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Recently in Salon Health & Body

Column
I was a human crash-test dummy
For 15 years, a professor gave his body for human impact-survival research -- and lived to tell the tale.
By Mary Roach
[11/19/99]

Urge: Naked World
Naked suicide plague streaks across USA
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By Hank Hyena
[11/19/99]

'Roid rage
Steroid abuse can cause everything from sexual voracity to violence; some people take them only for cosmetic reasons.
By Andrew Taber
[11/18/99]

Urge: Naked World
Japanese want baby girls; Indians choose boys
As parents coordinate their babies' sexes ahead of time, the male-female ratio gets even more skewed.
By Hank Hyena
[11/18/99]

Health Urge: Nancy Chan
Totems and taboos
When the IRS strikes, my favorite john wants to kiss me and my boyfriend refuses.
By Tracy Quan
[11/18/99]

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But living together makes it hard to keep secrets. One night, after smoking some particularly potent marijuana, Jean admitted to me that he'd always felt like a part of him was "feminine," and that he sometimes fantasized about being a woman when we made love. I was taken aback by these admissions -- I had never considered Jean anything but manly -- but I did my best to put my worries aside. After all, I reasoned, who was I to judge? It wasn't as though I didn't have any sexual idiosyncrasies of my own. And, from what I understood, people's habits inside the bedroom didn't necessarily extend outside of it.

But once Jean had made his initial confession (and found that nothing terrible came of it), the floodgates flung open. He began spending hours a day in primitive computer chat rooms, and a stack of transsexual porn magazines appeared at the back of our closet. Sometimes, I'd come home from school to find that my clothing drawers seemed pawed through; the lipsticks and eyeliner pencils on my bathroom shelf began to look suspiciously worn down.

Because I cared about Jean, I tried my best to be understanding. For a little while, I even tried helping him to "explore" his female side, thinking that doing so might help him temper his preoccupation with it. We spoke openly about his fantasies, played role-playing games in bed; once, at his request, I bought him a pair of large-sized nylons at my favorite lingerie store.

But my heart wasn't in these experiments. Deep down, I kept hoping that Jean's fixation with femininity would pass. And when it didn't, I realized that our relationship couldn't last. Accepting as I wanted to be, I also had to accept that my own sexual preferences were pretty conventional: I was a normal, straight woman who wanted an ordinary, masculine man.

I thought about all this as I played Jean's answering machine message over and over in my apartment. My first inclination was not to call back. After all, I hadn't even been able to manage the idea of Jean's feeling like a woman, never mind becoming one. Did he have to alter himself so severely, so permanently? Wasn't there some other way he could come to peace with his body, one that didn't involve a scalpel?

But then I started to think about what an enormously lonely undertaking a sex change must be. I'd known Jean's family, and, loving and tolerant though they were, I couldn't believe they'd be able to accept their only son and brother this way. If my phone conversation with Jonathan was any indication, Jean's friends weren't adapting to his physical changes very well, either. Dating and romance must be, at the very least, difficult; and then there was the worst part -- the fact that, in order to be doing this, Jean must have felt desperately wrong in his own skin. It didn't matter if I, or anyone else, thought he was just fine as a man. He was apparently willing to go through almost unimaginable difficulties not to be one.

It was this last realization that made me change my mind about calling him. I couldn't promise Jean, or myself, that I'd be able to handle things any better this time around. But if he had been able to muster enough bravery to do what he was doing, I could damn well be brave enough to pick up the phone.

"So ... how are you?" I asked, once we had gotten past the awkward, preliminary it's-so-good-to-hear-your-voice-again stuff. (His voice, I realized, wasn't all that different than it had been before -- just about a half-octave higher.)

"Well," he said, with a little giggle, "I'm an A-cup."

I nearly dropped the receiver. A sudden image of Jean as I'd known him, bare-chested, with a towel around his waist and shaving cream on his chin, flashed in my mind. The idea of cup size did not jibe, not in any way, shape or form.

"Uh," I said, trying to sound casual, "wow. I mean ... already, huh?"

"Mm-hmm," he replied. "I started the hormones three months ago, so they're still ... developing. But they're getting bigger every week!" He giggled again. "Soon I'll probably be bigger than you!"

"Oh ... well, that wouldn't be saying much," I said faintly. My head was spinning.

Jean was silent for a moment.

"Look," he said, finally. "I'm sorry. I know I'm probably throwing this stuff at you too fast." I noticed myself nodding.

"It's just that it's exciting for me, you know? And ... I don't really have many friends I can talk to about it. Please don't be mad."

"Jean, I'm not mad at you," I said. "You just have to remember how hard this is for me, OK? We have to go slow here."

"Slow is good," he replied, sounding relieved. "Slow I can do."

"OK."

"OK," Jean said, a note of mischief in his voice. "So, tell me about the men in your life."

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