Medium Brave

By Shelley Andrews-Hinders

Medium Brave is the poignant story of what it was like growing up transgender in 1950s Ohio--the challenges, the confusion, the struggle of growing up different twenty years before the term that defines that condition has even been created. Told with gentle humor, insight, and heartbreaking honesty, Medium Brave will touch the heart, inspire the mind, and encourage any soul still struggling with their authenticity and freedom to find out what it means to be medium brave.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Nov 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781647017002

Book preview

Chapter 1

Fail Spectacularly, Lick Wounds, Let Time Pass, Try Again, Succeed

1960

When I was nine, I got a bicycle for Christmas. It was my very first. I had wanted one for a long time, and I was thrilled that Santa had finally delivered. But, wow, was it ever big—and high. It was as big as the bikes my older brothers and sister rode. I was anxious to learn how to ride it, but I couldn’t sit on the seat and reach the ground at the same time. My mom said she thought Santa didn’t want to give me a bike that I would soon grow out of and, instead, had given me a sturdy bike I could grow into. Over and over, I begged my mom to help me learn how to ride, to which she replied, Michael, you would drive a saint crazy! I always knew that she had reached her exasperation point whenever she called me Michael, usually she just called me Mike. Driven to distraction, she gave my brother, Tom, the assignment.

Our driveway was gravel and pretty rough, and I wasn’t allowed to go on the road yet. What to do? My brother had a friend down the road a little ways whose family had a nicely paved, wide driveway. Tom said we would go there. Tom, six years my senior, wasn’t thrilled with being saddled as my bike-riding teacher, but he did hold the bike while I climbed up and tried to get a feel for sitting on the bike seat with my hands on the handlebars and my feet on the pedals. Tom’s advice? Just keep pedaling. Then he gave me a big push. I pedaled as best I could, but the bike was heavier than I could handle. Almost immediately, it began to wobble, and my feet slipped from the pedals, and everything was out of control. I could hear Tom behind me yelling Keep pedaling! Don’t stop pedaling! Moments later, the bike and I smashed into a brick wall that defined one end of his friend’s yard. I got a few cuts and bruises and cried all the way home as Tom wheeled the unharmed bike back home and into the garage where it stayed untouched for over a year, while I worried that there was something terribly wrong with me, that I had failed to learn something very basic, a skill that tons of kids younger than I had already mastered.

Much later, on a perfect summer day, when it seemed every kid in the neighborhood was out riding their bike, I finally decided to try once again. I was thrilled to realize that I had grown taller and could now sit on the seat and touch the ground with my tippy toes. In one glorious afternoon, I realized that I could balance and pedal and brake and not fall over or crash. That summer, I learned to enjoy one of the premiere pleasures of childhood: the intoxicating freedom of cruising down the road on my very own bike, the sun on my face, the wind in my hair, gliding fast without even holding on to the handlebars, baseball cards revving in the spokes like a motorcycle, popping the tar bubbles that repeatedly rose from the blacktop in the summer heat of southwest Ohio.

Years went by before I began to realize a distinct pattern in my life: fail spectacularly, lick wounds, let time pass, try again, succeed.

Chapter 2

A Few Questions, Dressing Up, Daddy and Baseball, and Daddy Dreams

Complete the following sentence:

If you’ve met one transgender, you’ve met

A. them all

B. one transgender

C. neither A nor B

The correct answer is B.

I can’t speak for anyone but myself and my own experience.

Q. When did you first know you were transgender?

A. Oh, that’s an easy one: When I was born. I saw this strange little hose between my legs and said, What the heck is that! I’m a girl! (I know a transgender woman who actually claims something like this.)

Right. (That’s a sarcastic use of italics.) Of course, you say things like that, otherwise, they won’t authorize your prescription for feminizing hormones.

Q. How long have you known?

A. Since I can remember, or, I’ve always known. Since I was five, four, three…the younger the better…otherwise you can’t get your hormones.

Q. Were you lying then?

A. No, yes, of course, yes and no, I don’t know. Honestly. Now that I’ve fully transitioned I’m in little danger of having my transgender status revoked. No one’s going to force me to get my penis back. My penis has graciously transitioned, magically, gracefully into a vagina, and I am forever grateful to it for its cooperation, and just for the record, never ever want to have a penis ever again no matter how many lifetimes I have left to live.

The world has changed significantly since I first came into it. I believe there are transgender children born today who assert themselves very early on and know without a doubt that they were born in the wrong body. My journey was different.

I have an early memory of proudly telling my older sister and her friend that I knew the difference between boys and girls. It was summer, and I wasn’t wearing a shirt. I used my little fists to squeeze together the flesh of my chubby chest to form a bosom. Little rascal me making my sister and her friend laugh and blush.

My earliest experience of gender dysphoria: I was four or five, standing in my parents’ bedroom, admiring Mom’s colorful, beautiful dresses and skirts and blouses, their variety and feel, comparing them to Dad’s sad, uniformly dull gray clothes. I remember in particular a green, white, and black pleated skirt with something like a frieze of black silhouetted charioteers at the bottom along the hem. I have actually wasted a whole afternoon trying to find the pattern on Google image search to no avail. In any case, it was obvious to me who had nicer clothes, and it was obvious whose clothes I’d rather be wearing.

I also have a memory of being examined closely by both parents after Saturday night bath because my little scrotum was empty and my testicles had not descended to where they were supposed to be. I noted the looks of concern and their whispers, but I was not in any pain, so I wondered if I might be able to parlay their concern into some ice cream before bedtime.

Sometime later, probably prompted by my begging and whining, my older brother Paul and I were allowed to get into a big box of Mom’s old clothes and started dressing up. Mom thought we looked pretty darn cute and took some pictures of us with the old Brownie viewfinder, photos of us mincing around the front yard in our too-long gowns and going-to-church hats, squinting and smiling for the camera.

When the pictures were developed and Dad got a look at them, he blew a fuse. They had a big fight, and I remember Dad’s coffee cup being thrown against the dining room wall, shattering, with rivulets of brown coffee running down. I don’t remember Mom or Dad saying anything about it to us directly, but I do know it was the last time we were ever afforded the chance to play dress up. I believe that I internalized the clear message: dressing in women’s clothing is wrong and dangerous and makes Mom and Dad fight.

In hindsight, I think that if Dad had never seen the pictures or if he had just recognized it as harmless child’s play that I would have continued to express myself freely and gravitated toward girl toys and girl activities. The sense of wrongdoing was compounded by the fact of my father’s illness. Although we did not know it yet, his body was riddled with cancer, and there were episodes of such anger and rage that Mom often wondered if cancer had spread to his brain and affected his thinking. There was an episode where twelve-year-old Tom was in charge of us while Mom and Dad were doing errands and a lamp got broken. The beating he gave Tom was shocking, and Mom had to beg him to stop.

So, Dad could be very scary and dangerous, and when he died, I couldn’t help wondering if I had done something to make it happen.

I know Freud would have a field day with this, but he’s dead and I’m not. Yet. By the way and apropos of nothing: I always thought a great name for a clothing boutique store for cross-dressers would be The Freudian Slip, don’t you?

Not long after the Big Fight, I seem to remember getting very boy-specific toys. A Little Shaver shaving kit just like Daddy’s, a police car that made a siren sound, a little handyman workbench with all the tools a little handyman needed, Paul and I getting boxing gloves for Christmas so we could learn how to fight. The only boxing match we ever had was on that Christmas Day, and Paul, taller, with longer arms, landed a punch to my face that sent me wailing in tears from the room. I never put the gloves on again. I know I sound like such a crybaby. I probably was, dammit. I must have been photogenic when I was crying since so many of my early photos were of me blubbering.

Sarah, my older sister, and Paul and I played together a lot during my preschool years. Mom would make us little picnic lunches that the three of us would take into the woods where we would find a log or a whole fallen tree for our picnic table. After eating, we would see how far we could walk and balance on the trunk or a branch without falling. I remember the three of us collecting fireflies together on warm summer nights or making bouquets from collected dandelions. We spent hours playing forty-fives on a little portable turntable, many of them for children, with stories that we would act out together. Hobbledy Horse is the only one I can remember from that time. I also have a memory of us playing the holy family. Sarah was Mary, Paul was Joseph, and I was Jesus. I remember play-acting the crucifixion with me in just my underwear, being nailed to the chest of drawers. It induced in me neither a messianic complex nor a desire to be a martyr.

Due to the closeness of our ages, we were our own playgroup. I remember playing with Sarah’s dolls like Betsy Wetsy (oh, my gosh, a doll that could drink and pee just like a real baby!) and Tiny Tears and Raggedy Ann. This was a few years before Barbie’s time. There were also show dolls in fancy dresses that lined a shelf in Sarah’s room that none of us, not even Sarah, were ever allowed to play with; they were only to be looked at.

On the previous page is a picture of Paul’s first day of kindergarten. My cousin Suzy and her mom, Aunt Annie, had come visiting, and I was very happy to borrow Suzy’s doll. Suzy had two older sisters, Maribeth and Becky, and we loved making visits to their farm for homemade ice cream and for a hide-and-seek-type game that we would all play after dark. Whenever we had the chance to play with them, I felt happy and free and just one of them.

I remember Sarah got an Easy-Bake Oven for Christmas, and the excitement of making our very own little cakes, and the disappointment of waiting forever for them to get done. In some metaphorical toy store of the heart, that little cake of mine is still baking. Not quite done!

Sarah had a scrapbook with little cartoons and jokes in the margins that hinted at what was to come in the life of a teenage girl—a world of poodle skirts and cashmere sweaters and saddle shoes and cheerleader outfits with short pleated skirts and pompoms and long talks on the telephone with a boyfriend who sends you Valentines and wants to take you for a drive in his convertible or treat you to an ice-cream float at the local malt shop. We would look at the pictures and imagine what it would be like to live that life. I don’t think I thought of myself as a girl or a boy in those moments. We were just kids imagining; but in many ways, Sarah was my role model.

I would often get up early in the morning and go to Sarah’s room, and if she wasn’t too annoyed with me for disturbing her sleep, we would just hang out under the covers, talking about nothing and everything. After the Big Fight, however, such early morning visits were suddenly forbidden.

It was not as though I went around the house pouting all the time because I couldn’t do only girl things. I did boy things too. I played with cars and trucks. In time, I learned to climb trees and play cowboys and Indians. In time, I would get toy soldiers and set them up to do battle. The majority of my play involved pretending, and as time went by, I found myself spending more and more time alone, in an activity or game of my own, where I had control of the process and the outcome.

Besides Sarah and Paul, I had two older brothers: Tom, six years my senior (who gave me the big push on my new bike), and Dave, twelve years older. Tom had his own paper route and was a Boy Scout. Dave drove his own car and dated lots of pretty girls and was soon to graduate from high school and join the Navy. They were in a totally different category of being from us. They were almost adults, and we were clearly children.

If there was one thing that brought us all together, it was baseball. Mom always said that Daddy was a pretty good pitcher, who played for a lot of pretty bad teams. He was 6'4" and was probably an imposing opponent in his prime. Family legend has it that he had been scouted and invited to try out for the Saint Louis Browns (now the Baltimore Orioles). This was during WWII, and there was a shortage of Major League talent, but a work-related injury to his throwing hand ruined his ability to grip the ball and throw as he had before. Another version of the story was that he was afraid that if he didn’t make the team, he would get drafted. In the end, he enlisted in the Navy to avoid the draft and maintain a modicum of control over where he would be sent (a submarine school in Connecticut). Still, he taught us all the fundamentals of the game, catching and throwing and hitting the ball and loving the game. That was before the cancer that prematurely ended his life sent him into its final death spiral.

I have few memories of my father because so much of the last few years of his life were spent in and out of hospitals. I will always remember his last words to me: I have to get better, so we can play baseball again. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen. A few days after my only visit with him in the hospital, he passed away. He was thirty-nine.

One version of heaven for me has always been: all of us playing baseball together where he is the permanent pitcher, and the game goes on forever. In that heaven, I am neither boy nor girl. I am just Daddy’s child, and he’s proud of me. The baseball-themed movie Field of Dreams with its final reconciliation scene where Ray Kinsella and his father played a game of catch has always and will always make me cry. Whenever I was asked what I was going to be when I grew up, I always said, A baseball player. Gender had nothing to do with it. It had everything to do with wanting to honor my father’s spirit. The only problem was, after playing on a series of losing little league teams throughout my childhood, I came to realize that I just wasn’t very good, and I had to give up the baseball dream.

Speaking of dreams, a few years after my father died, I had a lucid dream in which he was suddenly alive again. It was my first dream of this kind, and it was simply electric. He appeared from behind a huge red curtain like it was a game show, and he was the grand prize. It felt as though marching bands were playing and angel choirs were singing, and the air was filled with confetti and fireworks and cheering, all at the same time. Daddy was alive! Our family had won the grand prize! Daddy was back, and everything was going to be fine!

No, even better. Things were going to be great! I was so excited and happy that I couldn’t even begin to think about how it was possible. It was just this fantastic miracle, and it was happening to us. When I woke up the next morning, it just crushed me to realize it had only been a dream.

A few years after that, I had another dream, very similar to the first one, the same excitement and our incredulous happiness. But this time, amid all the celebration that was going on, a thought stuck in my head like a little black shadow. The thought was that Daddy had been away for a while now, and he would have some catching up to do. The world wasn’t the same one he had left behind. Still, the miracle had happened, and everything was going to be great, and the next morning when I woke, the world was washed out and colorless once more.

After that, I dreamed the same dream once or twice more. I remember the last time I had the dream. I was just beginning college. In the middle of the dream, I was very aware that a lot of time had passed since Daddy had lived, and that it was now up to me to bring him up to speed on all that was happening in the world. Once I became his teacher, and our roles reversed, I guess my psyche surrendered the need to have him return to rescue me and the rest of the family. This may have been the last time I ever dreamed about him. I was finally able to let him go.

I was only seven when he died. I have one solitary memory of ever sitting on my father’s lap. It was a Sunday evening, and I’d already been put to bed, but the TV was loud, and I couldn’t sleep, and he indulged me for once and let me crawl up on his lap. I don’t know the show they were watching, only the scratchiness of his face, his Daddy smell, the feel of his arms around me for a while, in the darkness, by the light of the old black-and-white TV screen. How many times have I summoned that moment of stillness? That moment of closeness? Hundreds, maybe thousands of times, always searching for additional clues, some new details that I