My Sister's Keeper

It’s funny how a small thing, such as the timing of an otherwise ordinary event in one’s life, can shape the entirety of the rest of their lives.

When Eve was born, the doctor and my parents were stunned: the baby they had thought all along was a boy, was actually a fully dual-sexed hermaphrodite. This predictably caused a quandary surrounding what to name the child. After much discussion, and with assurances from the doctor that Eve’s female half would dominate as she grew (because, after all, we all begin life female and it is only through the process of gestation that some females become male… or something) my parents decided to choose from girl’s names for my new baby sister. In hindsight, the doctor was entirely out of his depth to answer such a question in the first place: he was an obstetrician after all. Eve was the only hermaphrodite he would ever deliver and the complexities of her elaborate endocrine system was far outside his specialty.

My mother used my father’s emotional fatigue from the great “male or female?” debate to win his buy-in cheaply for her childhood-favorite girl’s name: what she had imagined she’d name her future daughter even before she had the physical capacity to have a child.

They called her Eve, and now, at the end of everything, that seems entirely appropriate.

Eve and I had fairly typical older-brother to little-sister relationship growing up. I loved her to death and, had things gone to plan, I imagined one day protecting her from the loser guys in her peer-group. Having said that, I also, very typically, couldn’t resist the temptation to sometimes terrorize my adorable little sister. She was a little sensitive about the fact that, contrary to prediction, her tiny penis hadn’t melted away but was stubbornly still there, just above her female pubis. I would tease her about it; you know, just enough to make her warm mahogany eyes sharpen to a glare. She’d straighten to her full diminutive height, her straight, indigo-dark hair whipping behind her as she pushed her brother as hard as she could. It wasn’t very effective, given the disparity in our sizes, but it got her point across and I would stop.

Though we were full-blooded Japanese going back to our great grandparents who landed in San Francisco long before World War II, large breasts run in our family. It was no surprise when Eve started to develop, and develop very quickly, at age 10. What was a great surprise to all of us was when at age 12, right on time for a normal boy, Eve’s until-then-largely-ignored penis and tiny scrotum began to develop as well.

By this time we’d had dozens of spats through the years: each time making up and being closer in the end as a result. But this time things didn’t end as they always did. I was frustrated that day because of the birthday party: a half dozen of Eve’s tittering, annoying friends, on a sleep over. Polite requests from my parents had become outright orders when I had been reluctant to give up my room for her friends “because they were girls” and go sleep on the couch.

Eve also didn’t help things by being especially perky and annoying, almost to the point of acting spoiled. She was bubbling on about how cool her party was going to be with no regard to the sacrifice I had made to make it possible. When Eve came downstairs that night, as she must have dozens of times before, for a glass of water, she didn’t consider the fact that someone was sleeping in the living room. Banging around the kitchen with unnecessary volume, she woke me up and, disgruntled, I marched into the kitchen. Without really thinking it through, I marched up to her and pulled down her sweats in the middle of the kitchen, not knowing that, underneath, she was going commando. Her developing penis and scrotum (no… now it well and truly was a cock and balls) were much larger than my memories from baths many moons ago and, for a moment, I couldn’t help but stare in shock. She went immediately red and stood stock still for a full minute before pulling her pants up and scurrying back up the stairs to her room.

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