My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (2 page)

then, when their whole lives didn’t improve dramatically, they became

disillusioned, often to the point of suicide. If he- now- she passes

muster— i.e., if certain psychological criteria have been met— she’ll

have genital surgery.

Since June he’s been on hormone therapy, under the supervision of

an endocrinologist who specializes in transsexuals. Nothing

artificial— he’s quite insistent on this; he’s not going to become some pneumatic babe, a Marilyn Monroe wannabe.

I think about this. “Just one thing,” I say (hoping to inject a note of levity, but not entirely joking), “please tell me you’ll still be smart at money and computers, and not dumb like . . . well, like a girl? Like

me? Or Eleanor or Beth.” None of us can go a week without having a

computer emergency and appealing to him for assistance.

“I’ll still be the same person inside,” he reassures me. And as such,

something of an exception. According to what he’s read and to doctors

he’s talked with, most transsexuals on hormones change more psycho-

logically than physically, but so far, it seems to be the opposite with him. I’m not ready for details, but I think this is a relief.

He’s begun taking instruction in feminine dress and comportment—

how to talk the talk and walk the walk— from a professional, a woman

in Santa Cruz who specializes in transsexuals. Apparently, there’s a

whole cottage industry, a surgical- cosmetic complex, geared to the

transitioning male. (The females to males, still considered a minority

within a minority, have different needs and physical goals.) And then

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My Sister

there’s electrolysis, which he must do every two months, in California, and it’s excruciating.

His plans are as precisely coordinated as a military campaign, in-

volving a whole set of changes that must occur overnight. Nothing can

be done by increments. Change of dress and hair (a wig at first), as well as name on Social Security card and driver’s license— all of these will take place simultaneously and by stealth, so that Chevey will disappear and Ellen, like Athena emerging from the head of Zeus, will go forth

fully armed as a woman. She will be legally— if not yet anatomically—

a female and, one hopes, a socially convincing one. It’s scary, like Kaf-ka’s
Metamorphosis
or the transformation when the fairy godmother waves her magic wand. One day he is John Haskell, Eleanor’s husband

(no shopping for female clothes, no fingernail polish) and the stepfa-

ther of her two children; the next day he is a she, Ellen Hampton, a

guy- gal in a wig.

And the worst part (other than the fear of failure as a woman) is

the facial reconstruction, the surgery with which Chevey has decided

to start in order to give himself every advantage. (It goes without saying that these alterations are hugely expensive; he’s been saving for

years.) The facial reconstruction, in which the face is hacked up and

reassembled, eliminating masculine characteristics, is far more ardu-

ous and difficult than genital surgery, and his description is the most convincing evidence of the overwhelming power of the transsexual’s

urge to change. It will last upwards of ten hours, and after coming out of it, he’ll look, in his words, “like someone who’s gone eight rounds

with Mike Tyson, without gloves.” Eleanor, in an act of astonishing

generosity, will accompany him for the surgery and bring him home to

live with her for a period of recovery. As soon as he, at that point she, is able to take care of herself— drive a car, go to the grocery store—

she’ll leave and go to Pine Mountain as Ellen.

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And then, if the facial surgery succeeds (and what is success?), there’s the perilous aftermath. Will she be safe? Transsexuals are particularly susceptible to deadly assault (see the film
Boys Don’t Cry
). They’re a lightning rod for sexual sadists sniffing out a victim, or for men who feel threatened by the in- your- face sexual confusion they introduce, and

Chevey is a particularly tall lightning rod.

“And what about, well, sexual orientation? Will you be . . .

heterosexual or homosexual?”

“It’s not about sex,” he stresses, “it’s about identity.”

Nevertheless, he will be heterosexual, a heterosexual female who

would like, but doesn’t necessarily expect, to meet a man. My brother,

almost sixty years old and six feet tall, will be a “woman on the loose.”

My heart stops. The danger. The grotesqueness. An aging transsexual.

Terence Stamp in
The Adventures of
Priscilla, Queen of the Desert
, sad, dignified, last chance at love: a sweet, grizzled, elderly mechanic in the outback. Or Dustin Hoffmann’s desperate frump of an actress in

Tootsie
. What’s the best we can hope for? That he’ll be more comely than Dame Edna, but not quite as dishy as Jaye Davidson in
The Crying Game
?

Yet there is nothing of the flamboyant gender rebel in Chevey.

What makes it unusual is precisely my brother’s conservatism: a guy’s

guy to all appearances, manly, reserved, twice married to wonderful

wives, from a city, or from a
section
of that city, where gays are still closeted, the word feminism is never heard, and no one has voted

Democrat since Harry Truman (which they lived to regret). To be spe-

cific, we are talking about Richmond’s West End, the very antipode of

those meccas of blurred gender San Francisco and the anything- goes

subcultures of New York. Simply put, when, in the two most recent

presidential elections, Virginia became a swing state for Obama, these

Richmonders were not the swingers.

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My Sister

Chevey and I grew up, and he has remained, in this lovely, sedate,

gene- proud Capital of the Confederacy. Or rather, since Richmond has

changed tumultuously in the last twenty years, a certain ultra- WASP

section of Richmond that has remained quietly but defiantly resistant

to time: staid, tasteful, the high- church altar of the Old Dominion’s

patron saints— Washington, Madison, Jefferson, Clay— with many of

its handsome residential areas situated on the James River, that most

historic river, now tainted by present- day pollution and its past as a major transportation route for newly arrived African slaves.

The conservatism and tradition of good manners, which I can ap-

preciate more with the passage of time, made our quarter of the world

an ideal place in which to grow up: secure; families intact; children

given enough freedom but not too much. It was a generally somnolent

era that was free of so many of the political and personal turmoil that would roil postsixties America. But this calm surface, this “whole-someness,” with all its taboos and secrets, exacted its price in conformity and repression. There was segregation, of course, always present

and rarely discussed. Richmond was on the wrong side of history

where race was concerned, but I was on the wrong side of Richmond,

or would have been if I’d given voice to my mutinous thoughts. I re-

member having discussions with another friend, the only one I knew

to have liberal tendencies, in almost hushed tones. We hated the fact

that blacks had to ride on the back of the bus, but an activist I wasn’t.

My chosen course would be to leave altogether.

Whatever its virtues and defects, Richmond as we know it is not

the kind of place that fosters alternate lifestyles or ethnic diversity, much less “gender confusion”! “Don’t stand out” is the fundamental

axiom of the tribe, the price of belonging, and deviation could mean

ostracism. We children all grew up in lockstep, went to the same

schools, belonged to the same clubs, learned to dance at cotillion, were

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confirmed and worshipped in the Episcopal or Presbyterian churches.

Moreover, the “good” families would have paid to keep their names

out
of the paper— not just from fear a burglar might strike if news of a trip leaked out, but simply because people like us didn’t promote or

advertise ourselves, didn’t need to. In truth, these families didn’t actually go on many trips. They were too content to stay in Richmond.

Those Trollope novels where everyone has to be in London for “the

season”? Well, in Richmond’s West End the season was all year long.

And the next and the next. Oh, a trip to Europe was fine once in a

while, and Florida in the winter (provided one stayed at one of the re-

sorts colonized by fellow Richmonders), but what place on earth, what

people could compare with Richmond? When the European tour be-

came de rigueur for the teenage set, a friend explained why she had to

postpone the pleasure: “If you go to France, you have to go for at least a week, and I’d miss too much in Richmond.” The tribe was more important than the individual and the individual took her identity from

the tribe.

Don’t get me wrong: growing up there was a privilege, and as a

child and teenager I loved the place. Indeed, my escape would have

been so much easier and less fraught had I loved it less. But Chevey

and I had taken the escape route of marriage. I’d left, moved to New

York, and, to Mother’s dismay, wedded a film critic from Queens, the

son of Greek immigrants no less. As the American importer of France’s

“auteur theory,” Andrew Sarris would gain recognition as an impor-

tant and provocative force in the explosion of sixties
cinephilia
, but at the time he was just one more idiosyncratic voice on the masthead of

an “underground” weekly called the
Village Voice
that no one in Richmond had ever heard of. And through marriage, Chevey had removed

himself from the rigidities of haute WASP social circles, had rejected

the “place for themselves” that my parents, not native Virginians, had

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My Sister

worked so hard to establish. His wives were not (and were not inter-

ested in being) “old Richmond,” which— it now strikes me— allowed

Chevey to keep pretty much to himself.

I was the official family renegade, the turncoat; he the apparently

staid and dependable stay- at- home. I’d become a transplanted New

Yorker of more- or- less liberal persuasion; Chevey was a moderate, but Richmond was still his city, his people. However little he might participate in their rituals, they shared a certain DNA, were bound to-

gether by— if nothing else— an overpowering sense of the importance

of discretion. And now . . . ? Transsexuals are everywhere, we’re told.

Presumably, like the saints in the Episcopal children’s hymn, “you can

meet them in school, or in lanes, or at sea, in church, or in trains, or in shops, or at tea.”

But in Richmond?

Actually, Chevey would be discreet, even about becoming a transsex-

ual, and Richmond would be discreet in its reaction.

On the day he leaves his and Eleanor’s house and moves to Pine

Mountain, a letter will go out to business acquaintances, close friends, and family, informing them that John Cheves Haskell Jr. has become

Ellen Clark Hampton. Why this name? Why choose the name Ellen,

so close to his wife’s? Because, he tells me, it’s the name he called himself in his fantasy life, and the fantasy life is where his soul and spirit lived, took sustenance. And why not keep our last name, Haskell? Because he doesn’t want to embarrass the family. Clark is my mother’s

maiden name, Hampton a family name deriving from our forebear

Wade Hampton, the South Carolina Civil War general, U.S. senator,

and postwar governor. There is a delicious irony in this, as Chevey,

never much interested in family history, has chosen just the name that

would chill the blue blood of our relatives who put great stock in gene-

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alogy, and many of whose children, male and female, bear the first

name Hampton. But Chevey just liked the sound of it; as he began to

live more and more as the woman in his head, these were the details in

which he wrapped himself, the saving fantasy of who he “really” was

and can’t now abandon.

Andrew and I are instructed not to breathe a word until the letters

go out in early May, some months from now. And then, only moments

after he’s made his revelation, he says, “You have to promise me one

thing.” Anything, anything. “You won’t write about this.” I nod. Un-

happy, but what can I say? In a matter of hours, I’ll begin to have second thoughts, and even come up with a title (“My Brother My Sister”),

only half joking, but for now I would agree to anything. An earlier

memoir I wrote about Andrew and his near- fatal illness infuriated my

mother and distressed Chevey almost as much on her behalf. For the

moment, however, writing about it would have to be the farthest thing