Born in 1958, Jennifer Finney Boylan grew up with her parents and sister in a Victorian mansion in Pennsylvania, a house that many believed to be haunted. Known as the Coffin House, it had numerous chimneys and gables, ceilings that slanted at crazy angles, windows that didn’t let in much light, and lyrics on the walls of Boylan’s third-floor bedroom. (The lines read ominously: “O dig my grave both wide and deep, Put tombstones at my head and feet…”)
As a child, Boylan was keenly aware of the presences that moved through the house. “I felt a creeping voltage in the air, and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up. The room grew cold, as if a window had been opened in December. And then something passed through me. I’d been speared by an icicle, stabbed by something I could not see.”
Trapped Inside the Wrong Body
With literary finesse, Boylan compares the house’s uneasy spirits to the apprehension in her own physical being, the sensation of being a girl trapped inside a boy’s body. She points out that what she felt “didn’t have much to do with being gay or lesbian; it was, even then, not about who I wanted to go to bed with, but who I wanted to go to bed as.”
Since gender theory did not seem particularly helpful in explaining what went on inside her, Boylan decided to put her experiences into a memoir. Although she is a professor, she says she tends to trust stories more than academic theories. (Her mother had a favorite saying: “It is impossible to hate anyone whose story you know.”)
Ghosts and Transsexuals
Boylan admits she doesn’t believe in ghosts, even though she has seen them. “A lot of people feel the same way about transsexuals,” she notes wryly. Acknowledging how difficult it can be for people to see her as she truly is, she has had to let some friends go, while discovering new relationships.
One person who was unable to accept her gender change was her sister Lydia, who abruptly cut off all ties. In fact, Lydia asked their mother to remove all Boylan’s photographs and books before she visited Coffin House, so as to see no trace of her. In the following years, the sisters became like ghosts to one another, never speaking again.
But not everyone had such an inflammatory reaction. Fortunately, Boylan’s wife Grace stayed lovingly committed to her partner. “To everyone’s amazement, we moved on into the unknown territory before us together.”
In the future, Boylan says, scientists may come to know more about ghosts and gender. “Maybe someday researchers will tell us more about what makes people see things that are not there, or yearn to inhabit a body other than the one into which they were born.” Maybe so. In the meantime, with excellent storytellers like Jennifer Finney Boylan to guide us with a steady hand and a light touch through unseen worlds, we may become better, more understanding human beings.
Random House/Broadway Books 2008, ISBN 978-0-7679-2174-9
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