The Woman I Left in San Francisco

On love and gender dysphoria

Image courtesy of Cody Delistraty

“What the fuck happened to you?”

Cara’s raised voice and sharp language added to my anxiety — no, fear. She stood in front of the table, her fists clenched. I could feel the couple at the next table staring, but I didn’t care, not in the face of Cara’s fury.

I sat mute, trying to return her gaze, trying desperately to make my voice do something. I’d arrived early for our rendezvous, afraid that if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to show up. She was half an hour late.

“I almost didn’t come. I shouldn’t have come. You tell me, Jaëll—what the fuck am I doing here?”

She made no move to sit — just stood there, eyes drilling into me.

“I want to apologize.”

A snort of pure disgust.

I didn’t blame her.

I had returned from London. San Francisco was the scene of the crime, where I had dumped Cara without explanation the year before, without even a good-bye. I just…disappeared. One evening we were in the audience at the ballet, and I up and disappeared backstage. Then into the St. Francis Hotel. Then to Europe. Just like that. A chain of unexpected, chance events that, in hindsight, were all so inevitable and predictable.

What had happened to me? I was largely at a loss myself. Sometimes…she just took over. How was I to explain this? I didn’t even understand this…this compulsion to be female. Something was horribly wrong with me, something I didn’t understand, something no one could understand, something that could not be fixed and must be kept secret.

It would be another decade before I understood that I was female. In 1980, at age 22, all I knew was that I was hopelessly trapped in a man’s life that I wanted no part of, a life that I tried so hard to come to grips with — to “go straight” — only to have it all come apart. A life that I needed to escape, one way or another. Cara was the innocent bystander, caught in the ugly blast of my impossible gender.

How had it come to this? Before Cara I made my living “sugaring” — a few weeks with this man, then that man, then a couple of months with a woman, then another — but I gave that up when I fell in love. I took a normal job and tried my best to be a straight man, even if I barely looked the part.

But there was the dance. Ballet was my escape, my refuge. I had survived since age 15 by throwing myself into classes and rehearsals. Six days a week, for a few hours, I was held safely in a female space, surrounded by other women. If there were…incongruencies in my situation (that I hated pas de deux, that I couldn’t take toe class, that I couldn’t do a second-position split because my hips wouldn’t turn out fully, and that the tights revealed…that), if I could not be the girl of my dreams, well, I could at least surround myself with femininity and illusion. Ballet consumed me.

Thus my disappearance backstage at the performance to meet people I wanted to be and to breathe their air, leaving Cara standing alone in the lobby after the show.

“I stood there and waited for you for two hours.”

The waiter came, and Cara sat and ordered a coffee, though she clearly didn’t want to. She glared at me with a raw challenge.

“Well?”

“I went to England.”

This wasn’t going to make any sense.