I couldn’t make myself heard for fifty years. Not even the boy could hear me, the boy I lived inside. My vocal anatomy worked fine—larynx, mouth, lungs beneath my breasts—I just didn’t have the words. Nobody did, not in the sixties. I had to resort to signals. Most of them he missed.

I couldn’t make myself heard for fifty years, and then one day I could. Now I never shut up. Whole glossaries come out of my mouth. But it’s his story too, and I overwhelm him sometimes, so I’ll let him start.

*

Nobody told me I was supposed to meet with Mr. P.

You’d think they’d let new students know the important stuff up front, like which guidance counselor to see. But they never explained how it worked in junior high: Mrs. McMahon saw the girls, Mr. Palizza the boys.

Seeing Mr. P never occurred to me. My mother talked all the time, my father hardly ever, so I’d grown up speaking and thinking woman. Everyone wants a guidance counselor who speaks their language, so I signed up for Mrs. McMahon. I didn’t realize my mistake till the day of our first appointment, when my friend Jim and I walked to the teacher’s desk for hall passes. Jim looked at mine and then stared at me.

“You’re not seeing Mr. P?”

My face burned as I walked back to my desk. Soon afterward I made the change.

My first choice should have tipped me off to her presence inside me—it was one of her signals, right? But if you have no words for something you often assume there’s nothing there.

*

I gave him his first signal at age four, and he put on a dress in response. He saw an illustration in a children’s book, a girl in a dress leaning over, her bum exposed. Something about it plucked a chord inside him—well, inside me, if we’re being technical. But he went along with it.

That stunned me but it shouldn’t have. If you’re four and you want to wear a dress, you wear a dress, no matter what’s between your legs. Unless someone tells you not to, which must have happened soon after the dress wearing started because it was the sixties. Boys wore pants as surely as they saw Mr. P.

*

Sitting close to my father gave me the fidgets. No choice, though, not with hundreds of seventh-grade boys and their dads crammed into the school auditorium to watch a film about sex. My father’s silence unnerved me, but more than that, he exuded man: sweat, stubble, metal dust from the machine shop under his nails. I cringed away from the armrest we shared in those theater-style seats, where his arm took up all the space.

The film’s voiceover intoned the clinical terms as they appeared on the screen. “Mas-tur-BA-tion,” a calm baritone. “Noc-TUR-nal e-MISS-ion.” Afterward the boys asked questions about intercourse, but intercourse wasn’t in the film, so the answers baffled me. Stonewall had happened the summer before, but no one dared breathe the word gay, let alone any word (if they’d had one) to describe her.

The way I remember it, the swelter and the odor blended into a suffocating haze. Or maybe the suffocating part was the absence of that word, because I look back now and swear I hear her gasp for air.

Oh God, the smell of man. Yes, I remember. No wonder he cringed. For years I watched him flinch when his mother pushed him to kiss that barbed stubble goodnight. Sure, it grossed me out, but I didn’t recoil like he did: his chest tightened, his breath stopped, he—shriveled is the best word I’ve got. I’ve always been the stronger one.

And I didn’t expect to hear a word for me in that auditorium. Twelve years had inured me to the silence. I’m not saying I liked it: living that way infuriated me sometimes. Maybe that’s the gasp he heard: me, confronted once again with how it felt to be trapped, voiceless, inside him.

*

Mr. P was there the day I nearly passed out. He and I and a small group of other boys had put our desks in a circle to discuss sex, a follow-up to the film in the auditorium. The deeper we delved into the discussion the clammier the sweat on my forehead, and the whiter my face went. One of the boys walked me across the school to the nurse’s office, and somewhere in there a hall monitor met us, a tall girl with long hair. Through a fog I heard her talk with the boy.

“What happened?”

“Almost fainted.”

She whispered a gay slur but as a question about me, without a trace of malice. I wonder if it’s the only word she had. I needed to defend myself, not because the word was hurtful but because it was inaccurate: I liked girls, and in our junior high, no one could be allowed to think otherwise.

*

Well, the faint made sense, didn’t it? Back then, after all, it was an activity ascribed to girls.

He was never gay, not even close, though he spent time wondering. Gay was the only word we had to indicate something outside the norm. If you had a penis and suspected there was a girl inside you, you were a—what? We had to wait for the words to come, and until then I couldn’t speak. I just made him faint. Signals.

*

The mother paced her kitchen like a mad bull. Mostly I remember her volume: furious, turned all the way up, aimed at me and my girlfriend, who rushed out of the room in sobs.

We were close, this group of preteen friends, together for a weekend that included a lot of what we called necking. My girlfriend and I enjoyed our first-ever fondle, and our second, and our third: breasts, bums, klutzy, electrifying. Word got to the mother—not even my girlfriend’s mother, for God’s sake—and she knew all about preteen hormones, she did, and she was going to put a stop to it, she was. She ranted for a good twenty minutes, her eyes boring into us, all our friends and parents looking on.

*

Oh, that fucking woman. She set him back, what, twenty years? No, more than that: he never got over the sex-and-shame bit. So he almost fainted again when I told him, years later, how much sex means to me. I felt so bad for him. All those years he had to navigate the shame, no sense of the tingle that ate me up every single time, at the very first touch.

*

In junior high English we read The Yearling. All I remember is it took place over twelve months, it involved a boy and his deer, and at the end the deer died and the boy cried. The book stirred up a row in our class, and it broke down by gender.

“Unrealistic,” the boys complained. “No one changes that much in one year.”

“Oh yes they do!” said the girls.

I wonder how many of the girls had started their periods that year, because they obviously knew something we didn’t. My girl didn’t have a period, of course, being inside me and all, but what did she know? Maybe inside girls know all about outside girls.

*

He makes it sound all mystical, but the fact is I learned a ton about outside girls by listening to them. Or, rather, to outside women—this was long after junior high, in my early thirties—whom I met at church dinner parties. These dinners had a prescribed way of working: the women gathered in the kitchen to talk and prepare side dishes, the men retired to the deck to banter and grill. For a while he stuck with the men, but he couldn’t figure out their halting conversations, their one-liners, their long silences. I could have signaled it wasn’t his style, but he had to learn for himself.

Over time, shyly, he gravitated toward the kitchen. Childbirth, periods, osteoporosis, I learned it all there. And I learned it because these were no halting conversations: they flowed like the wine in front of every woman round the kitchen table. My God, I couldn’t get enough of it, and I don’t think he could either. This was a different kind of tingle: the kind you know is building toward something, and you can’t wait till it bursts out of you.

*

Which brings me to the day it burst out of me, the day I made myself heard at last.

It started when he painted his toenails—forty years after junior high, twenty years after the women in the kitchen. Call it divine inspiration, or what you will. One day he needed something to relieve stress, something wild and out there, and toenail painting sprang to mind. So he went and bought a bottle of Sally Hansen® Navy Baby and did it. I sent him another signal: a jolt up the spine.

That’s when he knew, really knew.

No one changes that much in one year. Sure, boys, sure. You know what? Sometimes it happens in an instant. And then the words start coming, and they turn into a force, and they bulldoze all the old ideas away.

-John Janelle Backman

John Janelle Backman (she/her) writes about gender identity, ancient spirituality, and wrinkles in the fabric of reality. Her personal essays have appeared in Catapult, the tiny journal, Tiferet Journal, Amethyst Review, and Psaltery & Lyre, among other places.