BALLS Page 10

  Some people going through this transition probably would’ve taken the easy way out and just gone somewhere else. The thought crossed my mind, but Kate was by far the best stylist I’d ever had. My hairstyle wasn’t complicated; there wasn’t a name for it or anything. It was short (for a girl) and pretty nondescript. The problem was I couldn’t describe the haircut I truly wanted. I tried that once, the first time my mom took Wendy and me to an official hair “salon” in fourth grade. The stylist asked me how I wanted my hair cut, and I didn’t know how to answer so I said “like him” and pointed to the man styling the woman’s hair in the chair across from me. Wendy burst out laughing and then my mom and the stylist quietly negotiated some hairdo I hated. From then on, I just gave stylists parameters, they’d ignore them, do whatever they wanted, and I’d leave unhappy. Kate really listened and asked a lot of questions to make sure I’d like what she did. I decided it was in my best interest to add her to my hit list.

  “Okay Kris, what are we doing today?” she asked, fastening the smock around my neck. “Same as usual?”

  “Um . . . no. Something different this time.”

  “Oh, okay.” She looked at me, smiling, waiting for elaboration.

  “I . . . um . . .” Oh no. I could feel my eyes welling up.

  Why is it with some people I can tell my story without getting emotional but with others I can’t hold back the tears?

  Sensing this was likely going to be a delicate conversation, Kate brought me around to the other side of the mirror partition for some privacy. Soon she too had tears in her eyes but after a quick hug, got right down to business and asked me what I was thinking. I reached into my back pocket and handed her the ad I’d torn out of GQ. Kate gave it a quick once-over, evaluated the style—longer on the top, shorter on the sides, a bit messy in the front—and suggested approaching the cut in two stages. She didn’t want to go too short right away. Neither did I; I didn’t want to go into work and shock people. My goal was to handle the physical aspects of my transition gradually to give people a chance to get used to the new me. To achieve this I needed to avoid drastic changes that might give the agency gossip mill something to talk about.

  While she snipped away and gave me a shorter, more decidedly masculine haircut, I noticed the receptionist and a few other stylists who had seen me coming in for the last few years, stealing curious glances at me through the mirror. I didn’t care. Because while Kate was using the clippers on the back of my neck, I took a good look at my reflection and actually smiled. For the first time in my life the person staring back at me was starting to look familiar.

  Empowered by my new haircut, I went straight home and straight to my bedroom. I had an old-school closet—the kind with two sliding doors that overlapped each other on a track. On the left side were all the clothes I liked to wear, mostly men’s Ralph Lauren button-downs and polo shirts, sweaters, and sweatshirts. Behind the right-hand closet door, which had a broken runner and was therefore more challenging to open, I kept all the creepy female clothes I had to wear for formal occasions. I hated opening that damned door. But not this time. This time, I was armed with a black Hefty garbage bag. So long, skirts! Buh-bye, black dress! Suck it, heels! The Goodwill trailer is waiting for your sorry asses.

  Next I moved on to my drawers. Literally. I threw out all my underwear. Nothing gave me more pleasure than chucking those bras. I couldn’t have my breasts removed (or any other irreversible procedure) until I’d proven to my therapist that I could live full-time in my male role for six months, so until then I had to bind them. Luckily my boobs were relatively small. A classic Ace bandage did the trick. Binding wasn’t pleasant, especially when transitioning over the summer, but it gave me the appearance of having a flat male chest and felt more masculine than strapping on a bra. Finally, I searched every other drawer and chucked any item of clothing that came from the women’s department.

  It was one of the happiest, most gratifying moments of my life, but the best was yet to come: Now that I looked the part, I was finally able to shop in a men’s store and buy whatever I wanted without feeling self-conscious or embarrassed. Well, until I’d have to hand over my credit card and any sales person paying attention would see the name Kristin . . . I’d deal with that later. For now, clothes would maketh the man. I stocked up on Calvin Klein boxers and picked up a few dress shirts and ties. I never would have thought wearing something knotted around my neck could feel so liberating.

  Speaking of liberation, the next morning while in the shower a new realization hit me: I would never have to shave my legs or armpits ever again. Then out of habit I went to blow-dry my hair and realized that thanks to my new haircut, I wouldn’t need to do that either. My transition wasn’t just making me feel alive; it was buying me thirty minutes of extra sleep!

  I left my North End apartment with a spring in my step and set off on my fifteen-minute walk to work. I was sweating a bit with the Ace bandage on but I didn’t care. I was still high off my morning epiphanies when I entered the homeless zone of Boston’s Downtown Crossing. The usual suspects were in their usual places, including the tall, thin dude with the scraggly beard on the corner of Washington and Summer Street yelling, “Spare-Change-News-pa-per!” in my face. I gave him a buck and smiled.

  “Thank-you-sir,” he shouted back melodically.

  I stopped dead in my tracks. Holy shit, I pass! Granted, the observer was a borderline-crazy homeless person, but still, I took it as a good sign—and it was.

  I was definitely being seen as a man because all of a sudden I was invisible. I was used to men making eye contact with me and often smiling, but now men looked right past me. Turns out, as a short, pubescent-looking guy, I wasn’t getting checked out by anyone—male or female. In fact, I found that at times women went out of their way to avoid me. I’d be walking home from a night out and find that if I got within ten feet of a girl walking by herself, she would pick up her pace and cross the street to distance herself from me. The first time this happened, I had just come from a fajita joint with notoriously bad ventilation that makes everyone who walks out of there smell like BO, so I rationalized it away. But it kept happening no matter where I was coming from. I was starting to take it personally until I realized what was going on. Now that girls were viewing me as a guy, they were also viewing me as a potential threat (e.g., mugger or rapist). This bothered me at first, but then I totally understood: I too had felt more vulnerable as a girl. Maybe I was actually safer now that I was a guy.

  That safety, however, didn’t protect me from getting hit in the face with quite a few doors. Before my transition, people were apparently only holding the door for me because I was a woman, not out of common courtesy as I had assumed. And it wasn’t just men. Women too. I realized this when a woman entered a department store in front of me and just let the heavy glass door swing shut behind her. I was completely caught off guard and walked into it face first. I mentioned this phenomenon to a fellow writer as he held the door for me on our way out of a client meeting. He laughed and told me some people just don’t have any manners regardless of whether they’re male or female. He then informed me that if I’m with a woman at a revolving door, the gentlemanly thing to do is to enter first and get it going so she doesn’t have to exert any effort.

  This guy was a true gentleman in every sense of the word, which is exactly what I intended to be. And as I learned when I was little, getting others to see me as one would require a lot more than just new clothes and a new haircut. For starters, I needed to enforce the use of new pronouns.

  For the first two or three years of my transition, I was a correction Nazi. If you referred to me as “she,” I’d say “he” before you could finish your next word. Bet actually prescribed this behavior, warning me not to let it slide when people made mistakes. “Correct them gently but right when it happens,” she said. “They need to know you’re serious about this change and that they, in turn, need to take your change seriously. The more outs you give people, the
longer it will take them to unlearn their old behavior.” So I had let people know at the office not to get flustered if I corrected them and that I understood it would take some time to break old habits.

  This proved to be more challenging for my family, particularly Wendy, because out of everyone, she spent the most time with me. At one point when I corrected her she snapped.

  “Stop correcting me!”

  “I know it’s aggravating,” I said, “but my therapist says I have to.”

  “Well, at least give me a chance to correct myself before you jump in.”

  Fair enough. I could tell she was frustrated. But so was I. People don’t realize how degrading it is for a trans person to be called by the wrong pronoun—especially in front of other people. I remember early in my transition I was with a girl I had a crush on and when we ran into Wendy she said, “Helloooo, ladies.” I winced, causing her to quickly add “and gentlemen.” But it was too late. The damage had been done. Afterward she apologized profusely and I accepted, knowing it wasn’t intentional.

  But what I couldn’t understand was why two years later, when there was essentially nothing female about my appearance left, these pronoun slipups were still happening. Not with friends and coworkers, just my family. I brought this up with Bet at my next therapy session. She reminded me that I’d been a daughter and sister to my family for twenty-six years before I transitioned.

  “Imagine if you died,” Bet said. “How long do you think it would take your family to get over mourning you?”

  “I don’t know . . . a long time.”

  “Think they’d be over it in two years and ready to move on?”

  “No.”

  “Well, that’s what’s happening here. They need to mourn the loss of their daughter and sister before they can fully let go and accept you as a son and brother. You’ve been talking about Wendy and your parents—you even mention your grandmother slipping up a lot. I haven’t heard you mention Jill yet. Is she making pronoun mistakes too?”

  “No. Not really. But I don’t see her as much.”

  “More than your grandmother, though.”

  “Yeah.”

  “So why do you think Jill doesn’t have a problem getting the pronouns right?”

  “Well . . . she did say she always thought of me more as a brother than a sister.”

  “And I remember you telling me Jill was the most accepting when you first told your family. She said, ‘I’d rather have you as a brother than not at all.’”

  “Yeah, she did.”

  “So she’s probably not mourning the loss of her sister like Wendy is. Just be patient. They’ll all get there in their own time.”

  Bet was right, of course. At Sunday dinner when Wendy and Mom simultaneously pounced on poor Gram for incorrectly referring to me as “her,” I became much more optimistic. Now if they could just get her to stop calling me Kristin . . .

  WHAT’S IN A NAME?

  Summer 1995

  If you think naming a child is hard, try naming yourself. Or in my case renaming, which is even tougher because you’re asking people to unlearn something and adopt something new instead of starting from scratch. As anyone in advertising will tell you, changing consumer habits is a challenge, especially when changing perception is part of the assignment. Take J. C. Penney: At one point they changed their name to “JCP” in an effort to “hip up” their image. It didn’t stick because it didn’t fit their brand. My goal was for everyone to see me as a guy, so I needed a guy’s name—but it had to be one that fit me.

  My first name was a no-brainer. I was born “Kristin,” but people called me Kris, which I really liked, so I decided to change my full name to Christopher and still go by Chris. This made it easy for everyone. Well, almost everyone. While my family called me Kris and a slew of other nicknames, they also sometimes called me Kristin, so they did have a little unlearning to do. But hey, it could’ve been worse. As my boss, Ron, put it after hearing the news, “I’m just glad he didn’t change his name to Frank.” (By the way, I feel it’s worth noting here you should never ask a transgender person what their birth name was. While it may seem like a harmless question, it is hurtful because you are reminding them of the gender identity they are purposely trying to leave behind and likely bringing back painful memories. Plus, it’s really none of your business.)

  When it came to changing my last name, I wavered back and forth. Part of me wanted to change it as a way of moving forward in my new identity, but the other part of me didn’t because I felt like I’d be giving up both my family name and my Armenian heritage. My sisters planned on changing their names when they got married, so they suggested I keep it so Dad’s name would live on. My mom agreed with them. When I talked to my father about it, he said whatever I wanted to do was okay by him and that he’d understand if I wanted to change it. But something in his tone made me feel that deep down he was hoping I’d keep it. I was torn. After a few weeks of weighing the pros and cons, I told my family I was going to change my last name and outlined the reasons why.

  First, “Eskandarian” is unique, and I worried it might make things difficult or awkward for me during my transition. Say I met someone who knew one of my sisters somehow. I could see the conversation playing out as follows:

  Hey, I know an Eskandarian. Are you related to Wendy?

  Yeah, I’m her brother.

  Huh . . . I thought she had two sisters.

  Or say I’m at a party and get introduced to someone who may have known me from high school or something. I could hear it now:

  Hey, Laura, this is Chris Eskandarian. He grew up in Wayland too.

  Oh, I knew a Kris Eskandarian a couple grades ahead of me. But she was a girl. That’s weird . . .

  See where I’m going with this?

  Second, changing my last name would help me build my professional reputation independent of my father. I was already uncomfortable with clients and vendors automatically knowing I was the CEO’s kid and felt the whole nepotism thing was undermining my credibility as a legit writer.

  Finally, having a new last name signaled a fresh start for me. I told my family it was a tough decision, but I felt it was the right one, adding that if I ever wanted to reclaim my original last name, I could always change it back. They were all on board, though my dad looked a little sad behind the eyes. Then, Jill blurted out the obvious question, “Well? What are you changing it to?”

  I told them I wanted it to still begin with the letter “E” and waited for them to guess. They stared at me blankly. When I said “Edwards” they all smiled. It was a pseudonym we’d always used when calling restaurants to make reservations or to order pizza or something, simply because it was easier than having to spell out E-s-k-a-n-d . . . We’d been using it for so long everyone seemed to have forgotten that its origin was my father’s name. Since I wasn’t using his last, I wanted to use his first.

  Then I told them the other reason why I chose it—a conversation that had stuck with me since I was eleven years old. It happened during one of our six-hour station wagon rides to visit my dad’s side of the family in Telford, Pennsylvania. To help pass the time, Mom was telling us how my grandfather, Pop Pop, was upset when he first found out his new granddaughter’s name was Wendy. He had never heard such a name before and couldn’t pronounce it: “Vindy? Vhat is Vindy?” Then Dad chimed in and told Jill they almost named her “Catherine” after Gram-mom and that “Jill” was going to be her middle name so they could call her “CJ.” This information did not go over well with Jill. Turned out she liked her “almost name” better than the one she ended up with.

  “What about me?” I asked from the way back. “What was my name gonna be?” After a beat of silence, my mom answered.

  “Edward,” she said craning her neck toward the back seat. “The doctor told us we were having a boy, so we were going to name you ‘Edward’ after Dad. There were no accurate tests back then. But I really thought you were gonna be a boy too—it felt different than
when I was carrying Wendy.”

  I put my Walkman headphones back on and stewed, I knew it! The doctor even thought I was supposed to be a boy. What the hell???

  When I finished recounting the story everyone looked freaked out, especially Mom. She had forgotten all about it until I brought it up. She said she thought something hormonal must have happened while I was in the womb and that she strongly believed the theory in the literature she read about changes in brain chemistry being the cause of gender dysphoria.

  “Okay, well, what about your middle name?” Jill asked, changing the subject and bringing us all back to the present.

  I told them I wanted my initials to spell CRE (another family nickname, which at the time was spelled KRE) and that I chose Ryan because it was a name I liked that began with “R.” Nothing deeper than that.

  “So,” I said, “Christopher Ryan Edwards. There you have it.”

  But I didn’t have it, yet. The process was just beginning.

  ••

  I jogged up the steps of the Suffolk County Courthouse and found my way to the Probate and Family Court Department, where I explained to an extremely crotchety clerk that I was changing my name and needed to file the appropriate paperwork.

  “There’s a fee,” she barked, handing me a form, “and we only take cash.”

  “No problem,” I said.

  “I’ll need your birth certificate and marriage license.”

  Crap. She thinks I’m a woman. I should’ve worn a tie and lowered my voice to sound more like a guy.

  “I’m not married,” I said, in my deepest register.

  “Then why are you changing your name?”

  “Uh . . .”

  As if on cue, an angel of mercy appeared—a woman in her late thirties with the air of a helpful librarian. She cut in with impeccable timing, preventing me from having to answer.