Grace’s Daughter
By Michelle Lynne Kosilek
Copyright 2011 Michelle Lynne Kosilek
Smashwords Edition
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Dedicated to my sisters.
Your courage and love have taught me that the only thing that can defeat us
is our silence. I love you all.
Chapter 2 - Abandoned Childhood
Chapter 5 - Waiting for the Train
Chapter 11 - Not Just Another Chapter
Dr. Randi Ettner
It is a privilege to contribute to this book. The narrative you are about to read—Michelle’s memoirs—is riveting. I hope by penning a few words, I can amplify a voice others have sought to silence and lavish praise on the author.
I met Michelle on only one occasion; a day I vividly remember. The grim grey and wire exterior of the prison stood in sharp relief against the backdrop of a New England fall’s resplendent colors. My assignment was to interview Michelle, confirm her diagnosis of “gender identity disorder,” and opine on the necessity of medical interventions—including reassignment surgery—which she was being denied.
Under different circumstances Michelle and I might be colleagues or friends. Michelle, through her intellect, determination, and unwavering commitment to purpose, has done from inside prison what I attempt to do in my own work outside the prison walls.
Namely, to advocate for a condition known as gender dysphoria—the disabling impairment of having a gender identity that is not congruent with one’s anatomy. One in 11,000 natal males come into the world with this condition...and they will leave the world with it, as it is a lifelong affliction. While experts in the field believe the origins can be found deep within the hypothalamus of the brain, the etiology remains largely unknown.
What is known is that treatment is medically necessary. Medical interventions are the evidence-based best-practice standards, and the only efficacious treatment for this rare condition. Nevertheless, due to public misperception and ignorance, and an unfortunate confusion of sex with gender, many people regard this as a lifestyle choice or mental illness. In the case of an inmate requiring these procedures the judgments are even harsher.
I have served as an expert witness in several prisoner lawsuits. Transgendered prisoners are often placed in isolation. In too many instances, they are denied appropriate treatment. The result of this stigmatization and indifference is often brutalization and self-mutilation. Many prisoners with this condition attempt to castrate themselves—a tragic endeavor of “surgical self-treatment”-- in the absence of appropriate medical care. Michelle accurately describes the situation thusly:
…many prisons routinely deny treatment for gender dysphoria, with predictably tragic results, spending millions on litigation rather than providing treatment. Of the thousands of medical conditions currently known, only this one is routinely ignored.
It is my promise to you, Michelle, and the hundreds or thousands of silent individuals who are imprisoned in the correctional system and imprisoned by gender dysphoria that I will speak on your behalf.
Dr. Cindy Tavilla
There is a game often introduced by group leaders at workshops, retreats or trainings meant to foster camaraderie amongst strangers. The game is Truth Truth Lie. Each person states three things about themselves, and the others are to guess which of the three statements is not true. To win the game, one must be able to stump the crowd with a statement that would seem totally unbelievable to the rest. The following statement was once as unlikely to me as it is for most people I share it with:
One of my best girlfriends, Michelle, someone I call my third sister, is a transsexual woman doing life in an all male prison for murder. Of course, I couldn’t stop there without telling the story. I would go on to say that twenty-three years ago, we were working at a state prison for the most dangerous mentally ill men when Michelle was named Robert. I was quite fond of Robert back then, but unfortunately, as the Program Coordinator, I had to fire him when a criminal check came back revealing a previous conviction in another state. Within two years, I left my job to have a baby and Robert contacted me shortly thereafter to ask for a recommendation to complete his application for a Master’s Degree in social work. Robert’s past didn’t dissuade me, and I wrote a glowing, genuinely enthusiastic letter in support of his goals.
Less than a year later, I was the consummate suburban stay-at-home mother making baby food in my blender. Robert was making headlines for murdering his wife and showing up at trial with long hair, lipstick and lawyers asking the court to refer to Robert as “her.” I was shaken to my core. I was confused, and not a little bit disgusted. I wasn’t interested in understanding. My focus was on caring for a baby, keeping house and living a normal life free from bizarre sideshow drama. Robert was sentenced to life in prison, and soon after, legally changed her name to Michelle. I worked on my doctorate in Clinical Psychology and while I was becoming more understanding of gender and sexual variations, I never once read anything about Gender Identity Disorder. I held the newspaper accounts of Michelle’s legal trials and efforts at getting the state to allow and pay for her sex reassignment surgery at arm’s length. Once in a while, I would tell the dinner party version of how I once knew this individual, and my audience would be wide-eyed and shake their heads. I used my past association with Robert as entertaining storytelling material. Looking in from the outside, Michelle and I couldn’t have been more opposite, more separate, more disengaged from one another. And then the voice spoke.
I was sitting in the back pew of a church in Boston. Feeling increasingly disillusioned and disappointed in the community I had been actively participating in for two decades, I was looking for a spiritual home. Feeling the urge to volunteer, to be of service, I considered joining the Prison Ministry offered by this urban church. I’ve long held the belief that we each give from our own surplus. We serve in ways that we are able. I was a clinical psychologist, and I had worked in a prison, so felt that while the surroundings might deter many people from serving this population, it would not bother me. And then the message came.
It wasn’t technically a voice that I heard. But the message was as crystal clear as if spoken aloud into my ear. Was it God speaking? The Universe? The Collective Unconscious? My vivid imagination? I still don’t know. It said, “Write to her.”
If what really compelled me was letting someone in prison know that someone on the outside cared about them, I didn’t have to join a group. I already knew someone in prison. Someone I had had no contact with for almost twenty years. Someone who had been the target of enormous public ridicule and hatred because of her past crime and ongoing legal battles.
Over the years, I had learned to trust and heed these clear messages, even if I didn’t understand them. I wrote a short letter. I received a reply a few days later. I wrote again, and thus began a transformative friendship that no one could have predicted.
I reached out to Michelle because I thought I might have something she needed. I walked away with more than I started with. Compassion. Tolerance. A listening ear. Little did I know at the time that Michelle would be a teacher, a confidante, a girlfriend in every sense that the word connotes. I became educated about Gender Identity Disorder through her and through my own research. I learned that I wasn’t wrong about Robert, in terms of the intelligence, kindness, enormous caring for those forgotten and living on the fringe of society. I was afraid I was a horrible judge of character, and learned that I was not. Robert was and Michelle is a healer, a dedicated counselor to many who are in need of support, and I became one of those she helped with her compassionate listening.
I encouraged Michelle to write her story, which she did in a fearless and unwavering way. Week by week, chapters of her life arrived in my mailbox on handwritten, yellow lined, legal-sized paper. Though I had heard many of the stories before in our letters and later our telephone calls, reading them as a whole gave me a new respect and awe for this human being who has navigated some of the most dangerous and unchartered waters imaginable, often alone, and emerging with an optimism and grace that defies logic.
Michelle has earned the status of victim but does not wear it as a costume. Her life over the past twenty-two years has been a testament to the ferocity of the human spirit to survive and be recognized. She has worked to help alleviate the suffering of her many sisters, other transgendered incarcerated individuals across the country. From offering words of support, to guiding them through the legal process to assure that they are receiving all that is legally due to them, she has hero status, but again, does not want this label either. Michelle’s memoir is at times difficult to read, as she doesn’t flinch from the grit of living life as an abandoned child, an adolescent getting by on the street, an adult whose relationships run the gamut from pathetic to dehumanizing. Nor does she downplay the ultimate violent act that sent her to live in an all male prison while courageously trying to be recognized as the woman she has always been. If you are like me, you will have your share of doubts. Have them. If you are like me, you will question her motives. Question them. If you are like me, Michelle’s story will educate, transform and inspire you. Be open to the education. Be transformed. Be inspired.
This memoir was conceived in pain and nourished by the healing hands of all those who tried to understand the bizarre process that results in the birth of a transgendered child, then defended my right to self-determination. There would have been no legal victories without the tireless professionalism of four attorneys: Frances S. Cohen, Jennifer Chiasson, Jeffrey Locke, and Joseph L. Sulman, and their most recent and most dedicated legal secretary, Annie Newell, therapist-at-large.
In my darkest hours, the light of love came into my life and pulled me back from the precipice of that abyss that so many transgendered women look into at some point. I will continue to try to find the words, Jessica.
Kia Earp was there even before the lawyers, and her sisterhood was and still is an important spoke on this persistent wheel called life.
And finally, my eternal gratitude to Cynthia S. Tavilla, Psy.D., and her niece, Dianna Sawyer, my editor. It was Cindy’s belief in my writing and my right to travel redemption’s lonely highway that resulted in this memoir. At a very painful point in her own life, she encouraged me and transcribed my chicken scratches into printed words, then introduced me to her niece, a professional editor and published author, who lovingly produced what follows from about 500 pages of chaos. My sister-from-another-mother and the niece who granted me honorary auntie status. May you always find one another’s footprints.
The truth doesn’t shine brightly for all the actors in every drama, especially the villains. In the course of writing this memoir, I have had to reveal very disturbing facts about people who would normally be thought of as above reproach. Their behaviors have run the gamut from immoral to criminal, and all are documented in the case files of two civil actins in Federal court (92-12820 MLW and 00-12455 MLW), as well as my prison record. Unfortunately, every word of this memoir is true. Fortunately, Grace will always defeat cruelty.
The statements, views, and opinions in this book are solely those of the author. They reflect events and conversations as experienced by the author, and reported by the author.
On July 28, 2010, a month-long heat wave finally relented, and it was cool enough to power-walk. Within a minute of leaving my building on the way to the yard, I was greeted by an old friend. Kim Thanh had lived in my building for several years before moving across the Quad to Three-Block. Kim told me he had been looking for me, and that he had something for me because he was going home in a few months and didn’t need it.
“A robe,” he said. “I never use,” he added. My heart raced. “You wait,” he instructed, holding up his hand with the fingers spread as he walked off. I paced back and forth. The rules require it.
I’m a prisoner, and while the nuances of prison life are myriad, the only one that mattered to me that day was the property policy that limits the type and quantity of all possessions we are allowed to have. It was this policy that had prompted Kim’s generosity. He knew that I would appreciate a new robe; what he didn’t know was how much and why, so he had no idea why I was crying when he came back outside with a laundry bag containing a new electric blue velour bath robe with red trim and sash. Or why I hugged him so tightly when he handed it to me, saying, “You keep the bag. I no need.” The best gifts come when the gentle rains of grace fall on the seeds we have planted in the hearts of others. With a new robe, I could finally give my wedding dress the safe-keeping it so deserves.
Her wedding dress is the only garment that a woman will save forever, and hand down to a daughter occasionally. I won’t be able to do the latter, but thanks to my dear friend Cindy, my sister from another mother, I will be able to save it. The red velour bathrobe I wore to my wedding was the closest thing to a dress I’m allowed to have, my only dress in twenty years.
I’m a prisoner, a transsexual currently transitioning to female while living in a men’s prison. It is undoubtedly the most humiliating and reactionary environment in which to transition from one identified gender to another, but I had no choice in the matter. When I finally felt free enough to stop pretending, my choices were limited.
Our wedding was not state-sanctioned, though it was well-attended. On behalf of the happy couple, I sent hand-made invitations to all those I cared for, requesting their spiritual presence at the appointed hour, and a random act of kindness in lieu of a wedding present. My spouse is also an imprisoned transsexual, but in another state. When we said our vows on October 20, 2006, I wanted, needed to be as girly as I could for Jessica, even though hundreds of miles and impregnable walls prevented her from seeing me. I had a bouquet of flowers, a maid of honor, and an enlarged photograph of Jessica. My maid of honor was a friend, another transsexual who has been unable to publicly declare the fact that she, too, is a woman. This was a rare chance for her to feel connected as a woman to these sisterly rituals that are such an integral part of our lives as women. I was honored to have her there.
The realities of prison life are too complex to properly explain in this memoir, but some have results that are so far out of proportion to their intended purpose that they can fill one’s days with grief. A property policy that allows for only one bathrobe seems so innocuous on the surface, and I’m sure there are those who would say that we are lucky that showers are provided and we’re allowed to buy bathrobes.
In my case, a new thirty-six dollar bathrobe from the only vendor we’re allowed to buy from is a prohibitive expense, more money than I earn in a month as a five-day-a-week cleaning lady in my housing unit. I barely even earn enough to buy a couple of jars of peanut butter a month, cosmetic items, and writing supplies.
The first man who saw me wearing it said I looked like Super Girl. At my age, which is sixty-one, I’ve learned to take compliments like that with a smile and a polite “thank you.” They help to balance the years of terror I was subjected to by a world unable to forgive a little girl for being born with a medical condition called Gender Identity Disorder.
I immediately washed all the prison off my red wedding dress/robe and hung it up to dry in my room. For the first time in my twenty years as a prisoner, the concept of home came into play. My only home was in the hearts of those who loved me. There had not been a physical structure that included a family, a sense of belonging, or a place where I could reasonably expect to be allowed to store something important. When I called Cindy and explained my problem, and she told me that I could consider her home my home, I mailed my wedding dress and the journals that this memoir is based on. And when I told my friend Johnny that I had mailed something home, I couldn’t contain my tears. I was loved, and I was finally convinced that my journey to redemption had not been stalled in that silent, terrifying darkness in which it had begun.
Darkness
It is commonly believed that trauma can imprint memories as well as or stronger than joy. Accordingly, my oldest memory is of the time when I was first admonished for being a girl. When I was four and my sister, Patricia, was seven, we lived in a trailer with my mother and her boyfriend, Red. All my thoughts, feelings, fears and urges, likes and dislikes, every molecule that was the essence of self, was female. Yet no one believed me, based on externally visible, unwanted body parts. The messages I was getting in response to my clothing and toy choices led me to an inconsolably depressing realization. I was a girl who had accidentally been given the wrong outside parts! I recall my mother and Red taking a doll away from me and giving me a balsa wood airplane, along with the first painful warning of what awaited me in the future. "You're a boy, not a girl, and boys don't play with dolls or wear their sister's clothes." I threw the airplane on the roof of the trailer and sat on the steps to cry.
My sister tells me I shouldn't cry over my airplane; I should cry over my sins. Apparently, my sins were just beginning, and to those who have learned to wear their faith as a weapon, I may be seen as unredeemable. I forgive them. My heart insists that I aspire to something more profound than the anger and hatred that has been directed at me by those whose formative years were, like mine, partially mis-informative. Some of history's worst examples of human behavior have been the result of nothing more complicated than our innate need for the approval of others; because we are social beings, we are readily convinced that those who are different are bad for the social order. If the crucible of belief-formation happens to be fueled by a claim that these are God's beliefs or mandates, or equated with patriotism, it is a frighteningly seductive step down that road to black and white thinking, leaving most of our cultural palette by the wayside, and our civil rights in jeopardy. It is my fervent prayer that they will have as much grace in their lives as I have been gifted with, whether from the love of friends and families, or from mere circumstance, which even St. Augustine recognized as an invitation to gracious behavior. It is grace, I believe, that allows us to surrender our black and white thinking.
When a mother abandons her child, they both become prisoners for life, regardless of the eventual outcome. Inherent in this act is a lifetime of emotionally flooded moments whenever this subject is broached in conversations, movies, news reports and novels. On the radio or television, or overheard on the subway ride, it can instantly return the mother or her child to the most painful moment that the abandonment evoked for either of them. For my mother, these reenactments ended in 1977 when she died. That she had previously died a little bit on the day she left my sister and me at our grandmother's house has never been in doubt. When she failed to return for us and her mother relinquished responsibility for us to the Chicago Police Department, how many miles had she put between her pain and her past? When she died, I was too young and too preoccupied with my own brand of dysphoria to properly let her go to her long-sought peace. In my selfish race to achieve self-destruction, I had no patience to lean on, and certainly no strength to share with her. As a four year old, precocious and already problematic, it was black and white: I told her I was a girl instead of a boy and then she left. I don't have the words to describe it, but I know in my little girl's heart that our mother has left us because of my sins. Despite my sister's advice, praying doesn't help. I hear the voice of despair for the first time. I've been captured by a darkness that knows nothing about dollies and dancing with snowflakes. My mother, my sister, my world are all gone, replaced by an orphanage called St. Hedwig's. It is run by nuns, for whom English is a second language. Their native tongue is cruelty, and it has several dialects, each more painfully memorable than the last.
I sleep in a dormitory with a large number of boys. In the corner is a private room where Sister Oswalda sleeps. She makes me clean the hallway.
My sister Patricia lives on the girls’ side, and works in the dining room. Sometimes she puts a raw potato under my cup. I love raw potatoes. Raw carrots, too. We have the biggest garden in the world with apples, cherries, and pears, but it’s a long walk away, past the garbage dump. I have to pull weeds sometimes.
Sister says we shouldn't eat the fruits in the garden. She says it's a sin to eat them without asking.
“Who’s fruit is it?” I ask, because then I’ll know who to ask.
“You ask too many questions!” Sister yells.
“What about the dead people?” I ask, because I’m afraid of the cemetery at the edge of the garden.
“It’s not polite to call them ‘dead people.’ They have gone to Jesus.”
“What does sin taste like?” At confession, Father says God forgives all our sins. “Why doesn't God just give everybody fruit?”
“Stop asking so many questions!”
Sister called me Spawn of Satan when I wore the dress. I don't even know what spawn means. She hit me when I asked. She chased me all the way up the ladder on the slide. She tore my dress when she pulled me down from the slide. My beautiful dress, blue with small yellow flowers. My left shoulder hurt from falling off the slide.
I'm hungry and I have to pee. It's very dark in the closet under the stairs. I heard all the kids come down to supper, and then go back up. I think Sister forgot about me. I think there is a spider in here. I think God forgot about me. I don't know why this is happening. It didn't happen to Bobby for taking the dead people's fruit. Or to Thomas when he said a bad word. Sister just put soap in his mouth. I prayed again a little while ago. Please, God, fix me like the other girls. I don't want to be the spawn of Satan, whatever that is. I still have to pee. I don't want to look, in case God hasn't fixed me yet. I prayed to God and Mary, too. She's his mother. Maybe she can talk to him. Maybe God is busy finding food for the children in India. Sister says they have no food when we don't eat all of our food. Maybe God could give them the dead people's fruit. Maybe God can't hear me because I'm locked in this closet. Maybe this is too much darkness even for him.
The second time I was caught wearing a dress, I was imprisoned in the same closet under the stairs. For my original crime, Sister had decided, well after nightfall, that her gift of reflective solitude was preferable to a paddling, although her manner of inquisition as to whether I had had enough time to consider the seriousness of my misdeeds (wearing a dress and running when called) resulted in possibly more pain. I'll never know. The psychic pain from being brutalized merely for stating my gender later contributed to my self-imprisonment in the bottle and in the arms of Morpheus, beginning an on-again off-again drama of self-denial that ran for decades. A paddling would have consisted of a series of blows across my naked buttocks, while I repeated Sister’s words one at a time. So I may have been fortunate and only been subjected to five blows: SMACK-I-SMACK-will-SMACK-not- SMACK -disobey- SMACK -Sister. This was a standard dose, delivered with a wooden paddle about 4 inches wide and 2 feet long, with holes drilled through it - possibly for the offending child's ungodly impulses to escape through. Serving a sentence in the prison of your own body because others refuse to admit that neither the prison, nor the key, even exists, is no different than being in a concrete and steel prison with a life sentence. Both will teach you that if you don't embrace patience and humor, you will be embraced by anger and hate, insanity's internship.
The physical pain I avoided when sister shook me and saw me grab my injured left shoulder might have been kinder in the long run. As children we seem to shake off physical pain rather easily, but psychic pain invents its own reason for hiding. The closet under the stairs administered multiple blows of psychic pain: the darkness, the hunger, the spider, the fear of being abandoned alone in the closet all night, the unanswered prayers and a little girl's sadness and confusion about why God would do this to her. After five and a half decades of beatings, rapes, stabbings and emotional muggings, this pain can only be neutralized by releasing that imprisoned little girl. Stuck in a male body, I remain in that closet under the stairs, where my terror was kindled.
In the several years between my closet imprisonments, I survived by living in my head the life I was being denied. A fertile imagination is an isolated child's best friend, and loneliness was a receptive plot. The time and energy required to fantasize an alternative existence leaves no room for boredom, so the passage of time during that period was no more cruel or kind to me than the other inhabitants of St. Hedwig's. The nuns fed us very well, we were clothed and regularly bathed, and educated so proficiently that when my mother reclaimed us shortly after my second night under the stairs, my orphanage version of a fourth grade education exceeded the standards in the Chicago public schools by such a large margin that I was allowed to travel to a different school one day a week to receive advanced classes in algebra.
But back in St. Hedwig's, my precociousness lead to unintended consequences. As a fourth grader, I was bright enough to occasionally be summoned to a sixth, seventh or eighth grade classroom to answer a question that had stumped the students in that class. These missteps by the nuns sometimes resulted in retaliatory beatings by a student whose pride had been hurt, but they were no more painful than the hand-spanking and paddling from the nuns for poor work performance or poor penmanship in class.
I had few friends. But I wasn't totally isolated. The terror of the closet under the stairs may have temporarily stifled my dress wearing impulses, but I was still a girl, needing to be with other girls to say and do and freely express my little girl thoughts and feelings. Mary's father was the caretaker or groundskeeper, and they lived in a house within the black painted wrought iron fence that surrounded St. Hedwig's. When we were allowed outside, I would sometimes wander around behind the back of the kitchen and towards their house, hoping to run into her picking dandelions or just sitting under a tree. She may have been as isolated from the other children as I was, for I never saw her with other girls.
In Mary and me, and in a boy named Bobby who had webbed feet, grace found its purpose. With Mary, I could be as silly-girly as I needed to and be accepted. Sometimes we wandered over to the girl's playground, where the slide that sister had pulled me down from was a grim guardian, always reminding me that things were not as they should be in my convoluted world. I didn't see Mary often, but when I did, I could see myself through the eyes of another, in the way that girls like me, and maybe even all children who are a bit different in some way can instantly recognize acceptance or rejection of themselves as valid, as just another child.
Bobby was born with connective tissue between all his toes on both feet. Like children everywhere, the boys in the orphanage could be calculatingly cruel in that way that many children are without truly understanding their cruelty. Like me, Bobby spent a lot of time alone and that was how I met him, looking for bugs in the bushes that bordered the tall black wrought iron fence. I was just looking out through the bars at the cars driving by, and wondering where they were all going, especially the ones that had only a driver and no passengers. I would wonder if any of them knew my mother or my father, whom I had no memory of at all. A short time after I met him, Bobby went to the hospital to have his toes separated surgically. Later, we were told that he went to Jesus on the operating table. That was the summer of 1958, the second and last time I was punished by Sister for wearing a dress – and this time she had help.
There is a new word in my vocabulary. Abomination. That's what Brother Norbert called me, an abomination before God. I should have gone with Bobby the day he wanted to climb the fence to St. Adelbert's, eat fruit until we got full, then just keep walking until a family found us. But I was afraid, and now Bobby's dead and I'm something that God doesn't like. It's very confusing. Father says that God forgives everything. Sister says the same thing. Maybe they have different gods, but that can't be true because Father says there is one God. Maybe the abomination thing is the reason that Sister left me in the closet under the stairs this last time.
She let me out right after the other kids went to church this morning. Then she put me in a room with some tables and a refrigerator and told me to wait for Brother Norbert. There was nothing in the refrigerator but a stick of butter on a saucer, and a pitcher of milk. I'm glad I didn't get the runs until after Brother Norbert was finished hitting me. He doesn't have a paddle like sister has. He has a big leather strap, like a belt with no buckle, which is good because the belt part hurts bad enough. Every time I had to go to the toilet it hurt all over again, and I will have to say extra Our Fathers and Hail Mary's when I have to confess about taking the milk and butter. I had never seen that room before, and I don't want to see it again. Sister didn't say anything about me peeing under the closet door. Maybe it ran down into the tunnel before she let me out. I'm not going to confess about peeing, and I'm not going to confess about wearing a dress. If I'm an abomination it doesn't matter, and anyway I didn't do anything wrong.
Sister hit me again when we had baths because my underpants were soiled. The closet seemed a lot smaller than it was last time, and it smelled bad too. Maybe some other kid peed in there before I did.
When I entered the Stanley Street Detox in Fall River, Massachusetts, on October 24, 1983, I had been drunk, stoned, or both for the majority of my waking hours since 1959. The voice of despair had no competition by that point. I was devoid of self-esteem, having been scrutinized and found wanting for 30 years by a world that didn't know how to relate to my declared self.
I was born April 10, 1949, the second of two children born to Henry and Elizabeth Kosilek, unemployed laborer and housewife. They declared me a male child and named me Robert John Kosilek, unaware that 230 days earlier, during a several hour window of opportunity, there was a glitch. The hormonal influences that steer our development in utero had already decided on the fate of my nervous system, including my brain. Then, for an as yet unknown or at least a definitively unproven reason, the hormonal influences changed developmental directions. Like one in 11,000 natal males, nature had cursed me with a female brain and male genitals. Brain sex and visible genitals are the meat and potatoes of a self in any culture that embraces gender binarism; all other physical attributes, what science called the phenotype, are not as important. Yet this model is flawed, as it assumes that these two components will be as compatible as peanut butter and jelly, and that all little girls and boys will be born with the right plumbing to match their wiring. We now know that one in 11,000 girls is born with male genitals, and the same horror is visited conversely on one in 30,000 boys, regardless of ethnic origin. Nature's brutality is as relentless as it is indiscriminate.
Whose darkness is this, so palpably malevolent? I thought I had left these frightful, imperfect silences in my past. I thought that their tenebrous wingbeats had found another victim to haunt on the day that I left the Stanley Street Detox. Yet here they come again, creeping in, these leeches of the soul. Pain, fear, and confusion simmer in a familiar chemical haze.
Apparently the staff have elected to err on the side of caution in this litigious age, and I am heavily medicated, so much that on awakening I initially thought I had again surrendered to that lovingly poisonous voice that dictated 24 years of my life. From ages 10 to 34 there was no psychoactive substance known to humanity that was unknown to me. Eventually, clarity descends like a guillotine.
In the doorway sits a bored psychiatric aide, reading a novel. I am on intimate terms with his boredom; we are old pals. A year and a half ago I was employed by Goldberg Medical, a private vendor that provided mental-health staffing at Bridgewater State Hospital, a psychiatric facility housing seriously ill men convicted of or charged with crimes in Massachusetts. To me it wasn’t really a hospital – it was a prison. The patients possessed and were possessed by the most intolerable psychic demons known to the psychiatric community, their desperation so acute that one man had taken his own life by wrapping his eyeglasses in a sock and forcing it down his throat. I was one of 57 observers, hired to do eyeball watches on patients in the seclusion and restraint section of the hospital after six patient suicides led to litigation that resulted in a settlement. They called us Specially Trained Observers, and we all had bachelor's degrees, so we were all well qualified to document whatever behaviors our assigned patients were engaged in, a task we had to perform several times each hour. Patient still asleep. Patient pacing. Patient staring. Patient self-dialoguing. Considering the average state of heightened agitation most of them exhibited on arrival, where many were carried in with correctional officers restraining them by means of a towel twisted around each wrist and ankle, their increased medications left them sleeping, or at least lying down most of the time. Until the offer of free tuition to Boston College to pursue an MSW degree reintroduced me to a future I had been unsure of, the STO job was simply a holding action, an entry-level introduction to the mental-health side of forensic medicine, that impossible quagmire where medicine and law meet like siblings, each pretending that the other doesn't exist.
I've been informed by a matronly psychiatrist, with heavy makeup and an even heavier European accent, that I am being sedated with Ativan several times a day because of statements I made when I was brought here yesterday, to the forensic unit of the Westchester County Jail. I am being held for extradition to Massachusetts. I have no idea how I came to be in jail in New York, charged with the murder of my wife Cheryl.
It is May 24, 1990. My last memory is an argument that ended with Cheryl throwing a crystal mug full of boiling water on me, then coming at me with a large knife. In over six years together, neither of us had ever used violence. Now my last memory of her is one of trying to stop her from killing me, and I have apparently taken her life. On May 20 I was sitting at my dining room table having coffee. Four days and several hundred miles later, I am removed from whatever humanity I once knew. My darkness is just beginning. In addition to the irreparable damage to Cheryl’s extant family, the harm I caused by taking her life will continue to flow outward like ripples, infinitely depriving all those young women who might have been healed by her compassionate gift of therapy. That is my enduring shame. Twenty years later I will be no closer to redemption.
Whatever socially-redeeming actions I offer as atonement for my past will be diluted by the backlash of anger at my insistence that a prisoner's right to medical care is not contingent on the type of crime she was convicted of, a never-ending storm of protest that has made me a pariah in conservative circles and even among those whose rights I'm defending. I have become one of the people I used to watch at Bridgewater State Hospital, and I want to die. It's not the first time. The darkness of despair is intimately destructive, a roiling vortex that holds everything you fear on a mad merry-go-round of thought. It has depth and substance enough to hurt you, yet not enough to grasp effectively. Its voice is as seductive as any lover could ever be, and its promises are as generous as an equal-opportunity employer. Suicide is the great equalizer, canceling all debts. Moral or financial, they're gone, and despair convinces you that the darkness is the light you should walk towards. I start my planning. This journey has been calling me for years.
This morning, the psychiatrist put me on a modified suicide watch. I've been moved to a different room, next to the nurses’ station. There is a lot of traffic in the hall, and the windows are very large, so even a casual glance covers the whole room from the outside. I noticed that on my trip to the toilet. My mattress is on the floor. There is no bed or any other furniture that could be turned into a weapon or a tool for self-harm. They have allowed me to smoke, and every hour, the psychiatric aide brings me a cigarette and lights it for me without being asked. He also does this for the other patients, who I can see walking back and forth between the dining room and the toilet. Tobacco and caffeine are the drugs of choice for the incarcerated, mentally ill or spiritually ill. It's all the same jail.
The room is very long, allowing me to pace the floor, but I would much prefer someone to talk to. Solitude is onerous in a suicidal state. Its weight is never more oppressive than when the suicidality is driven more by guilt and shame than by despair. When we are frightened, filled with shame and remorse and doubtful that we can ever atone for our misdeeds, solitude is the weapon in the room that only we can see. With few or no distractions we are free to plan, with a freedom that only the incarcerated possess. With nothing to do but think, solutions that might usually be missed simply scream for recognition. I have two plans already, either of which should work, since I'm now on 15 -minute checks.
The psychiatric aide who glances in the window four times an hour is probably a college student, getting his feet wet in the swamp of human misery. I majored in psychology and sociology because my life was defined by this swamp, my soul emotionally homeless in the midst of modern society. "If you're not one of us, you're one of them” was a common mantra, and there was no way I could ever be one of "us.”
Nothing matters anymore, but there doesn't seem to be anything I can do about it. My life has become a series of ineffectual escapes. As a child, I imagined I was a loner by choice, but more than anything I was shunned. As an addict I was seldom interesting or fun for very long, because I wasn't looking to get high – I was looking to get gone. Pretending to be male led to a series of bizarre vignettes that all had the same depressing ending. I was alone, emotionally broken, and I was still an unexplored female at the molecular level, living a life defined by the deceit required to suppress my true self. The roadside of my life was littered with broken promises, disappointed family members, landlords and employers who simply never saw me again. I failed to escape from myself because it's not possible; regardless of the layers of veneer, we cannot escape inward. All the available space is filled with who we are; sometimes who we are is so painfully intolerable that we try to just stop being. Now I have also failed at this ultimate escape, first with a plastic bag so flimsy that it simply came apart when I tried to tie it around my neck, and then the rolled up foam slippers that I tried to force down my throat caused me to throw up my supper. I had to fish the foam slippers out of the puddle of vomit to hide my intention. I don't know if I'll get another opportunity, but my chances will certainly be limited with a documented attempt on my record.
I will soon be returned to Massachusetts, and for the first time in my life, I want something more than the surgery that would bring congruity. I want just to go back to May 20 and relive the last few hours that I remember. To bring Cheryl back, I would gladly die right now. When I'm not in a drug-induced sleep, I'm thinking about Cheryl and her two sons. I can't stop crying. I haven't showered or brushed my teeth since I got here. Nothing will change what I have done, and only death will erase my awareness of my inhumanity. This is a darkness without borders.
For most of the afternoon, I have answered a psychiatrist's questions. He knows my life story in great detail. He has informed me that I suffer from PTSD. The library of the Bristol County Jail in New Bedford Massachusetts is an interior room that smells of despair and moldy paper. A window might help me with the moldy smell, but the despair has tenure. Built during the time of the Civil War, its cells each possess a miasma unique to the terrors its walls have witnessed, a concentration of blood, feces, and the fear-smoke that escapes the very pores of the condemned as they battle the internal fires of their vanquished hopes. The library is no less miasmic for its isolation at the front of the building. The mention of PTSD seems to evoke a physical response in me, the kind you get when you see someone cut themselves accidentally, or the visceral response you get when you see a toddler about to run into an end table. The ancient walls seem to cringe along with me, as if they too know recurrent horror. Of course they do. I ask the psychiatrist to elaborate. He tells me that the knife scars I've shown him from being repeatedly stabbed indicate the type of chronic exposure to violent treatment that is one of the hallmarks of PTSD, in addition to the single traumatic event that causes recurrent reliving of the event in other victims. He tells me that being faced with being stabbed again could put me into a fugue state where I would relive the previous trauma, including possibly killing my presumed assailant. I have been stabbed by an ice pick, a paring knife and a camping knife, slashed by a small scimitar, bludgeoned by a brick, and been subjected to numerous beatings over the years. The last time I was stabbed was in my back while drinking in the woods - while I was arguing with one guy, another one stuck a knife in the upper right quadrant of my back. If I hadn't been wearing a coat he may have killed me. What's remarkable is that I don't recall anything after being stabbed, so the psychiatrist’s fear may be valid, though I always thought that PTSD mostly affected war veterans, and that their flashbacks were precipitated by noises that were reminiscent of battle sounds. I am filled with sorrow suddenly; for the first time, I am as sure as everyone else that I am guilty. I barely hear the last few questions. I am wondering why he is wasting his time on a competency evaluation. I’m not psychotic. Whatever I am, I’m not that, and if I do have PTSD, it changes nothing, not for me, not for Cheryl, and not for those whose loving memories of her will be their painful companions. My life’s journey no longer has a destination.
Abandoned Childhood
My sister Patricia and I are running down the stairs in the pouring rain towards the car when there is a flash of light and the voice of God seems to yell, "Come back!" The lightning flash has temporarily blinded me. It was so close that the thunder followed it like guilt follows a bad deed.
It's not God's voice, of course, but my life was immersed in religion so deeply in the five years I spent at St. Hedwig’s that I have become hyper-vigilant. I won't know this word until many years in the future; what I do know is that from almost the first day I arrived at St. Hedwig's, I have been afraid. So even though I am almost 10 years old, my response to lightning and thunder is to run.
It's just after 6:00 pm, so the darkness was settling in for the night when the lightning caught us stealing away like thieves. The fear of being seen in my young mind doesn't consider that the sight of a car inside the fence is all the more unusual. My fear doesn't extend to inanimate objects. Our mother has re-entered our lives as cryptically as she disappeared over five years ago. She came to visit us recently to plan tonight's escape, and now she stands in the unforgiving rain, hoping to reclaim so much more than the children running through the storm towards the open car door. My little girl's heart, so desperate to be loved, is already forgiving her, and when Patricia gets into the car first, and my mother spends an extra few unnecessary seconds in that punishing rain just hugging me, my forgiveness is complete.
Fifty-two years later, however, I still cry, because she never told me why. The little girl with too many questions grew into a woman with too many answers, because she never heard the only one that really mattered. Everything else was just busy-work to keep from being overwhelmed by the fear that our mother left because of me.
Ducking inside, my first sight is the driver who's turned around in his seat, urging us to hurry. My mother jumps in, slams the door, and we drive away into the rain. The windshield wipers are fighting to keep up, and there’s a battle raging within my mother. She finally has her children back, but the road ahead is dark and unknown, unwinding from a past better left where it lies. But that's not an option.
In the front passenger seat is Theodore Barron, alias Tadeusz Baronowski, my mother's new husband. We would soon know him as an insufferable bully, an aspiring gigolo who drank Hamm's beer, read The Chicago Tribune and watched television while my mother waited tables for tips and $.50 an hour. His only earnings, while strangers groped my exhausted mother, came from rare weekend gigs playing piano in local bars, alone or in a trio composed of himself, a standup bassist name Art, and a very sweet drummer named Baron Lee, the driver of the car. Baron asks us if we're glad to be leaving, and seems more solicitous than anyone else in the car. Because of his musical relationship with my mother's husband, I will be given a rare gift that I won't come to appreciate until years later - the gift of tolerance. None of the usual disparaging terms for people of color were ever uttered in our home. Baron Lee was the first person of color I’d ever met. Like me, he was a little different, but I liked him a lot more than my mother's husband.
Since arriving at St. Hedwig’s, I'd only left the grounds one time. Last summer, some of us went to a camp called Camp Villa Marie in Pistakee Bay, Wisconsin. Despite falling out of an upper bunk bed, having a shuffleboard disc dropped on the ring finger of my left hand, and stepping on a stray fish hook, I never wanted to leave Camp Villa Marie. The nuns were left behind, and the camp counselors did what camp counselors do best -- they let us be kids. The big yellow bus that delivered us from prison to paradise left through the same gate we are now stopped at, waiting for a break in the traffic.
I remember on the bus we sang"100 Bottles of Beer on the Wall." I know nothing about beer. If I did, I'd know that the heavy, unrecognizable odor in the car is beer, and a sharper odor is whiskey. They've all had a little helping of John Barleycorn's courage in preparation for tonight's adventure. And surely that's what it is, because anything on the other side of that foreboding fence has to be better than the closet under the stairs, the leather strap and this tangible fear that has me trembling even as the car pulls out of the driveway. I gaze fearfully out the blurry back window, expecting Sister Oswald or Brother Norbert to be there. But the only thing behind us is the reflection of the car’s tail lights on the wet pavement, flickering like votive candles.
Finally, after a frightfully long wait, there is a break in traffic. We turned left, west on Touhey, then at the traffic light we turn left again, South, on Harlem Ave. My only memory-reference for the dimensions of St. Hedwig as seen from the perimeter is from Spring cleaning, when all the kids would be spared from school’s regimented process for a week. Dressed in old clothes, we scoured the area between the bushes and the fence, removing all refuse that may have blown through the fence during the winter. On hands and knees, the fence seemed to go on forever. In a car, it rolled past the window on Patricia's side of the car in less than a minute, and we were passing St. Adelbert’s Cemetery, where dead people had more fruit than the children of India. Then it was gone, and I realized I had been holding my breath. I let it out, and for the first time in five years I breathed air that didn't smell or taste like my vision of hell.
My mother is hugging Patricia and me again, and someone is crying. I'm in the middle of human sadness and joy. I could smell something sweet now, something on my mother that temporarily overrides the beer smell. Is this what happiness smells like? Again the brilliant blue white lightning flashes, evoking warnings I've heard from adults who believe that terror is an appropriate motivational tool for teaching children. "If you keep misbehaving, God will strike you dead." On February 9, 1959, the day of our escape, their lessons in terror were undone. Who else was more deserving of this fate than I, the Spawn of Satan? The child who dared to question God by insisting she was a girl? That day gave me with a lifelong gift that I am still enjoying, even as I write these words. Ever since the day when that one washed away my fear of divine retribution, I have loved thunderstorms.
And lest the reader believe that all of the Sisters at St. Hedwigs were bullies, I can assure you that they were mostly sweet, hard-working Christians who gave me an abiding sense of personal responsibility and taught me a civility that no human brutality has been able to defeat. Like corrections officers who come to work with a personal agenda, and the prison administrators that allow them to enforce it, anyone, including a nun, can undo your whole world in a matter of minutes, reducing you to a subhuman status by the force of their misprision. The lack of oversight in both settings becomes a malevolent safeguard that allows the misguided few in any group to ultimately define how history sees them all. In Catholic orphanages of the 1950s they answered only to God. Fortunately, abuse scandals in recent years have mitigated many of the horrors that occurred. Without eventual civilian oversight, prisons will continue to hire and nurture the psychopaths who commit or condone most prison rapes -- corrections officers. At both ends of this spectrum of institutionalized care and custody, I have been tormented by the worst that both had to offer. That's why I cannot let that little girl die in that closet under the stairs. This story, in addition to being a celebration of the commonality of women, despite their disparate backgrounds, is also about how grace allows, even compels us to recognize the humanity and the inherent dignity in each of us, in all of us, and that any who would lay claim to being a child of God, any God, cannot gaze upon redemption’s rainbow through a colorblind haze. It is also a story of a little girl who rejected the God of her tormentors only to embrace a secular similarity of thought and action that allowed her to forgive them and their progeny. As her adult voice, and the potential voice of all my sisters and brothers who are similarly situated, I am guided and encouraged by some thoughts of Dr. Martin Luther King Junior, "Life's most persistent and urgent question is, what are you doing for others" and "Our lives begin to end, the day we refuse to speak out about things that matter." We have traveled a long way towards a passing grade on the goals of the 1960s. Only a few states continue to execute prisoners, but in all 50 states, prisoners die every year by their own hand. Many of them are, like me, transgendered, and have not been gifted with the amount of love and hope that I have found. It is this love and hope that have kept me alive. It is my privilege to be the voice of hope for others. That, my friends, is grace. Lightning, reborn. That will be the legacy of that little girl in the closet under the stairs; one lost girl helping others out of their darkness.