Being Human

An intimate, empathic exploration of the life of Alice Oehninger. For fourteen years, she grows up in traditional Tanzania and Zimbabwe of the 1980ies. She is white. And transgender. She looks like a boy, and is expected to act the part. At twenty, she returns to her native Switzerland and finds herself a stranger there, too. She navigates culture shock, love and rejection, earns a living, discovers the powerful wish to be a parent. In the role of a man, she marries and finds contentment in Germany, until crisis destroys her fragile world. Where others break, Alice rises. She is driven by enabling other people to be their best possible selves. She becomes a learning coach for youths and young adults, a mentor and a counsellor. And ultimately, it is this drive that has led to this book, that it may touch and enrich as many lives as possible. With her richness of insights and experiences, Alice understands the parallels and similarities in the joys and struggles of people across the globe. The appreciation that life is finite, and infinitely precious. How we are all united in this. Alice explores human needs so fundamental, they rule our choices and interactions. Our ancestral urges for dominance and survival pitch us against each other, define how cultures and genders interact. She delicately but implacably points out how much time and effort we dedicate to defending and preserving our comfort zone. Alice breaks taboos. Suggesting what we might require to solve emotional double-binds. Or live and thrive despite ambivalences and insecurities. What it takes to overcome biological dichotomy, the conditioning of childhood. How we all yearn for recognition, security, and love. Alice is clear in her expectations of us: identify our own constraints, conditioned by society or self-imposed. And in their stead, engender understanding and mutual empowerment. She asks that we become role models for a society we want to live in tomorrow. J.C.