She’s Not There

Our own Diane Sofia Frank reviews the recently published "She’s Not There- A Life in Two Genders" by Jennifer Finney Boylan

The trouble with writing a review of an autobiographical book about a transsexual is that it’s the same story you’ve read before. Different author, some different details, but the same story. Can one write the review without judging the person? Should one restrict the scope of comments to the quality of the writing and the means of telling the tale? And what should one assume of the audience for the review, what do they need to know? Should the review simply focus on the work at hand or is it a vehicle for the reviewer to discuss the whole problem of transsexuality?

We sat at a table in the lush garden of a Mexican restaurant in San Rafael, California. The last time I was here was to help celebrate the 50 somethingth birthday of a woman, V., with whom I had had a mutual, unrequited crush back in high school. I’m not sure what skirt I was wearing that time, but I did not stand out in a crowd of people from beyond the pale, transsexuals, pan-sexuals, polyamorists, and devotees of the various power-exchange forms of eroticism. It was a lively dinner, and it was a chance for my old friend to tell me how she and others had seen me as feminine in high school, a time when of course I was trying desperately not to be, and oblivious to the idea that people relatively close to me were seeing through the façade. I also learned that while I might be hot as a woman, to her I was still cuter as a guy. Chacon a son gout.

This time it was lunch and just the three of us, my partner and I and my old not-quite-flame V. Now some 30 years past high school, we had no particular secrets and the freedom to talk about anything. I mentioned that I had heard from a woman E., who I met at the party, asking if I had read "She’s Not There". E’s interest was based on the continued involvement of her elderly mother with an MtF transsexual. According to E, this man wanted to become a woman so he could "learn how to do hair and makeup". I thought it an amusing coincidence to hear from E., because we’d just picked up the book for travel reading and my partner was in the middle of it. V’s response was to relate back to a paper and field research she had done years earlier where she was studying transsexualism. She had found that many people were surprised after transition, surprised to find that they had become transsexuals and not the women they’d supposed they’d become.

The problem with this observation is that transsexuals who become women, who are in "stealth mode", living unremarkable or remarkable lives as women are not necessarily found to be included in this kind of study. Still, I think V’s observation has a lot of truth in it, and it leads also to the central problem of transsexual autobiography. With almost no exceptions these stories end soon after transition. The writing of them seems to be a last self-involved attempt to maintain the drama and focus of the messy business of transition before the world tells them "enough already, get on with life."

To me, the question is whether transsexualism is real, or the whole business of hormones and surgery is simply the best we can do right now to deal with a peculiar if not uncommon psychological delusion. It can’t be answered by narratives ending with the triumphant first few months or years after surgery. The life years and decades after is what matters to me. The relationships, the joys and sorrows of ordinary, daily life after the heroic struggle are the untold, never told story. So is Jennifer Finney Boylan a woman or a transsexual? As "out" as the former James Boylan is, who will ever just see Jenny as a woman?

Boylan does list a few incidents of life- two assaults by men, a female student who didn’t know her history, and a female colleague who asked for makeup advice, and a trip to the emergency room with a child. All in all a pretty paltry list of simply being a woman. And the last incident, the request for advice about makeup is to me a missed opportunity. In books I’ve read on the differences in communication styles between men and women, the business of asking for advice is discussed. Boylan treated the request in what I’d call typically male mode, expertise requested, expertise given or denied. But in the woman’s lexicon, the real message of such a transaction can be the initiation of a relationship, a friendship. It may not always be there, as sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, but Boylan was oblivious to the possibility. Boylan follows the typical, disappointing pattern of male-to-female biographies, the focus on job relationships, family and old friends. Where is the new life, where is what is gained, where are the women who are bonded with? They’re not there.

On the positive side, Boylan’s analysis of the double-bind that exists for transsexuals should be required reading for people thinking about transition. If one is too focused on "femininity" one is seen as not really a woman because being a woman isn’t about acquiring hair, clothes, makeup etc. If on the other hand, one neglects those items, one is seen as not really being a woman, but a someone stuck with male characteristics. Such a perilous tightrope to walk. In these days when women feel they can be just about anything they want, and men are as constrained as ever by the John Wayne mode (never mind the current success of "Queer Eye For A Straight Guy" or "Metrosexuals"), male to female transsexuals are hit with constraints from all sides. They must be femme but not too femme. Boylan admiringly quotes Nora Ephron’s review of Jan Morris’ "Conundrum" on this point: "I was no good at any of it, no good at being a girl; on the other hand I am not half bad at being a woman. In contrast, Jan Morris is perfectly awful at being a woman; what she has become instead is exactly what James Morris wanted to become those many years ago. A girl. And worse, a forty-seven-year old girl. And worst of all, a forty-seven-year-old Cosmopolitan girl." I do wish that Ephron could write of Morris now, and see whether the Cosmo girl in fact grew up and became a woman.

Boylan also addresses the question of continuing relationships with his/her wife and children. I know from other sources that Grace and Jennifer are still together. But there is an amazing chapter near the end of the book titled "The Death of Houdini". The family visits a magic shop. There is tension between Grace and Jennifer. And one-by-one the family disappears in the magic shop, Grace last, "But my wife wasn’t there anymore". This chapter angered me, unlike the rest of the book. Why the poetic allusions, hints and mystery? Grace and Jennifer may have a different relationship now, so what is it? Why bury things in literary excess?

I can recommend "She’s Not There" as a well written book. It seems honest and frank. But it does little to expand what we know, or think we know about transsexualism. Those books remain to be written. I hope that Boylan, with her exceptional skills as a writer and with her eye for detail does write a sequel in 20 years. I hope I’m around to read it.