The Greatest Lie Part 17

It was inevitable that I would disappoint them. As I mentioned, unless you adopt, you don't get to pick your offspring. So my parents got me, and I'm a post-op transsexual. What's more, I'm a girl with an insatiable appetite for danger, bad boys and big dicks.

When I chose to follow the dictates of my female gender, my family exploded. My father's wrath at my experimentation with a female identity pushed forward my tendencies rather than repressing them. His impotent anger turned into blame and then rejection of my mother and hatred of me.

Instead of hating me, he should have thanked me for providing him a convenient excuse for finally rejecting her and hooking up with his most beautiful and wealthy graduate student. But that would only happen in a just world. In reality, my father repudiated me for my decision to pursue my transsexual destiny. I repudiated him for abandoning my mother for his beautiful French grad student. Rather than suffering an academic scandal over what he'd done, he abandoned his academic post to become a capitalist grandee. My father sold his academic reputation to IDS, a Swiss pharmaceutical giant, which just happened to be chaired by his new girlfriend's father.

My mom reacted to rejection by emulating the lover who had replaced her, and the daughter who had replaced her son. She spent her marital settlement on a plastic surgery binge that restored the beauty of her youth rather convincingly. Then she hooked up a rich, doting real-estate millionaire.

Was the fault mine or theirs? Was it destiny, random recombination of DNA, or were we the playthings of some malevolent deity? This question is more than metaphysics to me. In a fumbling and ultimately futile effort to lay claim to my male identity, I had fathered an illegitimate child. Her mother, Marta, was my beautiful, but very blue-collar high school classmate. Alyssa Rodriguez, as my daughter was now known, had my blue eyes and blonde hair, but she lived in the barrio with Marta and her gangbanger husband, my high school nemesis and porno co-star, Miguel.