As Beautiful As Any Other is an education and a gift. Two-thirds into his debut memoir, Kaya Wilson writes: “I felt a greater power, knowing people could come for the transness and be taken somewhere universally human. That beauty could somehow dissolve a gaze.”
Wilson is a tsunami scientist and writer whose memoir and nonfiction work has been widely published in Australia. His writing, both generally and in the book, is politically generous – he writes with an expectation that people can do better, and provides plenty of opportunities for them to do so.
As Beautiful As Any Other is a story about transness, but also about bodies and becoming (and re-becoming). Wilson’s own body, the subject of the narrative, is a body that has been scarred and marked by various forms of violence but also by travel, family and community. This is a memoir specifically about one body’s journey through the world, although Wilson uses his own experience to reflect more broadly on masculinity, misogyny and #MeToo; on intergenerational shame and the dehumanising politics of the Australian postal vote for marriage equality. Intelligent and knowledgeable, he couples personal insight and lived experience with a highly intellectual understanding of the political, scientific and socio-cultural factors at play in the way cis-society understands and relates to transgender people.
Readers more used to a traditional narrative might find themselves grasping for chronology at times: As Beautiful As Any Other doesn’t unfold in a strictly linear fashion, but instead speaks to the origin of Wilson’s body in temporal and experiential terms. Wilson anticipates this in his opening, offering a more literal timeline, in case “grounding is required”. The parts of the story are divided thematically, as Wilson explores the way a body is shaped by trauma, inheritance, travel, home, rage, love, education, breath, sickness, death and care. This structure allows the author and the narrative to move in and out of moments of intense fury and grief to more quiet contemplation. His writing is fluid between these shifts, powerful, and each one leaves a particular mark on the reader.
It is interesting that Wilson starts the book in the ocean, exploring the trauma of an early surfing accident that broke his neck and left him in chronic and ongoing pain. Interesting, because perhaps unintentionally the ocean is the perfect metaphor for the rest of the book – a complex ebb and flow of emotions and ideas through which the reader is sometimes gently carried and sometimes forced to swim. “I saved my own life,” he says in this opening scene, and indeed the book is a reclaiming of power against the “naked forfeit” the government and cis-society demands of transgender people. The story invites cis readers in particular to reflect on why the privacy and respect we demand for cis bodies is so often not afforded to transgender bodies, which are objectified and inspected at every turn by the world we live in.
In conversations about stories like this one – memoirs that speak to marginalised identities, trauma and bodies – we often speak of bravery. “Bravery” expects the writer to make themselves vulnerable without asking anything in particular of the reader. What Wilson does, in sharing the story of his body so generously, is to show a great deal of trust in the reader, and in turn expects that they will do the work of earning it. It is uncomfortable work (and reading) at times, acknowledging the “hierarchy of value we attribute to lives lived”. There is space to sit in discomfort in the book though, space to grapple with challenging ideas, and (hopefully) arrive at a place of better understanding.
“I translate the language of normality and deficiency into that of our shared humanity. And if a crime is there, it is not in our existence but the lens through which it is seen,” Wilson writes. Like any good translation, he pulls the threads of the narrative together in a way that reads effortlessly. Over and over he prioritises connection, and finding ways and places to capture a shared humanity. Through the process, Wilson himself has created one of those places – a place to breathe, to be expansive, and to discover what we are capable of. As Beautiful As Any Other is an urgent and powerful contribution to personal and collective trans narratives, and one which all readers will find themselves transformed by.
• As Beautiful As Any Other by Kaya Wilson is out now through Picador
