This Body I Wore
A Memoir
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4.1 • 7 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A parallel journey of self-discovery and trans history, chronicling one woman's path to living authentically.
A Washington Post Best Book of the Year
Long before Time magazine featured Laverne Cox on its cover, countless trans women lived and died as men, most unaware of their true identity. In This Body I Wore, award-winning poet and essayist Diana Goetsch chronicles her long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.
"How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?" This question, often asked of trans people, is one that Goetsch addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a beloved teacher at New York City's Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city's crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and '90s, where people risked their jobs and safety to express urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.
More than a transition memoir, This Body I Wore is a full account of a trans life - one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years? Goetsch's captivating memoir is a must-read for anyone seeking to understand the complexities and joys of living authentically.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Traversing several decades and much societal change, poet Goetsch (The Job of Being Everybody) fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition. As a young, assigned-male cross-dresser in 1987 New York City, Goetsch struggled to feel like she belonged. Even when the internet brought "millions of closeted people" unprecedented community in the '90s, Goetsch writes, her reticence to settle on a fixed identity in her 30s isolated her. Still, she confesses, "I'd fantasized all my life about being a girl." Pulled between the false promise of stability that masculinity offered and the terrifying freedom she found in feminine expression, Goetsch traces how she came to reconcile her torn selves, reckoning with the specters of an abusive childhood, navigating sexual obstacles in her adulthood, discovering Tibetan Buddhism, and, eventually, finding herself as a woman at age 50. Balancing profound personal revelations ("Gender may be the only category of human experience where what you long to be is what you are") with cogent analysis of cultural gender narratives—including the "forced feminization" trope, "where a male gets into some predicament that makes it necessary to present as a female" (as seen in Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire)—she constructs a gorgeous self-portrait that defies categorization. The result obliterates binary confines around gender with breathtaking finesse.
