WHAT BECOMES YOU

WHAT BECOMES YOU

By Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz

From Publishers Weekly

Words source Amazon Books

Book Cover is link to Amazon

 
A blend of essay, memoir and intergenerational dialogue, this title is stranger-and smarter-than the average transsexual memoir. Link narrates his transition from female to male over the first 200 pages, interspersed with his views on everything from taxonomy to the difference between L.A. and Nebraska. His writing is hilarious, thoughtful and often poetic, but also frequently challenging. Discussing the general-knowledge concept that transsexuals feel "trapped" in their bodies, he points out that "If I'd dealt with my discomfort by getting rid of my body, I would now be dead." He deftly avoids gender stereotypes at the same time he demonstrates the new chance at life his transformation has given him. Link's mom, Raz, takes over for the next 100 pages, reflecting on her part in her daughter's transformation, her feelings and how they've changed, and her eventual acceptance of the son Link became. Even without the narrative hijacking two-thirds through, Link and Raz's book is a weird one; Link's looping narrative and lectures about gender theory see to that. The last 100 pages turn the book into a dialogue on any number of topics, including feminism, politics and, of course, the bonds of family. The result is oddly moving, more illuminating and memorable than a straightforward memoir could have been.
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The past year has seen more mold-breaking work by trans authors than ever before, from the anthology Self-Organizing Men, edited by Jay Sennett, and Max Wolf Valerio's The Testosterone Files to Alicia E. Goranson's Supervillainz. Now Serano is making a bid for another subgenre with Whipping Girl: the sharp-tongued blend of personal essay and political analysis.And April saw the publication of Aaron Raz Link's What Becomes You, the mutant offspring of the transgender autobiography, featuring strange observations, loopy introspection, and the occasional venture into manifesto — plus a tender 80-page coda by the author's mother. (Full disclosure: I'm the publisher of Other magazine, which excerpted both of these books before publication.)

Raz Link's What Becomes You takes the transgender memoir to places it's never gone before. The book follows the author's tortuous process of understanding and then realizing his male identity, but it's also an examination of conformity in general, a tour through a world of oddballs, geeks, and outcasts. Raz Link dubs these folks the "am-nots," as opposed to the "have-nots," and he shows, over and over, how reality is "whatever the person who's bigger than you says is true." The book also demonstrates, in excruciating detail, what it's like to be completely fucked with by the medical establishment. It's something the term gatekeeper doesn't really convey — the extent to which someone in a lab coat can make you dance. At one point, with a surgery date less than a month away, a psychiatrist tries to deny Raz Link the letter he needs because he hasn't been binding his breasts — even though they're too large to bind without ruining his chances for a good reconstruction. Much of Raz Link's portion of What Becomes You deals with his attempts to explain his gender transition to his feminist mother. In the final dozen chapters, though, his mother takes over, writing about her own struggle with losing a daughter (as well as the physical changes that come from her bout with cancer). It's jarring — and moving as hell.

(Charlie Anders) words sourced -

San Fransico Bay Chronicle Online

Anders full review can be found here in Whipping Girl