Fortysomething   By Melissa Tawn   It was Alice Carter’s birthday: fortysomething. She sat in her favorite easy chair, a drink in hand, and thought back on her life. Birthdays are the time one takes stock.

It was Alice Carter’s birthday: fortysomething. She sat in her favorite easy chair, a drink in hand, and thought back on her life. Birthdays are the time one takes stock.

She had been born Alan, a boy, though inside she knew that she was really a girl. At one point she tried to explain this to her parents, tried to get them to understand, but they were unable to do so. This was in the days before the internet and the local public library was very unhelpful when it came to information about what, as she was later to learn, was called transsexualism. She hid her feelings as best she could, and suffered from her parents, her siblings, and her schoolmates when she did not conform to the expected boy stereotype. That whole period in her life was so painful to remember, that, even now, Alice preferred to fast-forward through it.

After high school, Alice had started college, but could not concentrate on her studies. The college library, however, did have information which helped her, and she finally wrote a pain-filled letter to the author of an article in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, who was kind enough to put her in touch with a colleague in the city where Alice was studying. Thus, slowly, she began the long journey to become what she knew she was destined to be.

When she turned 21, Alice (then still Alan) gained control of a small trust fund which her grandfather had left her in his will. This money, which was intended to finance her professional education (her grandfather had been a lawyer and hoped that his grandson would continue in his footsteps), went instead to finance her transition. She began appearing in public as a woman, at first sparingly, then often, then full-time. She underwent facial feminization surgery, surgery on her vocal chords, and finally sexual reassignment surgery. All the time she was under the care of psychiatrists and counselors. By the time Alice was 25, she was legally a woman, and had sex organs which nobody other than a gynecologist could distinguish from those of a genetic female. She had arrived at the end of the rainbow and her dreams, so she felt, had been realized. She had no doubt that she was the luckiest woman alive.

Those were heady years. Alice loved to go to clubs dressed as a girl. First she went to gay clubs, then clubs for cross dressers and transsexuals, and finally — after her SRS — to pickup clubs for young singles. She was popular and a good dancer, and had more than a few flings and one-night stands. However, she had only two real romantic episodes in her life. The first was with Stuart, a young and promising engineer. She fell madly in love with him. He loved her too, and after going together for five months, he proposed marriage to her. She accepted, but then told him her secret, namely that she was a post-op transsexual, and he was in total shock. The next day, he called her and said that he just couldn’t handle the situation, and that it was best to break off the engagement. They never met face-to-face again, and when she learned that, a month later, he had resigned his job and moved to California, she accepted the news with resignation, and cried herself to sleep.

Two years after that, Alice did get married to Thomas, a low-echelon insurance executive who was not fazed when she revealed her secret to him, and said he loved her all the more for it. However, their sex life turned out to be much less satisfying than she had hoped, and there seemed to be a shadow constantly intruding on their married life. Then, less than a year and a half after the wedding, she caught him in bed with his (male) personal trainer, and realized that he had married her precisely because, in his eyes, she wasn’t really a woman at all. The divorce was speedy and uncontested. The divorce settlement stated explicitly that she would go back to using her maiden name.

By the time she turned 30, Alice concentrated less on her social life and more on work. She had managed to go back to college and finish a business degree, though her grades were not that good. Still, she was offered a position as a management intern with F&S Industries, the leading local manufacturer. (“F&S” stands for “Feldhausen and Schoentaller”, the names of the original owners of what began as a simple machine shop.) By dint of hard work and concentration, she managed to get a permanent position and to rise to her present position of Assistant Director of Human Resources, of which she was very proud.

F&S Industries employed over 1,500 workers and was an international leader and innovator in the field of specialized couplings for industrial-scale pipes and hoses. In order to maintain its leading position, it repeatedly introduced the latest cutting-edge computerized tools to automate its production and managerial processes. The introduction of each new computerized manufacturing or administrative process entailed, unfortunately, a further decrease in the number of workers needed on the production line or in the executive offices, and it was Alice’s job to handle the repeated waves of firings. Behind her back, and sometimes to her face, she became known as “the F&S hatchet lady”. She explained to whomever was willing to listen was that the only alternative to what the company was doing was to lose its industrial position to Japanese or Korean competitors, which would lead to entire plants being closed, or to move the entire production process to Mexico or China. She really felt that the company should be praised for making the utmost effort to stay in America. However, most people were more concerned about their jobs and the support of their families, and weren’t really interested in her rationalizations.

With the money Alice received in her divorce settlement (which involved a lump-sum payment in lieu of alimony), she bought a very nice condominium apartment. She lived alone. At the beginning, she thought of buying a cat for company — she really liked cats -- but was afraid of the “spinster with a cat” stereotype, and so gave up the idea.

When she was young, Alice always dressed in a very fashionable manner. She had nice legs, and loved to show them off by wearing skirts as short as fashion would allow (and sometimes a bit shorter than that), as well as sandals or boots with heels as high as fashion would allow (and sometimes a bit higher than that). However, as she rose in the executive ranks at F&S, her wardrobe perforce began to center more and more on conservative and expensive business suits, with the skirt at knee length and with matching sensible (though definitely fashionable) shoes. Even her casual wear became more tailored and less flamboyant. After all, she did have an image to project.

Time passed. The notorious F&S hatchet lady was obviously not the most desirable of all dates, and after a while Alice understood that men were avoiding her. She had stopped going to singles clubs anyway (there had been a very unfortunate incident when she accidentally ran into somebody whom she had fired the week before; only the timely intervention of one of the bartenders prevented it from degenerating into physical violence), and her social life consisted mainly of invitations to parties and receptions from her colleagues or others in the business world, almost all of whom were married. She couldn’t really count many of them as friends. Almost everyone in the company feared that, one day, they will get the dreaded letter summoning them to Alice’s office to discuss “severance alternatives” and to hear an offer which they knew they could not refuse. The women her age whom she knew were inevitably married with children, and these tended to be the focus of their conversations. Unfortunately, Alice had not much to say about the state of the local schools or scout organizations.

Alice had tried joining organizations such as the local Friends of the Red Cross or the Civic Center Boosters, but found that they expected their members to either donate considerable sums of money or spend time getting others to donate money, and she could not afford the former nor was she particularly good at the latter. She met very few people whom she was interested in befriending, or who were interested in befriending her, and soon gave up.

A tear appeared on Alice’s cheek. This is not what the young Alan had dreamed of when, alone in his bed, he fantasized about one day achieving womanhood. Somehow, the glamour, the romance, and the beauty of it all had gotten lost along the way. Alan had been so concentrated on gender that he had lost his grasp on the life that went with it. “Is this the body I want?” turns out, in retrospect, not to be the same question as “Is this the life I want?”, nor are the answers to the two necessarily linked. Alan had been obsessed with becoming, externally, the female he knew he was internally. He had neither time nor inclination to worry about other aspects of his life. He never read much (other than purloined copies of fashion magazines) and never developed a hobby. He never learned how to play a musical instrument or even how to use a computer for anything other than basic surfing, chat, and role-playing games. He didn’t care about what went on in the community, the nation, the world. His life was one-dimensional and, after his sole dream had been realized, the number of dimensions decreased.

The situation was intolerable, and Alice resolved to act. She had to do something. She would buy a cat after all, stereotypes be damned!

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POSTSCRIPT: The author has had many occasions to talk to, and advise, several transsexuals in various stages of transition or post-transition. This story came out of those conversations.