My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (16 page)

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My Brother
My Sister

following the natural hairline. Then there’s forehead contouring, also

done with anesthesia and incision.

These are but two of an assortment of Frankensteinian improve-

ments on the website’s menu. There’s also the brow lift, eyelid lift, et al. (Now I’m seeing Peter Boyle in the Mel Brooks film, his stitches

showing.) When this surgery heals, in about six months, there will be

a follow- up surgery to correct the asymmetry of the first: a complete

circle can’t be cut, as it would sever the nerves and arteries. Beth will accompany Chevey to California for this second and final step of facial reconstruction. The genital surgery will come six months or a year after this.

Chevey and Eleanor go out and I wait by the phone. And wait, with

Andrew at my side. Finally Eleanor calls. The operation lasted twelve

hours. She can barely talk. It went well enough, but he’s sore, ban-

daged, nauseated, and the biggest problem is with the nose, his devi-

ated septum. Eleanor slept in the room with him, and is wiped out.

“The doctors are calling him Ellen,” she tells me, “so now I have

to. The rest of you can wait until the official coming out in May.” I can hear her anguish. It’s almost as if she didn’t believe it would happen

right up to the moment of surgery.

“Worst of all was the moment, just before he went into surgery,

when we had to remove our wedding rings. We were both in tears.”

Though relieved the surgery went well, she can barely speak, so

great is her exhaustion and misery. There’s a special recovery annex

(“cocoon”) they share with other transsexuals. It’s run by a nurse con-

nected with the doctor, and they have a little basement apartment with

separate sleeping facilities, a kitchen, and windows opening onto a

garden. Various inmates— bandaged patients and their partners—

move around the home, like shadows in a Dantean sexual limbo.

“He looks better than you’d expect,” Eleanor says. “There’s some

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A Tale of Two Wives

pain and nausea, but that’s minor compared to the problems with the

nose. It’s so full of packing— to hold the shape— that he has to

breathe through his mouth. Sometimes he wakes up in the night with

phlegm in his throat and feels like he’s choking. It’s frightening. And of course eating is a chore.”

I feel so bad for her, or for both “hers.” “I wish you’d let me go

instead of you,” I say.

“No, I had to go. It’s important for me to see every detail, see how

scary and serious it is. Being in on it all, it’s a way of letting go.

“Also, I felt it was the least I could do. He’s been a wonderful hus-

band, so good to everyone in my family and that wasn’t always easy.

He’s given so much of himself, treating my children as if they were his own, taking them on trips. Out of decency and respect, I had to support him.”

Back in Richmond after Surgery I, Ellen stays with Eleanor for a week

and on May 11 leaves for Pine Mountain, and then the letter goes out.

There’s a basic letter, varied according to whether business or per-

sonal, relative or acquaintance. Chevey worked on it for days, consult-

ing with Beth and me, but it’s entirely his:

Dear

,

I have something important to tell you that you will find

difficult to believe, but I assure you that it is quite true. I wish

I could be with you to tell you this in person, but I have a

number of people that I need to inform at the same time, so

unfortunately a letter is the only way.

My entire life I have been struggling with what is now

referred to as a “gender identity disorder.” This means that I

have continually been tormented by intense feelings that I

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My Sister

should have been born female instead of male. I decided a

year ago that it was no longer possible to suppress this need.

After extensive therapy, I am now in the process of becoming

a woman and am at the stage where I am required by my

doctors to live full time in my new identity. Therefore, I am

now Ellen Hampton and am no longer Chevey Haskell.

I wouldn’t be doing this if the anguish weren’t lifelong,

overwhelming, and debilitating. While countless others have

taken this step, I realize this is a matter that few people know

much about. I hope you will try to be understanding.

Sincerely,

Ellen

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c h a p t e r e igh t

The Sculptor of Human Faces

It’s a lot of work for a woman to look good, but it’s a thousand

times more work for a man to look good as a woman.

— Ellen Hampton

N
othing happens! Silence. I’m waiting for the sky to fall and there’s not a single call. Or e- mail. A relief, but also decidedly odd. I’ve kept the secret to myself for seven whole months, but on the red- letter day, I’ve made a date (with Ellen’s permission) to see Jeanne, my oldest

friend from Richmond. We go back to childhood. Our lives were al-

ways diverging— she majored in math, I in English; in our first elec-

tion, she voted for Nixon, I for Kennedy; and as I tried to carve out a path in the arts, she went to work for IBM and then had four children.

But we have remained as close as sisters.

I hadn’t shed a tear, but now I wept. It was both a relief and an

ordeal, for it made it all more real and irreversible. Jeanne was pro-

foundly accepting, worrying only about Chevey’s health and happi-

ness, and my own. She represented all that was warm and

unconditionally loving in my background, but also she was here, in

New York, like me. Not representative of the world of my upbringing,

or the world at large, either.

At home, I wait for repercussions, cousins calling, angry, outraged,

or simply wanting details. Nothing! Again a deafening silence that is a relief but also unsettling. The one person who eventually calls is my

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My Sister

adored cousin Preston. A year and a half older than I, an entrepreneur

in Jacksonville with an expansive and generous personality, he’s

shocked, but completely sympathetic. No doubt the others simply

don’t know what to say. Chevey, or rather Ellen, gets letters from some of them as well as business acquaintances and is heartened.

I tell a few more people: Betty, a former New York roommate and

television reporter, is the only one of my New York friends who knew

him and, having done stories on the subject, is both knowledgeable

and sympathetic. Betty asks if she can call Ellen, and I readily agree.

She does and reports back to me that they had a wonderful conversa-

tion, that she sounds remarkably grounded and realistic. Take notes!

says Betty. And of course I do, though I am still pledged to silence as far as writing a book. If I’m ever released from the prohibition, I can imagine envious writer friends: What material! And it just dropped

into your lap!

Meanwhile, what else can I do but write in my journal, as I have

always done, recording everything from bowel movements and mi-

graines to thoughts on films, books, news items. Words flow, not as

from a “writer,” giving shape and form to grief, but simply from a per-

son trying to navigate the rising waters with a raft of words— trying to gain some form of control. Even fractured syntax and spontaneous

outpourings round out the present with a period, turn it into the past, and give one the illusion of moving forward. Yet I know from experience that the transformation of thoughts into form, of perceptions into patterns (not to mention gratification of the ego), comes only by writing for publication. My need is to explain Chevey not just to myself,

but to those out of earshot of my journal, and especially to my mother

and father, in some mystical hope of reconciling them and “making it

right.”

And what— for I can’t stop thinking about it— would our parents’

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reactions have been? The response of my father, a gentleman in both

senses of the word but a hard- core conservative, is simply impossible

to imagine. Would he have preferred that Chevey just disappear into a

new sex and a faraway location, as he’d planned to do at one time? I

think of some of the Lear- like scenes in Ovid when parents confront a

loved one transformed. In one of the cruelest, the father of Io finds his daughter turned into a cow. All she can do is moo, a sound that so

frightens her, she can’t bear the sound of her own voice. (One of the

harshest fates Ovid provides for his transfigured creatures is the loss of the human voice, and Chevey is losing his beautiful baritone to

something that wavers between a tenuous contralto and what he calls

a Tiny- Tim falsetto.) Perhaps our father would have reacted like Io’s, who cried out the bone- chilling words, “Lost, you were less a grief

than you are, found!”

Would Mother have felt similarly? It’s painful to think of her reac-

tion but impossible not to speculate. The sense of her grief and horror are as palpable as if she were alive. I imagine utter devastation, shock, revulsion, a mortification that goes beyond simple shame or embarrassment. Possibly even a stroke or heart attack, or deep depression. But

I’m simply imagining her as a woman of her time and place, reacting in

a generic way and on a single occasion. What part would love and the

passage of time have played? For if her taking the news with equanim-

ity is inconceivable, neither can I imagine our mother never wanting to see her adored child again. Mother love, mysteriously resilient, is capable of weathering an almost infinite number of shocks to the system.

Such maternal acceptance seems to have been granted to other trans-

sexuals, so why not ours? And if I concede such largeness of spirit to

Mother, should I deprive our father of a similar capacity to rise to the occasion? Mightn’t love burn through his own crusts of tradition and

resistance?

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My Sister

My own impulse to blow the lid off privacy is undoubtedly a reac-

tion to the straitjacket of a culture, a family, of silence and discretion.

Mine was not the South of Eudora Welty or William Faulkner, of

sittin’- on- the- porch and storytelling and confabulating, of secrets

passed around, but the South of retreat from display, stoical reserve,

secretiveness, and silence. Except when liquor loosened tongues and

gossip turned ugly.

Even as a child I was a nonstop talker and questioner, often driv-

ing my poor parents crazy. So naturally I fled this buttoned- up world

for New York City, magnet for blabbermouths, and eventually found

sanctuary at the
Village Voice
, the Wild West of cultural journalism.

There I wrote about plays, then movies, and— my own form of

“liberation”— was drawn to exploring sexual subtexts.

Meanwhile, Ellen is at Pine Mountain, in abject misery. It’s May,

then June, of 2006, and she’s still very sore, her nose hurts all the time, she has no sense of smell and no desire to eat. Moreover, it’s like she’s under house arrest. An inveterate walker, she barely steps outside her

apartment, is uncomfortable walking around the complex, and waits

until dark to take her garbage to the bin. Constantly terrified of exposure, when she goes into town for groceries, she first has to spend

hours on hair, makeup, and dress, and once in the store, only buys

items already wrapped and priced which she can then pay for at the

automatic checkout.

When we talk— often, as I’m trying to keep her spirits up— her

voice remains the same, which allows me to continue to think of her as

Chevey. Voice surgery as it’s now practiced is worse than useless and

those transsexuals who’ve undergone the procedure have cautioned

against it. The hormones don’t affect the voice, so the only real way to transform that most important signifier is speech therapy. It’s hard,

arduous, and Ellen is not yet up to it. Another setback: They told her,

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as she was going in for the tracheal shave, that one side effect could be a permanent lowering of the voice. Alas, this seems to have happened;

as reflected in the computer diagram she uses for speech therapy, she

can no longer reach her highest register— the “Tiny Tim” falsetto she

used in practice before the surgery.

On a recent trip to town, she uses the ladies’ room for the first time

(one obstacle met) and, also for the first time, goes to the bank. Every visit she’s on tenterhooks, trying to act natural. They know, she’s sure.

But they act normal. The desire to “pass,” to be accepted as female, is a longing weighted with existential dread.