My dogs Indigo and Ranger on a January morning.

You don’t survive in Maine very long if you don’t make peace with winter.   I love warm days and sunny skies as well as the next gal,  but I have to say I have come to love the heart of January in my home state.  After summer it may be my favorite time of year.

This is the real deal:  week after week of temperatures near zero, snow up to your waist, rivers filled with jagged schooners of ice.  This is an honest, Fuck You winter, the kind of weather that, as Garrison Keillor once said, “is natures way of reminding you that the world is not all about you.”

Part of what I like about January in Maine is the result of my own weird work schedule– Colby College, my employer, has a “short term” in January, and usually I am off for the whole month, the result of my less-than-full-time contract with the school.  And so I take January to write, to build fires in the wood stoves, and to read.  Right now I’m in our summer place, finishing up three weeks of writing and revising two new books that will come out next year– one, the updated version of SHE’S NOT THERE (the 10th anniversary edition) and the other, a new memoir about parenthood, STUCK IN THE MIDDLE WITH YOU.

The summer place in winter has a naughty moon-base feeling to it.  The bird feeders and the summer furniture are stacked up around the living room; the front porch is deep in snow.  Through the window I can see the sun reflecting off of the frozen lake.  After I finish writing this, I’m going to build a fire in the wood stove and finish up some reading I need to do for the coming semester.

Since almost no one knows I’m here, the phone doesn’t ring.  It is the quietest place on earth.  It’s just me and the dogs, the warm glow of the fires, and all the words I can find to set to paper.

Still, winter in Maine is not entirely silent.  Here are twelve sounds I hear:

Jenny B watches the young people on sleds.

One is the woomph of a frozen pond.  The water moves beneath the ice and the whole lake goes werrrp, a deep, warping groan, like something from outer space.

The dogs stand at the edge of the ice, snow on their black ears, and growl at it.

Two is the plow guy, doing the driveway in the middle of the night.  The heavy blade scrapes against the asphalt, the tires spinning around as our man revs his engine high enough to push the snow.  I think about our plow guy—whose name is Jared–when the snow is deep, how he spends hour after hour in that truck, driving around from house to house when everyone’s asleep. I feel bad when there are two storms right in a row, and Jared has to get right back out on the road and do the job all over again.  There are some winters when I think he never sleeps at all.

Three is the sound of a frozen stream, the clear merry sound of cold water rushing against ice,  like some strange music,  full of motion and hope.  A strange contrast to the ice-bound world.

Four is the shush of skis against new snow as the cross country skiers glide through woods, across fields, down hills.  Their heaving breath comes out in clouds.

Five is a car stuck in a snowbank, the tires spinning around and around. Car doors open, and close.  There’s cursing.

Six is the sound of Storm Center on television, early in the morning, from a room downstairs.  There’s a sudden cheer, followed by the patter of young feet on the stairs.  The kids run into the bedroom and announce, “No School!” Then the parents sit up in bed and groan as they imagine every last thing they had planned for that day instantly disappearing.

Seven is a maul chunking against the top of the log as the wood splits into two nice even pieces.  I usually split wood in the basement, so sometimes the tip of the maul ticks against the cement floor in the follow through.  Then I split the two pieces I just made into four, and sometimes the four into eight.  The smaller the piece of wood is, the higher the pitch as it falls to the floor. Clunk.

Eight is the birds, the few of them that remain.  I hear them in the morning as I go down the dark driveway to get the newspaper: black-capped chickadees, northern cardinals, ruby crowned kinglets, Bohemian waxwings.  They sound cold.

Nine is a car left car outside.  Return to the car to find a crust of ice on the windshield.  So out comes the scraper.  Sometimes—on a good day– the crud slides right off.  Other times you have to get serious, prying off that ice like you’re scraping burnt chocolate off a frying pan with a spatula.  How big does the hole you chop have to be in order for you to drive the car?  Sometimes I see drivers peeking through tiny portholes, like they’re driving a tank.

Ten is a snowmobile, heading across Great Pond.  Sometimes there’s a whole group of them, making a sound like a swarm of angry bees.  Other times it’s just one guy.  Late in the day I see them all parked outside the Sunset Grill in Belgrade, a basketball game on the TV, glasses of Irish coffee lined up on the bar.

Eleven is an icicle falling off the rain gutter and shattering on the driveway in a thousand pieces.  Once, one fell on my head, and I looked upwards, angrily, and cursed the sky.

Twelve:  In the middle of the night the power goes out and I’m suddenly woken by the shocking sound of nothing at all.  I’m warm beneath the covers, though, and the family is safe beneath our roof, the two grownups, the two boys, even the wicked oscars swimming in the fish tank.  While we were sleeping, the dogs have jumped up in the bed again.  All warm and soft, the creatures bark at some imaginary cat, in their dog dreams.

I lie there for a while in my dark house,  in a sleepy kind of wonder, and listen.

The Boylan house, about 1920.

This coming weekend,  my spouse Deedie (“Grace”) and I will go down to Devon, Pennsylvania, to say goodbye to the house that my family has lived in for the last 39 years.  Since my mom’s death this July,  the family has been going about the necessary steps to sell the old house, and if all goes well, we will close next Wednesday, the 21st of December.

The last month or so– since we first accepted the offer on the beautiful old place–has been hard emotionally.  I guess I felt as if we’d said a proper farewell to my mom this summer– but turning our keys in the lock for the last time presents us with a new kind of loss, and this one’s not so much about saying goodbye to my mom (again); it’s about saying goodbye to our own history.

We moved into that place in the summer of 1972.  I had just turned 14.  For the next four decades, it was the “mother ship,” the place we could always return to, the place where we know our hearts dwelled.  Both of my parents died beneath its roof;  one of my children was conceived there.  It was the place where I lay on my back at age 15, dreaming of a future that I believed to be impossible.  It was the place where I proposed to Deedie, and she said Yes.  It was the place whose doors opened to me after I spent months and years traveling the world.

And so we say goodbye not only to a place, but to a connection to the people we have been.

I’ve been wondering about a proper ritual for taking my leave, and have asked a few friends about good ways to make this break.  One friend suggested “smudging”– walking around with a bundle of smoking sage leaves. Another said to touch every wall and say, “Thank you.”  A third proposed a three stage ritual, one for each floor– on the top floor, eat something sweet, and be glad for life’s joy; on the middle floor, eat something bitter and acknowledge life’s pain and loss; on the first floor eat something salty, and acknowledge life’s flavor and continuation.

I even got as far as imagining my “items.”  The sweet would be handmade chocolate; the salty would be a Philadelphia soft pretzel, preferably purchased at a WaWa; the bitter would be some Angostora bitters, possibly shaken into a nice Manhattan.

But I suspect all of this is too histrionic for me.  Instead I bet we will just drink a little Irish whiskey, sing a few songs, shed a few tears, laugh at a few stories.  A ritual only makes sense if you believe in its power;  and the power of Irish whiskey and song is what I suspect I will trust most at this hard juncture.

The thing is, I really do want to leave the house–this last, final time– with a sense of hope, a sense of completion, a sense of a cycle complete.  There’s no point to going all the way down to Pennsylvania just to make myself sad again.  I want to bid all of this bon voyage, with love, and sadness, and hope.

My agent Kris Dahl says that the Devon house has appeared in virtually every single thing I’ve ever written.  It appears in various guises in the stories in Remind Me to Murder You Later; it’s the model for the abandoned high school in The Planets.  It’s the castle in the Falcon Quinn series, and of course it stars as itself in my memoir.

The places we live in make us who we are.  I grew up in this rambling, elegant, slightly eccentric house, a place full of books and creaking stairs, empty rooms that no one knew what to do with; a living room with a warm fireplace.  There’s a windowsill on the landing between the first and second floors where I made out with the girl from London I wrote about in She’s Not There; there’s a walk around the block I’ve taken with my father and mother, with Deedie, and with my own children.

And yet, I’m not the first person to take my leave of this house in the last 100 years. The Hunt family– from whom we bought the house in 1972, and who moved in in 1949–had to pack up their things when their father died. Al Hunt, who of course went on to be a well-regarded journalist, wrote me when I told him the house was sold– “Just hope you all are as fortunate as we’ve been: turn that treasure of a house over to people who care, appreciate and will infuse it with the same joy it has enjoyed for past 62 years. I think about it most every day, wonderful memories: xmas eve parties, dinner table discussions/arguments, swimming parties, painfully small kitchen, monkey in the third floor bathroom, an exuberant feeling when I walked throough tbe door after any absence. I have a picture of that house in our bedroom.”

Yes, that’s right, he said monkey in the bathroom.  And yet Jesus the Monkey (so called because, well, what did people yell when they opened the bathroom door and saw a monkey swinging around the shower rod?  ”Jesus!”) was not the strangest thing ever to dwell beneath that roof.

Here’s what we know:  soon a new family will live there.  The family in question is a lovely young family, with three small children, who– if the fates smile– will spend their lives beneath that warm, crazy roof, blessed by its many lovely rooms, and, above all, by each other.

I was blessed to have this house in my life.  And now it moves on.

There’s a scene in “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre,” after Humphrey Bogart and his fellow prospectors are taking leave of the mountain where they discovered all the gold.  As they walk away for the last time, Bogart looks up at the Sierra Madre one last time, and says,  ”Thanks mountain.”

For this strange, blessed, heartbroken, hilarious, joyful, tragic life,  so much of it lived beneath the generous eaves of my family home, I am grateful.

Thanks mountain.

“Children have an innate capacity for both astounding kindness and intense cruelty”

Jennifer Finney Boylan talks to Myla Goldberg about memoir, narrative, and Goldberg’s  new novel, The False Friend. Goldberg is the author of several books, the best known of which may be the novel, Bee Season.

Jenny Boylan: The False Friend brings us a woman who’s still trying to make sense of her own childhood, and trying to connect the person she’s become with the child she was.  Usually the search for identity is presented as joyful and uplifting in contemporary fiction– but here, as in Bee Season–that quest turns out to be harrowing. Do you think that, for your characters, self-knowledge is a dangerous thing?  Might they be better off with some of their questions unanswered?

Myla Goldberg:  Anything worth having is dangerous, to varying degrees, but I’d like to think that the long-term benefits of self-knowledge outweigh the risk.  Everyone needs to be harrowed at some point in their lives.  In both Bee Season and The False Friend, we are with characters at incredibly stressful and difficult turning points, but it’s possible to imagine happier and more fulfilled futures for them as a direct result of the decisions they end up making. Life loses its meaning when you stop trying to move forward, which in Celia’s case means looking backward for a while.

JB:   Your book is many things– an inquiry into character, an examination of how thechoices made by children continue to shape the lives of the adults they become– but in some ways it’s also a mystery story.  Were there books that guided you as you wrote?

MG: Rather than specific books, there were three specific writers whose work obsessed me during the five years I was writing The False Friend: Graham Greene, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Ian McEwan.

Graham Greene’s characters inhabit moral grey zones.  Their desire to do right is hampered by their personal limitations, and an action that genuinely helps one person invariably hurts another.

I covet the way Ishiguro can use a lone, idiosyncratic character to illuminate broad swaths of human nature, getting at the universal nature of regret, love, desire, and ambition all through a single pair of eyes.

Ian McEwan would be the closest I get to a mystery writer, per se.  He’s masterful at pacing a story in a way that makes you feel as if...(click here for the full interview)

The third in my series of summer 2011 op/ed columns for the New York Times appeared on August 18.  This time, I was subbing for either Gail Collins or Paul Krugman.  Or both.  It’s a valedictory piece about ghosts, transness, my open-minded “conservative” parents, and forgiveness.  A kind of amazing thing is that in the 100+ comments on the Times site, only one thought that my being trans was particularly remarkable.  I had long hoped for this: a piece in which transness is part of the exposition, but NOT the whole story.  Nice.

All My Old Haunts

Jennifer Finney Boylan

Belgrade Lakes, Me.

For someone who does not believe in ghosts, I’ve encountered more than my fair share of them over the years in my parents’ house in the Philadelphia suburbs. The first day I set foot in the place, I saw, or imagined I saw, an unseemly blue mist drift through the dark basement.

Just a few months ago, one of my mother’s neighbors, who had come over to check on her, saw it, too; the mist came down the hall, paused to consider him, and then curled into the room where my mother lay dreaming.

He told me about it after she died last month. “It didn’t seem malicious exactly.  More like it was just checking up on her.”

My mother, an evangelical Lutheran and a private, dignified lady, thought that talk of specters was ridiculous. “There’s no such thing as ghosts,” she told me. “There’s the Holy Ghost, of course, but that’s different. We call that the Holy Spirit.”

As a transgender teenager in the 1970s — a boy in body, a girl in spirit — I remember lying in my bedroom, up on the third floor, thinking that I heard footsteps creaking in the attic. I would whisper, “You’re not real. I don’t believe in you.” To which I always imagined the ghosts replying: “That’s all right. We don’t believe in you, either.”

What I’ve learned over the years is that you can be haunted by lots of things; actual ghosts can be the least of them.

I’m haunted, for instance, by memories of my smart and loving parents in that beautiful old house, by the dining room, with its long Winterthur table, where my father held forth from the southern end, an L&M King filter elegantly positioned between his second and third fingers.

My father, Dick Boylan, was a charming combination of medieval history professor and trust banker. While he helped mastermind the merger between Philadelphia’s Provident Bank and Pittsburgh National to create PNC, his true passion was for the Middle Ages, with a secondary interest in debate, or as he liked to call it, “forensics.”

My parents were Republicans of a variety that we will not see again. They adored Gerald Ford (“The Healer,” as my mother, Hildegarde, mistily called him). On plenty of social issues, she was a liberal, not that she’d have used that word. But she only voted for a Democrat once — in 1936, when she supported F.D.R. and jilted Alf Landon.

In those days, before we surrounded ourselves only with those who already agreed with us, my parents delighted in assembling people of divergent opinions over our dining-room table to argue about the Equal Rights Amendment or the Gary Hart campaign. At a certain point, my father would ding his fork against the side of his glass and command everyone present to begin arguing “the reverse of their earlier position.”

He would get me to play our piano with my left and right hands in different keys. “It’s good for you,” he would say, gently.  “It makes you open-minded.”

This kind of thinking seems almost quaint in the current political landscape, where it’s commonplace to call people with whom you disagree “traitors” or “un-American.”

In the wake of the recent debate over the debt ceiling, I imagined my father’s solution. If the goal were to cut $4 billion from the deficit, he’d have suggested that the Republicans be put in charge of coming up with $2 billion of tax increases and the Democrats with finding $2 billion of cuts in services and entitlements. “Only when you try to argue your opponents’ point of view,” he’d have said, “does your own begin to make sense.”

There was plenty of that in my mother’s view of the world, too. When I finally came out to her as transgender, just after I turned 40, my conservative, religious mother put her arms around me, and said, without hesitation, “Love will prevail.”

My father died in that house on Easter Sunday 1986; my mother passed away this summer on the day after the Fourth of July. I went through the old place at dawn after the funeral, turning out lights and preparing to take my leave.

I paused for a moment in the dining-room doorway, filled at that hour with long shadows. There at the head of the table was my father, his L&M King in hand; my mother at the other end looking at us all adoringly; and in between them my sister and me, teenagers still, all the tragedies and wonders of our lives unrevealed. I thought of a line from Thornton Wilder: “Oh earth, you’re too wonderful for anybody to realize you.”

For a moment they flickered like ghosts, that family, the voices echoing in the empty house. And then they were gone.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College and the author of “I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted,” is a guest columnist.

OP-ED COLUMNIST

This Astronomical Recession

By JENNIFER FINNEY BOYLAN

Published: August 4, 2011

Belgrade Lakes, ME

If the decrepitude of Neptune caused me to briefly lose my faith in America, it was the ingenious rings of Saturn that restored it for good.

Two weeks ago, on the day of the very last shuttle landing on Earth, I drove along Route 1, taking a good look at the Maine Solar System Model. This would be a scale mock-up of our cosmic neighborhood unveiled in 2003 and devised by Kevin McCartney, a geology professor at the University of Maine at Presque Isle, who built the thing because it “seemed like a good idea” at the time.

Driving the 40 miles from the Sun (at the university’s science museum), to Pluto (in nearby Houlton), also struck me as a good way, as the government likely prepares to cut the nation’s safety nets, to gauge the impact of the recession on Aroostook County, the state’s northernmost county and one of its poorest.

I saw plenty of signs of economic ruin — boarded up businesses, burned-out houses. But there were signs of life as well, like the tough-looking farms surrounded by fields of yellow-white potato blossoms and, on a mountain range between Saturn and Uranus, the swiftly rotating sails of a brand-new wind farm.

“We built it ourselves,” said Professor McCartney, meaning the universe. “Around here we sort of take care of ourselves.”

Hardship is nothing new for “The County” (as everyone in Maine calls it). “This area was never rich in the first place,” explained the professor’s wife, Kate, who runs a bed and breakfast. The county took its hit in the ’90s when Loring Air Force Base closed. “It’s not as if things are so much harder than they were. They’ve never been easy in the first place.”

As I headed away from the three-story-tall cross-section sculpture of the Sun, the inner planets came swiftly. Each mile represents one astronomical unit, the distance between the Earth and the Sun; I passed the silver model of Mercury in 0.4 miles, followed by a red and white Venus outside the Budget Traveler Inn. There, Stephanie McIntosh, a desk clerk, said occupancy was down except during snowmobiling season and the Maine Potato Blossom Festival. The best part of the festival, she said, is the mashed potato wrestling contest.

A cloudless planet Earth, about the size of a navel orange, sat on the top of a pole outside of Percy’s Auto Sales. Brian Rackliffe, a salesman there, told me sales have improved since the dark days of 2008. “But they have a long, long way to go before we’re back to normal.”

I found Mars by the “Welcome to Presque Isle” sign on the way out of town. From there, it was a long way to Jupiter. I passed fields of potatoes, hay and broccoli, and in a ditch near a lot filled with construction equipment, a model of Ceres that represented the asteroid belt.

Jupiter was by a sign marked “Moose Crossing.” Five miles beyond was Saturn, which had its own parking lot. It was hard not to be impressed by the planet, with its beautiful rings, built by students at local schools. “Saturn weighs over a ton,” Professor McCartney told me.

Next was Uranus, at the Bridgewater rec center, where a sign read, “Congratulations Chloe Wheeler. 2011 Pre-Teen Miss Potato Blossom.” Then there was Neptune, a blue basketball-size sphere another 12 miles down the highway, in front of a large garden of what looked like squash or pumpkin vines. Potatoes are still Aroostook County’s No. 1 agricultural crop, but the industry has been in decline for years, the result of shifting consumer tastes and competition from other states, particularly cursed Idaho. As I looked up at Neptune, it was clear that the planet had been through a few rough years itself. Paint was flaking around its equator.

I’d been wondering how the people of Aroostook County would handle Pluto, since it had been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet in 2006. Professor McCartney admitted that the demotion had hit him hard. With a Mainer’s mix of cussedness and generosity, he reacted to Pluto’s degradation by putting up a second Pluto. He also added a model for Eris, another dwarf planet.

At the second Pluto, I met a woman who said she’d spent her whole life in Aroostook County. “My son’s the son of a potato farmer,” she said, “but he had to leave. Now he’s a sea captain. It’s always a problem, keeping the young people from going away.”

Earlier in the day, I had driven up to Limestone, Me., on the Canadian border, to the old Air Force base. Once it was a weapons storage area and home to the 42nd Bomb Wing. Now the whole area is called the “Loring Commerce Centre,” a name that I tried hard not to find ironic. As a storm came on, I drove past ruined, rusted hangars, fields of decommissioned military vehicles and a rotting structure with four towers resembling desolated, ruined minarets. After a couple of wrong turns, I accidentally wound up on the vast, wind-swept runway, as rain blew horizontally past my car and lightning struck the ground.

The skies cleared on my way to Eris. Driving, I saw the St. Croix River off to the east, and the green forests of Canada beyond, and a black Labrador retriever with a snake in its mouth.

When I finally found the dwarf planet, it was across the street from a shuttered general store and next to a veterans’ memorial with a flagpole and no flag. But there was a new store a few doors down, selling fishing lures and cheeseburgers. Loggers were pulling their trucks into the parking lot, their rigs full of newly hewn timber.

I cast a glance north, toward the distant model of the Sun, and remembered something Kate McCartney had told me. “People always think the end of the universe is coming,” she said, referring not only to deadly asteroids but to the American economy as well. “But we’re more resilient than that. You drive the Maine Solar System Model, the speed of light is seven miles per hour.” She smiled. “At that speed, you have to believe everything is going to be all right.”

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College and the author, most recently, of “Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor,” is a guest columnist.

Jennifer Finney Boylan • Photograph by Augusten Burroughs

Amid all the cheering about marriage equality in New York State, it’s worth remembering that transgender people continue to lag far behind our gay brothers and sisters in the fight for equal rights.  In 36 states, I can still be fired for being my own damned self, and here in Maine we only narrowly defeated a bill this spring that would have actually removed people like me from the Maine Human Rights Act.  But the victory in New York is an occasion not only for joy for our allies, but to observe how this victory took place.

Three quick observations:

1) Marriage equality advocates in this fight were unified. According to the New York Times:  ”Five groups pushing for same-sex marriage merged into a single coalition, hired a prominent lobbying firm with ties to Mr. Cuomo’s office and gave themselves a new name: New Yorkers United for Marriage.  Those who veered from the script faced swift reprimand. When Assemblyman Daniel J. O’Donnell, an openly gay Democrat from Manhattan, introduced a same-sex marriage bill in May without first alerting the governor’s office, he was upbraided by Mr. Cohen. “What do you think you’re doing?” the governor’s aide barked over the phone.”

Advocates avoided the traditional urge to  stab each other in the back;  contrast this with the endless internet sniping over the very definition of  the word “transgender;” or with the way trans leaders are constantly belittled and heckled by their own communities.  I can’t think of a single trans activist who has stepped up to the plate in order to work for something bigger than herself who hasn’t been sniped at.  The gay and lesbian community has had plenty of internecine strife over the years, but this time–particularly under the unifiying efforts of Cuomo–a straight, Catholic governor–the movement stood together.

2)  Be public. The victory in NY was an avalanche made possible because of the stones that Harvey Milk–and others–got rolling.  The message: Come Out.  Let people see your face.  Over the last several decades, straight America now associates gay men and lesbians with their neighbors and their own family members.  Again, according to the Times,  it was a group of Republican donors who made the change: “the billionaire Paul Singer, whose son is gay, joined by the hedge fund managers Cliff Asness and Dan Loeb — had the influence and the money to insulate nervous senators from conservative backlash if they supported the marriage measure. And they were inclined to see the issue as one of personal freedom, consistent with their more libertarian views. Within days, the wealthy Republicans sent back word: They were on board.”

Because Singer’s son is out, and because of thousands of gay men and lesbians who have found the courage to live their truth publicly,  the image of gay men and lesbians has changed, both in the eyes of those Republicans, as well as in the eyes of all America.

To be out as trans is harder, and scarier, and trans people have much more to lose by being public. But here in Maine, activists were able to push back at the Statehouse on anti-trans legislation because dozens of trans people, and their allies, stood up and spoke before the Judiciary Committee.  A Republican legislator asked me, in the end, if I would address the Republican caucus;  a transgender middle school student from Orono looked those legislators in the eyes and told them what her life is like.  When legislators see us as human,  things change.  As a woman from Nebraska wrote me after an Oprah Show years ago, “Jenny, the strangest thing about you is that you seem almost like a person someone could know.”

3)  Be patient. We have seen several states wrestle, and fail, with trans protections this year, most notably in Maryland.  We wait year after year for ENDA to make its way through the Congress, and for other gender bills to progress in state capitals (including Albany).  We should remember that no defeat is final. The marriage bill in NY failed twice before– when Democrats had the majority in the Senate; this year it passes when that same house is controlled by Republicans.

Mara Kiesling at NCTE reports that the list of co-sponsors of ENDA in Congress is now growing, and includes Republican allies.  Will we achieve victory this time?  I surely hope so.  Will we achieve victory sooner or later?  This I know.

When we face defeats, we must resist the urge to despair, to hide our faces,  to turn on each other.  The victory in New York shows that it is possible with time.  As Paul Simon sings, “I believe in the future we will suffer no more.  Maybe not in my lifetime, but in yours I feel sure.”

(In case you missed it, here is my testimony to the Maine Judiciary Committee;  I had three minutes, and that’s what they got. My testimony is followed by that of other good allies, all of which contributed to the victory.)

–Jennifer Finney Boylan is professor of English at Colby College, and the author of 12 books. She serves on the board of directors of GLAAD.

As a transgender woman, I’d gotten this question before. I allowed as how I did.

Ms. Winfrey began to sing to me. “Yes, she has a vagina.”

I interrupted her. “What you mean,” I said, “is, yes, we have no bananas.’”

Everyone screamed. Ms. Winfrey said, “We’ll be right back.”

During that commercial break, as my interviewer was swarmed by her producers and directors, I got my first good look at her. The strange thing was that at such close range, she didn’t look anything like Oprah Winfrey at all.

I’ve been on the program, the last episode of which ran on Wednesday, three times since then. Now whenever I go somewhere to speak about gender issues — whether it’s the National Press Club, Harvard, the Judiciary Committee of the Maine Legislature — I find that there’s one question I’m asked more frequently than any other.

“What is Oprah really like?”

It’s asked by earnest moms in book groups, by excited teenagers, by literary critics who disdainfully claim never to have owned a television. Once, a stoner in a bar asked me that, then said, with considerable melancholy, “Dude, it should totally have been me who got to give everybody a car!”

I never know how to answer. Like a lot of authors, I had some anxiety about going on her program. There was the very likely possibility that I would make a colossal fool of myself. More urgently, I feared that transgender issues would be treated sensationally, as is all too often the case on daytime television.

I needn’t have worried. Ms. Winfrey treated me with respect and that first show made a brief and unlikely best seller out of my tragicomic memoir, “She’s Not There,” about changing genders and keeping my family — my wife and our two sons — together. The day the episode was broadcast, my book went from about No. 300,000 on Amazon to No. 8.

Ms. Winfrey may not have hailed me as the next Tolstoy on that show (plus Tolstoy never had to allow people to film him putting on his pantyhose) but her endorsement helped people see that transgender Americans are human too. One viewer wrote to say, “The strangest thing about you, Jenny, is that, sitting there next to Oprah, you seemed almost like a person somebody could know.”

Not all of my appearances went as well as the first. The last time, the episode was titled “Oprah’s Most Memorable Guests.” They included Ted Haggard and his wife; the husband of the woman who drowned their children; an 800-pound man who’d dieted himself down to 500; a mother with no arms and legs; and a previously recorded segment featuring the Texas polygamist wives. My sons had wanted to be on as well (we Skyped in from our living room) to show that children of transgender people can turn out to be perfectly well adjusted, and as this parade wheeled by, the younger one turned to me and whispered, “I thought you said she liked us?”

What could I tell him, except, “I know. I’m sorry. I thought so too”? (My older son only had questions about the polygamist wives. “If you’re going to have 12 wives, shouldn’t, like,one of them be hot?”)

I was left feeling unsettled. Oprah Winfrey has donated hundreds of millions of dollars to charity, started a school, entertained millions and helped to change the perceptions of gay, lesbian and transgender people in this country from marginal to mainstream. But at least some of her power has come from episodes like the one my sons and I shared with Ted Haggard.

Looking back, though, how could I be anything but grateful for my time as her guest? Last year, a trans woman stopped me as I was walking up Seventh Avenue in Manhattan, and told me that my appearance on the show literally saved her life.

“But can I ask you something, Jenny?” the stranger said, after she’d finished hugging me and wiping away her tears. “What’s Oprah really like?”

What could I say? “She’s nice.”

As a guest, I felt that Ms. Winfrey was a very smart, inscrutable performer. It was only when I watched the show at home, safe in my living room, that I felt again that she was a woman I’d turn to for friendship and advice. She generates a sense of intimacy, to be sure — but you can really appreciate it only from a distance.

After that first show, she paused with me backstage for a photograph. It was the first time all day I’d seen her off camera. “We did good today,” she said, and she put her arm around me.

Later, when the photo was delivered to my house, I looked at the two of us standing there. With all that stage makeup on, I hardly recognized myself. But the woman to my right? That could only have been Oprah Winfrey.

Jennifer Finney Boylan, a professor of English at Colby College, is the author, most recently, of “Falcon Quinn and the Crimson Vapor.”

There’s a lot to say about my day at the State House, but the thing I was really left with was how much the bill–and the overall acceptance of trans people is about passing.

A supporter of the bill (remember that “supporting” means being against trans rights; “opposing” means being for them) said as much. One of the Senators asked, “If a trans person has had surgery, and appears to be female in every sense, how would you be able to know they were in violation of the law?” And the supporter of the bill–another Republican legislator–said, “Well, if I have no way of telling, the person wouldn’t be in violation.” He then looked around and said, “I mean, if you can’t tell, what’s the difference?”

Cindy Redmond, another supporter of the bill, said more bluntly, “I’m not saying that all transgenders are wacky because they’re not, there’s lots of very nice transgenders,” Redmond said. “But there are a few, and what happens if one of those has used this law to be able to go into a female bathroom for the purpose of perpetration?”

Holding aside the insulting assumption that trans people are somehow more likely to “perpetrate” than straight people, Redmond’s comment here really gets to the heart of the matter. “Wacky” here appears to be a synonym for “not-passable.” Among other things.

I have seen this prejudice against “not-passable” people both within and without the trans community. The fact, of course, is that “passability,” like all forms of “beauty,” is more or less a genetic roll of the dice–it has nothing to do with what is in a person’s heart.

Anyway, EQME did a fine job of assembling its witnesses; while the proponents for the bill seemed limited, largely, to a few right-wing religious nuts–and the governor–the opponents included a Sheriff, a school principal, the father of a 13 year trans girl, and a well-regarded endocrinologist from Boston. I think I was the fifth witness, and the first trans person to come to the podium. The legislators treated me with respect and dignity.

Here’s a copy of my own remarks to the committee. You’ll be struck, perhaps, by their brevity, but we were given a very clear three minute time limit, and my reading of this testimony came out almost exactly at that length.

The committee now goes to ‘working session’, and we’ll see whether the bill makes it out of committee and onto the floor.

Testimony of Jennifer Finney Boylan, Belgrade, Kennebec County

Speaking in Opposition to LD 1046, 
”An Act to Amend the Application of the Maine Human Rights Act Regarding Public Accommodations”
 before the Joint Standing Committee on the Judiciary.

April 12, 2011

Senator Hastings, Representative Nass, and distinguished members of the judiciary committee:

My name is Jennifer Finney Boylan. I live in the town of Belgrade Lakes, in Kennebec County. I have been married since 1988, and am the mother of two teenage sons, both of them on the honor roll at Kents Hill School. I am the author of twelve books and have been Professor of English at Colby College for twenty-three years.

I’m also transgender. In the year 2000, in consultation with a therapist, a social worker, an endocrinologist, and my minister, I carefully went through the complex process of going from male to female. It was a terribly difficult journey, but in the end, I was able to complete that transition and at last live my life with honesty and authenticity.

I know that the lives of transgender people can be hard to understand. A report issued last week by the University of California suggests that less than .3 percent of the population of the United States is transgender. With numbers that small, it’s understandable that the issues that trans people struggle with are not easily grasped. But it’s worth noting that transgender Mainers are citizens too. We pay taxes, we do our jobs, and yes, like other people, we occasionally need to use the restroom.

Gender, as it turns out, is complicated. I honestly wish that this were not the case, and that the world were simpler, but it is the case, as scientists and neurologists have made abundantly clear. And the consequence of this fact is that some of us– who already lead difficult and complex lives– need to rely on the rest of you—good-hearted, intelligent Maine citizens—to look out for us, to protect our dignity and our safety.

Fortunately, you can do just that by rejecting this cruel and vague bill, which would make businesses responsible for checking the sex of people using their facilities. By saying no to a law that would marginalize people already at risk for discrimination and prejudice.

In short: Transgender Mainers should not be exempted from the protections of the Maine Human Rights Law, for the very simple reason that we too are human.

Thank you.