Purple Prose Read Free

organisations that he can no longer tick the ‘female’ box when it comes to expressing himself to the world. Because the world lets us know, in countless tiny ways, that we must always have a declared gender and that gender, once granted, is part of our personhood.
    A sister, for instance, is a female person, a ‘daughter of the same parents’, according to my
Macquarie Dictionary
in a typically unimaginative description. But what else is a sister? My intellectual self wants to run to the literature, to hide behind someone else’s words and emotionless theories of sisterhood. Because then I would never have to say that when I found out my sister was going to live life as a man, my wedding was about a month away. My first thought was that people would encounter him in his men’s clothes and with a dusky wash of stubble at my wedding for the first time and I would have to explain it. Why should I have to explain anything on a day that was supposed to be all about me?
    As soon as I thought it, I pretended I hadn’t and was horrified at my own selfishness. Because obviously my wedding was going to be the first of many occasions when my brother would find himself in a room full of people who would whisper about him but who would not ask him their questions directly. He was trapped in a new awkwardness, an awkwardness again not of his choosing. This time, the awkwardness was manifested by other people who wanted to study him but didn’t know where to look, who wanted to brand him as confused or just plain weird, who wondered how anyone could do something so unimaginable, and who thanked God that their own siblings were ‘normal’.
    The awkwardness I felt was of a different kind. I wondered if Icould acknowledge what had happened, talk about it with him, ask him questions. But I was a reminder of what he used to be. I was attached to the person he wanted to leave behind. Talking about it with him reminded him of the girl he wanted to forget, the girl he hated. The girl he wished had never existed.
    How can I be so selfish as to want to remember a sister my brother loathed?

    I feel guilty for mourning my sister. Guilty because mourning implies sadness. I worry that being sad suggests I do not support my brother’s decision. I should focus on what I’ve gained, not what I’ve lost. I should see the rainbow and not the rain. So I never grieved for her, in case that grief was misconstrued as grief over my brother’s decision, rather than over loss. A person still exists who is made of the same atoms as my sister. So what is there to lament? Then I read Rebecca Goldstein’s attempts to unpick the complexities of personal identity and it was a revelation. She articulates exactly what I could not: ‘A person whom one has loved seems altogether too significant a thing to simply vanish altogether from the world. A person whom one loves is a world, just as one knows oneself to be a world. How can worlds like these simply cease altogether?’
    Indeed, how can they? But they do. I know my sister has vanished, has ceased. She will never come again.
    In
Little Women
, Beth’s death is a ‘benignant angel – not a phantom full of dread’. Birds sing over her soul. In dying, ‘Beth was well at last.’ I hoped that becoming a man would heal my sister, that her metaphorical death would be that same benignant angel. That my new brother would be able to have conversations with people, would be able to work, would even find love. I hoped it would tweezer out the pain of the previous twenty-five years of being thought of as one thing, the wrong thing. That it might bandage up the deep wounds caused by thousands of thoughtless actions – thegifts of dresses and dolls and jewellery boxes from well-meaning relatives – and my own actions as a child in casting her as the ideal sister from a storybook, which was the exact opposite of who he wanted to be.
    I