“Schindler’s List”
By Pauline Wendy Phillips
When I became an adolescent and began to develop sexually, I developed all the secondary female sex characteristics except a bust. I developed female spine curvature, hips, waist, rear, and pubic dimples on the lower back, indicating female muscular development. And my pants had to be drawn in at the waist 2″ to 3″ inches by a tailor to make them fit. And my belt became too big. So I punched more holes in it, then later got a smaller belt. I wore big-boy-size shirts and pants long after my age suggested I should wear men’s sizes. Male clothing salespeople commented on this. My weight got up to 175 lbs. when I was a junior in high school, but I lost 10 lbs. from a week-long illness, and never gained it back till long after marriage. As an adult, when I bought a new suit for my brother’s wedding, the salesperson commented on how hard it was to fit me.
I grew no hair on my chest like Dad or my brothers, except a few hairs around my nipples, which many girls and women normally have. With my female muscular development, all efforts at a health ranch to “build me up” or my own efforts to take a muscle-building course failed, except to strengthen my arms.
My arms or legs were not male-like hairy. I was slow in growing facial hair and postponed shaving as long as I could until a male high school classmate asked me when I was going to shave. I don’t recall having any noticeable pubic hair until after I was married; and then, except for a few stray hairs, it was essentially triangular (female), rather than diamond-shaped (male).
After marriage when hair appeared noticeably on my legs for the first time, I shaved it off just as I had seen my wife do; she got after me and said not to do it anymore. So I didn’t, but I still wanted to. Both my parents and each of my three brothers and three sisters were tall, the males being 6′ or taller. But my enlarged feet were still very much smaller in length and width than Dad’s or my three brothers, all of whom had large feet.
When I became employed at the health ranch and began to buy my own clothes, and no longer lived with my parents, I began to wear look-alike sandals and shoes for men and women. I wanted to wear the actual women’s style and size but held back. When I put up such a fuss at Sears about the men’s slip-on shoes I was trying on being too wide, I’m sure the salesperson sold me a women’s look-alike pair and size which fit right. They were an 8D. But from their physical size, cut, appearance, and fit I was certain they were the women’s style and size. After fitting them on me, he told me to wait, and after some time he returned with the shoes. I figured he did something to the labeling inside to disguise the fact that they were women’s shoes. When I got back to the ranch, the owner’s sister commented my shoes looked too small, but I assured her they fit fine. I wanted the salesperson to sell me women’s shoes without me asking for them!
When I moved into my youngest sister’s former bedroom when she was away at college, I noticed a pair of her old size 8B saddle shoes in a box in the closet, and I tried them on. They fit somewhat tight. Later I buckled my belt up very tight around my waist in bed, wishing I had even a smaller waist.
About then I forced my small penis (when hard) up into my skin-covered vagina-like cavity. It was hard going at first, but suddenly something gave way inside, and it was easy after that to hide it there, whether it was hard or soft. I figured that what split was the same thing more or less as the barrier in most virgin females’ vaginas.
When I returned home from working at the health ranch, I looked in the catalogs for some women’s penny loafers to wear to work. I tried to hide just what I was looking for when anyone came around, but my brother (whom I later learned was a crossdresser) seemed to take more interest in what I was doing than I thought was “normal” for a man. Perhaps he had taken a liking to the small shoes I was already wearing to work. They were the ones that I got at Sears when I worked at the ranch. When the shoes came in the mail and I tried them on, my brother seemed to be there taking it all in and asking questions.
After I got a city job, I began buying women’s loafers size 9A and wearing them to work. Both men and women commented favorably about them. My justification for this was that my feet were too narrow to wear men’s or even boys’ shoes. The size 9A shoes were too tight to walk to and from the Pacific Electric depot or to stand in all day. I got ingrown toenails and blisters. I even put pieces of metal in the back inside my socks to keep the top of the backs from cutting into my heel. So I later got size 9B.
At the health ranch’s dairy, I had met a large Dutch woman working there who said her feet were so large that she had to wear men’s shoes, the largest women’s size then being size 9. So I figured I could do the same thing in reverse. I adopted literally the saying, “If the shoe fits, wear it!”
One day when I walked home after work from the P.E. station behind two girls, I noticed how they stepped up onto the curb with their toes rather than with their heel or whole foot, tensing their foot in the process to help raise them up. I wanted to step up the same way and began to imitate that way of stepping.
For a while I was on an organic-food kick, and I gradually lost weight till I weighed only around 145 lbs. or less. I wore men’s socks for many years, but I liked them to be nylon, orlon, or acrylic rather than cotton or wool.
Once I tried selling vitamins house to house. In the company sales headquarters building, I once saw a sales representative there who had tiny feet. So I felt justified all the more to wear women’s shoes.
One day I was sitting on my bed in my bedroom and my girlfriend was sitting on a chair. When I asked her then to marry me, at first she said no. She said that although she felt honored I had asked her, she didn’t love me enough. So I told her I loved her enough to marry her even if she didn’t love me. This broke down her defense, and she agreed to marry me. But ever after I had the fear in the back of my mind that eventually she would either quit loving me or find a man she loved more and leave me.
Before I married, I called my fiancée’s attention to the fact that I wore women’s penny loafers. I compared them with the men’s shoes in a mail-order catalog. I said I didn’t want to have any secrets between us. My excuse for wearing such shoes was because I had small feet, that men’s shoes were too wide or otherwise ill-fitting. And she accepted the idea, saying that the men’s and women’s loafers looked about the same. However, the loafers I wore had thinner soles than men’s loafers or other men’s shoes had then. And the top was lower cut than the men’s shoes.
After I became engaged, my fiancée returned to her home state of Texas. She knew I had worn women’s loafers in the past. I once wrote her I hadn’t gotten my laundry done. And that if she had been here (California), I could have borrowed a pair of her panties to wear. When she got my letter, she read it while she was standing in the cafeteria line at work. She laughed so hard about what I said that someone asked her what she was laughing about. She replied something vague to cover up what she had read.
Our courtship and marriage was accomplished under abnormal cultural, social, religious, and environmental circumstances. She had to suggest or first move on almost everything except taking a car ride or a walk. I acted more like best girlfriend to best girlfriend than boy to girl or man to woman. And both of us were abnormally naïve about sexuality to deal properly with the situation, although both of us sensed at some point that something was not “right.” I had blocked many of my childhood experiences from my mind and didn’t relate them to my situation then.
But because of our religious beliefs we went ahead despite the sexuality/gender problems. While dating my girlfriend, and later fiancée, I had had plenty of opportunities to have sex, but never did. When I confessed once that earlier I had felt like having sex one night out in the grass, she said she had wanted me to. I told myself my refraining from having sex was due to not believing premarital sex was right. But there was much more to it than that.
Shortly before we married, my fiancée measured me for a new suit for our wedding. As she did so, she commented about my small waist, wide hips, and protruding rear, and that she thought I needed to gain weight.
On our wedding day, I offered my fiancée the chance to back out of marrying me if she wanted to, but she wanted to go ahead with our marriage plans. I thought marriage might solve my sexuality/gender problems. But, even though we had very many happy times together for several years, marriage was really the beginning of sorrows—for both of us! I wanted to be and dress more and more female more of the time in more places than she would allow. I also liked to sit down to urinate. My excuse was that it was cleaner because nothing splashed onto the walls, the floor, or my clothes.
We talked over the matter of crossdressing considerably. And during my eight years of marriage I endlessly questioned my wife about virtually everything female and feminine. I watched her like a hawk to learn as much as was possible to learn. Since my grandmothers, mother, sisters, and teachers didn’t teach me how to act and dress as a girl or a woman, except for one grandmother trying to teach me how to walk, I used my wife to teach me. I learned a great deal. And quickly. And remembered it. And now for over 29 years I have lived by it.
After I married I immediately was not satisfied to just wear women’s loafers, which were a 10 AA then. I wanted to and began to wear women’s panties, elastic briefs, pajamas, pulled-up-cuffs cuffed anklets, boots, and slippers. When my wife bought a new long elastic brief, I asked her what she was going to do with the old one. She said it was for me. So I wore it regularly till it was completely worn out.
Once when I was dressed in a regular elastic brief over my panties with my penis tucked inside me, when we were lying on the bed, she tried to get into my panties to make love. But it was hard going for her! Once I bought my wife a package of new satin nylon panties of various colors which she was glad to get. But when I told her I had also gotten a similar package of nylon panties for myself, she said that took away some of the happiness she had from getting hers. I once told her later that I liked my panties to be a size smaller than recommended. She said she did, too.
Then I began to wear women’s thongs, sandals, and canvas shoes which were near enough in style and color to men’s that I thought I could get by without negative comment. If anyone did comment, either men or women, it was always complementary or just that I had small shoes, such as my male cousin did when I visited him. My response to such comments was that I had small feet.
I also wore clear or pink-tinted nail polish on long fingernails. In high school and junior college I had studied the pipe organ, then quit it for a time. But after I began to play the organ again, I kept my fingernails short. One can’t have everything!
Once I got some women’s sandals that had a snap-on heel strap. I removed the strap and used the sandals as house slippers. Later I got another even more feminine-looking pair of sandals and cut the heel strap off and used them for house slippers. My crossdresser brother came in one day while I was putting them on and asked me if they came big enough to fit him! I said, “I don’t think so.” The sandals were a women’s size 8 M, and he wore a men’s size 10 or larger shoe.
Once when my wife and I visited friends, a married couple, the wife wore T-strap flats. The light in the room was fairly bright, and I had my sunglasses with me. So I used the light as an excuse to wear them in the living room. Then, with some excuse, I sat down on the floor from my chair. My real purpose was to get a good look at the woman’s T-strap flats without being detected!
Partly because of my legal blindness, I hadn’t been able to get a job for some time; so my wife had me wash her nylon hose as well as do the rest of the laundry and look after our two sons. When my wife was at work, I began wearing under my pants my regular sheer gala-color (the lightest, most nude available) seamless nylon hose I bought at Penney’s. And I wore women’s T-strap flats in the house and out to the garbage can. I tried on as much of my wife’s clothes as I could get on even though they were too small. Washing her nylons and her underclothes helped me to want to do this, and to wear more women’s clothes of my own.
I didn’t understand my compulsion to wear women’s clothes, and I thought I must be the only person in the world like that! When my wife would mention magazine articles she had read or heard about describing crossdressers or gay men, I would stoutly, sincerely, and truthfully deny that I was either of these. Yet, despite all my history, I was not willing to admit then to myself that I was really a woman inside. I had been criticized and ridiculed so much that I had consciously and/or unconsciously hidden the facts, similar to what a sexually abused child does. At the time I didn’t recall many of the details given here, nor relate them together.
I just didn’t know what to think about myself; and because of the criticism and ridicule I had already received so much, I built myself a shell and crawled inside. And for years I put up a masculine front to most people, but my marriage revealed the truth and tore my shell away. I justified wearing nylon panties because of my very tender skin and because I had piles that caused rectal itch.
My wife thought nylon shirts looked sissy and didn’t like me to wear them. Some of them were the see-through type to a greater or lesser extent. Once when she and I were going out somewhere in Los Angeles, I met her in L.A. In the car she said I smelled nice, so I hastened to say that I had had no cologne, so I used some of hers. She didn’t respond, so I repeated what I said.
She had already committed herself, so what could she say? So instead she noticed I was wearing a nylon dress shirt, so she got after me for wearing it. That fact that my brother wore nylon shirts all the time to church and to work didn’t cut any ice with her. Nylon shirts were sissy to her, and that was that! Most women and/or men must have thought the same way, because most men quickly gave them up after the cotton-polyester blend wash-and-wear shirts became available.
I also began to wear heavyweight nylon beige women’s long hose, which required wearing a garter belt or girdle, and long panties to cover up the lump of the garters under my pants. One day in the car my wife noticed my hose and remarked unkindly, “The next thing you’ll want to wear a dress!” I sat silently without replying, for I knew it was true.
About that time I got an adjustment in my youngest brother’s chiropractic office. He commented on my smooth, shiny socks as I lay on the adjusting table. I just said I was wearing long hose. So he pushed up my pant legs quickly to have a look, then pushed them back down. But thankfully he said nothing more.
One time when I went into my folks’ bedroom, a dresser drawer was open. I saw some of Dad’s shorts. They were made of rayon and had a Ward’s label. I wondered if that was because he had piles. But his undershirts were rayon as well. So I wondered later if he might have inherited some mild femininity from his mother–and passed mine on to me. At some point I began wearing rayon, and later nylon, shorts and undershirts part of the time before I began wearing women’s underwear. One guy I knew who saw me wear rayon shorts said I had real feminine shorts! I replied they were only rayon like my dad wore.
I was still a virgin when I married and never had much interest in sex after marriage. I lost most of my personal interest in it after the novelty wore off. I thought it was all too much work and wanted to be on the bottom rather than the top! I seldom got to be on the bottom.
One of the hardest ideas for me to relate to was that I, as professedly male, should show a close interest in only one girl at a time and exclude all others.
So when my brothers or male classmates would ask me about my love life, I would say there was plenty of time, or stupid remarks like, “I wouldn’t want to date or kiss a girl I didn’t want to marry,” as if one could tell that in advance. And after marriage, I still wanted to be close friends with several girls or young women, married or not.
After I married, at some point I went to a men’s shoe store and tried on some shoes. They were all still too wide. So I felt justified in continuing to wear women’s loafers. A few years later I bought some boys’ size loafers from the Sears catalog. They were too wide as well. So I felt all the more justified in wearing females’ shoes. Of course, I knew there were shoe stores in L.A. or elsewhere who sold hard-to-find sizes. But I was unwilling to pay more for such shoes–since I really wanted to wear women’s shoes, anyway!
For about the last four years of my marriage I ate or drank certified raw whole milk, half-and-half, cream, cottage cheese, and ice cream, which I could metabolize better than pasteurized milk or cream. Cream, half-and-half, and whole milk contain cow estrogen. This helped to femininize my body and mind even more. I even started growing breasts at about age 30! But when I called my wife’s attention to that, she said they were only fat! I was 5′ 11.5″ then, and my weight got up to about 190 lbs. This overweight obscured my female hip-waist-rear lines somewhat, as being overweight often does with women.
After about six years of marriage, one night my wife began crying in bed. When I asked her what was wrong, she said she had fallen in love with a man we both knew and liked from her work, but that she didn’t want to hurt me. I told her I still loved her, anyway. In my mind, I had long since expected this to happen someday. So I wasn’t surprised or caught off guard.
She stayed at work late more often and later. Finally, she told me not to call her at work at night because she didn’t want anyone to know she was working alone. I suspected she was doing more than work, but I didn’t accuse her. Once she came home late and lay down on the couch instead of going to bed with me, despite all my urging her to do so. I got up in the middle of the night, and she was still there asleep on the couch. So I put a blanket over her. I was sure she had been unfaithful to me, but I said nothing.
Later she would talk on the phone and giggle with the very tall, handsome man we both liked. He was her boss by then. He would also come by and pick her up to take her to work so they wouldn’t both have to take cars. I didn’t like any of this, but I refrained from saying much. I liked the man a lot myself! So what could I say?
One night when my wife came home from work late, I was watching TV. She said to turn it off as she wanted to talk to me. She then told me she was leaving me. We talked the matter over some. Then she got up from her chair and went into the bedroom. I went outside and stood by a window and cried and cried till I couldn’t cry anymore! I tried to cry quietly so neither my wife, sons, family in the adjoining house, nor the neighbors could hear. No one said anything about my crying, so I guess I succeeded. As best I can recall, I’ve never really cried as much since.
When my wife left me, and then got a divorce after eight years of marriage, none of the reasons she gave for doing so was specifically attributed to my wearing women’s clothes; but I suspected that was undoubtedly part of it. Her principal reason was that she was unhappy. So when I got rid of all my women’s clothes by giving them to the Salvation Army, and told her so, she replied she didn’t like that either, because I’d just replace them. And I did—after the divorce was final or close to it. The medical books on transsexualism, which I later studied, say that replacement is always done when a transsexual gets rid of women’s clothes.
When my wife left me, I was unemployed. She took custody of my two sons. I didn’t contest it due to both my income level—legal blindness disability income from the state—and my crossdressing, which I didn’t want to come to light in court. I feared it would if my wife or her lawyer thought it necessary.
Likewise, while I consulted two lawyers on contesting the divorce, in the end I didn’t contest it in court when my wife told me plainly to my face the night before the court session, “I don’t love you, and that’s that!” Again, I didn’t want my intersexualism to come to light in court. It wasn’t so well known then via the media. I feared several repercussions.
Fortunately, my wife didn’t ask me to pay any child support or alimony, since I was unemployed and getting blind disability money from the state. But later, after I became a student at California State University at Long Beach, I could get federal disability Social Security, which not only added to my disability income, but paid money to both sons till each was 22 and had graduated from the same university I had attended!
After we separated, I returned to college, which the state was willing to pay for because of my legal blindness, providing I would train to be a blind teacher. And while attending CSULB, I started wearing women’s clothes again; I told myself, “I’ll be my own woman!” This statement didn’t reveal my true feelings, but it was as close as I was willing or able to put into words or thoughts at the time. My romantic interest in girls there was of no success either.
Being short of money, I ate less food, and gradually lost a lot of the weight I had gained, but not my bust. It was more than just fat. At some point I began to wear waist whittlers to reduce the size of my waist. I wore them both day and night, but particularly at night in bed, when I was less active and wouldn’t notice any discomfort in my sleep. I got a size smaller than recommended whenever I could.
After my wife’s divorce was final and she remarried, after I began to wear women’s underclothes, shoes, and man-tailored women’s clothes at the university, I did a lot of library research at CSULB in Long Beach, CA, where I was a student. I had taken a master’s level course in library research. I did this research on transsexualism and hermaphroditism. I researched the medical books in the university library about my problem. Later, when I moved to L.A., I continued this research in the L.A. public, USC, UCLA, and UCLA medical libraries. I also bought some books on transsexualism.
I checked out so many sex-oriented medical books that the check-out girl began to question me why I was checking out so many of those books! I said I was doing research. In my research I learned that all my experience, my feelings, and my physical characteristics added up to the fact that I was more than what some would call a transsexual or psychic-hermaphrodite, and that a large percent of so-called transsexuals exhibit secondary female sex characteristics just as I did.
I learned that the only successful treatment for male-to-female (M2F, MTF) transsexualism was female-hormone therapy, electrolysis hair removal, and sex reassignment plastic surgery; and that there were many more transsexuals similar to me and intersexuals like me, which made me feel better. But my research on hermaphroditism at the same time revealed fully to my mind that I was in fact a 100% female-oriented hermaphrodite, or at least a female pseudohermaphrodite, both being genetically female.
So I had facial hair removed by an understanding lady electrologist in Los Angeles who worked on entertainment people and others like me. After a few treatments, before she worked on my face, she looked it over carefully, closely, close enough for us to kiss. She would then ask me if I had any special requests. She had told me about her life, and we had become friends. From what she had said, I thought she might like me in a romantic sense, even though she knew of my intersex status. I wasn’t certain whether she was asking me about my face or about romance. So I would answer, no, just the regular thing.
Thus I had “grow-your-beard day for electrolysis tomorrow.” One day I came home on the bus still with some facial hairs that the lady hadn’t removed. At the bus stop near Sears a man whom I was sure was gay took great interest in me. To get away from him, I went into Sears to buy some hangers, taking the escalator to the second floor. He followed me in all the way up and talked to me on the way and after I got there!
Another “beard day” I stood in front of a barber shop waiting for the bus. I had hairs on my face. A man stopped his car and walked over to me and tried to get me to go with him. I think he offered me money. When I refused, he asked why I looked or dressed that way. I suspected he was gay or a plain-clothes police.
After several treatments, I told the lady I wanted to come dressed as a woman. That was okay with her, and she told me about the restroom facilities. So I put face powder on my face extra heavy and thick to cover my day-old beard. Many of my hairs were white or light, so it wasn’t much trouble to cover them. A few hairs were bright red—my Welsh Celtic ancestry, you know! She would complain that my hairs were almost too short for her to remove.
On “beard day” before I could dress regularly as a woman, I wore man-tailored women’s clothes–pants–and carried a ladies’ colorful billfold in my hand rather than a purse. Because I had to pay cash, which I had little of, I quit the treatments before the job was fully completed, but enough to get by.
In the late 1960s I began to contact–by mail, phone, or in person–doctors, surgeons, and psychiatrists and psychologists who were familiar with my problem, including Dr. Benjamin. I got an estrogen (Premarin) prescription and examination from Dr. Barbosa in Tijuana, Mexico, whom I had visited dressed as a woman.
Later I got a prescription from Dr. Elmer Belt in Los Angeles, which he sent to me by mail without me going to his office. I wasn’t able to afford surgery, but since my small penis fit up into my vaginal cavity when dressed, I could get by. After reading his book on transsexualism, I wrote to Dr. John Money at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD, that I believed I was in fact a hermaphrodite. But he doubted it because of its falsely supposed rarity.
I first took the Mexican Premarin at the Greyhound bus station on the California side of the border. When I went to the bathroom later at home in Long Beach, there was a great deal of foam in the toilet from my urine that looked just like foamy albumen from egg yolks. (I once used such in a print shop on zinc offset printing plates to sensitize them to hold words and images exposed via bright lights from negatives.) I had previously eaten eggs regularly. So the estrogen really cleaned out my bloodstream! Later I got blood clots in my eyes, so I cut down on the daily dose. After I began taking Premarin, I noticed I was attracted to student guys with hairy arms at the university. But when I quit taking it later, my interest in girls returned.
I had a psychiatric evaluation done at UCLA Medical Center by Dr. Richard Green who co-authored Dr. Money’s book, and also took tests with a psychologist there. The state of Illinois where I was born provides for sex and name change because of surgery on birth certificates. So it’s easy to see how frustrating and depressing it was for me not to afford surgery!
I recall once, at night while in bed, hearing a young woman in an apartment above me clicking her hard heels as she went up the stairs. It made me want to have my walking sound like that. My psychology textbook for my adolescent psychology course had a picture in it of two or three girls talking to a male athlete. One girl wore sling-back white flats. I wanted to wear such shoes.
In two of my classes at CSULB, there was a short young married woman with small feet who had the highest arches I had ever seen on a woman. I envied the shape and size of her feet. She also wore a plaid coat containing yellow, cut on the bias, which I loved. I’ve always wanted one like it but have never seen one for sale since in either big girl or misses’ sizes.
I had to wear a jacket to hide my bust, and my man-tailored clothing was feminine enough in either style or color or both to attract both heterosexual, bisexual, and gay men to me, including one of my university professors who had played football. I was sure he was gay. He even tried to eat lunch with me in the cafeteria. And he gave me an undeserved A grade for the Latin course! But I had no interest in either bisexual or gay men.
About this time, when I ate lunch in the cafeteria for a while, I saw an extremely sissy-looking “boy” there who wore sissy-looking clothes and slippers rather than shoes. As I recall, they were the moccasin or the crisscross over-the-toes sandal type. He seemed very unhappy. I felt sorry for him. I also had a teacher whose palms of his hands were very light and feminine looking, with the backs of his hands being darker, masculine, and hairy. And a “male” accountant in the library had a female rear.
Copyright 1996, 1998, 1999 by Wendy Phillips
Pauline Wendy Phillips was an intersex Seventh-day Adventist who was living in the Midwest at the time of writing this story.