Both Sides Now: One Man’s
Journey Through Womanhood Excerpt by
Dhillon Khosla
Both Sides Now: One Man's Journey Through Womanhood, written
by Dhillon Khosla, is a vivid and compelling account of how one man’s search for
wholeness led him through multiple, complex, and life-threatedgdedning
surgeries that transformed him not only physically, but emotionally and
spiritually as well. Born with the body of a female, Dhillon Khosla knew very
early on that his true identity was male, yet he spent nearly two decades
repressing that knowledge and trying to embrace his female form. Shortly after
turning twenty-eight, he came across an article about men born with female bodies
who had undergone surgeries to reclaim their male identity. When he read their
stories, Khosla felt flashes of recognition stirring within and—for the first
time—hope.
In this riveting memoir, Khosla discusses
openly and honestly what it was like to live as a woman, and how that life
shaped the man he is today. Through anecdotes, he shares unique and profound
insights into the sexes. Ultimately, however, Both Sides Now is a story about what
it means to truly love oneself, and the willingness to turn away from the
dissenting voices that tell us who we ought to be…and toward that one, lone
voice that he has known all along.
Both Sides Now: One Man’s Journey Through Womanhood
Untreed Reads Publishing (May 19, 2015)
ISBN: 9781611877991 (paper)
ISBN: 9781611878035 (ebook)
Excerpt:
IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF July 1997—I was driving
to Los Angeles
I had been working on putting together a demo
in a local studio for about a year, and as much as I was looking forward to
finally having a full week to work on music without the interruption of law, my
mind was occupied with something entirely different.
A few months earlier, an ex-girlfriend brought
over a copy of an article that had appeared in The New Yorker in 1994. She had
been given the article in a psychology class, after a female-to-male
transsexual had appeared as a guest lecturer. In the article, the author
interviewed several men who had gone through surgeries and hormone treatments
to transition from female to male. And as I read the things these men had said,
I immediately saw why my ex had asked me to read the piece. Flashes of
recognition went off in my mind, arranging themselves like the pieces of a
puzzle.
I read as one man described his fierce
resistance to being treated as a girl and I thought of my own childhood when I
had insisted that I was a boy, adamantly refusing dolls and dresses and hanging
out only with other boys during recess.
I read as another man—who had made the
transition from female—said that he never fit in the lesbian community because
he was too male in some way—not “butch”—just male, and I remembered how lost I
always felt at lesbian gatherings because there was no one with whom I felt that
“sameness.” I then thought about the girlfriends in my life who had always
identified themselves as straight and wondered why I was the one exception—the
only “woman “ to whom they were attracted.
And then, in the final interview, I read as a
man talked about all the wasted time he had spent in places where he didn’t
fit. He ended by saying he didn’t know why this condition chose him, but he was
finally the person he had always dreamed he would be.
The word “dream” hit me the hardest of all. I
had spent so much of my childhood dreaming of developing a firm, male chest. I
remember running around shirtless at my birthday parties and fantasizing that I
was a pop/rock star like Billy Joel or Rod Stewart—always men. And in the past
few years, when those fantasies and dreams had resurfaced, I couldn’t think of
anything to do except pray that God would make me a man in my next life.
Between the interviews, my ex-girlfriend had
highlighted statements from doctors where they opined as to the cause of
transsexualism. One doctor pointed out that in experiments with animals—from
rats to apes—they injected testosterone during a critical time of brain
development in a female fetus. In every case, while the animal still came out
with a female body, it behaved exactly the same as would have any male animal
of its species. In other words, contrary to its physical body, it believed it
was entirely male.
But it wasn’t until I gave the article to my
current girlfriend, Selena, that I really felt its full impact. I remember her
putting it down after she had finished reading it and saying, “Baby, this is
you.”
To hear it out loud, to have someone finally
hold up a mirror that reflected back the truth of who I am, touched some deep
place within me. I remember feeling this tremendous sense of release—like “Now
you see; you finally see.”
The relief, however, was short-lived. Next
came the tough question: Now that I knew the truth, what was I going to do
about it?
The ebook is available wherever ebooks
are sold. The print edition is only available, for now, through the untreedreads.com website (click here) The print edition is 25% off and in addition you'll receive the ebook for FREE if you add both to your cart. And if you enter the coupon code EXCERPTS during checkout, you'll get an extra 10% off
of the paperback price.
Untreed Reads Publishing
http://store.untreedreads.com/index.php?main_page=advanced_search_result&search_in_description=1&keyword=both%20sides%20now&inc_subcat=0&sort=20a&page=2
Author's Question: Do you schedule a time each day for writing or do you write when you're in the mood?
Author's Question: Do you schedule a time each day for writing or do you write when you're in the mood?
