To say the young K.K.’s home life was difficult would be an understatement. She was sexually assaulted as a young child, and her father was deported to his native Guyana when K.K. was a baby. Meanwhile, her mother had been diagnosed with bipolar disorder yet refused treatment and, in the author’s words, “would bully and shame us [her children] into doing what she wanted.” The woman also became a drug addict and held negative views of homosexuality, characterizing the feelings the teenage K.K. was experiencing as sickness. K.K. strategized to find ways of dealing with her own emerging sexuality—she conceived of herself as bisexual, and then identified as a gay male—that would be acceptable to her mother, but without success. A spell of “praying the gay away” in the Southern Baptist church where the family worshipped did no good. Around this time, K.K. began to show symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder.
But BRAVE: Story of a Trans Woman dwells more on the author’s transition from a man to a woman than on childhood trauma. Noting that it's taboo to disclose family secrets in the Black community, K.K. kept the dysfunctions of her home to herself and left for college to become a nurse. Escort work followed, and then the dawning realization that she was, in fact, transgender. The epiphany was gradual, as K.K., who had naturally androgynous features, observed how people treated her differently when they assumed she was female. Becoming a drag queen, K.K. was genuinely mystified when others assumed she had begun to transition before it even occurred to her that she might do so. Surgery followed, as well as a tumultuous love life (a toxic relationship with one man in particular dominates the final third of the book).
It is almost a cliché to recognize the disarmingly honest streak in these sorts of memoirs, but K.K. is open to a fault about her steps and missteps—the latter including taking street-bought hormones and getting unofficial silicone injections that (as she admits) fortunately did not lead to serious illness. In the same way, K.K. describes some of her sexual encounters both during and after her time as an escort in graphic detail (on occasion, unnecessarily). The insights into the process of transitioning are fascinating. The only real issue is the inclusion of poems about K.K.'s tribulations, which, though doubtless meaningful to the author, distract somewhat from BRAVE's status as a compelling and engrossing memoir.
Written by K.K., BRAVE: Story of a Trans Woman offers piquant commentary on the chaotic, harrowing, but ultimately uplifting story of a trans woman's journey of sexual discovery and transition.
~ Craig Jones for IndieReader