“Autumn in New York” (Percy Faith)
By Pauline Wendy Phillips
As I recall, I was named “Paul,” in part at least, after my other grandma’s brother, Uncle Paul. He was a very sissy “man,” and always cried over everything just like the rest of the women and girls did in the nineteenth century and later. He never married and was not a happy “man.” I recall that someone in Grandma’s family committed suicide, and I think it was him.
I was born at home in 1931 and was delivered by my father. He and my mother were finished or nearly finished with their study of chiropractic. At the time it was illegal to practice chiropractic in Illinois. I received no more thorough examination to determine my sexual status than do most children born in a hospital. There were no x-rays. It was decided I was a boy, even though there were no visible testes. And these didn’t descend on their own.
When I was born in Illinois, no birth certificate was required to be filed with the state. So my dad filled out a record of birth instead, which was filed with the county. The birth record showed I was male just because I had a small penis. Obviously, this birth record was inaccurate!
Time, mental and physical development, and research proved to me I was a 100% female-oriented hermaphrodite (HA) or female pseudohermaphrodite (FPHA). No actual medical tests were made to establish this exactly. Besides being saddled with hermaphroditism, I was born legally blind (20/200) as well. So whatever problems any transgenders (crossdressers, transsexuals, hermaphrodites, or pseudo-hermaphrodites) have, let them add on to it legal blindness and partial colorblindness, and they’ll have a very good idea what my 66 years of life to date (1998) have been like!
My vision in both eyes is 20/200 or less, and I’m partially colorblind from a defective retina on both counts. I have too few cones, which provide details, distance vision, and accurate color detection. So I see mostly with rods–side and night vision. I can detect colors but can’t tell for sure what some of them are. But, hey, I’m a survivor!
When I was around two, I got so severe a skin disease that no one but Mother thought I would survive. She fed me goat’s milk, and I recovered; but ever after, my skin was extremely tender, more so than that of most women. Many years later, a nurse told me I bruised more easily than anyone she had ever seen! I lack some of the normal layers of skin. I wear slippers around home most of the time because of my extra tender skin.
About that same age, I fell down the basement stairs and landed on my head. Some doctors familiar with transgenderism say such brain-damaging accidents may contribute to changes in sexual/ gender identity. I certainly didn’t need that besides!
When I was still young enough to use a potty chair, a hired teen girl who lived with us put me on the potty in the bathroom one day. Then I remember seeing her sitting on the toilet in front of me with her panties down. I’m sure a real boy baby wouldn’t remember any such thing. What would be the point?
My favorite toy as a baby and small child was my rubber dolly. My brothers liked to take it and do weird things with it, which would make me cry. Then they and other members of the family would call me a sissy, pantywaist, and crybaby. For many years I was called such names, plus a weakling and tenderfoot, when I didn’t say or do what was expected of me, or when I would try to express my female sexual identity.
When I was four, my elder sister, who was about ten, took me to a store that was giving one free toy to each poor child during the Great Depression. I had three brothers and three sisters, and we were poor then. I very much wanted a new and larger dolly, which I saw in the store; but my sister insisted I take a car or truck because she said dolls were only for girls. So, unhappily, I took a fire truck that I could ride; but I still wanted the doll.
One day when I was around age five, I was in the bathroom with my pants down and my eldest sister came in. She looked at me and said, “Let me see you.” She inspected me, and then said, “You have no balls! I’m going to tell the folks.” And she did.
I was laid on the dining room table, and Mother and Dad, by then both Doctors of Chiropractic, worked on me, massaging down what they assumed were testes. But by that time my female sexual identity was already long since firmly established and could not be changed. My genital area looked like a closed vagina with abnormally small male sex organs protruding.
Years later I read in a medical book that testes remaining undescended may dissolve away, remain sterile, or turn into ovaries; and that descended ovaries may dissolve away, remain sterile, or become testes. So which I really had at birth or developed later, before or after they were descended, is unknown. At least one was or became a testis, as I have two sons.
When I was around five, I was given a short-legged unlined wool suit to wear to church in the summer, and with no underwear. I spread my legs and held out my arms and cried and cried, but no one could figure out what all the fuss was about, even though I said, “It itches me!” So I was forced to be quiet and put up with my extreme misery. That I had had a skin disease that left me with abnormally thin skin failed to register with anyone, even with my mother!
When my youngest sister was old enough to play outside in warm weather, Mother gave her a pretty sunsuit to wear. I complained I wanted one, but it was denied me because I was supposed to be a boy. It was, however, cheaper for mother to buy more than one item of a kind from the mail-order catalogs. And she used the hand-me-down system of dressing her children as much as possible. So she bought my sister and me (with my encouragement) look-alike shoes, uncuffed anklets, pants, striped shirts, pajamas, and underwear. Or she would give me such hand-me-down items from my sisters, or which had been bought at a rummage sale or the like.
One winter my youngest sister got a new bright blue two-piece snowsuit with a hood, which had a white furry trim. I very much wanted one for myself, but I had to be satisfied with an old dark-colored one-piece snowsuit. And during a program at the high school auditorium, I kept looking longingly at my sister’s snowsuit and feeling I wasn’t being treated right.
As long as she and I slept in the same room in the same bed, or later in separate beds, I recall no problem with our look-alike clothes. But at some point my eldest sister convinced my mother that I ought not to sleep in the same room with my sister. She was all worried about incest! And on that basis, from then on I could never play in my sisters’ bedroom or talk with them there. I managed it rarely. My mother’s father’s ancestors were Calvinists, as were the Puritans. That speaks volumes for itself!
So when I was made against my will to sleep in my brothers’ bedroom with them, they teased me about wearing girls’ pajamas because they opened up in the rear rather than the front. I don’t recall any significant problem with teasing about wearing girls’ panties—as I dressed and undressed with my back to them and my front toward the wall so they couldn’t see my front; and I went to the bathroom alone as much as possible. I don’t remember wearing boys’ shorts regularly till I was in the tenth grade in high school and had to take a medical examination there.
One day after church I put on my elder sister’s high-heeled dress shoes and came downstairs to the kitchen wearing them. She really got after me about it, made me take them off, and put them back in her closet! Now and then I also tinkered with some of Mother’s things on her dressing table. She was tall and big, so I don’t recall ever wearing any of her clothes.
In my years later library research on transsexualism/hermaphroditism, I read that one of the prime signs that a supposed boy is actually psychologically a girl, transsexual, or psychic-hermaphrodite was then thought to be the desire and practice of wearing female shoes or outer garments. The desire or practice of wearing female underwear first was then thought to show a crossdresser.
I remember wearing corduroy pants that zipped or buttoned up the side. I had no problem wearing girls’ clothes myself as long as no one made fun of me. I also recall wearing panties in elementary school, taking care to hide the fact in the boys’ restroom, whether I stood up or sat down. But before I left that school, all the doors on the stalls were removed from the boys’ restroom except a reserved one for the janitor. From the boys’ restroom I could look down a corridor and see the girls’ restroom at the other end. I wanted to go in there to the girls’ restroom when no one was around. I went once, at least part way.
For many years, when I would get cars or trucks for my birthday or for Christmas, I would run them into furniture, step on them, kick them around, throw them, or otherwise handle them roughly so that they would break apart or wear out quickly. When I played with them, or more preferably with my brothers’ cars and trucks, I preferred to park them and then lie down beside them and imagine things or teach a much younger neighbor boy how to play with toys and make car noises. When my brothers asked me to play cars with them, I preferred to sit or lie down and watch them play while I would imagine things, and have shivers go down my spine. And my youngest brother particularly would get after me for just watching and not playing.
When I was about six, I was in a two-car accident on the way home from church. I was in the box of Granddad’s pickup; and when my eldest brother, who at age 14 was driving it, ran into the left rear of my other granddad’s car, I was thrown out and landed on my head. I received so severe a concussion that I wanted to sleep all the time for some time. And, as some medical specialists think that such injuries to the brain may contribute to changes in one’s sexual identity, I didn’t need that either!
When I was around eight, my two eldest sisters dressed me up in their clothes as a girl at bedtime and presented me to Granddad as “Pauline.” When I was around 11 or 12, when Mother and Dad were away at a chiropractic convention, my youngest sister rather easily persuaded me to dress up in a dress and go down the street in broad daylight to a house in the next block to play with some other neighborhood kids in the yard of the home of my young boy playmate’s grandmother whom I didn’t really know. My sister assured me it would be all right, as we were only playing. My only concern was that I needed some panties to go with the dress, so she gave me a pair which had holes in them. The only reason I didn’t do this sort of thing much more often was for fear of being ridiculed or punished.
I always preferred to play with my youngest sister, her girlfriend across the street, my female cousin, other neighborhood girls, their female friends, or their female relatives, rather than with my brothers or the neighborhood boys. The only exception was with the young boy playmate who could not fight with me. I had no interest in fighting or in boys’ sports.
After playing with the girl across the street in her sandbox, et cetera, with or without my sister, for some years, her aunt finally told me through the kitchen window I should go play with boys. So I left very unhappy about it.
One evening during World War II I went with my sister to play with the young girl and boy up the street in their bedroom at their mother’s invitation. Her husband was off as an officer in the navy. I noticed that the younger boy wore girls’ silky panties. When we left and we outside, I asked my sister why he wore them. She said she didn’t know. Evidently his mother used the hand-me-down system of clothing her children.
Once when I was playing with some neighborhood girls, a girl relative of one said I should leave and go play with the boys. The girl who lived at the house liked me, but she said nothing convincing to the girl that would keep me there. So I left very unhappy. Later, during World War II, when I was in the 8th grade, but not quite 13, a female classmate joined me in a war game at an intersection on one side of the street. The game opposed my youngest sister and another girl on the opposite side from the girl classmate and me. I concluded the girl with me liked me romantically, but I didn’t worry about it. I was just glad to play with girls, regardless!
At a very early age I took conscious note of the shoes, clothes, and jewelry of the neighborhood girls and at elementary school, much of which I still remember. In 6th grade I asked the girl who sat next to me in one class about the ring she wore, which she said was a birthstone ring.
I especially remember the shiny T-strap black patent-leather flats with perforated toes worn with white cuffed anklets by two girl cousins of the girl who lived across the street from us. I really loved that shoe-anklet combination! And many years later, while still married, I bought a pair of T-strap flats for myself when the style was available in women’s sizes for a few years. This close observation of what girls wore continued on into junior high, high school, junior college, and university.
The public elementary school I attended had a segregated playground for the boys and girls of grades six to eight at least. The girls in the front playground had swings, slides, merry-go-rounds, etc. The boys in the rear had football/baseball grounds and basketball courts. I wanted to play with the girls on their ground, but I could not.
Some boys, including some younger than myself, liked to fight me or corner me. When I wouldn’t fight back, they called me a sissy and a weakling. Two of my brothers tried to teach me how to wrestle, fight, and box in their bedroom; but I just wasn’t interested in any of this either for play or defense. At the time I didn’t really understand my true psychological make-up or refused to admit any more for fear of ridicule; and so I attributed my lack of interest in boys’ sports and fighting to my religious convictions. But it was a much deeper mental process than that.
My doctor parents had some medical books stored in the attic. Its entrance was in the ceiling of the closet to my and my brothers’ bedroom. We sometimes got these books and looked at the pictures of all the weird babies and people–the kind that used to be found in circuses. There were hermaphrodites, Siamese twins, two-headed, three-legged, animal-hairy, scaly hide, etc.
When I was around 12—the age when some girls then began to be interested in boys—the boy I liked the best hit me and knocked me down. It made me feel terrible! I wasn’t hurt physically, really, but emotionally. I just sat up right where I was knocked down near the baseball catcher’s fence and cried inside, if not outwardly. Finally, the boy came over to me and made up with me, saying he was sorry, and I felt much better.
My grandma liked me to walk around town with her. She once noticed I walked by stepping out on my heels. She said I should walk by stepping out on my toes or ball of the foot like she did. She showed me how to do it and then tried to get me to walk like that. It was hard for me to do then, and I gave up on it. I didn’t want any criticism or ridicule from walking like women or girls, anyway. But I naturally walk like females now without thinking about it.
In late elementary school my youngest brother and I had to chop and saw wood for our central-heating furnace. My hands were still growing, so this kind of work enlarged them beyond what a girl my age normally had.
Virtually all the pictures taken of me from babyhood, as a child, and as a teen show me as pouting, solemn, disgusted, or perhaps even angry. I didn’t want my picture taken! As I recall, the only picture of me as a child that I liked and in which I was really smiling was taken by my dad of me and my youngest sister, with me seated on a tricycle and her standing on the rear axle step. We both played together outside like that.
Whatever pictures I ever had of me dressed as a male have long since been destroyed. And, when my mother died, I told my eldest sister that as far as I was concerned all pictures Mother had of me dressed as a male could be destroyed, as I didn’t want any of them.
In junior high in Southern California my mother gave me a new boy-girl-look-alike girl’s coat for my birthday or Christmas. A boy noticed it buttoned up the “wrong way,” and asked me if I were a hermaphrodite. To escape criticism, I said Mother gave me the coat, and that I wasn’t a hermaphrodite. Girls then would ask me to walk home from school with them or play with them, and I refused. I was confused! But still longed to be with them.
In the 8th grade in junior high, I hated to have to undress in the boys’ gym and shower in a mass public shower. We had to wear gym shorts to play. So I started wearing mine under my pants. This helped some, but didn’t cure the shower problem at the end of P.E. Because of my poor vision, I finally got an excuse from my mom, a chiropractor, to not have regular P.E.
I still had to dress down to my shorts, but didn’t need to shower, or did so early, after talking to the teacher. I don’t recall what I said, but he was nice about it. It all worked out so that I could wear some old panties under my gym shorts. My mother gave me the old panties that my sister had when I complained my rear was cold in the winter. I hadn’t been wearing boys’ undershorts.
In junior high I particularly noticed the clothes, shoes, and activities of the band/ cheerleader baton twirlers. This group practiced outside where I would walk along to my next class early or from carrying a note from my teacher to someone. The girls all wore shiny black patent leather sandals with white cuffed anklets. I thought that sandal-anklet combination looked so nice, as well as the rest of their outfits! And I wanted to wear them and be a band/ cheerleader baton twirler. I wasn’t allowed to attend junior high school dances, but I would look in the open door to the girls’ gym where they were held and watch awhile.
Once the junior-high girl who lived across the fence to our backyard invited me to go into her house and play with her. I wasn’t sure whether she meant regular play or romance. I wanted to go anyway but refused because my mother had told me not to play with the neighbor kids without her knowledge or permission.
Before starting high school, I went to Sears to buy some new clothes. The salespersons in the big boys’ clothing department insisted I get the extra-long legged blue jeans they both said were popular right then. I tried them on, and the legs turned up made a cuff around six inches long. And the inside blue was much lighter than the outside blue.
I liked neither the cuff length nor the color contrast. I thought they looked hickish. I hated them and refused to buy them. City girls I knew didn’t dress that way. I insisted on jeans with legs short enough that no turn-up was needed. I recall the saleslady saying the only jeans that short were girls’ jeans. I recall replying that if they looked alike, what difference did it make. She went off and brought back some shorter-leg jeans. I tried them on, and they were fine. She evidently got them from the girls’ department! The label said Sears.
In high school two girls who were friends, who sat behind me in Biology class, wore identical white heel-strap sandals, which I liked. Other girls wore white wedge-heel slip-on flats I liked. Some Hispanic girls wore huarache sandals, which I noted. Much later the girl I liked best wore medium-dark, high wedge-heel shoes that looked like the toes might be perforated. Being legally blind, I couldn’t tell for sure. But I liked them.
One day when she was working on a class project after school, I walked down the hall and saw her shoes in the hall by a classroom door. I quietly walked up, kneeled down, and inspected her shoes. The toes had small metal pieces attached. Obviously, no non-transgender, non-crossdresser, non-transsexual, non-hermaphrodite genuine teen-age male would carry on like that!
When I was old enough to apply for a Social Security card in order to get a work permit, shortly before my 14th birthday, as I recall, I still had no birth certificate, which was required to get the card. So my mother showed me the record of birth she had and sent the required information back to Illinois so a birth certificate could be made. She had previously learned that Illinois had collected all the records of birth from the individual counties in the state, and for a small fee would prepare birth certificates upon request.
I recall telling her how I should be a girl and have a girl’s name, but it did no good. I recall asking the lady at the Social Security office when I applied for my card whether I could be on record as a girl with a girl’s name—Pauline. But she said not without testing or information I was sure my folks wouldn’t or couldn’t supply.
So I finally gave in to the idea of being male and for some years repressed my female feelings. But they all reappeared later in full force!
When I was a child of pre- and elementary-school age, I was also known as terrible tempered. I insisted for so long, to no avail, that I was a girl or should have been that I finally gave up talking about it, mostly. So I used anger as an emotional outlet for the great stress I was under for not being able to dress and live as a girl. I was an unhappy child and pouted whenever pictures were taken of me.
Eventually my religious convictions toned down my anger to hardly anything. Instead, I used strategy to get around things I’d otherwise get mad about. Then felt glad I could outsmart those in my family who tried to run my life.
Once when I was talking to my “old maid” algebra/geometry teacher, I had to go to the restroom. The boys’ restroom was down the hall a way, but not very far. She gave me the key to the closer restroom for female teachers, since the girls’ restroom was on the other side of the building. I already knew where her restroom was, as I had cleaned it along with the girls’ and boys’ restrooms in virtually the entire school as a janitor’s assistant in 9th grade.
Once when I was working inside a stall in the girls’ restroom, two girls came in and used two other stalls. I overheard them talk about their sex life! Normally there was a sign up on a chain across the door when I was in the restroom. But either I forgot to hook it up, or they had to go badly enough that they came in anyway when they didn’t see anyone around.
This job as janitor’s assistant made my clothes dirty, especially from emptying pencil sharpeners. And I didn’t have enough changes of clothes to stay clean at school before work after school. I didn’t like this. Once two girls coming out of the restroom commented to each other about how dirty I was. Fortunately, I worked as a janitor for only one year. After that I wore cleaner and nicer clothes, unfortunately male.
When my elder sister and her husband came to visit us when I was in high school, I did a lot of the cooking. I also liked to lean on things rather than stand up straight. Was it subconsciously to make me look shorter like a girl? They gave me a homemade card, I guess, for my birthday. It read in part “Paul-lean Cookshack Phillips.” The pronunciation of “Paul-lean” sounds the same as “Pauline” that I had been called by my elder sister’s years earlier at age eight. I noted that!
My youngest sister liked me to walk around town with her. Her excuse was that she was scared to be alone, or that she wanted me to appear to be her boyfriend before she had one of her own. It wasn’t too hard for her to convince me to go with her. One day we walked around the corner up a side street of the next block from our home.
Down a driveway we saw four young neighbor sisters my sister played with playing in their backyard on or near the fence dividing their yard from the one on the street we were on. So we walked down the driveway, and my sister talked with them awhile. Finally the eldest girl around my sister’s age said I shouldn’t be with them, that I was supposed to be with boys. So I walked away much disappointed.
When I was in junior college, white saddle shoes with black, brown, or red were popular with the girls. Some guys wore them in men’s sizes as well, especially if their girlfriends did. The ones I liked were the girls’ that had white-edge thin soles that came only to the very side of the shoe. I never liked shoes or sandals of any style that had wide soles that went beyond the edge of the shoe/sandal. That made them look unnecessarily wide to me.
There was a shoe store on a corner where I waited for the bus to go practice the pipe organ. I often would look in the windows at the girls’ and women’s shoes while I waited and wished I could wear the girls’ saddle shoes I liked.
I once commented to my organ teacher that girls must be able to play the pedal board easier than males because their feet were smaller and narrower, and their shoes had thinner and narrower soles. He agreed they had an advantage, unless a male wore organ shoes made for playing the organ. The organ shoes, for both men and women, have thin and narrow soles for feeling for notes and for ease in playing, and 1 1/8″ heels to play thirds with the heel and toe of the same foot.
I remember one girl who sat beside me in history class. She had nice, long, shiny blond hair and nice clothes. But she always wore beat-up dirty saddle shoes. I could never figure out why she did that! Why didn’t she wear nice clean saddle shoes like all the other girls, was my question? I wanted to ask her, but never did. I envied the girls who wore nice dresses, skirts, blouses, sweaters, and shoes to college; and I noticed what they wore.
When I was at the university, perforated-toe T-strap flats in patent leather or other colors, including white, were popular with some girls. I liked these very much—and the girls in my classes who wore them. Earlier I had bought a pair for myself, while I was still married.
My interest in girls from elementary school through university was virtually limited to girls who were very short, or at least small-boned–that is, childlike or girl-like in appearance–including the girl I married. When I held her on my lap while dating or after marriage, I felt I was like a mother to her. When I was around 14, I wanted to hug, kiss, mother, and play with (babysit) in the backyard a cousin’s two baby girls. But when she saw me, she drove me away, saying I should leave them alone. I kissed both girls before she saw me with them.
Shortly after World War II was over, Mother bought her sons white 100% nylon dress shirts, and nylon sport shirts soon were available. My elder brother and I continued to wear these after polyester-cotton shirts were worn by men. I liked the nylon shirts best because they felt better on my abnormally tender skin. My brother wore them because he had asthma and said he was allergic to cotton. We liked them also because they were wash-and-wear.
When I studied piano by home study around age 14 on, I had trouble reaching octaves. So I stretched and exercised my hands while they were still growing so I could reach the octaves. The result, along from the work I did, is that my hands are larger than they otherwise would have been, and my thumbs don’t spread out normally.
About the same time Dad had me help my brother dig up and chop out two large tree stumps in the backyard before the house was added on to, and later one in the front yard. This use of the ax likewise enlarged my hands. Also, the pressure and weight on my feet from all this digging and chopping while I was still growing enlarged them somewhat beyond the average woman’s size for my build.
Holding several jobs later in which I had to stand all day on my feet added to this foot enlargement, especially the job where I had to lift heavy packages of paper for a paper cutter. This standing all day and having gone barefoot every summer from babyhood and as a child, later flattened my feet and lengthened them beyond what girls’ feet normally were.
In junior high, high school, junior college, and university, I still wasn’t interested in boys’ sports. By then I was attributing it partly to being legally blind. So I got a doctor’s excuse from Mother to go to the library or handicapped P.E. class instead. I never had a date with a girl while in high school or junior college, nor even kissed one, and remained a virgin till I married at age 24. And at the university after my wife divorced me, I didn’t date girls either, although I made a weak stab at it.
I wanted a short girl in high school as my best girlfriend but was so shy I never could say or do anything to show her I even liked her. I’d even repeat over and over to myself as I rode my bike home from school what I wanted to say to her, and fantasized about walking her home from school, but none of this ever did any good. When we were seniors, she sat next to me in one class and asked me in a whisper the answer to a question in the test we were taking. Immediately I dropped all interest in her and attributed it to my high sense of honesty. But I’m sure a genuine male would have acted differently in the whole affair from beginning to end.
When I graduated from high school at age 17, the yearbook picture of me revealed I had a small feminine neck. When I graduated from junior college, I destroyed the yearbook except for the picture of my organ teacher seated at the pipe organ, and a copy of the senior insignia for our class sweaters I had designed with his help. He also taught art. When I was given a photocopy of my graduating class 25 years later after I’d begun living as a woman, I cut the picture of myself out and destroyed it but kept the others.
When I would tell Mother that I thought I really was or wished I were a girl, or while in junior college that I should have been a girl, she would ask “Why?” So I would explain what was on my mind. Her typical response was, “Well, you’re not, so that’s that!”
In Junior College, a male fellow music student who befriended me invited me to his apartment at noontime. After we got there together, he asked me if I was gay. I said no, but I later assumed he was, as he had nothing to do with me afterwards outside of class, even though I had let him know I wanted us to be friends.
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.