What Becomes You (American Lives) | 
| Authors: Aaron Raz Link, Hilda Raz
Publisher: Bison Books
Category: Book
List Price: $14.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  5 reviews
Sales Rank: 588466
Media: Paperback
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 320
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1
Dimensions (in): 8.9 x 6 x 0.7
ISBN: 0803216424
Dewey Decimal Number: 306.7680973
EAN: 9780803216426
ASIN: 0803216424
Publication Date: April 1, 2008
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Shipping: International shipping available
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Product Description
“Being a man, like being a woman, is something you have to learn,” Aaron Raz Link remarks. Few would know this better than the coauthor of What Becomes You, who began life as a girl named Sarah and twenty-nine years later began life anew as a gay man. As he transforms from female to male and from teaching scientist to theatre performer, Link documents the extraordinary medical, social, legal, and personal processes involved in a complete identity change. Hilda Raz, a well-known feminist writer and teacher, observes this process both as an “astonished” parent and as a professor who has studied gender issues. All these perspectives come into play in this collaborative memoir, which travels between women’s experiences and men’s lives, explores the art and science of changing sex, maps uncharted family values, and journeys through a world transformed by surgery, hormones, love, and . . . clown school. Combining personal experience and critical analysis, the book is an unusual—and unusually fascinating—reflection on gender, sex, and the art of living. This Bison Books edition features a set of discussion questions. (04/26/2007)
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| Customer Reviews:
 An interesting perspective July 10, 2008
This book tells the much needed minority story of what it means to be transgendered. The author did not necessarily experience his difference as one of gender in early childhood. Instead, he just felt different than the other children. He came to see gender as part of his problem as he got older. Even then, he doesn't identify with the feeling of being a "man trapped in a woman's body". Literature usually tells the stories of transgendered people who have always known they are the wrong gender, and who easily fit stereotyped notions of what transgendered people are. It is nice to see someone who doesn't fit the mold and to hear a story told from a different perspective.
While this does add some diversity to the literature on transgendered people, it is not a good introductory book. The author takes an unusual and highly dangerous approach to obtaining medical care, so this book is not a good way to learn about the process of transitioning. Also, there is very little factual information in this book about what is involved in a transition. Since that is not it's primary purpose, though, it still makes a great narrative.
Eye opening and beautifully written May 3, 2008
Raised a woman, Aaron Raz Link became a man - a gay man - at the age of 29. At least, he initiated the hormonal and surgical processes to alter his appearance toward a form closer to the person he had always felt he was inside. Because Link was trained as a scientist - specifically, taxonomy, the science of naming things - he is uniquely fit to analyze his unusual experience. It doesn't hurt that he's a beautiful writer as well as a thoughtful and witty one.
The book is nonfiction, he explains, and a memoir, but not autobiography: "It is a book about pieces that didn't fit the picture. As a result, the most confusing and difficult pieces play the largest roles." Strictly speaking, he writes, there is no such thing as a "sex change operation"; there are rather lots of little surgeries that were developed for other reasons, such as for badly mutilated soldiers, and infants and grownups whose bodies took an odd turn due to misbehaving hormones or cancer.
Link's analysis of his youthful fascination with movie monsters (they "were obviously the good guys"), of the Catch-22 of having to get himself diagnosed as mentally ill in order to qualify for the surgeries (legally speaking, "a mentally healthy person wouldn't want what I wanted"), and the absurdities of psychiatry and people's assumptions about gender roles, are all fascinating and well handled. There's even a kind of punch line: After an early lifetime of hating to be laughed at, following his sex reassignment, Link went to clown school.
Though a professor of English and women's studies who has been writing and publishing much longer than her son, Hilda Raz's less-than-a-third of the book is diffuse and less compelling - which probably reflects her passive and somewhat unwilling role in her son's transformation.
What Becomes You makes a terrific companion to Self-Made Man, lesbian journalist Norah Vincent's 2006 account of her three months dressing and living as a man. They're great food for any reader's thought.
 Compelling and new April 24, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
"What Becomes You" is fascinating, moving, educational and revealing. In this book Aaron and his mother examine their lives within the context of their experiences and expectations of gender, what it is and what it isn't, what it means and what it doesn't mean. This book avoids sentimentality and sensationalism---instead it is gentle, intelligent and intimate. Reading Aaron's section, I felt as if I were sitting beside him as he told me the story of his life, his emotions as a child growing up feeling always out of place in a female role, and his struggles as an adult who chose to change not simply his body but his relationship to the world. Reading his mother's section I experienced the roller-coaster of emotions that she felt during the years of Aaron's self-discovery and gender change and, along the way, undergoing her own trials with breast cancer. Throughout the book the authors' love and respect for one another's lives is palpable. This book is not just a "trans" story. It is the story of family, longing, love, loss, society, work, literature, healing and much more.
Thank you for the insight... March 25, 2007
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
I remember meeting Sarah many years ago.
Aaron has given me insights that will hopefully allow me to be a better friend to several folks who share her experiences, I plan to recommend the book, not just to these friends, but to their friends and famlies.
As a grandmother and great-grandmother, I share with Aaron the love of a wonderful person, his friend - my son. I thank him for the introduction, not only to Sarah, but now Aaron and the world he lives within. His book has furthered the limited education of this rural midwesterner, and I thank him so much for that.
And remember, Aaron, when you dig in the sand, fingers and flippers often bear a striking resemblance! But that doesn't mean a crime has been committed. Keep exploring, and keep writing.
An amazing Journey...with a fascinating person March 8, 2007
4 out of 4 found this review helpful
At first I was little reticent, fearing a lot of gay/anguished person trapped in the wrong body kind of stuff. Instead, I found the author's viewpoint startlingly original, and very much angst and dogma free. Aaron writes with a clear voice, and the little asides, and various characters he meets, and situations he ends up in...are seen from a wry and humorous point of view. Which is not to say there are not depths. Indeed, this book will definetly set you mind spinning as to just how we perceive ourselves, and how we let the world shape us. While the book is very good, I would love to see the author use this writing style to take on other projects. I think he has great potential. If you have any friends who are going thru big changes, this is a book I think they will like. I will definetly be buying it for some friends of mine. I rarely write reviews, but I think this is a very worthy book, and applaud the author's, honesty, and style.
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