In the Darkroom (24 page)

On paper. On the street, any urge to celebrate Hungary's declared tolerance was undercut by fear.

Soon after I arrived that summer of 2008, my father threw a party to introduce me to “my new trans friends.” I was pleased. For one thing, she was celebrating my presence. She even bought a cake for the occasion, a Sacher torte she had decorated with the message, “Susan—Welcome to Hungary!” For another, it seemed she had found a way to break out of a lifelong isolation. “Before, I was like other men,” she said. “I didn't talk to other people. Now I can talk to anybody.” Now, not only was she hosting a party; she was trying to assemble what she called, rather hopefully, “the Hungarian trans community.”

A few years earlier, my father had stumbled upon TS-Online, at the time the only Hungarian transsexual website. She e-mailed a few of the people who had posted comments and nearly two dozen agreed to get together. My father volunteered her front deck as their gathering place.

At the first meeting, the group settled on a name: the Hungarian Tranny Club. (The term “tranny,” regarded as a slur in the United States, had no such resonance in Hungary then.) My father proposed they make it an official organization, registered with the state. Her efforts met with resistance. Some were afraid to have their names on a government list in a hostile society; others felt ambivalent about the very idea of making common cause with other transgender people. “I don't want a ‘trans community,' ” Jazmin, one of the Tranny Club's reluctant members, told me when we met, clipping the air with a karate chop. “I am not a trans. I am a woman, and that's
it
.”

The second meeting of the Hungarian Tranny Club convened at the home of Lorelei, a retired police officer who only used that name when he wore women's clothes; he had not changed his sex and wasn't sure that he wanted to. For now, he considered himself a transvestite and cross-dressed in secret; in his public life, he lived as a man. My father showed up early and received a warm welcome. “Lorelei was glad to have someone his age to talk to!” my father told me. The other club members were decades younger. My father settled into a chair and surveyed Lorelei's living room. “He had a lot of books,” she said. “The walls were
lined
with books.” My father took a closer look. “And there were all these books about how bad the Jews were. Nazi books.
Mein Kampf
.”

Others arrived. “And they looked at the books, too,” my father said. “And one of them says, ‘Oh, you have
Mein Kampf
aaalso!' And another says, ‘There's some good things in that book.' ” My father, who had been sitting quietly, spoke up. “Hitler was an idiot,” she said. There was an awkward pause. Then, my father recalled, another guest said: “Oh no, Hitler wasn't an idiot. He had some good things to say.”

With that, the subject was dropped, and my father presented her research: to set up a state-recognized organization, members had to pay an annual fee of 10,000 forints (about $40 at the time), and at least ten members had to sign a petition requesting official status. At the end of the meeting, the petition was passed around the room. Only five signed it. My father was furious. “They are a bunch of 'fraidy cats.” When she got home, she solved the signature problem: “I faked them.”

Thus constituted, the Tranny Club soon disbanded. One member, a financial adviser who feared losing clients, announced that she didn't feel “safe” belonging to a club. Lorelei said he didn't want to appear anywhere publicly in a dress. Another member said she didn't want to participate because she was “a married woman.” Still another said she was too busy adopting a baby. Then several transsexuals said they didn't want any transvestites in the club.

“You mean you want to
discriminate
?” my father retorted.

In the end, they agreed not to have an organization at all—just a website. One afternoon as we were sitting, per usual, at her computer, my father showed me the club's home page, which she had illustrated with a picture of horses grazing on the Great Hungarian Plain and a photo of herself, posed in her backyard swing. The caption under the picture read, “Stefánie Faludi, Presiding Woman.”

My father invited all the former members of the Hungarian Tranny Club to the “Susan—Welcome to Hungary!” brunch. Two accepted: Jazmin and Lorelei. A third guest, also a male-to-female transsexual, was added at the last moment: Tatianna, a Hungarian expat who happened to be visiting the country from Florida. My father filled out the roster with some non-trans guests: two feminist professors she'd met at a literary salon, a young woman who wrote for a weekly city magazine, and the sociologist and LGBT scholar Judit Takács. And Ilonka. “She can help me with the cooking,” my father said.

Early that morning, Ilonka arrived with ten bags of groceries and housekeeping supplies. My father had asked her to clean the house, too. While we were setting the table, Tatianna showed up, wrung out from the climb on a blazing hot day. She'd taken the bus from Pest. She was wearing red suede boots, a black knee-length skirt, and, over her henna-red wig, a jaunty wide-brimmed straw hat, which, by the time she arrived at the top of my father's steep street, was perched at a perilous angle. She staggered in the door, batting hat and hair back in place with a devil-may-care swat. At the age of sixty-three, Tatianna wasn't trying to play the ingénue. I liked her at once.

“I nearly
killed
myself coming up your hill,” she announced to my father, collapsing into the nearest chair and kicking off her boots. She patted her midriff. “But it's okay, I need to lose some weight.” From her purse, she extricated a jumbo bag of mini-Hershey's chocolate bars and passed it around. “Not
too
much weight!” she added.

My father uncorked a bottle of Hungarian pálinka and poured a shot for each of us while Tatianna told her story. This was her fifth trip to Hungary since she'd emigrated to Venezuela with her parents in 1947, when she—then a he—was a toddler. As an adult, still a male, he'd moved to Florida, married and raised two sons, worked as an engineer, and pursued photography and collected cameras in her free time. (Her latest purchase—a big digital camera—dangled from one shoulder.)

“I started wearing women's clothes when I was seven or eight,” Tatianna said. “As soon as my parents went to the movies, I'd be in my mother's underwear drawer, I'd be putting on her makeup.” In 2006, Tatianna had checked into a hospital in Trinidad, Colorado. “Sex-Change Capital of the World!” she noted. (The late Dr. Stanley Biber, a pioneering sex-reassignment surgeon, performed thousands of sex-change operations there between 1969 and his retirement in 2003, at the age of eighty, after which he was replaced by a surgeon who was herself a transsexual.) Afterward, Tatianna's family refused to recognize her new status. So, Tatianna was still presenting herself as male much of the time, even as her anatomy and every piece of identification in her wallet declared her a woman. Later, when we exchanged e-mails, I noticed she went by a man's name even on the Internet—a name that wasn't her original male name, a new male identity that concealed a new female identity.

“It must be a relief,” I ventured, “being away from home and getting to dress how you want.”

Tatianna gave a pained laugh. When she'd arrived in Budapest a week earlier, she'd reported to the state agency that issues Hungarian ID papers. (She'd retained her old citizenship, and Hungarian citizens living in Hungary are expected to carry state-issued identification cards.) The state bureaucrats would only recognize her as male, because that's what it said on her original Hungarian birth certificate. The clerk behind the desk “wanted me to take off my wig and all my makeup, right on the spot, so she could take my picture as a ‘man.' ” Tatianna stood her ground. It took several days of fights with various supervisors up the food chain, but eventually she got her ID.

She pulled out her cell phone and handed it to me. “See?” She had taken a photo of her ID photo with her phone. “Just in case.”

“Nice,” I said.

My father looked over my shoulder. “Awful,” she said. “I had mine taken by a professional.”

A racket of stiletto heels on flagstones announced the arrival of Jazmin. The shoes were silver and matched the polish on her paste-on nails. Jazmin seemed to have adopted the perky persona of an aerobics instructor. She had buff arms. Her bubble-gum pink, off-one-shoulder, faux-torn T-shirt announced, in silver-glitter letters, “Gym Girl!” She was escorted by an equally toned young man in a muscle shirt and gym shorts. “This is my husband,” she announced to the other guests. They weren't technically married, but she preferred to describe him that way. Jazmin drew me aside to hear the story of her transformation, enlisting Tatianna as translator.

“I'm very special in this respect,” she said, “because for two months, I went into hiding from the whole world. And in this period, I changed myself, all my wardrobes changed, I had my breasts done, I had my FFS”—facial feminization surgery—“I had silicone injections on my cheeks and my forehead, and I had my eyebrows tattooed.” The finale occurred in a sex reassignment surgical clinic in Serbia. The operation cost 16,000 euros. “When I woke up, my husband was on his knees by my bed. Because he
knew
. Now I was all woman. This is the meaning of being.”

“Of what?”

“Being. Of
my
being. … It makes me very happy, this feeling that I only have to snap my fingers and men are at my feet.”

I asked if she and her husband had been together long.

“Ten years,” she said. “But we never used my penis. We made love another way. My penis was the worst part of my body. I never used it.”

Tatianna rolled her eyes. “That's the difference between her and me,” Tatianna said to me in English. “I used
my
tool. And I'm not ashamed to say it.”

Jazmin said her younger brother had stopped speaking to her since the operation and had forbidden her to come near his children. “He's very Catholic. I told him, ‘If God wasn't willing, then it wouldn't have happened.' ” He was unconvinced. “I changed,” Jazmin said, “but I can't make people change.”

“
My
daughter likes me now,” my father put in. “She comes to see me.”

Jazmin said her husband's family didn't know. “We never told them,” she said. He simply presented her one day as the “new” woman in his life. “His parents knew me since I was a boy. But as a woman, they didn't recognize me.” Just to be on the safe side, she was introduced to his parents “as the sister of a boy they once knew.” Which seemed to work. “They said, ‘Oh yes, we see the resemblance.' ” Still, there was a tense moment when her husband's parents asked to see Jazmin's baby pictures.

“What did you do?”

Jazmin pulled out her cell phone and called up the picture she had showed them—of herself when she was two years old, naked, and—thanks to Photoshop—sans penis.

Presenting her new self to the staff at the small business she owned required less finesse. Right before the operation, Jazmin had learned that somebody was stealing money from the till. The thievery presented a well-timed opportunity for a fresh start. Everyone was fired. Post-op, she hired a new crew.

“I'm very proud at how these girls take me as a role model,” Jazmin said of her female employees. “They try to imitate me—the hair, nails, everything. As a female, I'm representing womanhood.”

Soon, she added, she would be representing the ultimate in femininity. “I am going to have a baby,” she announced to the guests. “The baby will be God's son.”

“Oh, not
God's
, I hope,” Tatianna muttered.

“I'm looking for a surrogate,” Jazmin continued. “It will be a surrogate mother with my husband's sperm. It's going to cost three to five million forints, but I have another apartment that I'm going to sell.”

And then?

“And then, it will be a complete woman's life,” she said. “Before I was a transsexual. Now I'm a woman.”

My father brought in the cake, decked with candles. As she cut slices of the “Welcome to Hungary” Sacher torte for everyone, she recalled how she had gotten a deliveryman the previous winter to haul her giant Christmas tree all the way into the house. “It's great being a woman,” my father said. “I look helpless, and everyone helps me. It's a racket. Women get away with murder!”

Lorelei, who'd arrived at the party two hours late in a wraparound dress and a choker made of large wooden beads (to hide his Adam's apple), confided that he almost hadn't come. “As soon as I left my apartment, my heartbeat went up,” Lorelei said. He feared being seen in a dress. “When it seemed very quiet, I started down.” As he entered the lobby, the building's front door swung open and the man who walked in was one of Lorelei's former superior officers. He glanced in Lorelei's direction as he passed, and nodded.

“And he said, ‘
Kezét csókolom.
' ” I kiss your hand.

“He didn't recognize you?” I asked.

Lorelei shook his head. “It made me very happy when he
csókolom
-ed me.” Lorelei had only recently dared to appear in women's clothing. “March 6, 2005,” he said, his first attempt. He had ventured out of his apartment and descended just one flight before “I was trembling so hard I felt I would have to stop.” It took him another nine months to make it to the street. Since he had retired from the police, Lorelei had been working as a security guard. At his job, he wore a man's uniform and a badge with his male name. No one knew his other identity. He preferred to keep it that way.

Hardly surprising, given the political climate. As one of the feminist professors at the table noted, the times were “very very bad for LGBT people.” The conservative Fidesz Party and its far-right sidekick, Jobbik, were shooting up in the polls. “Look what happened at the gay pride parade last year,” said Judit Takács. Neo-Nazis and skinheads had set upon the marchers. There'd been injuries. “It could be even worse this year,” she said. “I'm very worried.”