My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (14 page)

was some radiant inner light that expressed itself through Mary.

It reminds me of a beautiful passage in
Conundrum
, in which Jan

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My Brother Writes a Story

Morris describes how, as James, he regularly attended (and sang in the

choir of) the cathedral- like Christ Church at Oxford. In its vaulting

splendor and celebration of the Virgin Mary, the young James felt his

own growing sense of the superiority of the female sex.

I ask Chevey how he was feeling during these years.

“I remember once I hit puberty doing a little bit of dressing. It

could really be terrifying to go into a store and buy women’s clothing, so I basically didn’t— except maybe at Christmastime when you could

pretend it was for your sister or mother. Once I was at a friend’s house and I got hold of a girl’s bathing suit and tried it on, but the opportunities were few. I don’t know what other transsexuals are like— this

keeps coming up and I’ll say it again and again— but we have this ste-

reotype usually created by some of the most outspoken but not neces-

sarily typical transsexuals. It was obviously a confusing time.

“I was always trying to play up the male side, not so far as Alpha

Male but just ‘normal.’ I had to hide the feelings of being a girl. It was just socially mandated, a fate worse than death. Not easy now, coming

out of the closet, but it was just terrifying back then. I joked about how transsexuals are the best actors in the world; they have to be spies. You could get killed.”

Mildred Brown and Chloe Rounsley write about boys who envy

girls their clothes, their dresses, and hate their own penises, even suppress the bulge. I ask him if he can relate to that.

“I had the former, but not the latter. I thought I should be able to

wear what girls were wearing but I never turned against my penis. Nor

did I have a sense of female superiority. Both sexes had their advantages.”

He tells me of a watershed moment, in about 2001 or ’02, when he

was suddenly taken aback and felt viscerally his indefinable but un-

bridgeable difference from the sex into which he’d been born, a mo-

ment that, perhaps not coincidentally, involved guns. He’d been invited

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My Sister

by an acquaintance, who was trying to do something for a client, to a

sporting clays event, a fund- raiser at Shirley Plantation on the river.

“Sporting clays is related to but more challenging than skeet shoot-

ing where clay targets are projected in an open field. In sporting clays the targets are projected in a wooded section that represents what

hunting’s actually like, with underbrush, forest, and paths. There were forty or fifty members of the group present, all men of course, gathered in a rustic lodge with woods behind it, and various paths.

“You formed groups of four, and as a team you shoot at one target,

then move on to another. When I got there, I didn’t know anyone,

which is usually not a problem for me, but I suddenly felt so out of

place. It was strange and totally unexpected. I felt I was the only

woman in a group of men. My host was the guy I rented office space

from. At the time, I had no inkling I would ever become Ellen. Elea-

nor will swear I’m lying, but on a conscious level . . . I dreamed about it but never thought I had a chance. I remember trying to act in such a way that these guys wouldn’t think I was feminine or effeminate—

because women are not ‘effeminate.’ You train with professionals to

have all those little cues, to be feminine, then you backtrack, because most women are not feminine. Most women dress like men. I remember thinking ‘What just happened?’

“At the time I had two different trainers and was trying to bulk up

like a man, to be more manly. But simultaneously I was losing a lot of

weight, partly for cholesterol, but also to have a feminine shape. It was like I was two twins fighting each other: instead of a devil and an angel, I had a woman on one shoulder, a man on the other, duking it out.”

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c h a p t e r se v e n

A Tale of Two Wives

I
t is now March of 2006, and the transition will begin in a month or so. I talk to Eleanor on the phone, ask her how the children are doing.

She says they’re having a rough time accepting the double whammy of

divorce and John’s transsexualism.

“They’ve been very gracious, all things considered, but their first

loyalty is to me, and they see how I suffer. I think it’s been harder on Adam. His own father was never in his life; John was the man he

bonded with, the man he called his dad.”

I talk to Beth on the phone as well, and we agree we’re both in

mourning for “Chiv,” his childhood nickname.

I’m so lucky to have these two as friends and in- laws. (“Thanks for being a guy long enough to give me two great sisters- in- law,” I tell my brother.) They were also friends with each other, though Chevey’s decision has inevitably caused some strain in the relationship. By the

time Chevey married Eleanor he was convinced he could suppress the

urge indefinitely. He did tell her about it, but even by then (the early eighties, about a year after they’d started dating) the whole phenomenon was shrouded in mystery. Now, when we have more knowledge of

how set and inalterable these urges are, such a confession would raise

red flags; but at the time Eleanor believed, or chose to believe, that he could successfully control it. Now Eleanor resents the fact that Beth

never discussed the situation with her, but Beth thinks Eleanor could

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My Sister

have talked with her about it and chose not to. Eleanor did know, after a given point, that Chevey’s desire for transsexualism was the reason

for the breakup of his first marriage. I can understand both points of

view: plenty of anguish to go round. For her part, Ellen says that the

mere fact he felt obliged to tell Eleanor (waiting for the right moment, shaking) suggests it wasn’t “over.”

“I was very good at hiding it.” Chevey says. “Partly this was for my

own personal security, but also out of deference to Eleanor. Before we

married, I’d told her I had this problem, but I didn’t want to remind

her of it. This went on for years. Because of it, Eleanor didn’t realize the stress. By 2005, I was unraveling on the inside, but it backfired on me. When I finally told her I couldn’t suppress it anymore, she was

both enraged and outraged: ‘Why can’t you just carry on as you are?’

she asked, over and over. ‘You’ve been doing fine!’ I was too good an

actor.”

They have different versions of this critical juncture. Eleanor in-

sists that he didn’t tell her the full story, and if she’d known what

transsexualism was, she wouldn’t have married him. And yet . . . I

want to ask, but I don’t: Wasn’t there wishful thinking on your part,

too? If you’d really wanted to know (Eleanor, intellectually curious

and voracious reader), wouldn’t you have researched it? And would

you now prefer not to have had the marriage at all, and the twenty

wonderful years you had together?

Who, in love, doesn’t enter marriage in a cloud of irrational hope,

blithely ignoring all warning signs? The alcoholic who promises to

give up drinking; the philanderer whose love for you will keep him

faithful. Chevey with his promise to give up his transsexual dream;

Eleanor with her willing suspension of disbelief. And both of them

ignoring important differences, like the depth of her commitment to

religion and her church. In order for them to get married, Chevey, a

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nonchurchgoer, had promised the minister he would attend “occa-

sionally.”

As time went on, the impasse hardened. When I asked about the

divorce, Chevey showed a trace of bitterness. “I spent weeks develop-

ing different plans, ways of giving her half of the joint property and

half of my net earnings for the rest of her life. She never responded. She hired a lawyer who went on the attack. I’d worked with her for years,

taken care of her mother’s finances, and suddenly she didn’t trust me. ”

“Why hasn’t that poisoned your feelings for Eleanor?” I ask.

“First, because I was the cause all of this; I brought it all on,

whether I wanted to or not. Second, it’s very rare to find somebody

you’re that compatible with, and when you do, you want to hold on to

them with both hands and make it work. I think in that way transsexu-

als are optimistic— they want to be accepted and continue to be close

to their kids, or spouses. They might think, ‘If I do everything right I can salvage this.’ You just don’t want to lose a person you’re so close to.

“So sometimes I am resentful, at other times I forgive and forget. I

can’t lose that kind of friendship.”

To me, the ins and outs of marriage and divorce are endlessly fasci-

nating; so much is unknowable. In a dream, Chevey tells me that An-

drew‘s been having an affair for eight years, and I’m devastated. I rant and rave, saying “Why didn’t you tell me? I’d have gotten a divorce.”

And I wonder if I can unlove him retroactively.

Chevey’s told me he never strayed during his marriage. But in a

sense, he
has
— his mistress has been his other self.

Chevey couldn’t understand the obduracy of Eleanor’s attitude;

she couldn’t understand his lack of empathy for her. To her, he didn’t

seem to show anguish or remorse.

“If you’re going to be a woman, you’d better start showing your

feelings,” she said.

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My Sister

This I can believe, as Chevey, perhaps during the time of our fa-

ther’s illness, had become an expert in hiding his feelings. His cool-

ness fooled people, even those closest to him.

I could see both sides: the life and married self that Eleanor had

constructed lay in shambles, but he had done so much for her, and was

now entitled to do something for himself. One of the things she com-

plained about was the name he’d selected. It did seem odd to me that

Chevey had decided on a name so close to that of his wife’s until he

explained how he had chosen it long ago (in the 1970s), and how this

was a central feature of his imaginative life. It was in this fantasy world, with all its particular shapes and contours, that he lived for many

hours.

I wonder if perhaps the name was part of what drew him to Elea-

nor in the first place. Lesser details have sparked elective affinities, and the unconscious hears its own song. For instance, the two women

he married, Eleanor and Beth, were exceptionally strong and smart,

women who needed plenty of mental legroom. They were also straight-

forward to the point of bluntness, with nothing of the coquette. With-

out being dominating, they were dominant types, and their masculine

side (which I recognized, “
mon semblable, ma soeur!
”) would fit smoothly and frictionlessly with Chevey’s feminine side. Eleanor might

not admit it, but something in her was drawn to Chevey precisely be-

cause of this pliancy, his openness, his not being threatened by her

strength. At one point Andrew and I were talking about the nature of

Chevey’s two marriages (Andrew being as crazy about both women as

I was). When I proposed that Chevey wasn’t threatened by their

strength, Andrew countered, “They weren’t threatened by
his

strength!”

Chevey and Beth’s relationship was different. They had known

each other, almost presexually, since the age of twelve or fourteen, had

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gone together and clung to each other as if for survival (it was the period of my father’s illness), had lived on a little island of their own.

“It was ghastly,” she tells me on the phone. “He had been my soul

mate all those years, since we were about fourteen. It shook my world

for a long time. My first reaction was to worry about Pete, who was

then sixteen months old. How would it affect his life? Then the pain

Chiv was in. Then fear— I was so dependent on him, he handled all

my business. I had no good friends. He and I really were a world unto

ourselves; we talked about
everything
.”

“Did you see a therapist?”

“No, Chiv was my therapist.”

“How did you manage it?”

“I’ve had some years to get used to it. But right away, I knew I

didn’t want to lose him as a friend.”

He left her, originally to make the transition, but then found he

couldn’t. He was living at The Argonaut Company and the extraordi-

nary Beth actually went with him to help him buy clothes.

“We’d go as if we were buying for her,” Chevey tells me. “We’d

both go into the dressing room, but I’d be the one to try them on. I