My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (20 page)

sensitive— are more painful than others. Invading the skin under the

nose and around the lips is so excruciating that when she comes to

another body part, the lesser pain seems almost soothing.

But Ellen tells me with delight that Patty says she’s the most nor-

mal one of everyone she’s treated.

“ ‘You were born to be a chick,’ she told me.”

For comportment she has found Denae, a widely recognized ex-

pert, an ex- model who teaches her clients how to walk, sit, go through doorways. She works on “GGs” (Genetic Girls) as well as “Ts” (we’re

not allowed to say “natural” girls, just as adoptees are no longer distinguished from “natural” offspring). And she works on men as well as

women, hetero and homosexual.

“There are,” Ellen tells me, “say, twenty ‘cues’ for femininity: the face is first and foremost, by far the most important; then height, shoulders, hands, dress, voice, way of entering a room, and so forth. You can get

nineteen right, but if one is off, it can ruin the whole effect. If the polish is too bright, the makeup attention getting, not to mention the inescap-able factors of height and voice, then you’re
read
.

“The one thing they tell you is not to overdo it, yet it’s the one

thing most transsexuals do. It’s hard because of the way women dress

nowadays. In the seventies, it was men, with their bell- bottoms, side-

burns, Afros, who looked a little ridiculous, while women looked

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good. Now it’s the opposite, the only women who wear skirts to the

grocery store are the ones who’ve come from a PTA meeting or the

boardroom. I can’t do grunge,” says Ellen. “I couldn’t as a man, and

can’t as a woman.

“This terror of going among strangers— a woman, I think, would

have a harder time understanding this, or feeling this, than a man.

They might understand it on a mental level. They can put on men’s

clothes. They can go back and forth even. But for a man, the ones I

have talked to told me they could never do it. They would absolutely

jump off a bridge before they’d do that type of thing. About the only

thing worse I can imagine would be to be buried alive. Every once in a

while you read about someone who is kidnapped and put in a coffin in

the ground with a breathing tube. Next to that . . .”

But what an image!

Yet, some of the fear comes from the sight, and ridicule, of those

transsexuals who haven’t had the advantage— either because they

were born too soon, or haven’t pursued instruction with the zeal of

Ellen— of absorbing the twenty cues of dress and behavior. Too often,

the desire to be “too” feminine outstrips taste and sense. I think of the sad but also hopelessly funny anecdote in Esther Williams’s memoir of

her brief love affair with Jeff Chandler. He was a very lusty and com-

patible lover whom she was about to marry when she went up to the

bedroom one night and found him dressed in women’s clothes. After

finding a closet full of high- end frocks from Rodeo Drive, she threw

him out, hurling the words: “You’re much too big to wear polka dots.”

Ah, dress. We can’t get away from it.

“Same person. No difference at all. Just a different sex,” observes

Tilda Swinton’s Lady Orlando in the movie.

And Virginia Woolf in the book: “Different though the sexes are,

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they intermix. In every human being a vacillation from one sex to the

other takes place, and often it is only the clothes that keep the male or female likeness, while underneath the sex is the very opposite of what

it is above.”

Woolf would probably agree with Alison Lurie, who pointed out

in
The Language of Clothes
that we provide a reading of ourselves through the way we dress that is likely to be truer and more revealing

than our speech. And the messages are often contradictory, not be-

cause they “intermix” male and female but because of another funda-

mental struggle, that between modesty and the desire for attention.

Orlando’s voyage is, among other things, a disguised valentine to

lesbianism, or perhaps more delicately, to Sapphic love and androgy-

nous freedom. Her ambisexuality also expresses the hunger of a

strenuous (“masculine”) mind in a female body to find a place in the

world, but as a female who wouldn’t have to suffer the insults and

condescensions of men. But perhaps above all, Orlando’s fluidity as a

character is based at least as importantly on her ability to move

through history, and to change location and occupation as easily as

sex. Her endless mutability speaks to a fantasy of living without lim-

its, even without death. Does the transsexual secretly annoy us by her

hubris? By, in refusing human constraints, daring to be
both
?

Ellen has in common with other transsexuals of her type that she

is not out to challenge the boundaries, the “categories.” The basic as-

sumption by postmodern (or “postcolonial”) intellectuals is that hav-

ing made a fetish of sexual difference, having fallen prey to what

Marjorie Garber calls “the pitfalls of gender assignment,” we require

these figures of dubiety to perform a service by confusing and blurring gender. In this value system, the transgressive is both aesthetically and morally superior to that which is (or claims to be) stable, which is always seen as illusory or false.

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My Sister

Jan Morris is praised for provocatively asserting, “What if I remain

an equivocal figure?” But Morris didn’t exactly remain equivocal.

What Morris is not is “earnest,” the unpardonable sin. Generally the

transsexual is all too sincere; there is too much fear and anxiety to

make room for irony.

Perhaps it is this desperation that unsettles. Zadie Smith, in an un-

usually harsh review of
Transamerica
, takes the academically fashionable view. Why, she asks, if transsexuality is (as one character in the film attests) a “ ‘radically evolved state of being,’ ” does Bree wants to take her doubleness and “reduce it to a singularity?” Wittily and almost incidentally, she goes on to what may be the real heart of the

matter: dress. She laments Bree’s “icky wardrobe of light pink sepa-

rates and chiffon neckerchiefs, a Harry Belafonte basso and the prickly vulnerability of the permanently self- conscious.” And in a last stand

for multiculture and multiple identity, she righteously observes that

Bree’s journey “was never intended to genuinely challenge ideas of fe-

male beauty or femininity itself or gender dysmorphia or the surgery.”

And just what form would that challenge take? A protest at
Vogue

magazine, a mass burning of cosmetics? After all, in the real world we

have to plunk down as one or the other, register in school as M or F,

and on all legal documents thereafter. Moreover, it would seem the

transsexual really does raise a great many questions, not so much

about gender as about taste and snobbery and class that take cover

behind these ideological catchwords.

August 15, the envelope with photos arrives. I’m in the Long Is-

land town of Quogue, at Round Dunes, a co- op where we have a little

studio apartment on the beach. Mother had bought it in the midseven-

ties and eventually given it to Andrew and me. It was my summer

sanctuary, I’d live and work here and Andrew would come out week-

ends. It was midweek and, alas, I had no Andrew here to screen the

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pictures. I’ve been told by Eleanor that the visit with Barbara went

well, and she thinks Ellen looks like me! After doing this and that er-

rand, postponing the unveiling, I finally open the envelope. First, I

feel huge relief. Then pleasure. She looks so good, and it’s not just the face and hair (okay, a little too blond) but the expression, the smile

(not at all self- conscious), and the sheer delight it conveys. And that sweetness, always in him, seems to come quite naturally to the surface, to inhabit her face. A kind of unfurling. She looks—
together
, at har-mony with herself. Nevertheless, as happy (and therefore reassuring)

as she looks, I’m still nervous at the prospect of her coming up in

March for the first time. Will I tell the doorman? No. I’ll have to tell Esmey, our housekeeper who’s been with us ever since we moved into

our apartment in 1975. Originally from Trinidad, she’s married (with-

out children) and living in Brooklyn. She and Andrew and I are very

close, have gone through one another’s illnesses and losses. Friday al-

ways begins with the kind of ritual Andrew so loves. Esmey arrives,

annoyed at her husband, Andrew greets her with some funny story or

remark, and she laughs so hard that she’s soon bent over, and then

without even knowing what Andrew said, I begin laughing, too. She

knows my brother and his wife, knew my mother, and will be knocked

back on her heels. She’s a smart, open woman, but— I sense— fairly

conservative on “alternate lifestyle” issues.

Then Ellen moves the date up, says she’s now planning to come in

early January. Andrew asks, “Do I hug her?” Did you before? “No.”

Then no, I guess.

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c h a p t e r t e n

Ellen Becomes a Mountain Woman

I am woman, hear me roar.

— Helen Reddy

T
here’s nothing like a transsexual to bring out one’s latent fashion snobbery, not to mention the equally ignoble if all too human worry

“What will people think!” We may get past the either/ors of gender,

even the blacks and whites of race, but never the ins and outs of fash-

ion. The next couple of years will be a period of testing for Ellen and for me, and I think it’s safe to say that she will pass more easily than I.

Ellen is supposed to come up in January, but her visit is delayed: I

have emergency surgery for a bowel obstruction. These episodes—

pain, hospitalization, abdominal surgery— have been the plague of my

adult life. Ellen calls. She’s concerned. Had the prospect of her arrival had anything to do with it? No, no, I reassure her. So it’s to be February.

D- Day. Ellen comes! It is February of 2007, her first time in New

York and a year and a half after the Announcement visit. Ever consid-

erate, and not wanting to put undue stress on us, she’s flown all the

way up just for the day. The doorbell rings; Dmitrij, the steadfast doorman, announces my “sister.” (I don’t detect confusion or mirth in his

voice.) And lo and behold, there she is, standing in the doorway with a big grin on her face. I still see my brother behind this . . . this . . .

woman’s face. We hug. She and Andrew shake hands. She looks radi-

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My Sister

ant. She looks very blond. I scrutinize her colors, hair, dress, yet how reliable is my vision? It’s like a cubist painting or Duchamp’s
Nude
Descending a Staircase
, a person in successive sections. I’m trying to see her as others will, but am inevitably colored by my own rainbow of

emotions: hope, ambivalence, love, anxiety. The ambivalence revolves

around her being both familiar and unfamiliar: though I wish ardently

for her success as a woman, for my sake as well as hers, the more of a

woman she is— or so it feels— the less of my brother there will be.

She has on some kind of white down jacket, bright blue turtleneck,

and embroidered coat; her makeup is very subtle except for the bright

pink lipstick. Very un– New York. But not Southern as I know it, ei-

ther. (This shade, she’ll tell me later, was chosen with a consultant.) Teeth very white, wig very blond and quite a bit of hair. She is pretty, I think, not sure. Most of all she looks happy. My gaze stops before I get to the hands and feet; can’t cope with it all yet. So I have no idea at all if she “passes,” and if so, to what extent. All I can see is my brother not quite behind but coexisting with the mask. As it happens, Megan, our

wonderful physical therapist, is here for her appointment with my hus-

band, an inveterate couch potato before they invented the term. Even

before the debilities caused by the illness of 1984, he spent more time prone than upright, a thinker and talker who lived in his head.

Megan, this dark- haired Irish beauty, provokes, prods, and charms

Andrew into what are for him remarkable feats of effort and exertion.

Megan and Ellen shake hands and chat. I watch nervously. She

gives her a thumbs- up. When she comes the following week, before I

can ask her for her impression, she volunteers: “I didn’t see a man

when I saw her. She’s very pretty, high cheekbones like you. And those

blue eyes.” But what about the hair? I ask. Megan pauses and admits