Two days before the trip...

On Saturday I am flying to Utah to meet my oldest brother, Andreas, for the first time. Andreas lives in Itzehoe, Germany with his wife of more five years, Lisa. Our father immigrated from Pineburg, Germany near Hamburg at the age of 19 to a suburb outside Salt Lake City when Andreas was only two. Andreas only saw him one more time when he was 4, when our father left my mother and moved back to Germany for a short while. Andreas still has a photo of our father and himself as a four-year old Angelika at that time.

Yes, that’s right, Andreas, the one on the right, and I have different mothers, grew up speaking different languages but share the same father, the same gender, if there even is such a thing as a gender that anyone shares, even though he was born legally female. Although now both legally classified as male, we do not share the same sexual orientation: I am attracted to men, he to women.

His birth name was Angelika and that is how I first heard of my “sister”. Angelika Kohler, I always imagined her living a more glamorous, worldly life than my life as a conflicted, bookish Mormon gay boy striving for perfection in Utah.

From photos I have now seen of him he appears “all male”, in fact much more masculine than I, with his goatee, enjoying a stein of beer and a Marlboro cigarette at a restaurant in Barcelona, or in a suit and tie with his beautiful, blond wife by his side at their wedding in northern Germany.

In fact, I must confess a secret fear that comes from years of feeling rejected by our father and coming out as gay in a small Mormon community. I am actually afraid that even though he was born female, he might be the son my father always wanted, that he might be more male than I.

Of course, this is silly and puerile. We are not brothers doing stunts in our backyard at the age of five to impress our father. We are not in competition and I am not that invested in being male.

Or so I tell myself. But I wonder if this is a luxury that we whose minds and bodies are in agreement can afford to have. Would I want to become a woman if given the opportunity?

I have great respect for women, some of the best people in my life are female but I’m fairly certain that I don’t want to become one. Not that I’m overly invested in being male either. I think though that if I woke up yesterday and felt that I was in the wrong gender, that my body did not reflect the essence of who I am, I am certain that gender would matter more.