There’s a moral difference between keeping quiet about whether someone is in the hospital, especially when you haven’t promised to do so, and honoring a promise to your mother not to discuss something with your father. Still, if you had wanted to talk to your father about this, you could have asked your mother to release you from the promise. Or you could have told her that even though you had learned about it from her, you now also had evidence of your own (if that was the case; you don’t specify when you learned about the makeup in the bathroom, etc.) and that, with or without her consent, you planned to ask him about it.

But my suspicion — speaking not as an ethicist but as an amateur shrink — is that talking with your father about his cross-dressing wouldn’t have brought you much closer. The disinhibitions of age aside, your father doesn’t sound like the kind of person who would have wanted to discuss intimate matters with his children. When your mother made the disclosure, there was less understanding of the complexities of gender expression and identity, and so less of a context within which to discuss it. But even today, we rightly think that people should be able to decide what they want others to know about their gender identity.

My oldest brother is a financial consultant with a nationwide company. My youngest brother is my mother’s primary caretaker; she is 88 and feeble (my father, a former high-school teacher, died six years ago). As caretaker, he discovered that my older brother had created an aggressive, undiversified stock portfolio for my mother, mostly in oil and energy stocks. She even got a letter from my brother’s company headquarters warning her against such a nondiversified portfolio. One company has since gone bankrupt, and two others are doing poorly. The upshot? My mother has lost 40 percent of her savings, $115,000 and rising. One cousin, among other relatives who purchased similar stocks from my brother, apparently lost $200,000 of her $225,000. Should I or another sibling tell my sister-in-law about her husband’s disastrous stock advice? I feel that she should know about it — I don’t believe she does — first, because she’s a member of the family, and this is a family issue; and second, because it affects my relationship with her. I’m less inclined to visit her, and she should know why I’m keeping my distance. Last, and perhaps most important, her mother is in her 90s and suffers from dementia. If her mother has been subjected to the same bad or incompetent stock advice as other family members, with similarly disastrous outcomes, I think my sister-in-law ought to know that. I understand stocks always involve risk, but risk should be measured and appropriate. When the life savings of elderly folks — former nurses and teachers — are destroyed by risks that fail to consider age and station of life, it is deeply upsetting. Name Withheld

You’ve made it clear that a portfolio of this sort was in no way a prudent investment for someone in your mother’s situation. Worse, if your eldest brother and his company were profiting from these unwise investments, he was abusing a position of trust. You and your youngest brother should let him know that he owes you all an apology.

Given that his actions were professionally and personally irresponsible, he’s not owed much consideration by any of you. Once you’ve told him that you disapprove of what he has done, you should feel free to spread the news widely through the family. You certainly want to protect your sister-in-law and her mother from exposure to the same risks. In talking to your sister-in-law, you won’t be the one responsible for any breach in the bonds of family: That began with her husband’s appalling conduct.