Friday, July 14, 2017

The Book That Almost Broke My Blog


Trans, Juliet Jacques

I've been avoiding this post for months. I even read an entire series since this one, but I want to chronicle my reading in order. So, it's time. This isn't going to be easy.

I mentioned previously that I am trying to read more first-person narratives. And my desire for an authentic storyteller is hipster level. Enter, Ms. Jacques.

To begin, I'm going to share a little of my experiences with trans people. I went to a state school that had a surprisingly large group celebrating and supporting the LGBTQ+ community. Sort of. Those four years I was around people who explored, questioned, and experimented with their identities in many ways. It was at a drag pageant on campus that I learned an acquaintance from high school was performing. My favorite nightclub had drag shows. The restrooms might have had gender signs, but nobody paid attention to them. Honestly, it was one of the few places where I felt like I could just be me, safely, and nobody cared what that meant.

My senior year I moved into a small apartment complex that shared a parking lot with another. The two buildings faced each other. Naturally, many of us became friends. It was an eclectic group of people. It was home. Among the maybe 3 dozen people living in those two buildings, were David and Shel. David was David most of the time, except when he was Kenya- a crowd pleasing queen. It was easy to know which persona was present. Kenya was a character David became. Shel was different. Shel was born male and tried to live as a woman sometimes. It was a painful struggle for him (his chosen pronoun). He had tried hormone therapy in the past but didn't continue it. He hated being a man and was terrified of being a woman. Today he might call himself genderfluid, a term we didn't have back then. The point is, these were people I saw daily. They were friends. They were my most intimate experience with trans identities. I took that for granted.

Now to the book. Jacques has admitted that she didn't want to publish a memoir, a fact that is pretty obvious to me. It's a shame that the only story a publisher wanted to touch was this one because it is not well-written. To be clear, my problems with the story aren't with the overall content. It reads exactly like a book the writer never wanted to pen.

For a memoir, Jacques shares very little of her interior life. There's occasional discussion of depression or the anxious feelings she had when shopping. But mostly it's almost a third person limited narration of events of her life. There are detailed paragraphs about soccer/football plays and many references to the music scene she was into. Both were completely lost on me and did nothing to help me relate to the person behind the story. I can't blame Jacques for this, since she didn't want to write a memoir. But at the same time, I wonder why she bothered with publishing it.

The other thing I didn't care for was the complaining about how hard it was to transition. Remember, I had a friend who was never able to, even though he wanted to. Knowing how difficult and expensive it is for people here, having to live as a woman for a year before having confirmation surgery seems like a pretty privileged complaint to me. It's not a competition, of course, but if that's the hardest thing you have to overcome ...

There are things I really liked about the book, too. Just not the memoir part. Jacques weaves in a little trans theory and politics. She talks about how limited trans lit is- the same thing her own book suffers from. She gives very limited space to her life before transition, which I have deep respect for. If people want to get off on that kind of stuff, they can read Middlesex. I liked that she didn't write a sensational story, that there was no huge battle with her parents or a suicide attempt.

It's hard to give this one a rating. My feelings about it are too mixed up. Most notably is that, as a cis-woman, it's not really my place to rate Ms. Jacques' experience. The obscure scene references and distant storytelling are not good writing, in my opinion. At the same time, I realize that she didn't have many options. I'm glad I read the book, but I'm not sure I'm glad she wrote it.

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