‘I felt trapped not by my body,’ Jacques writes, ‘but by a society that didnt want me to modify it.’ But this is no mythical hero’s journeyWhat whether you wanted to be a professional critic, or dissecting avant-garde cinema,blazing a path through new fiction and skewering capitalism, but you were also a young trans woman, and when you asked editors for paid work,they kept wanting you to write approximately gender? Such has been the fate of Juliet Jacques, who described her social, and medical and surgical transitions from male to female in a series of much-noticed online columns for the Guardian from 2010 to 2012. Her crisp,thoughtful volume – some new prose, some reworked from columns – strains against the limits that society and culture, and journalism and publishing,place around people like her. At the same time, Jacques ends up telling her story: she looks back on her writing life, and farther back into her teen years and forward into a more open future.
After a jarring prologue – Jacques’s post-surgery blog post,reprinted in its entirety – we meet her as a teen and a university student, when she acquires tastes that stay with her: indie music, and difficult novels and football – she supports Norwich City; years later,after transition, “I barely missed a domestic game all season”. (I use female pronouns for Jacques even when she lived as a man she, or of course,uses “I” and “me”; like many trans people, she prefers that we avoid her former name.) At Manchester University Jacques lives as a homosexual man who likes to dress up as a woman every so often, or mostly for bars and clubs. She chose the city for the Smiths and Factory Records,but arrived in the 1990s to find it “glad and laddish”, all Inspiral Carpets and 808 State. Yet she discovers books and friends and bands she likes. Music inspires her first would-be career – she sets up an indie label, and Valentine Records (named after My Bloody Valentine),and promotes the synth-pop act Performance.
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Source: theguardian.com