UI Press | Jason Cromwell | Transmen and FTMs: Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities

Transmen and FTMs

Identities, Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities

Writing as an insider and an anthropologist, Jason Cromwell presents the first in-depth examination of what it means to be a female-bodied transperson. Through extensive participant observation and open-ended interviews, Transmen and FTMs allows female-to-male transsexuals to speak for themselves and reveal aspects of female gender diversity that do not fit into the ready-made categories of male and female.

In clarifying how transmen and FTMs define and validate their lives, as opposed to how society attempts to pigeonhole and belittle them, Cromwell shows how female-to-male transpeople have been made virtually invisible by male-dominated discourses. He considers cross-cultural data on female gender diversity, historical evidence of female-bodied people who have lived as men, and contemporary transmen and FTMs. He also addresses how FTMs and transmen are working to challenge the mental illness model of transness as well as other misconceptions.

Transmen and FTMs seeks to reframe the dialogue about gender identity and move away from regarding fixed gender categories as normative. By redefining gender diversity from a manifestation of pathology to a human condition Transmen and FTMs promotes a fuller understanding of these individuals as persons in their own right.

"This book provides wonderful documentation of transmen's lives and voices as well as an excellent critique of a number of discourses that marginalize, pathologize, and otherwise make transmen invisible."--Evelyn Blackwood, coeditor of Female Desires: Same-Sex Relations and Transgender Practices Across Cultures

Jason Cromwell is the editor of Information for the Female to Male Crossdresser and Transsexual and has contributed chapters to Two-Spirit People: Perspectives on Native American Gender and Sexuality, edited by Sue Ellen Jacobs, Wesley Thomas, and Sabine Lang, and other books.