My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (10 page)

lates whatever person his eyes fix upon. That person becomes the ba-

by’s “tutor.” Tutorial is an intriguing idea, and “degrees” is an operative word. This would fit in with the (to me) rather startling findings of

psychoanalyst Susan Coates, who has written about cross- dressing

among children. In studying a group of three- and four- year- olds, she found some of the males dressing in girls’ clothes, and traced it back to trauma between the parents, specifically a wounded mother. Something had happened in the marriage, a husband who left or was abu-

sive. The boys were allying with the mother and trying to make

reparation by dressing like her, but they didn’t end up becoming trans-

sexuals.

“At that age,” she told me, “sexual identity is not yet stable. They’re

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not aware of it. Show them a picture of a male and a female naked and

ask which is a woman and which a man, and they’ll say, ‘How do I

know? They don’t have any clothes on!’ ”

“This would seem to be a subgroup,” I suggested, thinking of my

sibling who didn’t fit this pattern, and she agreed. There were no early signs in Chevey’s behavior, and he was at least six or seven when the

disorder made itself felt, in however inchoate a form.

Psychoanalyst and author John Ross, a specialist in masculinity,

writes (in
What Men Want
) of small boys who, before rigidities of gender set in, display feminine traits and express a kind of “womb envy”

from a sense that only women produce babies, since there’s no sign of

the father’s contribution.

It suddenly comes to me that Chevey experienced a breakdown

while Beth was in the hospital giving birth to Pete, and I ask him

about it.

“Part of it was because I didn’t want a child in the first place, but

more than that, I had what I called ‘pregnancy envy,’ the feeling that I should have been the one giving birth.”

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c h a p t e r f i v e

Who Has It Better, Men or Women?

Which is the greater ecstasy? The man’s or the woman’s? . . . the

pleasures of life were increased and its experiences multiplied.

For the probity of breeches she exchanged the seductiveness of

petticoats and enjoyed the love of both sexes equally.

— Virginia Woolf,
Orlando

A
s I comb the past for clues to my brother’s female leanings, this argument stands out, a bone of contention through the years. With

the fervor of a tomboy, and later buttressed by feminist argument, I

maintained that of course men had the advantage. The world was es-

sentially organized hierarchically, around the idea of male suprem-

acy. Women’s opportunities were few, their status borrowed, their

vocation marriage. A deeply ingrained double standard was endemic,

socially, sexually, professionally. Chevey, more controversially, ar-

gued for women. They might work or not, but their place in society

and even their self- esteem didn’t depend on it, while men were born

into the burden of proving themselves, their professional success

their identity. The pressure was enormous, and to him far outweighed

the excitement of work, the lure of power and distinction. He appar-

ently wanted the right
not
to be ambitious, not to compete. Was this because I so much wanted to? And the first person he didn’t want to

compete with was me? At the time, I thought some of this might

come from his childhood vision of male vulnerability. My father had

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My Sister

contracted ALS when he was fifty- three. I was thirteen then, and

Chevey eight. (In fact, it was about the time that he started poking

around in my closet.) My little brother watched as this youthful man

withered and died, while the women in his life survived and flour-

ished. Hence, no doubt, the fury expressed in the aforementioned

screed attacking me for not supporting myself, and, by implication,

Mother for helping me out.

Still, I thought now— and said to him on the telephone— just you

wait. See what kind of service you get when you call someone on a

business matter, go to a hotel, deal with workmen, appear alone at a

restaurant! And sex . . . you’ll be at the mercy of some man’s taste or distaste, no longer the one who chooses and initiates.

Even before Orlando posed the question as to whose is the greater

ecstasy, possibly the first known expert in these matters was the fabled Tiresias, who had lived both as man and woman. Jove and Juno were

having a heated dispute as to which sex had more fun in bed, and

called in Tiresias to settle the argument.

In Ovid’s version, Jove, like my brother, had argued for women,

advancing a similar argument but in sexual terms. The wily and inde-

fatigable god who never lost an opportunity to seduce, rape, and ravish had the gall to whine, “[W]omen have more joy / In making love than

men; we do the work, / While you have all the fun.” Tiresias agreed

and, in her fury, Juno struck him blind. Yet for all that supposed fe-

male
jouissance
, Tiresias, when given the opportunity, chose to return to being male.

Many have evoked Tiresias to express the longing we all must feel

at some moment to be the other sex. Christopher Hitchens alluded to

the myth in his eloquent and sexually ambidextrous memoir
Hitch- 22
.

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“I would seriously like to know what it was like to be a woman, but

like blind Tiresias I would also like the option of remaining myself if I wished.” So we have the vicarious consolations of art and myth . . .

and books and movies, and even movie stars, with whom we identify

regardless of sex, or rather, precisely because of sex, since we can “be”

both or either at the moment of watching.

Shape- shifting and the slipperiness of gender have never been

more astutely and wittily explored than in Ovid, the renegade, the

champion of women and pleasure against the stern patriotism of Virgil

and the repressive hypervirility of Augustus Caesar. In one story, Jove, in order to seduce the lovely young Arcadian Callisto, disguises himself as Diana, the girl’s idol. It works. Says Callisto: “Hail, goddess whose deep spell on me is greater / Than Jove’s himself.” And Jove’s

disarming response: “Jove laughed at being preferred above himself”

and gave her “tongue to tongue, a most immoderate kiss.”

Poor Callisto, no longer a virgin, is banished by Diana; then Juno,

whose jealousy is “forever on the boil,” whose sex is sublimated into

wrath, turns her into a bear. But the point is that for Callisto, Diana exerts a greater spell than Jove’s. Brandon Teena, according to the girlfriends Dunne interviewed for his article, exerted the same feminine

appeal. He was sensitive to their needs and able to play mother, sister, boyfriend, and father to these damaged souls.

Will we prefer Ellen-
herself
to John-
himself
? Isn’t there an even deeper lesson here: that the
she
- Jove is more attractive to women than the
he
- Jove? And wasn’t this what made my brother so lovable— all those she- qualities he possessed? If anything, the real clue to the secret he harbored was that he was too good to be true. Sensitive in ways foreign to most men. He was wonderful with Mother, had spoiled her

when she was healthy and vital, acting as unpaid accountant and a

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great deal more, and then, when she grew ill and finally housebound

with emphysema, he had been in constant attendance, arranging for

caretakers, visiting, watching over her.

I ask him about this.

“When I would be walking along with a girlfriend or woman

friend, whether you’re having a cup of coffee or enjoying a party or

getting in and out of a car or having intercourse, you’re thinking you’re inside her mind, thinking what she’s feeling and understanding what

she needs.”

“And women responded to you?”

“Yes, I think so, even if they didn’t understand why. But obviously

I was more interested in who they were. I wasn’t treating them dismis-

sively, like ‘Don’t talk to me till the game is over’ or seeing them as objects. I was interested in all aspects; it helped a lot in sex, but really in all aspects. Of course there are other men who are ‘into’ women

that way, and I’m not saying I was perfect at it, but then every woman

is different and you don’t have an automatic window where every-

thing’s clear. But at least you realize different ways of looking at things and interpreting things. So while I don’t exactly know what she needs

or wants, at least I know I want to try and understand.”

In a sense, the transsexual proves by his/her ability to emotionally

identify with both sexes, that he’s the exception to the rule, the “hy-

brid” that both confirms and challenges the divide between male and

female, between masculine and feminine. Sexual stereotypes— genetic

or environmental? Hardwired or mutable? What’s “natural” or “nor-

mal” in one culture may be anathema in another. A redhead in Poland

is considered good luck, but redheads are bad luck in Corsica, and in

Egypt they are burned. So important is a melodious singing voice in

Wales that those who can’t sing are ostracized. Epileptics are felt to be possessed by sacred spirits among the Hmong in Laos. In Western

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cultures, dating back to the Greeks, effeminacy in males has been

seen as a disease, a perversion, whereas in a South American country

an androgynous male can have godlike powers, uniting male and fe-

male, like the “two- spirit” people of some Native American tribes.

Male and female may signify opposites to us, but in China, “yin” and

“yang” mean an ultimate merger. There is ritualized transvestism in

Bali, whereas in the West, drag is most often either broadly comical

(hetero men in dresses) or disturbingly beautiful, like the divas of the

“ball culture” in the documentary
Paris Is Burning.

To these normative fixed poles of Western culture, however, resis-

tance has run like an underground river, expressing itself in myths of

hybrids and hermaphrodites, in art and mythology, that test, tease, and destabilize our sexual certainties. The sexual burlesques of Aristo-phanes and Euripides, raucous travesties of hypermasculinity, and the

plays of Shakespeare reveal earlier artists and audiences more com-

fortable with jokes about virility and send- ups of sexual stereotypes.

Like Ovid, from whose fables he so often drew, Shakespeare, the

grand master of sexual paradox, appreciates the criss- crossing of not

only male and female characteristics but interspecies as well. See, for example, Bottom the ass making love to Titania in
Midsummer Night’s
Dream
; Beatrice and Benedick, the screwball opposites of
Much Ado
About Nothing
, speaking and mocking the artificial language of court-ship, exposing the obligatory nature of male- female roles. The fact that men, or boys, played women only added extra layers to the pun, with

As You Like It
and its Russian- doll roundelay of sexual disguise— a man dressed as woman dressed as man dressed as woman— the ultimate pun on gender.

In his emphasis on artifice and role- playing, on life as theatre,

Shakespeare is the great poet of straying gender, understanding the

degree to which our sexual myths and stereotypes are far from natural

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but are culturally created, thus susceptible to changing fashion. But

the role reversals, the upending of stereotypes, the lure of regression may speak to an audience’s fears as well as desires. Such violations of

“nature” and order, including passion itself, are fraught with peril for the afflicted/liberated characters. The danger, Ovid understood, is

that once we leave our secure perch, once Io becomes a cow, Callisto a

bear, Viola a man, Bottom an ass, we will be neither one thing nor the

other, will be unable to communicate with either side, and will tumble

into a void of indeterminacy.

The sphinx, the centaur, creatures of mixed species, are sometimes

worshipped, sometimes scorned. The same ambivalence occurs with

that other hybridized figure, the feminized man, honored in more laid-

back and goddess- centric countries, like Bali and India; demonized as

freaks in male- dominant societies, like Greece, Rome, the West.

Religion provides us with other wildly differing precepts and pro-

hibitions. Christianity believes in the sacredness of the soul and the

profanity of the body: sex got its bad reputation when the church, de-

fining itself in opposition to Judaism, formalized the association be-