My sister came home with a new face today. Okay, it was more like three or four months ago, but that’s the sentence that’s been running through my head ever since, so that is where I’ll begin.

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For those of you who don’t know or haven’t read earlier posts, my sister used to be my brother. For some, watching a big brother transition into a big sister may not be much more dramatic than learning you have a gay sibling. I would hope that in this day and age, that realization sets in more like an interesting piece of trivia rather than a rock-your-world sort of discovery. But my brother and I always had a unique sort of relationship, so when I learned that he was really a lesbian trapped inside a straight man’s body, it took a few years to process it all.

I want to be really clear here—when I say it took some processing, I don’t mean in any way, shape, or form that I thought her gender identity was wrong or she was bad or there were any kind of moral implications attached to her struggle. I love my sister deeply, no matter what body is the right body for her. It’s just that my big brother was, well, such a guy.

My big brother was 9 years older than me. I am the baby in a family of five. The big “whoops” if you will. My parents essentially thought they were done having kids and were settling into the idea of relaxing a bit when “whoops,” I came along. I never as a child had any sense that I, personally, was, well, unintended. It was, however, pretty clear early on that my father had a different sort of lifestyle in mind by that point in his life.

My parents are a sort of rags-to-riches story. When my oldest brother (and now my only brother) was born, they lived in one of the motel rooms in my grandparents’ little motor inn. My grandmother was the 24-hour desk clerk, the housekeeper, the bookkeeper, and my grandfather was maintenance, security, and pretty much anything else that needed to be done. My mom was basically on call between diaper changes and my dad, fresh out of the Army, was busy trying to make a life for them with a real estate license. Their big step up after getting out of my grandparents’ place was a cute little “building” that was originally a chicken coup and had been renovated into apartments. They weren’t poverty stricken (although my mother was most of her childhood), but the early years of their marriage were mostly about working hard for a better future. I came along right around the same time as that “better future” did.

My father was always a bit of a workaholic. He typically put in about 80 hours a week. (My mother says this is one of the reasons why they got along so great in those early years). That didn’t really change when he finally achieved the success he worked so hard for. The only difference is when the weekend rolled around, or whenever he did have a free minute outside of work, he wanted to enjoy it doing things adults with babies don’t really do, like socialize. I think I was the only kid in school who got excited when her parents decided to “get separated,” which was about every six months or so, because I saw more of him during weekend visitation than I did when he lived at home. (Am I dating myself here? I think people nowadays skip over that whole separation nonsense and cut to the chase with a plain old divorce).

So what does all this have to do with my sister’s new face? Please bare with me. I’m getting there. My big brother had an unusually maternal instinct (should have been our first clue). In the midst of my parents’ tumultuous marriage, and my father’s general absence, my big brother being 9 years my senior stepped in when he could. In retrospect, he was a terrible role model, but in many ways, he was the only male role model I had. My other brother was even older than him and out of the house by the time I was in elementary school. Tony with a “Y,” by contrast, was very much my guardian and protector.

In order to understand why his transformation into Toni with an “i” was so shocking for everyone, you have to understand what kind of guy Tony with a “Y” was. Yes, maternal in some ways, like when mom brought me home from the hospital and he decided to take me out of my bassinet, hold me wiggling over the second story railing, and announce “Mom! I think she needs a diaper change!” (That was just the first of many occasions where my big brother almost got me killed). But on the surface, Tony was the roughest, toughest, most machismo guy anyone had ever met (again, another clue, but who really sees these things?)

When I told my childhood best friend, a dear friend who I spent every weekend with from age four to middle school and who grew up with my family, that my brother was a transsexual, she had the most interesting response:

“If someone were to ask me what I think of when I think of the archetypical male and everything that embodies masculinity, I would ask them, ‘Have you ever met Tony Vale?’”

That pretty much sums it up. Tony was the most popular guy in school. In spite of his relentless acne, he was stunningly handsome. All the girls wanted to date him, every guy wanted to be friends with him, and nobody messed with him because if they did, he’d kick their ass. He was muscular, but not in a meat-head, “I use steroids” sort of way. He was charming and kind, but a bit of a jock on the track or the soccer field. He was into martial arts and drag racing and out-running the cops with his friends (that’s the not-so-great role model part I was talking about). Think Patrick Swaze in Roadhouse. I could go on and on, but you get the point. Everything about Tony screamed GUY. So when he came out to the world as Bad Ass Chick, everyone was stunned, including my utterly heartbroken gay college roommate.

When Tony first came out, and I was still grappling with the whole concept, I asked him about the machismo front he put on. What about the fighting and the drag racing and all the guy stuff?

His response was, “Did you ever hear the phrase, ‘Be all you can be?’” He went on to tell me that it was all a lie. That his entire life was a horribly painful exercise in hiding the truth, that everything from working on muscle cars to the movies he liked—or pretended to like—was just a huge front. Everything but the girls that is. He genuinely liked the girls. Like I said, he was a lesbian trapped inside a straight man’s body.

Now, most people would look at that conversation and say that’s all just superficial stuff anyway, and to them I would say, bullshit. I mean, yeah, whether or not you really like to chew food with your mouth open to prove you’re a man’s man isn’t really important, I’ll give you that. The important things about your identity are things like how you treat people, how honest you are, being true to yourself …. hmm. When you become so comfortable with lying about something as huge as who you are, you can lie—and often do lie—about anything. I love my sister dearly, but one of the painful realizations that came to me later in life is that you never know when she’s telling the truth or not. In most people, this is a character flaw I can’t tolerate, but in her case, I attribute it to habit and tend to blow it off.

When I was a kid, my brother woke up one morning and couldn’t get out of bed. My mom rushed him to the hospital. He had injured his back so severely that he had crushed two disks and a vertebrae. He told everyone he hurt himself in gymnastics training, and the doctor said he probably made the injury worse in his sleep. The truth is he jumped off a four-story building at a nearby construction site in the middle of the night. By all accounts, he should have died. That was the plan anyway. He laid there for what he said felt like hours, writhing in pain, immensely pissed off that he was still alive. Finally, he was able to pick himself up, limp home, and flop into bed. When he woke in the morning, he couldn’t move. All because he was so afraid of what the world would do to him if they knew the truth.

It’s not that these things we associate with gender are important. Of course they’re not important. It’s that once you realize the closest person to you in your life has been playing a role the entire time and you never even had a hint of it—you had absolutely no idea—the incredible realization that you never really know anybody comes crashing down on you. We only know what people let us see, and sometimes people let us see things inadvertently, but anyone could be hiding the most unbelievable secret from you and you’d never know it. Slowly over the years I went from believing in first impressions and fancying myself a good judge of character to developing a more humble and skeptical approach to my own instincts. Now in the back of my mind, there is always the realization that you never really know anyone as well as you think you do. I often find myself surrounded by people who cling so dearly to their perceptions of others—good and bad—without ever considering they may be wrong, but I have no problem admitting you just never know about people because ultimately, we tend to see what we want to see.

When you realize that one of the dearest people to you has been pretending to be someone they’re not for your entire lives, you start the process of getting to know them all over again. You start the process of trying to dissect which traits we associate with gender and which aspects of a person are truly defining. And it’s not as easy as just write off or forget about all the “guy” stuff either. Like Toni with an “i” might not care so much about muscle cars, but she really does enjoy drag racing. You have to go through an entire list of things and find out which ones are real and which ones were bullshit.

It gets even crazier when the hormones kick in. When someone who is a relatively calm and detached individual is reduced to a blithering basket of tears over absolutely nothing, or at least something she would have thought nothing of in her past life, you have to ask yourself, how many of our own character traits are in fact defined by our biology? But that one’s too obvious. I’ll give you another example that is downright bizarre. Toni with an “i” had the same taste in furniture and general décor-type stuff as Tony with a “Y.” As far as she knew, she liked her couch and her bedframe and the pictures on her walls just fine. After all, her taste is her taste and she likes what she likes, right? Her gender apparently doesn’t have anything to do with her sexual preference, so why should it have anything to do with her window shades or her comforter? It didn’t. Until, that is, the hormones kicked in. Then everything started to look kind of dark and masculine and she decided some remodeling was in order.

Tony’s transition has been a long, painful process that has taken more than a decade and is still ongoing. It would have probably been much faster and far less painful for her if she hadn’t sadly (ironically?) gotten her girlfriend pregnant when she was only 21 years old. Since then, she’s had two marriages, two divorces, and a total of two children to match her double life. It seems that her unwanted appendage sure did bring about its share of trouble before she finally got rid of it. But all kidding aside, the fear of loosing or harming her children has made her transformation agonizing.

She went through all the pain of telling the world her secret, loosing most of her life-long guy friends (although some have pleasantly surprised us all), and facing my father (who still refers to her as him but loves her as much as he ever did), only to jump back into the closet when she watched her wife and son pack up and drive away. She managed to convince the ex that she “cured” herself and went back to being a guy for a couple years. This was absolutely heartbreaking for the rest of us to watch, and the extra oomph she put into her macho-guy persona sometimes made it downright annoying. Anyone who didn’t hate the ex prior to this “relapse” into masculinity definitely hated her after because it was hard to imagine letting someone you were supposed to love torture themselves trying to be the person you wished they could be. This charade went on for a couple more years until she finally came back out of the closet, this time to the sweet sound everyone’s sighs of relief rather than their shock and dismay.

When I was a little girl, I used to have a reoccurring dream that my brother had disappeared or died. Sometimes it was so vivid, I would wake up sweating and crying. As I grew up, the dream continued, although usually it was less dramatic as I got older. Sometimes I would wake with the vague sense that I was wandering around, looking for my brother in the woods or on some long journey to find him. While now the dream makes perfect sense, at the time it did not. I had absolutely no idea, at least not on any conscious level, that my brother was harboring this secret. My older sister knew, but for me, the shock and disbelief that accompanied my finding out that my big brother was a transsexual was equal to someone trying to convince me that the world was flat. Once the reality set in, there was an incredible sense of loss. Her lengthy transition, however, has given us all plenty of time to go through the five stages of grief. As much as I embrace the rebirth of Toni with an “i,” it would be disingenuous to pretend I didn’t mourn the death of Tony with a “Y,” no matter how tempting it may be to pretend that I’m that good of a person.

The five stages looked a little something like this for me:

1. Denial: Are you sure it’s not just a cross-dressing thing? I mean, you like women, right? So maybe you’re not really a transsexual.

2. Anger: You have children who are going to be devastated by this! I need my big brother!

3. Bargaining: Aren’t you at least going to try to go to a psychiatrist and see if that helps? I mean if it doesn’t, fine, but aren’t you going to exhaust all options before you do this?

4. Depression: My big brother is gone.

5. Acceptance: What brother? I’d like you to meet my sister.

Before you judge me, I am fully aware of how selfish most of these emotions are, but I’d rather be honest than pretend I’m above being selfish. Emotions aren’t rational, and we generally don’t choose the way we feel. All we can do is choose how we react to them and express them, and in spite of all the selfish emotions I’ve experienced watching my brother slowly disappear, I have always loved and encouraged my sister. Ultimately, I began to forget about my brother all together. For all the pain I felt over the loss of him, it’s kind of funny. I don’t miss him at all anymore. I mean I really don’t. Not even a little bit. But that may be because when you idolize someone, you don’t really see them for who they are in the first place. You put them up on this pedestal with expectations no one can live up to. When you become disillusioned, you set them and yourself free. The only thing that’s difficult now is watching my sister endure the cruelty of an unaccepting world. (That and feeling like I’m the big sister most of the time).

Toni was so physically masculine, she had a hard time passing after her surgery. She had the most unusual combination of male and female facial features. On the one hand, the shape of her face, her high cheekbones, and beautiful eyes were very feminine. On the other hand, she had a pretty thick eyebrow ridge, a strong jaw, and definitely a guy’s nose and chin. She hasn’t been able to get a job to save her life. It’s hard to tell with my sister, who has always been a bit of a grifter, if the no job thing was truly the result of bigotry and prejudice, or if it was her way of getting my mom to shell out for the final touch of her transformation, but in the end, mom decided it didn’t really matter. The bottom line was her daughter was frequently stared at and laughed at, mocked and ridiculed, and the thought of that killed her. So she found a plastic surgeon that specializes in feminizing surgery, and she made an appointment.

Here’s the thing about my sister’s face. There were a lot of people putting their two cents in before my mom decided to get Toni her plastic surgery. There were a lot of people who insisted she looked great and she didn’t need to have anything done, and their incessant need to reaffirm their own tolerance by completely denying the fact that she didn’t pass became almost infuriating. Yes, she did look great. She is a beautiful person with a kind heart and a glowing personality, and kind people who knew her looked at her and thought, “She looks great.” But that’s not the point. People who didn’t know her looked at her and snickered behind her back because whether or not she looked great, certain features gave her away. For me, and I think everyone else in the family who knew her before she became Toni with an “i,” when I looked at Toni’s face, all I could see was my brother, so I had no idea what other people really saw when they met Toni.

When Toni came home with her new face, it looked awful. It was so hard to picture what she would look like after all the swelling went down and the bruising went away. Mom and Toni were anxiously waiting for her new face to emerge from the swollen wreck that it was, all the while both fearful they may have made a big mistake. I really had trouble imaging the gentle face of a woman was going to appear, but all we could do was wait. Slowly, but surely, my sister’s new face came to the surface. There was nothing dramatic about the transformation—there wasn’t supposed to be. She still looked like the same person, and I think that’s why my husband and maybe my mom and even Toni herself couldn’t see the difference. But for me, the changes were plain as day. It wasn’t like the difference between pre-Sonny and post-Sonny Cher, and it certainly wasn’t Jackson 5 Michael versus Immortal Michael. Everything was just … softer. Her nose was the same nose, just smaller. Her hairline was brought forward and her eyebrow ridge was gone. Her strong jaw was a little more delicate, and her chin didn’t protrude quite so much.

I got mad at my husband when he said he couldn’t see the difference because for me, it was so obvious. I knew she looked different because even though in some respects she looked exactly the same, it was the first time since she embarked on this path that I didn’t looked at her face and see the sad reminder of my brother. For the first time since Toni became my sister, all I could really see was my sister. After my husband went out of town and came home again, all of a sudden he could see it too. And while that’s all well and good for me and him and everyone else, the sad part is, I don’t think Toni sees it, and what she sees is all that really matters. If she can’t look in the mirror and see a woman, then she can’t believe anyone else who looks at her can see a woman. So after all this, she still thinks the world is laughing at her.

In the meantime, we are all still living together trying to pull each other up out of the void. It is at times a contentious situation and other times a warm one, as living with family often is, but I only wish my sister could see what I now know. My sister came home with a new face today, and it is the same old face she has always had. The only difference is now I can see what was always there.

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• Social justice litigation for transgenders (thehindu.com)
• Born As Twin Bothers: Now They’re Brother And Sister (practikel.com)
• Great Strides Made For Transsexual And Transgender Workers (lezgetreal.com)
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