This Body I Wore

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A memoir of one woman's long journey to late transition, in the time before a visible community or accessible language might help her understand herself.Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, in many places far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn't even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch's This Body I Wore chronicles one woman's long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades."How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?" This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question Goetsch addresses with the complexity of lived reality.Goetsch brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and her forays into the cross-dressing subculture of New York in the 1980s and '90s. There these cross-dressers, nearly all of whom identified as straight men, risked their jobs and their safety to gather in secret spaces, giving expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many of them would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas and ugly ducklings of the trans community, largely ignored by history. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years? Goetsch has not written a transition memoir but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted.