{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.03273040482342808, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0, 'mean_word_length': 5.875739644970414, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
“Bear Witness” and “Build Legacies”: Twentieth- and Twenty-First-Century Trans* Autobiography

ABSTRACT After examining the historical tradition of twentieth-century autobiography by transsexual-identified writers, this article analyzes two contemporary life narratives: Alex Drummond's Grrl Alex: A Personal Journey to a Transgender Identity and Jennifer Finney Boylan's I'm Looking Through You: Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir. In contrast to earlier autobiographers, Drummond and Boylan representatively demonstrate a new era of trans* epistemology, which does not rely on the wrong-body model as the foundational aspect of trans* existence. Boylan remembers her haunting past, which inevitably leads her to seek medical intervention, while Drummond situates her self-actualized identity in opposition to medical discourse. Although their stories differ, their perspectives reflect similarly radical conceptions of gender. Because they narrate continuous subjects rather than subjects split between pre- and post-transition, Drummond and Boylan put forth a new way to understand and narrate trans* identity by exploring rather than justifying trans* experience.