Ben sits in the waiting room of a plastic surgery clinic at a strip mall in South Florida. It is eight in the morning, and he barely slept the night before. Drawn by word of mouth and the power of the Internet, he has driven 1,500 miles to see a surgeon who will masculinize his chest. Ever since the surgery was scheduled six months ago, he’s been counting the days until he can look in the mirror and see a flat chest. Now it’s nearly here, and his excitement is palpable. A high-energy twenty-nine-year-old who spent ten years as a photographer in the extreme water sports industry and as a political organizer before deciding to return to college, Ben calls himself “a super-late bloomer.”
Bess, as he was then known, short for Elizabeth, befriended a couple of transgender men while working on a campaign for marriage equality in Maine, where he lived. He felt a sudden frisson of recognition, which led him to wonder whether his lifelong feelings of estrangement from his body and his femaleness meant he was transgender. “So I think I’m having a gender crisis,” he told his good friend Allison. “Dude, OMG, that makes perfect sense,” she replied. “You’ve always hated your boobs.”
During the next year, Ben underwent a process of soul-searching that led him to undergo a gender transition. He asked his friends and family to call him Ben while he went on testosterone, investigated the possibility of surgically modifying his body, and posted the following on a crowdfunding website:
Hello there! My name is Ben Shepherd. I’m a trans man (meaning I was born female-bodied but identify as a man) and I am working to raise the funds necessary for me to have reconstructive chest surgery. This is important to me because it is the one area of my life that causes severe anxiety and often bouts of deep depression. I am currently a large chested person which means it’s very difficult for myself and others to view me as the man I feel I am. I can rarely fit into men’s dress shirts, even when wearing a binder. In order to wear dress shirts and other clothing that I feel more comfortable in I need to wear a binder which flattens my chest, but it also restricts my breathing and can be incredibly painful to wear. Even as painful as it is to wear, it is often more comfortable than going without it. Often, I’ll wear my binder for over twelve hours out of necessity, the recommended max time for wearing a binder is at most 6–8 hours.
The good news, there is a remedy for this dysphoria. There are surgeons all across the country that perform the kind of chest reconstruction that I am looking to have done. I am saving to go to Dr. G. in South Florida as he is one of the best in the country at one of the most affordable price points. Dr. G. has an estimated cost of roughly $7,000 with all the hospital and surgical fees included. Once the surgery is complete I have to return to Dr. G.’s office a week later to have him remove the dressings and drains. During that week post op I will be heavily medicated and won’t be able to lift my arms so I will need someone to care for me during this time. This means that in addition to the $7,000 for the surgery I need to raise $1,500 to cover the travel for myself and one other person for one week from Maine to Dr. G.’s office in South Florida. Once my top surgery is complete I will feel like my whole self and my transition will feel complete. That means the total I need to raise is $8,500. I’ll start by making the $8,500 the goal on this site and as I personally add money to my savings account for top surgery I’ll decrease the total goal to accurately reflect what’s left to raise.
My goal is to raise these funds by April 5, 2015, so that I can have my surgery on May 11, 2015 (Dr. G. requires full payment 4 weeks before the surgery date).
Every little bit helps, thank you so much for your kindness and generosity,
Ben
Over the course of ten months, eighty-six people—friends, family members, fellow activists, former schoolmates, and even a few people Ben had never met—contributed an average of $35 to help finance the surgery, and Ben put the remaining $4,000 on his credit card. Bob and Gail, his parents, agreed to drive from Maine to Florida with Ben, and used points they had accumulated through a Disney Vacation Club timeshare to book a hotel for the weeklong stay. Gail is a fifty-five-year-old middle school principal; Bob is a meteorologist with the National Weather Service.
On the eve of the drive south, Ben recorded a video of himself in a baseball cap, with a wispy mustache, and announced their departure with a big grin: “On the road!!! Headed south for the big surgery!!! Thank you all SOOO much for all your love and support. I can’t thank you all enough. I really am one of the luckiest humans on the planet!!” He and his parents narrated the Bye-Bye Tatas Trip, as Ben affectionately dubbed it, for friends and family. Ben and his dad tag-teamed, driving through the night without stopping to complete the twenty-three-hour journey. Along the way, there are posts from the Waffle House in Stephens City, Virginia, and a Dunkin’ Donuts in Hardeeville, South Carolina. When they arrived in Vero Beach, Florida, Ben mugged for the camera, offering a big thumbs-up.
The drive down from Maine was taxing, but the emotional journey was far more arduous, as it is for most who undergo gender transitions. When I meet them in the doctor’s office, Bob and Gail are sleep deprived. While Gail has come to terms with her child’s choice, Bob seems more ambivalent about the whole thing. As Gail recalls, Ben told his parents he wanted to “look the way he feels.” He’s never been girly, and often went to great, often unsuccessful lengths to perform femininity. Five years earlier “she told us she was dating someone named Joe,” Bob tells me “She didn’t tell us what sex Joe was, but I figured it out. Joe was Jo. His high school friends said, ‘Finally!’ They could sense it.”1
Gail didn’t quite get it, but thought, “Okay, no big deal. We’ve had gay relatives. My parents have gay nieces and nephews—it’s not a major thing. We have plenty of friends that are gays. I told Ben: Enjoy your life. Glad you’re happy.” Coming out as gay “was no big deal,” Bob agreed. “It’s a lifestyle choice. But this is huge.” When Ben declared he was transgender, “that was a lot harder to comprehend,” Gail told me. “Gender is more fundamental. It affects everyone around us. It has been an education, that’s for sure.”
In November 2013 Bess started going by Ben, and a few months later he announced that he would begin to inject testosterone. Bob and Gail saw it as yet another sign of their child’s impetuousness. Ben was passionate about whatever he was into at the time, whether it was surfing, photography, or political campaign work. Would this be just another fleeting interest? They battled over his decision to transition. “No, you don’t need to go and start it in thirty days,” Bob told him. “You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Just stop everything and seriously think about what you’re doing here.” He thought it was just another of his child’s frequent whims. “I was thinking, ‘Oh God, here we go again,’ ” said Bob. “Bess was always a person who embraced different ideas, did totally different things. It was familiar in lots of ways, but also way extreme. I mean, this is out there.” He said to Ben: “This is serious. You’re talking about sex change and everything else. You need to seriously calm down and think about this.” Bob and Gail were concerned that although their child had loads of friends, there was a kind of darkness at his core. He regularly slept until noon and had trouble keeping his room, and his life, in order. He seemed aimless, as though he was always searching for something but didn’t know quite what it was.
When Ben came out on Facebook, a few of Bob and Gail’s friends found out. Ben apologized for not preparing them first. “It was difficult telling people,” says Bob, “but we managed to do it. It’s the larger circles that are really hard. I’ve lost friends over this,” he tells me. “People talk, say she’s a freak. They don’t say it to his face, but I hear secondhand.”
As Bob inadvertently switches Ben’s pronouns midsentence, he ponders how to tell the people he works with about Ben. Meteorologists are not, as a rule, the most socially enlightened folks, Bob says. A few weeks before Ben’s top surgery, an aspiring weather forecaster who happened to be a transgender woman visited Bob’s workplace to shadow staffers, and people said some really rude things about her afterward. Bob isn’t typically one to make waves, but the experience hit home, making him uncomfortable. “I kept my mouth shut. These are supposedly educated people,” he said, expressing his displeasure.
Gail has fared better at her workplace. She sent an e-mail to staff at her small school north of Portland: “I am taking next week off to take my transgender son to have surgery,” she announced, though she concealed that information from the school district. While she wanted those she works with to know, she preferred that those “outside the building” be kept in the dark. She sent the e-mail on Friday at the end of the day, when everyone had already left for the weekend, Gail told me. “And they were fine with that. They didn’t really say anything.”
Coming to terms with Ben’s decision to transition wasn’t easy for his parents. They listened to their child’s pleading and watched a bunch of educational videos together. And they did a lot of talking and crying. Eventually, Bob and Gail came around, along with nearly all of their friends and family. But they still sometimes slip and call Ben by his former name, Bess. They worry, too, about what to do with all of the framed photographs that adorn the walls of their home in the outskirts of Portland, of the child who had been assigned female at birth.
“I will miss Bess,” says Gail, “but I have to support Ben in his new life.”
Until recently, people who were assigned female at birth but who grew up feeling that their bodies did not adequately reflect their gendered selves had little choice but to live with their smooth skin and protruding chests. They did not have access to medical technologies with which to alter their bodies, or the cultural affirmation for doing so. Today, however, thousands of Americans, and travelers to this country, are finding their way to surgical offices like the one Ben visited in South Florida, asserting their right to craft masculine bodies. I wanted to better understand what brings them there and how, collectively, transmasculine people are challenging popular understandings of gender.
In current parlance, I am “cisgender,” which means I do not identify as transgender. (The prefix “trans” is Latin for “on the other side,” and “cis” in Latin means “on the same side.”) That is, I experience my assigned sex and gender as congruent, at least to the degree that it has not become a major challenge in my life. When I was a kid growing up, I remember thinking that it would be cool to be a boy. Since I am now middle-aged, I can remember a time when girls were compelled to wear dresses to school, abortion was illegal, and team sports were something that boys, and not girls, could participate in. Boys got to play with electric trains, which I lusted after but my parents refused to give me—they were “boys’ toys.” Men didn’t have to go through the pain of childbirth, and they fronted the best rock-and-roll bands. Why wouldn’t one dream of being a man?
For me, identifying as a feminist and a lesbian enables me to express my femaleness in ways that seem true enough. But over the years I learned that there are others who feel that they were assigned a gender at birth that seems inauthentic and wrong—so much so that many seek out body modifications to bring their bodies into alignment with their selves. A number of years ago, I noticed a young man working in my campus bookstore who seemed vaguely familiar to me. I stared at him for several moments out of the corner of my eye, racking my brain to figure out how I knew him, while trying my best not to attract his attention. Suddenly, I realized that he had once been a student of mine, and that I knew him as female, but now he had peach fuzz on his face, a deep voice, and was all but indistinguishable from the other young men who worked alongside him selling camera equipment. But I was so ill-equipped to figure out how to respond that I pretended not to recognize him, and he did the same.
And then in February 2013, Kate, an artist friend of mine, accompanied a close friend of hers who was undergoing top surgery—chest masculinization—in Florida. “You would not believe the numbers of people there,” she told me, describing the long line of individuals, mainly in their twenties, who were waiting in the surgeon’s office. South Florida was once known for a Spring Break scene that drew legions of college students eager for hot fun in the sun—a scene immortalized by the 1960 comedy Where the Boys Are. Today it is also where the “bois”—young, female-assigned people, who identify as masculine, some of whom undergo gender transitions—go to masculinize their chests.
The scene at the doctor’s office surprised Kate. “There were people from everywhere you could imagine, and many of them were very young,” she told me in her soft Texas drawl. “Some even brought their parents!” In a nearby gated community, a guesthouse had been established to accommodate the steady flow of patients who needed a place to stay while they recovered from surgery. My curiosity was piqued when, a few months later, I happened to hear about another friend whose nephew also underwent “top surgery” in South Florida, and then I saw a mention of the same doctor in a magazine. Why were so many people flocking to Florida to modify their chests? What were they seeking? What did they find? More broadly, what does it mean that more and more female-assigned individuals are choosing to masculinize their bodies today? What might it tell us about how our notions of gender are changing more generally?
Sociologists, or at least my breed of sociologist, try to get as close to a subject as they possibly can, immersing themselves in it. That’s how I met Ben. I came across the crowdfunding website he had set up and I e-mailed him. He quickly agreed to let me tag along during his surgery week. So I booked my room and plane ticket and traveled down to Florida from my home in New Jersey to meet him—and, as it turned out, his parents too.
At Dr. Garramone’s office, I also met the four others who were scheduled for surgery the same day as Ben. Three of them were good enough to agree to speak with me: Lucas DeMonte, a twenty-three-year-old health outreach worker from Gainesville, Florida; Parker Price, a twenty-four-year-old software sales manager from Austin, Texas; and Nadia Khoury, a twenty-eight-year-old employment counselor from St. Louis, Missouri. Lucas, Parker, and Nadia, along with Ben, are the subjects of this book. They have allowed me to interview them and their friends and family, and over the next year, they permitted me to follow them at regular intervals, spoke with me over the phone and Skype, and even welcomed me into their homes on occasion. As I got to know them over the course of the next year, I came to better understand the lives and choices of a younger generation of gender dissidents. You can learn a lot about people by listening to their stories.
The “dominant scientific tale” about sex differences, according to researcher Rebecca Jordan-Young, goes something like this: “Because of early exposure to different sex hormones, males and females have different brains,” which in turn determines many of the differences we observe between men and women, such as men’s greater propensity to be fiercely competitive, and women’s more nurturing, relational character.2 My generation of feminists pushed back against those views. Influenced by Simone de Beauvoir’s claim that “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman,” we spent a lot of time refuting the view that biology is destiny. Society, not nature, creates many of the differences we observe between men and women, we declared.
If women are less competitive than men, it had less to do with how their brains are wired or their bodies are made and more to do with the fact that they are excluded from team sports growing up, channeled into nurturing occupations like nursing and teaching, and they are surrounded by advertising images that perpetuate certain ideals of womanhood. We feminists therefore set out to create opportunities for women to make different choices if they wished. “Who knows what women can be when they are finally free to become themselves?” asked Betty Friedan in 1963.3 We encouraged women to embrace their more masculine sides, and men to become gentler and kinder.
Thanks to our efforts, twenty-first-century Americans are less likely to believe you need to be a boy in order to climb trees, play with model trains, compete in high school sports, or even be president. But despite the best hopes of many members of my generation, gender differences haven’t faded away. Gender continues to be what sociologists call a “master status.” It is a primary way we divide up society, and through which we distribute social benefits, material resources, and even love. It continues to influence what kinds of toys we give kids, the kinds of jobs we seek, and the expectations others have of us on the job, in our families, and in public—though perhaps less than in the past. For some people, gender differences can be a source of pleasure, too, as many of those who have spent a lot of time hanging out on baseball diamonds, or planning bridal showers, can tell you.
But even as we have made gender roles more expansive, encouraging our daughters to be strong and athletic and our sons to be expressive and nurturing, it seems that we shoehorned many people into categories that never really fit them. We assumed that the world comprises two groups: men and women. And we took for granted the belief that if you have a certain set of genitals and secondary sex characteristics, you have a particular gender identity too.
Doctors make a determination of a baby’s sex, a sex assignment, based on what’s visible—genitals. Yet so much about sexed bodies, such as chromosomes, hormones, and reproductive organs, is invisible. Using an infant’s genitals as a way of determining sex is a pretty crude instrument, it turns out. Some babies have genitals that are ambiguous, and not clearly male or female—they are referred to as intersex. But even those bodies whose genitals are pretty unambiguous, and seem clearly female or male, may be far more complex than they seem on the surface. Our bodies do not divide as neatly into male and female as many people commonly believe.4 Nor do our minds. As Magnus Hirschfeld, the pioneering early twentieth-century sexologist, argued, “the human is not a man or woman, but rather man and woman.”5
But societies are organized quite differently, and they tend to divide the population into two different groups. Once assigned to one gender or the other, individuals are expected to abide by the rules. Be a man. Be a woman. Don’t step out of line. A host of social institutions, such as marriage, public restrooms, sex-segregated sports teams, and prisons, reinforce this distinction, as do manufacturers of toys and clothing. Individuals who flout the rules, refusing to conform to one gender, risk being kicked out of their families, and they are likely to encounter job insecurity and higher rates of bullying and violence.
While most cultures divide men and women into two groups, as far back as we know there have been those who establish a specific social role for members of a “third” sex or gender. In the early 1700s, Western observers noted that many Native American tribes recognized gender-variant individuals and at times accorded such individuals, now called “two-spirit,” honored roles. Different cultures have varied names to describe members of an intermediate sex: in India, there are hijras; in the Philippines, bâkla; in Thailand, kathoey; and in Brazil, travesti. In contemporary Japan, onnabes present themselves as men to heterosexually identified women who frequent Tokyo clubs. There are many, many other local examples of such gender variation.6
At different moments, and at different times, individuals have devised different strategies for grappling with their gender variance—the fact that they do not identify with the gender to which they have been “assigned.” At times, such individuals seek to cross over and migrate to the “other” gender. In twentieth-century Europe and the United States, some female-assigned individuals used prosthetic devices, hormones, and sartorial style in order to live the gender of their choice, “passing” as men in all, or nearly all, aspects of their lives. Jazz musician Billy Tipton, who was born in 1914, recorded two albums and toured the West, eventually settling in Spokane, Washington, where he married and parented three sons. Two of his wives, according to biographer Diane Middlebrook, never realized that he had been assigned female at birth. Tipton claimed he had been in a serious car accident resulting in damaged genitals and broken ribs, and that it was necessary to bind his damaged chest and use a prosthetic device to engage in sexual intercourse.7
During the course of Tipton’s life, medical sex reassignment became available to select individuals who wished to bring their bodies into closer alignment with their gendered selves. In 1930, Lili Elbe, born Einar Magnus Andreas Wegener, transitioned from male to female in Denmark (immortalized in the 2015 film The Danish Girl), with the help of Magnus Hirschfeld and his associates at Berlin’s Institute for Sexual Science, who performed the first sex change surgeries until the Nazis destroyed the clinic in 1933. The following decade, Michael Dillon became the first female-assigned person to medically transition. Born in 1915 to an aristocratic English family, after cross-dressing and identifying as male at an early age, Dillon spoke with doctors about his belief that he was a “man trapped in a woman’s body,” pleading with them to take on his case. He argued that transsexual men are members of an “intermediate” sex. Convincing doctors that he could gain relief by transitioning, Dillon underwent a double mastectomy in 1942 and two years later, at age twenty-nine, changed his birth certificate to reflect his new male name. He enlisted a world-renowned specialist in reconstructive plastic surgery to construct a phallus, and eventually he became a medical doctor himself.8
In the 1950s, medical and psychological experts drew a distinction between sex and gender that helped establish a framework for medical sex reassignments. Based on his work with intersex individuals, John Money, a professor of pediatrics and psychology at Johns Hopkins University, described sex, one’s designation as male or female, as rooted in biology and the body; gender, on the other hand, is influenced by a host of social expectations about masculinity and femininity, which encompasses roles and identities, he argued. The author of thousands of academic articles and at least a dozen books (including Venuses Penuses and The Breathless Orgasm), Money was a pathbreaking, controversial researcher who helped shape popular understandings of sex and gender during the twentieth century.
By opening up the possibility that biology does not wholly determine gender, he and others came to acknowledge that some individuals cannot or do not wish to conform to their gender assignment; their gender identity does not “match” their sexed body. They believed that the mind was less malleable than the body, and that bodies could—and should—be refashioned to align with an individual’s gender identity. Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist and sexologist, devised a spectrum of gender variance that placed transvestites (who liked to cross-dress) on one end, and transsexuals (whom he believed required sex reassignment, including hormonal therapy and surgery, to live successfully) on the other. He helped to establish the first gender clinic at Johns Hopkins University in 1966, which offered select individuals the possibility of modifying their bodies.
During its first two years of operation, three thousand people applied and only about thirty people were accepted for surgery—nearly all had been assigned male at birth and were transitioning to become female. To be eligible for surgeries, individuals were required to attest to the fact that their transgender identity was early and enduring—that they had “known” that they were transsexual since they were young children, and that they felt they were “trapped in the wrong body.” But since no insurance plans covered body modifications, individuals had to be able to finance them themselves—as well as take time off from work, have a means of traveling to a clinic, and be able to leave their families, and their jobs, to do so. They were also required to live as “normal” heterosexuals after they transitioned, hiding their past from others.9
And thus a new medical apparatus for reorganizing the relationship between sex and gender for certain select individuals, who were willing to subject themselves to stringent rules for “changing sex,” was established.
Today’s transgender individuals owe their existence partly to this legacy: they are coming of age at a time when aligning one’s body and gender identity is possible—because we have the medical technology to do so, and the cultural frameworks that can support the decision to transition. Younger transgender-identified individuals share the belief that transgender is a medical issue, but they also push up against that view. Armed with newer understandings of gender variance, they are challenging the assumption that the world is divided into two, and only two, sexes.
In the 1960s, when it first became possible to undergo a “sex change” in the United States, the phenomenon of transsexuality was associated mainly with individuals who were assigned male at birth, then known as MTF (male-to-female). Harry Benjamin had declared that there was one female-to-male for every eight male-to-female trans people.10 Jamison Green, a transgender male activist who grew up in California in the 1960s and ’70s, recalled, “I had no idea that others like me existed.”11 Even as late as the 1980s, when she was training to be a sex therapist and couples counselor, Margaret Nichols, who founded a counseling center in New Jersey that specializes in LGBT issues, was informed that female-to-male transgender people “barely existed.”
If transgender men have been vastly outnumbered by their male-to-female counterparts, it is partly due to the fact that they have, until recently, been excluded from access to medical technologies. The case of Pauli Murray, an activist and lawyer who played pivotal roles in the civil rights and women’s movements, is instructive in this regard. Murray grew up in segregated North Carolina. She became the first African American to earn a Juris Doctor degree from Yale, participated in the formation of the National Organization for Women, and was a friend and associate of Eleanor Roosevelt. Murray’s legal work was foundational in challenging racial segregation in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case. Throughout her life, Murray struggled with her gender identity and believed she was male. She was unsuccessful in persuading doctors to prescribe testosterone; the doctors told her she was delusional.
“Anything you can do to help me will be gratefully appreciated,” she wrote to one doctor, “because my life is somewhat unbearable in its present phase, and though a person of ability, this aspect continually blocks my efforts to do the things of which I am capable.”12 (I use female pronouns to refer to her because those are the pronouns she herself used.) Would Murray identify as transgender today? It is likely, though we cannot know for certain. What we do know is that during her lifetime (she died in 1985) transgender men were mostly invisible, lacking a subculture or social movement of their own. Openly identifying as transgender, or undergoing hormone replacement therapy, let alone top surgery, was practically impossible for people like Murray. Murray resisted gender norms, dressing in pants and slicking her short hair back with pomade. While some of her peers found refuge in the butch-femme lesbian world of the 1950s and ’60s, she longed for confirmation that she wasn’t really a woman at all—and the possibility that medical technologies could be harnessed so that her body could be brought into alignment with her deep sense of maleness. But these procedures were nearly impossible for female-assigned individuals, particularly racial minorities, to access.
Today, over half a century later, those who were assigned female at birth constitute the fastest-growing population of transgender-identified people, and they are increasingly visible and vocal. There is growing parity among females and males who call themselves transgender, at least according to mental health professionals who work with the trans population.13 Whereas once gender clinics limited access to body modifications to only a select few individuals, today a small but growing coterie of surgeons, endocrinologists, therapists, and others dedicate themselves to serving gender-variant patients. Body modifications are much more readily available to female-assigned individuals—to people who can afford the time and money, or who have access to insurance that covers such procedures.
In May 2014, Medicare lifted its ban on covering gender surgeries, and federal employees’ insurance plans quickly followed suit. The Affordable Care Act prohibited discrimination against transgender surgery and led the way for a number of states to begin covering transition-related care. Other legal reforms followed. The Obama administration enacted rules that allowed individuals to change the gender listed on passports, and in May 2016, rules that directed all U.S. school districts to allow transgender students to use bathrooms consistent with their gender identity, rather than the gender they were assigned at birth—policies that led some to dub Obama the “Trans-Rights President.”14
In addition to enjoying greater access to medical technology, and more legal rights, today’s gender nonconformists also enjoy greater access than prior generations to language and concepts that make the idea of modifying their bodies more imaginable, including such terms as “trans,” “non-binary,” and even “transmasculine,” and the introduction of questions such as “What are your pronouns?” They are busily fashioning new vocabularies to describe gender diversity, they are communicating with one another using innovative technologies, and they are modifying their bodies in varied ways. “Cultures emerge slowly, but sometimes a culture or subculture turns on a dime,” Kate Bornstein, the trans activist and writer, tells me. “That’s what’s happened with transgender subculture—big changes in just one generation.”
That sense of collective exuberance has since been tempered by the election of a president who ran on a platform that promised to turn the clock back, and several years after Bornstein uttered those words, the successes of the transgender movement now seem somewhat more precarious. Yet in some respects, the cat is already out of the bag. Younger people growing up today are less likely to believe that the world is divided into male and female, or that one’s anatomy is fixed for all time. They are more likely to see gender as a matter of choice, rather than something that is given at birth. If my cohort pioneered the idea of sexual liberation, and the belief that one could live in accordance with one’s desires, and come out as gay or lesbian, or even bisexual, for today’s younger generation the issue of gender seems even more central.
This book focuses on the stories of four young adults who, though assigned female at birth, found themselves together in one surgeon’s office where they had come to masculinize their chests, at a time when more and more individuals are questioning taken-for-granted understandings about gender. It was written for general readers who may have limited acquaintance with the transgender world and who wish to learn more about it, as well as for those who are more intimately familiar with transgender culture. Unbound is a group portrait of those who choose to remake their bodies and lives using the tools they have at their disposal. Ben, Lucas, Parker, and Nadia graciously offered their full cooperation and indeed encouraged me to write about them over the course of more than a year. While researching this book, I also spoke with more than fifty others—family members, friends, co-workers, medical and psychological experts, and transgender activists. What I learned is that even as they are shaped by prevailing conceptions of masculinity and femininity, a younger generation of transgender men are prying open many of our assumptions about what it means to be men and women.
A note on names and pronouns. Transgender people wish to be identified by names and pronouns of their choosing. I follow that convention in this book, honoring their self-definitions. If I have permission to do so, at times I use individuals’ assigned (pre-transition) names for illustrative purposes or when quoting friends or family members. I use pronouns of choice retroactively, referring to trans men as male even before their transition, in order to convey a sense of continuity over time, if that is how they see themselves prior to their transition. A few individuals are referred to as “they,” reflecting their non-binary gender preference, or the fact that I do not know their pronoun preferences. Finally, some people’s names, and the names of the towns or cities where they live, have been changed to protect their privacy.