Cynthia has breasts, a vagina, and the Y chromosome of a man. She was born with the chromosome; the breasts are largely the result of hormone therapy and the vagina is partially a surgical creation. But Cynthia, 41, is not a transsexual, at least not by choice. Her parents, counseled by physicians at Children’s Memorial Hospital, made the decision for her when she was seven weeks old. “That made me a tranny infant, I suppose,” Cynthia says. “The difference between me and a transsexual is that sex-assignment surgery was done to me without anyone asking me if I wanted it.”
Four decades after being assigned to the female gender, Cynthia has entered a many-layered coming-out process. It entails gradually letting people at work understand that “there’s a reason I never have a time of the month when you see me take my purse into the ladies’ room with me.” And she’s working with a California endocrinologist on reformulating the mix of artificial hormones she’s been taking since adolescence. Testosterone contributes to the sex drive of women as well as men, and she wants to see, among other things, if ramping up the male hormones will boost not only her sexuality but her general feeling of vitality and well-being. “Having one’s gonads removed early in life is just not a good thing,” says Cynthia.
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But even if this is an auspicious time for Cynthia to come out and explore her own history, doing so isn’t easy. “I’m just now waking up and saying, ‘Whoa, these few millimeters of my flesh, this little phallo-clitoris part of my natural-born anatomy, had so much power to create real heavy human drama,’” she says.
Her father seemed to bear a burden of anxious guilt for years, she says. Her mother “was an emotional basket case about anything about me.” And the price they paid to protect her was to uproot themselves and leave both sides of the family behind in Chicago. Cynthia herself felt bottomless angst for decades. When at the age of 40, still a virgin, she signed up at a dating website, she wasn’t sure how to classify herself.
On top of that, “the surgery stinks,” says Joel Frader, head of general academic pediatrics at Children’s Memorial and a professor of pediatrics and medical humanities at Northwestern. “If the child is born with a clitoris that looks more like a penis, most of the things that are done to make the child look more like a girl have a pretty negative effect on sexual pleasure later on and have other health effects.” These effects, he says, include an artificial vaginal opening that must be surgically reopened from time to time for the rest of the child’s life. Creating a penis is worse: “The surgical options are terrible, actually,” Frader says. “They might get better and someday be fabulous, but now what you get does not look enough like a penis.”
“I love my dad and I’m very interested in keeping my relationship with him,” she says. “But there’s a chasm with my dad. He loves me and he wants to have a relationship, but there’s this space between us. It’s his shame, his embarrassment, his pain. It’s ‘Look what we did to you.’”
Her parents decided on hormone therapy—the female gender she’d been assigned clearly needed to be prodded along. What her mother told her, Cynthia says, was that “we’re going to get you some pills to help you get your period.” The quest for pills turned into a visit to a Los Angeles hospital for a complete workup by an endocrinologist—a trip her mom promised would conclude in a shopping spree. “I’m supposed to be a girl, I’m supposed to love shopping,” Cynthia says. “But inside I’m thinking, ‘What’s wrong with me that I have to go see these specialists?’”
