For a 45-year-old novelist from Maine, whose loyal readership seldom felt pronoun-challenged in the past, it's been quite a ride. On radio shows, at readings, and in letters -- hundreds of letters -- Boylan's story has inspired an outpouring of empathy not easily predicted. Not by Boylan, anyway, or so she claims after sliding into a chair at a Portland beer-and-burger joint.
"I was never sure a book about changing genders would appeal to a mainstream audience," says Boylan, ordering a fizzy water. "But look, its central question is not, `How do I have a sex change?' It's, `How do I live an authentic life?' And everybody asks that."
Maybe. That's not all that people have been asking, though.
There are other questions, too, like how her spouse (given the pseudonym "Grace" in the book) feels about the gender swap now. Or how the couple's two sons are adjusting. Often the question boils down to: How could you? And if Boylan is emboldened to reverse that -- how could I not? she asks -- it would be pointless to deny the obvious. People don't quite know what to make of her. There is a lurid, amusement park-ride quality to Boylan's story that even close friends have struggled with, much as some keep conversationally tripping over "he" on their way to "she."
"Boylan's choice raises difficult questions about who a person is, what happiness is, and why gender matters so much," says Peter Frumkin, a documentary filmmaker who's known Boylan since college. "For a lot of us, it's been hard to accept. How well did we really know Jim? And why would he risk so many things that make most people happy, like a great job and wonderful marriage?"
From Daddy to Maddy
This much is indisputable: Sixteen months ago, Jennifer Finney Boylan was James Finney Boylan: author of three novels and a short-story collection; co-chairman of the English Department at Maine's Colby College; devoted husband and father; keyboardist for various bar-rock bands; cook, outdoorsman, and all-around good guy. Boylan's close pals included Richard Russo, the Pulitzer Prize-wining novelist and former Colby professor.
Much has changed, and much has not, since Boylan began hormone therapy three years ago. In June 2002, following a yearlong transitional phase she calls "boygirl" and an emotional coming-out to the Colby community, Jim Boylan underwent gender-reassignment surgery. His wife stood beside him in the Wisconsin hospital where the operation took place. So did Russo. While being wheeled into surgery, Boylan sang "I'm Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair." Today her long blond hair hangs past her shoulders.
Job and family life have survived, Boylan reports. So have friendships, such as the one with Russo, who contributed both moral support and a wry last chapter to Boylan's memoir. Her sons, who are 7 and 9, call Daddy "Maddy" now. She and Grace, a social worker, keep house together, raise the boys, and attend PTA meetings. The very model of a postmodern, transgendered nuclear family.
In person, all 6-feet-1 of her, Boylan is both witty and wary, academically earnest and hair-down honest. Asked whether she and Grace have taken other lovers, as the book speculates each might someday, Boylan says no -- yet doesn't elaborate. "I think we'll remain there for a while," she says quietly. "We've had enough trauma for now."
Will her sons be less accepting of "Maddy" a few years from now, perhaps as puberty approaches? "My sense is, we'll be revisiting this issue throughout their lives," Boylan replies, her cautious tone a hint that home life has been less sunny than the book and her public comments have implied. No parents, she adds, want to "make their childrens' lives any harder than they already are." (Boylan's partner declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Her more liberal-minded friends -- "overeducated smarty-pants," she calls them -- have been the first to question Boylan's sanity. Or to confuse gender identity with sexual orientation, which drives her nuts.
Gay and lesbian friends have not "gotten it" much better, she avers. "Who's been the most supportive? My mother, a conservative, religious Republican living in a blue-collar state," Boylan says with a laugh. As for the college where she has taught for 15 years, acceptance doesn't always translate into understanding.
"Colby is liberal compared to, say, North Korea. But it's not a particularly liberal place, either," Boylan says, sipping her water. "Most people who know nothing about [transsexualism] are convinced they're entitled to an opinion about it." On campus, she adds, there's a sense of relief that Jim Boylan -- who always seemed so secretive -- has gone away.
She ponders that for a moment. Jim's ghost seems to pass through her rearview mirror. "I was like a person being slowly electrocuted," says Jenny, "with all this wild energy that had no place to go."
Going public
Boylan's journey across gender lines joins a burgeoning pile of material related to transgender and transsexual themes (transgendered is an umbrella term for anyone who is gender variant, i.e. whose internal identity differs from his or her physiological gender; transsexual refers to those seeking to live permanently in the opposite gender, sometimes but not always through surgical alteration). Fresh examples can be found on film ("Boys Don't Cry"), on Broadway ("Hairspray"), and on television (HBO's "Normal"), as well as in books such as Noelle Holway's memoir "Dress Codes: Of Three Girlhoods -- My Mother's, My Father's, and Mine" and "The Phallus Palace," by Boston-area resident Dean Kotula, a male-to-female transsexual.
"We're like the annoying little sister to the gay and lesbian community," says Denise Leclair, executive director of the Waltham-based International Foundation for Gender Education. The IFGE publishes a quarterly newsletter and provides educational resources on gender issues. Founded in 1987, it grew out of a local club for cross-dressers. Today it helps draft legislation barring discrimination on the basis of gender identity. By some estimates there are as many as 40,000 male-to-female transsexuals, or MTFs, in the United States. Estimating the number of FTMs is harder because relatively few pursue the surgical option, according to "Phallus Palace" contributor Katherine Rachlin, a psychologist and gender specialist. Yet surveys conducted in Europe indicate the incidence of primary transsexualism is roughly equal between men and women, Rachlin writes.
"When I started the book, I was desperate for information," says Kotula, whose book contains graphic photos of FTM surgery. The media, and particularly shows such as Jerry Springer's, gravitate toward MTFs and the dramatic contrasts between "before" (male) and "after" (female), Kotula contends, whereas FTMs are "relatively invisible, more integrated into society."
Lives of secrecy and frustration are known to both, though. Like Kotula, who went through his transition period while working in an Oregon shipyard, Jim Boylan never set out to "become" a transsexual. He grew up near Philadelphia. By age 3, Jenny writes, she was aware of being trapped "in the wrong body." The burden grew as Boylan moved through adolescence. Jim wore his mother's clothing, yet he was "filled with a yearning that could not be quelled by rayon," writes Boylan.
A therapist told Boylan he was probably transsexual, but Boylan dismissed the diagnosis. Meanwhile, romances with the opposite sex fizzled. "Women seemed to detect some sort of inner struggle in me," Boylan writes, "some sort of feminine streak that kept them from getting too close." Nevertheless, Boylan asserts he was never attracted to boys.
After graduating from Wesleyan University in 1980, Boylan worked in publishing before enrolling in a master's degree program at Johns Hopkins. In Baltimore, he was "living as a woman about half the time," Boylan writes. He left school and resumed therapy. At 29, he fell madly in love with Grace and purged his closet of female clothing. The couple moved to Maine in 1988 when Boylan was hired to teach at Colby.
Boylan's debut novel, "The Planets," appeared in 1991. The couple's first child was born in 1992, the year Russo arrived at Colby. The Boylans and Russos became inseparable friends. When Russo published "Straight Man," his fourth novel, Boylan was shocked to find that a character closely resembling him was a cross-dresser. Russo swore it was just a coincidence. Boylan wasn't so sure.
Years later, Russo was among the first in whom Boylan confided about his gender issue. His transformation from male to female, especially pre-surgery, struck Russo as being like a piece of bad fiction: "mannered, studied, implausible," as the novelist wrote to Boylan.
One point made strongly by Boylan's book, however, is that neither success as a writer and teacher nor as a husband and father could suppress an urge so deeply felt. "Gender is many things, but one thing it is surely not is a hobby," Jenny writes. "Being female is not something you do because you're clever or postmodern, or because you're a deluded, deranged narcissist."
Medical protocol required Boylan to live as a woman for a full year prior to surgery. Besides hormones, he took voice lessons and underwent facial electrolysis. Swallowing estrogen "makes you want to talk about relationships and eat salad," Boylan writes, whereas a second, testosterone-lowering drug "makes you dislike the Three Stooges." The horror.
The operation itself, involving the construction of a vagina out of penile and scrotal tissue, was performed by Wisconsin cosmetic surgeon Dr. Eugene Schrang. Schrang promised Boylan he would be fully orgasmic as a woman. Boylan reports no complication from, or disappointments in, the results. Indeed, Jenny says, a doctor who examined her recently for a urinary tract infection never asked if she had once looked quite different anatomically.
In other respects the ride has been bumpy, Boylan admits. One transgendered friend committed suicide. Boylan's sister stopped speaking to Jim (hopeful they'll reconcile, Jenny avoids discussing her in interviews). At least one close friend bailed out on Boylan altogether. Grace's unconditional love, Boylan writes, has contained its share of sadness and anger, too. How could it not?
In June 2001, Boylan sent a letter to the Colby community. "I want to say it's all right to have a sense of humor about this," wrote Jim, but not for Jenny to become the "object of cruel jokes."
On campus, initial surprise and confusion over Boylan's announcement has given way to admiration for Boylan's forthright way of dealing with the gender change, according to Colby senior Kaitlin McCafferty, editor of the campus newspaper.
"The book has brought it back into focus again, but otherwise it had mostly died down," says McCafferty, who's taken courses with Boylan -- before and after -- and counts them among the best she's had at Colby. Though "it was kind of a shock at first" to see James transformed into Jenny, McCafferty adds, Boylan has not been the target of any widespread backlash. "She's the same teacher and the same person she always was, funny and supportive," says McCafferty. "I'd say the vast majority of the campus has not only accepted but embraced it."
Going public beyond the campus has been the next step. "People still think it's something from Mars," Boylan says during a two-hour interview. "The only times you see [transsexuals] is when they're offering themselves up to Jerry Springer to be beaten up and ridiculed. When people see me, they see a pretty average, middle-aged woman, though. A little on the tall side maybe. But I'm not a revolutionary -- although for me, living a normal life is a revolutionary act."
If the book has a deeper message, she adds, it's that being a transsexual is a condition one has, not something one wants.
"And no amount of praying or loving or wishing it were otherwise does anything," Boylan says emphatically. "The fact that we can't accept it, or think it's so strange, is sad. Although let me say this. It is strange. I think it's strange. That's why I fought against it. I didn't want to live the life of some nut. I wanted what everyone else wants, which is to fit. To live a life where I didn't matter so much. I don't want to become America's Transsexual. That's not the most important thing about me."
Joseph P. Kahn can be reached at jkahn@globe.com.
© Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company.
