Transgender: a Chevy Engine With a Buick Transmission?
How a cracked bell housing taught me to sing again
It’s hard to understand what it’s like to be transgender when you’re not. Don’t feel bad, it’s hard to understand when you are. It’s a complex medical condition and not a choice whether you have it or not; the choice is what you do about it, and when. Delaying treatment turned out to be quite costly for me. This is a true story and real life metaphor that helps me get something complicated into more manageable terms.
At 17, I ran away from my home in West Texas and moved to Colorado. That was the hip place to go in 1972. A blossoming case-study of alcoholism mixed with recreational drug abuse, I had just been inducted into the National Honors Society when I dropped out the last half of my senior year. I’m sure people in my hometown thought I had cracked.
After a year of hitchhiking around, I wanted to see more of Colorado and bought my first vehicle, a 1959 Willy’s Wagon. I didn’t have a lot of money and this was the coolest vehicle I could afford, mainly because it had been gutted for parts to restore another Willy’s. Of the original, only the shell remained — the engine, drive train, carpeting, trims and seats had all been removed.
To make it drivable again, someone had installed a Buick V-6 engine, a Chevy Camaro transmission, half a bench seat and a column shifter that worked sometimes. I loved this wagon. It took me twice to San Francisco to stand on the corner of Haight and Ashbury, to the grasslands to climb Pawnee Butte, and on quite a few expeditions to Rocky Mountain National Park and the lakes in the foothills.
I also learned to work on that wagon, a lot. I got rid of the sloppy column shifter and put in a floor shift. But the bigger problem was that the Buick engine and the Camaro transmission are not made for each other. Mechanics groaned and rolled their eyes when I told them what I had. The mismatch between the engine and transmission caused them to be under constant stress, and the place where all those stresses met was the bell housing.
The bell housing on a manual shift vehicle is a bell-shaped structure hidden from view underneath. It contains the clutch and connects the engine with the transmission. It is normally under tremendous pressure from the power of the engine and the normal operation of the clutch where powerful springs make and break the connection to the engine when you shift gears. But the bell housing used in this hybrid did not exactly match the engine with the transmission. It could not. With few exceptions, Buick parts are not made to fit Chevys and Chevy parts do not fit Buicks. The parts were not true to one another.
They did not fit; they had been forced to fit.
After being subjected to normal use for 1000 miles or so, the bell housing would crack. Its complaints would get louder and louder until I could hear it split open. Then the clutch would start getting mushy. The harder I pushed on the clutch to try to get it to disengage the gears, the wider that crack became until finally it was undrivable.
One time on my way back from San Francisco, it cracked loudly on the snowy desert highway crossing New Mexico. When the bell housing cracked, the normally noisy transmission would become eerily silent. Sometimes silence is a very bad sign. All I could do was shift as little as possible and pray it would get me back home where I could attempt yet another repair.
I scoured junkyards and replaced that bell housing several times. I had it welded once in an attempt to get the Buick engine to align with the Camaro transmission. The professional mechanics I talked to all told me the same thing:
“It’s never going to work. You either need to get a Buick transmission or a Chevy engine, or tear it all out and start over.”
I did not understand at the time that my beloved Willy’s — the perfect quirky match for my personality — had the same kind of problem that I had. For the Willy’s, it was a mismatch between engine and transmission that was never going to work. For me, it was a mismatch between the invisible biochemistry of my brain and the much more visible chemistry of my body that was never going to work no matter what I tried.
During this same time period, I very much wanted to transition from male to female. I knew very well the feeling of being female but living in a male body. I had no idea how to fix that, nor how to live with it. I could replace the shifter on my Willy’s but I couldn’t fix myself. My inner parts were not true to my outer parts.
Yet, just 180 miles to the south in Trinidad, Colorado, there was a hospital where most of the sex change operations in the U.S. were happening. It was 1974. All I had to do was hop in my Willy’s and drive down there, knock on the door and see if someone could steer me in the right direction. Or maybe they would think I was cracked. Fear set in.
I didn’t go.
I didn’t go because I was afraid. It was too weird, too uncertain, too expensive! I had no support; no one to talk to. There were no readily available resources like today. I had no trust for doctors, so I didn’t seek the advice of any professional — you know, a people mechanic — a doctor or counselor specializing in transgender treatment. Plus, there were a ton of both awful and wonderful feelings that I had been self-medicating away, starting at age 7 with binge eating and later with alcohol at age 12. I rapidly became alcoholic, though no one else in my family had ever been.
Those feelings that “something’s not right” went back to 2nd grade. That was when my family, teachers and peers began an earnest campaign, with pleading, begging, cajoling, threats, force, and sometimes violence, to force my Camaro personality to act like a Buick so it fit with my Buick body. Their expectations wouldn’t allow for any other possibility. They demanded that I change the core of my personality — the inner part they could not see — and force it to fit with the body that they could see.
But good mechanics know that if you have to force a fit, it will fail.
By 4th grade I quit resisting. I disassociated from my true self. I became someone else: a male character they insisted I play; someone I was not. I quit singing. This crushed my mother; she loved it when I sang. I too became eerily silent. I guess the rest of my family thought they had cured me, or that it was just a phase, but the troubles progressively got worse because my parts still did not fit. After far more than the usual teenage turmoil and running away at 17, by age 24 I fantasized that I had created a workable place for myself in the world as a boozed-up rebellious hippie.
That was a fail.
Eventually I sold the Willy’s to someone who could afford to restore it and bought an old Ford pickup with livestock racks: Ford engine, Ford transmission, no breakdowns. Later the alcoholism got traded for recovery and the pickup got traded for a Volvo station wagon… a family, a job, a career. Eventually, all that was split apart too, because I still had this fundamental problem at the core of me — deeper than my social pretenses and the addictions that masked over it — the mismatch between my brain chemistry and my body. I cracked again and again.
In grad school I relapsed into drinking again to keep it hidden from myself, so I could pretend it wasn’t the real problem. But self-medicating this was like taking aspirin for a broken leg; it hid the discomfort for a while but the problem remained.
Just like my half-baked attempts to repair the Willy’s, nothing in my toolbox of fixes helped, and some of my “fixes” definitely made things worse. Among other things I tried prayer, meditation, various careers, religion, college, marriage, yoga, more education, running away, parenthood, grad school and several addictions. Recovery from those addictions eventually required that I seek professional help for my real problem.
The bottom line all along was I either needed to change my body to be a better match for my brain, or change my brain to better match my body…and brain transplants are still hard to come by these days. There was no easier, softer way; I needed outside, professional help. The mechanics were right all along.
My beautiful, quirky Willy’s went on to have its own transformation. Its new, better-funded owner replaced all the mismatched parts with original equipment. It got a new life in some rich guy’s garage and the auto show circuit, a shining example of restoration and a bygone era. Restorations like that are not cheap, but they are mechanical and straightforward. If only people were that simple to fix.
Me, I tried a thousand different fixes except the one that would actually solve my problem. I kept trying in vain to somehow, some way, fit into the gender assigned to me at birth, even though in my heart I knew it was wrong. Like the girl taking ballroom dance who has to learn all the boy’s parts because there aren’t enough boys in the class, I tried to be a good girl, play the male role everyone wanted me to play, pretend this was normal, and spare everyone from having to deal with the real me. But again and again as the miles rolled by, the pressure of the mismatch inside made me crack apart.
At age 65, I finally sought counseling and started hormone replacement therapy.
Within 3 weeks I felt relief from an internal pressure I didn’t realize I was carrying. Unexpectedly, I felt better than I ever had in my entire life. My only regret has been not doing this much, much sooner.
My heroes today are the transgender young people who have mustered the courage to stand up and say, “This is what I am,” when families, teachers, peers and politicians try to tell them what gender they think they should be. The pressure they feel on that inner bell housing doesn’t lie. Everything inside of them — the hidden parts we cannot see — tells them the opposite, and they have found the courage to declare the truth. I applaud them and everyone who supports them in this change.
“This above all: to thine own self be true.” — Shakespeare, Hamlet
p.s. When I started hormone replacement therapy, the first change my loving, supportive wife noticed was that I began to sing again.
