AUBURN - A mother and her son came to Cayuga County Monday to share their stories of working through gender re-assignment.

Authors Hilda Raz and Aaron Raz Link visited Cayuga Community College and Wells College, reading and discussing topics raised by their collaborative work, “What Becomes You.”

The book, which was originally published by the University of Nebraska Press in April 2007, is a memoir written in the two voices and from the two different perspectives of the co-authors, detailing Link's decision when he was 29 to undergo gender re-assignment surgery in 1994.

Link was born female and named Sarah in Nebraska but, Link said, he never felt comfortable as a woman, a sensation that he explained was very difficult to convey and remains so to this day.

“I felt I always was a man,” Link said at the CCC event. “I never identified myself as a man, clearly I wasn't. I could look down at my body and see that I was physically female and that was all I knew.”

Through much of his life as a woman, Link classified himself as gay, a fact his family and friends and particularly his mother, Raz, were all open to.

Raz has been a long-time scholar and professor of English and women's and gender studies at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, as well as a writer and poet, who wrote that she has many lesbian friends and colleagues.

Raz said she was completely accepting of her daughter's choices to have relationships with other women, and understood even early on that there was something different about Sarah.

But even this knowledge didn't keep Raz from projecting some of her own images on to her daughter.

“I grafted on my expectations,” Raz said, “as one generation does to the next. I was a tomboy when I was growing up and when you don't know everything you fill in with what you do know.”

Raz said that even with her daughter's choices, she still projected a time when Sarah might even want to have her own daughters.

But for Link the question always persisted.

He said he was constantly asking himself who he was and who he really wanted to be, in a time when these questions were not easy to answer and there were few places to turn for information.

“I was the last generation before the Internet,” Link said. “There wasn't really anywhere to go to look for information and answers. I had to go to the psychiatrists and look at the literature, which said that this was a mental illness.”

But as Link learned more about the possibilities of gender re-assignment surgery, it became the option that offered the best answer to the inner turmoil Link felt between who he was inside and the body he was given on the outside.

This personal decision still presented many difficulties. Link said that he was declared mentally ill for wanting to have this surgery, and that to this day transgender people are still considered mentally ill, but do not have any protection under the Americans With Disabilities Act.

But the focus of much of the discussion was on the smaller and more intimate concerns this decision created.

Link began a series of testosterone treatments lasting 12 months before the surgery and legally changed his name to Aaron, the name his mother said she would have given him if he were born a boy.

In the book, Link said that he describes his feelings and the physical sensations that his body went through during the testosterone treatments and the feelings of concern as to how this would be received by his family.

Despite her interest and education in women's studies, Raz admits she was taken aback by her daughter's decision to change her female body into that of a man, but Link still found an accepting family full of support.

“It was accepted equally by the men and the women in my family,” Link said. “And for that I am really grateful.”

After undergoing the surgery, Link began writing about his experiences and his unique insights into the world at large and all the microcosms of the gay, straight, male and female worlds.

This led to mother and son writing a book together, with Link taking the first 200 pages and Raz closing the book, giving two voices on the same set of circumstances and how through communication the two were able to find common ground and understanding.

It's a message they hope all readers can take away from the work.

“I don't think there is a better or worse,” Link said. “It is hard to be a man; it is hard to be a woman. I just hope we can come to a place where it is OK to say those things.”