This book is honest, intimate, and important. As a non-binary trans individual, I related to Juliet’s experience in many ways, while still learning a great deal from someone who is attune to the way literature, art, and politics influences our lived experiences from childhood through the various phases of our transitions. I highly recommend this read for anyone wanting to learn more about the trans experience, especially for trans women. I also appreciated the lens from outside of the US!

After having read memoirs like Nelson's Argonauts, this book disappointed me. I liked her account of the very quotidian experience of transness, of what it means to be trans in a still unforgiving, cruel world that continues to subject trans folks to violence. But in many ways, Jacques' book missed many opportunities to engage with trans theory and to think through Jacques' own experience. Repeatedly, Jacques mentions that she learned about and engaged with trans theory, but we get mostly brief, albeit accessible surveys of trans writing over the years. Her own personal narrative is punctuated by these brief interludes about theory, but there is very little conversation between these seemingly separate parts, which are actually deeply intertwined as Jacques herself implies. Jacques expresses her own concern about writing too individual an account that it can't be useful and accessible to trans readers grappling with their own experience, but I think she could have enabled her readers, academic or not, to engage with trans theory in a truly accessible way. If the personal is indeed political as Jacques says, her memoir could have much more powerfully highlighted this.

I wanted to love this as I’d heard really good things but after a brilliant start the book quickly devolved into repetitive descriptions of outfits she wore, films she watched and music she listened to and I lost interest. I was hoping for something that was written more from the heart.

4.5* - A little less football dialogue, and this would have been a 5* read.
(I understand why it was there, though, as Jaques is trying to dismantle the trans-stereotypes of hyper femininity/masculinity - I just find football personally a bit dull)
The interspersal of trans-theory and memoir was a clever touch, and I feel very under read/cultured in the face of Jaques breadth of cultural film and literary touchpoints!