My Brother My Sister: Story of a Transformation Hardcover (23 page)

learned how to minimize her shoulders with jewelry or collars. She tells them the nightmare fantasy she told me about, that she will be strolling in the Village Shopping Center and a young mother with her child will

come by and the child will say, “Mommy, why is that man dressed as a

woman?”

Later Patty asks me why I made her talk about it, as if I’d pumped

her for their benefit. Was I tactless, putting her on display out of my own nervousness? But she’s always happy to talk about it, and the subject’s so fascinating. It seems to me I elicit all this because I know

they’re interested, and I know she’s willing to discuss it. Also, this

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openness and personal candor is such a welcome difference from the

more guarded pre- Ellen Chevey. Is this because endocrines have made

her more “female,” or because she’s simply happier and more at ease?

Having “come out” and made the change, the person that is ChivEllen

(as I call her to myself, and shorthand as C/E in my writing)
can
be open now? This is what I’ve learned: how well she handles it all. From

what she’s told me about a few trips she’s taken with small groups, if

someone seems curious, gives any kind of cue, she’ll open up. Other-

wise, she won’t bring it up.

The verdict from the Witches after Ellen’s departure: she’s very

convincing. I said the hair’s too blond, and Lily and Patty agree, the

hair is too blond, but they’re surprised at how good she looks and most of all how happy she seems.

What Ellen treasures from the occasion is something else. At cof-

fee, Patty referred to the moment when the three of us came to the

lobby to get her. “We walked through the front door,” Patty said, “and

I looked all around and couldn’t find you; I just saw this woman there.”

Ellen tells this with enormous pleasure, but then, “What do you

think she expected?” she asks ruefully.

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Ellen Changes Her Mind,

and Changes It Again

He wanted to be like his mother and now he is his mother.

— Dr. Fred Richman (of Norman Bates) in
Psycho

I feel like someone who died and came back to life in a different

form.

— Ellen

She’s cute; she looks just like your mother.

— Esmey

I
go down to visit Ellen after Christmas in 2008, almost two years after I first saw Chevey as Ellen. She’s wearing her Santa hat, enjoying her work at the Nature Foundation, and looks the picture of health.

We compare notes. I’m on Imitrex (for migraines, a constant now),

Prozac, Synthroid, and Lipitor, with various sleeping aids, while she

takes no medications (only the estrogen patch), not even vitamins or

aspirin. When she applied for health insurance as a transsexual, she

was dropped from Category One down to Category Four (the most

expensive), presumably because of her “condition.” She wrote a letter

pointing out that she was a far better risk than either a man or a

woman, having no uterus, no ovary, no cervix, no penis, and a

shrunken prostate gland. Even her old problem, high cholesterol,

seems to have vanished with her superhealthy diet. A few months later

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she received her new insurance card. No letter, just the card. She’d

been bumped up to Category One.

Pine Mountain, where she lives, is a skiing and hiking community

in the Appalachian Mountains. The complex consists of hundreds of

condos, town houses, single- family homes, some tucked in the woods,

others, like Ellen’s, angled into the mountain like a bird’s nest. Her

two- bedroom apartment is on one of the highest peaks, and has what

she considers the best view: forty or fifty miles of mountains and val-

leys. The living room is an open space that includes the dining area

and kitchen, and with its plaid- covered furniture surrounding a fire-

place, has a comfortable ski- lodge look. A wall of sliding- glass win-

dows leads to a balcony that looks out on two slightly smaller

mountains and a valley 2,500 feet below. The ski lift (used all- too-

infrequently in these snowless winters) threads its way down the hill.

Outside, natural beauty with discreet man- made intrusions. In-

side, art and artifice, like the bar shelves displaying her collection of hand- carved wood birds and a sailing ship in artisan glass. On the

mantel is artificial ivy, African violets, handcrafted plants, wild flowers that look about as real as artificial flowers get.

On this trip, I ask again about change and record the answers— it’s

now more than two years since the facial surgery, but of course she has been taking hormones since 2005.

“The treatment is much more sophisticated than it was when I first

thought I was going to try and transition in 1978. Then, there was no

estrogen as such, or rather estrogen in the form of the birth control

pill, no testosterone blocker and nothing about progesterone. When I

took birth control pills the first time around, I did experience a little swelling of the breasts. I had to get Ace bandages and wrap my chest.

It wasn’t a great solution, as the bandage would roll down during the

day, and you have to adjust it.”

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“Was this when you were working at the brokerage house?”

“No, at this point I had moved into The Argonaut Company and it

was summertime. Winter was not a problem, but in summer you wear

a short- sleeve shirt, and if you have Ace bandages on, even skin col-

ored, you can still see the outline. So I ended up wearing undershirts

under short- sleeved shirts, I was so terrified of anybody seeing the Ace bandages, and even more of not wearing them. I probably walked

stooped over.

“But that didn’t last long. I realized the Ace bandage dilemma was

just the tip of the iceberg, and even that I had to figure out on my own.

At that point it would have been so awful for you and Mother and

every one else, it seemed my only choice was just to move away, disap-

pear. Move to California because all the freaks went to California.

And that’s when I first started thinking I needed a different name,

even a different last name. Some transsexuals change their first name

and keep the family name. I was so afraid that even if I moved to Cali-

fornia, people would find out.

“Now I have an estrogen patch and the amount of hormones can

be adjusted regularly. It’s hard to separate changes from hormones

from the normal changes of aging; for instance, the hair on my body

seems a little finer, but it’s hard to measure. As I mentioned before

when I talked to the endocrinologist, he said: you’ll notice some men-

tal changes, you’ll feel differently about things. He made me think my

thought processes would completely change, my body less so. But it

happened in just the opposite way! His idea always sounded wrong to

me; it didn’t change my way of thinking. I don’t think he understood it all very well. When I went to my therapist, I mentioned I was supposed to feel more feminine, but I didn’t feel any different, and he

said, ‘You were that way before.’ ”

. . . . . . .

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When Andrew and I go to Miami in January 2009, he says this is prob-

ably our last trip here together. While there, he’s almost too tired to go to the movies, sleeps all the time. It seems to me, he’s not all “there”

anymore.

When I talk to Ellen, the voice remains the most resistant to

change. She has a high voice— “Minnie Mouse” she calls it— on her

answering machine, and must make a constant effort to pitch it higher

than is natural. She’s gradually acquired a baseline voice above what

she started with as a man, and has come to New York a few times for

voice coaching.

Back in the spring of 2008, Ellen decided she wanted me to write

the book. I had been taking notes all along, and with a feeling of ex-

citement and collaboration we began compiling transcripts of inter-

views. Now it’s the summer of 2009, I am in Quogue, working on a

draft, outlining a proposal, when, in a phone conversation, she says

she’s changed her mind. There are two things that bother her: the pri-

vacy issue and her reluctance to “negotiate” with me, her sister. What

do you mean? I ask, but I know what she means. She doesn’t want to

be going over the manuscript, wanting this and that deleted, while I

defend my position. I’m utterly crushed, desperate, but maybe some

small part of me is relieved. Still, I stop in my tracks, fall into a depression.

Then, in November, we’re planning a rendezvous. I have to give a

lecture in Norfolk, so we’ll meet in Williamsburg for the weekend,

where we’ll have rooms at her favorite hotel, the Williamsburg Lodge.

Before I leave New York we have one more conversation: “I’ve thought

about it some more,” Ellen says. “I do want you to write the book. I

want to help people. I wish there had been such a book for me.”

I’m thrilled, beyond thrilled. “But,” she adds, “I have a few stipula-

tions.” We agree to go over them in Williamsburg. (I knew I wouldn’t

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get off scot- free. How much control will she want? How much can I

afford to concede?)

I call when I get there. It’s a full four years since the original an-

nouncement to Andrew and me, yet this is my first encounter with her

in public. I’m acutely self- conscious— far more, it seems to me, than

she! Every time we exit or enter the hotel, effusive doormen in colo-

nial garb say “Good morning, ladies,” “How are you, ladies?” and I do

a double take. Yet the theatricality provides protective cover: it somehow makes it easier that our first public get- together is in this

eighteenth- century theme park where tourists mingle with actors and

volunteers impersonating early Americans. I soon discover that old

habits die hard. Every time we go through a door, I walk in front of

her as I would if she were a man. Then my worst gaffe: we’re at a high-

end restaurant where “Rob,” our waiter for the evening, has been hov-

ering. I’ve just tasted Ellen’s dish, then mine, and when Rob inquires I say enthusiastically, “His is good, but mine is great!”

Gulp. I’m mortified. Ellen gives a little laugh, then so do I. She’s

charmingly unvexed, yet I vow to be a little more on guard, hoping her

her- ness will become second nature, a reflex. Do others “read” her? I

don’t want to know, not this trip. I think there are occasional glances, but do they just see two tall blondish women, possibly striking just for that, or because they resemble each other? Or something else?

The next day we’re walking along the commons and during some

intense discussion we stop and pause. I turn and look up at her, and I

stop breathing. Mother! In that moment, Ellen
is
Mother. I don’t see the hair or the makeup, the jewelry or the clothes. Just the face. It’s as if I’ve dropped through the Looking Glass. Not
almost
Mother, and not just similar. But Mother. A chill runs through me; I almost call her

“Mother.” I’d thought there was a resemblance, but nothing like this.

Maybe I’d been too aware of her size, the accoutrements, voice,

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clothes. Or had simply been too self- conscious to really look. But now, in this light . . . it’s uncanny. And frightening. Freud gave us our modern idea of the uncanny as something already known that suddenly

presents itself to us in unfamiliar form, akin to what the Russian for-

malist Viktor Shklovsky called a “defamiliarization.” We shiver with a

ghostly sense of recognition.

I don’t believe in the supernatural as embodied in current movies.

Vampires, aliens, visitations by ghosts and extraterrestrials that

shadow our worst (or best) selves, are patently phony, computer-

generated images, props in an action story. But the world is full of

spells and intuitions that move us like dreams, another level of reality.

I think of the Celtic myth that the boy Marcel describes in
Swann’s
Way
— i.e., the belief that the souls of those whom we have lost are held captive in some animal or plant or inanimate subject, and are lost to us “until the day (which to many never comes) when we happen to

pass by the tree or to obtain possession of the object which forms their prison. Then they start and tremble, they call us by our name, and as

soon as we have recognized their voice the spell is broken. Delivered

by us, they have overcome death and return to share our life.”