Le Chemin: Autiste et trans : survivre, aimer, renaître is not a book that asks for permission to exist. It arrives quietly, almost humbly, yet it carries the emotional weight of an entire lifetime lived in fragments and reconquered piece by piece. Written by Olivia Gosselin with Tiavina Kleber, it is at once an intimate confession, a love letter, and a document of survival. From the very first pages, the reader understands that this is not a story about transition alone, nor about autism, nor about faith, but about the impossible task of holding together all the selves one is told cannot coexist.
She changed her body, her name, her life, but not her love for her daughters. That single sentence could stand as the emotional core of the book. Le Chemin is written as a letter to three daughters who no longer speak to her, and this choice shapes everything. The voice is restrained, never accusatory, never theatrical. It is the voice of someone who knows that love does not guarantee forgiveness, yet persists anyway. The absence of the daughters is present on every page, like a silence that structures the text. Olivia does not write to justify herself, but to leave a trace, to say I was here, I loved you, I tried to survive without erasing myself.
What makes this testimony particularly striking is the distance between the public image and the private implosion. Olivia Gosselin is a psychiatrist, a woman with an imposing academic and clinical career, trained in Nancy and Strasbourg, a former maître de conférences in neuropsychology, a hospital physician, a prison psychiatrist, an expert witness, a department head in adult psychiatry. Her curriculum vitae reads like a monument to rationality, discipline, and institutional legitimacy. And yet, behind this impeccable professional trajectory was a life spent dissociating, masking, and enduring an identity that had no language, no space, and no permission to speak.
Psychiatric hospitalizations, moments of collapse, and brushes with the limits of endurance are described with lucidity and restraint. There is no sensationalism in these passages, perhaps because Olivia knows too well, professionally and personally, how suffering is often misunderstood and consumed. Her clinical knowledge does not protect her from pain, but it gives her a precise vocabulary to describe it. This dual position, being both the one who diagnoses and the one who breaks, gives the book a rare depth. Le Chemin becomes not only a personal testimony but also an implicit critique of how psychiatry, families, and societies deal with those who do not fit the expected narratives of gender, sanity, or success. The moment of transition is not presented as a magical rebirth that erases everything else. It is a necessity, a point of no return, a step taken not to become someone else, but to stop dying slowly. The alignment of body and identity is described as a form of truth rather than liberation. Even then, loss follows. Relationships fracture. The distance with her children becomes real and devastating. The book does not hide this cost. On the contrary, it insists on it, as if to say that authenticity is not a guarantee of happiness, only of honesty.
Tiavina Kleber’s presence in the writing is subtle but essential. The text is polished without being smoothed out, structured without being constrained. The language remains accessible, emotional, and deeply human. There is tenderness everywhere, even when the subject matter is harsh. Shame is handled gently. Love is never weaponized. The reader is trusted to sit with discomfort rather than be guided toward easy conclusions. Le Chemin is more than an autobiography. It is a passage through fear, solitude, and silence, but also an insistence that no life can be reduced to a single label. It speaks to those who live at the intersections, autistic and trans, believer and scientist, parent and exile, respected professional and invisible self. It speaks to those who had to invent their own language, their own skin, their own way of breathing in a world that offered none. It also speaks to adult children trying to understand their parents, and to parents who know that love can survive even when contact does not.
What remains after finishing the book is not a sense of resolution, but of continuity. Olivia Gosselin does not present herself as healed or complete. She presents herself as alive, aligned, and still loving. In a literary landscape where trans narratives are often expected to be pedagogical, militant, or inspirational, Le Chemin chooses something far more radical. It chooses truth without spectacle. It chooses vulnerability without demand. It chooses love without guarantee. For those who do not fit into any box, this book does not offer a map. It offers companionship. And sometimes, that is the most necessary form of survival.
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