Pretty: A Memoir

By: KB Brookins

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Synopsis: By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspective—the tropes, the presumptions—Pretty is as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change. &“I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body,&” Brookins writes. &“Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how I&’m perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I can&’t change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says &‘female,&’ and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it mean—to be a girl-turned-man when you&’re something else entirely?&” Informed by KB Brookins&’s personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism, Pretty is concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituency—whose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as &“other&”