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Murder, she wrote

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In Bods we trust

“When I first went into the project,” Kennedy says, “I thought of sex changes in the way that it’s typically presented: a separate series of surgeries alone unto itself.” But as she continued to research the subject, she found that “so much of it is really the same treatments that non-transgenders go through. It’s the same conglomeration of surgeries and treatments that everyone’s using to manipulate their bodies.” That said, Kennedy doesn’t mistake a boob job or a chin tuck for a complete gender swap.

The biography reads like a novel. Dillon belongs to the English aristocracy, and as he changes from a woman to a man, he also morphs from an Oxford scholar and medical student to a sailor and Buddhist monk. “There’s something about the before-and-after story that lends itself to storytelling,” Kennedy says.

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Not only is her book a medical history of the procedure and an examination of the complexities of gender, it’s a devastating portrait of a man who goes to huge lengths to be at home in his own body and in the world. Kennedy says that inhabiting her subjects is her “job as a biographer.” “The piece that everyone can relate to,” she says, “is being misrepresented by your body, being betrayed by your own body.”

Kennedy reads from The First Man-Made Man on March 19 at 7 pm, at Porter Square Books | March 20 at 7 pm, at Brookline Booksmith | March 27 at 7:30 pm, at Newtonville Books.

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