Abstract
This book focuses on the lives of three millennial transgender men—Ben, Parker, and Lucas—and Nadia, who is described as “a gender bender who wants to modify her body and still be recognized as a female” (p. 171). Stein’s interest and fascination is in understanding and accounting for the motivations of these individuals from her standpoint as a cisgender lesbian-identifying woman with her own history of embracing and living a feminist and queer politics.
Much of the book centers on Ben and his family coming to terms with their son’s coming out and transition as a white trans man. Chapter two, for example, is devoted to providing a biographical account of the gender trouble that Ben experienced and incited as a youth growing up. He is also the primary focus in chapter four in which Stein examines how his family makes sense of his decision to transition. Stein contacted Ben through a crowdfunding website he had set up to fund the cost of his gender-affirming surgery. They first meet in the reception area of Dr. Garamone’s clinic in Florida, where Stein also recruits the other participants who have come to meet with this surgeon who specializes in FTM top surgeries.
In chapter five, Stein provides a critical account of the marketing of trans surgery and also includes the perspectives of surgeons she has interviewed. Here she exposes the offensive opinions and harmful accounts of surgeons who consider transgender to be a normative medical condition with a specific etiological basis in early childhood. Stein also offers an account of her own experiences of embodiment, as both a baby boomer growing up in the seventies and a young feminist lesbian woman, and highlights how she and her friends were encouraged to refute accepted norms of femininity and to not be concerned about body image. She draws on her own standpoint to raise some questions about the discourse of authenticity in realizing a fundament project of self-realization, which she seems to argue cannot be understood outside of the increasing intensification of consumerism that has come to pervade both cosmetic and gender conforming surgeries.
In chapter six, Stein details the biographies and transitions of Parker and Lucas. She sets up the illustrative contrast between the normative or conventional version of embodied masculinity embraced by the former with the more bigendered and expansive version of maleness that reflects the latter’s refusal to simply renounce his prior lived experiences. Elsewhere in the book, attention is devoted to the specific experience of Nadia’s female masculinity, and more broadly the experiences of trans men who identified as butch lesbians before transitioning. Stein’s argument appears to be that support for gender nonconformity would minimize the desire to transition and alter one’s body, a viewpoint that fails to address important epistemological and ontological concerns raised by many trans scholars in the field. She problematically compares a trans man’s bodily ontological experiences with that of a female-embodied individual who embraces female masculinity, thereby reducing the psychic complexity and ontologies of trans embodiment in the decision to transition as “very personal ones” that are influenced by social and cultural contexts (p. 189). In fact, Stein confesses that as she was researching the book she often felt “unnerved at the sight of handsome women transforming themselves into dudes with stubby beards, thick necks, and deep voices, people who were passing out of the zone of my own attractions” (p. 193).
Stein goes on to provide an account of another trans person named Angie who had top surgery, lived as male, but wanted to keep their female-identifying name while going by they/them pronouns as a reminder to others of the limitations of the gender binary system. The reader is told that Angie eventually became Carson, gave up on “living between genders,” and planned to take hormones (p. 194). In arguing that it is the binary culture that makes it difficult to live and embrace a more gender-fluid or gender-neutral existence Stein fails to address what transsexual scholar Raewyn Connell refers to as onto-formative complexities and temporalities pertaining to trans bodily becoming and livability, which cannot be reduced merely to questions of culture.
While the book aims to enhance an understanding about trans men’s lives and identities and ultimately comes to the conclusion that “medical transitioning is neither the beginning nor the end” of trans people’s stories (p. 277), it is very much influenced by a ciscentric accounting for trans male embodiment that does not engage with trans-informed epistemological insights into bodily ontological becoming and the complex temporalities of transness. The book would be useful for gender studies scholars and graduate students, as well as those with an interest specifically in trans studies.
