My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (19 page)

twenty- four hour obsession, and the criteria are perhaps more cruelly

elitist than they’ve ever been. Not only that, but the transsexual fails to abide by the gender- fashionable dictum of blurring boundaries or the-atricalizing gender. With the female- to- male there might be prejudice or the kind of aversion that greets the “butch” dyke. But with the

male- to- female transsexual, there’s the attempt at “true” femaleness

that can fail so disastrously and publicly.

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Talk Like a Dame

The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.

— Oscar Wilde as quoted by Susan Sontag

C
hevey wanted Ellen, and Ellen wants Ellen, to be the “best woman I can be.” This makes me uncomfortable, as if there were a single criterion for something as vast and multiform as woman. But as I ques-

tion her, she makes clear she doesn’t mean some essentialist concept of
femaleness
, or even goodness. It’s not a question of character, but— for safety and her own satisfaction— it’s about her persuasiveness as a

woman. Her guidelines will be from those periods when, according to

her, women looked and dressed like women.

Andrew once made a similar observation about an even earlier

time. We were walking along Fifth Avenue after a screening, and

every one we passed (as my mother would have said) “looked like scat,”

underdressed (possibly because most were now tourists) in some form

of sneakers and unisex comfort clothes. He wistfully recalled that in

the fifties, he and his army buddies used to come to New York and

descend on Midtown just to look at the beautiful girls. Was my genera-

tion responsible for the change? We’d shudderingly rejected the

Donna Reed small- waisted girly look— one of the few styles that hadn’t come back as retrochic. I was sure Ellen wouldn’t wear waist cinchers

or full skirts, but what model of fifties fashion would she adopt?

Thinking of how this would go down in Richmond made my hair

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stand on end. But dealing with it in New York would be no picnic ei-

ther. I could imagine the gossip, the snickers. Only months before, a

friend and I had rolled our eyes and laughed when she told me of a wed-

ding she’d attended where one of the “mothers” of the bride was a for-

mer male, now female, all dolled up, monumental, on the arm of her

new male companion. It’s the drag aspect that unsettles, the parody of

femininity.

One night Andrew and I are having dinner with friends— a thera-

pist, J, and her husband. J tells of walking into her waiting room to

greet her next patient, a pre- op male- to- female transsexual, and being taken aback by the sight of the woman, with huge hands and feet,

dressed in gloves and hat, everything “matchy- matchy, like a 1950s

lady.” J’s eyes widen in merriment but also distress. As we all laugh,

Andrew and I a little uncomfortably, I think perhaps she, too, is sur-

prised at her own momentary shock, distaste, even prejudice. Is it the

essential fact of it that bothers her, or the fashion grotesquerie. In

other words, is the offense against nature or against style, or can the two be separated?

In some ways, both the flamboyant cross- dresser and the blurred-

gender icon are easier to accept than the transsexual. The weirdo, the

proudly transgressive performer, and the androgyne, creature of art

and imagination— ethereal pansexual icons like David Bowie, Tilda

Swinton, Johnny Depp, Patti Smith, Hilary Swank— are as immaterial

as Orlando. They allow us to feel we recognize the mixture of male

and female “in all of us” at a comfortable distance. They rarely cause a jab in the genitals, a sense of the ground giving way beneath us. These, generally, are what gender progressives mean when they speak approv-ingly of “challenging stereotypes.” Yet it’s the transsexual who truly

challenges stereotypes— by reaffirming them.

At once ultraradical and ultraconservative, the transsexual is the

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most paradoxical of creatures: on the outer edge of society in wishing

to alter his sex, but conventional, even retrograde, in the ideal of womanhood he embraces, and the yearning to “fit in.”

One of the great ironies is that although the transsexual can’t be

seen apart from the ideology of sexual liberation, with its attendant

advances in science and technology, she has proved a thorn in the sides of gender liberationists. During the early seventies, transsexuals were labeled “Uncle Toms” by the very women who most rabidly opposed a

strict gender dichotomy. At a time when transsexuals already faced

huge obstacles, militant feminists denounced butch lesbians on one

side and transsexuals on the other for emulating benighted forms of

“patriarchy.” At a West Coast lesbian conference in Los Angeles in

1973, Robin Morgan gave a notorious speech, demanding the confer-

ence refuse admission to the transsexual lesbian singer Beth Elliott.

She proceeded to deliver a jeremiad about the “obscenity of male

transvestism” and “men who deliberately
re-
emphasize gender roles, and who parody female oppression and suffering.” Making no distinction between the male- to- female transsexual or occasional drag or heterosexual cross- dresser, she accuses them of not having suffered

enough to earn the title “woman.” After suggesting they might even

enjoy being hassled on the street by a man, she concludes, “He dares,

he dares to think he understands our pain? No, in our mothers’ names

and in our own, we must not call him sister.”

When the talk was later published in an anthology, Morgan wrote

in her introduction, “It was incredible that so many strong angry

women should be divided by one smug male in granny glasses and an

earth- mother gown.”

The feminist theologian Mary Daly labeled transsexuality a “nec-

rophilic invasion” of women’s space, and her student Janice G. Ray-

mond took these strands further in her book
The Transsexual Empire:

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The Making of the She- Male
(1979), in which she accuses transsexuals of raping women’s bodies.

Could it be that the granny glasses and the earth- mother gown (or,

in the East Coast version, the club lady with suit and matching gloves) are an offense greater even than the man- made vagina? Or that while

we may recoil from the cruelty and unhinged nastiness of Morgan’s

remarks, some part of us agrees with some part of her argument?

Woman to J. Michael Bailey, author of the inflammatory
The Man

Who Would Be Queen
: “When they say they feel like women, how do they know what that feels like?”

I ask Ellen the same question.

“Basically I think you learn enough growing up around men and

women, from lifelong contact with their associations, reading, ideas,

thinking, their conversation, what matters to them; you absorb through

the culture. Some people think I am trying to relive parts of my life

that I missed. But I haven’t missed that much. I lived through each

phase of my life in my imagination.”

I wonder if transsexuals have more vivid imaginations.

Since a big difference between transsexuals and biological women

is that the latter don’t spend time
wanting t
o “look like women.” I wonder about Jennifer Boylan and Jan Morris: how does it feel to them to

feel like women? How do their thoughts and feelings match their outer

selves, and how “authentic” do they feel? From photographs, Jennifer,

being younger and more typically feminine, seems to have made an

attractive- looking female, while Morris by most accounts, before set-

tling into dignified-

dowdy, went through a grotesquely awkward

wannabe- girl period. At least that’s how Nora Ephron saw it. In a witty but unforgiving review of
Conundrum
, Ephron declared that she, too, always wanted to be a girl, but felt that she “was born into the wrong

body.” Lean and boyish, she longed to be “feminine in the worst way—

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coquettish, submissive . . . dependent, soft- spoken.” She was no good at being a girl, she wrote, but “not half bad at being a woman,” whereas by contrast, “Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she

has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become

those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty- seven- year- old girl.

And worst of all, a forty- seven- year- old
Cosmopolitan
girl.”

While bowing to
Conundrum
as a pioneering masterpiece, Boylan,

who cites Ephron in her memoir, has to concede that there is an ado-

lescent tone to much of what she and her fellow transsexuals do. This

is because they who are “going through transition resemble nothing so

much as gawky, wonder- struck teenagers, amazed and perplexed by

their bodies, startled by an awareness of themselves as men or women,

as if they have invented the whole business single- handedly then and

there. There is nothing as annoying as someone for whom the world is

new. At least to those for whom the world is old.”

Boylan even admits that time and again she herself had fallen gid-

dily and helplessly into this same trap . . . wearing toenail polish, applying makeup on Sundays, reading fashion magazines, dieting

crazily. All of which gets at what annoys many women: the emphasis

on clothes and makeup by women who’ve never had a menstrual cy-

cle, never given birth; the sense that they’re wallowing in the “good

parts,” the “trappings” of womanhood, without having endured the

specifically female ordeals.

On the other hand, Boylan suggests, transsexuals are treated to

inordinate scrutiny and criticized for things many other women do. In

the early days, people would look at her and conclude she didn’t know

what she was doing— which in effect she didn’t. But “plenty of other

women— including forty- three- year- olds— behave in ways much more embarrassing than I did. Women
born
women are given the right to define womanhood on their own terms.” Nevertheless, “a transsexual

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who hopes to build a life around high heels and sponge cake is in for

something of a disappointment.”

A friend tells me an anecdote. She was in a shop on Madison Ave-

nue and saw a woman, clearly a transsexual, trying on a dress. She was

struck by the way she gazed at herself in the mirror, the way she posed, and the obvious pleasure she took from it. “Women never think they’re

that beautiful,” she said.

Nor do all transsexuals, incidentally. Renée Richards has candidly

acknowledged her regrets, none of which involve a wish to go back in

time and become a man again. There’s the pain it caused others— the

traumatized son, the lost wife. There’s the arduousness of the process, at the end of which she still didn’t feel like an authentic, biological woman. And finally her disappointingly brief shelf life as a sexually

desirable woman. “I had a very full sexual life,” she has said, “both as a man and in the first few years as a woman. [But] an unmarried woman

at sixty- four is a lot different than an unmarried man of sixty- four.”

Meanwhile, during the year of presenting and the next one, the

sixty- one- year- old Ellen will have more lessons in comportment, dress, makeup, and, unhappily and into the foreseeable future, electrolysis.

Patty, her electrologist, works with over a hundred transsexuals and,

according to Ellen, “knows more about Ts than anyone I’ve ever

known, including therapists and surgeons.”

“Facial hair is where the female- to- male has a big advantage over the male- to- female,” Ellen explains. “A woman can take testosterone and

grow a beard, even deepen her voice. But when a man takes estrogen,

his facial hair doesn’t stop growing. He has to have electrolysis for

years, and that’s the most painful and most expensive part of the tran-

sition. It’s also the most necessary in order to pass, even more than

your voice and the size of your hands. A male- to- female transsexual

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can walk into a store with her hands cupped and not say a word, but

she can’t hide her five o’clock shadow.”

Laser can work in the early stages, but not over time.

When she tells me what Patty does— something with a needle and a

pedal and red- hot electricity into a pore— I can hardly bear to hear

the details. It takes eight hours a day, four days in a row. Some parts of the body—

not the ones you’d necessarily think were extra-