Branded T

By Rosalyne Blumenstein

ISBN 1-4107-7241-1

Published by 1^st books

Review by Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH

I would say that autobiographies are probably the most difficult books to write in that in writing about oneself one can be self-indulgent. Blumenstein’s account of her life and drug addiction interwoven with the dynamics of her transsexual experience are riveting in an age of fly-on-the-all entertainment. She certainly digs deep down to the bottom of her soul and confesses all beyond decency, which leads to her revelations being admirable and fascinating. Rarely will you ever read such an honest depiction of debauchery and desperation born out of pills and the need to define oneself as a female having been barmitzvahed as a Brooklyn pretty boy.

Blumenstein was the brassy blonde who stripped and worked for many years in the peep shows of New York. Tall, slim, pretty and sexy she was the trannie who lived on the streets and survived in the sex industry. “I’m doing ok,” she would have told you, but secretly she was living a life of prolonged and enslaving multiple drug use with complex addictions that even today she is still dealing with. What appeared to be a mirage of the mister who became a sister and then the queen of the queens hid someone who had a harrowing journey to learn how to realise her own potential.

Her story tells how after her transition she got clean, went onto higher education, became a director of the Gender Identity Project, New York, a social worker and a political campaigner for the rights of sex and gender diverse people and learned how to fall in love. For many years she lived in fear of being found out, walking in the shadows and not disclosing her transsexual history to other people. Through her journey she tells us how in many ways it does not matter how well you pass or not, you are your history and what you have become through what you were.

So is this just another tale of a dumb blonde goes public - well no, it’s much more than that because her story peels away the layers of illusion about who she really is what she has become and now lays herself vulnerable. It a great book for anyone dealing with issues of sex and gender honesty in the public eye. It also the most useful book I have ever read dealing with issues of sex and gender diverse people and addiction. The reader wants her to survive the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, but most of all the unforgivable things she does to herself. You will want her to come back from death’s doors and be mad at her for taking the long way round, but most of all you will admire her for her honesty. This is the tale of a woman whose brains eluded her until the looks she created for herself began to fade and she evolved into something more than she thought she was.

Branded T can be ordered from Amazon.com or Angus Robertson bookstores.

Dr Tracie O’Keefe DCH is a clinical hypnotherapist, psychotherapist & counsellor and the co-editor of Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex & Gender Diversity. www.tracieokeefe.com

Branded T
by
Rosalyne Blumenstein, MSW

Reviewed by Dave Parker

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.

Branded T – ISBN: 4-4107-7240-3 (Hardcover); ISBN: 1-4107-7241-1 (Paperback)

Hardcover $30.45, Paperback $19.95  Available through Amazon.com

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.”

Carrie Davis, MSW
  Group Services Coordinator
  Gender Identity Project Coordinator
  The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Community Center