Therapy
She certainly didn't look like a boy. She was wearing a long jean skirt, perhaps the only hint that she wasn't comfortable with her femininity. But a lacy pink slip peeked out here and there around her ankles, so even that hint was ambiguous. Yet her words were unmistakable.
"I am a boy trapped in a girl's body," she asserted. "I want to wear pants. I want to have a penis. I'm not a girl."
Yet the voice was clearly feminine. Her body would have looked feminine even in jeans. Although she was only ten, she looked much older--twelve or thirteen--and had breasts.
I was her therapist. I had met her once before, when she had come with her mother. Now, she and I were meeting alone. She had insisted on it. I did not have her file on hand, but I had memorized certain important points in it a few minutes before our meeting.
"If it were not possible for you to become a boy--ever--what would you do?" I asked her.
"There are ways for girls to become boys," she said. "I'm going to do it someday. I need your help."
"It's possible, yes, but not easy. It's very expensive," I said.
"But it can be done. And I will have it done."
"What if you have it done then you change your mind? That happens more than you might think."
"Only to boys who become girls. Not the other way around."
I didn't argue. I knew of several men who had become women. All had been my clients. Those who had the surgery with my blessing and recommendations were almost always happy after the change. Those who hadn't gotten my approval were . . . less satisfied. But this child was the first girl who said she wanted to become a boy.
"I think you need to meet some others like you--girls who have wanted to be boys, I mean," I said.
"I don't want to meet girls. I want to be a boy," she asserted.
"Most girls who want to be boys have to wait till they're women when they can become men," I said.
"I want to be a boy now," she snapped. "Not tomorrow, not in ten minutes. I want to be a boy now." She was angry, but didn't cry like a girl this emotionally agitated might do.
"I know, but I can't make you into a boy. I'm not a surgeon; I'm a therapist. I need to get to know you and make sure there isn't something else in your life, perhaps something you know nothing about, that makes you want to become a boy. It wouldn't be very good if you had all the surgery and found yourself wishing you were a girl after all, would it?"
"I know what I am and what I need to be. I am a boy. If I could make this stupid skirt into a pair of pants right now, I'd do it?"
"You never wear pants?"
"I can't," she said, pulling up her skirt. "I can't even pull pants on under this slip. I don't know why."
I realized that she might be right--and if so, there might really be nothing I could do to help her.
"Can you wear other 'boys'' clothes?" I asked.
"Like what?" she asked.
"Neckties, jackets, T-shirts, baseball caps, you know?"
"I want to wear pants. You know I can't even wear shorts under this?"
I shook my head.
"I don't even know if I can wear underwear. When I go to the toilet, I just back up to the thing and pull up my skirt and slip, sit down and go. I can't feel anything. I don't even know what would happen if I tried to wipe."
"You've never discussed this with your mother or anyone else."
"Mother says I'm 'a perfectly normal girl.' But I'm not. I'm not a girl at all. I'm a boy!"
She came a few more times to therapy, and I tried to get her to accept her femininity. But I knew it was a hopeless battle, for I had seen stuff in her file that would have shocked her--and anyone else, except, of course, her mother.
Her mother had wanted to have a little girl. When her boy was born, and complications from the delivery resulted in the mother being sterilized, she decided to make her son into a girl. Normal channels were ignored, and instead voodoo and black magic were employed. Now I'm as skeptical of witchcraft, or whatever you call it, as the next therapist, but somehow the mother found someone who could do the job for the right price. Part of the spell--if you wanted to call it that--meant the child would be stuck in long skirts and slips for her entire life. But she would be an anatomically perfect female, with breasts, a vagina, the works--even though her mind would be the same as that of the boy she was born as. In my opinion, it was a cruel thing to do, and I was tempted to tell the girl of the action, but before I could decide for certain to do so, she stopped coming to me.
A few years later, she sent me a card with a picture of her in her most masculine pose imaginable. She was holding a welding torch, getting ready to teach a class in the subject at a community college. The torch matched her long, gray skirt.
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