There is a tender feeling a woman has about her body, early in the day, before anyone tells her she is too fat or too thin, or before she tells herself these things; before she sees the roadmap life carved into her face or wonders how her breasts became so asymmetrical. Were they always that way? And sometimes the heaviness of a woman’s body, the secret caves where things grow and fall and grow again, the sensations on her skin that are only air currents but sting in the winter like tiny bees; the parts of her that wake before other parts, slippery, quiet places; these parts, too, feel tender and alive and good.

Maggie imagined her body this way, early in the morning. And with that joy she slipped out from between the covers and wrapped a skirt around her hips and a put on a light blouse, something fine and full of color. And then, with her slippers on, she padded downstairs to start coffee brewing and soon afterward woke her young daughters, helped them dress for school, cooked their breakfasts and packed their backpacks. And when they were all ready, she went upstairs to get ready for her job as a teacher, a professor of science at a large university. She would dread this moment, the time when she would have to dress the part of the person she had to become for the rest of the day. The skirt would be hung up in the closet, the blouse set back on its hanger.

And Maggie would put on a man’s shirt, a man’s boxers and pants, a man’s socks and shoes, and she would step out into the world, feeling she was wearing the wrong clothes, living in the wrong body. And this, in the decade after her children were born, was how her day began.

***

Before Maggie came to be Maggie, she was Marc. Marc was born in 1960, a boy child who grew to be a soft-spoken man with a goofy sense of humor, a thin, lanky build and eyes the kind of blue you find in the shallow waters of a tropical shoreline. He married, had a family and was a devoted and affectionate father to his two daughters.  He adored his wife, Isabel, the girls’ mother. He felt close to her and understood her in ways he couldn’t explain, ways that made him uneasy.  They grew so close, and looked so much alike, their friends commented that the two of them could be brother and sister.

He was a well-respected teacher and a diligent researcher whose students joined him on treks into desert canyons and up mountain summits. Young scientists who enrolled in his classes came back as graduate students to learn from him again.

A few who got to know him well sensed that something was wrong, that some deep vein of grief ran beneath his genial, animated public persona. Awkward silences would punctuate his conversations with his protégés, as if he were examining every word before he let it be said. One student dreaded talking with him on the phone because the gaps in his speech were getting uncomfortably longer and longer.

This thing that was bearing down on him, this dissonance in what looked like a perfect life, a perfect career and a perfect family, could have led to a tragic ending.  It didn’t. 

Most of us don’t experience a conflict between our physical sex and our emotional and psychological gender. But for those people born with this internal discord, life can be an ever-worsening nightmare. The frustration and alienation often felt during childhood becomes despair in adolescence, and, finally, deepening depression and suicidal thoughts in adulthood. The medical name for this conflict between body and brain is “gender dysphoria.” The common term for the experience is “transgenderism.”

There are no good statistics on the number of people who experience gender dysphoria; men and women with gender identity concerns generally don’t come forward to be counted and often don’t seek treatment.  A dated study from the Netherlands puts the number at about 1 in 12,000 males and 1 in 30,000 females. More recent studies put the estimates much higher.

Lynn Conway, a brilliant pioneer in computer engineering who transitioned from male to female in 1968, estimated in 2002 that 800 to 1,000 male to female sex reassignment surgeries are performed in the U.S. each year and at least that many are completed overseas on U.S. residents. From these totals, and the knowledge that many transgendered people do not undergo surgery, she extrapolated the prevalence of transgenderism in adult men (older than 18 years) in the United States is between 1 in 500 and 1 in 250.

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