Scottie Jeanette Madden is no stranger to survival. For decades, she thrived as one of television’s most respected adventure showrunners, producing and directing for Discovery and the History Channel in some of the harshest and most dangerous environments on earth. Her résumé reads like a survivalist’s dream (or nightmare): leading über-male productions into the wilderness, demanding impossible feats from her teams, and earning her reputation as the ultimate alpha adventurer. But behind that façade, Scottie was fighting for her own survival, waging a lifelong, internal battle for her soul.
Her memoir, Getting Back to Me: From Girl to Boy to Woman in Just Fifty Years, captures that battle in real time. Drawn from her personal journals, the book documents the gut-wrenching, liberating, and often humorous process of coming out as a transgender woman after five decades of living as “one helluva guy.” With honesty and vulnerability, Scottie reveals what it meant to finally dismantle the walls of denial she had so carefully constructed and embrace her truth as a woman.
Scottie’s story begins in contradiction. To her family and colleagues, she embodied every traditional marker of masculinity: a husband for twenty-five years, the only son, the protective big brother, the legendary uncle, and the fearless survivalist who commanded dangerous sets across the globe.
“Everything in her life screamed Alpha Male,” the book’s description notes, and no one could have guessed that beneath that carefully polished exterior lay a truth that Scottie could no longer suppress. In her interview with me, Scottie explained that she had built elaborate coping mechanisms to keep her gender dysphoria under lock and key, systems of denial so robust that even her wife of two decades lived with her secret for years. But as she confessed, denial has limits. “One day I had a system-wide failure,” she told me. “My entire body literally threw up the truth of what and who I was to my wife. And for five years after that, we pretended that knowing the truth would be good enough. Until it wasn’t.”
Throughout the memoir, Marcy emerges as Scottie’s anchor, questioning, struggling, and ultimately standing with her through each step of becoming. Their relationship, tested in the crucible of transition, is portrayed not as picture-perfect but as profoundly human.
When asked what inspired her to finally write the memoir, Scottie told me that writing had always been part of her creative life. But the urgency came when her “life strategy” failed. “Until my body and soul revolted,” she said, “I thought I could just run out the clock as the best dude I could be and earn my true womanhood in the next lifetime.” Once the truth surfaced, silence was no longer an option. The memoir, she explained, wrote itself in just a few months, “three months of fourteen-hour days, and an additional two months of editing.” She journaled the milestones of her transition, weaving in the significance, irony, and humor of each moment. The hardest decision wasn’t writing, it was publishing. “There is no turning back in a ‘no turning back’ story,” she said.
The updated edition of Getting Back to Me includes a powerful foreword from actress, and activist, Alexandra Billings, best known for her role on Amazon’s Transparent. Billings calls Scottie “one of the most important new voices in the Trans community” and praises her for articulating what many cannot say for themselves. “Her courage to love and be loved is all the inspiration we need,” Billings writes. “I haven’t read anything this important in years.” That endorsement is more than literary praise; it reflects the deep respect Scottie has earned within the transgender community and beyond. In my interview for The Heroines of My Life, Scottie described Billings as her greatest role model, calling her “the loudest, proudest, most generous supernova of love and possibility and dignity that ever there was.” Their connection underscores the importance of intergenerational solidarity in trans storytelling.Scottie Jeanette Madden’s creative life extends far beyond her memoir. She has written and produced children’s television (Pug & Zero’s Field Trip), game shows (Duel, Do You Trust Me?), primetime reality series (Out of the Wild, Dude You’re Screwed), and even feature films like her indie horror-romance the kiss. She balances her professional work with her personal passions, cooking, caring for her wife, and always, storytelling. In our conversation, Scottie told me she identifies simply as a “storyteller.” Whether shaping clay under the guidance of her fine arts mentor, crafting adventure documentaries in the Alaskan wilderness, or writing about her transition, she approaches each medium with full immersion and commitment. “That richness has a different sense of legacy and expression,” she explained, “but they both have the same complete immersion of the storyteller, me, in them.”
What sets Getting Back to Me apart from other transition memoirs is its refusal to simplify. Scottie doesn’t make her story easy, not on herself, and not for the reader. She acknowledges her privilege as a white male in her earlier life, and she doesn’t shy away from the messy, painful, or even absurd realities of transition. Her honesty makes the book more than a memoir; it becomes a survival manual for authenticity, written with the precision of someone who knows what it means to stake everything on the truth.
For transgender readers, Scottie’s book offers validation and camaraderie. For cisgender readers, it provides insight into the complexities of living authentically after years of hiding. But above all, it is a love story, between Scottie and Marcy, between Scottie and herself, and between a storyteller and the truth she could no longer ignore.
As Alexandra Billings reminds us in her foreword, Scottie’s voice is vital. And as Scottie herself told me, the real inspiration lies in love: “My book is an inspiration to live in love, with love, for love, and to laugh. Always.”
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