by Terri Schlichenmeyer
AS A WOMAN: WHAT I LEARNED ABOUT POWER, SEX, AND THE PATRIARCHY AFTER I TRANSITIONED
PAULA STONE WILLIAMS
� 2021 Atria Books
$27.00 / $36.00 Canada
256 pages
There are two sides to every story.
In politics, there's left and right; in fairy tales, it's good or evil. Guilty or innocent in court, salty or spicy at mealtimes, dog or cat among friends. Sometimes you choose heads or tails, and at other times, as in As a Woman, a memoir by Paula Stone Williams, you can see both sides.
From the time he was very small, Paul Williams thought that he "should have been born a girl." He wasn't bitter about it – not when he was a teen, not even as an adult – but it lingered in the background of his life.
Oh, he had tried to tamp down his desires to dress in his mother's clothes, but he couldn't, though he knew it would anger her. She had caught him once wearing his grandmother's cast-offs, and he never forgot her reaction. Even so, he ransacked her closet at least once a week during his adolescence, hoping his parents wouldn't come home early.
His feelings of furtiveness were perhaps exacerbated by a family legacy of evangelical ministry. Every man he knew was a leader in their church; when he was young, it was assumed that he would follow their example, as if there were no other option.
And so, dutifully, he became a CEO in a "church planting" organization. He married a woman he genuinely loved, and they started a family.
But the urges didn't go away. As his children grew and left the nest, Williams began to explore the possibility of letting out the woman he was inside. He confessed everything to his wife, started taking hormones, and asked for his wife's silence until he made plans for a transition physically and at work.
He'd been at the organization for 35 years, and he was respected, although less than he believed. He was fired and humiliated.
Marriage in question, children shaken, job gone, he began to assess his life.
The world needed to know the truth.
And so, on July 29, 2014, Paula Stone Williams officially took to her blog...
If you come to As a Woman looking for a memoir, you're going to be happy: most of the pages tell a tale of transitioning while immersed in a major evangelical organization, which are generally incompatible. This is interesting, told in an unabashedly forward manner, as Williams resists minimizing her male past.
Dig deeper, though, and there's more to this book: its look at how society regards the roles of men and women – from someone with experience of both – is funny and sharp-eyed, and could serve as a primer-slash-warning for newly transitioning women.
It's also fiery, sometimes the tiniest bit whiny, a little repetitious, and eyebrow-raising with a dash of heated argument-starter for zest.
In the end, As a Woman leaves a lot for female readers to agree with, as Williams' observations are honed, hard, and honest. Men, however – particularly cis men – might take umbrage at her observations, and give this book a little bit of side-eye.