“Bear Witness” and “Build Legacies”: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Trans* Autobiography
Sarah Ray Rondot
a/b: Auto/Biography Studies·2016·12 citations
After examining the historical tradition of twentieth-century autobiography by
transsexual-identified writers, this article analyzes two contemporary life
narratives: Alex Drummond’s Grrl Alex: A Personal Journey to a Transgender
Identity and Jennifer Finney Boylan’s I’m Looking Through You: Growing Up
Haunted: A Memoir. In contrast to earlier autobiographers, Drummond and
Boylan representatively demonstrate a new era of trans
epistemology, which
does not rely on the wrong-body model as the foundational aspect of trans
existence. Boylan remembers her haunting past, which inevitably leads her to
seek medical intervention, while Drummond situates her self-actualized identity
in opposition to medical discourse. Although their stories differ, their
perspectives reflect similarly radical conceptions of gender. Because they
narrate continuous subjects rather than subjects split between pre- and posttransition, Drummond and Boylan put forth a new way to understand and
narrate trans
identity by exploring rather than justifying trans
experience.