Julia Shelton - Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir

2025, English, Julia Shelton, USA,

Full title: "Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir - A Trans Woman’s Guide to Radical Self-Love" by Julia Shelton.

What if becoming yourself wasn’t about changing who you are, but coming home to the truth you’ve always known? This is the question at the heart of Julia Shelton’s bold and unflinching debut, Becoming Me: A Trans Memoir – A Trans Woman’s Guide to Radical Self-Love. Part lyrical memoir, part defiant manifesto, Shelton’s book is a raw, radiant chronicle of survival, self-discovery, and sacred transformation.

 

With the grace of a poet and the grit of a woman who has walked through fire, Julia invites readers not only to witness her journey but to begin (or deepen) their own. Becoming Me opens with a tender, painful recollection of childhood, a time when gender was both a secret truth and a source of silent shame. Shelton paints early life with aching honesty: the confusion of being assigned male, the ache of invisibility, the early traumas that left her unmoored long before she had the language to name her reality. Her story is neither linear nor sanitized, and that’s what makes it so powerful. It is nonlinear healing. It is poetry breaking into prose. It is a woman wrestling with, and eventually embracing, the parts of herself the world told her to bury.

 

From these early memories, Shelton leads us through adolescence and early adulthood, revealing the intersections of trauma, addiction, and the relentless search for belonging. Her descent into substance abuse is recounted not as a cautionary tale but as a deeply human one, one that many queer and trans people will recognize as a response to systemic erasure, violence, and internalized shame. Still, even in her darkest chapters, Shelton threads her prose with sparks of clarity and self-awareness, offering hope without false resolution. One of the most profound aspects of Becoming Me is Shelton’s framing of gender transition not as a dramatic departure from self, but as a spiritual return. Her writing echoes the wisdom of mystics and healers, suggesting that transition is not about becoming someone new, but shedding what was never truly yours. In her words, “Every hormone, every name change, every stitch of clothing wasn’t about hiding, it was about revealing. It was about finally being able to breathe in my own skin.” 

 

Shelton challenges the medicalized, pathologized view of transness and centers embodiment, intuition, and spirit. She describes her transition as sacred, a pilgrimage that led her not only to the mirror but to the divine. Readers who have been taught to see trans bodies through the lens of loss or tragedy will find in Shelton’s story a radical reimagining: transition as birth, as freedom, as love. Shelton doesn’t shy away from the messiness of love, especially the kind that hurts. Becoming Me delves deeply into the heartbreaks that shaped her: the lovers who fetishized her, the partners who failed to see her beyond her transness, and the painful betrayals that nearly broke her. Yet even in these chapters, there is no bitterness. There is reflection. There is the slow, often agonizing process of learning to choose herself, not out of defiance, but out of necessity. Perhaps most powerful is her exploration of self-forgiveness. For the times she stayed too long. For the silence she kept. For the ways she hurt herself trying to be lovable. In these moments, Shelton’s vulnerability is a balm, a reminder that healing is not linear and love, especially self-love, is the most radical act of all.

 

Though Becoming Me is deeply personal, Shelton makes clear that her story is also political. She writes explicitly for trans girls and women who have been told they are “too much,” “not enough,” or “wrong.” For those who’ve been overlooked, tokenized, or made invisible. For those navigating not just bodies in transition, but worlds that punish truth. This book is a mirror for those who need one, and a revolution for those ready to look in. But it’s also a call-in to cis readers, especially those unfamiliar with the lived realities of trans people. Shelton never lectures, but her truth-telling is uncompromising. She offers spiritual insight, sociopolitical critique, and deeply personal storytelling without apology. She dares readers to unlearn, to witness, to stretch their empathy, and to love more radically. 

 

Becoming Me belongs on the same shelf as Janet Mock’s Redefining Realness, Glennon Doyle’s Untamed, and Alok Vaid-Menon’s Beyond the Gender Binary, not because it mimics them, but because it expands the genre. Shelton’s voice is unique: raw and refined, poetic and practical, scarred and sacred. Her story reminds us that being trans is not a tragedy; it is a testament. For every trans person who has ever felt unseen, Shelton’s words say: “You are already enough. You are already her.” And for every person, trans or cis, who is still learning what it means to come home to themselves, Becoming Me offers a map, a flashlight, and a hand to hold. In the end, this is not just a story about becoming a woman. It’s a story about becoming whole. And in Julia Shelton’s hands, that story becomes a radical act of love.

Available via Amazon