When I was younger, I found growing up as a twin pretty unremarkable. I had two other brothers, so my twin felt like just another sibling to me. I have a trans friend who has a hard time with me referring to my twin as a brother in our past, which I understand. My twin has always been a girl, even if she didn’t come out or transition until we were in our twenties. I want to make that very clear. My sister has always been a girl. But she presented as a boy for our entire adolescence. As far as I knew, I grew up with three brothers. And that felt fairly significant to my general outlook on life.
We grew up with a mom who rarely wore make-up, never wore high heels, wore dresses only when she worked in offices where she couldn’t wear jeans, and didn’t generally present as particularly feminine. Our aunt, our other closest female-presenting relative, never wore anything that wasn’t loose fitting and practical. I grew up following their lead and looking very tomboyish 90% of the time. It allowed me to fit in with the guys and do the stuff they were doing. I grew up with mostly male friends because I related to them better than I seemed to relate to girls.
I am a cis-gender female who identifies and presents as female. And I’ve never questioned that. But despite my parents best efforts, they raised me in kind of an ambiguous gender place. I wonder if, in light of that, their reaction might have been more accepting if I was the twin who was trans instead of my sister.
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, the men in my house were raised as “men.” “Men” meaning males who were the head of the household, the bread winners, the disciplinarian, the unapologetic last word. Men were to be brave protectors of the weak, less street-smart females. They were to be happy or angry, and definitely not sad or sentimental or… pink…
Naturally, this had a profound effect on the kind of person my twin was trying so hard to be. She and I were pretty close for most of our childhood. We were always in the same classes in elementary school. We had more or less the same friends. Around junior high and puberty, this changed. We maintained similar friends, but she started to get darker and angrier as we went through high school. Unbeknownst to me, she was struggling in school. As I grew into my odd personality and insane extroversion, she grew depressed and more inward. We lost any of the “twin esp” we had as kids. After I read “Becoming Nicole” (a book we both majorly related to), I realized that it was probably agonizing for her to watch me turn into a woman as she grew a beard and heard her own voice get deep.
Fast forward through a very rough 7-8 years of sibling-hood. After high school graduation, I ran away to college and started to find myself. I met new people, lived away from the crazy family I was escaping and would come to resent, and sort of met the world for the first time. It was a world that accepted people and could be religious while still loving people. I learned about a world outside of the strict cis-hetero rules of my home. It was liberating.
Those years at home were really hard for my twin, though I didn’t find out until fairly recently. We grew really far apart during those years. She even reminded me the other day that I disowned her after a particularly bad fight the night I moved out of the family home after finishing school. She was stuck between a deep love for our parents and a deep desire to be herself. I’ll always hate that I couldn’t see that she was going through that.
Before I get back to the twin stuff, I dated a trans person in college. She came out as trans shortly after we dated, and identified as male while we dated. One weekend while we were dating, she and I were at my house for a weekend to do laundry. My twin pulled this boyfriend aside and asked about the transition process, which that boyfriend had explored before. I think at that point my twin had come out to me as bi, and let me know that she’d tried cross-dressing a little bit during the very short time she had spent not living with my parents. Later, after this boyfriend began transitioning and I told the family that she was now going by a different name and pronouns, I got teased (seemingly in good fun but actually deeply transphobic) that I was such a bad girlfriend, I turned boys into girls. Nice, right? My family got to shit on me while totally discounting and minimizing the gender identity of someone I really cared about (and still do).
People often think of and describe trans people as “being born in the wrong body.” I get the instinct to simplify it down to that. It’s easy to imagine someone as wearing a costume. But that puts all of the responsibility of “passing” on the already heavy shoulders of the trans person and takes it away from us. It’s not fair. It also puts an emphasis on the body of a trans person, which is already stigmatized and sexualized. They weren’t born in the wrong body. They may have been born with a family that doesn’t accept them or in a place that doesn’t let them live out.
Okay, so a couple of years ago, about six or eight years after I ran away to college, I met my sister for the first time. We hadn’t spoken or seen each other in a few years. I only found out because my mom mentioned that my twin was going by a different name now. I think I sent her a Christmas card with my phone number in it as kind of a shot in the dark. She texted me, and that was that. I was living in the Capitol Hill neighborhood of Seattle and invited her for her first manicure (which happened next to an off-duty drag queen).
I know how ridiculous this is going to sound, but it was like meeting my long-lost sister. I guess I was actually meeting my long-lost sister. After she came out, and especially after my older brother moved out of their shared apartment, she got to be the person she had been wanting to be. It was a new life for her, and a new life for us as twins.
We had a lot of ideological differences a few years ago when we began repairing our relationship. We had to have a list of topics we’re not allowed to bring up because they’re too fiery. I’m very proud to say that we’re chiseling away at that list, while it just seems to grow with my other family members. Little by little, as we start to physically resemble each other we’re overcoming all those things that kept us apart for so long. We still have very different hobbies, but now I know that those things make us stronger as a duo. She finally gets to be her deeply sentimental soul, which makes our chat window full of adorable kitties and updates on what made either of us cry that day (we are our mother’s daughters after all, and no one tears up at a puppy adoption story like her). And I finally get to share clothes with the person I secretly shared Barbies with as a kid.