Stuck in the Middle With You: A Memoir of Parenting in Three Genders (21 page)

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN:
Wow. What a beautiful home. Although I guess I thought your furniture was going to be—

B
ARBARA
S
PIEGEL:
Little?

JFB:
Smaller.

BS:
I changed my furniture because I knew you were coming. [
Laughs
] Actually it’s kind of funny. I’ve moved nineteen times in my life. So the concept is just crazy. I’m going to customize everything in my house? Seriously? I mean, kids ask me the same question. “Is your house little?” And I’m like, “No. Because then, it’s like I’ve gotta find another dwarf family to buy it.”

JFB:
So help me understand the dilemma that mothers and fathers with achondroplasia face in terms of deciding to form a family. Dwarves have to spin a kind of genetic roulette wheel when you have a child with someone else who shares the condition. Right?

BS:
Right. Goodness, my husband and I both have achondroplasia, so we stand a 50 percent chance of passing it off to our child. We have a twenty-five percent chance of the child being average size, which is all fine and dandy. But then we also have a twenty-five percent chance of the child being double dominant, inheriting the achondroplastic gene, the FGFR3 gene, from both parents. And that’s fatal.

JFB:
So it’s [a] fifty percent chance that your child will be born like you. A twenty-five percent chance that the child will be of average size. And a twenty-five percent chance that the child will be stillborn.

Those are kind of frightening odds. How do little people deal with it?

BS:
Well, it’s even more complicated than that. Because if you’re giving birth, the chances are pretty good it’s going to be a C-section. Our pelvis can’t do that.

JFB:
Wow.

BS:
Well, in a way it’s awesome. Because you don’t have to do labor.

I told my doctor, “I’ll let you know when I’m done,” and he said, “You should carry till thirty-nine weeks,” and I was like, “I’m telling you now, I will not. Just my luck, I’d go that long and the thing would be poppin’ out.”

JFB:
But when you first conceive a child, there’s no way of knowing if it’s going to be like you, or if it’s going to be—what do I say?

BS:
We say “average-sized person.”

JFB:
An average-sized person, or if it’s going to be stillborn.

BS:
They told us our middle child, Alexandra, was going to be average-size at first. There was a mix-up at the lab.

JFB:
Were you feeling disappointed? Or relieved? Or what?

BS:
I was concerned about her future. If she was going to be a dwarf, then there was no problem. Whereas now she was going to be different than us.

I know how society can be.

I was also concerned for my own physical capabilities. As a baby, she’s going to be all long and lanky. How was I going to manage that?

Then, a week later, I get a phone call from the doctor’s office, “Your daughter is not average size. She’s going to have achondroplasia,” and
I said, “I’m—I’m sorry, what?” They mixed up our genetic stuff with somebody else’s and I guess when the diagnosis came back for this average-size couple they probably did the, you know, “What the hell?”

At that point, my husband and I decided we were going to take it to another testing facility, because I didn’t want them calling me, in another week, and going, “Oh, you know what, that baby that you’ve named in your belly now? It’s double dominant,” because when you have that double-dominant gene and you know ahead of time, there are choices that can be made.

JFB:
The double dominant means the child will be stillborn.

BS:
Yeah. And so some people would choose not to carry that out.

JFB:
Is that a common choice with people with achondroplasia?

BS:
If it is it’s not talked about.

JFB:
But you’d think it would be talked about.

BS:
Most people go through with it. Whether it’s for religious reasons or “I’m forty years old. I don’t think my body’s ever going to get pregnant again. I want to be a mother, whether it’s for four days or four hours.”

JFB:
Moms choose that, even knowing that they will lose the baby, because they just want to have the experience of being a mom? Even for such a short time?

BS:
Yes. Or they just truly believe that it is a life and it’s not their job to take that life. Whenever divine intervention decides the life is over, that’s when it is. There are a whole bunch of different reasons people might go through with it.

But a lot of people don’t want to roll those dice. One of our children is adopted.

JFB:
It’s a genetic—

BS:
Mutation. Although I hate that word. It makes me sad, like there’s something wrong with me. But, whatever. It’s a genetic mutation, it’s not me, per se.

But I should say that adopting a child is rolling the dice too. Our adopted daughter is from Russia. We had to answer questions like, “Well, you have one child already, why do you want to have another one?”

JFB:
What was your answer to that question?

BS:
Because we fell in love with her.

JFB:
Do you ever feel that people—average-size people—in their experience with you, in some ways, are taught to be more loving, because they see in you another way of being human?

BS:
Absolutely not. My friends deal with the same shit as anybody else.

There are some neighbors that—I wouldn’t say they’re nicer to me, because this is not exactly the warmest and fuzziest neighborhood. At least not for us. One neighbor, when we first moved in, actually we were at a party. In somebody’s drunken stupor, they sat next to me, on the stairs, at the club, and were like, “You know, I think it’s really cool that you’re little.”

I looked at them and I was like, “Well, that’s good that that’s cool because there’s not jack I can do about it.”

JFB:
What was it like for you to fall in love the first time? Did it change the way you saw yourself?

BS:
My parents were—messed up. They were average-size people. They divorced when I was three. I lived with my mother for a couple of years and then—due to an unstable household—I then went to live with my father and stepmother.

I would often hear from my stepmom, “If you were average-size, you would have guys knocking down the door for you, but guys aren’t going to give you the time of day.”

My stepmother would remind me how I wasn’t like everyone else. It was a very screwed-up situation. But I grew up confident despite her. Like I was going to prove her wrong.

JFB:
For people who believe that no one’s going to fall in love with them, that first romance does change who you are. I—I don’t know if you’ve figured this out already, but I’m transgender.

BS:
Yeah. I read up about you.

JFB:
You did? Okay. So, I’ve been comparing our experiences in my head. For me, being different was—well, it was invisible for a long time. But I still had that feeling—no one’s going to fall in love with me. As for now, well. Invisibility is a luxury which neither you nor I actually get.

BS:
When you’re a little person, you don’t meet people eye to eye.

JFB:
Eye to eye?

BS:
I’m always having to look up at average-sized people. I remember that’s how I met my ex-husband—he’s a little person too.

JFB:
How did you meet?

BS:
I was taking out the garbage. He was walking by. I was cleaning out a dead woman’s apartment.

JFB:
Wow. Romantic!

BS:
I know. Our fairy tale. Right there on the streets of New York, me hauling out the trash.

JFB:
Did you date a lot of other little people, back when you were single?

BS:
Almost never. We got more attention, the two of us being together, than if it was just me.

JFB:
And attention was a bad thing?

BS:
It was annoying because it felt condescending. Because it was like, “Oh, how cute!” “Oh, how cute”? I mean, really?! Why is it cute? If a man and woman get married and have children, in the average-size people, it’s, “Oh, that’s wonderful, congratulations.” But with us, it was, “Oh, it’s so great that you found each other.”

[
Talia crawls over to her mother, and Barbara picks her up. For a moment she looks at the child in her arms
.]

JFB:
So what do you imagine for the future? What do you hope for your daughter?

BS:
That she can be as well adjusted as her sisters are. And that when she gets older, that she can kick some ass.

TIMOTHY KREIDER

© Timothy Kreider

She told me that she couldn’t really bear to see pictures of soldiers killed in Iraq or Afghanistan because, for all she knew, I might be one of them
.

Tim Kreider
and I have been friends for over twenty-five years. For years he was a political cartoonist before turning to essays; his most recent book,
We Learn Nothing
, was published by Free Press (Simon & Schuster) in June 2012 and contained a short essay on the changes in our friendship in the wake of my gender shift. Kreider, forty-four at the time of this conversation, also wrote about the revelations of finding his biological mother and his unexpected half sisters in the essay “Sister World.” We met in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel in October of 2011 to talk about biology and destiny.

J
ENNIFER
F
INNEY
B
OYLAN:
Here we are in the lobby of the lovely Algonquin, where Tim is eating barbecued pork sliders—

T
IMOTHY
K
REIDER
: Just like Dorothy Parker used to eat.

JFB:
It was in this lobby that you first met me
en femme
.

TK:
You were not only a lady but were drinking a very ladylike drink. It was something in a secondary color with fruit and a parasol, and I got a big, honking martini.

JFB:
Yeah. Were you disappointed?

TK:
Disappointed? What do you mean?

JFB:
The fact that I would be the kind of woman who would drink drinks with a parasol.

TK:
No. I guess I figured as long as you’re going to be a woman, you might as well go whole hog.

I remember sitting in this lobby with you. At moments it was weirdly normal, and at other moments, it felt like the LSD was kicking in.

JFB:
Is there any more tea?

TK:
I’m sorry. I took it all.

JFB:
Oh, we’ll get some more hot water from the waiter.

TK:
Good luck with that.

JFB:
So I remember asking, a long time ago, “Do you ever want to go find your biological parents?”

I remember you kind of looked at me. You said, with what seemed to me like disdain, “I have parents. Why would I want to find some strangers? I have a mom and a dad, and they’re good parents.”

How did that change?

TK:
[
To waiter
] Hi. Could we get another pot of hot water, please? Thank you, sir.

You know, I felt, in many ways, I’d won the parent lottery, and I think I was a little more conscious of that than people who happen to be born to great parents because it had been, at one time, such a crap-shoot. I mean, there’s a whole room of infants that they had to choose one from.

And it’s got to be like going to [a] pound, you know, like, “Oh, this one has a floppy ear. Let’s get him.” So I lucked out, I felt. They were very smart. They were kind. They were funny in different ways, and they encouraged all my interests even though they weren’t all interests that they shared or understood.