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I Want What I Want
Our hero(ine), a highly intelligent boy, has little education and a love for his sister's clothes. His dad is appalled. His psychiatrist can't make contact. And he's sad he can't have the operation he would like. So he dresses for the part. And then Frank falls in love with him...
Freak? No, he's a character in an astonishing book, a figure who typifies, exaggerates and pinpoints the solitude of all mankind.
Freak? No, he's a character in an astonishing book, a figure who typifies, exaggerates and pinpoints the solitude of all mankind.
224 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1966
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 28, 2024
I came upon this novel while reading Lucy Sante's recent memoir I heard Her Call My Name, about her lifelong gender dysphoria and her recent transition. I Want What I Want is a compelling fictional story of a trans woman, born in Hull, working in a family-run fish-and-chip shop, who has resolved to live her life openly as a woman. I was hooked from the first page:
It is a rambling stream-of-consciousness tableau: the pleading repetition of her name (she is Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, not her birth-name Roy), interrupted with little laments (the rain, her poverty, her lack of a boyfriend) set against the bigger traumatic specter of her mother's death (accident? suicide? homicide?) It is a grammatically dizzying prologue interspersed with imperative commands ("stop pulling my hair") and whiplash questions ("Does this bus go to the city center?" "Would that yellow dress fit me?") The world is an uncertain and hostile place and her mind is frenetic, but Wendy is convinced of two things: she is Wendy and she wants a red cocktail dress. She has no doubts about her womanhood: "the error of nature was not my error", she says.
For Wendy, womanhood means prettiness and clothes but also something cosmic and transcendent. When she finally moves out from her violent father, she immediately starts to collect stockings, dresses, wigs and make-up. But her transition is more than just sartorial self-fashioning and cosmetic disguise. To "be a man was always used in connection with something painful or disappointing" and so, conversely, to be a woman was to be something spiritually higher:
Published in 1965, these reflections on womanhood are obviously outdated, and queer theorists would baulk at her rigid binaries of masculine violence and female passivity. Wendy essentializes gender: boys' clothes are for boys, she insists, girls' clothes are for girls; men are domineering and aggressive, women subservient and submissive; men are subjects, women objects; men are bodies, women brains. Her idea of gender isn't radical but familiar, regimented, rigidly conventional. She disapproves of homosexuality: "I hate homosexuals" she says on numerous occasions; she hates the idea of gay sex, gay cruising, and gay drag. Wendy does not just want to be a woman, she wants to be an upper-middle-class, riding-school, respectable woman. She certainly doesn't identify as "queer".
Geoff Brown's own personal life is mysterious: he grew up in Hull, married, and wrote two books, one about a schizophrenic patient in an asylum, the second, this story of a woman's struggle to live her life as a woman. While the details of his life are opaque, it's hard not to read this novel biographically. It's a psychologically detailed and convincing portrayal of a trans woman's desperate desire to be seen and valued as a woman, a sociological document of a trans woman's experience more than just a novelist's speculation or fantasy.
My name is Wendy. The rain was dreadful this morning. My name is Wendy. Does this bus go to the city centre? My name is Wendy. I am twenty-one years old. I am not married. I haven't got a boy friend. I am living on some money that my mother left me. She died. Actually, she was killed. She had an accident with an electric tooth-brush. It was a terrible shock. Please don't pull my hair. Would that yellow dress in the window fit me? Have you got the same style in blue? I want to buy a handbag. I want a red cocktail dress with a square cut front.
It is a rambling stream-of-consciousness tableau: the pleading repetition of her name (she is Wendy, Wendy, Wendy, not her birth-name Roy), interrupted with little laments (the rain, her poverty, her lack of a boyfriend) set against the bigger traumatic specter of her mother's death (accident? suicide? homicide?) It is a grammatically dizzying prologue interspersed with imperative commands ("stop pulling my hair") and whiplash questions ("Does this bus go to the city center?" "Would that yellow dress fit me?") The world is an uncertain and hostile place and her mind is frenetic, but Wendy is convinced of two things: she is Wendy and she wants a red cocktail dress. She has no doubts about her womanhood: "the error of nature was not my error", she says.
For Wendy, womanhood means prettiness and clothes but also something cosmic and transcendent. When she finally moves out from her violent father, she immediately starts to collect stockings, dresses, wigs and make-up. But her transition is more than just sartorial self-fashioning and cosmetic disguise. To "be a man was always used in connection with something painful or disappointing" and so, conversely, to be a woman was to be something spiritually higher:
A woman's body was a better place to live than a man's brain. All real stuff was woman's stuff. Mother and daughter and mother and daughter were one flesh going back and back in time to the female stomach creature that needed no male. The male was outside. He might master the world but he was not part of the world. When the sadist tortured the bound woman his cruelty was his anger that he was not the woman. She might have pleasure in pain, she might be bound and helpless, but she was still the woman, the center. Her helplessness emphasized the truth that she did not need to act in order to exist. A man might make his gentlest love to a woman and serve her powerfully and well, and in the moment of the orgasm he might feel that they were one. But two had not become one. The moment was gone, and he knew that had been an illusion. He knew that he was still the outside, still not a woman
Published in 1965, these reflections on womanhood are obviously outdated, and queer theorists would baulk at her rigid binaries of masculine violence and female passivity. Wendy essentializes gender: boys' clothes are for boys, she insists, girls' clothes are for girls; men are domineering and aggressive, women subservient and submissive; men are subjects, women objects; men are bodies, women brains. Her idea of gender isn't radical but familiar, regimented, rigidly conventional. She disapproves of homosexuality: "I hate homosexuals" she says on numerous occasions; she hates the idea of gay sex, gay cruising, and gay drag. Wendy does not just want to be a woman, she wants to be an upper-middle-class, riding-school, respectable woman. She certainly doesn't identify as "queer".
Geoff Brown's own personal life is mysterious: he grew up in Hull, married, and wrote two books, one about a schizophrenic patient in an asylum, the second, this story of a woman's struggle to live her life as a woman. While the details of his life are opaque, it's hard not to read this novel biographically. It's a psychologically detailed and convincing portrayal of a trans woman's desperate desire to be seen and valued as a woman, a sociological document of a trans woman's experience more than just a novelist's speculation or fantasy.
May 23, 2021
A mostly lost piece of trans fiction that feels far ahead of its time. It's about in step with current widely published trans fiction, maybe a couple years behind, but to have that from 1966 is truly surprising.
Brown does so many things right that will connect with modern readers. Wendy tells her story in the first person. She understands her gender identity in a way far beyond those around her and beyond the medical and psychiatric understandings of the time. The title is perfect because Wendy knows who she is and what she wants to be, even when she has been told her whole life that she cannot.
For much of the book, Wendy is out making her way alone in the world for the first time. She is quite young, not even 25, and she has decided to move to a new town where she will publicly transition and live as a woman. She feels unable to be who she is at home where no one will see her that way and where living as herself is called criminal or psychotic. The risks Wendy is taking on are substantial and familiar still today, the unspoken threat of violence or arrest or institutionalization hangs over her, and yet she seeks freedom and selfhood anyway.
We get to see Wendy really grow, that was the central journey of the book for me, as it doesn't really revolve much around plot. At first Wendy is repulsed by gay men, by all men, because she has such strong dysphoria. She starts out by thinking mostly about how she will physically present herself to the world, her clothes and her makeup. But eventually she finds that being who she is gives her the freedom to want more for herself.
If you are looking for a book without queer suffering you will not find it here. At the beginning Wendy has been placed in a mental hospital because of her gender. Her family is hostile to her identity. And she has taken in a lot of these ideas of wrongness, they tend to bubble up when she is unhappy and upset, which feels accurate but can be tough to read. There is also self-harm and suicide, and while I hoped against hope for a happy ending, we do not get one. (Some may consider that a spoiler, but I think it's important to know.)
It's a truly astonishing book, considering the time it came from. We do not know much about the author, who has passed away, except that he lived as a cis man and was married to a woman. But it's impossible to read this without wondering if Brown was trans because it feels so tuned in, so empathetic to Wendy's life, so aware of all the small things she had to do to get through each day. I would not have guessed that it wasn't written by a trans person. And it stands in strong contrast to other books of the mid-to-late-20th century where trans characters are plot devices used for shock value rather than as fully realized characters, and Wendy is absolutely that.
A few notes for Goodreads users. In some versions of this book I find that the Geoff Brown who wrote it links to the wrong author. He wrote only this book and another novel called MY STRUGGLE. Also Goodreads will show the edition with the most reviews/ratings attached to it and right now that is the original which, unfortunately, includes transphobic copy. If you are interested in reading this, please make sure you switch to the Valancourt reissued edition which is much better.
I listened to the audiobook and it was read quite nicely by Sarah Khan. I don't know if Khan is a cis or trans woman, but I appreciate the publisher bringing in a woman to read the story since it's still quite common for movies to cast cis men in trans women's roles.
Brown does so many things right that will connect with modern readers. Wendy tells her story in the first person. She understands her gender identity in a way far beyond those around her and beyond the medical and psychiatric understandings of the time. The title is perfect because Wendy knows who she is and what she wants to be, even when she has been told her whole life that she cannot.
For much of the book, Wendy is out making her way alone in the world for the first time. She is quite young, not even 25, and she has decided to move to a new town where she will publicly transition and live as a woman. She feels unable to be who she is at home where no one will see her that way and where living as herself is called criminal or psychotic. The risks Wendy is taking on are substantial and familiar still today, the unspoken threat of violence or arrest or institutionalization hangs over her, and yet she seeks freedom and selfhood anyway.
We get to see Wendy really grow, that was the central journey of the book for me, as it doesn't really revolve much around plot. At first Wendy is repulsed by gay men, by all men, because she has such strong dysphoria. She starts out by thinking mostly about how she will physically present herself to the world, her clothes and her makeup. But eventually she finds that being who she is gives her the freedom to want more for herself.
If you are looking for a book without queer suffering you will not find it here. At the beginning Wendy has been placed in a mental hospital because of her gender. Her family is hostile to her identity. And she has taken in a lot of these ideas of wrongness, they tend to bubble up when she is unhappy and upset, which feels accurate but can be tough to read. There is also self-harm and suicide, and while I hoped against hope for a happy ending, we do not get one. (Some may consider that a spoiler, but I think it's important to know.)
It's a truly astonishing book, considering the time it came from. We do not know much about the author, who has passed away, except that he lived as a cis man and was married to a woman. But it's impossible to read this without wondering if Brown was trans because it feels so tuned in, so empathetic to Wendy's life, so aware of all the small things she had to do to get through each day. I would not have guessed that it wasn't written by a trans person. And it stands in strong contrast to other books of the mid-to-late-20th century where trans characters are plot devices used for shock value rather than as fully realized characters, and Wendy is absolutely that.
A few notes for Goodreads users. In some versions of this book I find that the Geoff Brown who wrote it links to the wrong author. He wrote only this book and another novel called MY STRUGGLE. Also Goodreads will show the edition with the most reviews/ratings attached to it and right now that is the original which, unfortunately, includes transphobic copy. If you are interested in reading this, please make sure you switch to the Valancourt reissued edition which is much better.
I listened to the audiobook and it was read quite nicely by Sarah Khan. I don't know if Khan is a cis or trans woman, but I appreciate the publisher bringing in a woman to read the story since it's still quite common for movies to cast cis men in trans women's roles.
June 30, 2025
Great book if you enjoy having your heart broken in as many ways as possible. But really, this book felt very much ahead of its time, and read very much like a piece of trans-lit history.
July 6, 2016
This book made a huge impression on me and I believe taught me tolerance and understanding.
May 20, 2025
How exciting it is to find this little piece of trans history, this truly does feel like something special. For the time that it was written, there’s some terminology and thoughts portrayed by Wendy that in hindsight is now archaic, but feels very fitting and genuine for her to consider in this story. This is more than a coming of age story, it’s a surprisingly empathic and restrained delve into the painful yet hopeful journey that any trans person may go through.
Truly an enlightening read that I will always carry on my shelf
Truly an enlightening read that I will always carry on my shelf
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July 25, 2021For a glimpse at how society viewed trans people in the 60s, this book is very interesting and valuable. But an unrecognized gem of sympathetic trans fiction this is not. I’m baffled by other reviewers who claim this book reads as if it had been written today. It follows all of the worst stereotypes, misconceptions and medical theories regarding trans people, and while the readers are apparantly supposed to sympathize with the main character, it’s far from a great bit of representation.
The main character is a trans woman named Wendy. About 60% of this book is her thinking about or describing clothes. She also spends her time thinking about how men and women are inherently different: how all men should be rough, brutal, and hard working who make the sacrifices and provide. While women, the weaker, less intelligent, prettier sex, should look good, be brutalized (and secretly like it) and be provided for. She has the utmost contempt for homosexuals. She lives off her inheritance and spends her days shopping for clothes.
There are small moments of realism and poignant thoughts scattered through this book, and I do think the reader is supposed to root for Wendy. But do they see her as a woman? Contemporary reviewers used male pronouns to describe her poor, misguided life, and even Wendy herself calls other trans women ‘men’. Ultimately, as Wendy is told by a doctor that it’s impossible to change sex and she should stop the foolishness, she lets herself go, stops seeing her boyfriend, tries to commit suicide and ends the book falling down the stairs covered in her own blood and vomit.
If this is what readers still think of trans people today, we’ve got a long way to go.
The main character is a trans woman named Wendy. About 60% of this book is her thinking about or describing clothes. She also spends her time thinking about how men and women are inherently different: how all men should be rough, brutal, and hard working who make the sacrifices and provide. While women, the weaker, less intelligent, prettier sex, should look good, be brutalized (and secretly like it) and be provided for. She has the utmost contempt for homosexuals. She lives off her inheritance and spends her days shopping for clothes.
There are small moments of realism and poignant thoughts scattered through this book, and I do think the reader is supposed to root for Wendy. But do they see her as a woman? Contemporary reviewers used male pronouns to describe her poor, misguided life, and even Wendy herself calls other trans women ‘men’. Ultimately, as Wendy is told by a doctor that it’s impossible to change sex and she should stop the foolishness, she lets herself go, stops seeing her boyfriend, tries to commit suicide and ends the book falling down the stairs covered in her own blood and vomit.
If this is what readers still think of trans people today, we’ve got a long way to go.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
February 8, 2023
This is a remarkable book. Devastating, but remarkable. I feel so much tenderness toward it. Full review here: https://booksandbakes.substack.com/i/...
CW: transphobia, deadnaming, misgendering, transphobic violence, homophobia, domestic violence, suicide
CW: transphobia, deadnaming, misgendering, transphobic violence, homophobia, domestic violence, suicide
April 4, 2023
A book every trans woman should read
May 15, 2022
This was the second book in a row which I found to be 'unputdownable' and I raced through it in just a few days. Some of the chapters are just a few lines, which helped, but it really does grab the reader's attention
It is very much a 'curiosity'. Published in 1966, it came out immediately before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, the dawn of the relaxations in societal attitudes to gender differences. I have tried to discover more about the author without success which is frustrating, and given the date of original publication it would have been good to know a little more about the person who wrote it.
In many places in the book you feel that they are writing from the heart, both as to the protagonist's feelings as to their gender-identity and sexual identity and also matters of mental health.
At the beginning the narrative feels a little artificial and stilted before it really starts to flow at around the two-thirds mark. There was then a sequence which I felt uncomfortable with, where 'Wendy' rants about their attitude to the wife of the 'couple down stairs'. That did not fit well with the rest of the story and may have been included to indicate the unravelling of 'Wendy's' mental state, but it seemed superfluous to me. Without giving the rest of the story away I found the ending was also a bit unsatisfactory - possibly predictable in the 'light of the times' - and if a similar story was written today a less ambiguous ending might be expected
I wish I had known about the book several decades ago, but it was an interesting read. However, I am not sure how a younger reader who was not 'there' would process the story and many people might find it upsetting
It is very much a 'curiosity'. Published in 1966, it came out immediately before the Sexual Offences Act of 1967, the dawn of the relaxations in societal attitudes to gender differences. I have tried to discover more about the author without success which is frustrating, and given the date of original publication it would have been good to know a little more about the person who wrote it.
In many places in the book you feel that they are writing from the heart, both as to the protagonist's feelings as to their gender-identity and sexual identity and also matters of mental health.
At the beginning the narrative feels a little artificial and stilted before it really starts to flow at around the two-thirds mark. There was then a sequence which I felt uncomfortable with, where 'Wendy' rants about their attitude to the wife of the 'couple down stairs'. That did not fit well with the rest of the story and may have been included to indicate the unravelling of 'Wendy's' mental state, but it seemed superfluous to me. Without giving the rest of the story away I found the ending was also a bit unsatisfactory - possibly predictable in the 'light of the times' - and if a similar story was written today a less ambiguous ending might be expected
I wish I had known about the book several decades ago, but it was an interesting read. However, I am not sure how a younger reader who was not 'there' would process the story and many people might find it upsetting
October 23, 2024
It is rather difficult to imagine that this work was not written by a transwoman with consequent expansive knowledge of the many and various ways dysphoria can play itself out in every day life. Had it been written 10 years later, it might be possible for the author to simply be extremely well researched on the subject. But in 1966, there wasn't a lot that had been published, in the preceding years. Roberta Cowell's Story (1954) being the de facto birth of memoirs of this variety, in Britain. Though in many ways, that was a vastly less insightful telling.
So if Geoff Brown had personal knowledge of these experiences, the tale does read as tragic. As it seems he did not publicly transition, himself. But this book, even so, is a remarkably empathetic portrayal of the sort of struggle with gender identity which perhaps the author might have experienced.
So if Geoff Brown had personal knowledge of these experiences, the tale does read as tragic. As it seems he did not publicly transition, himself. But this book, even so, is a remarkably empathetic portrayal of the sort of struggle with gender identity which perhaps the author might have experienced.
February 1, 2024
Both of its time and ahead of its time, I WANT WHAT I WANT is an underrated classic of pre-Stonewall trans experience. I simultaneously empathized and rooted for Wendy, and while it is Clearly a Book About a Transsexual in 1960's England, with everything that entails (the white lower-middle class of it all, the disdain of same-gender love, the dour beat, the binary thought of gender as if Wendy could not even fathom the existence of a zebra, the hope to God that this isn't a ghost story), it is ultimately a tale of self-expression, and quite a lot of it resonated with me as a trans woman.
June 21, 2024
Geoff Brown was way ahead of his time. His character's internal monologue is both entertaining and a clever literary tool for getting the story told. In some ways his character is Kafkaesque, but it is plain that the social pressure placed upon him to be "Normal" isn't working. He is not confused about who and what he is nor what he wants. He is a woman, and he wants his body to reflect that truth. How he navigates through both gay and straight social expectations to arrive at his own truth is inspiring. Hard to believe that the book was written 55 years ago.
May 19, 2025
This is a risky novel written, from all I can tell, by a married straight man in the mid 1960s. And, though imperfect, it’s amazing. I was fully immersed in this first-person narrative of a trans woman fighting for her identity and survival. I do wish the writer had reached more creatively for a way to end the novel, but what this accomplished is pretty monumental. I hope this is recognized as a classic someday for its forward-thinking subject, its impressive prose and dialogue style, and its radical act of empathy.
October 13, 2018
Fascinating and at time devastating book written in the mid sixties about a trans woman from a small working class traditional community, trying to become who she wants to be. The story begins with Wendy (then known as Roy) in a psychiatric hospital because she has stolen women’s underwear from a washing line, and moves on through her journey over the following year. Written with some dry humour at times but also quite harrowing.
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September 24, 2019A profound look at transgender
So true it must autobiography a picture of post war life, the trans aspect could have been written by any of the current trans writers
So true it must autobiography a picture of post war life, the trans aspect could have been written by any of the current trans writers
August 8, 2023
this was pretty iconic ngl... devasting, but iconic
December 17, 2023
Claustrophobic, heartbreaking, and ahead of its time.
January 30, 2024
Ahead of its time, very moving, the writing felt so alive and real, I was always thinking about Wendy whenever I wasn’t reading it, but given when it was written and the context it might’ve existed in, this is not a book for anyone seeking a happy ending. It’s a visceral reminder of why things urgently needed to change for the trans community, and why we still have so far to go.
July 17, 2025
This is a "with a grain of salt" kind of book. It was very progressive for its time, and deserves praise for that. However, some of the characterization fell flat to me or even imitated unpleasant stereotypes, and in some ways the story punishes you for engaging with it. I'm attributing those moments to shortcomings of the author, whereas other book club members thought they were purposeful moments offering some kind of critique or insight.
First, the superficiality of Wendy's desires at the beginning of the book read like a man's limited understanding of womanhood (including rape fantasies???) and her obsessive theft of women's used panties feeds into the right-wing boogeyman of a neurotic pervert. (I just want to note again how much I hate the word panties and how no woman I know uses the term).
However, as Wendy begins living her chosen life, the characterization evens out. Wendy is a much more natural character, constantly and quietly at war with the world yet exhilarating in each new small triumph. Emotions are high and readers are firmly invested in Wendy's progress.
In light of this, the ending of the book felt like a slap in the face.
P.S. That title is so stupid.
First, the superficiality of Wendy's desires at the beginning of the book read like a man's limited understanding of womanhood (including rape fantasies???) and her obsessive theft of women's used panties feeds into the right-wing boogeyman of a neurotic pervert. (I just want to note again how much I hate the word panties and how no woman I know uses the term).
However, as Wendy begins living her chosen life, the characterization evens out. Wendy is a much more natural character, constantly and quietly at war with the world yet exhilarating in each new small triumph. Emotions are high and readers are firmly invested in Wendy's progress.
In light of this, the ending of the book felt like a slap in the face.
P.S. That title is so stupid.
May 20, 2018
How little we understand people who aren't like us.
July 21, 2025
Dated conceptions of femininity, but absolutely devastating. Under-read queer classic crazy this has <100 rates
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