Jean Vermette’s book Je Me Souviens: One Person's Experience with Male-to-Female Sex Reassignment Surgery is an unflinchingly honest account of a life lived largely in silence, and of the long, careful journey toward embodiment, integrity, and wholeness. Drawn from lived experience rather than theory, the book offers readers not an abstract argument about transgender lives, but a deeply human narrative shaped by memory, patience, spirituality, loss, and quiet courage. It stands as both personal testimony and historical document, rooted in a time when language, resources, and social understanding around transgender identity were scarce or nonexistent.
Vermette traces her awareness of herself as female not as a sudden realization, but as something that simply always was. One of the earliest memories she recounts is from the age of three, when she put on a piece of her mother’s clothing and looked at herself in the mirror. There was no sense of experimentation or rebellion in the moment, only a feeling of rightness, coupled immediately with an unspoken understanding that this truth was not something the world would welcome. That combination, of inner certainty and outer danger, becomes a defining pattern throughout her life. From that moment forward, her femininity is something lived quietly and privately, carefully hidden even from those closest to her.
