The Woman I Was Not Born to Be: A Transsexual Journey (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781566398404)

Told with humor and flair, this is the autobiography of one transsexual's wild ride from boyhood as Alfred Brevard ("Buddy") Crenshaw in rural Tennessee to voluptuous female entertainer in Hollywood. Aleshia Brevard, as she is now known, underwent transitional surgery in Los Angeles in 1962, one of the first such operations in the United States. (The famous sexual surgery pioneer Harry Benjamin himself broke the news to Brevard's parents.)

Under the stage name Lee Shaw, Brevard worked as a drag queen at Finocchio's, a San Francisco club, doing Marilyn Monroe impersonations. (Like Marilyn, she sought romance all the time and had a string of entanglements with men.) Later, she worked as a stripper in Reno and as a Playboy Bunny at the Sunset Strip hutch.

After playing opposite Don Knotts in the movie The Love God, Brevard appeared in other films and broke into TV as a regular on the Red Skelton Show. She created the role of Tex on the daytime soap opera One Life To Live. As a woman, Brevard returned to teach theater at East Tennessee State, the same university she had attended as a boy.

This memoir is a rare pre-Women's Movement account of coming to terms with gender identity. Brevard writes frankly about the degree to which she organized her life around pleasing men, and how absurd it all seems to her now.

Author: Aleshia Brevard
ISBN-10: 1566398401
ISBN-13: 9781566398404
Publisher: Temple University Press
Language: English
Published: 02/15/2001
Pages: 249
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.80lbs
Size: 9.03h x 5.96w x 0.50d

Review Citation(s):
Publishers Weekly 11/20/2000 pg. 53
Booklist 02/15/2001 pg. 1089
Library Journal 04/15/2001 pg. 122