Becoming A Visible Man By Jamison Green

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Recommended: How the media portrays transgenders

Becoming a Visible Man was an insightful and intriguing book to read for this course. It first caught my attention with the picture of the author on the cover smiling next to a billboard of a man bursting through water, almost as if he was being reborn. The process of being reborn was then seen as a common theme throughout the autobiography. The concepts of transsexualism caught my attention during class because I was least familiar with this minority of individuals within the queer community. I strive to know more about the understandings of what it was like to go through changes in gender, its effects on relationships, both sexual and non, as well as the emotional struggle that some people faced by themselves through the process of gender transition. Another component that came up throughout the reading that was drawn to my attention was the community and societal reactions to a transgendered individual.
The main ideas of the book are to explore the explanation of the political and emotional challenges that an individual undergoes when in transformation specifically from the female-to-male (FTM) perspective. The author, Jamison Green is a leading transsexual activist who over the years has combined his own personal autobiography with informed analysis to offer an insight on the transsexual experience. He combines his own personal stories of his journey from childhood up through adulthood and the transition as living as a lesbian to living as a heterosexual trans man.
Jamison Green does a brilliant job of articulating his story at the beginning of his novel. Jamison states to the audience and the reader “You all know what sex you are, right?” (2004). This statement shocked me as an opening line, simplistic in its words and ext...

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...if people look at transgendered individuals differently when transgendered people choose their sex change because they identify different than their physical body, vs the intersex individuals that had their gender chosen for them of which they don’t identify with. Does society make the distinction between the two or are they still bothered by anyone that sits outside the typical norm?
Becoming a Visible Man and the units that we have covered in this course have opened my eyes greatly to the communities for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered, and unidentified/undecided individuals. I learned that you are never to assume someone is intersex or transgendered, someone’s sexual orientation based on their appearance or their gender identity. I learned that as society we have a lot of work to do in not having to always try and categorize a person or their identity.

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