I must have been three or four years old. It was naptime, my younger sister already had fallen asleep, and my mother was in the front part of the house. It was surely safe to get up quietly, take one of my sister's dresses into the bathroom across the hall, and see how the dress might fit me. We shared a room in those days and I had easy access to her clothes, which I thought so much prettier than what I was required to wear. She was only a year younger than I, and we were sometimes taken for twins, but she was smaller and of course the dress didn't fit. As I struggled awkwardly to force the buttons in back to reach their impossibly tiny buttonholes, my mother found me. She rebuked me--gently enough, in my memory--but later I was teased about it by my father and my sisters in the company of friends or relatives. To this day, it amuses my sister to bring it up.
      Also during those early years, I began to play dress-up with my sister and cousin. Wearing the same things they did, old dresses and shoes and hats that must have once been my mother's or my aunt's, I felt as if I were a little girl too. Once, after finishing playing dress-up, my cousin let me wear a pair of her shoes, black and white saddle oxfords. They fit me, and I liked wearing them. She said I could have the shoes if I wanted them because she was getting a new pair for school. I did want them. But when I showed them to my parents and explained that the shoes fit me and that my cousin said I could have them, they said no. Boys couldn't wear girls' shoes. They weren't mean about it, but I felt keenly the injustice, believing I could have worn the shoes, even worn them to school, to first grade.
      So along with the feeling of embarrassment and humiliation from having been discovered trying on my sister's dress, I now felt keenly a sense of frustration and injustice. What seemed natural to me--pretending with my sister and cousin to be a grownup lady, wanting to accept the gift of my cousin's shoes--was forbidden.
      I began, then, to sneak into my mother's closet and put on her shoes. I did it secretly, without even my sister's knowing, for I knew now that it was "wrong" for me to do this. Still, it was a fairly innocent pleasure, a sense of excitement due to the secrecy, a feeling that this was something all of my own. In adolescence the feeling became less innocent--that is, more sexually arousing and more aggressively experimental as I began to delve into the dirty clothes hamper and pull forth bras and girdles, skirts and blouses. I was a skinny kid and self-conscious around boys who seemed to me to be growing so much faster, and I remember feeling somehow vindicated, special, in on the secret of how it felt to be a girl. Still, I assured myself that I would likely grow out of this, and, in time, feel whatever it was that gave boys the satisfaction of being male.
      I had girlfriends aplenty, I should point out. I fell in love regularly and frequently, from the first grade on, thrilled by the touch of a girl's lips, amazed and grateful that she would permit me to kiss her. In adolescence I longed to lose my virginity but this was the fifties and I accepted the rules, the limits. You might sit in a parked car on some dark street and kiss and embrace until the wee hours of the morning, you might even touch a girl's breasts (or at least the outline of them encased in a stiff bra), but what came next was reserved for marriage. Several of my friends had not had such scruples, and I feared for their souls, while at the same time envying them and also wondering if I was different from them. When the time came, would I rise to the occasion?
      I began to practice masturbating while thinking of my girlfriend. This was somewhat reassuring, but the secret excursions into femininity didn't stop. I had read of Christine Jorgensen's surgical transformation. Could it be that I, too, was somehow meant to be female? The idea both appealed to me and troubled me. I could not imagine giving up the pleasure my penis gave me, though. So what was I? Why couldn't I just be like other boys? It didn't occur to me that other boys might have feelings similar to my own--or, for that matter, that they might have confusions and obsessions far more destructive and legitimately troubling (years later, a member of my high school class, a former football player, shot and killed a dozen of his fellow postal employees before taking his own life).

      In time, thanks to considerable reading as well as to the invaluable experience of making friends in Tri-Ess, I came to learn that I wasn't alone. I began to feel better about exploring this feminine side of myself. I've concluded that my instincts were right all along and that it's quite rational to want to be a woman—-not just for the clothes, but to cultivate freely the interests and sensibilities that seem to characterize the experience of womanliness.
      But it's the irrational that continues to tug at me, the mystery of selfhood itself. When I disguise my body, my soul shows forth, and, miracle of miracles, I'm the lady that little boy with his sister and cousin pretended to be. I thumb my powdered nose at the accidental junctures of muscle and blood and genes that have conspired to trap us in our bodies. Walking into the world as a woman, I step swiftly, with grace, into the ineffable. I tell you, there's no turning back.

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