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.
