"“This wildly compelling, beautifully written, first-of-its-kind memoir is an incredibly important, useful, and deeply humanizing story about one transgender woman’s unique experience navigating the complex world of foreign affairs and diplomacy. It’s a joy to read.” — Anthony Cotton, international inclusive development professional.
Join Robyn McCutcheon, an out and proud transgender woman, on her journey as a diplomat with the U.S. Department of State. Follow her on travels that took her through the Soviet Union as a historian, to the stars as an engineer in the Hubble Space Telescope project, and onward to Russia, Romania, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan as a Foreign Service Officer representing her country on everything from human rights to nuclear arms control. Find out what it was like to transition gender while serving full-time overseas and to become an icon to the LGBTQIA+ communities in Romania and in Central Asia."
"Follow her as president of GLIFAA, one of the best known LGBTQIA+ associations in the federal government. This is a story of perseverance and personal triumph. Simply put, this is queer diplomacy at its best. Robyn McCutcheon has spent her life immersed in Soviet/Russian affairs and in pointing control for NASA missions. In 2017 she received a Superior Honor Award for her “exceptional dedication and creativity in advancing LGBTQIA+ rights in Kazakhstan” and was listed as one of the top 50 successful transgender Americans you should know. Now retired, she has bike-packed multiple times across the United States and travels frequently to Central Asia."
In 2014, I interviewed Robyn and asked her about her coming-out: "I have a typical story for a transgender woman of my generation. I reached out to the gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University Hospital in the 1970s but did not have the strength to follow through. Married to a spouse who knew nothing, I said nothing until 1990. That led to a week in a psychiatric ward -- not uncommon even at that time -- followed by another two decades of deep hiding. When I finally did come out at the U.S. Embassy in Bucharest, Romania, in 2010-11, the reaction was just the opposite of what I had experienced during my earlier transition attempts. What once seemed impossible now seemed, if not easy, entirely possible. It was a matter of building support slowly among my colleagues and at higher levels both at the Embassy and in Washington. We even had a "Gender Transition Committee" with representatives from the various embassy offices to coordinate how we would prepare the Embassy's American and Romanian staff and make the announcement about my transition."Available via Amazon
Photo via Heroines of My Life
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