FTM ─ Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society

In this ground-breaking study, Aaron Devor provides a compassionate, intimate, and incisive look at the life experiences of forty-five trans men. Emerging into 21st-century political and social conversations, questions persist about these individuals. 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, Devor spent years compiling in-depth interviews and researching the lives of transsexual and transgendered people. Here, he traces the everyday and significant events that coalesce in transsexual identity, culminating in gender and sex transformation. Using his subjects' own words as illustrations, Devor looks at how childhood, adolescence, and adult experiences with family members, peers, and lovers works to shape and clarify FTM images of themselves as men. With a new introduction, Devor positions the volume in twenty-first century debates of identity politics and community-building, providing a window into his own self-exploration as a result of his research.

Aaron H. Devor, PhD, FSSSS, FSTLHE, is the Founder and Academic Director of the world’s largest Transgender Archives, the world’s first Research Chair in Transgender Studies, a former Dean of Graduate Studies (2002–2012), and a professor of Sociology at the University of Victoria in British Columbia, Canada. He has been studying and teaching on transgender topics since the mid-1980s and was one of the authors of versions 6 and 7 of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s (WPATH) Standards of Care, guiding their translation into world languages. Aaron is author of numerous well-cited scholarly articles, and the widely-acclaimed books Gender Blending: Confronting the Limits of Duality (IUP, 1989), and The Transgender Archives: Foundations for the Future, a Lambda Literary Awards finalist in LGBT nonfiction. Aaron has delivered lectures to audiences around the world, and is a national-award-winning teacher, an elected member of the International Academy of Sex Research, and an elected Fellow of the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality.