clellman 's review for:

She's Not There: A Life in Two Genders by Jennifer Finney Boylan
4.0

this is the first trans memoir i have read, i think
still hard to understand what it is like to be trans, and even in this book it seemed reduced to things like wanting to wear women's clothing. also having a "woman's spirit" but i am a woman and i have no idea what that means. description of the hormonal changes was pretty interesting. there was no larger discussion of gender theory
interesting: boylan describes several instances of being mistreated post-transition, but it's always for being a woman and not for being trans (maybe because her trans-ness was not that visible).
that said, this was really good. i liked the way it was written, and there were a lot of powerfully-placed anecdotes and tiny things that had meaning connected to something somewhere else in the book. fun that she went to the haverford school. also its a pretty funny book
a lot of name-dropping throughout, got a little excessive