Customer Reviews

Branded T

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Here is an unusual book. In simple terms, it is a personal transsexual experience. But it is so much more. It is the story of the transsexual experience on the streets of New York from the early 1970s through the beginning of the new millennium. It is the story of the sleazy side of New York during the same period, seen through the eyes and experiences of a transsexual. And, it is an inspirational story of a courageous transsexual person surviving the streets to become a highly-respected professional social worker and political activist.
Rosalyne Blumenstein was identified male at birth. She was introduced to shame by five years old when she dressed female with dress-up clothes provided in kindergarten. She left school and home at age 13, and spent the majority of her next 18 years working in New York's famous (infamous?) sex industry. She experienced life on the street as a prostitute, drug user, and peep-show girl.
Then she overcame her drug addiction. She returned to the peep show business clean for another seven years, supporting herself through college and graduate school with her earnings and scholarships. She was an early participant in the Gender Identity Project within Mental Health and Social Services at the Lesbian and Gay Community Services Center of New York. By March 1996, she became the first ever Director of the project.
The book is somewhat disjointed, making it difficult to read straight through. It is best read in segments, and is organized in a way to facilitate reading in that fashion. Life on the streets and in the clubs is related in great and intimate detail. Some will find both the language and discussions offensive, but it reflects the environment where Ms. Blumenstein spent much of her life. No one without this experience can really understand what it was like or what strength and courage it required to survive and overcome it.
As a volunteer at the Center, Ms. Blumenstein realized how out of touch she was without a formal education. She also realized that most of those she worked with were truly out of touch without her informal (street) education. Her collegiate success built on her transsexual experience to make her uniquely-qualified for her varied mental health and social services, especially for the marginalized members of our gender communities.
"This book is about pain, it's about celebration, it's about taking risks, its about going crazy, and it's about being fabulous and adventurous" It is an inspirational success story of a young woman originally designated male overcoming this incorrect designation, overcoming drug and alcohol abuse, and overcoming her life on the streets of New York to become a leader in HIV/AIDS prevention, education and outreach to all LGBT, and many other services to various marginalized communities.

I knew Roz Blumenstein during the 1990s, when she was Director of the Gender Identity Project of the Gay & Lesbian Community Center of New York. I didn't know, until she asked me to read a pre-release copy of her book Branded T, that she was simultaneously working in the peep shows on Broadway. In print, I saw a different side of Ms. Blumenstein-- a side that was struggling with issues of self-worth and self-discovery. I had thought she had it SO together!

It takes great courage to tell the world of our secret struggles, our insecurities, our private fears, our little pockets of craziness. Ms. Blumenstein has that courage. She has given us a book that transcends her gender issue and speaks to the human spirit. As one reviewer at Amazon has said, it's sad, and funny, too. It's an amazing read.

Transsexual autobiographies often tend to recount events and experiences, but rarely do they delve deeply into the underlying issues. Such is not the case with this fine book, which gives a glimpse of what it was like to transition on the urban streets in the bad old days (which sadly hasn't changed much in the ensuing decades).

The reason I recommend this book so highly is not just the style or the thoughtfulness Rosalyne has put into this, but also because it shows that there is a way out of even terribly hopeless situations. We can stop the downward spiral of despair and self-medication, of anger and self-hatred, but it requires introspection, support, and most of all perseverance. I wish every drop-in house and shelter that services young trans clients living on the street and/or engaged in survival sex had this book available. Rosalyne is a survivor, and her example can give others strength in moments of weakness or times of great adversity.

What I thought I would find in the pages of this book when reading it was what I thought I already knew but to my pleasent surprize I found more. I found self-exploration, pride, humility, courage, and most importantly honesty. In our world where life is taken for granted on a daily basis and so few people share thier stories Ms. Blumenstein lets it all hang out. I couldn't wait to get to the next page. Her story is funny and sad at the same time but her exploration of self is enlighting and empowering, it's a journey you take with her. It is not often enough that a heart-felt story you can relate to is told and she tells it. You don't have to be gay, lesbian, Bi, or Trans to understand her struggles you just have to be human. There are so little readings out there that ask you to expand your mind but this book expands not only your mind but your heart and compassion to how far we still have to go to just let people be who they are ment to be. Thank you for sharing your story and your enlightenment with me.

One of the best books written yet on transgender issues...I would definitely recommend it to everyone interested in learning more about this community. A MUST READ for everyone, especially health care providers, substance abuse providers and HIV/AIDS Specialists.

BRANDED T is amazing. It keeps you captive from beginning to end. This book is provocative, real, graphic, and intense. It's a personal story and a text book. It's [] provocative and it's spiritual. Pass it on!

Credit must be given to the author for exposing major parts of her life as it takes great courage to tell the world of our secrets, our past and our dark sides.
Experiencing a life on the street as a prostitute, a peep-show girl and a drug user yet working hard to be loved and to advance in life through college and education. The author had a life of constant struggle and at the same time lived a life that was guided by her own sexual desires and fantasies. Some things have changed over the years but her promiscuity is still well engrained in her life style - I know!
I highly recommend the book as the author has done us all a great service and we should all learn from this incredible passage.

An extremely powerful and moving story told with charm and wry humor. My only quibble is with the the rather truncated ending. I can understand why she ends as she does but would rather have a little bit more.

The very title of this autobiographical work carries a connotation of deep shame. The author discusses the ramifications of growing up painfully aware of her internalized female self, in a state of almost constant emotional turmoil. She describes a feeling of discomfort with her gender, so powerful it relentlessly drove her to seek escapes, first through drugs, and then to an almost debilitating need for validation by men, all of which carried well beyond her gender transition. Getting "high" or engaging in self-destructive relationships with men, afforded the author an escape while she sought clarity about the mechanism that was causing her imbedded sense of gender dysphoria.

Spending her late teens and twenties as a sex worker and hard-core drug user, the author experienced a good deal of trauma, including sexual assault and the tragic deaths of family and friends. In a state of emotional discord, she made several suicide attempts before finally coming to terms with her drug addiction and eventually, her gender issues. She enrolled in college, went on to graduate school, and eventually became a psychotherapist, initially becoming even more closeted about her past, frightened about people finding out her transgender history; internalized shame spawning a viscous cycle of her own transphobia.

Even years after her transition, the author notes that her ability to relate to men as "beings" and not economic or sexual entities was one of her greatest challenges. Every man seemed to rekindle her trauma about her transsexual past. Her own uncertainty and lack of self-esteem, a mirror of how society responds to a woman of transsexual background. She relates that internalized guilt and shame are emotions with deep roots and the profound wounding she experienced continues to be present to today.

A very interesting book!

Rosalyne Blumenstein's "Branded T" is vivid testimony to the power and significance subjugated voices play in the movement to contest and end oppression. As a consequence of this oppression, Rosalyne has been gendered as "other" and is "Branded T[rans]" by the dominant culture that insists her personal understanding of gender is a deception, both to herself and to others, setting the stage for a conflict between two knowledge's, one purporting to know universal truths and a second knowledge scaled to the individual, Rosalyne's knowledge of herself.

The vast majority of the knowledge addressing the lives and concerns of people of trans-experience and with trans-histories has been collected and authored by non-trans-identified clinicians and academics, organizations and providers, often raising concerns about the exploitation of trans-identities as phenomena. This contrasts with a more primary resource: the spoken, written, electronic and performed voices, literature and material available from within the trans-communities, by trans-identified people themselves.

The knowledge that oppressed peoples have of themselves and their lived bodies has a power and value beyond the individual. This narrative perspective recovers a subjugated knowledge that offers a potent and under utilized resource for community development, as well as for the development of the practical knowledge needed to share space with these communities.

The knowledge map of culture, space, policy, power and language created by the dominant non-trans culture excludes trans-people and the trans-communities from consideration or relabel and reconfigure those needs to suit their purposes. In the context of a space allocation that maps territory and resources on the basis of class, race, ethnicity and gender, trans-space is difficult to perceive, almost invisible. As such, Rosalyne's narrative contributes to the drawing of a countermap of trans-experiences as normative. When seen as normative, the adaptive strengths that trans, gender-different and gender-othered people accumulate, the communities they create, and their different sense of fit, become valued components in a cohesive sense of identity. Recognition of subjugated knowledge is integral to supporting this as a normative identity

The subjugated position of Rosalyne's developing narrative often reveals an acute sense of insurgency. Not content to express her vision of the oppression that she and her cohort endures, her narrative explores action, small resistances, internal triumphs and hidden victories. The insurgent use of the narrative knowledge as a healing device then becomes a form of action knowledge or action narrative.

"Branded T" can then be seen as a potent addition to this developing body of knowledge, a knowledge that is aggressively maneuvering to shift the vision the trans-communities from one based on a global knowledge structured in diagnosis and pathology to one ordered on identity, management of stigma, and creation of community using the subjugated knowledge the trans-communities themselves create and value. In this context, Rosalyne's voice vitally reclaims the power of self-knowledge and has discovered another meaningful way to proclaim, "I am real."