Becoming Drusilla: One Life, Two Friends, Three Genders (Paperba

  • October 20, 2011 10:42 PM BST

    Autobiographies of Transsexuals tend to end up in a standard kind of way, you see the struggles, you see the need to conform and see an individual that seemingly breaks the shackles of a previous part of life, and throws them away. I often feel sad about this, for example Roberta Cowell felt the overwhelming need to stop liking motor cars because she lost an interest in them. It has always comes across to me it seemed she felt it was the right thing to do, and so the need to conform made her shun things she liked rather than embrace her inner self. Happily she allowed her liking to come back but in many other books I have seen people throw a whole chapter of their life away, as though it never belonged to the. With Dru in "Becoming Drusilla" you get to see a more familiar viewpoint, that it isn't a sin to still like things you always have, that many transsexuals keep an element of femininity and Masculinity of their previous part of life with them, something no different to any other man or woman.

     

    Dru still likes the things she did before, she likes to canoe, to fix motor cars, to go hiking, to work on ships in engine rooms, and drink pints of Beer, all considered manly things to do. For the average person even in our more liberal way of life in the western world this still looks very wrong in the sense of conforming, there is still a perceived way of being who you should be. When someone transitions it is not just difficult for that person, but for friends, partners and families.