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Considering that Norah Vincent has been bashing the transgendered for years, refusing to allow any legitimacy to their very difficult lives, one might have hoped that a quasi-transgender experience such as this could break through her prejudice, allow her to understand what a tough existence the transgendered have to lead. I can't tell from this review if she ever honestly faced up to these implications of her experiment. When she said her female gender identity was determined by her brain, she might have reflected that the female gender identity of transwomen is just as undeniable in their brains too, just as immutable and intractable. This could have been an opportunity for her to drop her prejudice and see transwomen as humans who suffer constantly, year after year, the way she did. But she could go back to her regular life afterward. Transgender is a lifetime sentence with no reprieve.
When John Howard Griffin's book Black Like Me caused a sensation in the Sixties, Malcolm X remarked: imagine what it's like for blacks who can't quit being black like Griffin did! Race was the big national issue back then, and Grace Halsell should be remembered for Soul Sister, the female answer to Black Like Me. Maybe in the present day, gender issues are coming to the forefront of the American mind, and this book for all its awkwardness around gender is a worthwhile exploration of matters that intimately concern us all, as Andrew O'Hehir sensed, the very meaning of being human.
What this book brought home to me is how I was never male... even though I was supposed to be male growing up. The male worldview that seems utterly alien to a woman like Norah Vincent was always just as alien to me, I never could fit into it. If only she could understand that I can't be male any more than she did, and if I were to be forced into maleness against my will, I would wind up as mentally ill as she did, and for very similar reasons. I had to openly come out as female to save my sanity. I can only hope that the insights gained by this experience would allow N.V. to lose her transphobia and accept us as human beings too.
