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A review by xia_banana
Trans: A Memoir by Juliet Jacques
5.0
Admittedly, this book perturbed me at first. I've been considering sex reassignment surgery more frequently, though prematurely at this point of my transition, and to hear the harrowingly honest recounting in the first Chapter- then again towards the end of the book- made me reconsider whether I had the mental and physical fortitude to endure it.
I'll shelve these thoughts for another day. The memoir itself was a comfort. While there were retellings of dysphoria that escaped my experience, there were greater numbers that forced themselves into my mind and made friends with my memories. A kinship flared with Juliet's past self experiencing things for the first time: coming out to friends and family through quiet social media changes first, then last-second messages; the awkwardness of beginning a transition in a workplace knowing who you are and have been; the desire to find and settle into safe spaces so she wouldn't have *think* about being trans anymore; and feeling frustrated by the pace of biological changes until you lose focus and return to noticeable differences.
I appreciated the self-awareness Juliet brings to her relationship as a writer in an oftentimes unrelentingly transphobic industry and her sincerity in detailing just how her education and transition unsettled her life in a manner I'm wary of replicating. Nonetheless, I'm satisfied to have read this and may read it again in a year when things have changed for me.
I'll shelve these thoughts for another day. The memoir itself was a comfort. While there were retellings of dysphoria that escaped my experience, there were greater numbers that forced themselves into my mind and made friends with my memories. A kinship flared with Juliet's past self experiencing things for the first time: coming out to friends and family through quiet social media changes first, then last-second messages; the awkwardness of beginning a transition in a workplace knowing who you are and have been; the desire to find and settle into safe spaces so she wouldn't have *think* about being trans anymore; and feeling frustrated by the pace of biological changes until you lose focus and return to noticeable differences.
I appreciated the self-awareness Juliet brings to her relationship as a writer in an oftentimes unrelentingly transphobic industry and her sincerity in detailing just how her education and transition unsettled her life in a manner I'm wary of replicating. Nonetheless, I'm satisfied to have read this and may read it again in a year when things have changed for me.