Running Head What Becomes You i American Lives Series editor: Tobias Wolff What Becomes You 66GDCG6OA> Publication of this volume was assisted by The Virginia Faulkner Fund, established in memory of Virginia Faulkner, editor in chief of the University of Nebraska Press. “Looking at Aaron” originally appeared in Creative Nonfiction (Fall ): –. “Scars” originally appeared in GENDER- qUEER: Voices from beyond the Sexual Binary, edited by Joan Nestle, Clare How- ell, and Riki Wilchins (Los Angeles: Alyson Press, ). “Stock” originally appeared in Fourth Genre , no. (Fall ): –, published by Michigan State University Press. © by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz All rights reserved. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Link, Aaron Raz , – What becomes you / Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz. p. cm. — (American lives) >H7C (cloth : alkaline paper) >H7C (cloth : alkaline paper) . Link, Aaron Raz , – . Female- to-male transsexuals—United States. . Jewish transsexuals—United States. . Transsexualism—United States. . Gender identity—United States. . Raz, Hilda. . Parents of transsexuals —United States. I. Raz, Hilda. II. Title. =F ..A6 .'—dc Set in Minion by Kim Essman. Designed by A. Shahan. I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit? | =:CGN96K>9I=DG:6J , Walden Contents Preface ix Acknowledgments xiii 66GDCG6OA> Stock Bias Pity and Laughter Girls Just Want to Have Fun Reading Garber Looking at Aaron Watching Aaron Teach Three-Minute Autobiography Preface What Becomes You has taken us ten years to write. One of the authors is a teacher, magazine editor, poet, and a participant in public conversations about women’s lives and work. The other is a sci- entist, teacher, and historian as well as a performer, an investigator of our myths of difference—status, race, gender, sex. We have chosen to write this book not from a theoretical perspective but from a lifetime of family and professional collaboration. Part of our contribution is the reminder that life explodes all theories. Our best teachers in living and writing this book have not been those who offer neatly bounded abstract explanations, regardless of intellectu- al discipline or radical/conservative flavor. The real experts were messily making a fuss—performing on stages, pages, and the streets, wearing clown noses, mastering the arts of illness, exploring the body’s limits, dancing in wheelchairs, representing themselves in multiple colors, cultures, and tongues. This book represents a fragment of that work, a forty-year col- laboration between the authors in the fine art of making a fuss—or, para- phrasing Emile Zola—living out loud. What Becomes You is a work of nonfiction. Nonfiction is a funny word. It tells us in bold and definite terms what something isn’t while leaving us completely in the dark about what it is. But, as they used to say on Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, all the events here, whether actual or created, depict authenticated facts. Aaron Raz Link did indeed have a sex change, and Hilda Raz did in- deed give birth to him, with original equipment, and we did indeed write this book. But this book is a work of creative nonfiction. While the events described actually happened (and if you buy this book you will indeed find a graphic and accurate description of his penis), the interpretations of events by the characters with our names are not always those of the au- thors. And sometimes we don’t agree with them, or each other. The Big Truth we learned (okay, there are five more Big Truths hidden in the text, ix