Biographical Information, Part I

I was supposed to be a boy.

My birth predated regular use of ultrasound technologies, and like most born before the last two decades or so, my sex, in utero, was the source of blind speculation on the part of my parents.

I think they really wanted a boy, figuring in a family predominated by women, they were ripe for producing male offspring. When my mother went visiting the family matriarchs—great grandmothers, dowager aunts, etc—various archaic forms of divination were employed in observing the size and shape of her pregnant belly. Food cravings were analyzed, the strength of my kicks measured. The various branches of the family tree conferred, and for the first time in family history, the Virginia rich, WASP socialites, the ex-Mennonite, Appalachian, German schoolteachers, the Southwest Virginia coal miner’s wives, and the Deep South Plantation chatelaines arrived at the same conclusion.

I was definitely a boy.

Though it would be months before I saw the light outside my amniotic chamber, my identity was born. Thomas Butler Fields. Tom, my mother cooed over her belly. Tom, my father told his friends at the club. Tom, they printed on notebooks and babybooks in imagining my future. My nursery was to have a Peter Rabbit theme, appropriately masculine. My cradle was lined in blue blankets, and my grandmothers bought mobiles of airplanes and rocketships.

I think a lot about Tom, and who he would be. Some rugged kid with reddish hair and blue-green eyes with the wild, Peter Pan brows of the Fields clan. Strong, a natural athlete, tall, prone to freckles. Tom would have walked six months earlier than Alison. He would be an avid reader of adventure stories, much like the young Alison, but he would never be at loss for a hero in those books. He would have had plenty of friends (my childhood neighborhood, was literally all boy), and a friendly dog named Sam that would follow him everywhere. Tom would have excelled in school, been inherently cool, and somewhat preppy with his country club pedigree, and followed his father’s footsteps to Woodberry Forest as the son of an alumnus and on to University of Virginia where he would have pledged the same fraternity, and partied so hard he nearly lost his academic footing before a long, heartfelt conversation with his father, got him back on track.

Tom would have played guitar, not piano. He would have written with force, some sort of terse, yet visceral language, winning him accolades in student newspapers before he got hired by some international news service, or found himself in law school.

Tom wouldn’t have dated my friends. They would be too weird, too imperfect. He would have enjoyed much romantic success with the kind of girls that mocked Alison in junior high. And by twenty-seven, Tom would be financially stable, independent, making some sort of name for himself. He would play tennis or basketball with his buddies after work, possibly have a long-term relationship with a girl named Charlotte or Katie, and be looking into making a down payment on a house.

Maybe.

Or maybe Tom would have been more like me. Maybe Tom would be self-conscious about his life, unable to find full-time employment, without the cushion of Ivy-caliber education or unwavering parental approval. Maybe Tom would be washing dishes, playing guitar in some shitty local garage band, living in some damp basement apartment full of dirty dishes and records and cat shit with a stoner girl named Jen who he doesn’t love. Maybe he would feel like a has-been at twenty-eight. Maybe he sit around at night, speculating what his life would have been like if he had been born an Alison.

Whatever the case . . .

Whatever the case, in 1975/76, my parents never considered the fact that I might be a girl. Never researched names, never added the slightest feminine touch to their pre-natal arrangements. Never corrected the overbearing old women when they referred to me as “grandson.” And when I was born, on an unseasonably warm Saturday evening in February, they just sort of picked Alison out of thin air. It was a trendy name in the mid-seventies, without personal or familial significance. I think my mother had heard it on tv. And Jesse was my father’s middle name. Simple.

And somehow in those hours in the hospital—I was the only girl born in the maternity ward that weekend—my father decided I would never be an athlete, never be the rugged, independent kid with freckles and a dog named Sam. The matriarchs exchanged their blue blankets for pink ones, and my mother was already complaining about the state of my hair.