{"id":141,"date":"2007-06-24T20:09:54","date_gmt":"2007-06-25T00:09:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lettersandsodas.com\/books-test\/?p=141"},"modified":"2007-06-24T20:09:54","modified_gmt":"2007-06-25T00:09:54","slug":"what-becomes-you-by-aaron-raz-link-hilda-razuniversity-of-nebraska-press-2007","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/what-becomes-you-by-aaron-raz-link-hilda-razuniversity-of-nebraska-press-2007\/","title":{"rendered":"What Becomes You by Aaron Raz Link & Hilda RazUniversity of Nebraska Press, 2007"},"content":{"rendered":"

I first read about What Becomes You<\/em> in a post on the University of Nebraska Press blog<\/a> back in April, and was pleased to find that the Brooklyn Public Library had ordered a copy. It’s a smart, well-written book, a memoir in two parts: the first part by Aaron, born Sarah, and the second by his mother.<\/p>\n

Aaron writes about growing up trans without having the framework to identify as such: watching monster movies and identifying with the monster, watching Rebel Without a Cause<\/em> and identifying with Sal Mineo. Aaron is a scientist by training and writes about taxonomy: naming, ordering, classifying the natural world. He writes about collecting acorns as a kid, watching insects. He also writes about surgery: wanting it, getting it, the process that trans people have to go through to get it. (“According to the rules of the evaluating psychiatrist’s job, if he had decided that I was mentally healthy, I would not have been allowed to have surgery, because a mentally healthy person wouldn’t want what I wanted. I made it clear to him that I wanted surgery. He diagnosed me as mentally ill. I thanked him” (p 141).)<\/p>\n

Hilda, in the second part of the book, writes about having thought she had a son and a daughter, realizing she has two sons. She’s a professor and a scholar, a woman who came of age with feminism, with the idea of a community of women, with a certain kind of gender solidarity. She’d imagined Sarah as part of a new generation of women, with lessons to learn from the older generations and lessons to teach them: she told Sarah stories of her own life, of her mother’s life, of her grandmother’s life. She writes about figuring out what Aaron has to do with those stories, what lessons he might learn from her, what he might have to teach her.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I first read about What Becomes You in a post on the University of Nebraska Press blog back in April, and was pleased to find that the Brooklyn Public Library had ordered a copy. It’s a smart, well-written book, a memoir in two parts: the first part by Aaron, born Sarah, and the second by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-141","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nonfiction"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=141"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/141\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=141"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=141"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lettersandsodas.com\/books\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=141"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}