The Feeder (14 page)

Camille had been almost obsessive about her journaling, believing that one day she would use her diaries as reference material for a series of best-selling novels. Perhaps she would have, if she’d only been able to stay away from the drugs, men and destructive lifestyle that eventually became her end.

They were all there, every diary Camille had kept from the age of eight. The trunk held other mementos as well; her old ballerina tutu, which she wore in the one and only recital she ever danced in, before she got tired of ballet lessons and decided she wanted to be a gymnast instead. She loved to dress up in the tutu for fun. It had been part of several Halloween costumes, each one a little more bizarre than the last as she got older. The last time she wore it she had been a zombie ballerina, and the time before that she incorporated it into some kind of bizarre looking Gothic witch-princess thing that could only be believed if seen. If Marilyn Manson and Cinderella had a child… was the general idea. Halloween had already come and gone this year and Camille’s tutu would forever remain stuffed into that trunk, never to be worn again.

I dragged the trunk upstairs to my bedroom. It contained all that was left of Camille, and I wanted her with me. I placed it at the foot of my bed, where I could take one of the diaries out at my leisure when I felt like traveling back in time with Camille.

~ Chapter  18 ~

The Perfect Twins

Camille and I were identical twins. At birth, everyone oohed and aahed at how beautiful we were; what a perfect set of twins! Blonde-haired, blue-eyed and angelic – what more could a parent ask for? Our parents were ecstatic.

“Just like the Bobbsey Twins!” Nina, my mom’s sister, always used to say. Auntie Nina bought volumes of those books for us because we reminded her so much of the blonde-haired, blue-eyed twins in the stories.

After reading several Bobbsey Twins adventures, I decided the books were not suitable reading material for children. Sure, they were old stories, written in a different time, but therein was the issue I had with them. Racism – plain and simple. Anyone who has read Bobbsey Twins books knows what I’m talking about.

The Bobbseys were the quintessential white-bread American family, blessed with not one but
two
pairs of perfect blonde-haired, blue-eyed identical male/female twins.

Identical twins are most commonly of the same gender, having both come from a single egg divided into two separate embryos. Identical twins that consist of one male and one female are comparatively rare, and having two pairs of male/female identical twins in one family is even more unusual. Male/female twins are most commonly of the fraternal variety, meaning that each came from a different egg. This is why fraternal twins typically do not look alike.

Anyhow, back to the Bobbsey twins. Aside from the fact that the stories were about a very unlikely family unit, I could have stomached the stories if not for the blatant racism. This perfect blonde/blue/white American family employed a nice couple to help them around the house. The hired help were ‘colored’ folks, according to the author. At my young age, I didn’t understand what was so darn colorful about these people. I assumed they liked to wear bright clothing or something.

It wasn’t until I read in one of the stories about a doll the hired couple had given the youngest girl as a gift. The doll was also ‘colored’. I read the description of the doll’s dark skin. Flossie, the little girl, felt the need to place a cardboard box lid between the colored doll and the rest of her doll collection to keep him separate from them. That was when all the pieces fell into place.

The Bobbsey Twins.

Camille and I reminded people of them. We were rare – a perfect blonde-haired blue-eyed pair of male/female identical twins. Our parents named us Camille Samantha and Samuel Cameron – Cammie and Sammie, no matter which way you switched it around.

Our mother was delighted to have one of each; a handsome, rugged son who would make his mother proud and a delicate, pretty daughter for whom she could buy frilly pink outfits.

Our father burst with pride at the thought of having a sweet, chaste daughter he would one day give away at the altar and a tough, manly son who would one day follow in his footsteps.

His size thirteen military-boot-wearing, oozing-with-testosterone masculine footsteps.

~ Chapter  19 ~

The Intersex Condition

For the first few years, things were perfect. Our parents had a son and a daughter – the ideal family, to some. By the time I reached three years of age it became evident that I was different. When we were born, it was clear that one of us was a girl and one was not. Simple deductive reasoning would tell anyone with common sense that the one that was not a girl would have to be a boy. Sure, some boys are born with larger penises than others, but it was there, and that was what counted.

As I grew older, my mother noticed that even though the rest of me was growing normally, one part of me did not appear to be growing at all. My penis, which had seemed unusually small at birth, had not changed in size at all. My scrotum was practically nonexistent.

At first, my mother was too embarrassed to mention it, but finally out of concern she asked the family doctor about it. Further examination revealed something unusual. I was not developing the way a little boy should. My penis was a tiny little button, which hadn’t raised any alarm when I was a baby. As I got older and began toilet training, its lack of growth was impossible to ignore.  I wasn’t able to pee standing up the way other little boys could. Where my testicles should have been, were loose flaps of skin that vaguely resembled female labia.

I was diagnosed with a condition called Grade 3 Partial Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome. Although I was producing some male hormones, my body was resistant to them, so they weren’t having as much effect on my development as they should have. My testicles were located inside my body, underdeveloped and undescended.

I was what was known as an intersex individual.

I wasn’t fully male, but I wasn’t female either. I was somewhere between genders.

My parents didn’t take the news well at first – especially my father.

My mother had envisioned me marrying a beautiful bride who would bear my children and carry on the family name.

My father… well, size thirteen, military follow-in-his-manly-footsteps… enough said.

Ever concerned about keeping up appearances and desperate to avoid a family scandal, my parents kept my condition a secret from their friends and relatives.

The doctors told them children with my condition were routinely given surgical alterations to give them a distinct gender. It would be easiest, from a surgical perspective, to turn my physical body into a female one. Shoot me up with some female hormones at puberty, create a vaginal opening and there you go – instant girl! The doctor recommended gender reassignment be done immediately, before I reached school age so I could start school as a girl.

My parents would have none of it.

It was too late – little Samuel was already known as a boy to all of their friends and relatives. Performing a sex change on a child was unthinkable, as far as my mother was concerned. She believed God had created me that way for a reason and it would be blasphemous to tamper with what He had created. I had her to thank for sparing me the pain and humiliation of genital mutilation.

My father believed that a strong male influence was all I needed to prevent me from turning into some kind of fairy-boy and he was just the man to provide that influence. He made it his mission to toughen me up from that day forward and ‘make a man out of me’.

When I reached the age of puberty, the doctors started me on androgenic hormone therapy to make me appear more masculine and prevent the growth of breasts, a common side effect of my condition. My body had a resistance to male hormones but was producing the same amount of female hormones as any normal male. Without the male hormones to balance things out, men with my condition often wound up with a set of ‘man-boobs’ at the onset of puberty. Even with the hormones my breasts swelled slightly but I did my best to offset the growth by pumping iron to build muscle in the rest of my upper body.

The hormone injections brought about some of the changes in my body expected of a normal thirteen-year-old male. My voice deepened a bit. My flawless skin broke out in acne and sparse but virtually invisible hair began to sprout on my body. My ‘penis’ grew slightly larger as a result of the shots but was far from large enough to function as a male sexual organ should. I had what was known as a ‘micropenis’. It resembled an oversized female clitoris. I would never be able to penetrate a woman without surgical intervention.

And of course, I was sterile.

Once again the doctor recommended surgery, this time to give me the appearance of a ‘normal’ male. I told him to go fuck himself and offered to mutilate
his
genitals if that sort of thing turned him on. After so many years of doctors gawking and poking at my private parts I was sick and tired of being violated and had developed a strong aversion to having my genitalia messed with.

In elementary school, they had taught us the difference between ‘good’ touches and ‘bad’ touches from adults. None of it seemed to apply to me. Because I was different, I had been forced to endure ‘bad’ touches from doctors ever since I could remember. I had never been comfortable with it and one day I was old enough to say so.

I stormed out of the doctor’s office after telling the perverted physician to get fucked and offering to neuter him. I left my poor mother sitting white-faced in the waiting room, along with everyone else who had overheard my outburst. She had stopped going into the examining room with me after I became a teenager out of respect for my modesty.

The doctor had no such respect. That pervert had taken hundreds of dirty pictures of me throughout my lifetime, which he showed to my parents and, I was sure, to anyone else who happened to be interested. It wouldn’t have surprised me if the sick prick had been charging curious strangers admission to view my little freak show of nudie pictures.

“Step right up, folks! Feast your eyes on the dickless freak-boy! Not much of a feast though, he’s more of an hors d’oeuvre! Is it a boy? Is it a girl? You be the judge!”

Nothing was sacred or private where
my
body was concerned.

My parents were mortified at the way I had spoken to the doctor but respected my wishes and didn’t push the issue. The subject of surgically altering me was not brought up again.

I didn’t like the way the shots made me feel; I felt angry and frustrated all the time and had a tendency to lose my temper for no reason. I started getting into fights at school on a regular basis. More than once, I was suspended for beating my opponent to the point where he required medical attention. My father scolded me and forbade me to watch television for a week as punishment the first time I kicked the shit out of a bully but I knew that the punishment was just for show. I could tell from the smile that tweaked the corners of his mouth as he scolded me that secretly, he was proud.

One of my father’s biggest fears was that I would get beaten up and bullied as a teenager; called names like ‘fag’ or ‘Nancy-boy’ because of my effeminate appearance. I assumed those were names my father and his friends had used to torment the weaker males when he was growing up. My father struck me as the type who was once a teenage bully. To ensure that I would be safe, he spent his weekends teaching me how to fight, military-style.

I may have looked like a pretty boy but I was no sissy. Thanks to my Dad’s lessons in hand-to-hand combat, it wasn’t long before even the toughest knuckle-draggers knew better than to call me ‘fag’ or so much as look at me the wrong way. When I was fifteen, the school psychologist made a recommendation that I attend anger management classes. It was at that point that I refused to take any more hormone injections.

My sexual preference was another issue of nail-biting importance to my parents, particularly my father. They were practically falling over each other in relief when I started dating a girl at age sixteen.

As an intersex individual, I could have easily filled the role of whatever gender they had chosen to assign to me. Throughout the 20
^th
century, many intersex children were forcibly assigned a gender and mutilated with surgical alterations, only to discover later in life that they identified with the ‘wrong’ gender. Because of this, some intersex individuals turned out to be gay. In my opinion, it was criminal for doctors to play God with the sexuality of another human being. What gave them the right to dictate on a whim whether their patients would have the letter M or F on their driver’s licenses? How did they justify branding people with genders that might make it illegal for them to marry whom they chose?

Having automatically branded me as male at birth, my parents were horrified at the thought that I might one day find I preferred men over women. My mother would have been the more accepting of the two. As for my father, I think having a gay son would have pushed the limits of his tolerance. Even if that son ended up being gay as the result of a doctor’s mistake. I hated to use a word like homophobic when referring to my father, the man I loved and admired more than any other man, but his attitude toward gays leaned in that direction.

As far as sex was concerned, I chose abstinence until well into adulthood. In high school, I dated the types of girls who were ‘saving themselves’ for marriage. It eliminated the pressure of having to ‘go all the way’ but I didn’t appreciate the even more uncomfortable pressure that came with dating girls of this caliber. Girls who were saving themselves tended to be very marriage-minded. From an early age these girls dreamed of being brides in beautiful white gowns. They spent most of their time planning their fairytale weddings, after which they would live happily ever after behind a white picket fence. Their ‘happily ever after’ would consist of them squeezing out litters of perfect babies while Prince Charming supported them with his six-figure income.