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Calling My Deadname Home: The Trans Bear Diaries
New Store Stock TRANS BEAR DIARIES ABISBOOK.
- GenresNonfictionMemoirAdult
Paperback
Published November 14, 2024
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Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews
November 19, 2025
3.5
A life I enjoyed getting a peak into.
Avi has one of those stories that captures you instantly and makes you want to ask all sorts of questions about acceptance from others and oneself. I appreciated an insight into such foreign cultures.
I feel as though a few major things were missed or skipped over - top surgery being one of them. This is a huge step in Avis life and we didn’t get an insight into this at all. I respect that it is his memoir but I do feel this isn’t something to miss.
A life I enjoyed getting a peak into.
Avi has one of those stories that captures you instantly and makes you want to ask all sorts of questions about acceptance from others and oneself. I appreciated an insight into such foreign cultures.
I feel as though a few major things were missed or skipped over - top surgery being one of them. This is a huge step in Avis life and we didn’t get an insight into this at all. I respect that it is his memoir but I do feel this isn’t something to miss.
August 12, 2025
This book very much sums up what a memoir is- a reflection on past experiences through the lens of feelings with time and self reflection added to it. Do the instances recounted actually reflect the authors' whole life or even what actually happened in the past? I would say no but it probably doesn't matter....Working class folks don't buy condos in the most expensive cities in the world usually but narratives work better if they fit in a tidy framework I guess. Right wing families are bad so why mention taking money from them... life isn't as simple as a memoir.
I do know that as a young trans masc person I had lots of other trans masc people are that time tell me I wasn't trans enough because I wouldn't stop liking the "femme" things I liked before physically transitioning. Or they just distanced themselves because they were are obsessed with performing masculinity as they had been with performing femininity before they came out as trans masc. I wished those people would apologize but now I understand they were externalizing the struggles they had inside. I wonder how many were like Avi and have no idea of the pain they cause not to just to themselves or others?
It is disappointed to see how after having this journey of self acceptance and reconciliation the author who has called for authors and artists to not affiliate with anti-Palestine org now will not remove themselves from the Polari prize even as they platform a anti-transphobic writer and have themselves said that transphobia and transphobic beliefs should be platformed by Polari and LGBT presses. Certainly had I know he was making that choice before I got this book I probably wouldn't have read it.
From an objective point of view this is very much not a representative of the average trans masc experience which I only bring up because he has said he is staying in the Polari contest for that, but his experience is a very specific one as any memoir is of course. I find that that while it may have had some adversity such as military service and a conservative family it was also filled with the unspoken privilege that he benefited in the USA and Europe as a tall attractive white presenting with advanced degrees, the financial ability to buy property and the ability to live in multiple countries. Perhaps another memoir is coming about that but actions speak the loudest like not claiming to be an anti-oppression advocate and then staying in a award scheme that is founded by a transphobe and platforms them.
I do know that as a young trans masc person I had lots of other trans masc people are that time tell me I wasn't trans enough because I wouldn't stop liking the "femme" things I liked before physically transitioning. Or they just distanced themselves because they were are obsessed with performing masculinity as they had been with performing femininity before they came out as trans masc. I wished those people would apologize but now I understand they were externalizing the struggles they had inside. I wonder how many were like Avi and have no idea of the pain they cause not to just to themselves or others?
It is disappointed to see how after having this journey of self acceptance and reconciliation the author who has called for authors and artists to not affiliate with anti-Palestine org now will not remove themselves from the Polari prize even as they platform a anti-transphobic writer and have themselves said that transphobia and transphobic beliefs should be platformed by Polari and LGBT presses. Certainly had I know he was making that choice before I got this book I probably wouldn't have read it.
From an objective point of view this is very much not a representative of the average trans masc experience which I only bring up because he has said he is staying in the Polari contest for that, but his experience is a very specific one as any memoir is of course. I find that that while it may have had some adversity such as military service and a conservative family it was also filled with the unspoken privilege that he benefited in the USA and Europe as a tall attractive white presenting with advanced degrees, the financial ability to buy property and the ability to live in multiple countries. Perhaps another memoir is coming about that but actions speak the loudest like not claiming to be an anti-oppression advocate and then staying in a award scheme that is founded by a transphobe and platforms them.
December 20, 2024
Avi Ben-Zeev grew up with the Israeli expectation of serving in the army upon turning 18 — yes, girls too, hence him. As a matter of conscience, he didn't want to. But the only ways out were to be married, religious, or insane. He faked the third option, which put him on the outs with his Jewish family. He moved to the US, got a PhD, worked in CogSci at Brown University, discovered himself as a gay trans man.
I stumbled on this book title on NetGalley a month after the book's release, just three days before NetGalley is due to archive it.
So it turns out that Ben-Zeev was teaching at Brown during my first and second undergraduate years there, and our boxes were near each other's in the mailroom. I took a couple intro CogSci courses, if I remember correctly, before ending up in Philosophy.
Anyway, Calling My Deadname Home is a SEX MEMOIR that processes interactions with several men, both long-term and short-term: the ones who wanted Avi for who he was, as well as a couple who didn't.
One revealing moment was when a guy who was processing his own trauma told him "and I really don't care that you're trans," and Avi replied, "But I want you to care." I think it means: If someone's processing their own stuff while another person who may or may not be un/interesting to them just so happens to be in the room, that's not a relationship. A relationship means they care about each other's stuff too. Maybe they can process their own trauma through each other's trauma somehow. Perhaps most of the time, we want most people to not care that we're trans, but those are generally people with whom we want zero relationships anyway. Once a relationship starts to become real, then we sort of do want that person to care in some way. Our stuff should mean something to them, and theirs will mean something to us.
This interaction laid groundwork for the final scene in which Avi decides to reconcile with his past by "calling his deadname home," sexually. He asked a sex partner to do something very specific to express care that he was trans.
This memoir doesn't tell you exactly where it's going, and it trusts that the reader comes to it because they want to hear a gay trans man's memoir of relationships. The memoir wants you to care. If that's what you're here for, it delivers.
I got a free e-copy on NetGalley.
I stumbled on this book title on NetGalley a month after the book's release, just three days before NetGalley is due to archive it.
So it turns out that Ben-Zeev was teaching at Brown during my first and second undergraduate years there, and our boxes were near each other's in the mailroom. I took a couple intro CogSci courses, if I remember correctly, before ending up in Philosophy.
Anyway, Calling My Deadname Home is a SEX MEMOIR that processes interactions with several men, both long-term and short-term: the ones who wanted Avi for who he was, as well as a couple who didn't.
One revealing moment was when a guy who was processing his own trauma told him "and I really don't care that you're trans," and Avi replied, "But I want you to care." I think it means: If someone's processing their own stuff while another person who may or may not be un/interesting to them just so happens to be in the room, that's not a relationship. A relationship means they care about each other's stuff too. Maybe they can process their own trauma through each other's trauma somehow. Perhaps most of the time, we want most people to not care that we're trans, but those are generally people with whom we want zero relationships anyway. Once a relationship starts to become real, then we sort of do want that person to care in some way. Our stuff should mean something to them, and theirs will mean something to us.
This interaction laid groundwork for the final scene in which Avi decides to reconcile with his past by "calling his deadname home," sexually. He asked a sex partner to do something very specific to express care that he was trans.
This memoir doesn't tell you exactly where it's going, and it trusts that the reader comes to it because they want to hear a gay trans man's memoir of relationships. The memoir wants you to care. If that's what you're here for, it delivers.
I got a free e-copy on NetGalley.
January 1, 2025
Summary: As Avi Ben-Zeev sits down to pen his memoir, he is haunted by the voice of a person he once was. Talia, his flamboyantly feminine pre-transition persona, refuses to be forgotten to simplify and smooth the edges of the story of who Ben-Zeev has become. To integrate the whole of who he is, Ben-Zeev walks his life back, first to the unsteady days of his early transition, then all the way to the start of Talia’s story.
Ben-Zeev charts the experience of moving not just between gender expression and identity, but between social class and country. Ben-Zeev begins his life in a working-class, right-wing Israeli family where he barely manages his way through high school and faces condemnation from his family for faking madness to avoid military service. After leaving Israel first for Italy, then for the US, Ben-Zeev works towards a PhD in Cognitive Psychology while facing some of the same barriers to students from minority groups as he researches. He navigates the difficulties of romance and sex as a gay trans man. And finally, he brings his story together, extending compassion to Talia, and honoring her resilience that allowed him to become Avi.
Reflections: The initial draw of Ben-Zeev’s story for me was his approach to Talia. He fully embraces her as who she was at the time, female and feminine. He makes her her own person, vibrant with life right from the start as she’s speaking up to Avi to make sure he keeps her in the story. It’s wildly at odds with the way I view who I was before understanding and embracing my gender and quite different from the approaches taken in many other trans memoirs and narratives I’ve read. The moments of conversation between Avi and Talia often had me stopping to consider the narratives I spin even just for myself about that time in my life as well as how and why I came into this concept of myself. So needless to say this hit hard at its theme of integrating the past and present.
Beyond his gender journey, Ben-Zeev’s accounts of his experiences with Israeli culture and with academia when coming from a working-class background were fascinating as well. He applies a critical, but caring look to each.
Overall Calling My Deadname Home managed what I find to be one of the most important factors in my enjoyment of memoirs: striking a balance between showing the past as it was in the moment, the heavy emotions that colored the memories of it, and the new insights that pull away the defenses, the rationalizations, the guilt.
Ben-Zeev charts the experience of moving not just between gender expression and identity, but between social class and country. Ben-Zeev begins his life in a working-class, right-wing Israeli family where he barely manages his way through high school and faces condemnation from his family for faking madness to avoid military service. After leaving Israel first for Italy, then for the US, Ben-Zeev works towards a PhD in Cognitive Psychology while facing some of the same barriers to students from minority groups as he researches. He navigates the difficulties of romance and sex as a gay trans man. And finally, he brings his story together, extending compassion to Talia, and honoring her resilience that allowed him to become Avi.
Reflections: The initial draw of Ben-Zeev’s story for me was his approach to Talia. He fully embraces her as who she was at the time, female and feminine. He makes her her own person, vibrant with life right from the start as she’s speaking up to Avi to make sure he keeps her in the story. It’s wildly at odds with the way I view who I was before understanding and embracing my gender and quite different from the approaches taken in many other trans memoirs and narratives I’ve read. The moments of conversation between Avi and Talia often had me stopping to consider the narratives I spin even just for myself about that time in my life as well as how and why I came into this concept of myself. So needless to say this hit hard at its theme of integrating the past and present.
Beyond his gender journey, Ben-Zeev’s accounts of his experiences with Israeli culture and with academia when coming from a working-class background were fascinating as well. He applies a critical, but caring look to each.
Overall Calling My Deadname Home managed what I find to be one of the most important factors in my enjoyment of memoirs: striking a balance between showing the past as it was in the moment, the heavy emotions that colored the memories of it, and the new insights that pull away the defenses, the rationalizations, the guilt.
June 27, 2025
A touchingly real exploration of how our past selves continue to haunt us. Ben-Zeev depicts the struggle of giving that past self grace, and how doing so can facilitate healing.
An engrossing, brutally honest yet still kind read. Highly recommend.
An engrossing, brutally honest yet still kind read. Highly recommend.
March 12, 2025
[Digital copy provided by Netgalley]
This was such a surprising book, a true breath of fresh air. I've read quite a few memoirs buy trans men but none so unflinching and complex as this one. Stunning and raw writing mixed with eroticism alongside grief and a fascinating personal history. You never knew where the author would take you next, but it was always thought-provoking and filled with liveliness. Bravo!
This was such a surprising book, a true breath of fresh air. I've read quite a few memoirs buy trans men but none so unflinching and complex as this one. Stunning and raw writing mixed with eroticism alongside grief and a fascinating personal history. You never knew where the author would take you next, but it was always thought-provoking and filled with liveliness. Bravo!
Displaying 1 - 6 of 6 reviews