Can’t You Wait Until I’m Dead? Memoir of a Mid-Life Transition in a Culture War ~ Chapter 1: Light bulb moment
February 19, 2015, began like every other day at work. I rode the brisk ten kilometres to the Polytechnic Institute of British Columbia (PIBC) to teach an afternoon class. I cared little about my clothes, and fenders kept the mud from splattering, so I clipped the cuffs of my pants away from the chain and wore a jacket to block the winter wind. With a pair of dress shoes under my chair and a bright yellow, button-down dress shirt under my windbreaker, changing was as fast as slipping off my runners and hanging my jacket next to my desk.
I taught specialty anatomy, physiology, and neurology courses for students at the technical institute, and it was a job I considered a calling. My preparation included a PhD in neuroscience, postdoctoral work in molecular pharmacology, and I’d been a university professor in the United States, a director of pharmacology departments at two small biotechnology companies, and a clinical research liaison for a multinational pharmaceutical company. At PIBC, I helped students become biomedical engineers, laboratory scientists, and neurophysiologists.
One office mate, Janet, was already at her Mac working on lecture notes, and I was writing an overdue review of a research ethics application. When I settled at my standing desk, we said little more than “Hello” and put our heads back down to focus. A few minutes later, our third office mate, Karel, shuffled in with a few huffs, hung his jacket on the back of his chair and said “Hello” in his thick, Czech accent.
Karel was a psychologist with a private practice who ran a long-standing group session for parents. He’d always been flattering and gracious, calling Janet “Janet Beauty” as he danced into the office, and he always bought me drinks at holiday parties and the campus pub. He was a mountain climber in his youth and an avid downhill skier here in Canada. Now nearing retirement, with his spine crumbling and his blood pressure above dangerous, he replaced his lilting greeting to Janet with a gruff “Aging ain’t for sissies!”
Today, something he heard on the morning news over breakfast triggered him. “Those transgenders are ruining the world. They should just shut up instead of protest. Did you hear that they’re protesting for gender-neutral washrooms? So now everyone needs to put in a third washroom?” The pressure in my head was too much. I needed quiet to concentrate and suddenly said, “I think the world will be a better place when all the dinosaurs are dead!” We looked at each other briefly, then turned back to our work.
After twenty minutes, Karel left to teach his class, and Janet and I were alone in the room. Embarrassed by my outburst, I needed to explain myself. “Sorry you had to hear that! I didn’t mean him specifically. Just all the people you hear about on the news trying to keep kids from learning about sexual orientation and gender identity. I think what he said about the students protesting upset me because if I were their age, I might have transitioned myself.”
Janet blinked a couple times, lost in her lecture notes, and turned back to the glow of her laptop. My heart quickened and I worried Karel might take it personally and complain to our department head, Linda. There wasn’t enough time to see her before class, so I put it out of my head and rushed down the hallway to lecture.
As I walked back to the office, I saw Linda’s door partly open, signalling she had time to chat. I knocked quietly and edged the door open wider to see if she was on the phone or focused on an email. She welcomed me with, “Come in! How’s it going?” I explained what happened earlier with Karel and repeated my thoughts about why it bothered me so much. She said, “Most of Karel’s generation from Eastern Bloc countries came here more conservative than us. It’s nothing to worry about. Talk it over with him and let me know how it goes.” Karel had gone home straight from class, so I had to wait to apologize.
The next day, the two of us were alone in the office, this time after my lecture and before his, so I broke the silence. “Sorry about my outburst yesterday. I hope you didn’t take what I said personally. I was anxious about getting my work done and needed to focus on an email.” His reply wasn’t what I expected. “Transgenders are like pedophiles. Maybe not as bad as pedophiles, but on the same spectrum and need counselling to manage their illness. I had a mother in my therapy group with a kid who said he was female and wanted to use a female name and pronouns. The mother didn’t know what to do and wanted help to manage her teenager, so I told her she needed to be more assertive—tell him that was his name, he was a boy, and needed to listen to his mother.”
I couldn’t believe that a licensed psychologist would undermine a young trans kid needing love and support, and wouldn’t counsel her mother to accept her. After Karel left for class, I opened his copy of Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM)-IV[i] and couldn’t find “transgender” in the index, so I flipped to the table of contents and found “gender identity disorders” in a section with “sexual dysfunctions” and “paraphilias.” Paraphilias included pedophilia, so according to the experts, he was right. Previous editions of DSM labelled transgender as “transsexualism” and filed it under the category of “sexual deviations,” next to pedophilia, frotteurism, and exhibitionism.
I didn’t need Karel or Janet to walk in and catch me reading his book, especially the one on mental disorders, but I had to know whether I had “gender identity disorder.” There were four criteria:
1) A strong and persistent cross-gender identification.
2) Persistent discomfort with his or her sex or sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex.
3) Not have an intersex condition.
4) Clinically significant distress or impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.
Intersex describes people who are born with genes or anatomy between male and female sexes, and I’d gone through a normal male puberty, so I could check number three on the list. As for the other criteria, neither persistent nor clinically significant described me since it was only yesterday that the word “transition” crossed my mind—I couldn’t have it.
I see this moment and much of what followed as proof that my life was at the direction of my subconscious—a driving force that reveals itself only in hindsight. Instead of launching into a period of soul-searching, I was driven to write an anonymous and secret blog on WordPress about what I’d learned about life in my forty-eight years. I used the URL hindsighttwentyten and opened a Twitter account in the same name with a profile image of an eye chart that spelled out “It’s all become clear in hindsight.” My head suddenly flooded with memories of a religious upbringing, times I was too cerebral and didn’t listen to my gut, living through the 1992 Los Angeles riots, the racism I saw in Canada, managing back pain, penicillin rash, and a lifetime of other experiences. My brother’s kids were too young to be on the internet, but I pictured sharing the stories with them in their teens, a few short years away.
The first post was a veiled reference to the terror lurking underneath and had a preamble that went like this:
“I was going to make my first post deep and useful–dealing with depression and so on–but hey, why start out with the heavy stuff? I want this blog to be a collected and somewhat random list of the things I’ve learned in nearly 50 years on the planet.”
The essay featured a photo of the house we rented in Los Angeles.
On Paranoid Fears
23 February 2015 – When I was a graduate student in Los Angeles, I remember being concerned about theft and electrical fires. I couldn’t do much about theft except to build and install an alarm. Nothing was ever stolen and the alarm never went off. No one but me knew it was there, so all it ever did for me was reduce anxiety (a little bit).
Electrical fires, on the other hand, I could prevent by unplugging everything before we went on vacation. Never had any fires, but returned once to an overpowering smell coming from the refrigerator/freezer. It had been plugged into an extension cord running from another extension cord! It was unfortunately a summer vacation and everything was rotting–smelled like death! Took hours of scrubbing with bleach and baking soda to get the smell to a point that didn’t make us want to vomit. Eventually faded over a few months.
I think my fear of electrical fires came from a grandmother who gave us an electric can opener and told us that she couldn’t live with herself if it ever started a fire. She instructed us to unplug it after use. I think we got the same advice about toasters! Now we leave everything plugged in (except for the toaster), got rid of the can opener, and bought a good insurance policy.
***
In retrospect, my subconscious was working through the “dinosaur” revelation and afraid of what the future held. “Paranoid Fears” summed up my state of mind. The second essay, posted six days later, also highlighted my subconscious fear of change and what could be the biggest mistake of my life if I got it wrong. This post featured a photo of a northern leopard frog on a white background from Wikipedia.
On Thinking a Few Steps Ahead
1 March 2015 – My 20s were either a good time or a bad time for brain development. I was probably capable of learning more new things then than I am now, but the synapses and axons that would bring me better judgment were not yet fully formed. Probably the same reason that young people are more likely to die from accidents and develop schizophrenia in their early 20s than later. My sense of animal rights hadn’t yet fully developed either, and I found myself in the difficult place of becoming a biologist who was expected to kill animals. Probably a bad career choice for someone who used to cry over dead birds found in the yard and traumatized by having once shot a grasshopper with a BB gun. [Note to anyone who cries over dead birds found in the backyard–don’t become a laboratory biologist. Even a veterinarian might be a bad choice.]
I found snails to be the least objectionable animal to have to kill, and as I was cleaning out the snail tanks one day, I found a desiccated lab frog under its former tank. It had managed to escape the tank but there was no escape from the dry room and it probably perished in a day or two. Wanting to return it to the lab it came from, I hit on the potentially humorous presentation of tying a noose around its neck, taping it to the lab door, and attaching a sign that read something like “goodbye cruel world.” I can see now all of the reasons this was the wrong thing to do, but my young, conflicted mind didn’t have any problem with it.
My advisor smoothed things over with the frog lab and saved me from getting kicked out of graduate school for the second time.
“What was the first time?” you might ask. I made the mistake of getting a pet rat (from a pet store) of the same black hooded variety used in my first lab placement. After injecting, bleeding, or killing hundreds of them, I couldn’t handle the cognitive dissonance of playing with and caring for one of their species at home. I asked to switch labs and arranged to move to the snail lab. I thought all had gone well until a few years later, I heard that at a faculty meeting, she had argued for my dismissal from the program.
My wee brain wasn’t yet clued in to how the people around me might feel and react. I had a late education in the ethical quandaries of self and others, but better late than never!
***
It took almost three weeks for me to process what escaped my subconscious on that fateful day in the office with Karel and Janet. I wrote my third post facing the reality of it bluntly.
[i] Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders: DSM-IV-TR (Washington, DC: American Psychiatric Association, 2000).