A memoir of gender change
analyzes "not fitting the picture"
by David Loftus
[A version of this review appeared in the
Oregonian on April 29, 2007.]
Raised a woman, Aaron Raz Link became a man -- a gay man -- at the age of 29.
At least, he initiated the hormonal and surgical processes to alter his appearance toward a form closer to the person he had always felt he was inside.
Because Link was trained as a scientist -- specifically, taxonomy, the science of naming things -- he is uniquely fit to analyze his unusual experience. It doesn't hurt that he's a beautiful writer as well as a thoughtful and witty one.
The book is nonfiction, he explains, and a memoir, but not autobiography: "It is a book about pieces that didn't fit the picture. As a result, the most confusing and difficult pieces play the largest roles."
Strictly speaking, he writes, there is no such thing as a "sex change operation"; there are rather lots of little surgeries that were developed for other reasons, such as for badly mutilated soldiers, and infants and grownups whose bodies took an odd turn due to misbehaving hormones or cancer.
Link's analysis of his youthful fascination with movie monsters (they "were obviously the good guys"), of the Catch-22 of having to get himself diagnosed as mentally ill in order to qualify for the surgeries (legally speaking, "a mentally healthy person wouldn’t want what I wanted"), and the absurdities of psychiatry and people's assumptions about gender roles, are all fascinating and well handled.
"How come women write books analyzing male gender roles but get mad when men analyze female gender roles," he wonders.
There's even a kind of punch line: After an early lifetime of hating to be laughed at, following his sex reassignment, Link went to clown school.
Though a professor of English and women's studies who has been writing and publishing much longer than her son, Hilda Raz's less-than-a-third of the book is diffuse and less compelling -- which probably reflects her passive and somewhat unwilling role in her son's transformation.
She responded much better than most parents -- the surgeon who assisted Aaron said 90 percent of families disown his patients who choose sex reassignment -- but she admits she misses her daughter Sarah, feels closer to women even as a married heterosexual, and had difficulty following her son’s request to write about herself for this book rather than about him.
Aaron Link grew up in Nebraska -- "Boys Don’t Cry”"Brandon Teena country! -- but he doesn't dwell on that culture, any more than he does on Portland, where his surgeries took place, he has pursued his careers as museum curator, teacher of troubled and homeless youth, and performing artist, and he continues to live.
Local readers will recognize Pill Hill, however -- and Sauvie Island, the St John's Bridge, Siletz Bay, and the Sylvia Beach Hotel turn up as local color.
What Becomes You makes a terrific companion to Self-Made Man, lesbian journalist Norah Vincent's 2006 account of her three months dressing and living as a man. They're great food for any reader's thought.