Gender's Hourglass

CHAPTER 1

If you shake me, I’ll rattle; because I am broken inside.

It was odd, closing my eyes in 2012 and opening them in 1972. But stranger things have happened to me. Like living my life in two genders.

I am a transsexual female, born with a female spirit but trapped in the body of a male. And I have a philosophy that you may or may not share: No one ever gets things right the first time around. Forget what they say about going with your first instincts. They’re often incorrect. A college professor of mine once said that there is no such thing as good writing, only good rewriting. No matter how good something is … your first kiss, your first lay, your first job, or your first novel … you’d have to admit that it could have been better. That is if you only knew then what you know now…

I know a lot of things I’ve wished I’d known when I was younger. I’ve spent the last 53+ years on God’s green earth learning things. Mainly what I’ve learned is a lot of lessons. Hard lessons, because I didn’t think things through, didn’t think ahead, didn’t apply my knowledge to the situation … or just didn’t know any better. But I’m, changing that now. In a big way.

***

CHAPTER 2

It was 1972. Late February or early March I think. The place was San Francisco, California. And the author, myself -- Mark, at that time -- was there. There in a hospital. A mental hospital (or institution, if you prefer). Specifically, the McAllister Neuropsychiatric Institute, within a wing of St. Margaret’s Hospital (now Medical Center) located on the corner of Stanyan and Hayes Streets in the Haight-Asbury District. Five years after the Summer of Love; and right across the street from Golden Gate Park. At that time, my home was in San Bruno, and I was in my first years of high school. My first year of madness. But I'm getting ahead of myself -- an easy thing for a time-traveler to do!

I was born in October 1957, within the dawn of the Space Age. Sputnik had been launched by the former USSR, just days before. My family, being my mom and dad and three older sisters – all from Boston, MA – were living in southern California when I was born. I was the youngest child of four and the only boy, which meant a lot to my father, I suppose. From him, I inherited my blue eyes, my mostly Irish temper, a love of the sea and all things nautical, a high degree of intelligence, and the strength to make it through difficult times.

From my half-Albanian mother, I inherited nervousness, a tendency to view most things negatively, a shorter stature than my father, and an even shorter and quicker temper and a tendency towards vengeance. But then, I was born a Scorpio, and this is a passionate sign, isn’t it? Don’t get me wrong though. I’ve loved and revered my parents all my life – which has been a long one for me and for them.

I don’t wish to sound like the late J.D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield, but what I want to tell you about my childhood is this. We moved back to Boston and its South Shore; we moved every year or so due to differing finances; my father worked hard in sheet metal construction and was away from home a lot, and our household was awash in estrogen.

Meaning, the female influence there was great. Also, my mother overprotected me; resulting, I guess, from when at age three I suffered from a traumatic accident.

I was hit in my left temple by a car, driven and braked too fast, by a young driver, suffered a fractured skull and was in a coma for weeks, but had my life saved through extraordinary measures by my father and mother and the best children’s neurosurgeon in Boston. I have often wondered if this accident was the cause of my madness -- of my difference -- but have found no evidence or studies to corroborate this. Although it occurs to me that I may have actually died, and had my original spirit replaced by another. Possession being none-tenths of the law, after all.

In any case, I don’t have many clear memories of my life at 3 to 5 years old, but I do know that I shared a bedroom with my three sisters: Katy, Deanna, and Robin, from oldest to youngest. Maybe it was because I was too young for a room of my own. Unlike my siblings, I was quiet and withdrawn. Probably due to my accident. At least I think I had my own bed and dresser or closet. Not that it much mattered, on account of what followed.

I don’t remember why, but late at night I began getting up while everyone else slept, and going over to my sisters’ clothes dresser, where I would finger their underwear and run my hands over their blouses and skirts and dresses. I then began trying them on, over my own p.j.’s – no way I would risk being seen naked by my sisters! (Not at that age, anyway.) I even went into their closet to pull their dresses over my head.

But, at some point, one or more of my sisters must have woken up and caught me cross-dressing (although that term hadn’t been invented, or at least popularized, in 1961-62). They told my mother and she, in turn, scolded me. She told me that boys didn’t dress up in girl’s clothes and that if I did it again, she’d send me to school (kindergarten, at that time) wearing a dress! Well that prospect scared me, so I did quit – for a while at least. But I never really got over how nice the clothes (especially the underwear!) looked or felt on me.

Could it be that I was simply over-identifying with the four females who dominated my household and life? Or did my true, female spirit began to emerge? I can’t honestly say.

I recall cross-dressing again when I was 7 or 8, in the garage/basement of another house in Massachusetts, where we would pile up our dirty laundry (through a chute) next to our washer and dryer. This was adjacent to a kind of underground den or playroom that came with a pool table and later had a jukebox from my dad’s bar in it. I spent time (alone) resuming putting my sisters’ and mothers’ clothes on over my own, being careful not to get caught again (which I never was). There were a lot of bad things going on at home involving one of my sisters, so no one took notice of me in the garage. Why, I even once had a friend, a boy my age, and his younger brother over; and I encouraged them to join me (which they did, willingly!) in my dress-up game. For a game was how it felt – then.

Clothes were different then than now: nicer, and better made and designed, I think. Girls still wore dresses and skirts for the most part, up to high school (unless they were tomboys); or culottes or shorts in warm weather. Women looked more glamorous, wore more makeup and jewelry in public, as well as hats of all designs, coats and wraps and stoles (made of real fur -- their one drawback), and high-heeled shoes; and slips and girdles and nylons under their outerwear.

They made women, in my opinion, more modest and yet more attractive than they are today. (Especially in church on Sundays when everybody dressed their best -- my sisters in little princess outfits and me stuck in a suit and tie and fedora, looking like a little gangster.) And these fashions and fabrics excited envy in me to wear them. When I was little, up to what age I'm not certain, I went shopping in Boston's department stores such as Filene's Basement with my mother. Naturally I was exposed to a lot of women and a lot of their clothing. And when I needed to go to the bathroom, my mother took me into the ladies' room where I did my business in a stall. Just being in a women’s' bathroom was mysterious and exciting for me then. I've gotten blasé about the experience by now.

By the time I was 9, and we had moved all the way across country to a pre-Silicon Valley Sunnyvale, CA, I was regularly getting up late at night and taking clothes out of our hallway closet to put on in my room. (I had my own bedroom now.) I think that was when I first started stripping naked first so I could feel the lovely nylon, Lycra, tricot, calico and lace on my skin. But, I for a while slept with my door open (I was sacred to be in a closed, dark room) so I had to be quiet and careful.

I had noticed girls, and had crushes on some, as far back as kindergarten, I think; and certainly from 4th grade onwards. But I was extremely shy. Most of my school years up through high school had involved some degree of being bullied, called names, or challenged to fight. Perhaps it was because I was quieter, shyer, and more withdrawn (not to mention less athletic) than other boys my age. Perhaps more so because, due to my home environment and my crossdressing, I exuded a more feminine presence they could detect. So, no matter how pretty or nice a girl was, I could never tell her that I thought so.

I went through a phase up through 6th grade of even actively and openly disliking girls. I took part (along with my few friends) in insulting them and chasing them like I wanted to hurt them. Even one girl I thought was cute, I used to call baboon-face, just because it sounded funny and sarcastic. But I think the nightly dress up sessions took their toll on whatever shreds of self-confidence or masculine pride I had in me. I felt my habits, or addiction – whatever you’d have called it – begin to warp me. As, for example, one time in 7th grade when my best friend, also named mark, and were play-wrestling in our garage in Sunnyvale and we ended up touching each other’s butts. Looking back on it, I think this also a pre-sexual, albeit same-sex, occurrence. Another portending of things to later come.

So, for a long while, I lived as a boy in daytime and as something like a girl at night. But I used other opportunities to indulge in my forbidden pleasures. By the time I was 13, I was living with my parents and youngest sister Robin in a coastal town in Connecticut: Old Saybrook. Katy and Deanna had each, at age 16, eloped to Tijuana and married their Hispanic first husbands, and later had children of their own. So they had left home. Now I was in 8th grade, but I got a late start due to my having come down with appendicitis just as the school year was starting. My appendix almost burst, and I came close to dying, once again, but I survived -- unfortunately, I began to think.

Oh, but here's a funny (ironic) thing: while I laid in bed for a week recovering at the hospital, I saw an episode of a show I watched once in a while in 1970 -- Medical Center, starring Chad Everett. And in this episode, the guest star was Robert Reed -- better known as Mr. Brady on the Brady Bunch; and decades later as a gay man in real life who eventually died of AIDS -- and his character went to the Medical Center to have a sex-change operation! I had no idea that could be done; but, needless to say I was glued to the set, watching and savoring every moment -- especially the conclusion when Reed was shown as a new woman.

I remember Chad Everett explaining to Reed's son that his father wasn't a homosexual (was that the first time I heard that word?) but that he was, in fact, a transsexual, and had been his whole life. I was stunned. And looking back, that show and that episode was way ahead of its time in showing a sympathetic view of a TS person -- someone like me.

When I returned home, I could not start school right away, and both my parents worked. So I was left home alone during the day for a week or so. I used that time to do some things that even now I think as somewhat bizarre.

For example, I would take my sister’s clothes, her panties and bras, slips and nylons, sheer blouses and short skirts and hot pants, down to the cellar of our home; and lay them out as though on display in a store. Then, I would start trying them on, individually or in various combinations, and strut in front a mirror, thinking how pretty I looked. My hair was long then – it was 1970 – and I hadn’t grown facial hair yet; also I was slim enough then to fit into Robin’s (or my mother’s) clothes fairly easily. I would be very careful to memorize exactly where I got each article from, and how they were folded or hung, which side faced which, etc.; so that I wouldn’t be caught. But at the same time, I wanted someone to see me, and had the desire to go outside and expose myself in lingerie.

By this time, I was entering adolescence, and got an erection every time I slipped on something sexy. But I was very naïve and didn’t know what sex really was, then. I knew it had something to do with putting my penis inside a girl (somewhere) and having liquid come out to make babies with. I had never masturbated or at least ejaculated, and got it into my head that a guy must pee inside a girl’s whatever. (I hadn’t ever seen one, only some Playboy photos of breasts and asses my friends had copped, with maybe some pubic hair showing. In fact, I don’t recall ever seeing any of my sisters or my mother naked either.) So, I would sometimes make myself pee a little in or on Robin’s clothes – not enough, I hoped for her to tell. Or did I want her to?

I guess it was, in a way, an almost sexual contact with my sister. But I never would have considered incest, even if I knew what it was back then. I mainly put the clothes on because I liked the way I looked in them. Not that I looked as good in her clothes or undies as Robin did (or that I imagined she did). I was still, at that time, attracted to girls, as well. Even to my beautiful sisters.

I remember that around then was the first time I read, in a dictionary, a term that I felt described me completely. I was a transvestite: a person and esp. a male who adopts the dress and often the behavior typical of the opposite sex esp. for purposes of emotional or sexual gratification (Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition, and Copyright 2003). Of course, my 1970 dictionary probably defined it in simpler terms than this. Nonetheless, I was stunned. Floored.

There was a name for what I was! And there were other people like me! Maybe I wasn’t such a freak after all. Of course, this didn’t alter my secretive practices; nor did I share my newfound knowledge with anybody.

I was still harassed at school, called Snowflake by one mean guy (who later became my friend), and had a major crush on a rather sexy and, reportedly loose, girl named Cathy. I even made her a character in a vampire story I wrote for the school newspaper (this was back when Dark Shadows was at its zenith).

And now we come to a critical juncture in my life, and some of the reasons for my time travel. It started the summer of 1971. I was 13 going on 14. My parents, Robin and I were moving back to California, where Deanna and Katy and their husbands and sons lived in San Jose. I went out first, by plane and by myself, which was a real big deal to me. I felt like an adult. But I was still very much a child. I landed at the San Jose airport and stayed with my sisters Deanna and Katy, respectively.

Robin was also at Deanna’s soon after while my parents searched for a new place in the Bay Area to live, eventually renting a house in San Bruno. But first, while staying with my sisters, my hormones ran amok, along with my transvestism. Especially when my sisters’ friend Bonny was around; in her 20’s like them and also having a little boy. (Bonny had a cute face and big tits, I recall.)

It was time for high school. I was a freshman and Robin a sophomore. The school itself, Oceana, in Pacifica (we lived on the border) was scary for me. It was largely a school for transient students, ones who were not expected to be there all four years; and, unlike junior high in Connecticut, it was a mixed-race environment with many Blacks, Latinos, and Samoans, as well as Whites like me. I hardly ever saw Robin there and was pretty much on my own. But my life changed abruptly when, for the first time I was aware of, someone else – a girl – really saw me.

This girl, named Maria Linda Juarez, became many things to me over the next 40 years: my first girlfriend, my first lover, and the mother of my daughter Carlene (all while still in high school) and grandmother of my granddaughters Bryce and Giselle, and my grandson Toby. Maria was the one great love of my life, and I had many dreams of one day marrying her (which never occurred), living with her (which did happen, for seven years), and having a family of our own (which never quite materialized). But most of that lay in a future, which, while it did happen to us, will now never do so.

Meeting Maria for the first time – I hadn’t noticed her in my homeroom class until she started leaving notes in my locker – I fell head over heels in love and in lust. For she was cute, and outgoing, although she had a vulnerable air about her that I didn’t, at that time, realize came from having been sexually molested for years prior by her uncle and godfather. I was confused as to why she liked me. Because I still cross-dressed at home, although that soon ended for a while -- and not, sad to say, because of her.

Shortly thereafter, my youngest sister, Robin, caught me in a compromising situation at home.

It was because of my greed, my inattention, and the fact that Robin came home from school early on one of many days in which I faked being sick, in order to stay home and dress up. I remember the day well. I had enjoyed wearing Robin’s panties and a white slip, all the while strutting about and even dancing to a Carol King record. I felt like a girl, despite already having had a couple of times kissed Maria at her house. Well, I lay down on my bed while still (un)dressed when Robin came home. Even though I’d locked the front door, just in case, I woke up to my sister pounding on the door and yelling for me to let her in.

Having no time to take off her underwear and put it back in her drawers, I quickly pulled my pajamas on over it and went to unlock the door. Robin came in, angry– whether at being locked out, or for some other reason, I don’t know – but, as she passed me by on the way to her room, she saw a corner of her slip sticking out of my fly, and said sarcastically: "Your slip is showing."

She was furious with me, then – more for going into her drawers, I think since she kept drugs there than for wearing her lingerie – and told me never to go into her room again; also, to go and take off the underwear and give it to her, and get dressed in my own clothes. And then came the horrible waiting: waiting for my mother and father to come home from their jobs, at which point I fully expected Robin to rat me out.

Which she did, although I can hardly blame her. I mean, what would you have done?

My parents decided that I needed professional help and took me to psychologist in San Francisco. It turns out that he needed more help than I did. He told us, at our first and only session that he was in the middle of a messy divorce and had to travel each week to Los Angeles and back, and couldn’t take me on as a regular patient. But, he referred us to a colleague, a psychiatrist down the hall named Dr. Kilroy. It was he that saw me the next time.

I remember going into his office to speak with him alone, and when I did I, very nervously, pointed out to him the word transvestite in my dictionary – I was too ashamed to say it out loud. (I'd discovered it while still in Connecticut; and despite the Medical Center episode, still did not believe myself at this time to be a transsexual.) After that, I don’t recall our discussion. Neither do I recall other visits over the next month or so. But, eventually, due to the stress and nervousness (bordering on paranoia) I was under over my gender dysphoria (as it is, or will be, called), and the added confusion of my attraction to Maria, a decision was made. A momentous decision, by my psychiatrist and my parents, in an effort to help me, which was this:

I was to be institutionalized. Placed in a private neuropsychiatric institute in San Francisco. Ostensibly, for observation over a period of six weeks.

And this is where I really began to rewrite my own story.

***

CHAPTER 3

You may already know this, but you can’t travel back in time with your body – only with your mind.

Let me clarify that statement. What I mean is that there is a way, a way that I found, to literally send your present mind back to dwell in your past body. Actually, one of many past bodies you’ve had over the prior span of your life. You could go back to infanthood – though I can’t imagine why -- or any other part of your youth or middle age. In my case, I chose early adolescence, for reasons I shall make clear. But again, let me say: there is no physical transfer between present and past involved.

You can’t, for example, take some gadget back with you 10, 20, or 30 years and claim to have invented it. You can’t bring a newspaper back to show someone that they’re going to be assassinated. Or have your physical future self meet your past self -- thus avoiding the famous time-space paradox. And so on. Only your incorporeal mind. The mind and intellect and memories you'd accumulated over a lifetime before you went back. That too seems paradoxical -- how could you remember things that hadn't happened yet, or that might never happen if you changed things? I don't really know why, but that just doesn't happen.

No, the process – which is unimportant, really – is a lot like memory. Anyone can go back in time through remembering and, with their mind’s eye and other senses, experience again (albeit fleetingly) a part of their life long gone. The trick, though, is to do more than that. It means returning to a past time and staying there. In doing so you force your past mind out -- or perhaps overwrite it is more accurate. (As a writer, I prefer that analogy.) But you don’t remain static. If you return to age 14, say, then you must start living your life again from that point on. It is as I have found, a one-way, one-time-only trip. I haven’t been able to replicate it, to go backwards twice – why, I haven’t figured out, nor to go forward again. Because traveling back in time does create one actual paradox. You can’t live your life back to the future because the future you came from will no longer be there. It will have changed as a result of the actions you take, the decisions you make, and even the very thoughts you think, the second time around.

Unless you relive your life exactly as you had, moment by moment; and that doesn't seem possible to me. Nor desirable. The main reason for travelling backwards in time is to change things. So if you discover the process, and choose to go backwards, take my advice: choose your forwards decisions wisely.

I can only hope that I have. And so my real story begins below.

***

I managed to time the following to occur just after my parents left the ward I was placed on, the second floor of a wing of St. Mary’s Hospital in San Francisco. (This was, incidentally, the same hospital where my daughter, Carlene, was born 2 years later, the first time around. But now that would change.)

For, still in 2010, I remembered being led to a long table with chairs in a large room called the Day Room. Most of the seats were occupied by my fellow ward-mates – children and adolescents – and others by our workers, or nurses, mostly female. I couldn’t recall faces exactly. I believe it was either a group therapy or an arts and crafts session. But I keyed the time travel process to occur when, so I remembered a black boy at the table asked me: What are you here for? Did you dress up in your sister’s clothes?

I never did know whether that kid was psychic, or whether the reason for my coming to the clinic (the McAllister Neuropsychiatric Institute) was known and worded about by the technicians and nurses. But it didn’t matter. I used this rather appropriate inquiry to do what I can only describe as keying in my future psyche with my past one. As I sat in my living room recliner in 2011, and concentrated in the way I discovered – with tightly closed eyes, with this memory in place –all of a sudden the transference (if you will) took place.

All sound faded from my ears; my body became stiff, as though paralyzed; then my head began shaking back and forth as if to say no – faster and faster. I felt the cold sensation up my spine and through my body that I believe is the Kundalini energy that some yoga practitioners speak of – or perhaps not.

Then my head stopped shaking, and a spinning sensation took over, then as quickly left me; and I finally opened my eyes again. And felt a physical shock, as I realized who and where I was. No longer a 54 year old man with diabetes aches and pains, inside a small Carson City 4-plex – I was back in my 14 year-old body, sitting across from an African American patient about my age who had just asked me a question and was now, along with the others, staring at me intently.

I had done it! My mind was that of my older self, with all its knowledge and memories of what was yet to be – that is, unless I changed things -- but in a much younger and healthier body. As I looked back into the eyes of my psychiatric compadres and staff, they were taken aback. Could they see the age and maturity of my future self looking back at them? Or did my face evidence the indescribable pleasure I felt?

The first change I made was on my first day there. After my future mind entered my past body, I looked at the black kid across from me, then looked around the table for a moment, and said:

Yes. I’m here because I like to dress in girl’s clothing. Anyone have a problem with that? I said this with attitude aplenty.

The other kids and even the techs gaped at me. Then a flustered woman quickly got us back to some craft activities. We started drawing, and I, using a soft pencil and sketch pad, drew an idealized picture of myself, as a beautiful blonde-haired girl, wearing a gorgeous gown and standing atop a hill, with a man standing further away.

I’d drawn this same picture the first time I’d been here, but then I had thought the man to be me and the woman was my ideal girlfriend (or wife), who I named Carlene. But now, as I finished the picture, I held it up and pointed at the girl and said: "That’s me."

***

Well now, I soon had my first therapy session with a female tech. We sat in one corner of the Day Room while other kids watched TV or listened to records or talked with their own counselors. Mine was named Emily. She was short, brunette, around 30 and kind of cute. She was saying to me: So, Mark. Tell me what you think about yourself and who you are. Who is Mark?

I decided to be flip. Beats the hell out of me, lady. Mark is a boy’s name. And I am not a boy, all evidence to the contrary notwithstanding.

Emily seemed taken off-balance by my precocious response, but said calmly: I see. Why do you think you’re a girl? You look like a boy and your parents named you Mark.

I sighed. This was going to be difficult. I said: Well now you’re a psychiatric tech. So I assume you’re familiar with the expression ‘a woman, trapped in a man’s body’? Does that ring a bell?

Emily smiled. "Of course, that applies to what we call a trans-sexual person. They claim to have been born into the wrong sex body.