My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (9 page)

he gives me instructions for rescuing the document, which of course

I’ll forget and have to call him again the next time it happens.

He wasn’t always so indulgent, and one of the very few times of

real acrimony between us was over money. I had moved to New York

and gotten a job and Mother was helping me financially. He was out-

raged, and wrote me a letter so blistering that it practically burned the skin off my hands. In his eyes, I was nothing more than a pampered

princess who didn’t have to prove myself by making my own way fi-

nancially.

Back in 1978 he had just started his own company and called it

The Argonaut Company, based on the famous myth of Jason and the

Golden Fleece. I thought it might have something to do with Jason

being a nontraditional sort of guy, less the masculine warrior- hero

than a manager, more democratic, more uncertain with his crew of

proven heroes. But Chevey says it was simply the idea of a quest, the

search for the Golden Fleece, which could be retirement wealth, life-

long striving.

Our Jason hung out his shingle, and in answer to the ad, there on

his doorstep, braving a busy intersection in Richmond’s West End, ar-

rived the heaven- sent helpmeet Eleanor. There may have been other

candidates, but he hired her immediately. She began on the first work-

ing day of January 1983. A former high- school English teacher and a

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divorcee (and, as it happened, several years younger than her new

boss), she had the typing, shorthand, and fire- building skills required, plus the unspoken credentials of attractiveness, intelligence, and a

laid- back, no- nonsense attitude. There were a few more pluses (or mi-

nuses) that weren’t in the job specs even in Chevey’s head: Eleanor had two small children, was a deeply religious Christian conservative (Baptist), and, to counterbalance any alarms this might raise, a sense of

humor that was on the wild side. His occasionally dark humor coin-

cided with hers; her quickness and common sense gave him every-

thing he needed in a secretary . . . and a great deal more.

They worked side by side, a mom- and- pop operation soon literal-

ized and sanctified by marriage in 1985. Her children— Barbara, an

eleven- year- old girl, and her five- year- old brother, Adam— soon warmed to him completely and permanently, as did her mother, Rose.

Mary, my own mother, was predictably less enthusiastic. A Baptist!

And coming after I had married a Greek. But she came to love her, as

how could she not have? They had bought a rather plain ranch house

in a woodsy neighborhood near the University of Richmond, and ren-

ovated it into something beautiful. The architect they hired walked in

and immediately saw the possibility of a house in the Frank Lloyd

Wright style: they covered the façade with stone, landscaped the slop-

ing front lawn, and added a high- arched sunroom with skylight and a

reflecting pool in back. They continued to work together, travelled as

often as they could, mostly to places within the United States and Can-

ada. Unlike me, who seemed to have been born facing Europe, Chevey

preferred Sausalito, historical places in Virginia, or places of great

natural beauty, like the Pacific Northwest.

They saw each other through family crises, of which they had more

than their share. On our side, Chevey had a son by Beth who never

quite found his place in life and may have had Asperger’s syndrome.

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Pete was pretty much a loner, and when he came of age he took to

travelling and drinking. He was a big, blond boy, the sweetest and

gentlest of creatures, though when his eyes narrowed, as they did in-

voluntarily, his expression could become quite menacing. When he

came to visit us in New York, he walked around with his pants un-

belted and hanging low on the hip in homeboy style, and immediately

found his way to some bars. Feeling responsible for my young nephew,

I was beside myself, but Andrew reassured me. “You should be more

concerned about the other barflies,” he said. “Pete looks like he’s come to the city to kick some butt.” One night, hoping to induce him to stay put, I ordered pizza from our favorite East Side joint— thin- crust, with haute toppings like wild mushrooms, eggplant, smoked mozzarella,

goat cheese, pancetta, etc. Pete took one look at it, hurried to the

phone, and called Domino’s, where he had a charge account.

He could be quite funny in his own way, a way that, not unlike his

father’s, had its own weird logic. Plus, his addictions didn’t fall far from the tree of our own family, especially our mother, who was also a

smoker, drinker, traveller. The trouble for Pete was he couldn’t do one without the other, and by now most of the airlines had banned smoking. So he simply went to those places served by Aeroflot, the Russian

airline, which still allowed smoking.

The tragedy came a few years later. Pete had gotten his own small

place in Florida. He was quite proud of it, and was looking forward to

a visit from his grandmother, Beth’s mother, who was driving down

especially to see him. In preparation for her arrival, Pete became quite agitated, worried that he and his place might not be presentable. Having no social skills, no sense of ease to fall back on, he had been taking tranquilizers. The night of her arrival, he drank a good amount, and

that, combined with tranquilizers, caused an accidental overdose. He

died in his sleep. He was twenty- four.

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Chevey, and Eleanor, too, had lived in terror that Pete would have

a car accident, killing himself, perhaps killing someone else. At least that hadn’t happened. It was about the only ray of redemptive light in

his death and sadly unfulfilled life— or so we think. But who knows if

Pete didn’t get as much satisfaction from his offbeat pleasures, unable as he was to explain himself, as those of us who can communicate our

desires and frustrations in a common language.

And during all this, there was yet another reason that Chevey and

Eleanor waited in terror for the phone to ring. She had a large family

with various problems, and in a crisis she was always the one they

turned to. And there were the mercifully normal but very difficult ag-

ing and dying of our mothers, Eleanor being as sweet and attentive to

mine as Chevey would be to hers.

Now, after twenty years of deeply intertwined lives, she is suddenly

forced to abandon not only her vision of the future, of growing old

with John, but her version of the past. Of what she thought was love in every sense of the word. The marriage has to be revisited and reassessed; the past was not what she thought it was. Were the moments of

intimacy completely hollow, a charade on his part? What had he been

thinking of? Her sense of herself, of her own desirability, was shaken

to the roots. And now, if it got out, it wasn’t the humiliation she worried about, but her privacy. She thought of her family. Her two grown

children— Barbara, now a dot- com executive in California, and Adam,

a social worker in Richmond— were devoted to their stepfather. Her

mother she simply couldn’t tell. And there was her church group. They

would ask why she and John had broken up and what could she tell

them?

And, and, and . . . so many fresh horrors to be dealt with. We wor-

ried about his future life, the dangers, the isolation. What made it all worse was how good he’d been as a husband, how kind to her family,

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so willing to share the burden. The person who’d shared her problems

was now the problem. Maybe— she prayed, I prayed— he would

change his mind.

Why couldn’t he just retreat to a back room and dress himself up

in women’s clothes? Because a “pretend” woman is not what he’s after.

Though what causes it remains a mystery (and what is “it,” anyway?),

one step in discrediting the idea that one can manipulate gender was

the John Money scandal. In 1967, when beliefs in environmental influ-

ences were ascendant, Dr. Money was a suavely successful sex re-

searcher connected with the pioneering efforts at Johns Hopkins

Hospital in Baltimore. When the parents of a male infant who’d suf-

fered a botched circumcision came to him for advice, he persuaded

them to raise the boy as a girl under his supervision, believing that

hormones would effect a successful switch to female. The experiment

was a disaster, the childhood a misery as “she” acquired both male

and female secondary characteristics. She later reverted to a male, but the experience haunted him through marriage and adulthood, and he

eventually committed suicide. Most scandalous of all was the cover- up

of the failure by Money and his fellow believers as they continued to

perform such surgeries for twenty- odd years.

I ask Chevey what he thinks. “Most of the doctors I’ve talked to

think that it is prenatal, without knowing quite how. Which brings up

an interesting point, because that really makes transsexualism a birth

defect. It certainly is a birth abnormality if you think of nontranssexualism as being the norm, which it certainly is statistically; then being a transsexual is really the result of a birth defect. Now I don’t think that other transsexuals would appreciate hearing that. I’m liable to be

stoned by the transsexuals if I said that. They would want to think it is something else.”

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“Like what?”

“I can’t really say, but my guess is they would say, ‘No, no, I was

supposed to be a girl all along, but came out a man.’ But then what is a birth defect? Isn’t that a birth defect? I don’t know. You are playing

with words here. The point is that it does seem to be something that

happens prior to birth.”

In fact, from the early either/or, nature/nurture debates, and with ad-

vances in neuroscience, has come the more sophisticated view that

transsexualism is caused by a multiplicity of pre- and postnatal influences, and that probably a disturbance occurs in the time gap between

the developing brain and influx of sex hormones. But it’s still speculation since no sex- atypical brain structures have been found, no specific marker for biological causes.

And even what we mean by biology is no longer clear. After all, the

womb is an environmental ecosystem of its own. And are PCBs—

those endocrine- disrupting chemicals found in plastic, pesticides, and food additives that can feminize the fetus— environment or biology?

Many scientists have linked these chemicals with gender identity and

reproductive problems. Another theory—

or an additional

possibility!— is that falling sperm count among human males pro-

duces transgenderism. The more we know about genes (the endless

variables and variations), it seems the less we know. We do have a finer appreciation of the endless and mutually reinforcing dance of muta-tion and adaptation, of “born that way” and “made that way,” but this

“knowledge” carries with it an admission of ignorance: specific diag-

noses are elusive, prescriptions for treatment even more so. That an

increasing number of teenagers are deciding to change sex early on

(especially the rise of girls- into- boys) has created a whole new set of problems and possibilities. The transition is often more successful,

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aesthetically and psychologically, if it occurs in youth or around pu-

berty, but any kind of intervention at that stage (from puberty blockers to surgery) can have disastrous consequences. The brain is still evolv-ing, the normal confusions of sex still in a state of irresolution. If a young person’s yearning to be the opposite sex turns out not to be a

deep- seated and unequivocal question of identity but just the melo-

drama of adolescent hormones and experimentation, or an escape

from something else, like depression or isolation, he or she will be

stuck irreversibly on the other side. This dilemma is especially true of children. When three- and four- year- olds demand to wear clothes of

the opposite sex, there has been a growing tendency to see this as bud-

ding transsexualism and treat them with hormones. Parents should be

wary since by various estimates, only a third will prove to be trans-

sexuals while another third will be gay, and another heterosexual. No

one can know at this stage how their adult identities will develop, and it’s too soon to make such a definitive decision about the future.

One scientist, Joan Roughgarden, believes that a large part of it

comes from the moment when the baby first opens his eyes and emu-