Brigitte Martel - Né homme, comment je suis devenu femme

1981, Brigitte Martel, Canada, French,

Original title: "Né homme, comment je suis devenu femme" (Born man, how I became woman) by Brigitte Martel.

Brigitte Martel’s autobiography Né homme, comment je suis devenu femme, published in 1981, occupies a remarkable place in Québec’s cultural and queer history. It is more than the life story of a single woman. It is a chronicle of survival, resilience, self creation and the heavy weight of living authentically in a society that was still struggling to imagine that authenticity. Long before the era of social media, representation campaigns and visible transgender role models, Brigitte Martel stepped into the public eye with a mixture of vulnerability and defiance that still resonates today.

 

Readers often come to her book knowing a few widely repeated facts. Born Jacques Bélanger on 31 October 1949, she became famous at age eleven with the sentimental hit Maman, tu es la plus belle du monde. A generation of Québécois grew up hearing that song. Nothing in that early fame hinted at the storm that would follow. Yet Brigitte writes in her autobiography that she always felt slightly misaligned with the role that society expected her to play. As a child star she learned to smile on cue, charm crowds and behave like the image crafted around her. The book shows how those years were as much a performance of gender as they were a performance of music. The persona of Jacques Bélanger was already a costume she struggled to wear.

 

The autobiography shifts dramatically when Brigitte reaches adolescence. The young adult behind the microphone was beginning to confront a deeper truth that no stage costume could hide. She describes the turmoil of those years with raw honesty, evoking confusion, longing, shame and extraordinary courage. Québec in the late 1960s and early 1970s was not exactly a sanctuary for transgender people, and certainly not for a public figure whose every step could be scrutinized by tabloids. When she decided to transition, she found herself at the center of a media circus that had no vocabulary for her experience. The book recounts headlines that treated her transition not as a human journey but as a sensational novelty. Her voice in these chapters is steady and almost stubborn, as if she were telling her younger self that survival depends on refusing to flinch.

 

At eighteen she became the first Québec celebrity to undergo gender confirming surgery. Brigitte quotes herself in the book from that time, recalling a decisive moment when she told herself that she would take the leap and let whatever would happen, happen. It is one of the most moving passages because it reveals the blend of reckless hope and steadfast determination required to carve out a life that matched her internal reality. The sections that follow document the fallout. Opportunities vanished, gigs were cancelled, doors closed and some family relationships frayed. She does not hide the loneliness, nor does she exaggerate it. Instead she presents it as one thread in a much larger tapestry. The reader sees her learning to reclaim her own name, body and dignity while reinventing her artistic career in the shadows of public misunderstanding.

 

One of the strengths of the autobiography is the way Brigitte situates her personal story within a broader political awakening. She did not simply transition and retreat. She helped build community, share knowledge and challenge stigma. In 1980 she co-founded the Association des Transsexuel(le)s du Québec, a pioneering organization that provided support and education at a time when these concepts barely existed in the public sphere. The book makes clear that advocacy was not an abstract passion for her. It was a continuation of her survival. Helping others meant helping past versions of herself who never had guidance. Readers today can see the roots of Québec’s contemporary trans activism in her early work, seeds planted decades before wider recognition grew. Her autobiography also paints a vivid portrait of her later life. With her impressive stature and powerful voice, Brigitte spent her final years singing in cabarets in the east of Montréal. Far from the glitter of childhood stardom, these venues brought her closer to communities that embraced her without spectacle. She evokes smoky rooms, warm applause, late-night conversations and the camaraderie of performers who knew both hardship and joy. These chapters feel like a soft exhale after so many storms. She was not wealthy or protected, but she was defiantly alive, living a truth that had cost her dearly yet given her a sense of wholeness.

 

When she died suddenly on 3 June 2006 of cardiac arrest at her home in the Laurentians, Québec lost a pioneer who never asked for that title yet embodied it. Her autobiography stands as the first published memoir of a transgender person in Québec, but its significance goes beyond that milestone. It is an archive of courage written by a woman who refused silence and refused erasure. It preserves the voice of someone who sang her way through pain and possibility, who transformed scandal into selfhood and who left behind a record for future generations grappling with their own transitions. Reading Né homme, comment je suis devenu femme today feels like opening a time capsule and finding a heartbeat inside. Brigitte Martel lived in an era when affirmation was rare, language was limited and understanding was often replaced by curiosity or ridicule. Yet she wrote with tenderness, humor and clarity that illuminate the human core of her journey. Her book reminds us that transitions are never only medical or social. They are deeply emotional acts of becoming. They require leaps of faith that can feel impossible until someone else shows it is possible. Brigitte Martel showed it was possible. And she wrote it down so the world would know.

Available via secondemain.ca

and Wikipedia

Photos (a documentary by Mirha Soleil Ross via YouTube)