Nine Lives: The Autobiography of Erica Rutherford

Cynthia R. Comacchio is an assistant professor of history at Wilfrid
Laurier University and the author of Nations Are Built of Babies: Saving
Ontario’s Mothers and Children.

Erica Rutherford has laid claim to eight lives: actor, designer,
producer, farmer, painter, shopkeeper, teacher, and author. And she has
lived these lives—many of them the result of “circumstances and
temperament”—with much passion, and not a little suffering. The
central fact of Rutherford’s life/lives is what she has defined as the
“gender disturbance” that made her live as though “divided from
within.” Rutherford was born a man. She did not confront her
uneasiness about being a man until a medical crisis at the age of 46
motivated “a self-examination which led to my need to expose the
secrets which I had guarded from the world.”

Most of Rutherford’s story unfolds between the years 1923 (when she
was born in Scotland) and 1976. During these five decades Rutherford
pursued many careers, married four times, became a parent twice, and
eventually took refuge in transvestitism, which she believes was
“symptomatic of my inner conflict and not really an expression of
myself as a woman.” While at the University of Missouri, the threat of
terminal lung cancer incited a process of self-examination that would
bring Rutherford to acceptance of his transsexualism and to the gradual,
and painful, process that would lead him to surgery.

Rutherford begins her story by choosing to depict her experiences as
“varied” rather than “unusual,” a choice that positions her life
within the real context of many other lives—both those that actually
intertwined with hers, and those of her readers. She recounts her life
honestly, with little sentimentality, but in a manner that engages the
reader’s sympathy and compassion.