My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (4 page)

think? (Thank God Mother is dead.) I know, it’s happening more and

more often; soon it will be common enough that it will be accepted,

especially by the younger generation.
But I’m not a member of the

younger generation.

In a memorable
New Yorker
article (1997) on Teena Brandon, a.k.a.

Brandon Teena, “The Humboldt Murders,” John Gregory Dunne

speculates as to what an earlier and even more famous transgressive

woman of the West, Willa Cather, would have made of the gender-

crossing Teena. Cather loved women, and created in her tomboy Anto-

nia a heroine very like the poor rural androgyne whose murder became

the subject of the Hilary Swank film,
Boys Don’t Cry
. “One can assume,” Dunne writes, “that Cather would have regarded her [Teena’s]

obsession with gender and its discontents as self- indulgent, and her

gender confusion as an excuse to abdicate personal responsibility.”

Cather may have shared geography with Brandon Teena but she

had the advantage of class and privilege and was steeped in the old-

fashioned sense of decorum that went with it. She would have had no

experience of Teena’s knockabout life of abuse and poverty. But surely

that exasperation with “self- indulgence” rings a chord among those of

us who came to adulthood before the efflorescence of gender identity

politics, with each minority’s claims of persecution and prejudice,

clamors for recognition, and determination to set matters aright what-

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ever the cost. That I’m on both sides of the divide— part traditionalist, part liberationist— doesn’t make the whole thing any easier. Even the

feminist that I am, by definition a supporter of minority rights, is staggered by the speed of change and the shape those rights have taken.

The struggle for women’s equality seems downright quaint, a settled

issue, compared to such recent commonplaces as single parents, gay

marriage, gay parents, test- tube babies, sperm donors, and egg surro-

gates.

Why should I be shocked? Back in 2001, I wrote an essay for the

New York Times
Arts & Leisure Section (“In the Land of Self- Invention You Can Always Start Over”) about the Second Chance narrative as “a

phenomenon that has always existed but that has somehow taken on

greater urgency and inventiveness in our age of long lives and multiple choices.” In the films covered by the article, “a beleaguered protagonist has the opportunity, either through outside intervention or inner

transformation, to do it over or better.” I attributed the proliferation of such stories to the fact that “we are seduced daily by visions of other places and possibilities, thereby living parallel lives in our heads . . . a function of rising divorce rates, feminism’s multiple- choice agenda,

and the life- span statistics on the actuarial tables. We have more time to evolve, change, rewind.”

I don’t think I had sex change in mind, nor could I ever be quite as

cavalier as I sounded.

My brother and I grew up in a world that was still late- Victorian in

its attitudes toward sex and everything else. There were euphemisms

for body parts and most of their functions; family secrets were best

kept that way. In most ways, the South was behind the rest of the

country— industrially, economically, politically, racially, even “sexu-

ally.” But socially was a different matter. We socialized early, were precocious imbibers, but with our elders as mentors, so that we would

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learn how to “hold our liquor” and conduct ourselves in public. At the

age of thirteen my classmates and I, wearing party dresses and gloves,

went to cotillion every other Saturday night. The stationing of the

boys on one side of the dance floor and the girls on another, observed

by strategically placed chaperones, was an apt configuration of the di-

vide between the sexes. The boys asked or were nudged into asking

the girls to dance, never the other way around, and the taller girls— I speak from stinging memories of humiliation— were more likely to be

wallflowers . . . an early lesson in rejection and preparation for many to come. These Saturday nights were training sessions, the prelims in

the stage- by- stage initiation into the privileges and penalties of the tribe. Next was debutante year, the final induction ceremony before

the summum bonum of matrimony. We painted ourselves for the first

time, drank firewater, and danced around our elite Holy Wasp camp-

fire sites.

No less socially preordained than I, Chevey came along five and a

half years later, mastering the lessons in gentlemanly behavior. He

would have to walk across the ballroom and lead a girl onto the floor

when perhaps he wished to be the one in the taffeta dress, the one in-

vited to dance. These rites were like the swaddling jackets in the crib, intended to ease the transit from the enclosure of the womb— keeping

us safe and secure but unable to move freely.

I ask him on the phone if he has memories of cotillion. He remem-

bers going for three of the customary four years, before being sent off to boarding school.

“And yes, I always felt I could be on the other side. I vividly re-

member an evening when, in some sort of contest, three or four boys

dressed as girls, one in a woman’s one- piece bathing suit! To me it was excruciating, because I was always trying to suppress the urge and

then something like this would bring it up.”

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“And naturally you didn’t volunteer to be one of the cross-

dressers?”

“God, no. I would have been terrified to do something like that—

afraid I would be too convincing. I was always going to the opposite

extreme.”

Another cotillion memory: they always had car pools, one for girls,

one for boys. We were living in the country so it was a good long ride.

One year he simply decided to switch to the girls’ group. At the time, he didn’t make much of it, just thought— correctly, as it turned out— that it would be more fun.

Thinking of this old- world mind- set as against the “do your own

gender thing” attitude of so many young people, I wonder if Chevey

(as I shall think of him until he becomes Ellen) doesn’t fall between

two camps: on one side, the older generation (to which she belongs

chronologically), so many of whom feel an impatience bordering on

aversion to “transgender,” along with an inability to even remotely un-

derstand it, and on the other side, the young people of liberal persua-

sion who think it’s no big deal— indeed, who wonder, why change sex

at all? Why not live according to how you feel at the moment? It’s the

“person,” not the sex, that matters.

I came up against this while teaching in the graduate writing pro-

gram at an eastern college famous as the last outpost of sixties- style hippiedom, and a virtual laboratory in gender experimentation. Here,

gender was being constructed and deconstructed daily, and in ways

that were more than theoretical. A friend was teaching in the same

department and realized one of her students was “in transition,” but

she didn’t know— and the student hadn’t disclosed— which sex s/he

was departing from and which joining. She decided to send an e- mail

asking if the student had a preferred pronoun, and was relieved when

the student wrote back “he.”

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My own students were similarly resistant to “labels” like male and

female, and my firsthand introduction to the New Democratics of

Gender came when a student read a piece that took place in a beauty

salon. There were two characters, the beautician and the client, but as to whether they were male or female there was no clue, and none

emerged as the story unfolded. Finally I stopped her and said we had

to know what sex they were. Since everyone considered me a fogey, she

glanced at her classmates for support, but this time they nodded in

agreement with me. Even these believers in “gender fluidity,” who

would never use the term “actress,” felt we needed the specifics.

According to the doctrine of inclusiveness and everyone- must- be-

invited- to- the- birthday- party, any label or category cuts off avenues of self- invention or hybrid selves. This was a subtheme of the postcolonial multicultural ideal, like the movement toward rejecting those forms requiring people to identify themselves as “White,” “Black,” “Hispanic,”

or even “Other,” in favor of a response like “All of the above,” or “Some combination thereof.” What is Obama but a mixed- race president who

decided early on to be identified not as “All of the above” but as black.

For me there’s a world of difference between the
idea
of multiple selves and the real- life drama by which a man gives up his penis for a vagina and a woman loses her brother of nearly sixty years.

Famished for information, and following my tendency to intellec-

tualize unmanageable problems by turning to books, I devour both

memoirs and scientific studies on the subject— my own way of dealing

with or repressing emotions— and find examples of other transsexu-

als, hoping for comfort and enlightenment. I desire knowledge, the

more the better. Perhaps understanding— quite a different thing—

will come later. Possibly I shall find a psychoanalytic explanation, a

category for my brother, in Robert Stoller’s
Sex and Gender:
The Transsexual Experiment
or Mildred Brown and Chloe Ann Rounsley’s
True

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Selves
. See where he fits in historically in Susan Stryker’s
Transgender
History
. And a view from inside in Jan Morris’s
Conundrum
, a memoir which I read and admired when it first came out, and Jennifer Finney

Boylan’s
She’s Not There
, which Chevey offered as a hostess- cum-initiation present on his announcement visit. He’d given instructional

copies to Beth and Eleanor as well. Transsexuals are lucky to have as

literary ambassadresses two such wise and witty self- appraisers. Jan

was James Morris, Oxford- Sandhurst graduate, officer in the Queen’s

Royal Lancers, distinguished journalist and travel writer. The vocation fits: the appetite for far- flung continents and cultures and the ability to slip into other people’s skins may have come naturally to this childhood wanderer and future gender- émigré with his sense of uprooted-

ness, of being “a creature of wisp or spindrift.” Morris was fortunate

in being born into a country, a class, a family where eccentricity is indulged, and to have come into an uncertain manhood at Oxford, a

place that, as she sees it, is hospitable to “misfits,” since there was no normative “fit” from which to deviate.

As an adult prior to the transition, s/he may have encountered ter-

rors that go with living in a gender no- man’s- land, surely more than

are present in her book, which resolutely avoids anger and self- pity,

but no one, it strikes me, appears to have been more at ease straddling the sexes. The officer (confident, authoritative) and the gentlewoman

(flexible, self- deprecating) adapts, even thrives, in ambiguous situa-

tions. At the security check at Kennedy Airport, Morris, now in

midtransition, simply awaits a signal— a “madam” or a “sir”— to guide

her into the appropriate frisking queue. As a world traveler who sees

beyond Western- style binaries, she herself might be one of those gods

or shamans of myth she cites, a fusion figure with supernatural powers

who represents and celebrates the complementarity of the sexes.

Fate has been similarly kind to Jennifer Finney Boylan. James

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Boylan, professor of writing at Colby, wrote picaresque comic novels

in a John Irving vein (though with less castration anxiety!), was mar-

ried with two children, and watched sports on television with his best

friend, the novelist Richard Russo. As Jenny, she continues to teach,

but has exchanged the novelist’s polyphonic voice for that of the mem-

oirist and essayist, often appearing on
Oprah
and writing smart op- ed pieces for the
New York Times
, many on transgender matters.

It’s easy to see why Chevey loves Boylan’s account of his (her?)

transition: it is not only funny but triumphalist, as opposed to the more troubled life of Renée Richards, not just as a tennis player but as the parent of a deeply unhappy son. Like Morris, Boylan manages to keep

her family— wife and children— together. Both describe early stirrings

in similar terms. Boylan’s first sense of living the wrong life came when as a little boy he was watching his mother iron his father’s shirts. Some-day, his mother tells him, he will wear shirts like this, and James feels an instantaneous recoil. Like Chevey, neither of these authors, as children or teenagers, could describe a “condition.” They simply felt an