She's Not There
A Life in Two Genders
by Jennifer Finney Boylan
Broadway Books, 2003
When I first saw She's Not There I had no intention of reading it.
I was at Powell's Books for the first time, and I had wandered over to see if they had a transgendered section and not just a "gay and lesbian" catch-all. They did; a few shelves, which is as good as the big gay bookstore in San Francisco has to give. And sitting there was She's Not There, yet another dreary, formulaic, and depressing chronicle of the terrors involved in becoming a woman after reaching middle age as a man.
At least, that's what I assumed. I hadn't realized I had such strong stereotypes of (or resentments against) transwomen's writing until that moment. I flipped through it anyway, out of some half-formed sense of loyalty to all transgendered writing, and discovered what an idiot I had been.
"Listen, I don't know if I should tell you this before the surgery, but I'm a Democrat," I said. The doctor looked at me, not sure if I was kidding.
Jennifer Finney Boylan is a goddess. Her book is bright, funny, clear, and sharp. She tells a very difficult story with sensitivity and amazing self-awareness. Even more impressive, she puts tremendous feeling into all of it, and
balances the bittersweet and the sad with hysterically funny and often sarcastic lines.
As transgendered readers know, our stories are often sad, complicated, even tragic. And when told to straight audiences, they can become deadly boring as they ask the same questions over and over. We become mired in the basics, and in language that is not our own; we become stuck in the prescribed story about how terrible it is to be trans and how nobody would ever want this and no one would ever undergo the torture of transition if it were not even more hellish to be trans. Thank goodness, Jennifer Boylan rises above these ruts to tell the truth about her experience: that there is pain, there are hellish experiences, but it's also just another variation on the infinitely strange experience of being human.
Her story opens with a present-day adventure, a ride with a hitchhiker who used to be one of her students and who doesn't recognize the newly-Ms. Boylan. As well as providing a setting for the story, a grounding example of who is telling this story and where she is coming from, the anecdote provides us with a great, subtle illustration of the problems involved in being open about gender changes. No matter how many times she thinks about broaching the subject with her old student, how many times Colby College comes up, Jennifer can't bring herself to do it.
"I was glad to help," I said quietly. "You take care." I so much wanted to take her hand and say, Goddamnit, Ashley -- it's me!
Introductions and old friends, pronouns and personal stories, become complicated by the need to include what is essentially very personal information in order to make it all make sense.
This is a very personal book. Debating whether to reveal herself to her old students is the least of her problems; greater are the problems of whether to transition, of how her wife and their marriage are affected by her transition, or her relationship to her best friend:
As we walked toward the bathrooms he seemed to take another hard look at me. "Which one are you going to use?" he said. "Will you at least do me that favor, and tell me before we get there?"
"Which would make you more uncomfortable?" I said. "I'll use that one."
"Tell you what, Boylan," Russo said. "If you get back to the table first, you leave a mark. If I get there first, I'll rub it out."
Since this is a true story, there are no pulled punches or carefully engineered happy endings. Everyone's complicated attempts at support and struggles with the changes in this woman are portrayed with self-deprecating honesty. For that alone, this book is a refreshing change from most memoir, fiction, and theory.
Clarity. Grace. Serenity. Harmony. Acceptance.
Jennifer Boylan takes our hands and brings us into her childhood, into her whole life. We learn everything about her, from her personal reaction to hormones and surgery to her childhood fantasies and the time her Aunt Nora died (but didn't). Much of it is heart-wringing, but like all great writers, she sees the humor in it too.
My friend Curly, early in the process, asked me, "What's it like? What's it like to have boobs after all this time?" And I simply said, "It's not like anything. They're just there.
Curly shook his head. "Man, Boylan, you areturning into a woman. One thing about women, they have no idea how interesting their tits are. They don't think they're all that remarkable at all. I mean, when I'm with girls sometimes I just want to say, how can you concentrate on anything, looking like that?"
"Sorry," I said. "They're great, but you know. The world doesn't revolve around breasts."
"Listen to you!" Curly shouted. "Of course the world revolves around breasts! What else would it revolve around?"
I shrugged. "I don't know," I said. "Like maybe, the sun?"
Curly looked at me as if I were a stranger. "The sun, yeah right." He sighed. "I wish you could hear yourself."
This book appeals to people on many levels. For some, it serves as a tender and informative explanation of "the transgendered experience." For others, it is a passionate validation of the feelings and experiences they've shared with her. And it will come as a huge relief to many of her readers, as they find one more volume to add to the small stack of books they can give to people to explain who they are.
But to me it's not the stories that are most important in a book: it's the tone. The story itself here is fantastic, but it is also wonderfully told. Jennifer Boylan is frank, funny, and intimate; reading She's Not There is like striking up an accidental conversation with the person next to you on the bus and getting drawn into a lavish life story before their stop comes along and you part ways forever.
Going from male to female is easy. What's hard is going from a person who lives in her head to a person who lives in the world.