Trans/Portraits

Starred review from September 1, 2015

This is the book that we've been waiting for. The transgender community has been in the spotlight throughout the past few years but the everyday lives led by trans people is less well known. The point of this book is to introduce readers to the broad experience of those lives. Shultz (writing, composition, New England Coll.) offers a contemporary oral portrait that is as significant a contribution as earlier works such as Kate Bornstein's transformative Gender Outlaw. In this case, we meet 34 individuals of various ages, ethnicities, social classes, and other parameters. The author begins by demonstrating the inadequacy of the language and the first encounters transgender people have with coming to find a "vocabulary I had been lacking." Interviews are framed with the issues trans individuals face: building community, personal safety, multiple identities, transitioning, and so on. The book could have been improved by supplementing verbal portraits with photographic ones but this may have been logistically or ethically difficult. VERDICT Unlike many books that use a similar technique, this one doesn't feel choppy. This deeply human title deserves a broad general and academic audience.--David Azzolina, Univ. of Pennsylvania Libs., Philadelphia

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

August 1, 2015
Made up almost exclusively of the words of 34 informants, the six chapters of Shultz's eye-opening survey constitute not so much an oral history as a state-of-society report, highly critical but hardly despondent, on how America is treating those who have transitioned from one sex and/or gender to the other. Shultz chose the 34 from many different parts of the U.S. and to include Native, African, Hispanic, Asian, and Pacific Island Americans; ages from teens to sixties; persons with physical and mental disabilities and/or chronic conditions; and a range of occupations, among them student, physician, mechanic, engineer, police, nurse, clergy, small-business owner, and unemployed. They talk about the special vocabulary of the trans community; personal transition experiences; needing caring support while transitioning; being trans and something else (black, movement-impaired, autistic, fat, etc.); feeling constantly, necessarily vulnerable; and becoming accidental activists. All recall times when the insensitivity and brutality of nontrans persons insulted and even physically injured them. Their successes as well as their grievances challenge ordinary gender conceptions.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)