This book is self-identified beneath the title as a memoir. A memoir is an autobiographical recollection. Considering that the author was still quite young at the time of publication, it should come as no surprise that the recollection is primarily devoted to the author’s childhood, adolescence and immediate post-adolescent life. The story begins with a flash-forward of sorts that precedes the title page. It is 2013, when the author is 24-years-old and heading off to school in San Francisco to pursue a Master’s Degree in Comics.
The story proper then flashes back to 1992 when the entire family moved into a home in the rural north of California lacking electricity and even modern indoor toilets. We quickly learn of the author’s rather bohemian lifestyle as the child of parents struggling mightily to keep the flower children wing of hippiedom alive and well at least a decade after most had transformed into Reagan-voting yuppies. The portrait of the author’s childhood is particularly notable for thing especially in consideration of future career choices: living in a state of total illiteracy until discovering the world of Harry Potter at age eleven. This lack of learning to read becomes symbolic of an entire childhood spent learning—or being taught—the most commonplace things that other biological girls learn almost as a matter of rote: not to take off shirts at the beach like the boys, the preference for shaving legs, and what to expect about periods.
The centerpiece of the story is not the unusual pursuit of a Master’s Degree in Comics as one might expect given the prefatory flash-forward, but rather the author’s ever-expanding awareness of gender expectations and the inability to comfortably find a niche within those expectations at any level. In addition to following the narrative trek of leaning hard into the fantasy/scifi genres of fiction, for instance, the reader is also introduced to some very graphic imagery of not dealing exactly well with the onset of menstruation. In addition to learning about the extraordinarily questionable curricula of Waldorf Schools, the reader also is also exposed to various crushes upon girls, boys, boy bands, and androgynous Olympic skating champions.
Throughout, the author is exposed to more possibilities within the gender/sexuality spectrum which includes reading literature by and about homosexuals, attending Queer-Straight Alliance meetings on the high school campus, discovering the music of David Bowie, learning of the existence of the word transgender, and fantasizing about having an ambiguously male twin that completed the seemingly incompleteness of gender construction at the person level. Along the way, the narrator gradually adapts to presenting a more male-centric appearance to the world while also learning that younger sister Phoebe had picked up the gender fluidity at work long before the author worked it out.
Along the way, the author begins to identify with a number of role models that spell out the situation pretty clearly. In addition to Bowie, there is Oscar Wilde and Johnny Weir. The gender subversion of these heroes—and the lack of any equitable heroines—leads directly through a path of sexual experimentation with lesbian cross-gender interaction (the notorious scene of biological girls using a strap-on toy to simulate having a penis allowing for the simulation of a certain sex act otherwise impossible to duplicate) and the adoption of more and more elements of clothing, fashion or style for the purpose of diminishing femininity and enhancing masculinity.
Eventually, the author arrives at a long-delayed point of recognition that a word exists to describe precisely the circumstances of the gender-based confusion which has dogged every step of the story. After several intense conversations with friends and family, a handful of mostly unsatisfying sexual experimentations, and a rational examination and analytic exploration of every possible alternative on the gender spectrum and why none of them seemed to fit, the answer finally arrives courtesy of Wikipedia’s definition of autoandrophilia. This is to many who don’t understand the relief that comes to those who immediately recognize the term as having described almost their entire life up to that moment a controversial concept as it describes a quite specific sort of transgender experience in which a person biologically female becomes sexually aroused by the idea of being a man. (The term for a man who is sexually aroused by the idea of becoming a woman is androgynephilia.)
Having finally come to terms with a means of self-identification with the discovery of autoandrophilia---“I never knew there was a word for that. For me.”—the author embarks upon the next stage of the journey: public identification. After first being exposed to the issue of pronoun misplacement in the form of a teacher who requested to be identified as “they” the author is faced with a series of unhappy incidents with a variety of people, not least family members, insisting upon using female references like “she” or “ladies” when addressing not by name. Ultimately, this obstruction to complete identification as gender non-binary is solved—to a point—by the adoption of the Spivak pronoun subset which substitutes “e” for he and she, “em” for them, and “eir” for their.
The final stage of gender freedom comes with the introduction the book Touching a Nerve by Patricia Churchland. It is through Churchland’s work that the author is able to put the muscle of objective science behind subjective anecdotal evidence. Direct quotes from Churchland’s book about chromosomes, gonads, testosterone, enzymes and hormones are presented with illustrations like the rest of the book, but in the form of a more scholarly academic paper completely with page references. The upshot, however, could not be less formal: “Lady Gaga was right—I was born this way.”
