What Becomes You (American Lives)

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.