For months now, i’ve put off writing this review. Not because i was hoping to delay hurting a friend’s feelings or because i was failing at finding anything at all to even say about the book. But because i didn’t want to rush my review. I didn’t want to treat it as though it were just another book to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. In fact, its been sitting here on my desk, right next to my computer, for the past month or so simply so that i wouldn’t forget about it.
Self-Organizing Men (SOM), the first book to be published by Jay Sennett’s Homofactus Press, is groundbreaking. While Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical work, Stone Butch Blues, opened the eyes of many to some of the complicated realities of FtM life, SOM goes even further beyond the persynal narrative and interweaves theories and realities of masculinity, desire, fluidity, and the search for the oft-alluding self-definition and identity.
SOM, a collection of essays, poems, and art from several FtM transsexuals, does well not to wander too far off into the realm of theory, though. That’s the beautiful thing about this book. It can speak to anyone, regardless of your gender identity, and get you to question the very foundation of your existence and yet it seems so oddly familiar as if reading a diary, perhaps your own. I found myself, on more than one occasion, reading a passage and nodding my head. Not just because i agreed with the words, but because i could swear that i had written them or perhaps the author had somehow stolen them from my brain while i was sleeping.
Somewhere sandwiched
Between the bully and sissy
There was me
Trying to produce in mirrors
A man I could actually love
And want to keep
This piece from Tim’m T. West’s poem, Bent, i could swear was stolen from my collection of poems that i had written in high school. The only proof that its not is that Tim’m has composed the words into beauty whereas my book of teenage poetry was mostly dribble. While the words are quite persynal in a way shared in the experiences of one trans persyn to the next, who says you have to be trans to know what its like being forced into an identity that isn’t of your choosing? Most of us know what it means to constantly be at war with our attempt at self-identification and the invading forces of social norms and standards. Life is a constant path of creating and re-creating ourselves into someone that we can love.
SOM is a book that takes your hand and lets you walk that path with a group of men who are doing just that: creating and re-creating themselves and the entirety of masculinity, as well. Its not easy for any of us, but as the journey of SOM’s narrative shows; for those of us whose very existence is an incoherent disruption to the core of social construction, its far from a paved path.
Self-Organizing Men is certainly a book that i’ll be keeping with me to read from time to time. I suggest you do the same.
I loved this anthology. I found the overall quality of Self-Organizing Men to be superior.
Max Wolf Valerio, author of The Testosterone Files
This book really made think about being trans. I like how there are different types of masculinity covered and all of them are okay. There is no push to have transsexual be better than transgender or vice versa. Plus, Tim’m West is a bio-man and that really makes the discussions of masculinity and feminism much richer. This book really helped me understand myself a little better.
Zoom Boy Jack, A Reader
I found Self-Organizing Men to be funny, challenging, emotional, and educational. I am the parent of a FTM guy: a son who is wonderful in every way. But I must admit that despite years of PFLAG I just did not ‘understand’ what he and others had experienced, felt, and endured. Not on a gut level anyway. This book finally let me understand that our bodies are not our gender and that love, sex, and yes, happiness lie where your mind and emotions tell you they belong. I recommend this book unreservedly for anyone who loves someone who is transgendered, intersexed, genderqueer, FTM, or just questioning.
James Gerard, A Reader and Parent of an FtM Son
Self-Organizing Men challenges the binary of gender and makes me think about how my own male privilege plays itself out in my everyday life. It makes me reconsider what it takes to really be a man and the insanity of our social construction of gender. As a professor of social work specializing in diversity and social justice, I would highly recommend the book for anyone who wants to expand their definition of masculinity and to better understand the FTM experience in a deeply emotional way. At the same time, the book’s use of humor makes this the kind of book that will make you laugh and cry at the same time!
Dr. Mike Spencer, School of Social Work, University of Michigan
I wanted to let you know that S. shared your book with me. I’ve been reading it every night for the past week. And I can’t put it down. It’s beautiful, and meaningful to me and my life in ways that have been more profound than I can articulate. I told Sebastian (as ridiculous as this may sound) that I feel like carrying it around and hugging it because for the first time in a very long time, it makes me feel less alone in the world. I feel company. It has been, in short, a very emotional and powerful experience for me to read, especially in this current moment of my life.
The book made my truly feel a sense that mine and S. ‘s experience as a couple is actually not so uncommon. The past nine months have basically turned my world around in really beautiful and difficult ways, and the depth of my own experience with S.’s transition has been something I haven’t been able to share with many people who really *get* it. It has changed my own sense of self, my own representation, and my identity as a queer person in the world. All of which has simultaneously made me feel more grounded in myself, and very isolated from my friends and peers.
Yes, people have been incredibly supportive of both of us. But folks don’t really connect to the nuances of the experience. I realize that the day-to-day things that others might not think are such a big deal can become the MOST significant parts of any given day in my own life, as a queer person, as a person of color, as a woman, as the partner of a trans man, (and all my other identities and their intersections and all that stuff…) In reading the writings of the people who contributed to your book, many of those nuances became centralized and validated. Even though it’s not a book specifically about the experiences of “partners of trans people,” it IS largely about my experience, and has facilitated helpful ways for me to think about myself. And it is most definitely the most important book I’ve read in a very long time.
N.R. Ann Arbor, Michigan
Jay Sennett’s new anthology, Self-Organizing Men, represents an ambitious effort to grapple with issues of social privilege, cultural assumptions, and public presentation, versus personal subjectivity among trans-masculine individuals and transgender communities.
Leslie and Shahn Freeman-Dykesen, Out in the Mountains
Self-Organizing Men look(s) beyond biology to find how we define ourselves, our bodies, spirit, and gender.
Patrick Lincoln, Masculinities in Media
If you care about gender, read this book. Be ready to have your preconceived notions, even if you developed them in women’s or gender studies classrooms, challenged. And encourage Jay to publish more like this.
Dr. Nels P. Highberg, A Delicate Boy
I thought it was a nice mix of academic work, personal essays, what I think is a poem, artwork, a dialogue, and probably other bits I have forgotten. Being self centric, I really was interested in parts that I had personally experienced. By which I mean once I saw Scott Turner Scofield do a performance(and once he taught our gay history class) and so I thought smuggly that Emory let him by with only a few warnings around the area about how the show might contain nudity, and also, I saw a picture of Nick’s cute baby on the interweb, so followed his story about transmotherhood with interest.But don’t get me wrong. The voices I hadn’t heard before interested me too. I’m reading an essay called Trans Incoherence now and think it should be photocopied and handed out in women’s studies classrooms. I mean, the teacher should buy a copy of course! Then again, maybe the students should all buy their own copies? Yea, that’s the ticket.
Shannon @ Egotistical Whining
Wow. Drinking my first cuppa this a.m., as part of my toying around with the project of being a gay man (Janet Halley Self-Organizing Men, an anthology of essays, images, and poetry from transmen edited by Jay Sennett. What an inspiring introduction! reference) and “taking a break from feminism” for awhile, I decided to read the introduction to
Bitch at Bitch Lab
Just got my copy of _self-organizing men_ edited by Jay Sennett today, and I am hyper with the drug of smart good ideas & philosophizing!Highlights:
- Eli Clare’s poem, which I read out loud twice at brunch.
- About Radicalia Feminista. Phallacies and Queeries: a Phaggot’s Contemplations by Tim’m T West which I want to just quote the whole thing to you. So smart and awesome! also, love the inclusiveness of the book that included a piece with the sentence: “We are butch dykes with biological penises that we do not exalt…” (1) (2)
- The dialogue between Jordy Jones & Doran George: damn! do I now have an intellectual crush on them both!
(1) I must admit, I wasn’t expecting the anthology to include somebody with a bio-cock. and I love, love, love that it did! It makes the space safer for me to be there– in the same way that when I had all-girl body-painting parties in the 90s I always included at least one boy… defining a space more broadly makes it safer for mixed-race genderfuckers like myself…
(2) Reading this quote out loud in a coffee shop got me big smiles from the interracial boy-girl couple at the next table over. 
