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This Body I Wore: A Memoir
A Washington Post Best Book of the YearA captivating memoir of one woman’s long journey to late transition, as the trans community emerges alongside her.“Achingly beautiful.” —Manuel Betancourt, The New York Times Book ReviewLong before Laverne Cox appeared on the cover of Time, far removed from drag and ballroom culture, there were countless trans women living and dying as men, most of whom didn’t even know they were trans. Diana Goetsch’s This Body I Wore chronicles one woman’s long journey to coming out, a path that runs parallel to the emergence of the trans community over the past several decades.“How can you spend your life face-to-face with an essential fact about yourself and still not see it?” This is a question often asked of trans people, and a question that Goetsch, an award-winning poet and essayist, addresses with the power and complexity of lived reality. She brings us into her childhood, her time as a dynamic and beloved teacher at New York City’s Stuyvesant High School, and her plunge into the city’s crossdressing subculture in the 1980s and ’90s. Under cover of night, crossdressers risked their jobs and their safety to give expression to urges they could neither control nor understand. Many would become late transitioners, the Cinderellas of the trans community largely ignored by history.Goetsch has written not a transition memoir, but rather a full account of a trans life, one both unusually public and closeted. All too often trans lives are reduced to before-and-after photos, but what if that before photo lasted fifty years?
338 pages, Kindle Edition
First published May 24, 2022
89 people are currently reading
1864 people want to read
About the author
Diana Goetsch
12 books47 followersPreviously wrote under the name Douglas Goetsch.
Diana Goetsch is an American poet, author of eight collections, including In America (a 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize selection), Nameless Boy (2015, Orchises Press) and The Job of Being Everybody, which won the 2004 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. Her poems have appeared in leading magazines and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and Best American Poetry.
She is also a nonfiction writer and columnist, author of essays on subjects ranging from baseball history to medical ethics to political messaging. From 2015-16 she wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar, where she chronicled her gender transition, along with issues faced by America’s newest visible minority. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Donald Murray Prize for writing pedagogy, and a Pushcart Prize.
For 21 years she was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School, where she taught gifted and mostly immigrant children, and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.
Diana Goetsch is an American poet, author of eight collections, including In America (a 2017 Rattle Chapbook Prize selection), Nameless Boy (2015, Orchises Press) and The Job of Being Everybody, which won the 2004 Cleveland State University Poetry Center Open Competition. Her poems have appeared in leading magazines and anthologies including The New Yorker, Poetry, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, Ploughshares, The Southern Review and Best American Poetry.
She is also a nonfiction writer and columnist, author of essays on subjects ranging from baseball history to medical ethics to political messaging. From 2015-16 she wrote the “Life in Transition” blog at The American Scholar, where she chronicled her gender transition, along with issues faced by America’s newest visible minority. Her honors include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the New York Foundation for the Arts, the Donald Murray Prize for writing pedagogy, and a Pushcart Prize.
For 21 years she was a New York City public school teacher, at Stuyvesant High School, where she taught gifted and mostly immigrant children, and at Passages Academy in the Bronx, where she ran a creative writing program for incarcerated teens.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 120 reviews
June 11, 2022
I met Diana Goetsch once at a writer's conference about five years ago. She struck me as charismatic and highly intelligent. I felt compelled to compliment her on the lecture she gave a few days earlier on book titles, and from there we had a lovely conversation which took us to the subject of mentors, and how to thank them (particularly if you can't any more, after they have passed away). She said something I'll never forget: the way to thank someone who means the world to you is to live your best life. That's how she thanked hers, she told me, by being the best self she knew to be.
If you read this book, you'll see that it took 50 years for Diana Goetsch to begin living her best life. You'll see why it took that long, too. Goetsch's memoir offers a truly revealing and personal account of her journey as a trans person. It's beautifully written, which isn't surprising, given she's an accomplished poet, but what's more, it's inviting. Inviting readers to see, and hopefully to engage empathy and understanding. To humanize the experience of finding your best life.
Fascinating, heartrending, inspiring.
If you read this book, you'll see that it took 50 years for Diana Goetsch to begin living her best life. You'll see why it took that long, too. Goetsch's memoir offers a truly revealing and personal account of her journey as a trans person. It's beautifully written, which isn't surprising, given she's an accomplished poet, but what's more, it's inviting. Inviting readers to see, and hopefully to engage empathy and understanding. To humanize the experience of finding your best life.
Fascinating, heartrending, inspiring.
June 26, 2022
This trans memoir is, I believe, somewhat of a change from the typical entry in the genre which often begin with "the surgery", or read like a defiant justification for one's journey—the struggle before and the metamorphosis before. It is, as a trans person myself, a genre I often find very difficult to read. It's impossible to be neutral, to not reflect one's own reality against that which is presented. I tend to find few ah-ha moments, and to be honest, I am not looking for them in the way that I was 25 years ago. Besides, the experiences and trajectories of trans men are often quite different from those of our sisters.
However, what Diana Goetsch achieves in this memoir is a refreshing look at a story that is not often heard. This is her eloquent account of five decades of searching for herself, through years of troubled friendships, failed romances, teaching roles, and Buddhist training, all the time keeping a closet filled with women's clothing and struggling to find a place for a deep female longing in a life lived as a man. For each one of us who transitions later—I was 40—the journey is as unique as the individual epiphany. Yet there is a tendency to judge ourselves and others in relation to standard, medicalized norms, especially against an increasing anti-trans sentiment in many places. This book is one woman's story, and a very human story, beautifully and sensitively told.
My blog review and reflection can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/06/26/pr...
However, what Diana Goetsch achieves in this memoir is a refreshing look at a story that is not often heard. This is her eloquent account of five decades of searching for herself, through years of troubled friendships, failed romances, teaching roles, and Buddhist training, all the time keeping a closet filled with women's clothing and struggling to find a place for a deep female longing in a life lived as a man. For each one of us who transitions later—I was 40—the journey is as unique as the individual epiphany. Yet there is a tendency to judge ourselves and others in relation to standard, medicalized norms, especially against an increasing anti-trans sentiment in many places. This book is one woman's story, and a very human story, beautifully and sensitively told.
My blog review and reflection can be found here: https://roughghosts.com/2022/06/26/pr...
June 29, 2022
So, this is by and about a narcissist. A deeply, tragically damaged person, but still a narcissist. The author's lack of self-awareness can perhaps be excused (she is, after all, a narcissist, that is part of the pathology), but I can't for the life of me understand why this book has so many 5 star reviews. She literally justifies what she describes as revealing the deepest, most secret of all secrets of her apparently sincerely held religious beliefs, and excuses it as the rules not applying to her? She can't understand why she was bullied in high school, and quotes yearbook notes from her peers talking about how angry and confusing and difficult she was? I have no doubt that she suffered great trauma. But this is not a story of triumph and overcoming. This is a story of a person who only values people as far as they are useful and validating to her. Don't bother reading it, there is not enough honesty in it to learn anything.
May 15, 2022
This Body I Wore is a door wide open to a brilliant mind tormented by gender dysphoria. The memoir is beautifully written taking the reader on an exquisitely detailed journey of transition from Doug growing up in loveless Long Island to daring weekend crossdressing in New York City, inchoate relationships with women, and ultimately to full-fledged Diana. Goetsch's memoir reminded me, oddly, of Henri Cherriére's Papillon in its gripping narration of extraordinarily painful experiences.
July 17, 2024
If you’re looking for a “before and after” photo of a man who transitions into a woman, you won’t find it in the remarkable memoir, “This Body I Wore,” by Diana Goetsch. What you will find is far more enlightening: a photo of a small, thin girl – a girl held hostage: “She handed me a note on a scrap of paper. The note said, ‘Don’t forget me.’”
I will not forget the journey Goetsch takes us on – from childhood and college through crossdressing, searching, teaching, writing, loving, leaving, and transitioning. With a poet’s eye for language and detail, Goetsch shares her life story with compassion for the child she was and the woman she was always meant to be.
Goetsch, known for her widely published poetry, includes only a few poems in this memoir and to great advantage. That said, the poetry of her prose is undeniable. Consider her description of shooting pool in 1991: “There’s no changing the laws of impact, spin, speed, and friction, as the ball you called, its unique color like jockey silks, hits the pocket hard …”
In balance with the beauty of the writing, there’s the brutality of the life. Family dysfunction, bullying, abuse, broken hearts, broken confidences – it’s all there. This is no easy read to skim through; there were nights when I had to stop reading, put the book down, and process what I had read.
I met this author years ago when she was living as a man and was dazzled by her talent at writing and teaching. Now that I’ve met Diana Goetsch through this unforgettable memoir, I admire her even more. “This Body I Wore” is due for release May 24, 2022.
I will not forget the journey Goetsch takes us on – from childhood and college through crossdressing, searching, teaching, writing, loving, leaving, and transitioning. With a poet’s eye for language and detail, Goetsch shares her life story with compassion for the child she was and the woman she was always meant to be.
Goetsch, known for her widely published poetry, includes only a few poems in this memoir and to great advantage. That said, the poetry of her prose is undeniable. Consider her description of shooting pool in 1991: “There’s no changing the laws of impact, spin, speed, and friction, as the ball you called, its unique color like jockey silks, hits the pocket hard …”
In balance with the beauty of the writing, there’s the brutality of the life. Family dysfunction, bullying, abuse, broken hearts, broken confidences – it’s all there. This is no easy read to skim through; there were nights when I had to stop reading, put the book down, and process what I had read.
I met this author years ago when she was living as a man and was dazzled by her talent at writing and teaching. Now that I’ve met Diana Goetsch through this unforgettable memoir, I admire her even more. “This Body I Wore” is due for release May 24, 2022.
December 4, 2022
I was interested in transgender people as far back as 1972, but there wasn't much to read about it back then. I have always been fascinated by how fiercely transgender people feel that they are in the wrong body. Diana Goetsch's story was a bit more confusing. It took him/her a long time to understand why he/she wanted to dress in women's clothes. (I will never understand why someone would crave the experience of wearing panty hose, but that was certainly the case in this memoir.) Doug/Diana's struggle to come to terms with their gender issues was long and hard. I would love to know more about what it has been like to live as a woman after 50 years as a male. I do not understand why there is so much backlash against transgender people. They are obviously suffering enough already. They can never be who they truly want to be and must go through agony to get even close to wearing the body they feel they should inhabit. People should have mercy, not malice.
November 3, 2022
This is a honest depiction of what it feels like to live in a body that you feel doesn't rightfully represent who you are to the world. Goetsch delves into her dating life, her childhood and the trauma of never having a sustained relationship with any one person. It's a life of isolation and loneliness.
What it brings to mind for me is the many families navigating new laws that determine how they should make decisions for their own children. Like many things, these are family decisions - private decisions. Once you come to understand just how difficult life as a trans person is, you should feel compassion and gain awareness of how arbritary rules are regarding gender and identity.
My hope is that more people that need to read this book find it. I am grateful Goetsch shares her story in an honest way.
What it brings to mind for me is the many families navigating new laws that determine how they should make decisions for their own children. Like many things, these are family decisions - private decisions. Once you come to understand just how difficult life as a trans person is, you should feel compassion and gain awareness of how arbritary rules are regarding gender and identity.
My hope is that more people that need to read this book find it. I am grateful Goetsch shares her story in an honest way.
June 4, 2022
This Body I Wore, by Diana Goestch has renewed my faith in the memoir. This is a vital, literary account of transition, and child abuse. Every single sentence is beautifully written. Goetsch saves herself in this memoir and I have no doubt will save others by having written it.
August 27, 2023
To know a life is to appreciate the human condition. This memoir shows the humanity of a transgender person’s journey in tender and honest terms, heartbreak and messiness included. I have the utmost respect for the perseverance shown and the authenticity to walk through the world as yourself. Everyone should read this book.
July 18, 2022
This Body I Wore is a wonderful memoir focusing on Diana's mental transition over the course of decades to acknowledge who she is. The writing in this memoir is beautiful, the pace and decision to start the timeline in adulthood is inspired, and I loved the stories of New York in the '80s and '90s. It is also so refreshing to read a memoir where the main narrative is the journey and nuance of life as opposed to only a coming out event. As a non-binary person so much of this book felt intimately familiar and Diana was able to clarify in words the confusion that many of us feel. Reading about Diana's journey reminds us that not everyone figures out their gender identify as a child, and everyone's journey to standing in their body and life is unique and that is ok (it took me until my '30's). 100% worth the read and I have a better understanding of life's possibilities as a result.
July 20, 2022
Sometimes a 4, sometimes a 5, sometimes a 9. This is a gripping and moving memoir of a late in life transition, but it's not really about the transition (that's explored thoughtfully but deliberately briefly near the end). It's mostly about being seen - or rather, not being seen - and how that can confuse and terrify a person whose biggest desire is to connect and be loved. A triumph.
April 19, 2023
Goetsch's life and trans experience is distant from mine in just about every way, so I couldn't figure out what I found so compelling about this memoir. I think the answer is, she's a hell of a writer.
July 24, 2025
I read this in order to try to gain more perspective and understanding of some of the people around me who are transgender. I was offput by the beginning, nervous to even continue but I'm glad I did. I think the author did a great job telling their story and the writing was quite good but more critically, by spending so much time in their mind, I feel like I was able to achieve my goal of being better able to connect and understand those around me. There are still parts I can sympathize without but struggle to empathize with but I think that is ok for now. I hope on rereads of either this book or reading others like this one I will continue to improve my understanding.
June 20, 2022
This is a beautifully written memoir of a trans woman who transitioned late in life. Instead of being a memoir about transition, it is a memoir that explains why she took so long to transition. The reasons are not what you might think. Certainly, Goestch's pre-transition life included the typical searches for professional and romantic fulfillment, but the searches were marked by the unsanctioned longing to be a different gender. I found it interesting to see how her practice of Buddhism helped her come out to herself, as well as to learn one therapist's assessment of why people detransition: "not getting work and not getting touched."
July 3, 2025
A deeply intimate and incredibly honest account of one woman’s experiences. I really loved this, some was hard to listen to but felt honored to bear witness to the journey. I think it is essential to listen when people want to share their story and this was a very moving memoir especially listening to the author narrate her own book. I appreciate the narrative around coming out to yourself and figuring out who you are.
June 16, 2023
If half stars were an option, I would give this 3.5. I really wanted to like it more. I struggled with the structure of the book and wonder if that is why some themes felt very repetitive but I am glad I pushed through to the end.
May 5, 2023
raw journey, she doesn’t cut out the “ugly” so to speak — i think this is something i’d share with my family who struggle to conceptualize trans humans and the trans experience. she writes so eloquently about others and it translates so well to herself.
February 2, 2025
Really loved this, highly recommend!!
May 30, 2022
There is much to love about this book, which I devoured, both lyrical and easy to read. I hoped that it would move me, and it did; I hoped that it would expand my understanding, and it did that, too. What most surprised me was how the experiences of the author — unique, specific, and in many ways terribly painful — have something to say to all of us about the courage involved in seeking the best and truest life we can live, the value in doing that sooner rather than later, and the fact that later is always better than never.
July 2, 2022
It's always hard to rate a memoir less than 4 stars. I appreciated learning about Diana's life and I'm glad she is living her true life now.
May 26, 2025
Enjoyed the writing style and the narrative. Thank you for sharing.
July 1, 2025
Trans fem memoir cut into three parts that span the authors life and transition. Beautiful and informative account of trans lives, and the shapes they took, since the 60s. Heartbreaking and hopeful. Loved it
September 5, 2022
Deep and thoughtful. A life story spanning many trans generations, from special nights at NYC bars in the 90s to the early internet in the 2000s to support groups in the 2010s.
November 8, 2022
I try not to browse the shelves at my local library, since I have so many books already on hold or checked out to me. But this one just called to me, and I’m so glad I listened.
While I love memoirs of generally non-famous people (i.e., not celebrities), I don’t always enjoy the writing because most of these folks aren’t writers. But Diana Goetsch is a poet; of course her memoir is going to be extremely well-written. It’s beautiful and lyrical and vivid… and full of the pain she experienced living as a man for the first 50 years of her life.
I’ve read other reviews that point out that Goetsch often wasn’t well liked as a child or teen; she includes notes written by her peers in her high school yearbook that show how unliked she was. They wonder how someone could not understand why people might be so cruel to them, basically that they brought it on themselves. I too wasn’t well-liked when I was younger, and I was just as oblivious as to why people didn’t take to me. I wasn’t really taught how to behave or not to behave, what to do and what not to do, and when you don’t have that background (as Goetsch did not, not having emotionally available parents), you don’t really understand that you’re alienating people around you with your behavior. Goetsch also makes it clear that her mother must have physically and sexually abused Goetsch as a child, which breaks my heart for her. Children should never experience abuse.
I found this memoir very intriguing. I’ve read quite a few of them thus far, and most have been by younger people, people who have grown up with the language to describe what it is they’re feeling. And even if they didn’t have it as a child or teen, it wasn’t that far off in time until they did learn the language for it. Goetsch, being born in the 1960s, spent much of her life without any kind of language or the ability to express what it was she was really feeling. Instead of insisting at a young age that she was really a girl trapped in a boy’s body, she instead tried to be the boy that society expected her to be. But putting on women’s clothing gave her an illicit thrill, and stepping out as a woman made her feel more natural. Finally she and the world got to a place where she could express how she really felt, and realized she needed to begin to transition.
This isn’t a memoir about Goetsch’s transition or any hardships she might have encountered along the way. Instead it gives the reader an insight on how Goetsch denied her femininity for many years because she didn’t realize that she was trans, and lets the reader travel along with Goetsch on her difficult journey through life feeling like a square peg in a round hole. I’m so glad she finally realized her truth, and is now able to be the person she feels most comfortable being.
While I love memoirs of generally non-famous people (i.e., not celebrities), I don’t always enjoy the writing because most of these folks aren’t writers. But Diana Goetsch is a poet; of course her memoir is going to be extremely well-written. It’s beautiful and lyrical and vivid… and full of the pain she experienced living as a man for the first 50 years of her life.
I’ve read other reviews that point out that Goetsch often wasn’t well liked as a child or teen; she includes notes written by her peers in her high school yearbook that show how unliked she was. They wonder how someone could not understand why people might be so cruel to them, basically that they brought it on themselves. I too wasn’t well-liked when I was younger, and I was just as oblivious as to why people didn’t take to me. I wasn’t really taught how to behave or not to behave, what to do and what not to do, and when you don’t have that background (as Goetsch did not, not having emotionally available parents), you don’t really understand that you’re alienating people around you with your behavior. Goetsch also makes it clear that her mother must have physically and sexually abused Goetsch as a child, which breaks my heart for her. Children should never experience abuse.
I found this memoir very intriguing. I’ve read quite a few of them thus far, and most have been by younger people, people who have grown up with the language to describe what it is they’re feeling. And even if they didn’t have it as a child or teen, it wasn’t that far off in time until they did learn the language for it. Goetsch, being born in the 1960s, spent much of her life without any kind of language or the ability to express what it was she was really feeling. Instead of insisting at a young age that she was really a girl trapped in a boy’s body, she instead tried to be the boy that society expected her to be. But putting on women’s clothing gave her an illicit thrill, and stepping out as a woman made her feel more natural. Finally she and the world got to a place where she could express how she really felt, and realized she needed to begin to transition.
This isn’t a memoir about Goetsch’s transition or any hardships she might have encountered along the way. Instead it gives the reader an insight on how Goetsch denied her femininity for many years because she didn’t realize that she was trans, and lets the reader travel along with Goetsch on her difficult journey through life feeling like a square peg in a round hole. I’m so glad she finally realized her truth, and is now able to be the person she feels most comfortable being.
October 14, 2022
This is a sad read. I did not have Diana as a teacher but knew of her. I don’t read memoirs often, and in this one, I really felt her desperate need to share a story; yet, the story feels barely present. So much is shared yet feels like even more was withheld about her story of origin in relation to her depression and transition. Instead this reads like an accounting of relationships and gossip. It is hard for me to reconcile how someone known for creating a safe classroom space for introspection and honesty couldn’t allow herself that same authorial liberation.
November 30, 2022
I admire Diana’s honesty during her journey and I admire her for sharing it with the world!
December 29, 2022
Definitely informed my understanding and reinforced my empathy
April 25, 2023
I was riveted from the first page. I appreciated Goetsch’s note on languages usage at the beginning. Helped me recognize some of my own unexamined trans-phobia.
August 16, 2023
Unbroken
Born cloth of white shell
Always her
Born cloth of white shell
Always her
Displaying 1 - 30 of 120 reviews