Molly Haskell - My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation

22145 My Brother My Sister 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 1 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 A lso by Molly H Askell From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the MoviesLove and Other Infectious Diseases: A MemoirHolding My Own in No Mans Land:Women and Men and Films and FeministsFrankly, My Dear: Gone with the Wind Revisited 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 2 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 molly h ask ell My Brother My Sister Story of a Transformation vik ing 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 3 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 [Copyright Page TK] 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 4 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 [dedication to come] 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 5 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 6 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 ContentsNote to Readers . ix . c H A p t e r o n e My Brother Drops a Bombshell . 1 . c H A p t e r t wo Flesh and Blood . c H A p t e r t H r e e My Brother Kisses His Elbow . 33 . c H A p t e r f o u r My Brother Advertises for a Secretary and Reels in a Wife . 47 . c H A p t e r f i v e Who Has It Better, Men or Women? . 59 . c H A p t e r s i x My Brother Writes a Story . 73 . c H A p t e r s e v e n A Tale of Two Wives . 87 . 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 7 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 Contents cH A pt er eigHt The Sculptor of Human Faces . 101 . cH A pt er nine He Learns to Walk and Talk Like a Dame . 119 . cH A pt er ten Ellen Becomes a Mountain Woman . 131 . cH A pt er elev en Ellen Changes Her Mind, and Changes It Again . 147 . cH A pt er tw elv e Andrew Falls and Ellen Comes Up and Shows Off Her Body . 161 . cH A pt er tHirt een The Year of the Transsexual . 175 . cH A pt er fourt een Ellen Is a Welfare Mudder . 187 . cH A pt er fif t een Looking Backward and Moving Forward . 199 . [Acknowledgments] . 213 . . viii . 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 8 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 Note to ReadersI t is not exactly a spoiler to say that this book got written, though for a while its fate was in doubt. 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 8 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 Note to ReadersI t is not exactly a spoiler to say that this book got written, though for a while its fate was in doubt.

The first thing my brother did was to swear me to silence, both oral and literary. Somewhere along the way, the ban was lifted and I began writing; further along came a cease and- desist telephone call, and writing was suspended. Eventually, though, he became she, and a deal was struck. She not only agreed to it, but participated with generosity and at length. Her words as pre sented in this book occurred in conversations between us, either in person or over the telephone, both before and after the transition. Once shed authorized the project, I began recording our conversa tions, most of which came after shed undergone the first surgery, fa cial feminization.

However, since many of these discussions occurred in nascent form from the time my sister then my brother first told me of her intentions, I have taken the liberty of presenting them in their fuller form from the beginning, to aid the reader in experiencing the story as the two of us experienced it. Although neither my brother/ sisters name nor any details or names from our family have been changed, the names of his/her first and second wives and a few people in his/her immediate family have been altered to protect their privacy. Nevertheless, their words, like my brother/sisters, are their own, and I have presented each persons story as faithfully as I could. . ix . 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 9 4/23/13 4:10 PM 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_FM.indd 10 4/23/13 4:10 PM 22145 c h a p t e r on e My Brother Drops a Bombshell I ts the sixth of October 2005, a crisp Indian summer day in Manhattan, and were sitting in the dining room of our Upper East Side apart ment.

Outside the window, against the cobalt blue sky, looms the Church of the Heavenly Rest, where Andrew and I were married, where my brother, all and handsome in his morning suit, walked me up the aisle and, in my fathers stead, gave me away. Now, almost forty years later, hes come alone for a single night, bringing with him a whiff of unease, even alarm. First it was his wifes last- minute cancella-tion, and now its the formality with which hes summoned us to the table... like one of those scenes from Law & Order, when the detectives have to tell the family a loved one is dead. Named John Cheves Haskell Jr., after our father, hes always been known in the family as Chevey (pronounced Chivvy as in chin). In addition to being the only immediate family we have (Andrew and I had no children, and Andrews brother died in a sky- diving accident when he was twenty- eight), Chevey is the one we turn to for help in so many ways all those areas in which we are inept.

From the humbly domestic (What temperature should the refrigerator be? Chevey trav els with a special thermometer) to the technological to the arcane ways of money and finance (hes a financial adviser by profession and a rationalist by avocation), my brother is a fixer of problems and a fount of common sense, generous with his time as if there were no end to it. In recent years, the only time I can remember being vexed with him was . 1 . 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 1 4/23/13 4:12 PM 22145 My Brother My Sister in this very dining room. Andrew and I were giving a party that re quired removing a leaf of the chrome and glass table. As Chevey and Eleanor were up visiting, he offered to help remove the panel, but the heavy glass, detached from its chrome frame, dropped and shattered.

If Andrew had perpetrated this domestic calamity, it would have been exasperating but unsurprising. At the hands of my hyper- competent brother, it was almost comically out of character. And now he is about to shatter normalcy in our dining room again, in a way that I would have said was out of character if I knew what character was and if character had anything to do with it. Im terrified its some fatal illness, possibly ALS (Lou Gehrigs dis ease), the degenerative neurological disorder from which our father died. Without our ever talking about it, that possibility has been a constant in our lives. Sensing this, he immediately disposes of it: hes not dying and he doesnt have an illness in the ordinary sense.

I have whats known as gender dysphoria, he says. For as long as I can remember, Ive felt I should have been born female. And now Im going to become one. Stunned silence. Disbelief. How can this be? Chevey, my brother! Andrews brother- in- law! Hes so utterly normal.

Theres no sudden memory, no flash, no Of course. He was (and is) a manly guy no trace of effeminacy or kid in a tutu who, if not captain of the football team or a hell- raising, beer- swilling male chauvinist, was always plenty virile, and there were two wives whod have so attested. When did he know? Since way back, early childhood, he tells me, I had confusing urges, feminine longings, but even in puberty I simply had no concept for what I was experiencing. You mean, as the expression has it, a female trapped in a male body? . 2 . 9780670025527_MyBrotherMyS_TX.indd 2 4/23/13 4:12 PM 22145 My Brother Drops a Bombshell Nothing as clear as that, but just confused feelings, a desire to dress and feel like a girl, not very strong at first.

A desire, it seems, for which neither he nor society had words. His marriages were good, even sexually, but part of every day was increas ingly spent in something like agony, imagining himself a woman. Im suddenly struck by two odd memories. In the later years of his second marriage, he became anorexic. Eleanor and I kept asking, even nagging, him about it, but he insisted he was doing it to keep his cho lesterol down, with his internists approval. I was trying to change my body shape, he now admits.

The other image seems even more telling. For as long as I can re member, he would pick at the skin at his fingertips, almost like an animal gnawing its own flesh, till his fingers became raw. I was trying to get out of my skin, he says. And now, in effect, he will. I think about Eleanor. She has to be devastated.