num_pages: 304
description: “Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You , who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. Turning from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal process involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes the process as both an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experience and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living.
language: English
title: What Becomes You
titlecomplete: What Becomes You (American Lives)
genres: Gender, Transgender, Autobiography, Queer, Nonfiction, Memoir, LGBT
ratings_count: 156
series: American Lives
awards: awardedAt: 1167638400000
name: Lambda Literary Award
category: Transgender
publisher: University of Nebraska Press