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.

A California transsexual activist offers insights into the challenges of gender dysphoria. Born with a female body, and in a lesbian parent relationship prior to sex reassignment surgery, Jamieson begins his frank personal and analytic account by asking how we know our sex. He discusses the complexities of the answer for those whose sex and gender are mismatched; medical options; psychosocial and legal implications; and media representations of "transpeople." A sociologist introduces Jamieson's identity quest as a core human struggle.
Annotation ©2004 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Jamison Green tells, with integrity, and in a moving and thoughtful way, his story.

Dallas Denny, Editor, Transgender Tapestry Journal

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.