Man Enough To Be A Woman - Jayne County (with Rupert Smith)

Good to get hold of this. Here’s another book you can study if you want to speculate on why particular individuals emerge as trans. I identify with Jayne so much, but there are many reasons why, and this autobiography lays out them all. The story she tells is about being pragmatic and knowing when enough was enough (though sometimes it’s a close-run thing), and still having a sense of the world, of belief, if not belief itself. I’m of a similar generation and I’ve also ended up making art, performance, theatre. Like Jayne I’ve always been a bit of an “edge” person, taking the less easy way and being prepared to settle in the margins, the far extremities where land meets sea and the really big picture starts. I’ve found myself in riots and on the rougher side of town. I’ve always been prone to provocation without letting shame get the better of me and compromise isn’t in my nature. As a result I, like Jayne, have never had to do some kind of awkward coming out – we were always exceptions to the rule. Nor have we made big secure money. At least we found our limits and didn’t self-destruct or self-harm. We admit to our mistakes and thrown-away opportunities. Most of all I identify with Jayne’s “between gender” self-location, which is not a moderate “I’ll just stop here, I think…” but co-existence, a proper fluidity with Wayne as publicly available as Jayne depending on circumstances. That’s queer for you. Well, that’s also me hitching my wagon to JC’s star but, of course there are differences too. I have never got to writhe on stage while spitting rock-vocals into the audience, nor have I worked in a brothel, nor have I been as nasty or obnoxious as he/she managed to be quite often in her life and career, and her tolerance for drink, drugs and dirt has far exceeded mine. Her cheekbones are better than mine and I never got what she hated about her nose, - it was that gurning chin with pursed lips which was the hick-boy give-away, surely? And that title – set me wondering if there is something just a teeny bit masculine about the impulse to transition. I don’t know – what do you think? In the end – and this edition of the book brings us up to the present, ie, 2022 – it’s a book about moderation, finding a dynamic middle something which allows for both extreme maximalism and shy fastidious retreat. Thanks, I guess, to a sturdy ego she could fail to function without actually malfunctioning. Starting life before gender definitions were formed and fixed JC has a wonderful lack of dogmatism and a down-to-earth freedom with language and pronouns. That’s the advantage of being a pioneer and the advantage of having lived through all of the post-war style-revolutions. On Stonewall she is a realist but without any scores to settle and in the later pages she places her sometimes quite epic story in a common-sense context without getting bombastic. If there’s a mark of a life well-lived that’s it, I think. Fortunately, with the assistance of Rupert Smith, this is also a life well-told and thereby a lesson to us all.