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Sex Changes: A Memoir Of Marriage, Gender, And Moving On (2012)

by Christine Benvenuto(Favorite Author)

2.92 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0312649509 (ISBN13: 9780312649500)

languge

English

genre

Memoir & Autobiography

publisher

St. Martin's Press

review 1: Ms. Benvenuto as she states is not from the land of political correctness, she may be from the land of transphobic. The reason I didn't give this book one star is because it is an intresting story. You really do began to feel her sadness as she begins to see the changes in the man she married as he begins to make the transformation from he to she. The story drags on as it starts to become a little to much poor me. She really drives home the point of all the pain and emotional damage her husband caused their children. How him not wanting to keep it a secret ruined their children. Then she goes and writes a book about it. It really made me wonder how much any of this was about protecting her family or if that was just digs at her ex husband. I understand how one may be upset... more about their live wanting to change genders but she puts transgenders back years with her writing. She seems to want to write transgender off as a political statement or pollutants in the waters. I don't think she believes that someone can actually be born in the wrong body. One statement really took me back. She refers to a man with a ponytail as having a man ponytail. Today I didn't wear a woman ponytail I just wore a ponytail. And further more men have been wearing ponytails just as long as women. I think she is very stuck in gender roles and plays the victim.
review 2: This is one woman's story of a section of her life during which her husband of 20 years decided to live as a woman. It also includes her ensuing affair with another man.What struck me most about Christine Benvenuto's experience were two things she repeatedly emphasized: the complete character change that accompanied her husband Tracey's gender bending, and the seemingly unanimous unconditional support the community offered to Tracey.Tracey didn't only decide he felt like a woman and wanted to make the outside match the inside (his terms); he also became selfish, manipulative, controlling, and bullying. He essentially discounted the past 20 years of what seemed like a happy marriage and demanded Christine to admit that none of it was real. He neglected his responsibilities to their three children and tried to create inappropriate peer-type bonds with the two girls.This makes the second point even harder to swallow, the fact that in the name of political correctness, the neighbors and friends and fellow Jewish congregants basically told Christine that whatever Tracey was doing was okay because it was what he needed to do. By refusing to allow for the possibility that the way Tracey was moving forward in a new gender was selfish and destructive, the community failed to support Christine.But. Benvenuto is not faultless in this memoir, though she writes it as though she was. The love she finds after the dissolution of her marriage is a primarily sexual relationship (at least initially) with a married man. In what feels like weak justification, she describes his marriage as one of convenience; but she never delves into the question of whether she is doing to this man's wife the same thing Tracey did to her: destroying her happy life.I'm interested in the question of how spouses are affected by gender changes. Benvenuto highlights what I would think are common issues that arise for the spouse being left behind. But I want her to have written this memoir maybe ten years down the road, when she's gained a little more hindsight and doesn't feel the need to prove her worth as a woman (which is what it seemed like she was trying to do) by describing her later hyper-sexual encounters with a decidedly non-effeminate man. Although she has plenty of legitimate whine fodder, the often whiny tone chips away at the empathy the reader naturally wants to feel for her. less

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