My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (18 page)

subtle, a matter of maybe a millimeter or two. I don’t even notice it but he does. It’s why he’s the best.

“With the nose he changes the angle of the ski slope part, the tip

and the width, to give me a smaller, more feminine nose. I think he

even made my nostrils smaller.

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“Next, in my way of thinking, which may not be the order in which

he did it, he shrinks the distance from the top of the upper lip to the nose, which is less in a woman than a man, just like the forehead.

That’s why if a woman relaxes her mouth so that it’s slightly open,

you’ll see the upper teeth. If a man does the same thing, you either see no teeth or lower teeth. In photographs of women you see the upper

teeth but not in those of men.

“Proceeding down the face, there’s the jaw. On the male, the chin

sticks out a little further than in the female. So he goes in and takes off some of the bone. He can’t just sand it down, he has to break it and

wire it back together. He uses titanium on some parts of the face,

stainless steel on others. He assured me I’d have no trouble getting

through airport security. The male jaw is much heavier than the fe-

male’s. He took bone off the back and sides of the jaw. Then the tra-

cheal shave, which removes the Adam’s apple.”

I ask why there were no scars.

“Because he’s such an expert. He used to sculpt as a hobby, in

wood. Eleanor said she could see that in the final result— as if he were carving in wood or ivory. He pioneered by studying all these skulls;

there were some two thousand, and he spent days on them.

“It was just so important for me to get it all as perfect as possible. I feel bad for those transsexuals, so many of them, who can’t afford it,

because the first thing you look at is the face. I was fortunate to have enough savings to do it.”

The next round, where she’ll be accompanied by Beth and her

husband Randy, will correct problems created by the first surgery. So

when the skin heals, the second phase of the surgery— only six hours

this time— will complete the process. Eleanor’s daughter Barbara will

come down from northern California to see her. She’s requested a

photograph as preparation— an excellent idea, I think. Ellen, wanting

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to control the drama of her coming out and get independent reactions

from her near and dear, resists such a move, feeling it won’t give the

whole picture. But that’s just the point. A partial revelation, a glimpse.

In the privacy of our own reactions. We convince her that it will help

us enormously, a kind of interim exposure that will help us get used to it/her.

Ellen’s may be an extreme version, and may, as she says, have nothing

to do with aesthetic enhancement, but it’s still the next stage in the art and technology of cosmetic surgery. Hers may not fit the category of

altruistic or therapeutic, like the war wounds, burns, and birth defects for which it was originally invented. But it’s also not as frivolous as the whole spectrum of knife- wielding improvements that have gone from

being the slightly shameful vice of Park Avenue matrons and movie

stars to a massive billion- dollar industry catering to what Alex Kuc-

zynski calls “beauty junkies.

Time was when men and women would pass “naturally” into the

age of androgyny, looking more and more like each other as facial

muscles drooped, eyes dimmed, gray hair thinned, whiskers sprouted,

voices met in the middle, alto- contralto, trousers became the default

wardrobe. Now such signs of aging are to be found in a minority, a

curious little tribe of stubborn, untransfigured “elderly,” who with

their canes and walkers toddle among us like harbingers of a mortal-

ity we refuse to believe in. Our enchantment with enhancements—

from butt reduction to Botox— has a good excuse. Now we live longer

and feel healthier; the image we see in the mirror doesn’t match our

sense of ourselves. And if the here- and- now is all we have— without

the consolations of religion, and with no spiritual payoff in leaving the flesh and its mortifications “as God made them”— then who among us

can stand alone or stare down the looks- and- youth obsession that

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dominates our lives and turns every face and body into a work in

progress?

Because of Eleanor’s strict religious beliefs, Ellen’s transformation

has been especially troubling.

“Eleanor said one time that God does not make mistakes,” Ellen

tells me, “implying that it was a sinful thing to transition from a man to a woman. You frequently hear, ‘God hates the sin but loves the sin-ner.’ But her comment had to do with not making mistakes and I

thought about that a lot, and my opinion then, as now, was suppose

you use the analogy of birth defect. Say a boy is born with some kind

of spinal injury or malformation that prevents him from walking. He

grows up in a wheelchair, and when he’s a teenager, or maybe later,

medical science has devised a surgery that would correct the problem.

Well, first of all, you could say ‘If God doesn’t make mistakes, why was this boy born unable to walk?’ The usual answer is, ‘Well, it’s God’s

purpose.’ Maybe God was trying to prepare for some higher purpose?

Still, if the possibly of a corrective operation had arisen, you wouldn’t think there was something spiritually wrong with him having that operation. So I think, why doesn’t that same reasoning apply to me? Why

can’t I change something that I feel was like a birth defect, something wrong?”

“Maybe,” I suggest, “because your ‘defect’ seems so subjective,

people don’t yet understand it.” Even a visible birth defect like her-

maphroditism, having male and female sex organs, presents a more

universally compelling case for surgery.

“But in any event,” Ellen continues, “it’s not really rational to say

that God doesn’t make mistakes because we don’t know. Maybe there

is a purpose in all of this. So that is my feeling about people who think that it is some sort of sin. Certainly my life has been pretty sedate; I’m not wild and reckless.”

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Eleanor is a woman whose everyday life revolves around the teach-

ings of the Bible, and who lives her religion. She always said grace before meals, not the formulaic one, but one adapted to each of us and

our present situations— e.g., asking God to protect us in our travels,

support some upcoming trial, thanking Him for bringing us together.

As one who practices foxhole religion— officially a nonbeliever who

nevertheless prays to Providence or the Great All- Seeing in emergen-

cies— I was somewhat put off by these personalized expressions of

thanksgiving but drew comfort from the generosity of the impulse. I

call her, as I need to hear in her own words how this has affected her

reaction.

“Everybody has their faith. I feel very strongly that God creates us

the way He wants us to be. John was treading on sacred ground, tak-

ing over the creative power that only God should have. I couldn’t

shake my fist in the face of God like he was doing. God had made him

a man and given him the strength to be one for sixty- five years. I was afraid in a religious way. And I don’t think I’m a religious nut; I’m

pretty mainstream, but with strongly held beliefs.”

Some of this religious feeling about what is “natural” and God-

given, whether explicit or residual, informs the ambivalence toward

surgical “enhancement” that runs through out culture, even as we

stand in line to buy Beauty and Youth at the hands of willing doctors.

Reviewing a book on the cosmetic surgery industry, Sherwin Nuland

calls our current obsession “the culture of inauthenticity.” But the

word authenticity has become a slippery concept indeed in a culture

where image usurps reality at every turn, and “reality” shows are as

phony as three- dollar bills. The argument is not artifice vs. nature, but which kinds of authenticity seem acceptable, then “natural”— which

reality is “real”— at any given time. Once brandished by flower chil-

dren and war resisters as a badge of integrity, a challenge to the hypoc-

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risy of their warmongering elders, “authenticity” has become its

opposite, a code- word- as- sales- pitch used by politicians to burnish their flips and flops; a claim made by participants on Facebook and

other media Web sites even as they Photoshop their images and biog-

raphies.

A Web site called Cloud Girlfriend encourages creating a fantasy

profile as the beginning of a beautiful relationship. For anyone born

after 1960, many of the distinctions between “true” and “false” (e.g.,

computer- generated imagery versus film; photographed reality versus

photographed “re- creations”) are meaningless.

Computerized voices constitute a rather large fraction of daily

communication, robots perform increasingly sophisticated tasks: our

machines are extensions of ourselves, endowed with human qualities.

The line between fact and fiction is constantly debated, constantly

crossed, as in the new genre known as “autofiction” (or is this just a

more accepting term for a perennial literary bastard?). Cindy Sher-

man, in her multiple guises and disguises, never invites us to wonder

about the “real” Cindy Sherman, but on the contrary glories in the

profusion and confusion of identities she’s able to summon up. Bob

Dylan’s astonishing metamorphosis from Midwestern Jewish boy to

Zeitgeisty troubadour is captured in the film
I’m Not There
by having six different actors play his distinct personae. Doppelgangers are the

stock- in- trade of writers who are always creating alter egos; how can it not be when they are funneling parts of themselves from the unconscious into the DNA of their protagonists?

People die and a whole other identity comes to the fore, as was the

case when Alan Feuer, a
New York Times
reporter, paid homage to a man bearing his name, an aristocrat- impostor who concealed his Jewish immigrant background. He’d gone to England, then become the

epitome of the English gentleman, a fixture at New York’s old world

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society balls. One of the dead man’s friends astutely remarks, “I don’t like the phrase ‘reinvent yourself.’ I think what really happened is that when Alan got to England, whatever he found there allowed him to

discover who he already was.”

“Emerge” is the current preferred description. Old personae, exit

stage right: enter new personae with different names and faces. “Is

there an end to perpetual becoming?” Richard Ford’s Frank Bas-

combe asks.

But what is transsexualism? Is it an invention or a discovery? In

fact, it’s both. Feuer’s new persona may have been what he considered

his authentic self, but it also required enormous invention, fabrication.

Most changes don’t occur so dramatically or so visibly. Like the changes in a marriage, or from one love object to another. We can no more truly capture that moment of change or its preceding experience of pain or

ecstasy or boredom than Proust’s Swann, once out of love, could recall

the sensation of passionate love for Odette or relive its intensity.

It’s why, Proust suggested, novels (and, I would add, movies) pro-

vide such pleasure: they accelerate change, give characters a move-

ment, an “arc,” endow lives with the climaxes, turning points, and the

illusion of meaning we so desperately want. The transsexual, however,

contradicts the natural rhythm of change; he’s a movie, a music video,

an overnight transformation.

A woman writes an op- ed piece about how changing her name

turned her, or allowed her to turn herself, into another person. In her book
Nom de Plume
, Carmela Ciuraru cites and analyzes the large number of writers who have pseudonyms. She contrasts the courage of

great literary bifurcated beings like George Eliot and Isak Dinesen

with the less noble and consequential deceptions of bloggers and their

ilk. The latter present alternate selves as if dressing in a Hallowe’en costume when the occasion arises, whereas the writers are more like

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transvestites (I’d substitute “transsexuals” here) whose “self-

presentation is bound up inextricably, profoundly and even painfully

with . . . identity. It’s the difference between striking a pose and learning to walk.”

Ellen has the good fortune to be learning to walk at a time of

greater cultural leniency in such matters, but the misfortune to

“emerge” at a time when image rules, when youth and beauty are a