The first ever person who not only took notice of my transsexual or whatever you may call them, tendencies, but also helped me do something about them, was my nanny, Pascal. She was French, young, no more than eighteen and she had long fair hair, but that’s about all I can remember of her. My parents hired her to stay at home with me when they were out doing I can’t really know what, ‘cause she didn’t speak any Greek and they wanted me to learn French. She was a "femme au pere", that is, she was staying with us, in the family house, as a part of the payment.
At first, I hated her, of course. It was open war between me and her, me insisting on speaking Greek and only Greek, and her refusing to learn a single word of my language, while she tried to teach me hers. I was very young then, no more than four years old and, I guess, learning new languages doesn’t really make any difference. It’s just like learning your original one. So, in the end, I gave in. See, I was fed up with the situation, I was trying to explain to her, all the time, what I wanted us to do with (or, most often, to) my toys and she played dumb, pretending she didn’t even understand my furtive signing… so one good day, I came out with it. I said:
“Je veux jouer a la guerre”
"I wish to play at war."
Since then, our relationship improved dramatically. We became best friends. I let myself talk to her, and I guess I must have talked all the time and a lot. I probably told her things I never told my mother or my father. Because, at some point, she started helping me to play dress-up. And of course, it’s no question what I always wanted to dress up as.
I remember we had a stash for my “costumes”. It was a wicker basket, for wastepaper I presume, and in it, we hid all the little things that we used to make me a girl. Well, I was really young and they were silly little things, like, I remember this mask we ‘d made. Pascal had cut out a pair of red, glossy lips from a lipstick ad in a magazine, cut holes on the edges so I could tie them with an elastic band behind my head and wear them on my face. It was things like that we did, toys and games and she seemed to enjoy it actually. I think she liked the idea of a little boy that didn’t like to play only with toy soldiers and weapons all the time, and preferred to play at being a little girl instead. My mother actually remembers a time when Pascal was looking at me playing and told her something like “when I think he ‘ll grow up to be another stupid male-chauvinist pig like all of them…” and nodding. I bet it must heave been before we started actually communicating and she started helping me dress up. Pascal was a very pretty girl, or so I seem to remember. She must have been petite, a little French girl, you see. Men in Greece can be such brutes to girls like her and one night, when she was coming home with the bus, the bus driver said something to her, or did something to her that made her really upset, so upset that she came home crying.
My father wasn’t much of a sensitive or delicate person when it came to women either. I remember so many times, sitting in my room with Pascal, not playing at anything, not saying anything, just looking at her while my father and mother screamed to each other and then started banging things around and then hitting each other with them. Oh, my mother is a damn bitch on her own right, but I really blame my father for the actual physical violence.
I ‘ve no idea wether Pascal ever understood, but for me, the times we played dress up, and I let myself be a girl, where the only times when I felt the brutality I had to live with every day faded away into insignificance. Playing at being a girl, was my retreat from the shit happening at home. I doubt I could have explained that in so many words, at that age. But it must have been obvious to my friend that it wasn’t just any game for me, dressing up.
One night, Pascal, or me, I ‘ll never know, made a mistake. We figured, since it was the carnival, that it would be OK if I dressed up and waited for my father to come back from work. You know, sort of let him in to the game, when it wouldn’t really matter, when he probably wouldn’t take it seriously.
Well, he did. He didn’t say anything at first, when he opened the door and I greeted him with a blanket tied around my waist for a skirt and wearing a pair of butterfly shades (oh, please, try to keep in mind I was too young to know anything about dress codes back then … this is a bit embarrassing, really). I told him I was “Helena, from next door”, a girl from the neighborhood I used to hang out with. He didn’t say anything, at first. But then he noticed I wasn’t really eager to let go of my new status as a girl, see. And he started getting upset. All worked out in a berserk rage he was, in the end. I can’t remember the details. He probably avoided making a scene there, in front of me. He wouldn’t have wanted me to think something was wrong, you understand. It was just a game, right?
But then, a few days later… I ‘m not sure how it happened, but I found my self in Pascals’ room, pushed in by my father, in his usual angry mood, his eyes bulging with righteous indignation. Pascal was naked. My father pointed at her and screamed at me “Well? Is it like that that you want to be? Is it? Tell me this very instant, and if you say yes, I ‘ll throw away all your pants and you ‘ll only wear skirts from then on!”.
I was terrified. So must have been Pascal. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the truth, and, to tell it now, I really couldn’t think of it, that moment. All I knew was my friend was standing there, in front of me, shaking, in an awful state and scared shitless, a victim of the same brutality that had been the hallmark of our happy family since forever that I could remember. I was young, please, try to understand. I ‘ve never forgiven my own self for that nights’ treachery. But I said… “no”. I said I didn’t want to be like her.
And it was a lie. Such a huge, horrible lie. Because, all I wanted there and then, was to have the power to stand up for my self and my friend and defend both of us and use the truth, that I wanted to be a girl no matter what shit tyrants like my father where able to put me or her through, like a fucking painful weapon indeed against him.
I hope she understood. I hope she didn’t feel so lonely as I did, then. That she didn’t really feel so let down by me, as she felt terrified by my father… she must have been really afraid of him if she let him do something so ugly to her, as to force her to stand naked in front of me as an example of something I should try to avoid at all costs. Shit, I so wish I could have found the courage, the strength, in me, to throw a tantrum, there and then, to let my father know what a disgraceful asshole he was, what a horrible, petty little insignificant worm he was being.
I know many transsexuals who wish they could go back in time to change something, usually, the time they started on hormones, or the time they came out or they had their operation or whatever it was. For me, the one moment that changed my life, the one event that made me doubt myself and took away the best part of my self-esteem and my belief in my own power, was that. If I could go back in time now, I ‘d go back to that night. And I ‘d try to summon the courage, this time, to make it all the right way. And say yes, that I wanted to be like Pascal and not like my father, that I liked the way she was and I wanted to look like that too, when I grew up. And that I loved her far more than my father, or my mother indeed.
But I lost the keys to my time machine it seems.
Pascal stayed a while with us, even after that. I don’t remember if we ever played dress up after that, but somehow, I doubt it was an option anymore. I believe our stash was emptied and everything in it thrown away. After she left, I only met her again when I was seven or eight years old. I remember what she looked like then. She looked like a hippie girl, with sandals and flared jeans and her long, fair hair loose. All the dark shit had been forgotten then and we were friends, still, but then I never saw her anymore after that. She did leave me something. A bottle of eau de cologne, for kids. For boys, mind you. Kind of a parting gift, I suppose. She and my mother also wrote a few letters to one another for a while, but then lost contact. I ‘ve no idea where she is now, or what she is doing. I doubt I ‘ll ever find out.
And that’s it.