Samantha Allen - Love & Estrogen (The Real Thing Collection)

Two Ways to Read

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L ove and estrogen are both drugs. I recommend taking them together.

The morning of the day I first saw her, I slipped on a polyester dress the same color as the oblong emerald pills I had been swallowing three times a day for eight months, softening my skin, puffing up my cheeks, ferrying fat to my hips and breasts. Second puberty is what transgender people call the hormonal transition processand that Monday in June found me a quarter of the way through my own at the already liminal age of twenty-six.

The Kinsey Institute had awarded me a fellowship to study sex, of all things, for the summer at their famed archives in Bloomington, Indiana. The invitation was an unmissable research opportunity. But it was also an excuse to hide my molten, shape-shifting self in a town far away from the people who knew me before my transitionaway from anyone, reallyand come back changed. I was not expecting to get waylaid in Bloomington, much less laid. Sex, I had thought, would stay on the page.

I walked through Indiana Universitys campus that Monday morning to the sprawling gothic building that the Kinsey Institute calls home, prepared for yet another day of hibernation in the library. This had been my routine since I arrivedporing through box after box of precious artifacts with little human contact, save for asking the taciturn staffers who guarded the archives to bring me more of the obscure 1980s fetish newsletters I was studying. Researching sexuality and gender had become my convoluted mode of self-discovery after college; for a time, it was easier to encounter myself in the pages of The Transgender Studies Reader and in the highfalutin words of queer theory texts than to accept that I had to physically change. But three years into my doctoral program in womens studies at Emory University in Atlanta, I turned the abstract into reality: I stopped studying women and admitted I was one.

After I took the elevator up to the Kinsey library, I settled into a well-worn chair in the tiny reading room, then spread my papers out in front of me in haphazard piles on the wooden table. The room was almost empty that day, as it had been most days, but there was a newcomer at its only other table: a young woman in tortoiseshell glasses with a deep shade of mauve on her lips. I noticed her. But she didnt notice me, I would later learn, until I got up to use the rooms ancient photocopier.

Just as I had done every afternoon before she arrived, I gathered the newsletters I had set aside to copy and half tiptoed the five steps around my table to that old machine, pressed up against the wall in the middle of the room. This time, though, there were two prurient eyes tracking me as I walked, as I lifted the copier lid, and as I bent all five feet eleven inches of my lanky transsexual self over the glass. The first thing she saw had been flat before I started taking hormones: my butt. She still remembers the way that cheap synthetic dress clung to the contours of my morphing body.

Two more days passed of us studying in that cramped reading roomme and this strangermy smut strewn across one table, hers across the other. We didnt speak a word and never once caught each others gaze, but we were both sensitive to the others presence like two bats sharing the same filthy cave.

I learned her nameCoreyfrom the label beneath the shelf where she kept her books, deducing from titles like Bound and Gagged and The Politics of Lust that she was there to study feminist pornography.

But my natural shyness was only compounded by the anxiety of being so visibly transgender. I felt unfit to be seen, like an amusement park ride under refurbishment, waiting for hormones to finish their construction work. The silicone breast forms I was wearing in the meantime were obvious. My hair was still growing out from the last time I shaved my head, in a moment of self-hate, months before beginning my transition. And beneath the weight of my bodys changing proportions, my gait was more like a clumsy baby giraffes than a gazelles.

I had structured every day so far around avoiding people: I studied at the Kinsey Institute until its five oclock closing time. I took the elevator alone. And without fail, I picked up a deep-dish pizza at Mother Bears restaurant across the street to take back to the basement I had rented for the summer from a local grad student. There, in a dim bedroom with a drab tile floor and bare blue walls, I ate a few slices, watched MasterChef , and called it a night.

But that Wednesday, when five oclock rolled around, this stranger followed me into the elevator, seemingly by coincidence but with an urgency in her steps that hinted otherwise. My routine would never be the same again.

When you meet the love of your life in an elevator, you have a nice dinner storysomething like the tales told by the old couples whose interviews frame When Harry Met Sally . When you meet the love of your life, who happens to be both breathtaking and queer, in the elevator of an Indiana sex library at the start of a gender transition, you never shut up about it. I havent yet. Stories like this arent supposed to happen to women like me.

I had b een conditioned to believe that transgender women are unlovable freaks. In school, our identity is reduced to a cruel taunt: tranny. On TV, we are punchlines. And in films as divergent as Ace Ventura and The Crying Game , we are the characters who make men throw up after they unknowingly kiss us orGod forbidsleep with us. At once hypersexualized and devalued, alternatingly irresistible and repulsive, there is no neutral ground left for usonly paradox. We are, as transgender scholar Susan Stryker once put it, abject creatures, the morbidly fascinating monsters at the margins of humanity itself.

I was carrying two and a half decades of that messaging with me when I got into the elevator with Corey that Wednesday. Upon coming out as transgender to my Mormon mother the year before, I heard her wonder aloud whether anyone would ever be in a relationship with me again if I went through with my transition. I pushed back against the ideaIll be fine, Mombut secretly that same fear was gnawing at the inside of my skull. In fact, for years, I had allowed my dread at the thought of being alone to keep me from becoming myself.

Who would pick me? I thought.

Always a romantic, often to a fault, I was scared the answer would be no one.

In 2012, I made peace with the better half of a devils bargain: I could either transition and risk a solitary life or I could keep pretending to be a man and allow gender dysphoriathe clinical term for the psychological disjuncture I felt between my womanhood and my body to keep wearing me down. At the end of one road lay loneliness; down the other, further depression with all its possible repercussions.

The thin veneer of self-confidence I wore at the Kinsey Institute in the summer of 2013 was barely enough to cover how grotesque I felt, like a misshapen piece of pottery abandoned in media res , full of awkward angles and discordant features. It never would have occurred to me that anyone would have been checking me out, examining the only visible asset that estrogen had bestowed on me by that point.