…it’s not simply that her public struggles on behalf of women, minorities, and the working class suddenly seem more relevant than ever. It’s that her private struggles—documented for the first time in all their fullness by Rosenberg—have recently become our public ones … a scholarly and methodical biography that is built, occasionally too obviously, from one hundred and thirty-five boxes of archival material … Rosenberg mostly takes Murray at her word, though she also adds a fresh one: transgender. Such retroactive labelling can be troubling, but the choice seems appropriate here, given how explicitly Murray identified as male, and how much her quest for medical intervention mirrors one variety of trans experience today.
