Synopsis

Best Book in Transgender Studies, 2005
Winner, Center for Lesbian & Gay Studies (CLAGS), NY
2005 Lambda Literary Award Finalist

Written by a leading activist in the transgender movement, Becoming a Visible Man is an artful and compelling inquiry into the politics of gender. Jamison Green combines candid autobiography with informed analysis to offer unique insight into the multiple challenges of the female-to-male transsexual experience, ranging from encounters with prejudice and strained relationships with family to the development of an FTM community and the realities of surgical sex reassignment.

For more than a decade, Green has provided educational programs on gender-variance issues for corporations, law-enforcement agencies, social-science conferences and classes, continuing legal education, religious education, and medical venues. His comprehensive knowledge of the processes and problems encountered by transgendered and transsexual peopleâ€"as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as othersâ€"enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.

Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiencesâ€"including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgeryâ€"the book examines transsexualism as a human condition, and sex reassignment as one of the choices that some people feel compelled to make in order to manage their gender variance. Relating the FTM psyche and experience to the social and political forces at work in American society, Becoming a Visible Man also speaks consciously of universal principles that concern us all, particularly the need to live one's life honestly, openly, and passionately.

Library Journal

A leading advocate for transsexuality and the author of the "Visible Man" column on the web (www.planetout.com/people/columns/ green), Green argues that the transsexuality movement is a struggle for fundamental human rights. The author is a female-to-male transsexual who deploys his autobiography to illustrate political points about gender and sex diversity. He asserts that transsexuals seek to balance their gender identity (an abiding sense of oneself as a man or woman) with their physical bodies. Like recent literature on the history of the body, this text differentiates biological sex, gender, and sexual orientation. Green's call for tolerance is important, but he fails to answer the concerns of sympathetic gender theorists. For example, Green asserts illogically that gender identity is both a naturally occurring "essence" and a mutable social construction. And despite Green's repeated denials, his arguments inadvertently reify sexual stereotypes. The result is less scholarly than Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States yet less scandalous than Edward Ball's Peninsula of Lies: A True Story of Mysterious Birth and Taboo Love. Recommended with reservation for public libraries and undergraduate libraries. Katherine C. Adams, Bowdoin Coll. Lib., Brunswick, ME Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

Biography

Jamison Green is currently board chair of Gender Education and Advocacy, a non-profit educational corporation, and a board member of the Transgender Law and Policy Institute and the Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association. He has also been featured in eight documentary films and numerous articles and books. He holds an M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Oregon.