Born Both

CHAPTER 1

The Hazards of Being Female

MANHATTAN, NEW YORK

NOVEMBER 1988

THE TREES ON THE sidewalks of the West Village are in that lovely, colorful state of transition. It's my favorite neighborhood in Manhattan, this enclave of winding cobblestone streets lined with beautiful old brownstones and decades of queer history, like the Stonewall riots of '69 and the infamous Halloween parades down Christopher Street that I'd been lucky enough to attend in high school.

I find the address I'm looking for on Perry Street and ring the buzzer.

"Hey, girl!" I hear Jade say over the intercom. "I'm up on the third floor."

Jade is my good friend from high school. She's a year younger than I am, and the minute she showed up at St. Francis Preparatory School in Queens, she was the girl all the straight boys wanted. I thought she was hot too, but we were in high school in 1985, and "Prep," as we called it, wasn't just Catholic but prided itself on being the largest Catholic high school in the United States. In other words, it wasn't exactly okay to make it known at school that I was into another girl.

Jade was more than just a hottie though; she was cool. She was someone who could, like me, hang equally well with the artsy outcasts, the jocks, and everyone in between. She had stayed in New York after high school to go to the prestigious Parsons School of Design and had been trying to convince me to come visit her new place in the city ever since I dropped out of Wesleyan.

Not many folks drop out of Wesleyan, and I certainly hadn't planned on it. When I first arrived there, I had the time of my life. I was away from my parents and living with the largest group of cool people I had ever been around. During freshman year, however, this all changed.

My father, a doctor, lost his medical license after he was accused of sexually abusing a fourteen-year-old patient at gunpoint. Although the charges against him were eventually dropped, the state medical board had been unwilling to reinstate his license to practice medicine.

I knew my father had a gun because my brother, Hugh, had told me about it when we were kids, and he, my younger sister, Eden, and I had taken it out of its hiding spot in my parents' bedroom before. It was a silver handgun, and I remember thinking it was quite heavy. I also remember not wanting to handle or mess with it too much. Fortunately, neither did Hugh or Eden.

Shortly after the sexual abuse charges against my dad were filed, Hugh told me that our father had pulled the gun on him the year before, on the morning after his ex-boyfriend had called the house. I was a senior in high school and Hugh was a senior in college, living at home while going to Pace University in Manhattan, and the call happened late, while we were all asleep. The incessant ringing woke me up. After some time, I heard someone walking downstairs to answer it, followed by my father's voice angrily asking who was calling in the middle of the night. Then I heard him hang up and go back to his room. However, the phone continued to ring, with my dad getting angrier each time he picked it up, raising his voice and cursing at the caller in his thick Spanish accent before the commotion finally ended and I was able to fall back asleep.

Hugh told me that when he woke up the following morning, there was a gun pointed at his head, and my father was holding it, demanding that he tell him whether he was gay. Apparently, Hugh's ex had said something that implied it, and my dad wanted confirmation. Hugh was terrified and had answered that he was bisexual in the hopes of staving off a lethal response.

Although my brother got him to put the gun down, our father promptly kicked him out of the house and even stopped paying for his college tuition. He also took back the car he had bought him as an early college graduation present—and gave it to me to take to Wesleyan.

During the fall of my sophomore year, my family had gone to the proceedings against my father to show support. Everyone but me, that is. I felt bad for not going, but I just couldn't bring myself to do it because deep down, I believed that he was guilty. For some reason, despite the lack of evidence, and the fact that he was my own father, I didn't doubt he would do something like that. I didn't like to think about it or talk about it—I still don't—but it had to do with the way I'd seen him looking at and acting around young girls all throughout my childhood. Including me.

So my mother and siblings went to the proceedings without me, and they reported back that there was a tape recording of my father asking the girl to give him a blow job. Even if the act didn't actually happen, he had wanted it to. That was bad enough, in my opinion.

After the trial, things at home only got worse when Hugh outed me as a lesbian during one of Dad's why-can't-you-be-more-like-Hida tirades. Since we were little kids, and long before the gun-to-the-head incident, our father had been reading Hugh the riot act for being a "maricón"—which is Spanish for "faggot"—as well as for not being as smart or accomplished as me. Considering all the torment that Hugh had endured, I ultimately couldn't blame him for snapping and telling our dad I'm gay too—even if it did fuck up my life. Unsurprisingly, once my dad knew I was a lesbian, he didn't want to pay for my college tuition either, especially with all the money he had been spending trying to get his medical license back.

Having to drop out of college because I no longer had the funds to pay for it left me in such a state of despair that I didn't even try to convince my father to change his mind. In fact, cutting all ties with him seemed like a great idea to me, despite the problems it would cause.

"I'm so glad you made it!" Jade says when she opens the door, the late afternoon sun streaming in behind her. It catches the red in her long, disheveled hair and makes it glow like fire.

Jade's actually a brunette, but as usual her hair's dyed some more interesting color. It was blond when we first met, which made her mild resemblance to Madonna a lot more obvious. Jade's face was a little longer and tanner but similarly heart shaped, with luminous skin, big eyes (Sicilian brown, in Jade's case), and a prominent beauty mark above her lip.

There are plants on every possible surface of her apartment, a Persian rug over the hardwood floors, a pillow-covered couch, and a big wooden coffee table buried under a stack of art books. Two tall living room windows overlook a tree-filled courtyard, heat steaming up between them from one of those old metal radiators that keep New York apartments so cozy.

"Wow, this is so cute!" I gush.

"You're cute," she quips. "The girls are going to be fighting over you tonight!"

"Yeah, I wish!" I laugh.

The plan is to eat here and then go dancing at a club. Jade knows I've been bummed after having to drop out of Wesleyan, and she thinks it'll cheer me up. She's right that I need it, the fun and the potential for romance and sex, but what would really cheer me up is a full scholarship to an equally prestigious university.

After we finish eating and getting ready, we walk across town and stop in at The Tunnel, a gay bar where my brother, Hugh, bartends. It's a narrow, dimly lit dive of a bar that lives up to its name.

"Hey, you two!" Hugh yells over the music when Jade and I step up to the bar. "It's so good to see you! What'll it be?"

Jade and I decide to do shots so we can get a good free buzz before making our way over to The World, which is hosting a lesbian night tonight. We have two rounds.

I guess Jade can handle her booze much better than I can though, because I remember only a few moments from the rest of the night, whereas she remembers all of it.

The first thing I remember is getting to the club and realizing that it isn't actually lesbian night but Jade and I going in anyway since we're already there. The next thing I remember is being on the dance floor surrounded by men. The third is being pressed up against a wall while some guy is kissing me. And the last is having some guy—presumably the same one that was kissing me—on top of me, fucking me, before hearing Jade scream at him.

That last image is the first thing I think of when I wake up the next morning in Jade's bed, and it makes me feel nauseous, like something cold and foreign is running through my body, chilling my insides. I lie there, paralyzed.

After she wakes up, Jade finds me in this state and tries to console me.

"You've had sex with guys before, and ones you didn't know very well. Maybe try to think of it like that?"

I know what she means but it doesn't help.

"But I wanted to have sex with those guys," I say. "It feels so different that I can't remember this and that I didn't want it to happen. I mean, the only reason I even went out last night was because I wanted to meet a girl. And—oh my god—I doubt he used a condom. I might be pregnant!"

"I'm so sorry, girl," Jade says, realizing it's no use trying to minimize what happened. "I wish I'd found you sooner."

She tells me how it went down. Jade and I had been dancing and some guys were hovering, trying to dance with us. Then I said I was going to the bar. When I didn't come back for a while, she started to worry, so she went looking for me. She found me in an empty coat-check room downstairs by the bathroom, with one of the guys from the dance floor on top of me. She yelled at him to get off me, but she had the feeling she was too late to stop him before he had finished.

When I hear this, I'm so upset I can barely speak.

"How the hell did I get so drunk?" I manage to ask.

"Well, we had those two double shots," Jade says. "I guess maybe that's more than you can handle—"

"Doubles?" I interrupt her. "They were doubles?"

"Yeah."

I hadn't realized how much alcohol we were consuming, but I scold myself and think, I shouldn't have had two shots. I shouldn't have downed them so quickly. I should've known that it would be too much for me. I present myself as a tough chick, but physically, I'm still petite.

For several weeks after the incident in the club I wait anxiously for my period, which is late, and I'm relieved when the blood finally starts trickling. But that's all it does. Trickle. That isn't normal for me, but I want so badly not to be pregnant that I convince myself it's okay.

BROOKLYN, NEW YORK

JANUARY 1989

A couple of months later, I'm doubled over in pain and can't ignore that something isn't right. I go to the nearest hospital, Downstate Medical Center, and tell the doctor what happened. She's a woman, so I expect her to be sympathetic.

Instead, she stares at me coldly and asks, "What birth control do you use?"

"I'm a lesbian and I don't usually have sex with men, so I'm not on birth control," I begin. "I think I'm pregnant because my period was spotty and I've had these really terrible pains in my stomach. They're so bad I sometimes have to just lie down in the fetal position."

"I'll have some blood work done and I'll call you with the results," she responds.

A week later there's a message from her on my answering machine when I get home from work.

"We got the results and I need you to come in immediately for more tests," she says. "Please come in first thing in the morning, as early as you can. It's urgent, really—you have to come in first thing."

The tone in her voice gives me the feeling that I'm at death's door. I imagine she's going to tell me they've found cancer or something and that I have only a few weeks left to live. So I spend the rest of the night drinking half a bottle of vodka while crying and praying to Jesus that the prognosis isn't horrible.

I gave up on Catholicism when I was about eight and decided that it taught girls and women to think they were inferior, but I always loved Jesus, who didn't seem to share any of Catholicism's judgmental opinions. He was all about love and everyone being equal. He disapproved of the overvaluation of money and hung out with prostitutes and the other dregs of society because he preferred their company and didn't believe there should be a social hierarchy. Basically, he was like a rebel with hippie values, which massively appealed to me.

I pray to him until I pass out.

After I arrive at the hospital the next morning, the doctor runs a sonogram and informs me that I have an ectopic pregnancy, which I've never heard of. She explains that it's the result of an embryo forming in the fallopian tube instead of the uterus.

Then she tells me that the condition can often be fatal, especially if the tube has burst and there's hemorrhaging. After conducting a procedure so that she can evaluate the state of my fallopian tube, she confirms the worst: the tube has burst and the hemorrhaging is so dangerous that she'll need to operate immediately.

There's a good chance I won't survive.

She asks if I want to call anyone to tell them what's happening. I try my mother, but she's not home and I don't feel like leaving the information on the answering machine she shares with my dad. Then I try my apartment, but my roommate, Patrick, isn't home either. I leave a message so he'll know what hospital I'm in and ask him to tell my mom.

When I fill out the forms to admit myself into surgery, I'm informed I've been taken off my family's Blue Cross plan. I guess that's another one of the punishments my dad doled out after discovering I'm a lesbian, and I have to spend almost an hour filling out forms for Medicaid before they'll admit me.

When I finally make it to the operating room, my doctor reiterates that I might not come out of the operation alive. It definitely isn't what I want to hear, but strangely, I begin to feel calmer and more peaceful than I ever have.

"I understand," I say.

I can tell my placid response seems odd to her. Maybe that's why she reminds me, once again, how life threatening my situation is.

Although part of me wants to scream, "C'mon! At least say you're going to try to save my life!" I remain in this calm state.

"Yes, I understand," I repeat before another doctor administers the anesthesia. "I may not survive."

I COME TO ON a cot in a large room that's filled with other recovering patients, and I'm screaming. The anesthesia has worn off, and I can't believe that the aftermath of surgery could hurt this much. I frantically try to grab one of the nurses or doctors moving about the room so I can ask them to give me more drugs, but my words are coming out funny and they ignore me.

I pass out, but the next time I wake up I'm in a real bed in a different hospital room. I can hear laughter and Caribbean accents coming from the hallway.

I'm confused, until I remember that this particular part of Brooklyn has a big Jamaican population. I was happy I could get to the hospital pretty easily on the bus from my apartment, which is in Bensonhurst—not exactly a hip, close-to-Manhattan neighborhood, but the apartment was big and dirt cheap.

The faces of two nurses pop into my hospital room doorway.

"Oooh look—she's finally awake," one of them says, looking at me with a big smile.

"We was wondrin' when you'd be wakin' up," the other says, walking over to my bedside. "How're you feelin', my love?"

"I'm okay," I say, still a little out of it.

"Well, you just relax, shuga," she says, propping up my pillow and giving my forearm a gentle squeeze. "We gonna take good cara you."

Her voice and her touch radiate through me, soothing me like nothing has in a long while.

The next day, my mother visits me in the hospital. She's distraught and asks me about what happened. When I tell her, the first thing she says is, "How could you do that?" before telling me that it was my fault for getting drunk.

Her words are like knives.

One strikes my vagina, cutting away at the wound that has barely started healing. The other bores deep into my heart, cutting through its layers like the growth rings in a tree trunk until it gets all the way to the core, what my heart had been like when I was a little girl seeking her protection.

I can't believe another woman—my own mother, no less—can blame me for what happened as I lie here, having almost died. It's almost crueler to me than my rape itself.

The morning after it happened, Jade told me that the guy she found on top of me had been trying really hard to make me laugh and talk to him. So he thought I was hot, I think, and he was probably drinking himself and wanted to have sex. Part of him probably even tried to convince himself that on some level I was into it, or that I wouldn't mind because I looked like I wasn't a virgin. He could just tell his friends he met this hot drunk girl who fucked him right in the club and everyone would believe him.

The thought of this being true reminds me how completely used and violated I feel, but at least I'm able to discern what his motive likely was.

It's harder for me to understand how my mom could criticize me when I'm hurting so much from the experience. Even before I ended up here in this hospital bed, I had been so disturbed by what happened at the club that every time the memory surfaced I felt shaky and sick to my stomach.

Things had been done to my body, literally inserted into my body, while my mind was elsewhere. It was so disturbing to me, and dehumanizing—like I'd been a lab animal, snatched up and used as a tool to fulfill someone else's goals. My own needs, my life, were deemed worthless. Whenever I remembered that night, the feeling it gave me made me want to be dead.

So I tried not to think of it, and I didn't discuss it. Even though I typically tell my friends everything, I hadn't told a soul. Only Jade knew, because she was there, and I'd barely spoken with her about it after that first morning. Part of me hoped that if I didn't talk about it at all, it would feel less real, almost like it had never even happened.

Some women I know would have turned to their parents for comfort, at least their mothers, but I'd had no desire to share what had happened to me with mine. They both come from very Catholic, sexist, old-fashioned South American cultures, where "respectable" women aren't supposed to drink or go to clubs unless they're chaperoned by their husbands or brothers. So I knew they would disapprove of my going out like I did. In their minds it would probably amount to my being responsible for having been raped.

I also know that my mother is freaked out seeing me in this hospital bed and that people can say crazy things when they're upset, but I still wish she could have kept her thoughts about my culpability to herself, at least while I was here.

As much as I love my mother and want to be understanding, her words hurt like hell. In fact, they hurt like hell because of how much I love her. They hurt so much it feels like they're going to destroy me. I feel a huge, protective rage welling up, so I ask her to leave, my voice quavering with anger.

Once my mother's gone, I cry like an abandoned baby until one of the nurses comes into the room and comforts me in her warm Caribbean accent. She feels like an angel sent to save me, and she does. She saves me from losing all hope, and comforts me more than my own mother had.

ABOUT A WEEK LATER, during my follow-up visit, my doctor says, "Can I ask you a personal question?"

"I guess so," I answer.

"Has your clitoris always been this large?"

I think back to the first time I remember noticing something was different about my genitalia. I didn't know the word clitoris yet, but I had noticed my "thing" and that it moved a little whenever I peed. It seemed like the stream was coming from it. In fact, I was convinced it was, until I learned that only boys peed that way.

So I decided to give myself a genital exam to find out what was going on. Of course in an ideal world I would have just asked my mom, but I knew I couldn't talk to her about such things. Privates are private, she always said, and would hide hers whenever she changed while my siblings and I were in the room. She even made my little sister, Eden, and me hide ours from each other. I hadn't seen Eden's privates since she got out of diapers.

I also never knew how my mom was going to react to things I told her. One time, when I was about four, I told her about how my best friend, who was a boy, asked me if he could kiss my butt and that I let him. I didn't know it was so different from kissing my hand or my forehead. I just thought it was funny and that she would laugh like I did, but she started yelling at me and then did something I never imagined she would: she told my dad. I never saw the boy again.

That said, it was best for me to figure out the pee thing on my own. I unplugged the desk lamp in my bedroom, grabbed my pink plastic handheld mirror, and set up in the bathroom upstairs.

I angled the lamp to act as a spotlight, stood over the toilet, and held the mirror in a way that I could see my privates in it. Then I let it rip.

It was hard to tell at first, but after a while I could see that the pee was actually coming from a tiny hole somewhere underneath my clitoris. I remember feeling disappointed for a moment. For some reason, I liked the way it moved and the idea that I was urinating out of it. But I also knew that it was better this way. I was a girl, after all, and girls were not supposed to pee like boys.

In the examination room, the doctor clears her throat.

"Um, I don't remember any sudden growth spurts," I answer, "so yeah, I guess it's always been large."

"I'd like to do some tests," she says with a strange look on her face.

"Why? Is there anything wrong?"

She pauses, looking down at my chart. "You said on your form that you've had acne problems in the past."

"Yeah, but only briefly when I was in high school, and not more than anyone else…"

"And you also said that you have some facial hair on your upper lip…" she continues, eyeing me closely.

"Well, yeah, but not more than most Latin or Mediterranean women…"

"I just think it's a good idea," she insists.

"But why? Is there some kind of medical issue or something I should know about?" I ask, confused.

"Not necessarily…" she begins.

I can tell that, for some reason, she seems reluctant to answer my question.

"Well," she finally blurts out, "it just isn't normal."

I don't like the tone of her voice, or the thinly veiled look of disgust on her face. She reminds me of the snobby people at the fancy restaurants my parents sometimes took us to when I was a kid. They weren't used to dark-haired Latinos like us having enough money to mingle among them, and their expressions were far from welcoming.

"Well," I say firmly, feeling anger welling up, "since there's no medical issue, then no thanks—I don't want any tests."

The appointment ends soon afterward and I leave, knowing I'll never go back.

Fuck her, I think on my way home. I know my body's different, but she didn't have to make it sound like I'm abnormal, in a bad way.

As much as I try to ignore these kinds of thoughts though, her comments begin to fill me with nagging doubts over time, the way certain remarks can.

I begin to think, She is a doctor, after all. Maybe she knows something I don't.

A FEW MONTHS LATER, I finally decide to see a gynecologist at The Center, the gay and lesbian community center in Manhattan. They have a medical clinic with a sliding scale, and I figure their doctors will be more accepting.

"Um, you know how I told you about my ectopic pregnancy?" I ask the doctor as she's wrapping up my routine gynecological checkup.

"Yes."

"Well, the doctor who operated on me said, afterward, that she wanted to do tests because my clitoris isn't normal. Like I'm a freak or something because it's as big as it is."

"Well, that wasn't a very nice thing to say, was it?" she says.

I'm relieved and grateful to see that she's a caring person.

"No, it wasn't. But do you think there's anything I should be worried about?" I ask.

"If you want to lie back down, I'll check again," she says, "but your ovaries felt fine to me."

"That'd be great," I say, lying down.

"Yup," she says, as she feels around, "same as I thought the first time—perfectly healthy."

"Thanks for checking again."

"You know," she continues, looking me right in the eyes, "genitals come in all shapes and sizes, and I think your clitoris is beautiful."

Her words are as soothing as the Caribbean nurses' in the hospital, and I feel a tear of relief and gratitude roll down my cheek. I search her face for insincerity, so used to people like my dad who look down on anything outside the status quo, but I can't find any.

In the weeks that pass I'm struck by the contrast in how the two doctors had viewed me. One saw me as I see myself: healthy, with a variance in my genitals that's nothing to be ashamed of.

Part of me wonders if this doctor said those things just to be nice, but it still feels good, especially since the other doctor had found me so strange. The way she had wanted to run tests makes me think of sci-fi movies where unusual beings are whisked off to government labs upon discovery. I have a vague sense of having narrowly avoided something, but I have no idea what.