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from a magazine that had before-and-after anatomical line drawings.
    “Who is this?” asked Mrs. Rayburn, fingering a clipping of an extremely tall woman in sunglasses climbing down the steps of an airplane, parked dramatically on the center of the tarmac.
    “That’s Christine Jorgensen,” I told her, feeling very superior. “Isn’t she incredible?”
    Mrs. Rayburn leaned in for a closer look. “I’m not sure I know who she is,” she said, smiling and intrigued. She must have wondered if this was some new folk singer or perhaps the author of a popular series of children’s books.
    “She’s not
the
first, but she’s
one of the first
and definitely the most
famous
male-to-female transsexual,” I explained. “She was born George Jorgensen, and then in 1953 she flew to Denmark to have her surgery.” I could have talked about her all day.
    Mrs. Rayburn appeared alarmed. “Do you identify with Ms. Jorgensen?” she asked.
    “Oh yes,” I replied enthusiastically. “If I could be anything in the world, I would be her.”
    Which pretty much ended
that
conversation.
    It wasn’t so much that I wanted to be a girl. It was that I wanted to make a dramatic change in my life. My parents hated each other, and I hated them. I longed for them to die in an auto accident so that I could be whisked away by uniformed social workers and sent to live in a compound near a major city.
    I was in the midst of an unhappy childhood, ripe for transformation. The idea that a person could make such a profound change in life gave me hope. In my world there were boys and there were girls and that was it. And here’s this girl who used to be a boy. My whole idea of what was possible in life expanded.
    Besides, I already had more in common with the girls.
    Boys only seemed to care about trading baseball cards or riding their dirt bikes. And my feeling about baseball cards was,Give me the gum, and you can have the stupid cards. As for riding a dirt bike, dirt made me anxious, so I preferred my mother’s station wagon. And the girls were always much more fun. They read books and talked about what they wanted to be when they grew up. All the boys ever did was snort and then swallow it.
    Eventually, I took down my articles about Christine Jorgensen and replaced them with pictures of Jesus on the cross, though I wasn’t religious. I had asked my parents “Is there a God?” And when I couldn’t get a definite answer from them, when they offered no actual proof, I decided that God was like Santa Claus for adults. But I did like the image of a naked man with his arms outstretched, as though thanking his audience after a performance.
     
    I didn’t think much about transsexuals again until I was nineteen and working in San Francisco as a junior advertising copywriter. The receptionist’s name was Amber. She was six-foot-four, black, and had Diana Ross hair . . . except that she had been born a man, so her hairline was receding, and she looked like Diana Ross after a particularly brutal round of chemo.
    My transsexual obsession was rekindled. Occasionally, Amber wore brightly colored stretch pants, and I couldn’t help but stare at her crotch because the fabric dented at the hole between her legs. It didn’t make any sense to me. Surely the surgeons could have closed up the hole better than this? Her vagina seemed so large, I could easily have stuck my fist in it. Maybe she needed to go back for a revision but couldn’t afford it? This was probably the case. She’d probably saved all her money for the big operation and couldn’t afford the finishing touches. In this way it was like buying a Jeep, stripped down until there wasn’t even carpeting or an AM radio.
    Amber used to eat her lunch alone, downstairs in the vendingmachine room. Her lunch was always the same thing: a giganticplastic tub of spaghetti with meat sauce that she brought from home and an entire bag of Orville Redenbacher’s Gourmet Popcorn, which she microwaved and ate