In the Darkroom

  “Actually,” she interjected, “it’s more accurate to say that during that time I had no sexual relations.” And was divorced, more accurately, in 1977. Later, the report continued,

  … he also openly wore feminine clothes, filling the feminine role in certain circumstances.

  I wondered what “certain circumstances” meant. The Standards of Care stipulate that sex-reassignment candidates should live “continuously” and for a minimum of a year as the opposite gender before progressing to surgery, a period referred to more colloquially as “RLE,” or Real Life Experience.

  “Did you?” I asked.

  “Waaall, sometimes at home, when I’d take pictures of myself.”

  “I mean, out in the world, ‘Real Life Experience,’ ” I said.

  She thought about it.

  “Once in Vienna, I wore a dress to a restaurant.”

  “And?”

  “And I was very convincing. The waiter said, ‘Ja, meine gnädige Frau! I will bring your Wienerschnitzel right away!’ ”

  “But aren’t you supposed to—?”

  My father cut me off. “Now, here’s the important part.” My father pointed to the words toward the bottom of the page under Velemény (Opinion), Transzexualizmus, F64.0. “What he’s saying here is that the personal examination of the patient by the psychologists have concluded that the patient suffers a transsexual identity crisis.”

  “But the first psychologist didn’t reach that conclusion.”

  “It’s irrelevant,” my father said. “Dr. Simon was my psychologist.”

  “You saw him regularly?”

  “Just to get the letter. I don’t need psychiatry. Maybe I visited him three or four times, but the rest were just friendly visits. He was a good guy, funny, too.”

  “Oh?”

  “When he walked me out to the waiting room, there was a woman sitting there, and I said to her, ‘Kezét csókolom.’ ” I kiss your hand. “Dr. Simon started laughing, and he said, ‘You’ve got a lot to learn!’ ”

  I looked at Simon’s letter again. I couldn’t decipher the Hungarian. But I could read the date: 2004, Július 8.

  “This was written … two months after your operation.”

  My father took her time responding.

  “He wrote this after I got back from Thailand. For the Motherbook,” the Hungarian birth registry. “So I could get my name changed on my birth certificate.”

  Like the Red Queen, I thought: Sentence first, verdict afterward.

  “See, it says right here”—my father translated the last paragraph of the letter:

  The patient does not currently have male sex organs. However the female organs have been successfully formed. The petition for name change is justified and I recommend the acceptance of the request.

  “But …”

  “I gave Dr. Simon some money. Ten thousand forints. On top of his fee.” Which was 8,000 forints. A 125 percent tip. A generous “pseudo-solution.”

  “So you didn’t have a letter from Dr. Simon before the operation?”

  “Correct.”

  “And you didn’t send in the letter from the psychologist?”

  “Correct.”

  “So how is it that you were able to have the surgery?”

  “Aaah!” My father swiveled around to his computer and began clicking through electronic files.

  “See?”

  On the screen was an e-mail exchange, in English.

  Feb. 26, 2003

  From: Steven C. Faludi

  To: Dr. Sanguan Kunaporn:

  Your web page informations are quite clear. In addition I would like to know what are the minimum required preparations for SRS [Sex Reassignment Surgery], as in Hungary the psychological and medical examinations are not as readily available as for example in the United States. I am an older person and in excellent health.

  And the reply:

  March 14, 2003

  Dear Steven

  Thank you for your mail.

  I understand your limitation. Do you have anyone like your wife, your friends that can send me a letter to tell me about your transition. Also, I need you to send me your photos. Do you live full time as a woman and have female hormone or not?

  Regards

  Sanguan Kunaporn

  Years later Dr. Sanguan and I would have an exchange of phone calls and e-mails, and he would elaborate on his procedures and protocols. Before 2009, he said, when the Thailand Medical Council tightened regulations, he offered sex-reassignment surgery to Thai patients based on his own judgment, but for “foreigner TS”—transsexuals—“I like to follow Harry Benjamin criteria. … So I ask them to send me a letter of support from their psychiatrist or therapist before [I] accept them as a good candidate for SRS.” With an exception: Some people, he wrote me, even those who have lived and been accepted as the other gender for a long time, “struggle to get the letter from the psychiatrist.” He continued: “These people would have never had peace in their lives until death because they had no chance to get SRS in their home country. So for humanitarian view, I open a small window for these people, if they can send me a letter from their friends or close relatives, I will consider to do SRS for them, even I might face the lawsuit if there is something unexpected later.”

  My father took full advantage of Dr. Sanguan’s humanitarian proclivities.

  “So,” she told me, “I said to myself, Ilonka could be ‘my friend.’ ”

  She hit a few more keys on her computer. “See?”

  I peered over her shoulder. On the screen was a typed letter, set in a feathery italic font. My father had e-mailed it—from his own e-mail address—to the surgeon on March 23, 2003:

  Dear Mr. Kunaporn,

  I am writing this letter as a recommendation for Ms. Stephanie Faludi whom I know well since 1989, when she came to live in Hungary. At that time he came as a man and a mountain climber. I have helped him after he moved into his new house. We have developed a close relationship, that has lasted all these years. As I am married I could only see Steven once a week, but we went away on many occasions, also on summer vacations. He always took the female role and dress. I did not mind this. The last two years we have joined a Transsexual Club in Vienna Austria and went together to their evenings, dances, picnics and hikes, which I have also enjoyed. Recently we have discussed the possibility of a gender reassignment for him, that he is now considering. When Stephanie is in a foreign country she always dresses as a woman and passes as such without any problems. Her health is good and I hope it will remain well, also in the future. With friendly greetings Ilonka—.

  I had no trouble reading this note. Like the e-mail exchange between my father and the surgeon, the letter was in English. My father gave me a slow, satisfied smile. The cat who swallowed the canary. Ilonka doesn’t speak English.

  “I wrote the letter. And put her signature on it.”

  “That’s—”

  “See how I typed it in this italic script? It looks more feminine that way.” She considered her handiwork. “It’s very well written. This is my literature.” Then: “I’m a fake. But a good one!”

  “Dr. Sanguan bought it?”

  “He just wrote back: Does she know that after your operation, you won’t be able to have sex as a man and woman?” “Ilonka” wrote back at once, assuring the doctor that she didn’t mind. Two days later, Dr. Sanguan e-mailed the good news: “I will accept you as a candidate for SRS.”

  One bit of my father’s falsifications nearly came back to bite her. To change her Hungarian birth certificate and passport, my father had to submit the Post-Operative Medical Certificate—the surgeon’s fancy document with the blue-cross stamp—as proof of her new sex. But thanks to my father’s lying about her actual age, that document now listed a date of birth that didn’t match the original birth certificate by ten years. So my father performed another alteration. “I made a very nice full-color copy,” she said. She rummaged through the “Changes” folder again and presented me
with the doctored version of Dr. Sanguan’s certificate. “The blue stamp came out perfectly. No one could tell the difference.”

  The difference being that the birth date now read, with the original typing replicated down to the skipped spaces, “born on November 1, 1927.”

  My father studied the final sentence of the document and read it out loud with slow relish. “ ‘She—may—now—ass-ume—fe-male—gen—der.’ ”

  “It’s like in The Wizard of Oz,” my father said.

  “How’s that?”

  “When the house lands on the Wicked Witch of the East, and the coroner reads the proclamation.” The coroner of Munchkin Land—whose verdict my father now singsonged from memory, affecting a high-pitched nasality:

  And she’s not only merely dead,

  She’s really most sincerely dead!

  “She’s your old self?” I asked.

  No answer.

  If my father had cast Steven as the witch in the fairy tale of her life, who was Stefánie? I had an inkling. On the first anniversary of her surgery, she sent me an e-mail with a link to a book she recommended I buy, a new biography of Hans Christian Andersen. My father signed the note, “Love from Stefánie,” and beside her name pasted in a photograph—of a swan.

  She may now assume female gender. I handed the certificate back to my father, who read it once more before returning it to the protective plastic sheath and inserting the sheath into the hardback folder with elastic straps to hold it steady. She stored it that way, she said, to avoid “damage.”

  “When I got back from Thailand, I carried it with me in my purse.” She’d carried it, she said, for months. “Just in case.”

  “In case of … ?”

  “It’s important to have the correct papers. Otherwise, you could get into problems.”

  What sort of problems? I asked. For the second time in my father’s life, she was roaming around Budapest with an altered ID.

  She gave me one of those Hungarian shrugs and changed the subject.

  Back home, I sent the psychological report I’d pinched from my father’s office to a friend who knows software. He’d offered to run the document through a computer translation program. Such things were still primitive then, but he had found one on the Web that claimed to convert Magyar into English.

  “Ugh,” he wrote in an e-mail accompanying the translation, “it’s a bust.”

  A tantalizing bust, though: a gusher of gibberish with an occasional spurt of nonsensically arranged English words.

  Rasps spondee, rasps kerdesekre valaszolva tell, that novel loves operaltatni selves. …

  Hazassagukat Jonathan they were keeping, for it against him sauce ban runaway tole …

  Kisgyerekkent very slack it had been, unloved tussle …

  Maybe it had been a mistake to pick translation software with the name of the world’s most unbreakable encryption. The program was titled Enigma, presumably after the German device that enciphered and deciphered the Nazi’s secret code. I read on:

  Gannet jo module, Jewish people there had been. Bud there is not. … THE deceive trance szexualisokkal alakitott who connections this time acquainting the simile Hungarian kozossegekkel. About your child elhatarozasarol not could ugy think about …

  A few weeks later, I called my father’s old high school classmate, the retired trauma surgeon and anesthesiologist Otto Szekely. We met at a café in downtown Portland. Over lunch we talked about Otto’s various postretirement endeavors—he was taking classes at the local university on Renaissance drama and studying the latest breakthroughs in genetics. He had recently participated in the opening ceremonies of Portland’s Holocaust memorial, placing the names of his father and sister among those inscribed on the memorial wall. “It was something I could do to honor them.”

  As we were lingering over coffee, I fished the purloined document out of my purse and pushed it across the table.

  “Would you translate this?”

  Otto studied the subject heading at the top of the page:

  Pszichológiai vélemény

  Név: Faludi István Károly

  Szül.: 1927. 11. 01.

  Otto read through both pages without speaking. He looked up and over his glasses with a frown of disapproval. I thought he was dismayed I’d absconded with the letter, but that wasn’t it. “This psychologist is writing in a very German type of way,” he said. “It’s not good Hungarian.”

  Then he started translating.

  “Part I of the evaluation,” Otto said. “He has titled it ‘Exploration.’ ”

  “She,” I said.

  “What?”

  “The psychologist is a woman.” Perhaps it was the usual Magyar confusion with gendered pronouns.

  Under “Exploration,” Otto told me, the psychologist wrote of my father: “His appearance is conventionally dressed, a little bit of a feminine man. He is partially spontaneous in answering the questions. He would like to have a sex-change operation from a man to a woman. … He was dreaming about this for a long time but because of his financial responsibility for his children, he couldn’t do it.”

  “Hardly,” I sniped, under my breath. I had paid my own way through college, with the help of an Elks National Foundation scholarship and a federal loan, and support from my mother. My father hadn’t contributed anything. “Responsibility?”

  The furrows in Otto’s forehead deepened. “His parents were well-to-do Jewish people,” he read. “During the war he joined the underground and that way he was able to obtain false papers and rescue his parents and himself. Later, his parents emigrated to Israel and they died there.”

  Otto reached under his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “I don’t think he’s a Jew.”

  “Who?”

  “The psychologist.” I blinked, surprised. I’d asked about the gender identity of my father, and Otto was speculating on the religious identity of the shrink.

  “This is very much simplified,” he said, “this idea of ‘joining’ the ‘underground.’ This psychologist doesn’t understand the Hungarian Jewish situation.”

  He slid his glasses back on his nose and continued reading: “His relationship with his parents was good. As a small child he was very girlish. He didn’t like to fight. He avoided the boys’ activities. In secret, he wore his mother’s dresses. Their maid also often dressed him as a girl.”

  Otto raised his head and we exchanged a wordless glance.

  The “Exploration” whipped through my father’s biography: the two years in Denmark, the five in Brazil, his emigration to the United States at the end of 1953. “In 1957, he says he got married to a German-origin American girl.”

  German origin? One of my mother’s grandparents was German. Is this how my father saw her? I wondered why the psychologist found this significant enough to include in a document that was only a page and a half long.

  Otto continued: “They had two children. He felt that the marriage was good, but despite this fact, his wife divorced him. According to his story, he still doesn’t know the reason for the divorce. … He feels his relationship with his children is good, and in spite of geographical distance, they keep in contact.”

  Otto translated the “Exploration’s” last paragraph:

  From the sexual point of view, he was always attracted to females. He has sexual relationships with women only. Until the beginning of the hormone treatment, he led an active heterosexual life. However, during his marriage, it happened sometimes he secretly took his wife’s dresses. … He doesn’t know whether after the sex change he will be attracted to men or women.

  Part II was titled “Examination.” It recounted the outcome of various psychological and personality tests that the psychologist had conducted on my father, including—how quaint!—a Rorschach.

  The tests don’t show any sign of psychosis or bizarre appearance and aggressive signs. However, some signs of circular thinking can be found. The whole result of these test materials are impregnated with an uncertainty of or about i
dentity and searching for identity. … But this is not circumscribed to the psychosexual areas only. It characterizes the behavior and the disharmony of the desires. …

  “Oh, this awful Germanic language,” Otto groaned.

  His psychological condition can be characterized as different in activity—open or branching—which shows up in sexual fantasies and behavior. Primarily, the preference of impersonal eroticism is present, which is associated with the experience of feelings of guilt.

  We arrived at Part III, “Vélemény,” or Opinion, the all-important determination of whether the patient is eligible for surgery:

  Based on my examination and various tests, it can be stated the psychosexual development is disordered. However, a straightforward indication of transsexuality cannot be verified without doubt. A fetishistic or transvestite type of identity disorder can be supposed. No conception and aim can be explored in relation to the future for the sex change. From a psychological point of view and taking into consideration the age of the patient, the experience of rebuilding a new identity and adaptation to it after surgery seems problematic.

  “The language here is very ambiguous,” Otto said. “But I think what this psychologist is trying to say is that he doesn’t think—she doesn’t think—that your father knows what he wants to do. Or who he wants to be.”

  PART III

  20

  Pity, O God, the Hungarian

  Several years after my father had flown to Thailand to establish his gender identity “without a doubt,” Hungary’s identity crisis, building since 1989, reached its own Rubicon. The crisis was, in its own way, as “disordered” and “problematic” as my father’s, with all the insistence of a generation raised to believe it was one thing, Soviet-subject Communist, only to discover that it had been something else all along. “Step by step,” as Gábor Vona, the founder of the far-right Jobbik Party and Magyar Gárda militia, had declared to his followers in 2008, “we have to rebuild our identity as a nation.” That summons proved to be one of Jobbik’s greatest draws, especially among the younger electorate. (Nearly half of Jobbik’s voters in the 2010 national election were under thirty-five.) In a survey of Jobbik’s Facebook fans, the party’s supporters chose this phrase as one of their top three reasons for backing Jobbik: “the protection of identity.”