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I was in my room, nodding over a book, when I was jolted awake by a loud crash. Someone was breaking into the house, and then pounding up the stairs with blood-curdling howls. It was my father, violating a restraining order. Six months earlier he had been barred from the premises. I heard wood splintering, a door giving way before a baseball bat. Then screams, a thudding noise. “Call the police,” my mother cried as she fled past my room. When I dialed 911, the dispatcher told me a squad car was on its way.
“Already?”
Yes, the dispatcher said. Some minutes earlier, an anonymous caller had reported “an intruder” at the same address.
The police arrived and an ambulance. The paramedics carried out on a stretcher the man my mother had recently begun seeing. He had been visiting that evening. His shirt was soaked in blood, and he had gone into shock. My father had attacked him with the baseball bat, then with the Swiss Army knife he always carried in his pocket. The stabbings, in the stomach, were multiple. It took the Peekskill Hospital’s ER doctors the better part of the night to stanch the bleeding. Getting the blood out of the house took longer. It was everywhere: on floors, walls, the landing, the stairs, the kitchen, the front hall. The living room looked like a scene out of Carrie, which, as it happened, had just come out that fall. When the house went on the market a year later, my mother and I were still trying to scrub stains from the carpet.
The night of his break-in, my father was treated for a superficial cut on the forehead and delivered to the county jail. He was released before morning. The next afternoon, he rang the bell of our next-door neighbor, wearing a slightly soiled head bandage, trussed up, as my mother put it later, “like the Spirit of ’76.” He was intent on purveying his side of the story: he’d entered the house to “save” his family from a trespasser. My father’s side prevailed, at least in the public forum. Two local newspapers (including one that my mother had begun writing for) ran items characterizing the night’s drama as a husband’s attempt to expel an intruder. The court reduced the charges to a misdemeanor and levied a small fine.
In the subsequent divorce trial, my father claimed to be the “wronged” husband. The judge acceded to my father’s request to pay no alimony and a mere $50 a week for the support of two children. My father also succeeded in having a paragraph inserted into the divorce decree that presented him as the injured party: by withdrawing her affections in the last months of their marriage, my mother had “endangered the defendant’s physical well being” and “caused the defendant to receive medical treatment and become ill.”
“I have had enough of impersonating a macho aggressive man that I have never been inside,” my father had written me. As I confronted, nearly three decades and nine time zones away, my father’s new self, it was hard for me to purge that image of the violent man from her new persona. Was I supposed to believe the one had been erased by the other, as handily as the divorce decree recast my father as the “endangered” victim? Could a new identity not only redeem but expunge its predecessor?
As I came of age in postwar America, the search for identity was assuming Holy Grail status, particularly for middle-class Americans seeking purchase in the new suburban sprawl. By the ’70s, “finding yourself” was the vaunted magic key, the portal to psychic well-being. In my own suburban town in Westchester County, it sometimes felt as if everyone I knew, myself included, was seeking guidance from books with titles like Quest for Identity, Self-Actualization, Be the Person You Were Meant to Be. Our teen center sponsored “encounter groups” where high schoolers could uncover their inner selfhood; local counseling services offered therapy sessions to “get in touch” with “the real you”; mothers in our neighborhood held consciousness-raising meetings to locate the “true” woman trapped inside the housedress. Liberating the repressed self was the ne plus ultra of the newly hatched women’s movement, as it was the clarion call for so many identity movements to follow. To fail in that quest was to suffer an “identity crisis,” the term of art minted by the reigning psychologist of the era, Erik Erikson.
But who is the person you “were meant to be”? Is who you are what you make of yourself, the self you fashion into being, or is it determined by your inheritance and all its fateful forces, genetic, familial, ethnic, religious, cultural, historical? In other words: is identity what you choose, or what you can’t escape?
If someone were to ask me to declare my identity, I’d say that, along with such ordinaries as nationality and profession, I am a woman and I am a Jew. Yet when I look deeper into either of these labels, I begin to doubt the grounds on which I can make the claim. I am a woman who has managed to bypass most of the rituals of traditional femininity. I didn’t have children. I didn’t yearn for maternity; my “biological clock” never alarmed me. I didn’t marry until well into middle age—and the wedding, to my boyfriend of twenty years, was a spur-of-the-moment affair at City Hall. I lack most domestic habits—I am an indifferent cook, rarely garden, never sew. I took up knitting for a while, though only after reading a feminist crafts book called Stitch ’n Bitch.
I am a Jew who knows next to nothing of Jewish law, ritual, prayers. At Passover seders, I mouth the first few words of the kiddush—with furtive peeks at the Haggadah’s phonetic rendition and only the dimmest sense of the meaning. I never attended Hebrew school; I wasn’t bat mitzvahed. We never belonged to the one synagogue in Yorktown Heights, which, anyway, was so loosey-goosey Reform it might as well have been Unitarian. I’m not, technically speaking, even Jewish. My mother is Jewish only on her father’s side, a lack of matrilineage that renders me gentile to all but the most liberal wing of the rabbinate.
So if my allegiance to these identities isn’t fused in observance and ritual, what is its source?
I am a Jew who grew up in a neighborhood populated with anti-Semites. I am a woman whose girlhood was steeped in the sexist stereotypes of early ’60s America. My sense of who I am, to the degree that I can locate its coordinates, seems to derive from a quality of resistance, a refusal to back down. If it’s threatened, I’ll assert it. My “identity” has quickened in those very places where it has been most under siege.
My neighborhood in Yorktown Heights was staunchly Catholic, mostly second-generation Irish and Italian, families who were one step out of the Bronx and eager to pull up the drawbridge against any other ethnicities or religions—in particular, blacks and Jews. In the mid-’60s, when a petition circulated to block a black family from buying a home on the street, my mother squared off against the petitioners. The family eventually bought the house; my mother remained the neighborhood pariah. Soon after we arrived, a boy down the street welcomed me by hurling rocks while yelling, “You’re a kike!” How he knew was a mystery: we’d shown no signs, and wouldn’t. My father made sure we aggressively celebrated Christmas and Easter and sent out holiday cards with Christian images (The Little Drummer Boy, Little Jesus in the Manger …). His eagerness to pass only reinforced my sense of grievance and, perversely, my commitment to an identity I barely understood. You could say that my Jewishness was bred by my father’s silence.
And my womanhood bred by my mother’s despair. When she gave up her job in the city (as an editor of a life-insurance periodical) and moved to the suburbs, my father awarded her the various accessories to go with her newly domesticated state: a dust mop, a housedress, hot rollers, a bouffant wig (with Styrofoam head stand, on which the hairpiece was left to languish), and a box of stationery printed with a new name that heralded the erasure of hers, “Mrs. Steven C. Faludi.” No doubt I learned some of my anti-nesting tendencies from my mother in this time. My father, for his part, was eager to present himself as a model of postwar American manhood, with wife and children as supporting cast, along with the convertible sports car (and before that, a Lincoln Continental), the saws and drills in the basement, the barbeque grill, the cigar boxes and pipe on the mantel, and the oversized armchair with a headrest in the living room that we all understood to be “his.” The chair was his throne, proof of his dominion and dominance over his quarter-acre crabgrass demesne. We were careful not to sit in it.
When I was in grade school, my father bought me a tabletop weaving loom. After a halfhearted effort that produced a couple of uneven fabric coasters and one miniature scarf, I took the loom off my desk and stashed it in the closet—to make room for my writing pads. Journalism was my calling from an early age. I perceived it, specifically, as something I did as a woman, an assertion of my female independence. I worked my way through stacks of library books on intrepid “girl reporters” and imagined myself in the role of various crusading female journalists, fictional and real, Harriet the Spy and His Girl Friday’s Hildy Johnson, Ida B. Wells and Ida Tarbell. In my schoolgirl fantasies, the incarnation of heroic womanhood was Nellie Bly exposing the horrors of Blackwell Island’s asylum for women, Martha Gellhorn infiltrating D-Day’s all-male press corps (and one-upping her war-correspondent husband, Ernest Hemingway). On the Little Red Riding Hood stage that my father had built, I turned the girl in the red cape into an investigative reporter uncovering the crimes of a wolf who was now the Big Bad Warmonger (it was the Nixon years). By fifth grade, I was championing my causes in my elementary school newspaper—for the Equal Rights Amendment and legal abortion—incurring the wrath of the John Birch Society, whose members denounced me before the school board as a propagator of loose morals and a “pinko Commie fascist.” The denunciations made me all the more a journalist, my sense of selfhood affirmed as that-in-my-makeup-that-someone-else-opposed. And all the more a defender of my gender. I asserted my fealty to women through my reportorial diatribes against the canon of womanly convention. I renounced the standards of femininity not to renounce my sex but to declare it. In short, I became a feminist.
That identity became explicit the day my teenaged self consumed Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room. I read that overwrought fulmination against suburban marriage in one sitting, shortly after my now-divorced mother had fled suburbia with her two children, resettling in a cramped two-bedroom apartment in the East Village in New York. But more accurately, my feminist consciousness emerged a season earlier, following a bloody night in a suburban house in 1976, seeing my mother unjustly demoted to “fallen” woman and my father falsely elevated to defender of home and hearth. I would spend the next many decades writing about the politics of women’s rights, always at that one remove of journalistic observer. My subject was feminism on the public stage, in the media and popular culture, legislative halls and corporate offices. But I never forgot its provenance: this was personal for me.
Feminism, according to the insistent mantra, is all about “choice.” Did I choose to be a feminist? Wasn’t it also what I inherited, what I made out of a childhood history I couldn’t control? I became an agitator for women’s equality in response to my father’s fury over his own crumbling sense of himself as a man in command of his wife and children. My identity as a feminist sprang from the wreckage of my father’s “identity crisis,” from his desperation to assert the masculine persona he had chosen. Feminism, as an avocation and a refuge, became the part of my life that I chose. The part I couldn’t escape was my father.
The term “identity” is a hall of mirrors, “as unfathomable as it is all-pervasive,” Erik Erikson asserted in 1968. He had coined the term (shortly before he coined the phrase “identity crisis”). But on the first page of his weighty tome on the subject, Identity: Youth and Crisis, he confessed he couldn’t define it. The best he could hazard was that “a sense” of identity felt like a “subjective sense of an invigorating sameness and continuity.”
A crisis seemed inevitable, given the murkiness of personal identity evident in subsequent definitions, like the one in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The fact that a person or thing is itself and not something else.” Over the years, attempts to come up with “identity theory” have foundered. In 1967, sociologist Nathan Leites bemoaned (as recounted by UCLA colleague and transsexual-treatment pioneer Robert Stoller), “The term identity has little use other than as fancy dress in which to disguise vagueness, ambiguity, tautologies, lack of clinical data, and poverty of explanation.” Mass popularization didn’t help. In a 1983 essay titled “Identifying Identity,” historian Philip Gleason observed: “As identity became more and more a cliché, its meaning grew progressively more diffuse, thereby encouraging increasingly loose and irresponsible usage. The depressing result is that a good deal of what passes for discussion of identity is little more than portentous incoherence.” And yet, for all its ambiguity, the question of identity would define and transfix Erikson’s age, and ours.
Identity as a concept didn’t enter psychological theory until after World War II. When Erikson searched for antecedents in the utterances of his professional forebears, he found that Sigmund Freud invoked the term seriously only once, in an address to the Society of B’nai B’rith in Vienna in 1926. The founding father of psychoanalysis was describing what made him Jewish: “neither faith nor national pride,” Freud confessed, but “many obscure emotional forces, which were the more powerful the less they could be expressed in words, as well as a clear consciousness of inner identity.” In short, he felt like a Jew but couldn’t say why.
Early on, Erikson counseled against the urge to define individual identity as something you acquire and display all by yourself. “Mere ‘roles’ played interchangeably, mere self-conscious ‘appearances,’ or mere strenuous ‘postures,’” he wrote, are not “the real thing,” although they are some of the prominent elements of “the ‘search for identity.’” A sturdier selfhood, he maintained, emerges from the interplay between self-development and a collective inheritance. “We cannot separate personal growth and communal change,” he wrote, “nor can we separate … the identity crisis in individual life and contemporary crises in historical development because the two help to define each other and are truly relative to each other.”
Just as it is impossible to separate your individual identity from your social identity, Erikson held, so is it necessary to synthesize your past with your present, to incorporate all aspects of your experience, even (or especially) the parts you prefer not to acknowledge. When someone tries to deny unwanted history, “the diverse and conflicting stages and aspects of life,” and insists instead on a “category-to-be-made-absolute,” Erikson cautioned, “he restructures himself and the world by taking recourse to what we may call totalism,” an inner tyranny in which an internal despot patrols “an absolute boundary,” maintaining it regardless of whether the new identity is organic or its components coherent.
Erikson famously failed to heed his own warning. In a 1975 article titled “Erik Erikson, the Man Who Invented Himself,” philosopher Marshall Berman, Erikson’s former graduate student, detected a disturbing absence in his mentor’s autobiographical writings: Erikson had scrubbed his past. The erasure began with the family name, Homburger, which he had first reduced to a middle initial, “H.,” then eliminated altogether. The deletion suggested to Berman a more disturbing equivocation:
As we unravel [Erikson’s] story, we discover something else he cannot bear to say: that he is a Jew. We infer that his mother, “nee Karla Abrahamsen,” was Jewish, and we read that his stepfather, Dr. Theodor Homburger, was not only a Jew, but a member of a synagogue. However, Erikson says of himself that as a child he didn’t look Jewish: blond and blue-eyed and “flagrantly tall,” he was jokingly “referred to as ‘goy’ in my stepfather’s temple.”
As an adult, Erikson reinforced that goyishness (along with marrying an Episcopalian minister’s daughter and displaying a crucifix on the wall of his Harvard study) by adopting a new and invented last name, one that implied not only gentile origins but self-genesis. “I made myself Erik’s son,” he told a friend. “It is better to be your own originator.”
Better, that is, if you succeeded in shucking your provenance. Had he? In a long letter to a social worker who had asked him to describe his religious faith, Erikson wrote, “I know that nobody who has grown up in a Jewish environment can ever be not-a-Jew, whether the Jewishness he experienced was defined by his family’s sense of history, by its religious observances, or, indeed, by the environment’s attitudes toward Jews.”
In Identity: Youth and Crisis, Erikson described a patient, a “tall, intelligent ranch owner” who had concealed his religious origins from everyone but his wife. Despite an outwardly successful life, he was plagued by “a network of compulsions and phobias” that derived from his childhood as an urban Jew. “His friends and adversaries, his elders and his inferiors all unknowingly played the roles of the German boys or the Irish gangs who had made the little Jewish boy miserable on his daily walk to school,” Erikson wrote. “This man’s analysis provided a sad commentary on the fact that [Nazi publisher Julius] Streicher’s presentation of an evil Jewish identity is no worse than that harbored by many a Jew,” even a Jew living as far from his collective past as the American West. “The patient in question sincerely felt that the only true savior for the Jews would be a plastic surgeon.”
Whenever as a child I’d press my father on his Jewish heritage, and its banishment from our suburban home, he would dismiss my questions with a vaguely regal wave of the hand and a look of withering condescension. “That’s not interesting,” he’d say. Or, one of his trademark conversation-enders, “A stupid thing.” Later, on my first visit to my father in Hungary, I’d ask why she’d changed the family name. In 1946, the Friedmans became the Faludis. It was eighteen-year-old István’s idea. My father chose Faludi, she told me, for two reasons: it was an old Magyar name, meaning “of the village” (true Magyars hail from the countryside), and she’d seen it roll by on the credits of so many Hungarian films she’d adored as a boy (“Processed by Kovács & Faludi”).
Had she also shed the name Friedman, I asked, because it sounded Jewish? My question prompted her usual gesture.
“I changed it because I was a Hungarian.” She corrected herself, “Because I am a Hungarian. One hundred percent Hungarian.”
I was someone with only the vaguest idea of what it meant to be a Jew who was nevertheless adamant that I was one. My father was someone reminded at every turn that she was a Jew, who was nevertheless adamant that her identity lay elsewhere.
6 (#ulink_ea9c6ab9-3db2-5f57-a2fe-5d1d12cc2c83)
It’s Not Me Anymore (#ulink_ea9c6ab9-3db2-5f57-a2fe-5d1d12cc2c83)
My father stood in the doorway in her favorite crimson bathrobe; she wore it every morning of my first visit. It had a monkish cowl and angel-wing sleeves. She called it “my Little Red Riding Hood outfit.” It wasn’t entirely closed. “What are you doing?”
“I’m”—my voice squeaked; I looked down at the receiver in my hand—“phoning someone.”
“Who?” She eyed me, suspicious.
“Just a friend of a friend,” I said guiltily, though I was telling the truth. “She lives in Pest. She wanted to meet me.”
“There’s no time,” my father said.
“I just—”
“You’re only here another week.”
I set down the receiver. No time? I thought. I’d been here four days, and we’d only left the house once—to pick up her new Web camera at Media Markt. My confinement had me wondering whether my father’s elaborate home security system was meant to keep burglars from invading or guests from escaping. She kept the gate in the security fence locked on both sides. Merely to step outside, I had to ask her for the key. Stefánie’s Schloss was starting to feel more like Dracula’s Castle, and as the days passed, I was acting more and more like the passive captive, a character in one of my father’s treasured fairy tales, Rapunzel in the tower. Why didn’t I finish dialing the phone number? When my father refused to visit her family’s old summer villa a half-block away—a place I was eager to see, having heard about it all my life—why didn’t I just go knock on the door? If she didn’t want to venture out, why didn’t I hike down the hill and catch the bus into town? Instead, I retreated to my room, made resentful cracks under my breath, and attempted furtive phone calls when my father was out of earshot. I was slipping back into that twelve-year-old self, timid and sullen, fearful of Daddy. Who was no longer Daddy.
Yet inside the ramparts my reclusive father seemed determined, even desperate, to come out of hiding, or to bring at least one aspect of herself out for inspection. That first week she’d led me up and down the stairs, unlocking closets and cabinets, modeling outfits, donning makeup, and reciting labels (“Max Factor English Rose Lip Gloss,” “Wet n Wild Cover-All Stick,” “Vogue Self-Adhesive 100%-European-Hair Lashes, Trimmed and Feathered”). She was introducing me to “Stefi,” as she preferred to style herself, displaying the evidence of what she called “my new identity.”
Including and especially the evidence of her new physique. The robe seemed always to be falling open. Or the blouse. Or the nightgown. Every morning, she’d summon me to her room for wardrobe counsel. “Do these shoes go with this purse?” she’d ask, more often than not standing in her underwear. What does it matter, I’d mutter to myself, we’re not going anywhere. Or she would barge into my room on some pretext—“I think I left my stockings in here”—to present her new body in a negligee. Her exhibitions felt more like invasions. She said she was “showing” herself. But as the shows piled up, so did my distrust. What lay behind the curtain of her new transparency?
“This is where I put the things I wore when I first started ‘dressing,’” my father said on the second morning of my visit. We were standing on the third-floor landing, before a large, gray-metal locker. She extracted from her apron pocket a key ring worthy of a prison warden. After a half dozen failed attempts and a lot of rattling, she found the one that opened the creaking door. The locker’s contents might have outfitted a Vegas burlesque show: a sequin-and-beaded magenta evening gown with sweep train, a princess party frock with wedding-cake layers of crinoline, a polka-dotted schoolgirl’s pinafore with matching apron, a pink tulle tutu, a diaphanous cape, a pink feather boa, a peek-a-boo baby-doll nightie with matching ruffled panties, a pair of white lace-up stiletto boots, a Bavarian dirndl, and wigs of various styles and shades—from Brunhilde braids to bleach-blond pageboy to Shirley Temple mop of curls. “Why do you keep this locked?” I asked.
“Waaall … These clothes are more”—she considered—“flamboyant. They are from before the operation. Before I became a laaady. Now I dress sedate.”
Another morning, my father summoned me to the two computers in her attic office. Under the eaves was her image palace. On one wall were two locked doors. The first led to her reconstructed photographic darkroom, which she had had crated and shipped from New York in the summer of 1990. And then never used. The digital age had made my father’s talent for “trick photography” with film and print obsolete. Behind the second door was more photo equipment, including her old and giant photo-print drum dryer. The main room contained still more photographic supplies, several studio lights and jumbo rolls of paper for the advertising shoots she no longer conducted. An aluminum frame to hold backdrops was bolted into the floor.
The floor-to-ceiling shelves that wrapped around the central room held a video library: more than two thousand DVD, VHS, and Beta tapes of Hollywood epics, romantic comedies, Disney animations, TV sitcoms, mountaineering documentaries, and, to my dismay, a full set of Leni Riefenstahl films. (“Okay, she was a Nazi,” my father conceded, “but a greaaat filmmaker!”) She also possessed a vast array of digitized NASA footage—she subscribed to the space agency’s daily e-mailed download—and a cache of flight-simulator games. At her request, I’d arrived with the latest edition of Microsoft’s “takeoffs and landings” video, an unnerving item to be carrying in my hand luggage so soon after 9/11. My father wanted me to buy it in the States to avoid the import tax.
Tucked into the far alcove was my father’s electronic command station. Here she trolled the blogosphere, Photoshopped her images, visited the lunar landscape, and piloted her virtual fighter jets. We fell into a routine the first week, sitting for hours every day in front of a computer monitor, my father at the keyboard, me in a folding chair by her side, reporter’s notebook and tape recorder at the ready. Some mornings she wanted me to see all the cross-dressing Web links she had bookmarked to “My Favorites” in the years leading up to her operation: “Costume Wigs,” “Fantasy Femmes,” “Gender Bender,” “Gender Heaven,” “Just Between Us Special Girls,” “Maid Service,” “Miss Elaine Transformations,” “Mrs. Silks,” “Paper Dolls,” “Petticoated.com,” “Pink Gladiolas,” “Sweet Chastity Online,” “T-Girl Shopping,” “Top Sissy Sites” …
“You can find everything on the Internet!” my father exulted.
The longer we spent in the third-floor garret viewing virtual non-reality, the more frantic I became to escape into the world beyond the perimeter. If I stood at the attic window and stretched on tiptoe, I could just make out, over the chestnut and fruit trees and down the sloping hills and across the river, Pest, that fabled cosmopolis, the historic venue of so much creative and cultural ferment. At the turn of the century, Pest had been host to a spectacular upwelling of artists and writers and musicians whose works had packed the museums and bookstalls and concert halls, who’d painted and scribbled and composed in the six hundred coffeehouses, published in the twenty-two daily newspapers and more than a dozen literary journals, filled the more than sixteen thousand seats of the city’s fast-proliferating theaters and opera and operetta houses, and transformed the identity of the long backward capital into the “Paris of Eastern Europe.” The city in my mind was the one I’d read about in John Lukács’s Budapest 1900, the one the London Times correspondent Henri de Blowitz described in the late 1890s: “Buda-Pest! The very word names an idea which is big with the future. It is synonymous with restored liberty, unfolding now at each forward step; it is the future opening up before a growing people.” Blowitz’s city, I knew, belonged to a time long past. Still, my mind somehow wanted to hitch the city’s old aspiration to my father’s current one. Even when I was growing up, I’d felt that a key to my father’s enigma must lie in that Emerald City of István Friedman’s birth. I still couldn’t dispel the notion that to understand Stefi, I had to see her in the world where he was from, visit the streets and landmarks and “royal apartment” that little Pista had inhabited. But Pest was down the hill, visible only on tiptoe.
On those mornings when we weren’t lost in NASA rocket launches or Gender Heaven beauty tips, we were inspecting the images she’d assembled under “My Pictures.” Few of them were actually her pictures; most had been lifted from the Web. An exception was her Screen Saver image, a photo of a servant girl in a French maid’s outfit, a pink bow in her platinum blond curls. She had one white stiletto heel thrust out and was reaching down to adjust a stocking. The chambermaid was my father, who’d taken a selfie standing in front of a mirror.
Then there were the montages: images she’d pulled from various Internet pages, into which she’d inserted herself. All that long experience doctoring fashion spreads for Vogue and Brides had found its final form: Stefi’s face atop a chiffon slip originally worn by a headless mannequin. Stefi implanted on the long legs of a woman ironing lingerie in a polka-dot apron. (“I added the apron,” she said.) Stefi transported into an online Christmas card of a girl wearing a red ruffle around her neck and not much else. Stefi in a pink tutu and ballet slippers, captured in mid plié. Stefi in another maid’s outfit, this one belonging to a little girl, who was being disciplined by a stern schoolmarm in tweeds and lace-up boots. The girl held the skirt up in back to reveal her frilly underwear.
“I did these before I had the operation,” my father said, “but it was too extreme. Transvestite pretension.”
The theme of “before” and “after” was a recurrent one in these viewing sessions. My father seemed intent on drawing a thick line between her pre- and post-op self, as though the matron respectability she’d now achieved renounced her earlier sex-kitten incarnations, made them into a “flamboyance” that she no longer needed or recognized.
“What’s that?” I asked, pointing to a link she’d bookmarked called FictionMania. I was hoping for narrative relief from the onslaught of images. “Oh, people make up these stories about themselves and post them on this site,” she said. “We don’t need to look at that.”
“Stories?” I pressed. I’d look it up later: FictionMania was one of the largest transgender fantasy sites on the Internet, a repository for more than twenty thousand trans-authored tales, the vast majority of them sexual. A popular story line involved a dominatrix (often a female relative) forcing a cowed man into feminine undergarments, dresses, and makeup. The genre had a name: “Forced Feminization Fiction.”
“You know, stories,” my father answered, “like they’re little boys and their mothers make them dress up as a girl as punishment and then their mothers spank them. And they have illustrations.” I reached for the mouse to click on the link. My father pushed my hand aside. “I wouldn’t even share that with a psychiatrist.” Not that she had one; she regarded psychiatry as one of those “stupid things” best given a wide berth. I asked if she had ever posted a story on the site.
“No, I just used some of the pictures they have on here. For my montages,” pasting her face onto one or another costumed playmate. She’d done more than that, though. Her upstairs hall closet contained stacks and stacks of file folders of forced feminization dramas she’d downloaded from FictionMania and similar sites, in which she’d montaged her names into the text (Steven “before,” Stefánie “after”). Her stash showed a predilection for subjugation and domestic service, often set in Victorian times: “Baroness Gloria, the Amazing Story of a Boy Turned Girl” (in which Aunt Margaret in Gay Nineties Berlin disciplines her nephew into becoming a corseted “real lady”) or “She Male Academy” (in which Mom sends her misbehaving son to the Lacy Academy for Young Ladies, a “vast mansion designed in the Victorian Gothic manner,” where whip-wielding mistresses exact a transformation: “Steven will become Stefánie; his bold, brash and arrogant male self will be destroyed and replaced with the dainty, mincing and helplessly ultra-feminine personality of a sissy slave girl”). Along with the altered downloads were a few stories my father had written herself. Her character stayed true to form, submitting to the directives of a chief housekeeper while an all-female crew of iron-handed maids order “Steven” into baby-doll nighties, Mary Jane shoes, and a French chambermaid’s uniform.
At the computer, my father had moved on to another page of links. “I haven’t looked at that website for two years at least,” she said of FictionMania. “It was just a—, like a hobby. Like I used to smoke cigars, but I gave it up. This was all before.”
“And now?”
“Now I’m a real woman,” she said. “But I keep these pictures as souvenirs. I put a lot of work into them; I don’t want to throw them out.”
She hadn’t stopped montaging; she’d only shifted genres. She showed me a few of her more recent constructions. Now she was the lady of the house: Stefánie in a long pleated skirt and high-necked bodice. Stefánie with hair swept up into a prim bun and holding the sort of large sensible pocketbook favored by Her Majesty the Queen of England. This was certainly a persona shift from the “sissy slave girl” in Mary Janes, or at least an age adjustment. And yet, it seemed less a repudiation of her erotica collection than a culmination of it.
The sex fantasies and lingerie catalogs in my father’s file folders in the hall closet were commingled with printouts of downloaded how-to manuals on gender metamorphosis (“The Art of Walking in Extreme Heels”), many of them narrated by virtual dominatrixes: “This is your first step on your journey into femininity, a journey that will change your life,” read the introduction to “Sissy Station,” a twenty-three-step electronic instructional on “finding your true self” by becoming a woman. “You will be humiliated and embarrassed. Most of all, you will be feminized.” The journey required, in different stages, applying multiple coats of red toenail polish every four days, beribboning testicles, and practicing submission with sex toys before a mirror.
“There isn’t any one way to be a trans,” a trans friend cautioned me some years later. “I think of transsexuality as one big room with many doors leading into it.” My father’s chosen door was distinct. But the big room, like any condo, had its covenants and restrictions. A reigning tenet of modern transgenderism holds that gender identity and sexuality are two separate realms, not to be confused. “Being transgender has nothing to do with sexual orientation, sex, or genitalia,” an online informational site instructs typically. “Transgender is strictly about gender identity.” Yet, here in my father’s file folders was a record of her earliest steps toward gender parthenogenesis, expressed in vividly sexual terms. And here in FictionMania and Sissy Station and the vast electronic literature of forced feminization fiction was a transgender id in which becoming a woman was thoroughly sexualized, in which femininity was related in terms of bondage and humiliation and orgasm, and the transformation from one gender to another was eroticized at every step. How to tease the two apart?
My father clicked the mouse and a greeting card popped up: Stefi’s visage pasted onto a frilled lace gown, hands clutching a bouquet, above the card’s preprinted message, “Wish I could be a bridesmaid on your Wedding Day!”
“You sent this card?”
“Not this one. I’ve sent others.”
“To?” Who, I wondered, was the bride she wished she “could be a bridesmaid” for?
“Other trans friends,” my father said.
“People you know?”
“People who have websites. You know, ‘Internet friends.’”
My father had bookmarked some of these “friends’” websites: Annaliese from Austria who, according to her page, “dresses sexy,” is “a size 12,” and “loves to go shopping.” Margit from Sweden, who “loves” bustiers, plush teddy bears, and “the color pink.” Genevieve of Germany, whose blog featured shots of herself topless on a nude beach and a timeline of “my second birth.”
“These pictures aren’t retouched,” my father said, unimpressed. “They aren’t as good as mine.”
“Where are your family photographs?” I asked. Suddenly, I’d had all I could handle of bustiers and second births. “From your childhood.”
My father gave her dismissive wave. “I don’t look at those.”
“But where are they?”
Silence. Then, airily: “Oh, somewhere.”
“Somewhere where?”
She shrugged, kept clicking through her images. Finally: “I keep all the old stuff, the important documents, in the basement. In a lockbox.”
“Could I see them?”
“It’s irrelevant,” she said. “It’s not me anymore.”
I looked at the clock; the day was half over. Day Five in the fortress.
“Dad, Stefi, please,” I said. “Let’s go out. You can show me the places you love in the city. Show me where you used to go in Pest as a child.”
“It doesn’t pay to live in the past,” my father said. “‘Get rid of old friends, make the new!’”
“I don’t think that’s how it goes,” I said. At any rate, I was here to see if I could make a new sort of friend: her. If only she could drop her age-old obstinance long enough to allow it. But our interactions were persistently one way: instead of mutual exchange, a force-fed guided tour of frou-frou fashions and hard-drive fantasies. When was she going to let in the daughter she wouldn’t let out?
“I don’t want to go to old places,” my father said. “It’s not interesting.”
“It interests me,” I said, hating my whininess, my own age-old obstinance.
“You are off the subject,” she said, tapping an insistent pink-polished nail on my notepad. “I’m Stefi now.”
One late afternoon, we stood in the kitchen, my father peeling an apple with her latest Swiss Army pocket knife. It was the “ladies’” version, she noted, with an emery board and cuticle scissors.
“Can I ask you a question?” my father said.
I nodded, hopeful. She was never the one who asked the questions. Maybe this was the start of an actual conversation.
“Can you leave your door open?” she said. “You close it every night when you go to bed.”
I drew back, speechless.
“Can you leave it open?”
“Why?”
“Because I want to be treated as a woman. I want to be able to walk around without clothes and for you to treat it normally.”
“Women don’t ‘normally’ walk around naked,” I said.
The blade snapped shut, and the conversational opportunity, if that’s what it had been, shut with it. She returned her ladies’ knife to an apron pocket.
That night, I closed the bedroom door. Then I reconsidered, and opened it a crack. As much as her intrusions disturbed me, I sensed that she wasn’t really targeting me. Or, if she was, it was only me as a mirror. After a while, a hesitant knock.
