Gender journey
A brave memoir of transition
Faking It: My Life in Transition by Kyle Mewburn (Penguin, $38)
Reviewed by Renata Hopkins In the prelude to Faking It: My Life in Transition, author Kyle Mewburn awaits a consultation with the surgeon who will ‘‘peel off my face, grind down portions of my skull, then nip, tuck, stitch and staple my new face into place’’.
This pivotal event fades to black as the anaesthetic for the FFS procedure – facial feminisation surgery – takes effect and only resumes towards the end of the memoir. In the intervening chapters, Mewburn revisits 50 years of life in transition – from the struggle and strain of ‘‘faking it’’ as a boy and a man, to the transformative decision to live openly as a transgender woman.
Mewburn, a celebrated children’s author, tells her story with directness and humour. She transports the reader back to the stifling conservatism of suburban Brisbane in the 1960s and ‘70s to meet the little boy who felt like ‘‘strawberry jam in a can marked spinach’’.
There’s real pain here as Mewburn recalls the secrecy, repression and violence running beneath the surface of family life, dynamics that shaped the psyche of the young ‘‘boy Kyle’’ and taught habits of detachment and shame that would prove hard to break.
But she also finds comedy in the ironies offered up by that era and culture.
Recalling an episode in which a teenaged Kyle sneaks his mother’s clothes and wig for a daring cross-dressing excursion to the mall, she notes that: ‘‘spare hair was, rather helpfully, a standard accessory in most women’s wardrobes at the time.’’
The memoir continues through university, work, the big OE, and first love with ‘‘born rule-breaker’’ Marion. The pair soon marry, but although the intimacy of their relationship is a revelation, Mewburn remains unable to reveal her gender dysphoria and the weight of that secret begins to take a toll.
Shortly after the couple’s travels land them in New Zealand, growing tensions cause them to separate, an event that triggers Mewburn’s familiar selfloathing.
This time, however, a less punishing instinct pushes back: ‘‘I did deserve happiness. I did deserve love. I may have been a liar, but only out of necessity.’’
This kinder impulse underpins a long journey towards self-acceptance, a period that also sees a parallel means of self-expression develop as Mewburn’s writing career takes shape.
The affirmation that comes from publishing, finding an enthusiastic young audience and, later, from winning literary awards, helps Mewburn to inhabit a persona sufficiently authentic that ‘‘at times I even imagined that it was enough’’. But this conditional freedom only serves to intensify the sense of a life lived in limbo until, finally, a crisis forces Mewburn to come out to Marion as transgender.
The remarkable compassion and support with which Marion responds makes her the other heroine of this story.
As Mewburn gradually comes out to other family and friends, she’s met with a heartening degree of support and acceptance. Nonetheless, she’s clear to point out that this is no Cinderella fairytale complete with the aspirational soundtrack accompanying the transition stories she watched online in preparation for FFS.
While there are huge rewards in the freedom and authenticity Mewburn feels post-transition, she bluntly admits, ‘‘Being trans is often a b .... ’’.
There’s the shock of encountering sexism and misogyny firsthand, as well as episodes of transphobia – some stemming from ignorance, others from a more sinister intent to hurt. While these are, thankfully, less common for Mewburn than are the many expressions of empathy, they’re a reminder of the distress and harm that limiting concepts of gender continue to cause.
Ultimately, this brave and revealing story asserts that no life should be constrained by lazy, simplistic binaries. When no-one has to fake it – when everyone can be real, complex, and contradictory – we are all of us the better for it.