Chapter Nine

Back in London I had time to examine my own feelings over Vicky’s facial surgery. They were complicated and Vicky didn’t understand what it was that upset me. I tried to find other people who had been through the same experience, but as I’ve said before, the partners of transgendered women wouldn’t fill a phone box.

I looked to the online support group, where Vicky was already posting regularly and excitedly about this latest part of her journey. I desperately wanted contact with any other women whose Trans partners had gone through facial feminization surgery. I understood that Vicky was simply revealing her true face, but it didn’t seem unreasonable to be a bit sad, sometimes, for the face that had gone forever. I knew she was recovering from surgery and therefore not at her best, but when I admitted to her that I had shed some tears over the ‘loss’ of my male partner, she got upset with me, said I was ‘false’ and couldn’t possibly celebrate her journey AND mourn the past at the same time. Of course I could. I knew this because it was exactly what I was doing but I felt pretty hurt to be told I wasn’t being supportive enough. It was stupid really, obviously Vicky was not at her best and sitting in a hotel bed wrapped in bandages,surrounded by strangers and pumped full of pain killers. These statements represented her own anxieties rather than my behaviour, but even so, I felt let down. Vicky was still posting images of herself post-op on face book and now everyone could see, if they wanted, how completely unrecognizable she was from her old photos.

As soon as she was healed enough she planned to address her voice, next to facial surgery it sounded like a walk in the park. She hoped to be booked in for that procedure in the new year. It was a lot to put her body through, but with her new face her voice had become more inappropriate than ever. There was no question of asking Vicky to ‘slow down’ anymore, it was more a case of getting the rest of the surgery out of the way so we could get on with our lives again.

In a way the facial surgery did make it easier for me to let go of my husband. He was really gone now, my future was, very visibly, with Vicky. That isn’t to say that I never felt a pang of regret or sadness. No matter how much I understood and accepted that truth, there still needed to be space for my grief.. I felt guilty letting Vicky see these moments, it felt disloyal, and I would try to hide them, but I think it would be naive to think she didn’t know, or understand.

As I witnessed Vicky going through all this painful and invasive surgery, I wondered how much easier her life might have been had she been offered support before puberty kicked in and ravaged her body with testosterone. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if children starting school were asked ‘are you a boy or a girl?’ Those who gave unexpected answers could be asked again at say 10. Sure some would reply ‘ good Lord did I say girl? how odd’ (assuming a steady diet of P.G. Woodhouse over the last five years) but some, the transgendered ones, might say, ‘yes, I feel like I got the wrong body’ and then the appropriate counselling and support could be offered.

It’s probably not as simple as that and maybe this is a completely mad idea, but watching Vicky, and many others, go through this grueling process in mid life made me think, surely surely there is a better way?

The next time I spoke to Vicky in Chicago she was celebrating. She had made it down to breakfast in the hotel , it was a first and a good step forward. Though the greasy sausage and egg were not what a woman needs when recovering from major facial surgery, the fact that she could put the fork in her mouth was progress. She continued to endure the massages of Doctor D. because she knew the outcome of all this would be as dependent on what was done now and in the next few months as what had been done in the eleven hours on Tuesday.

Sometimes I would get a bit tearful. A tiny bit of that was thinking about the face I would never see again, but only a tiny part. 95% was crying for the pain that Vicky had been enduring and continued to endure. Such a radical change of appearance was challenging for everyone around Vicky, but especially for her step kids and me. We had got used to so many things, we could get through this too. I hoped but I didn’t know and the not knowing was frightening.

Ellie was anxious about seeing Vicky’s new face for the first time. She was also angry. I kept telling her Vicky was concerned about how she would feel, but sometimes it didn’t come out that way. She felt Vicky had taken this very drastic step too quickly. It was hard to explain why the surgery couldn’t have waited. That difficulty was partly because I was not absolutely clear in my own head why it had all happened so fast. Fast is, of course, relative. For Vicky it was anything but fast. Forty years is a long time to wait just to see yourself in the mirror. It hadn’t been forty years for me and the old fear still had power. If she really loved me, she would have waited, or more realistically, if she really loved me she would have been Anthony. I longed to be through all this. I longed for my heart to catch up with my brain, which perfectly well understood the realities of Vicky’s situation. I didn’t want to want Anthony anymore, because I definitely couldn’t have him.

I still read a lot of posts on the online support forum from transgendered women who had lost both their relationship, and contact with their children, since transitioning. There was often a level of despair because they felt they were somehow unlikely and even unworthy to find love again. I wanted to say to them that Vicky and I had been through similar moments of despair. I had thought of leaving, I had declared that exposing the children to this ‘female’ was an impossibility. I wanted to let them see that it wasn’t all over. That even these things could change, with time. Love was still out there.

The second week was over and Vicky was coming home. I was relieved and looking forward to having her safely back in the UK, but I was worried. I didn’t know how Vicky would look when she got off the plane. She had had another week of healing since I had seen her. From the phone calls we had had, it was obvious that she was able to talk more freely and was much more mobile, I was even worried that I wouldn’t recognize her, which was ridiculous. To my shame, I was still to embarrassed to kiss her full on the lips in the middle of Heathrow airport, but I did hug her. I wish I wasn’t so afraid of how other people would react to two women kissing, or to a woman and a transgendered woman, or to, well anyway, I wish I wasn’t such a coward.

Vicky had to wear the ‘face bra’ all the time for the first four months, which did something to hide the full extent of stitches and scarring from Ellie. Even so it was quite a shocking thing to be confronted with, and she was pretty good about it. She even managed to give Vicky a gentle hug. There is certainly no better way to dissuade your teen from plastic surgery. The cold hard realities of a face cut, swollen and bruised, the joins looking more like poorly stitched blankets than invisible scars, would surely be enough to put off all but the most determined. I don’t really consider Vicky’s facial surgery as cosmetic. That suggests a level of choice that wasn’t there. Had she not had the surgery there is no question that many more people would still be treating her as male and responding poorly to the fact she was in a dress. That kind of thing can wear you down, day after day.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of it, the surgery was a done deal. It would improve of course but none of us would forget that initial sight. Another hurdle overcome, we got on with life.

A few days later, came a moment I had not been looking forward to. Vicky’s scalp had been seriously remodeled and held together with, I kid you not, staples. These staples now had to be removed. The device for achieving this was almost identical to the one for removing staples from paper. A small metallic jaw with two sharp teeth at either corner, top and bottom. Doctor D. Had blithely suggested that this was an ideal job for me. He’s a surgeon, I expect he’s used to hoiking metal out of people’s flesh. I was less blasé. The staples ran from behind the bottom of Vicky’s ears up into her hairline. There were dozens of them. It was vile and exactly as you might imagine it so I won’t describe it anymore than to say there was a noise as you pulled the staple out and a level of tug required and, well yes, that’s quite enough of that.

That fun little task behind us, it only remained to keep Vicky in hand-washed face-bras and regularly and liberally apply moisturiser to her eyes. She now had to continue the facial massage herself. It had been suggested I might help with this, and I tried it once, but really it was more than I could do to inflict such direct pain on her so I’m afraid I left her to manage on her own.

It was behind us. I knew there was still the small matter of genital surgery to come but really compared to what had just been done I found it hard to believe it could be any worse. Vicky had at one point been considering surgery on her two middle toes, which were a triumph of individuality against evolution, they were better designed to cling to a branch than fit into shoes. It meant she could only wear size elevens. If they were shortened she might get into size nines, which would open up a world of possibility to her inner Imelda Marcos. Now though still bruised and swollen from facial surgery, with the prospect of imminent vocal and eventual genital surgery, signing up for yet another operation didn’t seem that tempting. I understand some people get almost addicted to the wonders of plastic surgery, unable to stop tinkering with their own appearance. Vicky was not going to be one of those. Enough was enough.

Family and friends were astonished at what had been achieved, more than one of them now said they could see the reality of the woman that Vicky had always claimed to be. It had worked. We got stared at in the street because a face-bra is an attention grabbing object, but the point is people would say, ‘what happened to her’. No-one saw a man anymore. They saw a woman who had undergone facial surgery. Often newer friends would question if she had needed anything doing at all. They had no idea how much she had had done. It was all very gratifying. Of course once Vicky opened her mouth they would look again. It was the biggest remaining problem. Her voice.

Vicky had been attending speech therapy for some time now, both in groups and one to one. She tried so hard to modulate her voice, but it had always been a very deep rich manly voice and it was not responding to exercise and thinking differently. Vicky found it very frustrating, and so, I have to admit did I. The moment she spoke, shop assistants, waiters, anyone on a phone, assumed she was male. Even if she corrected them and said, ‘It’s madam actually’, they would more often then not reply, ‘sorry about that, now what can I help you with sir?’.

To add to the problem, Vicky herself found it very hard to hear how she sounded to other people. In her head she would hear a warm female voice and then be upset at yet again being called ‘sir’. When she did find a pitch that everyone around her, including me, accepted as sounding female, she felt false, as though she were putting on a comedy mouse voice. Surely that couldn’t be what she must sound like for the rest of her life? Vicky’s vocal problems were so much more complicated than the thickness or tension of her vocal chords. They were wrapped up in a lifetime of hiding her true self away, trying desperately to embrace the man she wasn’t. Now after forty years of hiding, her voice wasn’t there, or if it was, she was too afraid to use it.

The speech therapist agreed that therapy alone could only achieve so much, but she was also very clear that surgery was not a magic fix. Before and after surgery Vicky would have to practice regularly, focus on every word she uttered. As a thoughtful and considered speaker, Vicky already seemed to focus on the meaning of every word she uttered and this could make her appear hesitant at times, or worse, as though she hadn’t heard the question (It’s in our top ten things we quarrel about list, right next to Vicky’s inability to use an indicator when driving and my inability to put the lid back on anything..ever). The thought of adding another layer of hesitancy worried me.

Part of me, as with the facial surgery, wanted to tell her that how other people perceived her, or us, was their problem. She was transgendered, she would have a deep voice, so what. Vicky of course was never going to go for that. Though she supported anyone’s choice not to have surgery and to present to the world as a woman with male attributes, she didn’t want to be one of them. She just wanted to be like any other woman. It’s all very well singing ‘I am what I am’, but if no one understands what you are it’s hard to stay confident.

In July 2010 Vicky finally had the vocal surgery. She was in and out in one day, but not allowed to speak, or so much as whisper for three days. Instead she had a notebook and paper. This worked perfectly well if you were standing next to her and could be alerted to the communication by a prod in the ribs, but as she was resting in bed and I was getting on with life downstairs, it was very frustrating. Vicky also discovered the frustrations not just of not being able to communicate the big things - The house is on fire, Your daughter has eloped with our neighbour, that kind of thing - she also missed the minutiae of conversation. One afternoon as we were out doing the weekly shop, she pulled me over and began frantically writing in her notepad. I put down the bags I’d been lugging to the car and waited in silence as Vicky scribbled away. Finally she passed me the paper and I read the urgent message, ‘Isn’t that a new Paperchase’. Worth waiting for I think you’ll agree. Well, it was only for three days and yes, it was very quiet.

Vicky had to be examined by the doctor again to make sure she was ready to speak. When the moment came her voice was very quiet. Not squeaky, but not as dark and rich as before either. It was a partial success. The bottom third, the chest voice had definitely been erased, but Vicky continued to find it hard to raise her voice higher than it’s middle range. There’s no question that she was disappointed. No matter how much you are told that an operation is not a magic fix-all, part of you must still secretly hope that you’ll wake up sounding like Marilyn Monroe. I was, if I’m honest, a little relieved. Not because I’d been secretly hoping the pitch wouldn’t shift, I wanted the operation to succeed as much as Vicky did, but the truth is I could still recognize the voice, like her face it was changed but still related. Anthony’s sister’s voice.

In speech therapy sessions she could read passages and passages in a light piping tone, which sounded utterly feminine, but she just could not do it outside of the session. Our counsellor pointed out that she had become reliant on her speech therapy sessions as the place where her voice would work. The reality was if she could do it in the safety of speech therapy, she could do it anywhere. There was no mechanical reason why she couldn’t talk like that all the time.

Vicky struggled with this for a long time. One day quite recently she was speaking to an old friend on the phone and he suddenly said ‘that’s too feminine’. No, I thought, that’s how she’s meant to sound. It comes and goes, but considering all the changes Vicky has managed to make, I think she’ll get there when she’s ready. Just don’t ask her to sing.

As Christmas 2010 approached my annual obsession with how many cards we sent and how many we got reared its ugly head. I don’t know why I focused on this so much. Writing about it now I want to give myself a firm slap, or at least a gentle shake, but the truth is at the time it mattered to me. I tried, while posting online, to talk myself out of this petty example of self pity, but I seem to remember it didn’t work.

In years gone by we have sent and received around 100 christmas cards, we’re friendly folk and I do love christmas. This year, I’m sad to say, looks like being a repeat of last year, we’re down to about ten. Since Vicky’s transition, maybe I should say ‘our’ transition, because we have certainly been through this together, we have lost many many acquaintances and not a few friends. The Christmas card tally is a rather visible record of this and it’s a bit depressing. Yet I know we are lucky. Our families are still speaking to us, we do have good friends who have stuck by us, we are not isolated or ostracized. I wish it were so for all transgendered people, but I know it isn’t. So this is a virtual Christmas card to everyone who is alone this Christmas simply for being honest about who they are. I think you’re all amazing and the world is a better place for having you in it. Happy Christmas x

That last bit is something I believe deeply. The world is a better place for being diverse. There is a running debate about whether society should seek to eliminate disability, not by improving the individuals capacities, but by stopping them being born in the first place. Think, the argument goes, of all the suffering, not to mention expense, that could be avoided if disabled people were never born. Genetic testing holds the power to predict more and more of the conditions that affect people’s lives. We could, theoretically, eliminate them. I assume that argument would extend to intersex people. The argument against such a plan beside the religious one that, ‘all life is sacred’, says, ‘ Look what we would lose. Look at Einstein, what about Stephen Hawking?’ The truth to me though, is that these differences are not only precious when they are counterbalanced by some extraordinary talent or genius. My life has been immeasurably enriched by having my son. The world is a better, more interesting place for having him in it. My life has been immeasurably enriched by having Vicky in it. I’m only going to live this life once and my experience now contains the astonishing truth of Vicky’s life, of watching a woman emerge from the cocoon of an apparent man. It’s all worth having and celebrating. Still. I would have liked more Christmas cards.

Christmas 2010, with all the family, came and went. It was a much happier time than the previous year. It felt like we had all come a very long way. Things that at the time had seemed insurmountable were now only memories we didn’t bother revisiting. All the resentment I had felt towards my family ebbed away. I was now able to step back and understand with much more balance. They had, each one of them, only been making their journeys. That was all. My anger, no, my fear had come from that same old familiar place. To my mother and my sister all I was really saying was, ‘if you really loved me...’, and all they were doing was saying it right back at me. We all of us feared that each other’s reactions signaled a diminution of the love we felt for each other, and of course we were wrong. How useful it would have been to understand that in the first place. It would have made the whole thing easier if we could have known there would come a time when we were all together as a family and the fact that part of that family was Vicky was neither here nor there.

By January, Vicky no longer needed to wear the hideous face-bra. Her stitches had mostly dissolved and the swelling was going down noticeably. No one stared at us any more. I’m sure our local community was well used to seeing us out and about, but even so, and this may have been entirely in my head, it felt like we were blending in more. I wasn’t afraid to walk down the road with her anymore. The thought of going to the cinema filled me only with pleasure and not the anxiety of potential reactions. What a shame we couldn’t have had all this without eleven hours of surgery. Still, we did have it and it was good.

Every now and then a hornet would escape from the bottom of Vicky’s emotional Pandora’s box. She could still become very angry or very tearful. It was not easy especially as my capacity for ‘yes dear’ was not strong and all too easily things would explode, but we talked it through. We always talked it through in the end. We’d got very good at talking things through. We had continued the weekly counselling sessions up in central London and they had become, not a crutch exactly, but a time to look forward to when both of us knew we could raise and discuss the things that were hurting us and then be rid of them. Afterwards there was lunch and strolling around shops and maybe going to the cinema. It was a nice day out combined with the emotional equivalent of a deep facial cleanse.

It seems strange to say that the main part of Vicky’s transition was behind us, when her gender reassignment surgery was yet to come - but in terms of our daily lives,that was just packaging. I’m not saying Vicky wasn’t still desperate to get it done and frustrated by the slowness of the progress within the NHS. but the truth was the woman was already here, not waiting to be created by a bit of flesh being repositioned. We could, to a very large degree, just get on with life, thank God. Some people loved us, some didn’t, the same as everyone else. It was normality and we were ok.

Life was normal, and that included death. On February the 11th 2011, my dad died. He had been in the wonderful theatrical nursing home, Denville Hall for a decade and a half. He had lived his last years in dignity and comfort. The staff were tireless and wonderful. It had all been as good as it could have been, which was pretty awful really. In the last few years his speech had all but disappeared, reduced to the concise pairing of ‘Love’ and ‘Fuck off’, (said with all the humour a man of three words could muster). His head had gradually fallen to one side, which made eating and drinking really hard and he was in a wheelchair, reduced to one working limb, his left arm. Though we’d set him up with a piano in his room, he only played it twice to my knowledge. In the last months of his life I took to playing for him all the songs he had taught me as a child. Gershwin’s best, ‘Summertime’, ‘S’wonderful’, ‘Our love is Here to Stay’. The lyrics said all the things he couldn’t.

I didn’t ever tell him about Vicky. He had been so happy to know I was loved and cared for, and I still was, so why complicate things. He had blotted his son’s death from his consciousness. If we ever mentioned Matthew, or even Matthew’s sons, Dad would look away, whistle, laugh or sing. He was having none of it. His mind was balanced between the control of his epilepsy and the control of his madness. A bearable medium had been achieved, not too many fits, calmly bonkers. It seemed unnecessarily indulgent to insist he process the complexities of a transgendered daughter-in-law. The impact of that was that Vicky didn’t come with me to see him until he was nearing the end, and then she waited outside in the car. I hope she didn’t feel I was ashamed of her, because I wasn’t, but I can see it may not have seemed that way.

Two years before he had come close to dying, going into a series of seizures every thirty seconds or so for a couple of days. It was awful and none of us wanted him to have to go like that. In the end he didn’t. The nurse who sat with him as we all tried and failed to get there in time to say one last goodbye, held his hand as he breathed gently out. He didn’t breathe in again. That was it. He went gently into that good night full of love for all of us and knowing we loved him. S’wonderful.

Vicky was invited, but couldn’t come, to the funeral, which was a great shame. I had imagined this would be the moment I would introduce her to the staff at Denville Hall, show them who had been my back-up all this time It just wasn’t possible, but then my sister’s husband couldn’t be there either so we were all in the same boat. I wanted Vicky there also to meet my extended family, many of whom had only heard about her transformation had been ready to welcome her, as herself. It felt like an opportunity missed, but it did at least show me that everyone knew about Vicky and me, and no one minded a bit.

A death is a good reminder of what is important in life. Dad had not been the best fun for a lot of his life with us. We had experienced fear and anger, resentment and indifference. Somehow, we had all ended up at Love. It reminded me, as if I needed reminding, that Love, still, and always, is the answer.

Two months after dad’s funeral I went into a recording studio and made an album of all those wonderful Gershwin songs. I had played in local pubs with a trio for a couple of years before this all happened, but I hadn’t sung since Vicky told me she was transgendered. The emotional honesty required had shut down in me. I had become a carrier of unspeakable secrets, and then, once it was no longer a secret, I had been so confused about what I felt that the last thing I could do was sing about it. Now I could sing again, and not only that, I could sing about ‘he’ and not burst into tears. It was just a song. Vicky had felt very frustrated that I had stopped singing and had been pressing me for some time to do a pub gig or at least get together with my band and have a play. She felt my inability to do so indicated a deep lack of acceptance and made all my words hollow.

I wanted her to accept me even if I never sang another note, and to try and understand why I might find it difficult to sing ‘ The Man I Love’ . All I can say is that it took the time it took. It was a grieving process. Now though, it was fun again and I didn’t need to cry. I had love and I could sing about it. Several of the tracks were a tone lower than I used to sing them, and my mother, fine musician that she is, noticed. She asked if this voice drop was because I was ‘now a lesbian’. I think she was joking. Probably.