I should have been a girl - Chapter 2

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I remember my ninth birthday, well just before that. It was when Jenny received on her ninth birthday, her first laptop computer. Jenny like me was a good student and we had sat together in class for two years, the two nerds, the kids that soaked up knowledge and with the encouragement of our parents, worked diligently and enjoyed learning.

We were the kids that avoided the rough and tumble of the playground and were useless at sports because we were more interested in an insect on the ground or patterns of clouds, anything but chasing after or hitting a stupid ball. We didn’t care if others found it fun, that was up to them, but we would usually stand near and play word games, like I would say a word and then Jenn would say one beginning with the second letter of the first word, then the third letter and on.

We thought that was great fun and laughed as a softball whistled past or someone netted. The computer, unrestricted because her parents were ignorant of the dangers of the Internet, was an instant hit with us. It was at this time too, that some of the gang of girls I played with, started to treat me as an outcast. They were, whether or not yet going through puberty, pretending they were, and started to treat me as an outsider.

They would still play and greet, but there were whispers that I was not privy to. Soon Jenny had become my last real friend, boys had given up on me ages ago and well, I’d given up on them. Boys. They were another problem. As much as they had rejected me, I had rejected them. I hated their rough and tumble. They had already started on dirty jokes about girls and sex and genitalia.

They had already, well some not all, started to treat girls as sex objects, demeaning them by references to their physical appearance. Some, showing off, repeated things they must have heard from older brothers, like taking girls to bed, trying to spot the color of panties, seizing a girl around the waist and digging fingers in to make them squirm or shriek and even lifting a skirt.

Girls were my preoccupation too. I was completely fascinated by what they wore from the head down to toe and how they spoke and the games they played. Everything I saw in boys and girls, reinforced my belief that I should be a girl. Most of these girlfriends were close to their moms, very close, just as I living as a boy, was not. I was Dad’s property like my bro, Robert the Truly Dreadful. I was expected to love games, be one of the boys, and express my affection for other boys with a shove or a punch. Everything that I hated about being a boy,

I was expected to do. I had first known I wanted to be a girl when I was around six. I was playing with other kids and I managed to persuade Delia Kennedy to swap clothes, so she wore my T and shorts and I wore her dress. It was more than fun for me. I was as I wanted to be except my hair was too short and not in the style I wanted either, but I loved wearing that little dress, twirling in it, sitting down, and letting it fall around me.

Even little ankle socks and girly sandals, and plastic bracelets, I wanted it all. The time came when Delia’s Mom saw us and smiled and said it was time to change back. I cried. Delia’s Mom talked me down and promised I could be a girl another day, a promise that of course was not fulfilled. My Mom was told and she challenged my behavior. I told her then, I should have been a girl, wanted to be a girl, and asked Mom the question there was no answer to, ‘Why wasn’t I a girl? Why do I have to be a boy? I hate being a boy. I hate boys.’ I was taken to some man; some counselor I think he was and he gave me tests to do.

Half I didn’t understand, like ink blot things. Some looked like butterflies, and others just looked like a mess, something I might have done when I was into inkblots. There were some puzzles and easy jigsaws that apparently informed him whether I was male or female. I chose the one with a cat, well a tiger actually because I loved cats, big or small. Whether that was the right one, I don’t know. I suspect I should have chosen the one of a girl dancer. I liked that too, just I liked the tiger.

Don’t girls like tigers? Is a tiger a symbol of masculinity? Mom and Dad like carpeted me. They gave me a good talking to and told me to be sensible and behave and, on pain of punishment, no more borrowing a girl’s clothes. After that, I just became secretive. My innocence had been taken from me. The things I did openly were in the future done in private and thoughts in my head stayed there, except for confiding in Jenny.

I could go to her house and while her Mom went next door for a chat with her neighbor, which she did quite a lot, we could play and that involved me dressing up in Jenn’s stuff. Even when her Mom found us, she didn’t seem bothered. Jenn said to her, ‘Don’t tell Ally’s Mom,’ she had christened female me Alyssa, ‘she’ll get in trouble, Mom.’ ‘Really?’ her Mom questioned. ‘Really. Their church is horribly strict.’ I just think Jenn knew how to play her parents. They were good people but not the church, not at all. Jenn told me her Dad was an atheist, which means he doesn’t believe in any sort of God, but he doesn’t as she said, wear that on his sleeve because of doing business with those that do worship.

For whatever reason, my secret cross-dressing with Jenn continued and my parents never knew. That went on for ages, well forever, until the present time. Anyway, when Jenn got her laptop and this new thing called the Internet, we could look up anything and Jenn’s mum was pleased we so wanted to learn, and learn we did. I did lots of surfing on transsexuals and found so many accounts and a bit of science too and realized I was not crazy, not what Dad called a pervert, and that there were perfectly good people out there like me.

That gave me the confidence, to investigate more and to assert myself. It was what I always knew; something had gone wrong when I was a fetus in Mum’s womb. It was as simple as that and people like me, even children were becoming female. Sometimes girls also became male. Just before my tenth birthday, I tried again. Making pastry for a Deliverance Church Social I said to Mom, ‘Mom I should be a girl Mom. I’ve read all about it at the library,’ a lie because I didn’t want her to know I had read it on Jenn’s laptop.’ ‘We’ve been through this Craig.

You remember I took you to see that man. He said you should be a boy and trying to change your sex is against God’s Holy Word.’ ‘Why is He even bothered about how I feel or what I wear Mom? It doesn’t make sense. I’m a girl, Mom, in my brain, I’m a girl. I’m so unhappy being a boy.’ ‘Stop it, stop this now or Dad will be really angry.’ ‘I can’t help how I am Mom. People are changing sex, why can’t I?’ ‘Craig! Enough. I’ll tell your father.’ Even so, I persisted, every now and again, insisting I should be a girl. With every year, my frustration increased, and the pain was ever more penetrating.

Every year, the years of puberty when differences became greater, my dissatisfaction with my lot, my gender, my life, and my appearance increased. I began self-harming. I withdrew more and more from the family. I kept repeating, ‘I’m really a girl Mom.’ They took no notice at first and then began threatening me with another counselor and damnation. The Pastor lectured me. He showed pictures of Hell, of people being thrown into what appeared to be an erupting volcano. ‘That is where you will go if you pretend to be a girl. God loves you as the boy He made.’ Jenny and her household, her atheistic parents, and her easy-going ways were my salvation.

I could have a morning or a day of relief, being a girl, unremarked by Jenn’s remarkable Mom, playing, cooking a cake, swinging on the garden swing, my skirt flying up and down with motion, my face alight with the joy of being Alyssa as they called me. I don’t know how I would have survived had I not had Jenny’s home to escape to. Jenn’s Mom was so cool, allowing our innocent fun, looking at the Internet with Jenn and me. ‘Alyssa,’ she said, ‘one day, you will be able to do what you like, free of your parents and their Church. Don’t feel desperate.

If you do, come and see us, you are always welcome.’ What I know is, they kept me alive. If it hadn’t been for Jenn and her house and family, a safe refuge, I would have been found hanging in the woodshed. Oh yes, on a dark day, I really contemplated that as an end to my unhappiness and, to serve as a lifelong regret for my sanctimonious parents. As the pain increased, so causing pain to myself increased. It’s amazing what one can do with a needle, even cross-stitch on my skin, pulling a thread through, and then crying myself to sleep that I had done such a thing. I was turning into a monster.

It was driving me to more excesses that I feared would end with my going to an asylum. I determined to try one more time, before my fourteenth birthday, male puberty and all the destruction that causes a body, became a fact. I don’t want a man's voice. I don’t want muscles; I don’t want chest and facial hair. I want lovely smooth skin, delicate hands, and long fingers, elegant limbs, shining long hair.

I want a room full of girl stuff, dresses, undies, perfume, and makeup, everything a girl has, because I’m a girl in my damned brain dragging around this vile male body. ‘Mom, I need testosterone blockers, before male puberty wrecks my life. Mom please Mom, I’ll do anything. Please don’t let me become a man.’ I see her close her eyes, and her lids flutter. ‘Craig, we have been through this so often. Get it into your head, you are a boy, I feel sure when puberty comes, you will feel like a young man and be pleased to be one. Girls have to do horrible things you wouldn’t like.’

‘Like what Mom?’ ‘Like dealing with periods, like having children, like the drudgery of looking after a house and family.’ ‘Then you wish you were a man Mom? Do you? Does every woman on God’s earth wish they were men, and girls wish from puberty onwards they were boys, men? It’s not so Mom. Ninety-nine percent of girls like being girls and boys the same.

It’s me, the one in fifteen thousand or whatever the statistic is, that is unhappy and wants to be the opposite of their birth gender because Mom, in here,’ I tap my skull, ‘there’s a girl's brain. Fact Mom, science. Proven. Not like rotten God, rotten Pastor, and his rubbish imaginary picture of Hell. ‘Craig! Stop it.’ She bursts into tears that stifle any further discussion. I know I’m right but there’s no arguing with fundamentalist religion.

Tuesday night, bro’s football training, so Mom picks me up alone. As I get into the car, Jenny comes to the door. ‘Hi Al,’ she refrains from saying Alyssa, ‘see you tomorrow.’ ‘Yes, Jenny. Bye till then.’ Mom has the car moving before I even get my belt on, which is unusual because she always obeys the law and won’t start until everyone is belted. We are halfway home and I realize we have taken a detour. ‘Mom, where are we going?

I have a lot of homework to do.’ ‘I can’t help that. I did your room out today and I moved your chest of drawers and found girls’ items hidden under it. We have to get this out of your system. Why do you shame us like this Craig?’ ‘Because I should be a girl Mom.’ I have turned puce. ‘Where are you taking me?’ ‘We’re going to see the pastor, to pray this out of you.’ ‘Well, I don’t believe in all that witchcraft. This is how God made me, with a boy’s body and a girl’s brain.

You know I’ve always been into girl things. Praying won’t alter how I am.’ ‘We’ll see. Here we are. Now behave.’ I didn’t know what to do. I would have run but where could I go? The only place I can think of close is Jenny’s and that’s the other side of Pantonsville and then I wouldn’t want to get Jenny’s parents involved. I feel so ashamed and I fear what they are going to do to me. Even praying over me will be humiliating enough. I could do a runner as soon as the car stops but where to run to and for how long would I avoid whatever plan my parents have for me?

The car comes to a halt and I try to escape but she has the child lock applied. The door won’t open. The Pastor comes out with one of the elders. Mom springs the door and I’m delivered straight into the hands of these two men and escorted into the house as though under arrest, their great hands holding my wrists in a vice-like grip. Hurting. Mom doesn’t follow. ‘Mom, please Mom,’ I scream as I’m hauled up the steps of the Pastorium, and then I’m inside and the door slams behind me. I’m led into the front room where there are more elders. They all know me yet seem without recognition and they are all stern. ‘Take off your clothes sinner.’ ‘I will not. What are you perverts going to do?

Let me go or I’ll tell the police.’ I’m extra fearful because at lunch after we’d done gym, I changed into panties. They take no notice of my protests. Their great hands are pulling at my threads and a button pings as my shirt is pulled from my protesting body and soon I’m standing just in my socks and girl pants. Luckily my panties today are fairly plain, not black silk or nylon and not real lacy, just girls' white cotton panties with a little pink bow on the front and thin elastic lace around the leg openings. Now the tears really flow.

The fear and the degradation I feel, take hold and I let out a tremendous howl of shame and distress. The panties are cut from my buttocks and hurled into a basket and I’m still held in the vice grip of two of God’s heroes as other hands slap and beat upon my body. I sink to my knees and howl even louder. ‘The devil resists, it will not depart.’ The Pastor rants and the slaps continue until I sag and only their hands hold me in the kneeling position, like a kneeling Jesus on the cross. It is then that I lose consciousness. When I awake, I find myself in the car and Mom is at the wheel. I am partially dressed, trousers on and the shirt less some buttons upon my body. I lie on the back seat and whimper like a wounded animal.

‘How could you Mom? How could you let them do that to me? You don’t love me at all. I hate you.’ ‘We, your father and I decided that it had to be beaten out of you, for your own good, to save your soul from damnation. It’s because we love you that we have done this. Now perhaps you will behave like a proper boy.’ ‘What have you done with my things?’ ‘They are all gone, you can forget about being a girl, it’s not going to happen. It’s a sin and we won’t let you be a sinner.’ ‘It’s not a sin. I don’t believe in sin. What the hell is sin anyway.’ ‘Transgression against divine law, that’s what sin is.

You should know that we have dragged you to Meeting all these years.’ ‘Yes, you have, but I don’t listen. It’s stupid Mother, all that fear of God stuff. If there is a God, let him strike me down because I hate him and I hate you for doing this. My God is not your God. My God loves me, after all, he created me, so I must be perfect in his eyes because that’s what God does, makes perfect things. I should be having medical support to help me transition not men stripping me and beating me. You and those men have raped my mind.

I will never forgive you. Never.’ By this time, we’re home. I have myself painfully in the back seat and out of the car. I stand unsteadily. I start to cry again, as I make myself walk to the door. The door opens to reveal Father. He stands aside and pulls me in and Mom follows me in with my bag and some of my clothing. I see tears in her eyes so perhaps a degree of love still exists. ‘Go and shower and put your dressing gown on, then come down for dinner when it’s ready. In the meantime, do your homework.’ Father orders. I drag myself up the stairs and into the bathroom.

I take off my trousers and shirt, the only clothes I have on, and throw them on the floor. I run the shower until the temperature is a steady warm stream and I sit under it for maybe five or ten minutes. Tears of hate, tears of betrayal, and tears of despair mingle with the stream of water falling upon my ravaged body. I struggle to my feet then and wash. My flesh is painful but with few bruises as far as I can see, except on my wrists and upper arms, where those two gorillas held me fast.

My body seems to be red all over from the slaps. I hate those fucking Brethren, I hate Dad, for he more than Mom, is in that church, brought up in it, the Church of hate, as pious as the Inquisition of the Catholic Church had been. Every religion seems to have within it, fundamentalist, cruel people. When I’ve scrubbed those evil men off me, I stop the shower and dry my pain-wracked body. I put my dressing gown on and sit at my desk and try to concentrate on my work, an essay on the benefits of space exploration. I can’t do it.

I phone Jenny. I tell her what happened and about the church trying to cast the devil from me. She tells me to go to the police but I can’t. I don’t want to get my parents into serious trouble. ‘Then perhaps it’s time for you to go to Uncle Jem, run away from people that don’t understand you. Where is he again? ‘New Hampshire, upstate in the hills. The White Mountains.’ ‘That’s rugged country up there Alyssa. Dad took us on holiday to Cranmore skiing.’ ‘I know, we all went there once too but there’s nowhere else to run to. I have to get out of this State.’ ‘And you’re certain he’ll look after you?’ ‘He said, when cousin Hannah married, if I ever needed help, he was there.’ ‘That’s not quite the same thing.’

‘I don’t think he’ll turn me away and he has this lady who lives with him who’s a ski instructor in the winter, Deanna, really sweet and smart. I can’t stay here, they beat me, Jenny. I’ll never forgive Mom or Dad for that, never.’ ‘Then what can I do?’ ‘I need to get to Washington Union Station and then train to Lawrence, New Hampshire. I need to be in disguise.’ ‘Ah.’ I can imagine her frown. ‘By disguise, I guess you mean as a girl?’ ‘Of course a girl, what did you think?

Go as a quarterback like a brother, a thick skull inside a crash hat?’ ‘Will that be safe, I mean, if you go as a girl? Have you really thought this through?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘And you have no clothes?’ ‘No Jenny. They just shredded my girl things. I thought perhaps we could shop together in the Mall.’ ‘So, you are planning this, not just running? This isn’t going to happen tomorrow?’ ‘No. I have to get my savings book. I need clothes and a ticket and I need to get myself to Washington.’ ‘So, this weekend, can you get away and we can shop?’ ‘We’re not doing anything. Sunday I shall go sick so I don’t have to go to the Meeting. I can’t see those elders again. If we shop Saturday, if you’re free, then I’d disappear next Wednesday, when Mom goes to look after Aunt Richie.

I’ll go to school, but not go in, then go home, dress, and then I need to get to Washington somehow.’ ‘I’ll talk to Payton.’ ‘He won’t tell on me?’ ‘I don’t think so. He’s against religion, told Mom he’s not going to Church anymore and our Church aren’t a lot of nutcases like yours. He’s a good brother. Look, I got to say, I don’t like the thought of you going off like this. Shouldn’t you at least warn Uncle Jem that you’re coming?’ ‘They would trace my calls. I’m leaving a note, saying I’ve gone to Los Angeles to try to be in films. That might put them off the scent at least for a while.’ ‘Wow. How long have you been thinking about this?’ ‘About three years, more, forever, ever since I don’t know when just when I first plucked up courage and said I should have been a girl and the wrath of God descended in the shape of being prayed over.

Now it’s being beaten. Next, it could be death.’ ‘Surely not Alyssa. Surely that’s an exaggeration?’ ‘Who knows when the Lord is upon those Elders. Anything could happen.’ There’s a long pause. I say nothing and I know Jenny is weighing it all up. ‘See you at school tomorrow Aly. I need to sleep on this.’ ‘You don’t want to help?’ ‘I’m not saying that. I want to help but I want to know you will be safe. A young kid, a boy dressed as a girl tracking about the nation unaccompanied is dangerous. I want to know you’ll be safe.’

‘I’m not safe here.’ ‘No Alyssa, you’re not. I have to remember what you’ll be running from, as well. We can plan for tomorrow at school. I think you have one chance, and it mustn’t fail. If this fails, they’ll keep you on a chain, never out of their sight.’