McCloskey’s analytical mind comes closest to concretely describing the experience, as she uses the metaphor of migration to describe the movement from male to female: “Most people would like to go to Venice on vacation. Most people, if they could magically do it, would like to try out the other gender for a day or a week or a month […] But only a tiny fraction of the crossgendered are permanent gender crossers, wanting to become Venetians.” Migration is a powerful metaphor in that it captures both the mystery of how a person decides to cross the border of gender as well as the enormous challenges in doing so. And gender migrants, like their geographic counterparts, come with different sets of privileges and disadvantages that aid or interfere with acclimation to their new roles.



Like the immigrant who can’t get rid of her accent, McCloskey’s own struggle to acquire a “female” voice leads to many people considering her an interloper in the land of women. The power of Crossing lies in the incisiveness with which McCloskey describes her experiences as well as her perspective — unique among memoirists — as someone who has enormous trouble passing. When she discusses the rejection of her family and her experience of being committed to a mental institution after she decides to undergo facial feminization surgery, McCloskey unflinchingly recounts how different trans experience is for those who feel themselves to be women, but are perceived so staunchly as male by others that their transgender status is equated with severe mental illness.

Compared to McCloskey, Boylan recounts a gentler transition into womanhood, preserving her marriage and core friendships. She also speaks not McCloskey’s analytical truth, but the poetic truth of someone who had built a career as a novelist by the time she transitioned in her forties. She communicates her experience not only through metaphor, but also by writing as though we as readers were reliving her experience with her.

The early parts of She’s Not There are particularly effective, especially in the way Boylan writes about how her transgender feelings expressed themselves when she was a child. “Sometimes I played a game in the woods called ‘girl planet,’” Boylan writes. “In it, I was an astronaut who crashed in an uninhabited world. There was a large fallen tree I used as the crashed-and-destroyed rocket. The thing was, though, that anybody who breathed the air on this planet turned into a girl.” Games are a near-universal part of childhood, and Boylan uses hers to illustrate what was both typical and rare about her experience, ably and touchingly bringing the reader into her world.

Boylan’s narrative is also peppered with a sly humor that is a trademark of her work – she recounts her best friend Russo observing, “You love that place between what’s funny and what’s terribly sad.” For instance, Boylan writes of her early cross-dressing experiences: “Wearing my sister’s and mother’s clothes wasn’t exactly satisfying, though. For one thing, it was creepy, sneaking around. Even I knew it was creepy.” Boylan’s gentle comedy makes her not just an entertaining narrator but a deeply disarming one, in her ability to find humor in life’s obstacles. There are times, though, when the humorous tone of She’s Not There reveals a hesitation to unearth what must be recesses of emotion under the surface. If a memoirist’s job is to dig deep, then Boylan’s humor sometimes feels like an impediment, though certainly a beguiling one.

The person who thus leaves herself most vulnerable is Mock, who lays her life bare in Redefining Realness without being overly sentimental or self-objectifying, as she recounts incidences of childhood sexual abuse, parental violence, and sex work to fund her gender reassignment surgery. The most effective parts of Redefining Realness are those that move away from the factual and at times didactic realm of trans education and into the murky territory of Mock’s inner life, as her memoir becomes a venue not just for communicating her experience to others, but for discovering the resonances of her life for herself.

Mock’s most painful recollection is the time when she had to appear in a transgender porn video so that she could pay off the balance of her gender reassignment surgery, an episode she recalls with harrowing clarity and restraint. “I know that excluding it from this chronicle of my life would be cowardly,” she writes. “It would mean I was actively erasing a part of my journey. Why tell your story if you’re not going to tell it in its entirety?” This chapter of Redefining Realness illustrates its greatest achievement — Mock’s willingness to expose parts of herself that are the stuff of sexual fantasy, without any sense that she is doing it for spectacle. I’ve read few authors like Mock — James Baldwin and Joan Didion spring to mind as signposts — who can slice so deeply to the core of their experience yet present the cut in such an evocative and insightful way.

We’ve come a long way from the breeziness of Morris’s Conundrum, where a type of euphoric writing clearly obscures her struggle. Morris wrote in 1974: “When I woke each morning I felt resplendent in my liberation. I shone! I was Ariel!” More than 40 years later, her words seem replete with overcompensation, especially when authors who came after her have so minutely explored many recesses of transgender life in their own ways. Over time, transgender memoirists have felt less and less of a need to justify their transgender feelings or mask the pain of their experiences. They have also steadily felt less of a need to portray medical transition as a profound, landmark event, choosing instead to view it as one among a set of important experiences. Clearly, transgender identity is both so enormously complex and gender such an embedded part of human interaction that there is plenty more to be said, shown, and written about transgender lives. These memoirs don’t just show how varied the experiences of trans women can be, but point to transness as a deeply powerful lens through which to view human possibility.