My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (5 page)

indefinable falseness. Morris asserts it had nothing to do with a desire to be
feminin
e. Rather, “it had everything to do with being
female.”

“To me,” she writes, “gender is not physical at all, but is altogether

insubstantial. It is soul, perhaps, it is talent, it is taste, it is environment, it is how one feels, it is light and shade, it is inner music . . . it is the essentialness of oneself, the psyche, the fragment of unity. Male

and female are sex, masculine and feminine are gender, and though

the conceptions obviously overlap, they are far from synonymous.”

Chevey read and admired
Conundrum,
but it’s Boylan’s
She’s Not
There
that had a life- altering effect.

“When I read it,” he tells me, “and saw the things she would think,

they were exactly the things that I had thought time and again. I had

found myself thinking the same phrases, trying to understand, and

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here she had felt and expressed them, practically word for word. I

could relate to her personally in a way I couldn’t to Christine Jorgensen or Renée Richards. I saw interviews with them that didn’t interest me,

but Jenny was a revelation. And the weirdest part of all was that when

she would quote things that her wife, Grace, had said, I would sit there dumbfounded, thinking that it was almost verbatim what Eleanor had

said three weeks ago. And I thought,
Wow
,
what is going on here?

There is a whole lot more going on than just an emotional state. Be-

cause an emotional state wouldn’t have people in different parts of the country thinking and feeling the same words.”

Fascinated as I am, these optimistic memoirs don’t allow room for

my own stupefaction, resentment, shock— on Eleanor’s behalf as well

as my own— feelings I imagine most close relatives must experience at

one time or another. Was Morris’s wife really as comfortable as Jan

indicates? Ditto Boylan’s? Russo we know was blindsided, and

critical— he writes a very funny and poignant epilogue that hits home

more than Boylan’s upbeat accounts. He couldn’t believe it wasn’t a

“choice.” And what about the failures? The transsexuals who were dis-

appointed, even devastated, whose lives didn’t turn out better? Pre-

sumably, failures don’t write memoirs.

I suppose I am still in stage one or two of grief: Denial and Anger.

Not ready for “Acceptance.” As Chevey has embarked on a leap into

the unknown, I need to give him my love and support, but also to find

my own way to wherever I’m destined to go with this. So far I seem to

be alone.

It is early 2006, and I pay a visit to Ethel before going to a women-

writers’ dinner at a friend’s, a gathering I dread and now wish I could skip altogether. At these friendly gossiping- and- venting sessions, we may discuss politics or cultural events, but that’s only the warm- up for

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the main course: ourselves and our writing dilemmas. We go around

the room, each woman describing her current vexations, professional

and personal: difficulties with publishers (she can’t find one), editors (they don’t call back), personal- memoir dilemmas, writing blocks, and

significant others, whereupon the rest chime in with advice, parallel

problems, and other forms of reassurance or counsel. Throughout my

life, I’ve found enormous strength and consolation in the company of

women. As a teenager I wouldn’t have survived my father’s illness and

death without school and schoolmates; during my recent and ongoing

anxieties regarding Andrew, friendships have been a major sustenance.

But in my present predicament, these crucial outlets— friends and

writing— are closed off to me as a source of comfort, as is the balm

that might come simply by the airing of my secret. When I tell Ethel

that my main concern is how and when to tell people, she replies, “You

don’t have to tell.” Which is meant to reassure me but is no reassur-

ance at all. Perhaps it’s partly that I want to control the news, can’t bear the idea of it leaking out and people discussing it behind my

back, but it has more to do with my nature: I would rather shout it

from the rooftops than retreat into shameful isolation in a way that

only further stigmatizes the condition it’s meant to protect.

Ethel adds ominously: “What people think and what they say are

two different things.”

Before trying to embrace this new reality, I can’t help playing dev-

il’s advocate, taking a look at the loss and hurt involved, even the desire to look away—

another form of ostracism. Transsexual

autobiographers— Morris, Boylan, Christine Jorgensen, Renée Rich-

ards, Dierdre McCloskey— are a remarkably smart and sympathetic

lot. Their memoirs range from good to excellent, all brave, sometimes

funny, describing and embracing their condition and making an overt

or implicit plea for tolerance. But what about those of us left to pick up

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the pieces? While I’m certainly for tolerance, I can also sympathize

with those struck dumb, who simply can’t get their minds around why

an apparently normal and successful person would want to switch

sexes in middle age, or later. Is gender, as Boylan says, really as “mal-leable as sand”? And my brother’s life has been so honest and honor-

able. Chevey has been not just beyond reproach, but deeply loved and

appreciated! How unlikely a candidate he seemed, how far from the

stereotype we imagine. But I have to ask: how unlikely is he? He’s a far cry from those flamboyant and campy images from popular culture,

but do we have an image of the transsexual as pathological or cutting

edge or flaky just because, in a hostile environment, those who’ve had

the temerity to go through with it tend to be people already closer to

the margins, further from the mainstream, to begin with?

It’s precisely the spectacle of “normal” people changing sex that

brings into the open the real fear: not difference but sameness. The

degree to which there is already so dangerously much of the female in

the male and vice versa.

The feminist theoretician Judith Butler, leading exponent of the

idea of “performativity,” and of gender as a socially constructed role, advances the notion of mourning for the sex one isn’t. There is a kind

of unconscious grief, a yearning for what we have lost or never had.

The ambiguity of sex begins early on. Weeks into human life, the fetus

is chromosomally female, XX, before (if the fetus is a male) the Y

chromosome replaces one of the Xs and we go our separate ways— or

not so separate, for as Freud maintained, we all begin as bisexuals.

And we may cling to our respective gender teams all the more anx-

iously because becoming a man or a woman is never smooth sailing

In the course of the Oedipus complex, the boy must tear himself

away from the powerful mother of the nursery, become a man pre-

cisely to escape
femaleness.
But that escape is never final; masculinity

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must be on constant guard against the incursion of the feminine. As

most observers will tell you, preschoolers are far more rigid in enforcing sexual stereotypes than are adults.

What we used to call sex and now, faute de mieux, call “gender” is

fundamental, our first identity, our last certitude. “Deeper down than

we are rich and poor, black and white,” wrote Theodore Roszak, “we

are he and she. This is the last ditch of our socially prescribed iden-

tity . . . the one line of our psychic defense we dare not surrender.” No wonder the panic that arises at the prospect of someone breaching

that divide finds expression (or protection) in all sorts of adverse reactions: incredulity, hostility, disapproval, anger. We may think they’re trying to have it both ways, like Michael Jackson. Or resent these

female- to- males who insist, as nominal men, on having babies. Why

can’t they play the hand they’re dealt! we say, and I said so, too. Militant feminists have notoriously blasted transsexuals for horning in on

their turf, “playing at” being women while “real” women have gone

through the whole ordeal. Men for their part just can’t believe it: why would a guy give up his penis, his potency, and his privileges?

Not only popular culture but most religions exalt the male over

the female, a preference explicitly rendered in the Orthodox Jewish

prayer “Blessed are you, Lord, our God, ruler of the universe, who has

not created me a woman.” And what about the manic obsession with

the male member in recent stand- up comedy: could it spring from a

fear that the penis isn’t quite the supreme commander it once was?

For all my proud stance as a diversity- championing New Yorker, a

let- many- flowers- bloom feminist/liberal, this seemed to have nothing to do with tolerance and was beyond understanding. You don’t have to be a

redneck bigot in the Borat mold to feel the ground is shifting too quickly.

The one person who seems completely at peace with the transition,

even happy it will finally take place, is Beth, Chevey’s first wife. She

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found out about Chevey’s longing and problem— when he himself had

found the words for it— in 1976, eight years into their marriage. Some-

how she managed her grief and sorrow, and became his ally and fellow

traveller into this unknown world. She is happily remarried; she is also a militant liberal. Unlike Eleanor and me, she simply can’t understand

why others can’t get with the program.

“There is so much prejudice,” she says with exasperation when we

talk on the phone. “Why can’t people just accept different norms for

different people!”

“But doesn’t this seem like one outrage, one plea for tolerance, too

many?” I’m thinking the body politic is patting itself on the back for

having come to terms with homosexuality, even homosexual marriage,

and now they’re being asked to accept this phenomenon that in most

people’s eyes is far more freakish, more of an outrage against nature.

Instead of getting angry at Chevey, I displace my exasperation onto all other transsexuals. He’s genuine, they’re phonies. All the arguments I

use in his favor are suddenly out the window when it comes to the oth-

ers. If I can’t reject
him
, I can them. My anger takes the form of: they are
choosing
this, why can’t they choose
not
to do it! I realize it’s not just the confusion it introduces about gender, and our faith in a “natural” sexual identity. Worse, possibly, is the challenge it poses to our faith in free will: hence our insistence on the word “choice.”

Someone tells me about a documentary on the Discovery Channel

about people with a certain type of obsessional disorder in which the

afflicted believe a body part doesn’t belong to them, and want nothing

more than to get rid of it. As a transsexual wants to be relieved of his penis, a man in the film wants to get rid of an offending leg. After

hours of therapy, and knowing full well it’s irrational, he plunges his leg into a freezing solution, contracts gangrene, and, after having his

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leg amputated, feels blissful relief. In a similar vein, the movie
Quid
Pro Quo
(2008) features an eerily fascinating subculture of able- bodied men and women who fantasize and play at being disabled, among

them a curator, played by the always adventurous Vera Farmiga, who

wants passionately to be wheelchair- bound. What these psychic phe-

nomena share is an inexplicable desire to become what the world sees

as less rather than more, maimed rather than whole. Whatever the psy-

chological underpinnings, the fantasy is for them the reality. Their

mental image of their deformed selves so dominates their existence

that only by bringing their bodies into line with that image can they

achieve a sense of peace and “normalcy.”

When we talk of fantasy here, we mean a force far more all-

encompassing than the everyday notion of “daydream” or conscious

wish. Psychoanalysts have given us this modern (Freudian) definition of fantasy as a governing but unconscious principle of our lives, a shaper of personality that rumbles along like a powerful underground train, more

often than not taking us in directions that have little to do with what we think we want. Freud and Proust anticipated current discoveries in neuroscience, Freud with his exploration of the unconscious and the play of primitive and unacknowledged superstitions, Proust with his insights

into the foreignness of one’s mind and behavior to one’s “self.” Now

scores of books on neuroscience— scholarly, popular, and in between—

examine the exploding field of brain chemistry and our habits of misre-