The Brother Who Won’t Say My Name
He was sure my transition was wrong. It kept me alive.
My mother picked my name before I was born, then lost it on a coin flip. Grace was the name she had ready for the daughter she expected; the coin came up the other way, and she put the name back in the drawer for fifty-three years. Ann was her own mother’s name. When I finally took both, I did not invent a thing. I claimed what had been set aside for me before I drew a breath.
My middle brother will not say it.
Almost seven years now, and he has never once spoken my name in front of me, never once used the right word for what I am to my face. He is polite. He is awkward. He passes me the gravy and asks about my kids and looks at a spot just past my shoulder. The silence is its own sentence. He has decided that what I did was wrong, and he lets one missing word carry the verdict, so he never has to say it out loud.
I want to be fair to him. The first time I watched a man be certain about me, he was a child, too.
I was ten. We had one television, and in 1976, it carried Renée Richards into the den, a transgender woman answering a CBS interviewer’s questions about her tennis and her life. My father scoffed. He laughed. My brothers laughed with him. I sat on the floor and said nothing, and what I knew, with the whole of my ten-year-old body, was this: that woman is me. I had no language for it. The boys on the couch had no doubt. That gap between us, the silence on the floor, and the laughter above it, ran for the next forty-three years.
I came out at fifty-three. I told my brothers on our father’s birthday, in October of 2019, in a house gathered to celebrate the man my mother and I had agreed could not yet be told. You learn things about a family in a moment like that. One brother went still and stayed kind. My middle brother looked for proof that I was making a mistake and found Walt Heyer.
If you don’t follow this fight, Walt Heyer is the man the movement reaches for. He transitioned in his forties, lived eight years as a woman, then returned to living as a man, and he has spent the decades since telling that story to anyone who will book him, from state legislatures to the Family Research Council, where he is now a senior fellow. My brother handed me, Heyer, the way you hand someone a verdict. See? Even they regret it.
Here is the part my brother did not read closely. Heyer says, in his own telling, that what pulled him back was not the discovery that he had never been a woman. It was a religious conviction: a church that loved him and taught him that his identity was something to be redeemed from. He returned to manhood, by his own account, through faith and the congregation that wanted him to.
Read that again. It is the whole thing. The detransition story the movement holds up as proof was produced by the exact force my brother was applying in that living room: the pressure of family and faith, leaned on a person until they fold.
The research says the same thing in numbers. When Jack Turban and colleagues at Stanford and Harvard analyzed the U.S. Transgender Survey, they found that of the people who had ever detransitioned, 82.5 percent named at least one outside reason, most often pressure from family and the weight of social stigma, and only 15.9 percent named anything internal, any real sense that the transition itself had been the mistake (Turban et al., 2021). Detransition and regret are not the same event. One is a person changing their mind. The other is a person being changed back by everyone leaning on them.
My brother held up a man who got pressured out of his own life and called it evidence that no one should be allowed to live theirs. The proof was a confession. He just could not hear whose.
And the thing none of the certain ones knew, the thing I had told no living soul on the day he quoted Heyer at me, was how close the wrongness had already come to killing me.
Eight weeks before that birthday, on a Sunday in early September, I drove out onto a highway south of Sioux Falls and aimed my car into the oncoming lane, at the front bumper of the first of three grain trucks. The only reason I am alive is that I pulled the wheel back at the last second; I could not make myself take the driver in that other cab with me. I drove home shaking. Nine days after I finally said the word out loud to a therapist, I started spironolactone, and a few months after that, estradiol.
The hormones did not fix my marriage, my money, or my faith. They did one thing. For the first time in my life, the noise stopped, and I could hear myself think. That is what certain people were calling wrong. Not a haircut. Not a costume. The medicine that let me stay.
So when my family asks who gets to decide what is right and what is wrong here, I have an answer, and it isn’t a comfortable one. The people I was surest were wrong were the ones standing farthest from the coast. The boy laughing on the couch did not have to live inside my body. My father, certainly, did not. My middle brother, with his Heyer story, did not. The only person who had to live or die inside the decision was the one everyone agreed should have the least say in it.
I’m almost seven years on the other side now. I coach gymnastics in the afternoons. I play guitar in a working band on weekends. Five grandchildren call me Gramma Grace. By every measure that can be counted, the wrong thing was the right thing, and it was not close.
My brother will still not say my name.
That is allowed. I cannot reach inside another person and install a word he refuses to spend. What I can do is tell you the truth about who was right, and leave the missing word out in the open where you can see it for what it is. It was never the one who would not say it who got to decide.
The name was mine before he was old enough to learn it. My mother set it aside for me before either of us arrived. It doesn’t need his mouth to be true.
I will say it for both of us.
Author Note. Grace Ann Hansen is an independent researcher and writer, and an MBA and PhD graduate student in health informatics and artificial intelligence. She is also a published author, a professional musician, a gymnastics coach, and a queer transgender woman living in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. All interpretation, argument, and prose are her own. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Grace Ann Hansen at grace@graceannhansen.com.
Source: Turban, J. L., Loo, S. S., Almazan, A. N., & Keuroghlian, A. S. (2021). Factors leading to “detransition” among transgender and gender diverse people in the United States: A mixed-methods analysis. LGBT Health, 8(4), 273–280. https://doi.org/10.1089/lgbt.2020.0437