This week we present two stories from people who learned something about their childhood later in life.
Part 1: Growing up in the fifties and sixties, Jenice Matias senses there's more to her mother's occupation than she understands.
Jenice Matias is a dancer, singer, actress, comedy writer, and storyteller. Her story on the Guys We Fucked podcast has been listened to over a quarter of a million times, and she performs storytelling all over New York City. She is currently revamping her solo show “Pussinomics: a comedy” a political satire on the selling and marketing of the female persona. You can learn more about Jenice Matias on her website Jenicematias.biz
Part 2: D.B. Firstman has always known their body is different, but at the age of thirty, they make a discovery that changes everything.
D.B. Firstman is a lifelong New Yorker born and raised in Queens. A career-long civil servant, they are a data analyst for the City of New York, crunching numbers in Excel and SPSS. A lifelong baseball fan, they have had their work published on ESPN.COM and BaseballProspectus.com, as well as in the SABR Baseball Research Journal. Their first book: “Hall of Name: Baseball’s Most Magnificent Monikers from ‘The Only Nolan’ to ‘Van Lingle Mungo’ and More” is available on Amazon and local indy bookstores.
Episode Transcript
Part 1: Jenice Matias
My story takes place in 1959 when I was 7 years old. I lived in East New York on Spanish Harlem. And at that time, New York City was the capital of the Jim Crow, which practiced strict racial segregation. My mother relocated from Puerto Rico and she had a natural ability to always find a way to make a dollar.
So she was able to move my brothers and me and my father into a five-room apartment on East 110 Street, Building 110, Apartment 10. Our standard of living really, really increased. And it was all owed to my mother's relationship to our neighbor Miss Gertrude who lived across the hall in Apartment 12.
Now, my mother worked in New York City Hospital in housekeeping. She would come home and during the night she would be at Miss Gertrude and all day Saturday and Sunday. I didn't know what was going on. I just knew when I would peek out the door on the weekend, I would see a line of women and they will go in one by one and I would hear screaming and crying. And I wondered why they didn't run, because I thought my mother and Miss Gertrude was beating them. So I said maybe it's a big girl thing.
Well, one day when I was 8 years old, I was coming from school and usually our front door is unlocked. And this time it was locked. So I'm banging and knocking calling, “Mommy!” And my mother flings open the door and she grabs me by the arm and almost put me airborne and just slams the door. And I noticed she was shaking nervously.
She reminded me like that white woman in those movies that when they saw a creature, like the Blob, you know. So I thought the Blob, I don't know. This is really if you know, you know what I'm talking about. The Blob was coming to get us, okay.
Jenice Matias shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So that night I overheard my mother say to my father the pigs came and took Miss Gertrude away because she killed a woman with a hanger. So I said, “Oh, I don't want to get beat with a hanger.” So I got very scared of hangers.
When I was 10 years old, something started happening. My mother started coming home with bags from New York Hospital. Now, I love looking into the bags because I got introduced to bagels. We did not have bagels in my neighborhood and just food that wasn't… you know. So I always looked in her bag.
And there was one bag when I looked, she would adamantly just scream at me and slap me. On those days we didn't have DYFS so I didn't know what's going on.
But also I noticed that she always had this special pot that she told us we could not touch. She would put it on the stove and one day I peeked into it and it looked red and thick like a soup, but it didn’t smell like a soup. But I said, okay.
My mother's a great cook. But every time she did this, a strange woman would come to the house. So the woman would come and be crying but my mother would put this mixture, this soup into something and take the woman into the bedroom. And the woman would emerge and she would be happy and hugging my mother.
So one day when my mother was in the room with a strange woman, I went to the stove, I took a spoon and I dipped it into the pot and I put the whole spoon in my mouth. It was the worst soup I ever tasted. And I couldn't understand so I just said, “Well, it makes the women happy so it must be a big girl thing.”
And those days when you were Catholic, the nuns will come to the elementary school and pick you up and then they will march you to Catholic school. I was starting to hear at 10, 11, 12 talk from the big girls about certain words like ‘pregnancy’ and ‘month’ and ‘abortion’. I didn't understand what was going on.
But I did learn in Catholic school that if you… as the teachers, as the nuns would walk back and forth and they will rhythmically beat on their hands the value of being a virtuous girl and not having sex and having a man to take care of you and being faithful and all this. I didn't understand what was going on.
But I did learn that this body was bad. That I had an evilness. This body could be evil.
When I was 13, my mother… well, the signing of the Civil Rights Act and my mother’s ability to make money, she was able to purchase a house in Springfield Gardens, Queens, New York, the first housing low income in an all-white neighborhood. And we started getting white women coming to the house.
Now, I never met y'all. Y'all didn't come to my house. But in Springfield Gardens, white women started coming and I couldn't… you know, it was weird. It reminded me of… well, it was just weird.
But I went too far. I forgot to tell you one event when I was 10 years old. Please bear with me. My mother came to the bedroom at our home in East Harlem and it was like 3:00 in the morning. She grabs me from the bed and she says, “I need your help.”
Now, my mother never asked me for anything. Matter of fact, we really didn't spend time with each other because she was very busy. And she takes me into the kitchen and it's dark. She sits on the floor and I said, “Oh, we're going to play. We’re going to have quality time. We're going to play jacks,” you know.
So she sits there and next thing I knew, she lays back and she opens her legs and she exposed her vagina. Now, I didn't know what a vagina was. I knew that outside it looked like mine but I know what I was looking at looked like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. Yeah, I looked at a lot of movies.
And she hands me a long tube and she says, “Take the lamp and shine it.”
And I was fascinated. I thought this was like a creature… you know, I thought this was like The Twilight Zone. I looked at that too. So I took the tube and I stuck it in the hole. And my mother moaned. Next thing I know, she slaps my hand she says, “Go back to bed.”
And I was very angry because I didn't know if I won the game. What's going on? It's just I didn't know what the game was but I know there's a winner and a loser.
So going back to when I was 13 years old, my mother decides to teach me how to make arroz con gandules, which is Spanish rice. She calls me down. We had like an upstairs. Whoa!
I come to the kitchen. My mother's sitting at the kitchen table with this regal look on her face. And she says to me, “It's time for you to learn how to cook rice and beans because I don't want you killing my grandkids.” So I was very happy.
As she sat there and she started to conduct me, you know how to cut the seasoning, how to make the sauce, how to put… you know, the preparation, I thought this is a good time maybe I can bring up that incident when I was 8 years old, because I want to know what…
Anyway, I turned to her and, to kind of initiate the conversation, I said, “Mommy, is white people coochie the same like our coochie?”
So my mother looks at me with a look on her face like I had two heads. And she leans in, she says, “Child, what shit are you talking about?”
I said, “Mommy, I just want to know does white women coochies the same like our coochie?”
She just looks at me, she says, “Child, pussy is pussy.” So she used the big girl's term.
Jenice Matias shares her story with the Story Collider audience at Caveat in New York City in August 2019. Photo by Zhen Qin.
So now I started really feeling like I was bonding with my mother and I wanted to ask her because I heard that my mother’s business was something. That she could go to jail.
So I said, “Mommy, aren't you afraid of going to jail, what you're doing?”
So she looked at me. She kind of smirked. She was kind of surprised that I knew something but I didn't know. She just kind of said, she said, “Child, I work for the mafia. They ain’t going to let anything happen to me. They need me.”
So I knew from East Harlem that the mafia were some dangerous people so, for some reason, it made me feel good.
Then I said I'm going to ask her the ultimate question, what I've always suspected. So I said, “Mommy, don't you think what you're doing you can go to hell? That you're killing babies?”
My mother put a stance like she was going to get ready. Her whole demeanor changed and she just looked at me with piercing eyes, like if they were knives I would have been dead.
And she says, “Let me tell you something, child. You don't know how it is to be a woman today. I hope, I hope in your generation it'd be different. But women today have no rights. They need a man for everything. A man can mistreat you, beat you, kill you. Ain't nothing going to happen to them.
Let me tell you something. If you get pregnant, nobody is going to want you. You're going to have to leave your family. You can't get a job because they going to label you as a whore. And if you have a kid in this, they're going put a label that he's a bastard on his birth certificate and give him a whole life, a life of a hardship and troubles. So don't tell me what I'm doing is murder. You don't know what it is.
I tell you if a woman has a miscarriage and she goes to the doctor which is white, or her husband or her boyfriend or her neighbor says she did something, they can arrest her. They can sentence her for 20 years, 25 to life and she might get the death penalty just because she had a miscarriage. So don't tell me.
Yes, I make my money. I make a few dollars here. But the decision on the woman is on her. I just give her something. I just give her help. Just help her in her times of trouble.”
I put the rice in the pot, put the broth, I cover it and then I sat down, and the rest of the day was talking about how to make the perfect rice.
When I was 15, I was in the kitchen. I didn't feel good. My mother comes down and she walks and then she stops abruptly and she looks at me. I mean she looked at me like she was looking through me, like she was really like x-rays.
She said, “You're pregnant.”
I said, “No, I'm not.”
She says, “You've been messing with boys, haven't you?” And I kind of lowered my head. She said, “Well, you better decide what you want to do.”
That month, my period didn't come. I was 15. I told my mother, yes, I'll have a… I learned the word ‘abortion’.
And as I laid on the bed, spread my legs, my mother brought the pot. I knew now what that mixture was for. My mother brought the wire… not the wire, the long tubes. Now, I knew what that was for. And as she injected the solution into my uterus, I closed my eyes, took a deep breath and I said, “I'm a big girl now.” Thank you.
Part 2: D.B. Firstman
It's a beautiful spring day in 1994. I'm a 30-year-old woman sitting at a desk in the office of my longtime gynecologist Dr. Sweeney. Dr. Sweeney it's a fatherly type, in his late 60s, salt-and-pepper hair, ruddy face and glasses. And I'm in his office on this fine day to ask him whether or not I actually have a clitoris. And if not, why?
Why should I need to ask him such a question? Because my girlfriend at the time couldn't find it. And despite my protestations and pointing to where the magic button should be, she insisted there was something definitely wrong with my sexual anatomy and that I needed to find some answers for my own sake.
Now, I will tell you that at that point in my life, I was aware of anatomical differences between me and most women mainly because I went through multiple surgeries between the ages of 2 and 18 so that I could have “a normal sex life’ and “normal menstrual cycle”.
But when I asked doctors such as, “Why can't I have children? Why do I have to take estrogen?” And, “Doesn't a cliterectomy mean the removal of?” They gave me only the most basic and rudimentary answers.
So we're back in Dr. Sweeney's office and I say to him, “Dr. Sweeney, do I or do I not have a clitoris?”
D.B. Firstman shares their story with the Story Collider audience at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY in February 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.
He pauses. He thinks. He takes a deep breath and he says, “No, Diane, you do not.”
I’m like, “Okay.” And I say, “But what about that bump where my labia meet?”
And he says, “That's just a bump. There are no nerve endings at the end of it.”
He goes on to tell me that the reason for all my surgeries growing up was that I was born chromosomally male with what's called an intersex condition. Basically my body was a mélange of male and female gonadal tissue, and back in 1963 when I was born, people like me were assigned a female gender 99 times out of 100 because it's easier to fashion a vagina than a penis out of gonadal tissue.
Intellectually, I actually understood this. Emotionally, no fucking way. Because what it basically meant was I had been misled by the doctors and my mother for 30 years growing up and it basically meant that I was living a lie for my first 30 years.
I thanked him for his time. I left his office. I was hurt. I was confused. I was depressed. I was angry and I didn't know what to do. I called my mother. I said, “Mom, we need to have a talk.”
I went to her house, knocked on the door and we sat down. I said, “Mom, I just found out that I'm intersex. Dr. Sweeney told me.”
And a look crossed her face, concern and sadness. And she said, “Oh? I thought you knew already. I thought the doctors had told you.”
At that point, I'm confused and livid because (a) she let me go through all these procedures, and (b) she hid the truth from me.
I said, “No, mom. No. Actually, no, they didn't tell me anything.”
She went on to say that was told not to tell me as that was the proper etiquette or protocol back in those days, and to just raise me as a female going forward because that was the easiest thing to do back then.
Intellectually, again, I understood this. Emotionally, again, no fucking way.
And what was really weird was… well, not weird but also pathetic. That's a better word ‘pathetic’, was when I asked the doctors about who was supposed to tell me what was going on, they thought that my mother was supposed to tell me. But if she hadn't, they were going to tell me if I ever moved away from New York City. Which means that, potentially, I would have never found out about my true identity had it not been for the girlfriend who couldn't find my clit.
So, from that point, I started having flashbacks. Flashbacks to childhood where I can distinctly remember being 8 or 9 years old and being wheeled down to a cold basement studio in the hospital, told to strip naked, stand in front of a wall with horizontal lines on it, and have pictures taken of me for inclusion in what I believe to be case studies or, God forbid, medical textbooks.
Apparently, the hospital thought I was some sort of miracle child. I was trotted out in front of hospital residents. I was trotted out in front of visiting doctors. They thought I was something special. I thought I was special because I was just so damn smart. IQ test off the charts, Stuyvesant High School, Mensa. Fat lot of good it did me then.
My life having known, having found out about my true identity, my life actually got worse in the 18 months thereafter. In quick succession, the girlfriend who couldn't find my clit broke up with me, a promotion I was supposed to get at work went to somebody else, and my estranged father passed away all within 18 months.
My life basically crashed down upon me on Labor Day weekend of 1995. I took an overdose of sleeping pills and vodka. I lay down in bed and, as I was drifting off, I had second thoughts.
I alerted my housemate. She whisked me away to the emergency room at Park Slope Hospital whereupon the very first thing said to me by the attending ER physician was, “Are you transgender?”
D.B. Firstman shares their story with the Story Collider audience at Union Hall in Brooklyn, NY in February 2020. Photo by Zhen Qin.
My life is in this man's hands and that's his first interaction with me. I was so fucking scared at that moment of being treated differently based upon my answer that I told him the truth. I told him I was intersex while they were pumping me full of Ipecac.
Managed to survive that then I checked myself into a mental health facility and I spent the next two weeks asking some very big questions. What do I do now? Do I want a sex change? What am I? Am I a lesbian? Am I a bisexual? Am I a man? Am I a woman? Am I a genderfuck? Am I a human being? And possibly most importantly, how could I ever trust anybody who says they care about me ever again?
I managed to get out of the mental facility and I jumped into weekly therapy. Obviously, I had a lot to process. One of the first things I had to process was the concept of having a sex change. Though I realized that my brain seemed to be wired for male abilities and male interests, emotionally, I felt more connected towards women. So I thought maybe I shouldn't go through with this. And also, I was afraid at that time of what it would do to my mother to go through this.
Now, I know what you're thinking. Weren't you just livid at her just a couple of months ago, weeks ago? I had gotten to the point in my relationship with her and in my knowledge of my condition that I really understood that she did what she did out of love and that she really had nowhere else to turn. She had no other resources to consult as to how to raise me. So she did the best she could with what she had.
Flash forward 20 years. My mother passes away in 2015 and I leave weekly therapy a year later. I'm still gender conflicted. I still hate my body. I hate my breasts. I can't achieve orgasm and, most days, I feel like I'm floating through the gender continuum. I don't feel like I have any contemporaries. I don't feel like anybody else is like me.
Now, I'm still seeing a therapist, a psychiatrist for medication maintenance but I don't bring the topic of intersexuality and gender identity into my sessions with him. That's how deep, how fucked up I am about this topic. All I talk about is my job, how much I hate it and the book I'm writing, how that is going.
But in the meantime, the world of gender norms has exploded. You've got non-binary people, people who don't ascribe to either male or female. You've got gender fluid people, people who ascribe to one or the other depending on the day of the week. You've got transgender people.
One of my friends is a woman named Christina Kahrl who used to be a guy named Chris Kahrl until her early 30s and is now a successful baseball writer with a lesbian wife. There's a co-worker, a transgender co-worker at work who walks and talks with pride and purpose. Every day I see her. Me, I feel stuck and I feel like the anger is burning, it’s building up in me, like I have nowhere to turn.
I remember something that my longtime psychologist asked me many years ago. She said, “What do you do with all of your anger?”
And I think about that and I say, “I turn my anger inward.” And if anybody knows Psych 101, if you turn your anger inward it leads to worsening depression. So I was reaching a fight-or-flight moment with regard to my gender identity. I was either going to end up back in a mental health facility or I was going to find an answer.
Lo and behold, on the morning of December 9, 2019, I woke up, got myself dressed, got on the subway and, all of a sudden, I had an epiphany. I finally, finally, finally realized and allowed myself to think that I didn't have to accept the gender and the body assigned to me by those doctors. I could be Christina Kahrl. I could be that transgender woman from work. I could be any fucking thing I wanted to be. I have free will.
I came out that day as non-binary. I let everybody know, all my friends on Facebook and Twitter know that they should stop calling me Diane and start calling me DB, which happened to be my first and middle initials.
I called my best friend of 40 years who's known me through thick and thin, but she hasn't known some of the really deep, dark places that I've gone emotionally. And I told her that non‑binary felt like the truest self identity I could ascribe myself to. It felt real. It resonated with me that being assigned female didn't.
So that night, December 9th, a feeling of self-esteem and self-worth washed over me. I felt self-validation for the first time in maybe all my 56 years. And by the end of that week, I had filed for a legal name change, which, by the way, became official this morning. I filed for the legal name change. I investigated getting my gender marker on my birth certificate changed from F to X. I changed my work, my email and my… I asked people at work to start calling me DB and using the pronoun 'they’.
So now when I go into doctor’s offices, I check their intake forms and I make sure that their gender section offers more than just male and female and that they actually have a gender identity section. And if they don't, I walk up to their desk, I hand them back their form and I say, “It's 2020. Time to get your act together.”
For me going forward, I'm planning on having my breasts removed because I want to get my body back to the unmodified state it was in before the doctors pumped me full of estrogen. I don't want to be a man but I'm not comfortable being a woman based on the assignment of doctors from so long ago.
So going forward, every December 9th, which happens to be my half-birthday, I am celebrating Non-Binary Independence Day. Watch out, world. DB Firstman is finally happy in mind and body and I'm here to stay.