My long lost transsexual sibling

My long lost transsexual sibling

David Waters was shocked to find out that his mother had given up a baby, born before her marriage. But there were more shocks to come

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David Waters

The Guardian, Saturday 10 April 2010

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I had two shocks when I found out about my adopted half-sister. The first was that she existed. I was 15 in the late 70s when, during the course of my parents' bitter divorce, I found out that Mum had had a child with another man when she was 17, and that this daughter, Lisa, had been adopted.

My older brother, Steve, and I were dumbstruck. I didn't speak to Mum for the next few days as I mulled over the information, while the ground beneath me seemed to slip way. In my brother's case, the revelation seemed to turn him against her.

Our mother had no idea that we knew about Lisa, but understood something was amiss as we were obviously avoiding her. A few nights after we found out, I heard an argument between my parents in the kitchen – he had told Mum that we knew about Lisa.

Mum was enraged and hurt. It was her story, her past, her decision when, how and if we were to ever hear about her first child – the most painful episode of her life. When things had calmed down a little, Mum told me about the summer romance she had had with a jazz musician, the accidental pregnancy, the limited choices she had had aged 17 at that place and time – in the conservative west country of the late 1950s.

She had been sent away to a nearby town when the pregnancy began to show. The deepest wound followed – the adoption itself, organised through a doctor in the nursing home where the baby was born. Then came the heart-stopping moment when she handed over her red-haired baby girl to an older couple who couldn't have children of their own. It saddened me to hear of her distress in giving up her baby when she was barely older than me.

Finding out about my sister made my head spin. I had grown apart from my brother during our teens, and our parent's divorce seemed to drive a further wedge between us. The thought of an older sister was exciting.

As the years passed, though, thoughts of my sister came into my mind less often, and the urgency of my early questions – is Lisa out there? Will she ever make contact with us? – faded.

Mum had contacted adoption charities and agencies that acted as go-betweens for adopted children and birth parents, but there were no guarantees that Lisa would appear. But 25 years later, she did. Mum got a phonecall to say that Lisa had been in touch. After the initial paperwork was sorted out, the agency people wanted to meet Mum. There was something wrong. A representative refused to give information over the phone, but suggested a meeting before contacting Lisa.

This is what they said: your daughter is no longer your daughter – she's your son and his name is Stephen. He has been living as a man for the last 10 years. He has multiple sclerosis (MS), which he has had since his teens.

Mum was deeply shocked at the news. I was floored. There was so much to take in. And the coincidence of Lisa's name, too – Stephen spelled with a "ph", just like my brother's. I was the brother of two Stephens.

Over the next weeks, Mum spoke to her new son on the phone – he was a PhD student writing his thesis on female to male transsexuals. He asked about his siblings. I said to Mum that if she wanted me to go with her when she eventually met Stephen, I'd be happy to. She declined at first, but later changed her mind.

We travelled on a stiflingly hot weekend, and I had booked us into a hotel. Stephen met us at the station. He was a small man, not much taller than Mum, with sandy hair and a wispy beard. His illness made him shuffle when he walked. We looked very different, which somehow was a relief. Mum and Stephen hugged, and his arm reached out to pull me into the hug too, but as I felt the pressure of our bodies pressed together, I felt as if I was looking down on this strange reunion from somewhere high above .

Stephen drove us to our hotel, and he and Mum went off together. I thought about the pamphlets from the adoption charity Mum had given me on the train from London. They advised keeping an open mind when you meet an adopted child and keeping your own fantasies in check, seeing the person for who they are, however they have turned out. I felt pleased with myself, I felt open-minded – I was doing what the pamphlet recommended.

That evening we went to a restaurant for dinner with Stephen. As he sat down, his hand caught a fork on the place setting and it fell to the floor. It was an awkward moment – so much seemed to be resting on this meal, the first meal together as … what? A family?

I looked at Stephen. I could see that he was nervous and shy, not used to being with people. I again had that strange feeling of relief that we didn't look alike, although I could see Mum in his face. Then I saw his hands – they were just like mine. That moment is fixed in my mind because I could no longer ignore the fact that we shared the same genes.

In photographs from that weekend – the only time I've spent with my brother – I see a fixed grin on my face. I was present, but hiding behind that grimace. The graphic photographs that Stephen showed us of pre- and post-operative female-to-male transsexuals in his study and the jokey conversation he and Mum had about who was responsible for his 38DD breasts, which he'd had to have removed with a double mastectomy, flare in my memory. He admired my chest and my hairiness. Was I the golden brother – the man who hadn't had to transform himself to make himself whole, the one who wasn't given up by his mother for someone else to bring up? If we had been born in a different order, we might now be sitting in each other's places.

For Mum and Stephen, the reunion was breathtaking – the beginning of a conversation to fill in the empty years and to answer each other's endless questions. He was at last able to hear that he was conceived in love rather than indifference – or worse. And Mum finding out that Stephen's adoptive parents (his father was dead and his mother in an old people's home) were kind, loving people helped to soften the guilt she had long felt about giving him up. Importantly, too, Stephen didn't see his MS or gender identity as problems that could be blamed on my mother or, indeed, anyone else.

Yet there was a problem. Where was Lisa? Mum had said years before we had contact with Stephen that she felt Lisa was dead. When she met Stephen, she found out that the same year she had experienced that gut feeling, he had started out on the road to becoming a man. That was the year Lisa had, in a sense, died.

When I returned to London and my ordinary life, I spent an evening mourning for the Lisa who was no more, and my demolished family idyll. I had deluded myself on that train that I was prepared for anything and anyone, when clearly I wasn't. And yet, though I have not seen Stephen since that first meeting, we have had more contact via Christmas and birthday cards than I have with my full brother. So, in that sense, maybe he is the brother I'm closest to after all.