Haskell Ellen - My brother my sister: story of a transformation

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 apartment. Outside the window, against the cobalt blue sky, looms the Church of the Heavenly Rest, where Andrew and I were married, where my brother, tall 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 cancellation, 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 waysall those areas in which we are inept. From the humbly domestic (What temperature should the refrigerator be? Chevey travels 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 in this very dining room. Andrew and I were giving a party that required 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 disease), 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 most of my life, 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 guyno trace of effeminacy or kid in a tutuwho, 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?

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 increasingly 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 cholesterol 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 remember, he would pick at the skin at his fingertips, almost like an animal gnawing its own flesh, till his fingers became raw.