This Body I Wore

December 1, 2021

An award-winning poet and essayist who taught at New York City's Stuyvesant High School for over two decades, Goetsch delivers a memoir not of transition but of living a trans life that unfolded over decades; she was active in New York's crossdressing subculture in the 1980s-90s but transitioned later. As she says, "How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?" Her story is thus personal while also running parallel to the emergence of the trans community in recent decades.

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March 15, 2022
A trans poet and essayist who transitioned later in life reflects on decades of discovering, reckoning with, and finally embracing her gender identity. Poet and author Goetsch opens with a section about her mid-20s, when she was living as a man whose public persona concealed severe depression, aching loneliness, and the cross-dressing as a woman that exhilarated and confused her as well as isolated her from the human connection she craved. While studying at Wesleyan in the 1980s, the author tried desperately to understand herself and her "unmoored" perception of gender, struggling with feelings for which there were few avenues of expression at the time. At the beginning of the book, she includes a note about the language she uses throughout, which reflects the often offensive attitudes of the time period she describes. The narrative follows a nonlinear structure, with chapters indicated by years as well as titles. In the second part of the book, Goetsch returns to her childhood and adolescence, marked by family dysfunction, bullying, abuse, and loneliness, and the third section delves into the last significant relationships the author had with women while living as a man, her blossoming affinities for poetry and Buddhism, and the process of coming out as trans at age 50. Goetsch recalls periods and important locations in her life with rich, compelling detail, but sometimes her revelries are sprawling and unevenly paced. The prose is often lovely and emotionally affecting, as when she describes writing a painful goodbye to an ex-girlfriend's sons after the breakup, and her insights into what it means to be trans, both on a personal and societal level, are valuable. Readers may find her blunt quips about transphobia even within the queer community sadly relevant, highlighting how much work still needs to be done: "The institutional transphobia was appalling: L, G, and B didn't give a fuck about T." A valuable memoir enriched by years of personal and societal insight into the fraught subject of gender identity.

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March 28, 2022
Traversing several decades and much societal change, poet Goetsch (The Job of Being Everybody) fashions a brilliant and tapestried story of her late-in-life gender transition. As a young, assigned-male cross-dresser in 1987 New York City, Goetsch struggled to feel like she belonged. Even when the internet brought “millions of closeted people” unprecedented community in the ’90s, Goetsch writes, her reticence to settle on a fixed identity in her 30s isolated her. Still, she confesses, “I’d fantasized all my life about being a girl.” Pulled between the false promise of stability that masculinity offered and the terrifying freedom she found in feminine expression, Goetsch traces how she came to reconcile her torn selves, reckoning with the specters of an abusive childhood, navigating sexual obstacles in her adulthood, discovering Tibetan Buddhism, and, eventually, finding herself as a woman at age 50. Balancing profound personal revelations (“Gender may be the only category of human experience where what you long to be is what you are”) with cogent analysis of cultural gender narratives—including the “forced feminization” trope, “where a male gets into some predicament that makes it necessary to present as a female” (as seen in Some Like It Hot and Mrs. Doubtfire)—she constructs a gorgeous self-portrait that defies categorization. The result obliterates binary confines around gender with breathtaking finesse.

Starred review from April 1, 2022

Goetsch, an award-winning essayist and poet, captivates and educates with this enthralling memoir/coming-out story. Told with unique eloquence and tenderness, the memoir follows the emotional and physical transition of someone who spent 50years living in someone else's skin. Goetsch's lyrical talent mesmerizes with an honest and heartfelt recall of the crossdressing culture of the 1980s, as well as her openness about the evolution of her trans community over the span of several decades. Her memoir opens a window into the cultural evolution of trans communities, gender identity, authenticity, and mental health, with nothing held back as she ascends shame through intimacy. Hope blooms within these pages. Readers will witness first-hand the tragedy of living a life closeted and the miracle of discovering it's never too late to shed your old skin and become the person you were always meant to be. VERDICT Powerful and beautifully written, this is a mesmerizing memoir and will appeal to fans of Melissa Febos and Roxane Gay.--Alana R. Quarles

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