Purple Prose Read Free Page A

wanted my brother to become someone who could smile occasionally, someone who would answer the telephone, someone who might venture outside into the sunshine. But that never happened. Instead he became more withdrawn, overcome with fears and phobias about dirt and illness, unable to eat, anorexic, declared mentally unable to work, alive only in the mechanical sense that his heart continues to beat and his brain stem allows him to perform the basic tasks of movement and breathing.
    I’ve tried to do what I thought was right. I’ve put away the photos of my sister, I never speak about our childhood except in the vaguest possible terms, I tell everyone that I have two brothers and no sisters. On the rare occasions when I see him, I say hello and he nods at me. He doesn’t speak, ever.
    I wonder at what he cannot say.

    â€˜One is not born, but rather becomes a woman,’ Simone de Beauvoir states in
The Second Sex
and the thinker in me understands the notion that gender is socially and culturally ascribed, whereas sex relates to the anatomical body one is born with. But gender is one of the primary labels we attach to people. We immediately identify people as woman or man based on the way they look. Ideas of gender are assumed to shift and change over time as society and culture changes, but, regardless, one’s sex and one’s gender are thought by most people to be fixed and the same. If someone looks like a man, they are assumed to be a man both physically and categorically.
    To change one’s gender – the M or F label they tick on a box on a form – and their sex – their physical body – requires medication, psychological assessments and staged surgery so that one’s anatomy remains, for a time, in a state of flux. In fact it often remains foreverin a liminal space because the final stage of gender reassignment surgery is far too costly for most people, including my brother, to consider. But, as well as this, it requires a change of name on all documents validating one’s identity. It requires new clothing, new hairdos. It requires everybody who knew what you once were to remember to use the pronoun ‘he’ rather than the pronoun ‘she’ and, after nearly thirty years, this is a hard habit to break.
    How many times have I heard relatives, my parents, myself in the first few months, accidentally say ‘she’. How it must have hurt my brother each time we did. But that is just one of the small shifts required. The bigger shift is to realise how hard it is for someone to change gender and sex, but still have the world treat them the same as anybody else.
    If one is not born a woman, but then becomes a woman, that is the way our gendered society largely expects one will stay. These expectations have been so damaging to my already fragile brother. I imagine he sees how easily other categories in our lives can be changed – I shifted from marketer to writer, from daughter to mother – and these changes were celebrated, and even expected as part of my growing up. I announced the new label I was to give myself – ‘I’m going to be a mum!’ – we raised our glasses, moved on and no further explanations were required, the evidence of my children being enough to testify to my new state of being. But, fifteen years ago, nobody popped a champagne bottle to salute my brother’s more courageous and more significant transformation.
    In fact, for some people, my brother’s decision to inhabit one box instead of another still has the dark cloak of a secret about it. Recently, my mum gave me some of the books we used to have as children, for me to pass on to my children. She opened the front cover of one, pointed to a white streak of liquid paper on the title page and said, ‘I whited out her name.’ (It was a book that had been my sister’s.) My mum continued, ‘Because you wouldn’t be able to explain to your kids