Book Review

reviewed by Linda Heidenreich, Newsletter of the Committee on Lesbian and Gay History, Issue 16/1 Spring 2002

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"The Woman I Was Not Born To Be" (2001) Author: Aleshia Brevard.

The Woman I Was Not Born To Be

by Aleshia Brevard
Published by Temple University Press, 2001 I.S.B.N. 978-1566398401

Like so many M.T.F. transsexual autobiographies, Brevard's is a painful story of a little boy who knows he is different, whose parents try very hard to push him to fit in with his playmates, and who discovers the "why" to his difference at about the same time he learns it is not okay to talk about it.

Brevard's transsexual journey from little "Buddy" to Aleshia, the writer and "off off off Broadway" actress, is plagued with transphobic neighbors, unsteady employment, and men and boys who do not respect the word "no." Brevard's account also carries many stories of triumphs, of family support, successfully completing two college degrees, and landing acting parts in a number of B-Grade movies. Like earlier M.T.F. autobiographies (Conn, 1974; Morris, 1974; Richards, 1983) Brevard's work contains a powerful critique of the gendered society in which she grew up. Her work differs from these earlier monographs because she writes after living as a woman for four decades: from the early 1960s through the 1990s. As such, her work carries a wonderful sense of change over time that many earlier transsexual autobiographies lack.

The biography opens with a young adult Aleshia awaiting surgery and reflecting back on the journey that brought her and her supportive family to Westlake clinic in California. Brevard's early life reads like a frightening ride through a hostile and foreign city with no street map and few people who can tell you anything about where you need to go. And perhaps this is one of the strongest points of the first part of the autobiography. Like so many transgendered youths coming of age in the 1950s and 60s, Brevard had to make her own map. Once she reaches her destination, the reader is left with a sense of relief that she made it there alive. Her childhood was a difficult one with parents who loved her, yet did not hesitate to deride the "sissy" they encountered in her. By the time Buddy was five, he knew not to tell anyone about the feelings and questions he had about his own identity. He suffered and survived the sexual violence to which so many effeminate boys are subjected in high school, fled to California where he had a long term relationship with a priest named John, and began a stage career as a female impersonator at San Francisco's infamous Finocchio's. It was there that Aleshia met Stormy Lee, a mentor who would help her in her early years of transitioning from iving as a man to living as a woman, and it was there that she met Hank Foyle, her first husband.

The remainder of the text focuses of Brevard's life as a woman: looking for Mr. Right, trying to succeed in a career, and learning that sexual violence threatens not only effeminate men, but all women regardless of their place on the gender spectrum. It's in the latter part of the text that some of her strongest critiques of twentieth-century western social structures emerge. Surgery does not bring paradise. Instead, segregation continues to structure life for whites and African Americans in her hometown; in the workplace her husband is hired over her simply because he is a man; and she continues to look for Mr. Right, even after two divorces, because in the 1960s the majority of American women were still perpetuating the archaic myth that without a man, a woman is worthless". Within this social milieu, Brevard completes both a bachelor's and master's degree, and she launches a career teaching and then acts in theatre and several B-grade movies, including The Love God, with Don Knotts.

Brevard's work is a highly readable account of a transsexual woman coming of age in the middle of the twentieth century. Like other transsexual autobiographies, her account attempts to explain transsexual lives and experiences to larger audience. Like many of these other works as well, Brevard provides a strong critique of the structural inequalities she had to negotiate first living as a male, then a female in modern America.

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