This Body I Wore: A Memoir

Pushcart Prize-winner Diana Goetsch's This Body I Wore is a memoir of a long journey to late transition, in an era before the modern social network of real community or a language about gender identity could help.

"How can you spend your life face to face with an essential truth about yourself and still not see it?"

This is a question people in general often ask of trans people, and a question this book addresses with the complexity of lived reality. Long before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time magazine, 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.

Goetsch brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at Stuyvesant High School, and her forays into the crossdressing subculture of New York in the 1980s and 90s. There these crossdressers, 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 these people would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas and ugly ducks of the trans community, largely ignored by history. All too often trans lives are reduced to "before/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.