FTM: Female-to-male Transsexuals in Society

FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society provides a compassionate, intimate, and incisive look at the life experiences of forty-five female-to-male transsexuals. Until now, little has been known about these individuals, and questions persist about them. Who are they? How do they come to know themselves as transsexual? What do they do about it? How do their families cope? Who loves them? What does it mean for the rest of us?

To answer these and other questions, Holly Devor spent many years compiling in-depth interviews and researching the lives of transsexual and transgendered people, many of whom became her friends. She traces the everyday and significant events that coalesce in transsexual identity, culminating in gender and sex transformation. After an introduction which grounds the discussion in historical and theoretical contexts, the author takes a life course approach to understanding female-to-male transsexualism. Using her subjects' own words as illustrations, Devor looks at how childhood, adolescent, and adult experiences with family members, peers, and lovers work to shape and clarify female-to-male transsexuals' images of themselves as people who should be men.