On January 1st, I began reading for my PhD exams (known in my department as our “orals”). While I’m still meeting with professors to finalize all of my exam list topics, my first list will be on LGBTQ+ memoirs. Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques (2016) is the first book I read, having purchased it during Verso’s year-end sale. I’ve decided that at least for the memoirs, I will blog about each book I read for my exams, partially as a study technique and partially because I enjoy casual writing about books without the pressure of a deadline or any of the other strictures of academic writing that can make it so stressful. These posts will likely not contain arguments, or really even be reviews— but they will be records of what I found interesting and what I thought about while reading.
I didn’t know what to expect going into this book, and I didn’t know quite what I would be looking for as I read. Jacques begins the book with a reprint of her column in The Guardian about the day of her sex reassignment surgery. I took a class with Nancy K. Miller last year on memoirs of illness, and we began the class with discussing different narrative structures of illness, so Jacques’ choice to begin with surgery immediately stuck out to me, and I wondered what would come next. Jacques explicitly discusses in the book her frustration with the structure of many trans narratives, particularly those that climax in surgery, representing the moment the person became a “real” (woman/man). Here, we begin with surgery, and then skip back in time to one of the first times Jacques went to a gay bar with friends, doing what at the time she called “cross-dressing.” The book then traces her life from sixth form college through her thirties with occasional flashbacks and theoretical interludes, ending not with surgery, or even with recovery, but with an ordinary day at the office followed by an interview-style epilogue about the writing of the book itself.
While reading, I found myself highlighting whenever she discussed her changing relationships with different identity labels (drag queen, cross-dresser, gay, transvestite, transsexual, transgender, man, woman), and the different books, essays, films, and songs she mentioned as important (either positively or negatively) to her gender journey. She includes some dialogue around significant moments relating to these labels, but not in every case. For example, over the course of the book, she shifts from rejecting “transsexual” to embracing it. However, we don’t get to see a particular moment, set of moments, or reflection on where she begins to apply “transsexual” to herself in the same way that we get to see other key terminology moments like when a trans mentor tells her that “drag queen” only applies if it feels like a performance, or the time she first encounters the word “transgender.” We do see the first time she finds herself saying she would like to start taking estrogen, but not the first time she realizes she would like to get surgery also.
(On the topic of me highlighting references to media important to Jacques, I don’t have anything to say about that right now, but I would like to go back through and compile a list to publish on this blog at a later time. I think studying collections of what media is significant to LGBTQ+ people and why would be very fruitful.)
Another interesting and complex aspect of the book is Jacques’s discussion around bodies. She is very against the “trapped in the wrong body” narrative of transness, although she understands its use as a shorthand, and specifically says she comes to understand herself not as a person trapped in the wrong body, but as a body trapped in a wrong society. She meets and talks with trans people of various genders and backgrounds who make every possible combination of choices about what to do with their own body/society and body/mind relationships—surgery(ies), no surgery(ies), some surgery(ies) hormones, no hormones, trying to “pass,” not trying to pass, etc. She ends up deciding to pursue laser hair removal, an estrogen prescription, and sex reassignment surgery, but does not always go into great detail about how she came to these decisions. Some of it relates to the desire to pass and escape harassment (a wrong society problem, not a wrong body problem), but some of it does not, and it’s not always clear which is which. I think the absence of a clear, point by point articulation of Jacques’ individual relationship with her body vs. understanding of structural transphobia is important; she refuses to explain such deeply personal information that is going to be different for each person anyway, and in doing so forces cis audiences to do the empathetic and sociological work ourselves.
Jacques also writes extensively about the socioeconomic and political pressures surrounding her role as a trans memoirist and journalist writing about her own life, as well as her goals for her column in The Guardian and for the book (and her imagined audience for each!). She wants to talk about trans issues, but doesn’t only want to write about trans issues. Would rather write about trans issues from a political and social standpoint rather than a personal one, especially since she fears contributing to the stereotype that trans people are self-absorbed, but editors are only interested in confessional journalism (and memoirs!) about trans issues. Doesn’t want to be a “professional trans person,” but also needs to pay the bills, and LGBTQ+ organizations keep asking her to give talks and write pieces. I deeply appreciated and enjoyed her honesty around these issues—and how brave is it to say in your book that it’s actually not the book you want to be writing, but your editor insisted?
I went into this orals list asking myself questions like, “How do you write a memoir that other people find meaningful instead of self-indulgent?” and “What unexpected aspects of LGBTQ+ experiences end up as recurring themes in memoirs?” and “What makes LGBTQ+ people decide to write and/or publish memoirs?” and “How can I use memoirs to learn more about LGBTQ+ history and individual experiences across place and time?”
Fortunately for me, Jacques describes her own thoughts and struggles with many of these questions explicitly in the book. As for the last question, I’m finding this book useful in its depiction of what different sexual and gender terminologies were available in Jacques place/time, what connotations they had, the legal environment trans people had to deal with during those decades in the UK, and what media was available. There’s also some stuff about the role of the internet, which I like from a DH perspective as well.