My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (6 page)

membering, and remind us that far from being the captains of our ships, the masters of our souls, we are more like galley slaves, madly rowing as our wayward vessel navigates stormy seas into which murky and unknowable desires have plunged us. Rooted in preverbal experience and

the potent undercurrents of family, these propulsive forces of desire,

rage, inhibition, and guilt affect the jobs we take (or don’t take, or fail at), the people we choose (or reject), our moods and memories. We’re

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constantly reminded of how often we act in ways contrary to our self-

interest, or remember only what fits a chosen (or unconscious) scenario.

Over and over again, we reenact patterns of behavior and make per-

verse choices— older men, triangles, neediest cases, wounded or crazy

or destructive partners— which fly in the face of reason and which we

are “helpless” to correct, and so which are hardly “choices” at all.

These include, but aren’t restricted to, sexual fantasies dating from

childhood, which the psychoanalyst and writer Robert Stoller did so

much to illuminate. A disciple of Freud and pioneering sex- role spe-

cialist (he developed the concept of “core gender identity”), Stoller

wrote in books like
Perversion
(1975) about the presence of guilt, revenge, and aggression as triggers for pleasure and pain while simulta-

neously de- pathologizing these feelings and behaviors. He and Dr.

Harry Benjamin, known as the “grandfather of transsexuals,” were in

the forefront of attempts to describe and understand the transsexual.

Benjamin, an émigré from Berlin who came to work with Kinsey, de-

veloped the Benjamin Standards of Care, which are still in use. The

two disagreed, however, as to the origin of transsexualism, with Ben-

jamin believing it occurred in utero, while Stoller, at least initially, saw the child as “gender neutral at birth,” and stressed the mother’s influence. “The transsexual boy,” writes Stoller, “begins to show his ex-

treme femininity by age two to three, though the first signs may appear as early as age one.”

Since Stoller’s work in the sixties and early seventies, his theory has been modified (including, in later years, by Stoller himself) to accommodate wider scientific and psychoanalytic research, placing greater

emphasis on genetic or prenatal occurrences, in addition to informa-

tion yielded by a broader spectrum of transgender types. All of which

(bad news to lovers of clarity) makes the condition more mystifying

than ever.

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c h a p t e r t h r e e

My Brother Kisses His Elbow

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need.

— e. e. cummings

“W
hen did the desire to be female first occur?” I ask Chevey. We are talking on the phone in March of 2006. He has come home from

an extremely painful bout of electrolysis on the West Coast, and will

go to San Francisco in April for the facial feminization surgery.

“I’ve thought about that question many times. It was at Ashley,

when we lived in the country. I distinctly remember going up into

your room, which was along the hall and up the steps in the old part of the house, and trying on your clothes when no one was around. I’ve

since tried to go back and figure out how old I was at that time, but I don’t have a frame of reference. I guess about six or seven years old.

We lived there till I was ten. So that’s all I have to go by.

“I do remember times when Mother would say things, not realiz-

ing what she was saying. Like one time she mentioned this silly thing,

how if you could kiss your elbow it would turn you into a girl. And

though on the surface I ignored it, inside I jumped. I know it was idi-

otic but I must have just about broken my arms a couple of times after

that, trying to hold my arm in a door, to see if you could get to your

elbow. But of course, you can’t.

“I didn’t have, we didn’t have, the concept of ‘transsexual.’

“It probably wasn’t long after I started dressing up that Christine

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My Sister

Jorgensen hit the news. [This would have been 1953, when Chevey was

seven.] I happened to be in the room when Mother and Daddy were

talking about the news. Most dismissed it. It was a once- in- a- lifetime thing; she was seen as a freak, not as big a deal as Renée Richards was years later. But I must have at least known I didn’t want to get caught dressing up; I had the concept of ‘sissy.’ ”

In fact, Christine Jorgensen (1927– 1989), the Brooklyn- born pro-

fessional photographer and ex- G. I., who went to Denmark for surgery

in 1952, was not the first but the most world- renowned transsexual. In around 1930 or ’31, there were two in Germany, the most famous of

whom was a Danish painter named Lili Elbe (né Einar Wegener). Her

tragic story (recorded in the book
Man into Woman
) involved a series of experimental surgeries, including the implantation of ovaries, and

after only a year, she died. But it was Jorgensen who entered the public spotlight and became a catalyst for other would- be transsexuals, many

of whom went to Europe for surgery. She also became a patient of Dr.

Harry Benjamin, the German endocrinologist turned sex researcher.

“When I look back,” Chevey continues, “I’m surprised and amazed

at how my life and my very, very slow transition to being female almost coincides with society’s realization of transsexualism— I won’t say getting used to it, but just hearing about it more and more. It’s actually an incredible leap, from the dark ages of the fifties and sixties to the

present- day explosion of stories in the papers and on television.

“It was Renée Richards who really turned my life upside down.

Christine Jorgensen seemed remote— we wondered if this was truth or

fiction. But when Renée Richards appeared on magazine covers in

1976, playing women’s tennis, and we learned that she had been an

ophthalmologist named Richard Raskind . . . well, that just blew the

lid off. Before, I think my feelings of being a boy were stronger than of being a girl, simply because that’s all there was.”

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I agree. There has to be a possibility, an example, even a descrip-

tive language, before such vague feelings and disturbances can co-

alesce into a concrete “something,” a condition, a visual image, a

real- life possibility.

The scandal caused by this pivotal event may be hard to remember

now. Born in 1933, educated at Harvard, an enlistee in the Navy,

ranked male tennis player, this handsome, even beautiful, man be-

came a woman at age forty- one. When she tried to play professional

tennis as a woman, she was ostracized by her fellow players, rejected

by the crowds, and lampooned in the media— Bob Hope joked with

Johnny Carson on
The Tonight Show
that she was her own “mixed

doubles team.”

Nevertheless, for people like my brother, it was as if lightning had

struck, illuminating a path but unleashing a storm of agonies as well.

“When that happened, it all came to the surface. I acknowledged

to myself my yearning to be female and told Beth, and that caused my

castle walls to crumble. Up to then, I hadn’t spent a lot of energy

thinking about it, because it simply wasn’t in the realm of possibility.

Now it seemed there were others out there, and information, and doc-

tors. It was still experimental, of course, but there were doctors who

did this!

“I keep repeating this point, but you can’t imagine what it was like

back then, and why Renée Richards was a like bomb going off. At the

time, homosexuality was still in the closet; admitting it would destroy your life. I remember a movie about that time [
Advise and Consent
, 1962], based on a book, about a congressman who commits suicide

rather than be exposed as a homosexual.”

Yes, the world has changed, at least theoretically. The argument

against gender- specificity advanced by my students is gaining currency.

Shifting shapes and, in academic- speak, the problematizing of identity

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My Sister

represent a retreat from the presumed rigidity of traditional norms: the dominant male and supine female who define each other by their differences. Cutting- edge gender provocateurs like Marjorie Garber and

Camille Paglia speak of “the pitfalls of gender assignment” and of our

fetishizing gender. The psychoanalyst and author Ken Corbett, in his

illuminating
Boyhoods
, actually argues that the terms “male” and “female” have outlived their usefulness as designators of gender identity, as have the prescriptive norms tucked within them. Judith Halberstam,

celebrator of butch females in her book
Female Masculinity
, speaks of a

“post- gender world.” The gender- studies expert Anne Fausto- Sterling

(Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Men and Women
; “The Five Sexes: Why Male and Female Are Not Enough”
)
has mounted an extensive and scholarly challenge to the rigid division of male and female in Western culture, citing examples of hermaphrodites and other

variations in the organization of gender that she insists must be seen as a spectrum.

Real- world hints as to the porousness of the sexes were not un-

known. As a teenager, I went each year to the State Fair with my

friends and eagerly sought out the “Half Man, Half Woman” exhibi-

tion. With a mixture of horror and giddy fascination, we would place

ourselves on the children’s side of a curtain that divided us from the

adults, who were apparently exposed to the naked body of the her-

maphrodite (if that’s what “it” was) while we were shown only the up-

per half. Who knows how we absorbed the implications of this, but

certainly the image was hard to erase.

If male and female, masculine and feminine, have become unreli-

able opposites, transgender has become even more of a blur. And

where there were once no words for it, now they proliferate with a

vengeance. Transgender is, itself, a term whose parts are constantly

shifting and overlapping.

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The simple taxonomy of TGs- meet- yokels road movies such as
To

Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar
, and
The Adventures
of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
, seems almost quaint.
To Wong Foo
, which came out in 1995, features Wesley Snipes and Patrick Swayze as

prize- winning drag queens, and John Leguizamo as the teary wannabe

for whom Snipes lays it out: “When a straight man puts on a dress and

gets his sexual kicks, he’s a transvestite. When a man is a woman

trapped in a man’s body and has a little operation, he is a transsexual.

When a gay man has way too much fashion sense for one gender, he is

a drag queen. When a tired little Latin boy puts on a dress, he is sim-

ply a boy in a dress.”

If only it were so simple.

There are many and ever- changing variants in the ever- blossoming

field of “gender nonconformity,” from biological aberrations like her-

maphroditism (a child born with both sets of genitals) to performance

celebrations (drag and female impersonators), all of which challenge

the feminine- masculine polarity around which we organize our self-

image.

Along the transgender spectrum, female- to- male transsexuals have

probably been underrecorded (the one- in- five statistic has recently

been adjusted to almost equal). For one thing, it’s so much easier for a woman to dress, even act, like a man and pass under the radar than it

is for a man to cross- dress without raising eyebrows. For another, the surgery is unsatisfactory (the penis being so much more difficult to

create than the vagina). Moreover, female- to- males tend to keep a low profile, withdrawing from the limelight that their counterparts actively seek. The club of “difference,” LGBT, now includes “I” for in-

tersex, a coinage as yet without a definition. The gender rebels

constantly invent their own lingo (like “genderqueer”— synonymous

with androgynous), rejecting the medical vocabulary that wafts sulfu-

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My Sister

rically from the laboratory and stigmatizes “disorder” with terms like

“sexual dysphoria.”

It’s the word “sex” that causes the problem, since the first basic and

unequivocal rule is that transsexualism
is not about sex, sexual behavior, or sexual orientation, but rather about identity: gender identity. Sex is biological and anatomical— chromosomes, genes, anatomy, gonads,

hormones, as well as being the locus of one’s carnal desires. Gender on the other hand is how we perceive ourselves: a social construct with