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 people—as well as his legal advocacy work to help ensure that gender-variant people have access to the same rights and opportunities as others—enable him to explain the issues as no transsexual author has previously done.

Brimming with frank and often poignant recollections of Green's own experiences—including his childhood struggles with identity and his years as a lesbian parent prior to his sex-reassignment surgery—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.

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

CUSTOMER REVIEWS (Average Customer Rating: 5.0 based on 12 reviews)

Great book for anyone to read.

This is an easy, fun, and interesting read. The book rekindled my sensitivity and respect for humanity.
April 06, 2008

Amazing!

It's a very good book, because it's one of the very best books I've ever read on trans issues. It's good if you need it for a positive outlook on transitioning. It's a book that has helped me as a person and I know that this book can help other guys out there see that they're not alone and there is a good way to transition.

Green, explores his own experiences and tells them in great detail. He's very educational and has helped me get through some tough times. It's a book I couldn't help not buying. It's in my library when I need to go back and see that I don't need to apoligize for who I am.
November 25, 2007

A Personal Transformation

Personal experiences mixed with arguments about transgender issues provide the reader with insight about what it really means to be a transsexual.

May 21, 2007

Becoming a Visible Man

Definately an excellent read, and one to keep in the library of any FTM.
May 17, 2007

A most excellent read!

Jamison Green's book Becoming a Visible Man is easily among my current top choices of trans-related texts. Not only does Green give readers pieces of his own personal experiences (following the trend of many other trans texts), but he also offers accessible, educational, and nuanced arguments around trans issues. In this way, Becoming a Visible Man is not only the story of Green's own personal becoming, but also, and perhaps more importantly, the story of the structures, institutions, and other forces that circumscribe, shape, and color all our becomings. In this vein, I'm confident that this book would appeal to transpeople and non-transpeople alike, both those with none or very little knowledge of trans issues, as well as those with much experience in this area.

While I haven't had the fortune (yet) to be familiar with Green's writings in the FTM Newsletter, I have no doubt that he provided much help and wisdom to its breadth of readers. His writing is balanced and aware of its biases, always mindful of questioning the existing structures of power, and responsible to those with whom he seems himself in community and alliance. By no means does this mean that Green attempts to speak for or about all transpeople or all transmen, or that he understands all transpeople or their experiences to be the same. Rather, Green is quite adamant about the differences between and among transpeople, at the same time that he is clear that we must come together in all our differences to effect true social change. And to his credit, through this all, his author's voice is calm and poetic; a great combination indeed of form and context!

I really could go on at length about the merits of this text...there isn't one thing I didn't like or find useful in its 231 pages. But, I'll settle for highlighting some of my most favorite passages:

(68) "I realized that if I could live in a way that declared my own self-acceptance--that is, not to broadcast my history every minute of the day, but to speak up honestly when it was appropriate, not necessarily with anger or even impatience, but with the compassion that I was finding within myself, to dispel myths and stereotypes that people cling to about us--that it would show others they could do it, too. Together we could change the conditions that generated our fears."

(78) "Politics is the art of negotiation among divergent goals, and cooperation is difficult when people are unaware of their motives or goals, or unable or unwilling to reveal them."

(89) "Being a transsexual is not something we do in the privacy of our own bedrooms; it affects every aspect of our lives, from our driver's licenses to our work histories, from our birth certificates to our school transcripts to our parents' wills, and every relationship represented by those paper trails."

(127) "For some people, the consequences of a transperson's assertion of his or her identity are simply too frightening because it threatens their own position within a particular community of ideology or faith."

(128) "My brother was not exactly disapproving of my sexual orientation, nor was he resentful of my ability to pitch in with his friends on construction projects or to manage home electrical problems, but he was much more comfortable when he didn't have to explain me anymore. This is not a reason to transition, as far as I'm concerned, but is a fact that an appearance of conformity with normative gender behavior does cause less social friction, a fact that every child has had drummed into her or him from earliest consciousness.

(177) "The extent to which we convey the truth of our experience is the extent to which any audience will receive us, yet so long as other people control the forum, or so long as the analyzing or commenting voices are not informed by direct experience of us, we are still vulnerable to being treated with nothing more enlightened than prejudice."

(180) "Social conventions and institutions support individual prejudice against the rights of transsexual people, adding to the burden of secrecy. These conventions persist because no one has tried, until very recently, to correct them."

(191) "Gender is a private matter that we share with others; and when we share it, it becomes a social construction, thus it requires, like language, a `speaker' and a `listener.' It is between the two of these actors that gender is defined, negotiated, corroborated, or challenged...But if we don't speak a language that others understand, then it can be a source of difficulty, even conflict, if we find ourselves in an intolerant environment."

(210) "If we are concerned that others will perceive our physical differences as laughable deficiencies, the answer is not to dehumanize and desensitize ourselves so we can manage rejection, but to sensitize others to appreciate us, and to learn to manage our own self-doubts so that others will be able to see worthy partners in us."

March 05, 2007

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