This
is the story of Debbie and Chris. Chris loves
Debbie and Debbie loves Chris. They have been a
couple for nearly 10 years. After all this time,
Chris still lights up, describing the moment he
first laid eyes on Debbie, in a crowded bar in
Providence, R.I., where they both were with
other partners. ''I thought, my God, that's the
most beautiful woman I've ever seen,'' Chris
says, slapping a palm exuberantly to his knee.
Debbie, a willowy woman with lively brown eyes
and full lips, was not instantly in love with
Chris. She is, by nature, the more cautious of
the two. Where Chris is an optimist, Debbie is a
worrier. Where Chris's love is sometimes blindly
romantic, Debbie's is more analytical, more
brooding, though no less strong. After all this
time, Debbie still laughs wildly at Chris's
jokes. And Chris likes to stroke Debbie's arm
when she's talking, as if to show how carefully
he's listening.
Chris and Debbie live in western
Massachusetts, in a rambling Victorian
fixer-upper that's filled with mismatched
antiques and the artwork of their 4-year-old
daughter, Hannah. Also in residence are two cats
and an aging lab-shepherd mutt named Lucy. In
the yard, there are blueberry bushes, flower
beds and a tire swing hanging from an old maple
tree. When I arrive at the couple's house on a
humid summer evening, Debbie, seven months
pregnant with a second child, is at her prenatal
yoga class. In the meantime, Hannah, who has her
mother's olive skin and unruly brown hair, is
putting on a dance performance, wearing a crown
made of construction paper and a pair of wooden
clogs. On the couch nearby, Chris, a sleepy-eyed
man with a Nordic complexion and a blond buzz
cut, plays a set of bongos, stopping every so
often to clap appreciatively as the young girl
flits and spins.
If you didn't know anything about Debbie and
Chris, you might mistake them for an ordinary
couple -- as several of the people in their
neighborhood have done since they moved to
Massachusetts from North Carolina just over two
years ago. Most recently, an older woman walking
her dog happened upon Chris and Hannah raking
the front yard. When the woman leaned toward
Hannah and asked the kind of simple-minded
rhetorical question adults so often put to
children -- Are you raking leaves with your
daddy?'' -- she got the kind of you-asked-for-it
wallop of truth only a child can deliver: ''He's
not my daddy!'' Hannah said brightly. ''He was
born a woman!''
Chris laughs, recalling the story for me. He
is accustomed to unnerving people, though he
doesn't particularly enjoy it. ''The woman
actually continued to be pleasant,'' he says,
''but you could tell she just wanted to get the
hell out of there.''
Chris is a transgendered person -- in this
instance, someone born in a female body but
whose internal wiring, even as a child, seemed
to be more typically male. ''From my earliest
memories, I pictured myself in a male role,'' he
explains. ''I was the boy in all my plays, the
husband in all the house scenarios.'' As an
adult woman, Chris -- whose birth name is
Christina -- was ''miserably uncomfortable''
with the contradiction between how she felt and
how she appeared. She hid her body beneath baggy
clothes, identified as a lesbian and was often
perceived by strangers to be an adolescent boy.
Store clerks would uneasily switch between sir
and ma'am when speaking to Chris. (''This was
North Carolina,'' Chris reminds, ''where
everyone's either a sir or a ma'am.'') In
women's restrooms, Chris was treated scornfully,
with women saying, ''Can't you read the
sign?''
The memory still galls him. ''If they
actually thought I was a man,'' says Chris,
''they'd never say those things. They probably
would just run.'' For the most part, she simply
kept herself dehydrated, avoiding public
bathrooms altogether. ''When your gender is
ambiguous, people feel enormous license to make
really inappropriate comments. I felt like I was
a piece of educational material.''
Chris had one particularly important ally in
the world, however, and that was Debbie. Debbie
is a lesbian who has been out since the age of
15. She is not bisexual. She has never been
seriously attracted to men. What she loved about
Chris as a woman were her inherent
contradictions, what Debbie calls her ''gender
transgressiveness'' -- the masculinity cloaked
in a female body, the combination of toughness
and vulnerability that Chris seemed to embody;
in lesbian circles, Chris was identified as
butch. In their early years together, Chris took
Debbie for long motorcycle rides around the
countryside. Living in separate states for a
while, the two exchanged hundreds of pages of
love letters. Eventually, they moved together to
North Carolina so Debbie could attend graduate
school. They bought rings to symbolize their
commitment. They enjoyed a wide circle of mostly
lesbian friends. And in 1996, with the help of
an anonymous sperm donor, Debbie became
pregnant.
As Chris and Debbie navigated life as a
couple -- weathering everything from the
stresses of a colicky baby to a suicide in
Debbie's family -- one issue never seemed fully
resolved. ''The gender thing kept rearing its
ugly head,'' Chris says. ''I kept trying to push
it down and push it down, to distract myself
with everyday life, but it never went away. I
never felt at peace.'' Even as Debbie frequently
cried over the indignities that Chris suffered
as someone who seemed neither fully female nor
male, even as Chris struggled with depression
and a growing sense of alienation, neither one
viewed a sex change as a remedy -- at least not
initially. ''I had all kinds of preconceived
notions about what weirdos transsexuals were,''
says Chris. ''I thought, those people are on the
fringe, they're very underworldish.'' Yet
attending the annual National Gay and Lesbian
Task Force conference one year, they happened to
sit in on a panel discussion between
male-to-female transsexuals. Debbie hardly
remembers the experience, but hearing the
transsexuals' stories, Chris felt something
stir. ''I suddenly felt like crying and jumping
in their laps,'' he says now. ''Like, hold me,
hold me.''
Over the next four years, Debbie tried in
earnest to dissuade Chris from the idea of
having a sex change, mostly because she thought
it would be the death knell for their
relationship. Life with a man, after all, wasn't
exactly what she had signed on for. ''I couldn't
picture what she'd be like as a man,'' Debbie
says now. ''I'd been a lesbian for 18 years at
that point. There was just no way my partner was
going through a sex change and I was going to
stay with her.'' But in time, Chris confided her
yearning to transition -- as the slide from one
gender to another is often called -- to a
handful of female-to-male transsexuals she met
at another conference. ''I told them I was
really scared because I had this baby at home
and a partner who was really resistant,'' says
Chris. He remembers the group's response as
uncategorical: '' 'Dump her!' they said. 'If she
can't come along, dump her!' ''
In the end, however, Chris and Debbie made a
move that would ultimately save their
relationship: they compromised. Chris waited
another year to begin transitioning, giving
Debbie some more time to mull things over, and
to connect via an e-mail list with other people
who'd seen their partners through a sex change.
''I poured my heart out,'' says Debbie. ''I was
so full of fear and worry.'' In the meantime,
Chris began meeting weekly with a psychologist
who formally diagnosed in her a gender-identity
disorder. With Debbie's blessing and financial
help, Chris began testosterone therapy in the
fall of 1998, and several months later underwent
a radical mastectomy and chest reconstruction,
choosing, however, to forgo genital modification
-- phalloplasty -- which can cost more than
$50,000 with mixed aesthetic results. (''We've
got college tuitions to pay someday,'' Chris
says lightly. ''I'm not that interested in a
penis.'') In 1999, armed with a doctor's letter
stating she'd undergone sexual reassignment,
Chris was able to legally change her sex to
male.
Debbie says her decision to stay with Chris
as she became a man was tenuous at best. ''It
was a total leap of faith,'' she tells me as we
sit drinking tea in their living room, long
after Hannah has gone to bed. A chorus of
crickets sings outside the window. Debbie is
curled on the couch, her feet resting in Chris's
lap, her pregnant belly between them. ''There
was no way to know what Chris was going to look
like, what our dynamics were going to be. But
just realizing I had to be with her -- with him,
with this person -- was a big turning point. I
needed to at least give it a try.''
These days, there is little trace of the
woman whose contradictions Debbie once loved.
Chris is now 36 years old and walking testament
to the power of testosterone, 200 milligrams of
which he injects every two weeks. He has broad,
triangulated shoulders, a square jaw and a voice
that's midrange bass and continuing to drop.
''My shirt size has gone up, my waist size has
gone down, my hairline has moved back probably
an inch and a half,'' he says, still somewhat
incredulous. ''My nose is bigger, my eyebrows
are heavier, my shoe size is up.'' Chris lathers
up and shaves every day, and just recently he
sprouted his first chest hairs. His arms and
legs, tanned and muscular from his work as a
historic carpenter, look entirely male. Despite
the fact that he is only 5 foot 8 inches tall,
he is never, under any circumstances, he says,
mistaken for a woman. Clearly, though, there's
more to this than hormonal alchemy. Chris says
he is finally happy, and it shows. While as a
woman he was reserved and sometimes came across
as sullen in public, Chris is now, in Debbie's
words, ''flowery and talkative.'' He credits the
sex change for bringing about this happiness,
and Debbie for bringing about the sex
change.
''She empowered me to do it,'' he says.
''Which is ironic,'' adds Debbie, ''since I
supported him in figuring out who he was, and
yet it was something I really didn't want.''
Two years after Chris's transition, Debbie
still struggles with what it all means. As Chris
has quietly delighted in his body's changes,
Debbie has grieved the loss of her female
partner -- and with it, her own identity as a
lesbian. ''The higher he got, the lower I
felt,'' says Debbie. ''There were nights when
I'd see Chris coming to bed wearing boxer shorts
and with a flat chest, and I'd just cry. I
really questioned who I was, suddenly, this
lifelong lesbian living with a man.'' Out in the
world, it's Debbie who now deals almost daily
with contradictions. ''I'll either go through a
10-minute conversation without once using a
pronoun to describe Chris,'' she says, ''or I'll
do this massive overshare, explaining the whole
story to a virtual stranger.'' Either way, she
says, it can be exhausting. Laughing, she adds,
''I swear, sometimes I wish I had a T-shirt that
reads, 'I'm gay and he used to be a she.' ''
Chris and Debbie realize that their story is
unusual. Reliable statistics on the number of
transgendered people in this country are
unavailable, in part due to a paucity of
research on the subject and because, by nature,
transgendered people -- whether they've
undergone a sex change or not -- tend to resist
easy categorization. What is well documented,
however, is the violence often used against
them. The 1999 movie ''Boys Don't Cry,''
depicting the murder of Brandon Teena, a
transgendered teen from Nebraska, may have
raised mainstream awareness of the issue, but
the stigma surrounding people who express gender
ambiguity still runs deep. In an eerie mirror to
the Teena story, in June of this year, a
16-year-old boy named Fred C. Martinez Jr.,
identified as transgendered and as gay, was
bludgeoned to death near Cortez, Colo.
''The freak factor is just too high for some
people,'' says Chris, who feels vulnerable
discussing his situation with strangers,
particularly a reporter. (At his request, I have
agreed not to use surnames in this article.)
Indeed, there is something inherently invasive
in the process, in wanting -- somehow needing --
to situate Chris at either end of a gender axis.
Does he have a penis? How does he have sex?
Would the answers to these questions help us
understand someone like Chris, or would they
marginalize him further? ''I wish that people
didn't find it so personally threatening,'' he
says, sighing. ''They don't need to participate
or understand or sympathize, but why does it
need to be so threatening?'' It was partly fear
that led Chris to reveal his past earlier this
year to the all-male renovation crew on which he
works -- eight months after beginning the job.
Worried about the possibility of a work-related
accident sending him to the emergency room
without Debbie by his side, he felt it was
important for his co-workers to know his
situation.
''The fellas,'' as Chris calls them, received
his news sensitively and continue to treat him
with respect. Living in a man's body, Chris has
learned some interesting lessons about the male
world. His ability to do his work is seldom
questioned, he says, whereas when he was a
woman, ''people always wanted references.'' He
has adjusted his body language and become more
adept at ''guy talk,'' though he has also
occasionally slipped up. He once, for example,
unwittingly called a former neighbor who was
also a state trooper ''honey.'' ''I thought,
oops, working-class guys don't do that,'' says
Chris, laughing. ''I wanted to say: 'Oh, sorry,
sorry, sorry! I've only been doing this a few
months.' '' The sex change has wrought emotional
consequences as well. Chris was surprised to
discover after starting on testosterone that he
no longer had an easy time crying. ''It has
always been a point of pride for me to be
emotionally accessible. But sometimes the tears
get stuck right here,'' he says, touching his
chest. ''They just won't come.''
For Debbie, who is also 36 and who works as a
health and social services researcher, the
changes have been no less profound. She says
that she misses the more emotionally accessible
version of Chris. She misses the concrete
parameters of what was once her own rock-solid
sexual identity. Though she insists that her
sexual orientation has not changed -- I don't
want people to take my story to mean you 'fix'
gay people,'' she says -- she has, over time,
developed an appreciation for Chris's male body.
''My attraction is very specific to Chris,''
Debbie says. ''It doesn't translate to other
men. And it was a year and a half before I felt
it at all. It must have been terribly difficult
for Chris, being with someone who didn't find
him desirable.''
Chris agrees. ''I challenge anyone to look at
their partner and think about what it would be
like if he were a she, or she was a he,'' he
says. ''It's an enormous thing to even
consider.''
Yet after all this time, after all this
change, Debbie still loves Chris and Chris still
loves Debbie -- an accomplishment by anyone's
standards. As a male-female couple, they are
legally permitted to marry, but they remain
resistant to the idea since they feel it
undermines the rights of gay people. Instead,
they are thinking about having a ceremony of
some sort, or maybe a big party to celebrate
their 10th anniversary as a couple. ''We have a
very deep sense of inner strength as a couple
now,'' says Debbie. ''We've each learned what it
really means to be patient with somebody, what
it really means to be selfless. I'm proud of us
and I want to celebrate.''
If Debbie and Chris have discovered anything
from their love for each other, it's that gender
does not need always to govern supreme. It's a
sensibility they have worked to instill in
Hannah, and one they intend to pass on to the
son they're expecting in December. Hannah, for
her part, lovingly refers to Chris as ''B-da,''
(an amalgam of ''butch dad'') and has no problem
beginning a sentence with ''When B-da was a
woman. . . . '' At the age of 4, she is far more
concerned with finger-painting and dancing and
watching a spider build its web beneath her
family's porch than she is with gender issues --
or anything beyond the fact that she has an
intact and loving family.
Early one morning, I join Chris and Debbie on
their drive through rolling, green farmland to
Hannah's day-care center. In the back of their
Subaru, I sit next to Hannah as she chatters
happily to herself. A sticker on her lunchbox
reads Hate Is Not a Family Value. From
the front seat, Debbie is explaining that she
and Chris will often switch the genders of the
characters in Hannah's children's books to keep
things more fluid, more equitable -- and as they
like to see it, more true to life. When Chris
reads ''Make Way for Ducklings,'' for example,
he tells the story of Mrs. Mallard and Mrs.
Mallard.
''We try to make some of the the characters
into she characters, and vice versa,'' says
Debbie.
''And sometimes we just call them 'human
beings,' '' says Chris.
