Hanneke Dragtsma - Terug naar Avebury

2017, Dutch, Hanneke Dragtsma,

Original title: "Terug naar Avebury: Dagboek van een transgender" (Back to Avebury: Diary of a transgender person). This is the revised edition of "In transitie" (2012) by Hanneke Dragtsma.

'Martin de Jong travels to England, where he symbolically buries his man's life. Upon his return, a new life begins as the woman he has always felt. In order to follow her own path, Marieke will no longer have to make herself dependent on the judgment of her environment.

She ends up on an emotional rollercoaster, looking for herself. In seven chapters her thoughts, doubts, fears, and desires pass by. Eventually, Marieke travels back to the place where everything started.'

As a child, she mainly immersed herself in technique, where the mechanical movement fascinated her the most. So in the eighties, she went to the then car school on the Loolaan in Apeldoorn. The older she got, the more her boy's body played tricks on her. She went through periods of prolonged depression until she almost died of it at the age of thirty-three. Sometimes you almost have to die to take on life.'

'She broke with her old life and went into transition to be the woman she truly is. It was a journey in which she was confronted with fear and rejection, and was challenged to go her own way apart from the opinions of others. Now, almost twenty years later, the greatest added value of the transition is not so much the physical transformation, but the growth and development that it went through socially, emotionally, and spiritually. She now sees herself as an "expert of being", shaped by life. But every transgender person, and deeply every human being, can become an "expert" through the process he or she goes through.'

Available via bol.com

and hannekedragtsma.nl