I am grateful for the word “sibling,” stiff as it is. Not every language has an epicene word for brother or sister. Ancient Greek had a word that meant essentially “womb-mate,” but Italian has only il fratello and la sorella, and no way to describe a transgender sibling unless you fiddle with the inflections: il sorello, la fratella, la fratello/sorella, il sorello/fratella. One of the first sentences I formed in Italian class was “Mio fratello vuole essere mia sorella”: “My brother wants to be my sister.”
What is the first thing everyone wants to know when a baby is born? Girl or boy, right? What is more basic to your identity than that? Growing up, I was very well aware that my brother was a boy; I defined myself in relation to him, and it was my observation that he got much better treatment than I did. He never had to do the dishes or polish the tiles around the fake fireplace, and when he grew up he wouldn’t have to wear a girdle every day of his life, the way our mother did. I was jealous of him, fairy-tale jealous, and in my older sister’s way I coveted everything he had. That’s right, everything. I had no pride in being a girl. So when, as an adult, my brother announced his intention to become the girl he had always wanted to be—to have a masculine body revised to reflect a feminine soul—I felt threatened and betrayed.
The idea that gender in language is decorative, a way of dressing up words, can be applied to the human body: things that identify us outwardly as male or female—breasts, hips, bulges—are decorative as well as essential to the survival of the species. Lipstick and high heels are inflections, tokens of the feminine: lures, sex apps. Those extra letters dangling at the ends of words are the genitalia of grammar. And the pronouns turn out to be in our marrow.
Before long, my sibling and I were engaged in a pronoun war. It started in Cleveland, where we had gone to watch out for our father in the nursing home while our mother was in Oregon, spending Christmas with our older brother and his family. The first day there, before going to visit Dad in the nursing home, Dee came downstairs wearing lipstick and blush. “Too much makeup for nine o’clock in the morning,” I said. Dee wanted to go shopping while we were in Cleveland, and told me that shoes are particularly hard for a male transitioning to female. I remembered a shoe store for big and tall girls downtown in the arcade and found it in the phonebook: Mar-Lou Tall Girls Shoe Shop, and we went downtown together. The saleslady seemed to think I was Dee’s mother. “He wants some ladies’ shoes,” I said, aware that I had already stuck my foot in my mouth. But Dee, who was munching on a bag of roasted cashews, did not react. She picked out a pair of low black leather bootlike shoes with buckles, a pair of brown oxfords with thick treads (it was important to have shoes that worked both ways), and some slip-ons, which even I had to admit were surprisingly becoming. She carried them proudly in a Mar-Lou Tall Girls Shoe Shop bag. To celebrate, we went to a bar—an old favorite, Otto Moser’s, that used to be decorated with vintage photos of vaudeville days and served beer in thick goblets called fishbowls. Dee’s thrill over the new shoes was something I could appreciate—every girl loves new shoes—and I found it poignant that Dee had never before had a pair of shoes that could be kicked off, like slippers.
We were in Cleveland for about a week, and Dee spent the days combing the thrift shops and coming back with bags and bags of ladies’ clothing. The bed was heaped with sweaters featuring eccentric sleeves and striking necklines, scarves, even a feather boa. Dee changed clothes several times a day and experimented with hair and makeup. I got ornery waiting outside the bathroom while Dee was in there primping—my own gender inflections were confined to the most conservative possible expressions of femininity: I used Chapstick and wore earrings that looked like buckshot—and I’d do a double take in my mother’s kitchen when my sibling appeared in a top that emphasized a set of new little boobs, and the lipstick stains on the glasses that I had to wash really pissed me off. Dee was like a deranged fourteen-year-old.