Amy Bloom - Normal

No one cares at all about theory at what I’ll call the American Fantasia conference. It’s a big get-together of crossdressing men and their wives and a smaller group of transsexual men and women and their partners, held behind a homemade curtain of pink tablecloths, down the most remote corridor of a smallish motel in a Southern suburb.

American Fantasia is organized by a man whose name I can’t use: although many at the gathering know that he’s transsexual, his neighbors don’t, his colleagues don’t, the psychiatrists and psychologists and social workers to whom he regularly lectures on transsexuality don’t. I don’t know either, until he tells me, halfway through the interview. In his earnest, slightly old-fashioned suit, with his tidy hair and beard, he looks like a behavioral psychologist or a very effective insurance salesman. He has a deep, manly chuckle that gets on my nerves, especially when it punctuates his belittling remarks about male-to-female crossdressers and the amusement with which female-to-male transsexuals regard them. I’m annoyed until I realize, with surprise, that he’s just another courtly, charming Southern man whose notion of appropriate physical distance is somewhat narrower than my own — a nice man who doesn’t really like women (the ladies, God bless ’em).

I’m at ease with most of these men, though, even when they compare handiwork, after a presentation by one of the plastic surgeons, and the guys who are most pleased with their mastectomies begin lifting their shirts. It’s like being in a room full of cardiac surgery survivors; everyone is telling stories, wagging fingers, showing what his doctor did for him. I see the scars from a distance, but it seems that the men wouldn’t mind if I got closer. I take my cue from Aaron, a transsexual man in his late forties, enough like Joe Pesci to be his shorter, Southern brother. Aaron is taking photographs for his newsletter for ReCast, a nonprofit organization that provides information, referrals, and support for FTM transsexuals, and he is acting as my guide. When I am speechless, he acts as my interpreter.

One guy whose chest Aaron and I study looks like a blond sailor from the cover of a 1946 Life magazine. “It takes about three years for the body to settle down,” this guy says, and as he rolls up his T-shirt to show the incision lines, tan and thickly ridged against his muscular torso, another man, middle-aged and narrow-chested, moves his tie and shyly opens his white shirt and shows me the incision marks around his nipples. I see, as I have never properly noticed, that the male chest, from nipple to collarbone, is configured completely differently from the female.

I’m cold, but Aaron unbuttons his cuffs. “Look around you,” he says. All the guys have loosened their ties and rolled up their shirtsleeves. “Testosterone heats up the system. We’re all comfortable, but you’re gonna freeze your butt off.”

After the conference, Aaron provides introductions to some wives and significant others. The first one I talk to is Aaron’s girlfriend.

Samantha, forty-two, met Aaron through a personal ad. “I had dated women, and I had a bad dating experience with a genetic man, so I was looking at the personals: gay, straight, and alternative. And this was alternative. I didn’t have to go through the anguish of his transition — I just met this man. And although I wasn’t attracted to him physically right away, I was very attracted to his energy and his vigor. That testosterone, it’s really something.

“I thought it would be very different from being with a genetic man, but it turns out to be not so different after all. There’s nothing female about him. Sometimes I wish there was … just a little more female style in him. I said to my friend Mitzi that men are all wrapped up with their cocks, whether they have them or not. It’s still all testosterone and power and having balls, one way or another.”

Bridget is the journalist who became James Green’s girlfriend.

“I thought, as a feminist, This is horrible — these are crazy women, self-hating women who find these unscrupulous, misogynistic surgeons to lop off their breasts. I had met a few of these guys, and I had read a few books by feminists on the subject. Transsexuals seemed pretty wacky.

“But after two hours with Jamie, I was very attracted, and I think I fell in love with him the next day. I went for a walk and began fantasizing about him sexually. I had asked him, for the article, to show me the surgery, and we were both embarrassed, we laughed, but he showed me. And my first, my spontaneous response to what I saw was, ‘Oh, that’s so cute!’ And it was. I have friends — straight friends — who think I’ve given up something important because he doesn’t have a regular penis. It wasn’t a loss to me. We have a lot more variety. We make love to each other, after all, not to organs.”

Her tone of fond reminiscence, the affection she holds not only for the lover but for the joy the lover has given, frays, and her voice tightens to a sharp New York buzz. “I saw him as a combination of female and male, and he was sane and he was a feminist … sort of. I thought, I’m tired of men, I’m tired of women, here’s someone completely new. But now we’re dealing with the same old man-woman thing, like with any other man. And we’re struggling. Suddenly, I can totally relate to my friend who has been complaining about her husband for years.

“I’m convinced — I know otherwise, but I’m convinced — that he was never really a woman.”

Lucy Davis, widowed after eighteen years of marriage and with two teenagers, thinks that meeting Forrest was her destiny. She saw Forrest’s name on the patient roster at the hospital where she’s a social worker, and the name struck her, although she couldn’t imagine why. “I just knew that I would know this man. I finally met him two years later in a store. He flirted with me, I recognized his name, and I knew he was the one.” After they dated for a while, he told her about his surgery. “He told me with his eyes closed, he couldn’t look at me. And when he opened them, he said, ‘You’re still here?’ And I said that it wasn’t a problem. We’ve been together ever since 1982.”

Forrest is an editor, and no one in New Hampshire, not his in-laws, not his stepchildren, certainly not his colleagues and neighbors or the guys on his softball team, knows. “We’re pretty paranoid here in the closet,” Lucy says. “Otherwise we’re like all other heterosexual couples, up and down over the years. I can live with his body and his scars. He always says he has a cock, it’s just a little bit smaller than other guys’. That testosterone, you know. I never had a lesbian relationship, and I still haven’t had one. I like guys. I love this one.”

Michael is the pseudonym he has asked me to use for him, and I cannot describe his comfortable home or the company he runs. He does not go to events like American Fantasia. His former therapist contacted him, and he agreed to talk with me on neutral ground, at a friend’s apartment. We’re meeting in the late morning, and I buy three sandwiches, a dozen cookies, and two kinds of soda at a fancy deli, but he doesn’t eat. He is a serious, dark-skinned black man dressed in corporate casual for a Saturday with his relatives, whom he announces he plans to join before too long. I take him for thirty-eight or so, but he is ten years older than that. (I don’t know if I have just never noticed that men usually look younger than women their age, or if it’s something in the skin of these particular men — some vestige of former female smoothness — or if it’s having had a second, hormonally powerful adolescence later in life, but all the transsexual men look to me at least five years younger than they are.) After two hours, Michael is less nervous than when we began, but he is never relaxed. About half an hour before he leaves, he takes a cookie and a sip of club soda.