In Just Tess: A Trans Female's Journey to Womanhood, author Tess Juliana opens a window into the tender, complex, and deeply human evolution of identity, soul, and purpose. This memoir is not just a record of transition from male to female, but a spiritual and emotional chronicle of duality, of two spirits, Jules and Tess, walking side by side until they could become one. Tess Juliana’s life is anything but ordinary.
Born with what many Indigenous cultures would call the gift of "Two Spirits," she navigated much of her early life as Jules, a man who served honorably in the United States Air Force as an air traffic controller. Jules' military career included a transformative year in remote Greenland, an experience that sparked a lifelong passion for geology and the Arctic's harsh and magnificent landscapes. That same passion carried him into a decades-long career in science education, during which he earned degrees in geology, science education, and biology. But science and adventure were only half the story. In Just Tess, the reader travels not only through physical terrain, across glaciers, mountains, and oceans, but also through the interior landscapes of longing, silence, love, fear, and truth.
