The Wrong Wrong Body: Notes on Trans Phenomenology

From 2010 to 2012, Juliet Jacques penned an immensely popular autobiographical column for the Guardian while transitioning from male to female. With Trans: A Memoir, Jacques reworks and expands on her earlier work with biting wit and brutal intimacy. But as Sandy Stone (1991) pointed out over two decades ago, transsexuality is just as much an issue of genre as of gender, and Jacques remains deeply suspicious of the transition memoir. Her wryly generic title, far from announcing the book's allegiance to genre conventions developed to court a prurient public interest and satisfy medical gatekeepers, registers Jacques's uneasy and often recalcitrant navigation of the memoir form. A number of the book's chapters end, therefore, as if in protest, with short critical essays explicitly devoted to, say, trans representation in film or the origins of transgender theory. Much of the book is in fact a memoir about a...