She's Not There

When suffering from a horrible flu bug, I had the house to myself and didn't feel up to doing anything besides reading for enjoyment. I picked up She's Not There, one of the option for the Book Club reading. It's about a transgendered person who was a man who became a woman. I really didn't expect to like this book, but I actually enjoyed it. I don't read much in the way of non-fiction, so I'm always happily surprised when I end up enjoying it. I was able to read through it, start to finish, in probably 4 hours.

(Confession here. My original plan was to take the portable DVD player up to bed and watch X-Files on DVD, but I couldn't get it to play anything other than the first episode without the remote control, which my son had misplaced when he was pretending it was a spaceship or some Power Rangers thing, so I decided if I couldn't have X-Files, I would not settle for lesser entertainment, but would instead be productive and read something from the Learning Community class. Oh, and I should note that because I agreed I would not read ahead, I did not finish re-reading the fifth Harry Potter book without my husband. This took considerable moral fortitude here)

Back to She's Not There. The author is also a fiction writer, so he/she (? I thought of him as him for the first half to 2/3rds of the book and then as she for the later portion, what to call him or her now???) uses literary techniques in the writing. I guess since she was a she when she wrote the book, I'll refer to the author as "she" from here on out.

Parts of the book were funny and others heart-breaking.

One thing that I really found interesting about it is when she's in transition and taking hormones to become more female, she noticies herself doing all kinds of things she never thought she would, including qualities she has never liked in women she's known. The part that stands out the most to me is when she goes to The Gap to try on jeans as a woman. She says that for a man, shopping for jeans is no big deal. You go in the store, the measurements are what they are and there are maybe two choices of what kind of jeans to try on (relaxed or whatever). For women, the sizes do not match up to any known measurement in the universe and there are at least 6 different cuts of jeans to try on, each emphasizing certain areas of the body more or less. She found herself obsessing about which size she wanted to be. And she later did things like order the salad even though it wasn't really a salad she wanted to eat.

It made me feel better to know that some parts of being female can perhaps be blamed on the hormones or society's impact and not on my lack of common sense. Because I know the number that represents the size on my clothing does not represent me, and yet I find myself thinking I'll wait to go shopping for clothes until I can fit in a more desirable size. I have found myself purchasing a pair of pants in part because they fit and the tag still said the size I wanted it to say. I have passed up perfectly fine pairs of pants simply because the tag said something I didn't want it to say. This is particularly true of immediately post-pregnancy shopping.

This reminds me: I hate David's Bridal. A friend of mine asked me to be in her wedding (btw, this does have something to do with the previous chain of thought) and the bridesmaid dresses she chose were at David's. My son was around 7 months old at the time. This means that the immediate post-pregnancy weight was gone enough that I was proud of that and yet not so much that I was entirely happy with my whole body. My chest was also still huge. The lady helping me measured me and then brought me a 16 and an 18. I was wearing a size 12 at the time. Not good for the self-confidence. Then....then!...when I said something about it, she made a remark about how I should feel proud about the child I brought into the world. Let me tell you, when someone is making you spend over $150 on a dress you don't like in a size you definitely don't like in a color that makes you look abyssmal, do not insult them by implying pride in her child and body perception have anything to do with one another. A woman can be perfectly proud of her kids and still regret having stretchmarks.

On to another point of the author's. She talks about how (heterosexual) men are infatuated with breasts, enamoured of them, wouldn't-get-anything-accomplished-if-they-had-them kind of thing. (And I agree with this part of her point, as I have had similar talks with my male friends in college) Then she said when her male friends asked her about them once she had them, she said they were no big deal-- that they were just there-- and women do not give them any thought. I think this is not entirely true. We do not think of them in the way that men do and do not care about them in the way that men do, but I think women do think about them. I had a small 101 class last semester that was breast-obsessed, and it was an overwhelmingly female class. The girls kept bringing the topic up (btw, the guys thought it was funny and didn't mind one bit-- that was a very open class). I think women feel they get stereotyped based on breast-size and therefore think about them more than they need to. In fact, the females talking about breasts and breast-size in that class were either rather small or really large chested. I think when on either end of the spectrum, women think about it even more.

Since I don't want to end this post while still writing about breasts, I will say that I think this book would be an excellent choice for any group for Book Club. It will be interesting to both genders, it's informative without being overly so (had to say I was a little worried about possibly getting too much information about the sex change, but needlessly so. When she's still a he, he talks about the night he lost his virginity, but not in a gross way. Luckily, she writes more about when the sex occured than the details of the sex acts themselves). What's truly fascinating is it gets you thinking about your identity and what part gender has to play in that. I think by the end, I was just really grateful that I feel content with my identity.

At one point, Boylan has a talk with one of her sons about how how she felt on the inside and how she looked on the outside didn't match up. I think that can be true of anyone at any time, but non-transgendered people just have more choice in the matter of how they will try to change their looks because it is just a matter of looks for them, a surface appearance kind of thing (the non-transgendered people, that is) and for transgendered people, it is an issue of the whole body itself.