A couple OF THINGS occur to me as I regard myself in Miss Vera’s well-lit, full-length mirror. One, being a woman puts 10 pounds on you. More unsettling, though, is the extent to which this façade of femininity has accentuated my masculine features. Until I’d seen my face made up like a woman’s, I’d never realized how un-womanly it is, how long the chin, how wide the cheeks, how narrow the mouth. Draped in lace and frills, my shoulders seem broader than usual, my trunk straighter and shorter, my legs thicker and more muscular. I am reminded of something I learned in freshman philosophy: we never truly see an object until it loses its everyday context. A hammer is not a hammer until its handle breaks. Tonight, I am that hammer. I’ve never felt more like a man in my entire life.

Perhaps a pair of boobs will help.

"Give me the biggest set you’ve got," I say to Miss Vera. When she comes at me with a beach-ball-size bosom, I opt for something smaller, more manageable — a pair of softballs. I must admit, I love my breasts. Stuffed into a lacy black bra, they are eerily realistic — pink, soft, with little brown nipples. In the midst of a conversation, I find myself absentmindedly twiddling them, lifting them, flattening them with the palms of my hand.

But a pair of breasts, even lovely ones like these, does not a woman make. It’s time to don the Veronica — Miss Vera’s infamous fake butt.

The Veronica, a modified girdle equipped with foam-rubber pads around the buttocks and hips, is an impressive, even intimidating, device. For one thing, it takes two people — a grunting Miss Vera and a groaning Miss Deborah — to haul the thing into place. For another, despite its having a little zipper in the front, once the Veronica has been installed I can say bye-bye to peeing (I’d have to find the thing, untuck it, get it past the gaff and the panties, through the tiny fly, all the while wearing those pinging fingernails). Still, at least my femme self is starting to take some kind of physical shape. I go to the mirror and have a little wiggle. Baby, I have to say, got almost too much back.

The final phase of Miss Vera’s quest to give me a hot bod entails squeezing me into a corset so stiff it feels like body armor. People raid crack houses in things like these. To get the Kevlar corset on good and tight, Miss Vera jams a knee into the small of my back and starts to heave, stopping only when (like a turkey that’s through cooking) my eyeballs give a little pop. Next, Miss Vera drapes me in that lovely knit-and-glitter A-line dress, cut just above the knee (with matching swing coat), and hands me over to Miss Tiger, the Dean of Deportment, who’s here to teach me the basics of walking, sitting, and standing like a lady.

As I strut around like a drunk, aging, half-paralytic cheerleader, Miss Tiger bubbles with oddly accentuated enthusiasm. I am a natural, she says, endowed with effortless grace. "Are you a trained dancer?" I greet the question with a smile — or as close as I can get to one. The thing is, I am not happy. My feet are throbbing, my ribs are aching, the band of my wig is cutting the blood flow to my brain, I have a lash digging into my eye, my fake ass is starting to ride up my real one, and I am tired. By the time my attempts to enter a make-believe cab in a ladylike fashion result in another testicular catastrophe, I am ready to put my femme self to rest once and for all.

But then, four hours or so after it began, Miss Vera suddenly and unexpectedly announces that the session is over. Before I can leave, though, Miss Vera and her deans want to take one last look at their handiwork. They stand around me, tilting backwards, smiling like indulgent parents. For the first time, I feel a little tug of sadness at the thought of saying goodbye.

Many students, says Miss Vera, get so emotional right about now that they start crying. Others, she continues, start getting horny. They do? I take a glimpse at the wide-faced, big-chinned woman in the mirror. Apparently, one client recently looked at himself in this very same mirror and exclaimed, "I’d fuck me!" I turn sideways and hike up my breasts. Not only am I a fairly unattractive woman, but I look old enough to be my mother. No, I wouldn’t fuck me. I might let me tuck myself in with a cup of hot milk and a plate of cookies, but that’s about it.

"Mm, sexy," I mumble, grabbing my gear and tottering towards the front door. Once again, though, my exit is blocked by the deans, who are determined to outfit me with a fully stocked pocketbook (hairbrush, spare nails, etc.).

"Do you want a condom?" Miss Vera asks.

"No thanks."

"Are you sure?"

"Yep."

There’s a WORD in the transgender community — "passing" — which describes the ability to go out in public and pass for a woman. Serious cross-dressers will often go to great lengths to achieve this — when dressed in tight pants, for instance, some will wear a "merkin," a pubic wig, to get that all-important camel-toe effect ("workin’ the merkin"). The failure to pass, meanwhile, is known as being "read." As I make my way out of Miss Vera’s studio into the New York night, I immediately attract a series of double-takes. Tee-hee, the expressions say, or huh?, or aargh! Clearly, I am an open book.

Usually at this point, Miss Vera and her deans will take their student out for a drink, give her a chance to flaunt her newfound femininity in a public setting. In my case, they cry fatigue, cite the lousy weather, mumble excuses about having other things to do. Still, I am determined to make my mark on New York society, so I head out to a bar in the West Village, where, without Miss Vera to lady-sit me, I find myself half in the bag, inviting complete strangers to feel me up. Like I said earlier, some lady I turned out to be.

The fact is, despite hours of instruction and reconfiguration, despite the stockings and the breasts and the garters and the corset and the pumps and the panties and the wig and the ass and the 17 layers of makeup, I am no closer to being a woman than I ever was. I don’t fully understand why this is until I meet Patti, one of Miss Vera’s "closest girlfriends."

Patti first came to Miss Vera’s academy in the early ’90s, when, at the age of 40, she felt her long-suppressed femininity "exploding" inside her. "I just couldn’t keep a lid on it anymore," she says. Over the next five years, Patti became a regular at Miss Vera’s studio, signing up for a class a month. Though she still drops in quite often, these days it’s only to say hello. "I’m a different person now," she says. "I’m much happier. It used to be hard to find a picture of me smiling."

Today, after a couple of years of hormone therapy, Patti is even coming to terms with her former self — her "Mr. Hyde." "I don’t feel threatened anymore," she says. "I’ll never be that person again." For all her progress, though, Patti is not what you’d call a petite person. Indeed, at six-foot-three, with broad shoulders and big bones, she makes me look like Mary Lou Retton. Yet Patti is more of a woman than I could ever hope to be. The reason for this, I understand now, is that Patti is female on the inside, and I am not.

A couple of hours after leaving Miss Vera’s studio, I am not female on the outside, either. Following the barroom debacle in the West Village, I dodder back to my friend’s apartment and literally rip my clothes off — along with the wig, the corset, the remaining lashes. I cannot begin to describe what a relief this is — to be able to scratch my nose without worrying about losing a nail, to have the package restored to its rightful place. For some people, like Patti, being a lady just comes naturally. For others, like me, it is an impossible stretch.

Still, I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t gained some valuable insights from my time spent with Miss Vera. The experience has afforded me, as she predicted it would, a fresher, healthier outlook on life. Today, when I feel as though things are getting on top of me, when I feel unfulfilled or unhappy, when I stub my toe or suffer a financial setback, I can look back at that long, strange day in New York and say to myself, "At least you’re not wearing a fake ass."