Abstract
In Unbound, renowned sociologist of sexuality and gender Arlene Stein offers readers a view into the lives of transmasculine people, individuals assigned female at birth who identify as transgender. Stein follows three transmasculine people and one butch lesbian who undergo chest masculinization, or top surgery, on the same day. Geared to a broad audience, Unbound situates the stories of Ben, Parker, Lucas, and Nadia amid larger political and social forces. Stein finds that these four individuals are simultaneously affected by contemporary normative notions of gender and forge new gendered ways of being beyond binary and static identities.
To construct this group portrait, Stein interviewed her subjects multiple times, observed them on the day of their surgeries, and followed them on social media. She also interviewed their families and friends, as well as a host of medical and psychiatric experts and transgender scholars and activists. Her portrayal of Ben, a political organizer and college student from Maine, is particularly deep, as Stein got to know his family and even visited them in their home.
After an introduction that situates the book in the emergence of transgender identities and medicine in the twentieth century, the first chapter introduces Ben, Parker, Lucas, and Nadia and the complex “transgender identity projects” and histories that brought each of them to the surgeon’s waiting room. The next three chapters focus mainly on Ben’s transition, covering his childhood gender nonconformity, work as an LGBT activist, and coming out to his family and friends. Stein contextualizes Ben’s story throughout by showing how his experience illustrates modern notions of gender, the self, and individuality as well as changes in medical and psychiatric gatekeeping over time. She also documents how the Internet has become a place where transgender people can express themselves and find support.
Chapter 5 gives background information on the surgeon, Charles Garramone, and other surgeons who work primarily with transgender people. She places the rise in gender-confirmation surgeries and the surgeons who specialize in them along with a broader normalization of plastic surgery for all people. Next, Stein returns back to the other trans men, Lucas and Parker, to show how figuring out how to be masculine in the world is a social process that goes well beyond testosterone or surgeries. Through focusing on Nadia in Chapter 7, Stein explores the overlaps, tensions, and differences between trans men and butches. Stein details how her own and older generations fear the loss of lesbian community, as younger people, unlike Nadia, often find themselves more at home in transgender identities. Then, Stein highlights how Lucas and his friend Oliver tackle questions about assimilation and engage in radical efforts to transform gender binaries through art and activism. Indeed, for Ben, Parker, and Lucas, their transitions do not end in unquestioned identities as men but with more complicated relationships to being masculine, queer, and feminist. In the final chapter, Stein joins Ben at the Philadelphia Transgender Health Conference where she learns about the new and seemingly endless ways for individuals to understand their genders and sexualities. While the main text ends on a hopeful note, the afterword brings the reader to the aftermath of the 2016 US presidential election. This political climate creates increased fear for Ben and the other protagonists along with a wider doubt about simple narratives of progress for transgender people.
The depth with which Stein engages with the stories of the four subjects would not be possible with a larger sample, but, as she notes, the four individuals are quite similar—white, in their twenties, and raised Catholic. Their lives differ in significant ways from other transmasculine and/or butch individuals, such as those who do not want to get top surgery and who cannot afford the cost of this particular surgeon who does not accept insurance. Overall, this thoroughly researched and engaging group portrait represents only a sliver of the larger transgender experience.
One of the strengths of Unbound is in how Stein documents other transformations beyond the four individuals. She shows that the families and friends of those who transition must grapple with changes beyond learning a new name or pronouns to rethinking their own understandings of gender and relationships to one another. Stein also traces the transformations of medical, legal, psychiatric, and popular understandings of transgender issues along with shifts in LGBT communities and politics in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. All of this is framed throughout the book by Stein’s own transformation as a feminist and lesbian moving from some initial ambivalence about the prevalence of gender transitions to acceptance and understanding. This journey makes her a fitting guide for scholars and popular readers alike seeking a greater understanding of transgender people.