me that she could accept transgenderism but that she was "challenged" by their shift towards a more masculine identity.*

"I've always related to her [Gavin] as a she, and I still see her in my mind's eye as a she," Leslee said, sitting on the edge of a chair by a window in her living room.* She's tall, slender and impeccably dressed. "My pregnancy with her ignited a lot of controversy, and I kept her over the wishes of my mother... I think having a bond with my daughter has always been important to me because my relationship with my mother was so troubled. I wanted to do better."

"I can accept gender neutral more easily, I would rather she went with the flow and stuck with that," she said, "And I try to focus on that she's the most amazing individual, that she's a genuine, sincere, loving, gifted human being. But I'm challenged. I have issues with the fact that she still wants to have a child, I don't see how that fits with her being a male."

"But when I'm talking to people and they seem unsure, I say it like I say that my boyfriend is black: My child is transgendered, and if that's an issue for them, too bad, the door is shut."

Gavin says that they argue with Leslee that the bond the two of them have as individuals needn't go away just because "Kadie" changed her name to "Gavin." They've never been a "girly" person, they say, and they and Leslee never did archetypal mother/daughter things together. The discussion is ongoing.

Talking criticism

On the last of I don't even know how many pots of tea, we're tossing around criticisms of transgenderism that I've encountered. I ask them how they respond to people who say that since you can't change your DNA, you can't change your gender.

"That one's easy," Amy says, "We're not talking about genes, we're talking about roles. Those change. You used to be a child, but that doesn't make your date a child-molester. And there's no DNA difference between you right now and you dead, but clearly something changes."

I come back with: "What about the essentialist argument, the one that says that male is male and female is female and you shouldn't mess with it?"

"What about the intersexed?" she replies, "Not everyone falls into a simple male/female paradigm. And so what if some of us feel the need to change things?"

It's getting late and we're wrapping up. The last question I have is an awkward one, since it's not really based in a logical argument: I get the feeling that much of the hostility towards trans people is based in the 'yuck' factor. Some people are just uncomfortable with how they think transgendered people look, or they get hung up on the messy medical details. What can you say to people like that?

"Well first off, you don't see the invisible trannies, the ones who pass perfectly. And you never know what's going on under their clothes or what they've been through to get there," Gavin says.

"But really, if you don't like how I've chosen to live my life or how I look, that's okay. You don't have to kiss me."

*Story updated Oct. 28 at 12:20 p.m.

[See more Tyee stories in: Gender and Sexuality.]