The LGBTQIA community has a history of reclaiming words. Slurs once used to shame and silence have become declarations of pride, as I saw recently during Dublin’s annual Pride celebrations, with self-proclaimed queers, faeries, and dykes all taking to the streets in beautiful technicolour. Chloe Schwenke has titled her moving memoir of her gender transition with a word used many times against her which she wishes to reclaim. For her, selfishness is the ultimate goal, not a source of shame or guilt: “It doesn’t get any more basic than ‘self.’ Unless we are self-ish, we are not present in the world.” Her articulate and honest story of how she has forged her own path towards full selfhood leaves the reader with a deep connection to this writer’s likeable voice as well as raising many questions as to how society deals with the complexities of gender in the 21st century.
Schwenke is a very accomplished person. Having originally trained as an architect, she became an international development practitioner and worked for more than fifteen years in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East before being selected by the Obama administration as a senior political appointee advising on human rights in Africa, and on LGBTQ issues worldwide. She has also held senior positions at the leading human rights organizations Freedom House and the International Center for Research on Women, and currently serves as an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland. Her main focus in her varied work is advocating for universal human dignity, work which has become very personal since her transition. Though her female sensibility was present throughout her life, Schwenke only fully acknowledged her transgender status in her fifties when an intelligent therapist, treating her for hitherto undiagnosable emotional turmoil, had the insight to ask if she ever thought she might be a woman. Schwenke at that time was “Stephen” with a wife and two young children, but the question lit a spark which resulted in a “fraught, turbulent, lonely crossing.” As she writes in her clear and calm prose, “there is a limit to how many times someone can look in the mirror and see someone else looking back at them.”
Schwenke’s transition was fraught with enormous pain and difficulty. I was deeply affected by the description of her coming out to her children, the exact details of which are “far too tender and too private to relay in any detail.” The evening of their initial conversation her young son begs her to wait until he is grown up and she must calmly explain that this would be impossible. It is not a choice for her but an acute matter of life and death. Her struggle to find a settled identity as a “transgender quasi-mom” for whom society has no proper name within her now-adult children’s lives is teased out with humble dignity. Schwenke’s compassion for her wife Christine, who was being “incrementally widowed” during her transition is genuine and palpable. Christine remains a close and loyal friend despite their marriage ending and is currently pursuing doctoral studies so she can begin research on the very understudied plight of spouses and children of transgender persons. Schwenke also gives details of how her wider family relationships, friendships, employment oppourtunities and dating prospects have been affected by her transition. No aspect of her life is recognisable by the time she legally becomes Chloe, but she is strengthened by the fact that she can finally look in the mirror and see her true self.
SELF-ish is rich in insight and details but is unfortunately structured. The final third becomes strangely repetitive and could have been replaced with a mention of pioneering transgender women such as Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Riviera to elevate the book from pure memoir into contextualised societal commentary. Schwenke does dip gingerly into the waters of gender theory by mentioning Judith Butler but this barely lasts one page. She makes the case for questioning the place of the “T” in the LBGTQ+ acronym, finding fault in the conflation of sexuality and gender dysphoria, but this discussion is again brief. Presenting theoretical arguments is not, however, the purpose of this book. It is about Schwenke’s personal experience and the most striking sections contain the unexpected incidents along her journey. Examples include her emotional response to finally legally changing her name which was expected to be a feeling of relief, and her lasting connection with her electrolysis practitioner. The complexity of the trans experience is illustrated with brave honesty in an account of attending an event where she sits at a table with other transwomen who are not “passing” (a term she finds problematic) and she is confronted with her worst fear of being seen as “a man in a dress.” It is Schwenke’s consistent honesty which overrides the book’s weaknesses and makes it a highly recommendable treatise on self-compassion, Quaker stoicism (her faith is the centre of her life) and being self-ish no matter what.
Schwenke admits that her account is not conclusive—“When you’ve heard one transwoman’s story you’ve heard . . . one transwoman’s story”—and has accepted that she will be constantly coming to terms with and reevaluating her transgender identity. The calm tone of the book in contrast to the pain it chronicles emphasises Schwenke’s quest for dignity, not just for herself, but for all marginalised and unrepresented persons. She advises the reader that “dignity, like justice, may work well as a general concept for crafting speeches and slogans, but it really only starts to make a difference when you connect with the look-them-in-the-eyes part of human dignity.” With SELF-ish Schwenke asks us to look her in the eyes and I found it impossible to look away.
Buy SELF-ish: A Transgender Awakening (Red Hen, 2018) here.
