Becoming Drusilla - Richard Beard

I picked up my copy of this book from a Help Yourself table at work but then thought no more about it for a long time. It would I guess have been about 2010 and trans was coming into media prominence so people were starting to step up and tell their stories. This was nothing compared to the publishing deluge we are now experiencing but it felt a bit much to me, as though all you had to tell your story and it would be in print, - very much a bandwagon to jump on. As it turned out there weren’t so many books as it seemed and “Becoming Drusilla”, when I finally got round to reading it, turned out to be much more than a pedestrian transitioning tale (although its narrative does turn out to be literally pedestrian). It is an account of transitioning written not by Drusilla Marland but by Richard Beard an established writer and longstanding close friend of Dru/Drew. Early on you begin to wonder if this is really a book about Richard who has set himself to write an account of his mission to understand what is happening in his friend’s life, and of course to get it published. Writer’s opportunism? You wonder, and for a long time it seems as if Richard’s mental wrestling is going to take centre-stage throughout. Whose story is this, and whose story-arc will the book follow? Gradually though the balance shifts, and Drew, then Dru, then Drusilla, comes into focus, and the two friends set off on a walk-and-camp expedition across Wales, an experience which will summon up a lot of the practicalities and issues which were the province of transition at the turn of the decade. At this point it takes on in earnest the job of understanding. Richard’s friendly interrogations don’t always yield easy (or any) answers, but his side research and observations and the excavation of Dru’s personal history all combine to validate the medical transition which has happened barely months before the journey, and put it into some kind of context. Dru is never fully in the spotlight but this serves to remind us of a simple truth, - that transitioning is both heroic and prosaic, and it’s the messy, complicated but ordinary and undramatic dimension of it all which matters most to most people. There are, for example, the practicalities of taking on a further gender, not least on a rainy walk or in a tent or pub-restaurant. There are the experiences of being taken both for who you intend to be and who you don’t intend to be, the shifting shoals of passing in public. There is the strain of definitions and the failure of words and language to express the uniqueness and individuality of the transitional moments. And there is the challenge of engaging with a real someone, - not a case-study - someone who seems to have almost none of the established characteristics of a transitioner as depicted in the media of the time. Richard’s journey then becomes necessary for us to understand and to relish both the uniqueness and the typicality of Dru’s “becoming”. Actually Dru is subtly there in the book and in an unmediated way. The illustrations and short poems which head the chapters are hers and they have a clarity which offsets Richard’s sometimes floundering ruminations and restless questions. And we understand that the process of becoming is not the cliched drama of big selfish moments but slow and incremental, almost by nature understated, not clear and well-defined but vague and submerged. Life is erroneous and funny and messy and mostly in-between. In the end Richard Beard “gets” Drusilla Marland, - “Dru is a girl who likes boy things who was [mistakenly] born into a boy’s body”. And then he can get on with the job of being a writer. At that job he is a pro – the narrative reaches its climax in the engine-room of a Cross-Channel ferry and its ending with prayer in a church. Poetry and drama are invested in it all, and although you suspect that there has been some narrative grooming to get Dru’s story into a nicely-shaped journey-structure, the writing has been careful and considerate, detailed, sometimes funny and finally empathetic. It was about Drusilla after all. The trans she is now is “of” her former self, an emergence, an addition, a completion perhaps. The book was also after all about Becoming . Despite my period of neglecting it I was glad to have finally met the book. It is written for people who are interested in transgender which should be everybody, and that’s what I think TReasured is for. For every trans of any definition there must be many friends, as many as possible, and here is understanding arrived at through friendship.