When I was eight, I developed a theory: if I were a boy, my mother would like me. I found, on a crumpled summer camp form under a school bus seat, a question about whether “your daughter” knew about menstruation or had menstruated. I’d never heard the term (I was in fourth grade but in 1966) so I asked the bus driver what it meant. He turned red and told me to ask my mother. I persisted; he refused to answer. My mother gasped, “You asked the bus driver?” She offered an account of which I understood little except “never speak of this with your brother.” Babies and blood seemed to be involved. At the dinner table, I brought up both, plus the new word, which I pronounced “menyoustration.” I failed to interest my brother but succeeded in enraging my mother. 

At age eight, I announced I was “a tomboy.” To me, the word conveyed physical strength, for I was weak, skinny, asthmatic. Watching Butch, the bully with the perpetual scowl on Our Gang Comedy, convinced me boys didn’t get their feelings hurt. Even wimpy Alfalfa seemed tough because he was a boy. If I couldn’t become an actual boy, I could try for tomboy.

“Sometimes I want to be called Honey but I think I might change my name to Bucky,” I told my mother. Watching her stiffen at the sound of both names, I thought of Butch swinging his fists and chose Bucky.

“You want a doctor to cut out your vagina and sew in a penis?” asked Mommy.

That sounded scary, also painful, and I said no. I stopped talking about being a boy. I was beginning to see that turning into a boy couldn’t transform her into the pie-baking warm mothers I saw on our black-and-white TV; I wanted one of those mothers to hug me and then turn into Mom. About two years later, it hurt when I got hit in the chest with a baseball. Small lumps were forming on my chest. I tried pounding them, but that hurt, and I stopped. Sometimes I wonder whether hitting my developing breasts caused the breast cancer I developed some fifty years later.

Girls in my class began to tease me because, in sixth grade, I still wore an undershirt. My classmates had trainer bras, lacy white garments sporting “gro-with-you” cups, an adorable rosebud between them. Everybody twanged everybody else’s bras from behind. The few lacking a bra fastener sank in popularity.

It was time to buy school shoes and I wanted a bra, too, but to get one, you’ve got to ask, so I did. Mom turned to Dad and said, “We’re going to get school shoes—and—” her eyes danced. Breathless with laughter, she elbowed him, wheezing, “Maybe a bra!”

The saleslady tried and failed to find one small enough for my ribcage. She shook her head: “You’ve got to let your puppies grow.” My mother’s gleeful look made me want to turn myself into a boy on the spot. To do so would have meant giving up the dresses from my grandmother, the dolls and trolls I still liked, but maybe Mom wouldn’t sneer.

Suppose I’d said, “Mom, I’m a boy,” and asked the pediatrician for puberty blockers. I picture myself sitting across from him, my mother beside me. He might have felt strong pressure to hand over substances that would shrink my breasts and enlarge my clitoris. But if I know him, he’d have said something like, “Have you chosen a new name and do you think you’ll like it as much as the name Melissa?” His eyes would have telegraphed: “I like you the way you are,” and that would have meant the world to me. He liked me even though I was skinny, and wore a Twiggy haircut and pale blue glasses with sparkles in the corners.

I’d have watched him and thought: Will I mind not being able to wear the dresses my grandmother got me? Would she mind? I guess she’d know boys don’t wear dresses. I’d have known Mom would feel pleased if I hated dresses. Would Mom mind if my grandmother bought me suits and bow ties instead? Then I’d have turned to Mom, sitting next to me in front of Dr. Silverman’s consulting room desk, and asked, “What about the name Bucky?”

I can see her turning bright eyes to me, giggling with rage. I’ve outfoxed her? I’ve embarrassed her? I’ve done something wrong? Maybe I’ve tried to please her and she’s angry because I’ve seen she would rather I never become a woman. She’s understood I want to be a child she loves, and will become a boy to accomplish this? Maybe she realizes I know how much she hates being a woman.

The medicines are there, the pills, the injections, and as the doctor explains how they work, alerting us to side effects, He’s offering a definite course of action, and my mother’s face is frightened. If I take these pills and these injections, I’m doing something she never did, or could do, and once I start, she can’t control things.

Let’s say a feeling of devil-may-care engulfs me, as it often did in my teenage years. Any change would make me feel better. At fourteen, I jumped into a stranger’s car and still feel lucky to have escaped with nothing worse than a forced, malodorous tongue kiss. Let’s say I start that course of Lupron and my body starts to change. Everyone at school cheers me on, the teachers, too. I’ve suddenly become a popular child, when I used to be the last one picked for a team, the one who wasn’t invited to birthday parties. I feel myself changing into something my mother has not made—something only I have made. I’m proud. I’ve given birth to myself as a boy. There’s the ghost of a regret that I’ll never actually give birth, never breastfeed, never be a mother. I push those fears away: everyone’s telling me, “You’re so brave.”

In my closet, where I still go to imagine I can get to Narnia, like the children who walk from a rack of fur coats to a magic winter land, the dresses still hang—and with the dresses, the memory of how pretty I felt wearing them, of how my mother didn’t like pretty.

But now I’m a boy with a testosterone-engorged clitoris, sometimes called a “peen,” since Dr. Silverman advises against bottom surgery. I’m relieved. I put the dresses my grandmother gave me in a box. But I can’t get them out of my head, and find I still feel shy around boys, feel breathless, and blush when I see one I like. I see myself developing into a girlish boy and saying I’m gay; then I’m selecting dandyish clothing that never makes me feel quite as good as the dresses. I hear myself putting down men in drag: dressing as a girl at this point would bring back all I’d lost. Year after year I’d maunder on, not daring to admit the mistake.

Or maybe I give up the medicine at fifteen, more or less recover but keep the gin-and-cigarettes voice. Maybe I have had the sense not to tell my mother I’d gotten my period—an event to which she reacted with the same disgust she awarded the dresses. This line of thought gets me to other “maybes”: Maybe, if I’d had a different mother, I’d have enjoyed the sight of my breasts. Maybe that mother would have sat with the Kotex boxes explaining things; maybe she’d be like the muffin-baking mom in the black-and-white Disney “Story of Menstruation,” who feels joy in her daughter’s growth.

“Menyoustration,” the fateful step toward womanhood, earned me her disregard, as did boyfriends, a husband, and marriage. “You can expect her to resent each child,” said a therapist. Mom does love my three children—as her pals, her playmates. Once in a while, she’ll say, “You’re more of a mother than I am!” The first time I felt astonished: Mom’s seeing I’m a better mother than she was? A moment later, she added, “Because you have three children and I had only two.” I guess she sees me as the champ in the knock-out round. A boy after all.

But I’d wanted her to help me understand “menyoustration.”

– Melissa Knox

Author’s Note: “Translation” is a meditation on doing anything for love and for a sense of self; I’m sad to see young women taking testosterone and having their healthy breasts cut off because they do not feel comfortable with their bodies.