One day I was helping G-pa (as I called him) set a new fence post. I was shoveling dirt back into the hole and he was tamping the dirt tight with a double-bitted axe. He accidentally struck my hand with the axe, nearly severing the first two fingers of my left hand. The doctor managed to save my fingers, although they were stiff and numb for a long time after they were healed. That first night, though, I awoke crying from the pain in my hand. G-ma gave me a few words of comfort, told me 'to be a man', that 'Men don't cry from a little pain', and to go back to sleep. The next day the pain was worse and ached all the way up my arm. All day I complained of the pain and spent most of the time whimpering. That afternoon, G-ma took me upstairs to my bedroom. It was a large room that I shared with my older sister when she was home from school. When G-ma ordered me to undress, I was bewildered, but did as she said.

She then informed me that as long as I was acting like a girl, I had to dress like one. She took one of my sister's slips from a drawer and one of her dresses from the closet. I looked at them and begged her not to make me put them on. She won, though, and I found myself wearing girl's clothes for the first time in my life. I cried with shame. She said that as long as I cried I had to wear them. I missed supper that night because I didn't want G-pa to see me like that. I laid on the bed until darkness fell, then undressed and went to bed. I finally fell asleep on a pillow soaked with tears-tears of pain and humiliation.

The next morning, I went down to breakfast dressed in my own clothes and with the determination that I would never cry again. My hand was badly swollen and discolored. G-pa took me back to the doc- tor, who cleaned the cuts and re-bandaged my hand. The original band- age was too tight; and with the new bandage, most of the pain was soon gone except for normal soreness.

On the way home, I kept thinking about being dressed as a girl. I was at the age when girls were dirty words and I hated the thought of 'those clothes'. I think I hated my G-ma, too, for forcing me to suffer the tor- ment of dresses. I was more determined than ever never to cry again, because she had found a way to punish me that was far more effective than any other method she had used. She didn't believe in spankings. A good slap, maybe, but no spankings. I didn't know it at the time, but I had entered a world where there was no turning back. I was a Transvestite, although I wouldn't know what I was for several years.