Sunday, December 23, 2012
T Cooper's book tackles the experience of being transgender
By A.J. Kiyoizumi | Staff
http://www.dailycal.org/2012/12/23/t-coopers-book-tackles-the-experience-of-being-transgender/In his new book, T Cooper recounts an interview with a journalist about one of his previous works. After an interview in which the journalist was overly interested in his life (even off the record), Cooper read the published story and was dismayed to see that the majority of the article talked of his personal life rather than his book. Even though his life is intriguing — he was anatomically born a female but is truly a heterosexual male — Cooper saw the move as a betrayal. It's not that he was ashamed, but the article's focus kicked away the literature that he crafted for years in favor of the spectacle that is his personal life.
This anecdote can't be ignored when writing about his newest release, "Real Man Adventures," which describes his gender and sexuality. The book is a conglomeration of interviews and short chapters that tackle one issue at a time for Cooper as a transgender man. Violence, marriage, children, side-effects of hormones — even airport security is an issue that worries a transgender person more than often. He says that "everything is at stake, pretty much all of the time ... It will almost always come up some way, internally or externally, benignly or potentially threateningly."
