Free Trans-Sister Radio (2000) by Chris Bohjalian Page B

way through the drinking and the drugs, and how, somehow, he had finally come out on the other side, unscathed. Miraculously.
    Maybe he would have recalled how much he had hated his erections when he was a teenager, how much they had reminded him that his body was wrong. All wrong. An error that howled every time he felt himself growing hard.
    Maybe he would have told me the fantasies he had now when we made love, he would have confessed to me where his mind roamed when he was inside me.
    But he didn't. He didn't say any of that. He reassured me that he loved me, too, and then he plunged ahead, assuming--in the euphoria that enveloped us both like a fog after my candor--that our particular love could shoulder anything.
    "Okay, then," he said.
    "Okay," I said.
    "Well," he began, and he blinked. "You're in love with a woman. In a little less than four months--just after the first of the year--I'm going to Trinidad, Colorado, to have a sex change."
    "You're kidding," I said, though I had a sense that I didn't get the joke. Clearly what he had said was meant to be funny, and I was missing the point.
    "No. I'm not. I've been on female hormones since Valentine's Day."
    I turned to face him. "If this is some bizarre story because you want to break up with me ... I'd rather you just told me the truth."
    "No, that's not it at all! I love you, too, Allison! My God, you can't begin to imagine how much! That's why I'm telling you this. I'm telling you because I want you to know everything about me. I'm telling you--"
    "Telling me--"
    "Look, I'm a woman: a woman who's been saddled since birth with the body of a man. But in my mind, it's a fact: I'm female. Just like you. Well, not exactly like you, because you're straight and I'm gay. At least you've been straight up until now. But my hope and my prayer is that none of that matters anymore, because in a couple of months, I'm finally going to take care of it. The penis. I'm finally going to have the surgery that will make me as much of a woman on the outside as I am on the inside. And I know this is a huge stretch for you, but I'm hoping with all my heart you'll still love me. After all, I'll still be me. Dana. I'll be the exact same person I've always been, except I'll be dressing the way I'm supposed to, and I won't have to endure public bathrooms with urinals."
    He'd tried a joke because he must have seen he was losing me. He must have seen I was slipping away. I heard what he was saying, but I was no longer listening. I was listening instead to my ex-husband's accusations in the car, I was listening instead to my instincts from July. I was listening instead to the sighs he would make when we would make love, and wondering at the way his body, abruptly, had begun to repulse me. What sorts of people had he been with, what kinds of hands had stroked him? Whose mouths had been there before mine?
    What, exactly, had Dana done?
    It suddenly seemed that I'd been sleeping with a person who was either deeply perverse or profoundly insane.
    A person who, either way, was capable of harboring inside himself all manner of errata. Insanity. Secret.
    I think that's when I started to feel ill, and I think that's when he tried to touch me.
    And I think that's when I grew angry and told him to get his hand off me.
    But I wasn't nearly that polite.
    NATIONAL PUBLIC RADIO TRANSCRIPT
    All Things Considered
    Monday, September 24
    DANA STEVENS: I told her when I told her for a lot of reasons. Honesty. Decency. The fact that in a couple of weeks I was going to start wearing a dress.
    CARLY BANKS: Transition?
    STEVENS: Girl's gotta start sometime.

    Chapter 8.
    will
    ALL IN ALL, I THINK I TOOK THE NEWS RATHER well. Rebecca Barnard told me toward the end of October.
    "I assume this has something to do with Halloween," I said.
    "Nope. Mental illness," she said.
    Rebecca knew Dana Stevens from the university. She didn't know him well because they were in different departments, and they were constitutionally likely