Transsexual Nation: The FTMs

By David Tuller

Fthe most part, the female-to-male transsexuals I met charmed me as better versions of the human male than their genetic counterparts - as men who had been forced through some sort of feminizing processor that tenderized them, softened their harshest edges.

Even their definitions of what constituted maleness often included a sweet, unexpected element. One - a preoperative transsexual who had launched a highly profitable real estate business - expressed it like this: "A man is a person who can take responsibility, who can be the master of the situation. If you set him down all alone in the taiga, he would be able to survive for months. But everyone has their own style. You can be very soft and feminine but still be completely male."

I couldn't imagine a standard-issue Russian man uttering that last touching line.

Oleg was truly a remarkable creature - forthright, funny, and very much a man. He was barely over five feet tall, but he carried himself with a good - natured swagger and a brash energy that boomed across the room. A conductor on trains between Moscow and St. Petersburg, he arrived at the apartment of a mutual acquaintance dressed in his work clothes: blue jacket, dark pants, and an oversized shirt that concealed even the suggestion of breasts.

Tragedy had laced Oleg's life. Abandoned by his mother, he spent many of his early years, like Oksana, in an orphanage. By the age of six, he realized - with horror and shame - that he would not be growing a penis. Still, the child insisted that everyone call him Oleg rather than Olga, the name on his birth certificate; and in referring to himself he used the masculine declensions of verbs and other parts of speech. When he was thirteen, his mother resurfaced briefly and dumped her three - year - old daughter in Oleg's care. The two children lived in attics and basements for a year until a kindly man found them hiding in his dacha. He took them in and sent them to school.

A woman in her thirties introduced the teenage Oleg to sex, and after that he regularly sought out female partners. When he was seventeen, he met a girl two years younger at a health spa, fell in love with her and tricked a priest into marrying them. "I convinced him that no one else would marry us because we were underage," recalled Oleg happily. "The priest thought that I was a young man. He didn't try to undress me and see whether it was really so. So he registered our union. I ordered a special suit, and put on a dress coat. She wore a ball gown. It was wonderful."

Oleg and his wife, Olga, spent eight years together and raised Oleg's sister. Olga considered herself a straight woman and regarded Oleg as her husband. But a year before Oleg and I met, Olga died of a congenital heart defect; her passing devastated Oleg, who attempted suicide and spent two months in a psychiatric ward. Now the pain had finally started to subside; an acquaintance had recently brought Oleg to meetings of the gay group Wings, and he was finding comfort in the company of others.

On the evening we met, Oleg and I left the apartment of our friend together and strolled along the brim of a broad, leafy park. As we approached the metro, one of the glass doors in the vestibule swung toward us with surprising force. It smacked to the end of its powerful arc with a loud thunk - and shattered. Hundreds of glass shards tumbled to the ground. Instinctively, I jumped back. I glanced at Oleg. He just stood there, sturdy as a tree.

"Weren't you frightened?" I asked.

"Nah!"

We both laughed at the irony: This biological woman who felt she was a straight man apparently possessed far braver reflexes than the male homosexual.

That wasn't Oleg's only opportunity to assert his hard - won masculinity. We met several times, and the more we talked, the more I was struck by his chauvinistic attitudes. During his married life, his wife cooked, cleaned, and took care of all domestic chores; Oleg assumed the financial obligations and protected his wife from harm. He firmly believed that men and women thought differently.

"Women are capricious creatures, and they have a female logic," he confided. "For example, a woman sees a pretty thing, and thinks, 'Yes, that's pretty, I want it.' A man sees it and thinks, 'Yes, it's pretty, but how much does it cost?' When my wife and I would discuss things, I would set the tone. But she was very smart. Even if she knew that I wasn't right about something, she would allude to how she hoped it would be, and then I would come to that, as if it were my own idea."

When it came to sex, Oleg also played the dominant role. He demanded that his wife not sleep with anyone else, but he reserved the right to seduce as many women as he could. He was blunt about this double standard. "Women for me are sexual objects. If I like a woman, I'll keep her around for a while, but by the third time it's already not interesting to me. My wife never got jealous because she knew very well that I was not going anywhere."

One night I rode with Oleg to St. Petersburg on the train leaving Moscow at 1:13 a.m. He saw me as I stepped into his wagon, and his round, ruddy face flushed with delight. He ushered me into the conductor's cabin, which reeked of sweat and stale cigarette smoke.

Oleg cut slices of cheese and bread to nibble on with our cognac. I asked if he or his colleagues ever slept with those riding the train. Oleg grinned. "I had a contest one month with one of the others, a man, to see who could sleep with the most babes. He used an intellectual approach, but that didn't work so well. So I won. Had one almost every night."

Oleg described his seduction technique. "I look them over, pick one who seems bored and ask her if she'd like some tea. . . . Usually she says, sure, why not?" He slouched forward and leaned on his elbow in an aggressively masculine pose. "Then, after a while, I come on to them a bit. Sometimes they say right away, 'Oh, no, I have a husband, and a family.' I tell them we don't have to have sex - sometimes we just lie down together or hug. Of course, some of them find the sex satisfying. Woman is a creature of curiosity. Here's the logic she uses: 'I'm on a train, and I will never see this person again, and no one will know about this.'"

Had a biological male uttered similar statements, I would have found it boorish and offensive; in Oleg's case, I didn't. Maybe it was because he was so short, such an unthreatening presence. Or maybe I sensed that a bud of sweetness, an echo of femaleness - whatever that was - cushioned the sharp edge of his prejudices. That gentleness emerged in the way he spoke of the younger sister he had raised, the wife he had cherished despite his infidelities, the agony he suffered at her death.

I heard it, too, when he told me about his pregnancy.

Oleg and Olga had desired a child of their own. But Olga was afraid that her husband might stop loving her if she were carrying another man's baby, so the couple decided that Oleg should be the biological mother. They consulted a doctor, who explained about artificial insemination. A friend of Oleg's agreed to be the sperm donor. Though Oleg despised menstruation as a reminder of his female physiology, the months of his pregnancy were among the happiest of his life.

"I felt like I was carrying a child we had conceived together." He spoke wistfully. "We dreamed of this, we discussed how we would raise him, where he would go to school. We bought clothes and other baby things. I calculated how I could earn more money, so that my little child wouldn't need for anything. I had planned to sign papers to give up my maternal rights so that my wife could adopt him as his mother. And I would be the papa."

When Oleg was four months pregnant, the sperm donor died suddenly from a leukemia - related blood disorder. Oleg's doctor feared that the baby would also be sick and convinced him to have an abortion. Before the couple could find another donor and try again, Olga died. By the time Oleg and I met, he was already considering getting pregnant again - a way, he believed, of honoring his wife's memory by fulfilling the dream they had shared.

Though firmly convinced of his maleness, Oleg had little desire to have a sex - change operation or even to take male hormones. He just didn't see the point. "What's the difference whether I have a penis or not?" He shrugged. "I don't need it, I get by without it. My friends say, 'Oleg, you were born to be a man, not a woman.' But I realized that with an operation I wouldn't be as popular. First, there's my height. A man should be a man, tall. And also, when a girl meets me as a girl, she's not afraid that I will hit on her like a man. But if I had an operation, I would lose my aplomb, my individuality."

As I listened to Oleg and other transsexuals tell their stories, I tried to imagine the pressures of growing up knowing that my body wasn't mine. I could not. All I could do was marvel at how those I met had survived, at their guts and fortitude and humor. Only one - Ivan - appeared to have buckled under the psychological strain.

I don't think I met anyone else in all my travels who was quite as disturbed as Ivan. He believed he had been an SS officer in a past incarnation. That was why he'd decided to get the swastika tattoo, which he showed me by rolling up the sleeve of his black shirt.

Ivan had curly brown hair, a wiry build, pale lips. His raspy voice would have made his biological sex difficult to determine if I hadn't already known. He was strong, too. When a mutual acquaintance introduced us, Ivan shook my hand so vigorously that I almost tripped. He demanded that I feel the muscles of his chest, his stomach; and insisted on an arm - wrestling match. I lost.

Ivan spiked his speech with curses and spits. He constantly invoked the cosmos and his sexual prowess and God. Women and gay men, he told me within minutes of our introduction, offered to pay him to make love to them, and of course the artificial penis he'd constructed himself worked as well as the real thing. Even better, maybe. If he closed his eyes, in fact, it almost seemed like he had his own. He could actually feel it, like a limb that was cut off but that you imagine is still there.

As Ivan spoke of sex, he bounced on his feet and shook his arms. His face twitched in ecstasy and madness. "It's erect, the blood rushes, such dizziness! And you lose consciousness, it's indescribable, the universe sends me a cosmic orgasm. I fly out of my body completely. I can come ten times, twenty. God gave us the capacity to love. A man is not impotent so long as he has a tongue and even one finger - with that he can work so that a woman is in heaven!"

Ivan hated heterosexual men and punched them out when he thought they needed it. He had even killed one - or so he said. He especially derided their sexual abilities. All they knew how to do, he spat, was climb onto women, have their orgasm and roll over. They couldn't understand a woman's body the way he could. They didn't have the tenderness and warmth of transsexuals or even lesbians, who really knew how to pleasure women. . . .

When Ivan wasn't riffing about sex, he was fretting about his girlfriend, Galya. Though Ivan was thirty - three, Galya was only fifteen. She had dropped out of school to sell flowers for a living, and they had met on the street. He explained to her that he was a transsexual; then they fell in love. The relationship shocked her parents. When they could not succeed in breaking it up, they committed her to a psychiatric ward. This had happened a couple of weeks before Ivan and I met.

We agreed to get together again a few days later at Kazan Cathedral on Nevsky Prospect. At the appointed hour, I approached the church's massive columns, gold and glinting in the icy light of early spring. I heard my name and pivoted to my right; there was Ivan, flush and cocky and strutting toward me. Latched onto his arm was a young woman - not plump, exactly, but with a round, pliant figure that lacked the angular precision of adulthood.

Ivan beamed. "Hey, this is my babe!"

I looked at her. Galya was pretty, but in a frighteningly vague sort of way. Her eyes, pale and grey, gave no indication that she had ever entertained a provocative thought. Her makeup - eye shadow in two shades of purple, layers of blush, raspberry - colored lipstick - functioned as a mask. Throughout our conversation, she maintained an expression of stoic blankness. Sometimes, out of the corner of my eye, I sensed a ghost of a feeling flit across her face; by the time I turned my head, it was gone.

We sat on a bench in front of the cathedral. It was freezing out now, and I hoped they would invite me back to Ivan's place. That, as it turned out, was impossible. They were on the lam.

I had assumed that the hospital had released Galya. But, no - Ivan himself had sprung her. Galya related the story in a casual tone, as if there were nothing unusual about your transsexual boyfriend arriving at your hospital, telling your nurse he has a note for you, pulling a knife on her when she lets him in, cutting the telephone lines, grabbing the keys to your room, threatening to kill the nurse, locking her in the toilet and spiriting you off. "We were going to run away to the country, but then Ivan remembered that he had arranged to meet you today."

This apparently made perfect sense to her. I realized that Ivan's dedication to our rendezvous was somewhat greater than mine would have been under similar circumstances.

Ivan had marriage on his mind. He had obtained his official psychological diagnosis of transsexualism and hoped to change his passport soon. That, he said, would give him the right to wed Galya when she turned sixteen, which would free her from her parents' clutches.

He urged her to describe their first encounters. "Tell him how you came over to visit me and didn't understand why I didn't come on to you."

"I was very surprised," agreed Galya. Her voice was so low that I could barely hear her. "I thought maybe he was impotent or something. And then he explained about himself."

Now I was confused. "Wait, when you went to visit him you thought he was a woman, or a man?"

My question offended her. "I thought he was a man, of course. To me he is a man, what kind of woman could he be? I'm not a lesbian!"

"I'm also not a lesbian!" asserted Ivan.

"And did it bother you, that he was transsexual?" I asked.

"No, we hung out like a woman and a man, and not like a woman with a woman. He's very good to me. He's more attentive than other men. He brings me flowers. . . ."

The cold became unbearable. Ivan suggested that we go to a nearby cafe. As we walked, he whipped out an umbrella and wielded it like a machine gun, spraying imaginary bullets across the plaza. "If I was in America, I'd be a gangster!" His harsh laugh clattered against my ears.

In the cafe's vestibule, Ivan held forth. "I looked and looked and asked God to give me love," he yelled. "And now, for the first time in my thirty - three years, at the age of Jesus Christ, I understand what it is to love. . . . But the words to express my feelings haven't even been invented yet. This is not how Romeo loved Juliet but a million times more. My woman has the most beautiful lips, the most beautiful smile, the tenderest skin, the tenderest fingers. She's the most good - hearted, the most caring. . . . God gave us the ability to love, but only fools think it's all good. There are always problems. For love you must fight! Those are my last words. Am I right?"

"Absolutely right!" concurred Galya.

"My ideas, my soul, are already in the twenty - first century, but my body is still here," Ivan went on. "It's like we're in a dirty, stinking swamp. They're pulling us to the bottom, and I am trying to get us out. It made me furious that she was in that hospital. She is my woman, why should she be there? I had to get her out. That's what any real man would do."