My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (11 page)

tween Eve and carnality. Judaism, by contrast, placed its faith, more

literally, in the human body, the here and now. The body was sacro-

sanct, death should be followed (almost immediately) by burial rather

than cremation. So it finds itself in a Talmudic bind where transgender is concerned.

Since it’s evident from the outset that male and female can’t con-

tain the “whole diverse panoply of genders and gender identities,”

Lori Lefkovitz suggests we reread a passage of Genesis—
zachar

u’nikevah
— not as “ ‘God created every human being as either male or female,’ but rather ‘God created human kind male and female and
every combination in between
.’ ”

The religions align in the belief that the way things are is the way

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they have to be. Until times change and religious authority wanes.

Once, the definition of marriage as the union between a man and a

woman was as fixed and impregnable as the Rock of Gibraltar; now

the marital vows are being extended, state by state, to partners of the same sex.

The perversities of religious law and superstition (are they not the

same thing?) are nowhere more evident than in the interpretation of

the Koran in present- day Iran. Under its current policy, homosexuals

are condemned, even executed, while the state not only accepts trans-

sexuals, but provides money for surgery. Documenting this remark-

able anomaly is the film
Be Like Others
, showing us individuals in the course of sex change (some to escape the dangers of homosexuality).

The Koran explicitly condemns homosexuality as an evil, whereas

there is nothing in it that forbids transsexualism, and the Ayatollah

Khomeini even issued a fatwa permitting sex changes. According to

one story, a male, having become a female, stormed the Ayatollah’s

compound, opened up her top, and declared herself a woman who

needed help. Khomeini said, “Woman, put on a chador. Cover your-

self. You’re disgraceful.” And the woman said it was the happiest mo-

ment in her life.

At a transsexual support conference in Teheran the speaker is an

Imam who reaffirms Khomeini’s dictum that transsexualism is not a

sin unless so stated in the Koran. People argue that it’s unnatural, says the theologian, that it changes God’s natural order, but, he continues, we take wheat and turn it into flour and turn that into bread.

And so does the definition of what’s “natural” change in the eye of

the beholder and of holy writ.

And what about hormones? Rather than a clear-

cut battle—

testosterone versus estrogen— the picture is considerably more mixed.

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It’s not that testosterone isn’t a marker for male aggression, risk taking, playing with guns and fire engines, even looking at women in a certain

way: it is.

A friend in Canada, a scientist herself, dropped in on a fellow sci-

entist, a patient in a Toronto hospital, who’d been given estrogen for

his disease. He was heterosexual, but noted that he felt like a different person on the hormone, began looking at women’s faces rather than

their breasts, listening to them rather than waiting to take over the

conversation.

Chaz Bono, Cher’s daughter- now- son, appears in a documentary

about his transition. One can’t help but suspect, and he partly con-

firms, that this pudgy child of anorexic celebrity parents— parents

who trotted her out on stage with them— simply wanted to get out of

that humiliating body. The new Chaz not only looks masculine as he

proudly exposes his surgically flattened chest, but has changed psy-

chologically: he is, he says, less tolerant of gossip (compare this to

the now gossip- loving Jan Morris) and is more interested in machin-

ery and male- type gadgets. He has also, by his own and his female

partner’s admission, lost some of “her” niceness and empathy in the

process.

And it’s not that estrogen doesn’t make girls into sympathetic, sup-

portive emotional figures who play with dolls and teacups: it does. But the overlap is perhaps even more significant. In fact, women do produce testosterone (men in their testicles, women in their ovaries and

adrenal glands), but far less than men. Women injected with testoster-

one develop male characteristics, like deeper voices, facial hair, and

even baldness. Tomboys have higher levels of testosterone, as do their

mothers. To make matters more interesting, research connects higher

testosterone to working women, and this characteristic is passed on to

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their daughters! I fully believe that something in my mother— her re-

pressed ambition, her analytic mind, maybe a high level of

testosterone— was passed on to me.

There is, at least for now, one area— sports— where fudging is im-

possible, and where we see biological determinacy at its starkest and

most unforgiving; but even that is changing under the pressure of

those who argue that the subjective sense of self should be the deter-

mining factor. I remember well the outrage caused by Renée Richards;

in clubs all over the country, queasiness and unease took the form of

dire predictions: male players who ranked below the top 20 or 30

would change sex in order to compete in the women’s game. Didn’t

happen. Jennifer Boylan has argued that how one identifies oneself

should be the determining factor. I wonder if Chevey agrees and ask

him about it during a phone conversation.

“No, I don’t. They have to make a determination, and genetic test-

ing isn’t it, but it has to be done, maybe by muscle mass, strength,

speed. If someone has a clear preponderance of masculine traits, it’s

like steroids. It gives an unfair advantage.”

Chevey was never an athlete, but it was because he had a bad eye. I

ask about testosterone, did he have feelings of aggression?

“I was never the sort of timid Clark Kent type but not some big

Bruto guy wanting to smash heads, either.”

In a later recorded interview, we get into the specifics of sex: a sub-

ject so fraught, yet it’s strange how natural these conversations have

come to seem. “What about a sex drive; did you have one, or not that

much?

“I think I did. I think I was a very good lover. I always made sure.”

“Did you want to date girls?”

“Yes, I loved them as friends as well as potential sexual partners. I

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think that’s true of men as well, although they may never get enough

credit in that area.

“It’s hard to know what is typical; nobody talked about it, or if they

did they lied. But in my early teenage years, I think I had— I know I

had— strong feelings of both male and female, boy and girl. I wasn’t

the stereotype transsexual who felt totally female. And this is turning out to be a major aspect of my life. I was attracted to both girls and

boys and naturally I didn’t understand any of this. I thought, Am I

gay? Of course even then— we use the term gay now— we didn’t use it

then. All those song lyrics— ‘Don we now our gay apparel’— you can’t

sing them, the word has been totally corrupted. It’s like so many

things: it’s hard to go back and remember how it was, we’ve learned so

much since then. I certainly didn’t know the term bisexual then. A lot

of people say there’s no such thing as bisexual, but I don’t agree.” I ask him if he masturbated.

“Yes, a lot— and eventually I could only ejaculate by picturing my-

self as a woman. When I loved and made love to a woman, I identified

with her, but I also wanted to give her pleasure. I tried so many times to change my mental image but I was just never able to.”

“Did you ever try aversion therapy?”

“Not officially, but for many years, every time I was going to make

love to Eleanor, I would say to myself over and over, ‘You will not

imagine yourself a woman, you will not imagine yourself as a woman.’

But then I couldn’t perform. The only way I could, and give her plea-

sure, was by picturing myself as a woman. And don’t forget that in a

long relationship, couples start fantasizing other lovers, movie stars, whatever.”

“But where’s the male in your scenario?”

“The person I’m touching is the male. If you’re a male having sex

with a female, and I think a female might say the same thing, the penis

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could belong to either one. You can’t really tell who it’s attached to.

You close your eyes, there’s no light in the room, and it’s very easy to get lost. Most people don’t think about that.”

Or, I think, maybe they know but repress it. Because somehow the

act of sex shatters boundaries we need to keep in place. By idealizing

sex as “making love,” we can retain the idea of our unique male and

female individuality. But we’re merged, more like e. e. cummings’s girlboys and boygirls.

Chevey thus confirms what the transsexual community went to

great lengths to deny: the theory advanced by Michael Bailey of
autogynephilia
(i.e., having an erotic obsession with the image of oneself as a woman).

The term, which made Bailey anathema to the transsexual com-

munity, was from psychologist Ray Blanchard’s study of a man who

hadn’t cross- dressed but had fantasized himself as a naked woman

having sex with a man. Bailey’s book, designed for the general public,

brought down the wrath of the transgender community in particularly

vicious terms.

I can understand the resistance to the concept, if not the venom of

the attack. The image smacks of Narcissus, even a betrayal of the sex-

ual partner, which makes it hard to accept. Also it’s a reminder of the dark side of sex, the aloneness at the moment of climax, and the fact

that there’s a certain amount of autogynephilia in all of us, as well as curiosity about what it’s like to be the opposite sex.

This is a fantasy that may be stronger in some than in others. One

of the most fascinating revelations in recent Hemingway studies (or

rather, insights that have emerged from a less protective view of mate-

rial already available) is a more precise understanding of the “dark

side” he often wrote about. Details accumulate in both the novels and

the life, like the recurring hair fetish. In
A Farewell to Arms,
Lt. Fred-

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eric Henry describes the erotic charge he receives watching Catherine

have her hair done (his voice becomes “a little thick from being ex-

cited”), and she wants them to cut their hair the same lengths, so they can be “just alike.”

Catherine:
“I want to be you.”

Henry:
“We’re the same one.”

Catherine:
“At night we are.”

Similarly, in the early days in Paris as described in
A Moveable

Feast
, Ernest and Hadley, at his urging, grew their hair long together; throughout his marriages and friendships he urged his women to dye,

cut, or otherwise change their hair, and supervised the process, even

dying his own hair red in a moment of stress. Both Ernest and Mary

Hemingway, his last wife, wrote about her wanting to become a boy,

and about the sex games they played in which she was the boy and he

the girl. What Hemingway considers a dangerous loss of identity is

reimagined in his posthumously published novel
The Garden of Eden
, when another Catherine cuts and cuts her hair and changes and

changes (“I’m a girl, but I’m a boy too and I can do anything and any-

thing and anything”), and when, in the dark of their lovemaking, the

writer protagonist becomes Catherine, and says, “Now you can’t tell

who is who, can you?”

For Hemingway such deviancy was a “corruption” that gradually

corrodes the self. And ends— at least for Catherine— in madness.

Gregory (Gigi), Hemingway’s third son (he wanted a daughter), was

considered the most talented of Hemingway’s children, the most like

his father, and also, in the words of Gigi’s son John Hemingway, the

“black sheep of the family.” In
Strange Tribe
, John describes his father’s mental instability, his manic- depression, and the cross- dressing

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that began when he was ten years old. Although Gigi married several

times, and even worked as a doctor, he was more often adrift and liv-

ing in ramshackle style. He was arrested several times for dressing as a woman in public. His father reported it was for “drug abuse,” and felt

that the scandal of Gigi’s first arrest in a Los Angeles movie theater