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FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society

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It's a pretty good book if you're looking for a definitive volume which focuses mainly on female-to-male transsexuals. Though it's laborious reading at times with its mounds and mounds of technical statistics on Devor's research, it's still a must-own for any FtM or anyone who wants to know about FtMs. It's also very good reading for those who need to know the facts, e.g. family members who are dealing with a family member who is FtM.

All in all, it's a very good (and long) read.

While Devor masterfully strives to be an ally to female men in the text, the disciplinary allegiances seem to encumber her work in ways that perhaps limit its value for transpeople. Released during a time when transgender people became ever the more critical and suspicious of psycho-medical non-transgender writings about them, the text was met with both ridicule from with the movement of transcholars and acclaim by sociological and psycho-medical academics.

She makes a marvelous research contribution to studies of female men that is still a needful field of research. It is a marvelous resource text. That has likely been greatly underestimated due to political controversies that surround transgender studies. Key transgender scholars and activists who have been leaders in the female man transgender community are subjects of the research. In this regard, it can function as a historical text.

It is scientific, statistical, theoretical, interesting, well done, and an amazing achievement. Female men could find educational support within. Scholars a rich resource for critical analysis.

Am a transgender who purchased this book thinking it was about modern day female transexuals only. Little did I know the vastness this materal covers. I have learned the rich history of transgenders which I never gave any thought to. This indepth history is important to me.

Dr Devor's observations and data analysis of her transexual voluntees are in detail and revealing. I appreciate her work.

Holly Devor
FTM:
Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society

(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1997) 695 pages
(ISBN: 0-253-33631-7; hardback)
(ISBN: 0-253-21259-6; paperback, 1999)
(Library of Congress call number: HQ77.9.D49 1997)

Careful sociologist, Holly Devor, interviewed 45 individuals
who were born as normal females but who later decided to become men
--socially, hormonally, & sometimes surgically.

She begins her book with an historical review
of women who lived as men
long before sex-changes or transsexualism were invented.
These women had many different reasons for living as men.

FTM contains several stunning pictures
of people who would always be taken for men:
beards, male-pattern balding, muscles, etc.
But all of these people were born female and later changed to men.
It is very hard to believe that these people ever lived as women
--or that they still have female genitals, which is usually the case.
Real first names are given with these pictures.

But in order to protect their privacy,
the participants in this study were all given pseudonyms.
Thus it is not possible to connect the pictures with the stories.
The author informs me that some of the participants are pictured.
Maybe a follow-up book, two decades into the 21 century,
would find the participants more willing
to have their pictures used along with their stories.
Some books on transsexuals do include 'before' and 'after' pictures
of the individuals who have changed sex.

Devor does not endorse any single theory
of why some people want to change sex.
She reviews the scientific theories
but remains open to newer explanations that might emerge in the future.
The participants showed a variety of pathways to becoming men.
Some decided relatively late in life,
whereas others knew from an early age that they wanted to be male.
Family background does not provide a comprehensive explanation.
But it is an obvious place to begin looking.
Holly Devor spends quite a few pages exploring
the family backgrounds of the participants.
However, dysfunctional families are very common everywhere.
And most families-with-problems do not produce children
who want to change sex in adulthood.
Additional factors beyond alcoholism in the family,
child abuse, abandonment, or tomboyism must be the reasons
--because millions of other girls had similar backgrounds,
without wanting to become men in adulthood.

Most of the subjects had a phase of teen-age sex with males.
Some got married and lived as wives and mothers for many years
before deciding to become men.
Almost all had a phase of lesbian identity
(including sex with other women) before they became men.
After their (years-long) transition to living as men,
they were much more satisfied to call themselves
heterosexual men than lesbian women.
(Some had other self-concepts after becoming men, such as gay man.)
Most of them found changing sex to become men
(who could legitimately have sex with straight women)
a much better self-concept than considering themselves lesbians.
Most wanted to fade into the male population
--being considered by everyone they met to be normal, everyday men.
However, their sex-partners knew that they still had female genitals.

FTM includes full discussion of all the dimensions
of changing from women to men:
family, friends, psychological adjustments, new names,
clothes, manners, various hormonal and surgical treatments,
adjustments with sex-partners, etc.
Because they had lived at least a few years as women,
before they started living as men,
they rarely went to the extreme macho position or stereotype.
They were generally known as gentle and sensitive men.

A very fundamental question remains:
Why did these (and other) women want to become men?
Surely they could have become more stable, deliberate,
self-confident, decisive, independent, autonomous,
courageous, disciplined, foresighted, & pragmatic
--several personality traits from the 'masculine', admirable column
of my Gender-Pattern Chart--without becoming men.
Many women do have these admirable personality characteristics.
So the desire to become the other sex
must be something more than the desire for personality change.

Holly Devor does not believe that the motivation was primarily sexual
(in the sense of erotic fantasies, for example).
But we can still ask to what degree (or in which cases)
were these women motivated by their sexual yearnings?
Perhaps some found erotic responses deep within themselves
that told them that they already were men,
so they took the courageous step of radically changing their bodies
in order to match their imprinted sex-scripts.
(To learn more about this sex-script hypothesis , click those words.)

From this perspective, perhaps this book could be seen
(at least in part) as a collection of stories about lesbian women
who decided to go "all the way"
--to become the-men-they-were in their sexual fantasies.
If we understood lesbianism--especially 'butch' lesbianism--better,
perhaps we would understand 'female-to-male transsexualism' better.
If we had a thousand 'butch' lesbians to study,
perhaps most would have sexual fantasies of themselves as men,
but only a few would want to become men.
And perhaps only a small number of these
would actually take the steps to begin living full-time as men.
(However, Holly Devor says that FTM
is definitely NOT a book about lesbians.)

Even more broadly, this book might be a study of
45 individuals who were born as women
who later decided to live as men for a wide variety of reasons.
If we could have each story separate from the others,
the various reasons for wanting to live as men
might become more clear.
Will better public acceptance of lesbianism
(and other variations of sex and gender)
correspond with a decrease in the demand for sex-change?
Will some of the people studied in this book
later revert to a lesbian self-concept
instead of thinking of themselves as men?
Will same-sex marriage
(which will be realized in some forms in the 21st century)
also correlate with a decrease in 'transsexualism'?

Here is a basic criticism of the book,
which can be corrected if Dr. Devor decides to do
follow-up studies 10 or 20 years later with these same participants:
Each woman-becoming-man should have a separate chapter.
This would have improved the narrative quality and interest of the book.
And it would have made the information
better raw material for other scientific analysis.
(The author does provide a Participant Index in the back of the book
that allows careful readers to trace
all mention of any individual throughout the book.
And frequent footnotes tell us
which specific participants are being discussed.)

Because the author is a sociologist, she looked for general patterns,
especially in the family backgrounds of these women-becoming-men.
But because transsexualism is so extremely rare
--perhaps one person in 100,000--
collecting data about birth order, childhood trauma,
family structure and dynamics, etc.
contributes almost nothing to understanding
why these women decided to begin living as men.

Statistical summaries and composite stories would make sense
for exploring a phenomenon that is quite common
--such as getting married or getting divorced--
but when bits and pieces from the lives of these 45 different individuals
are woven together into a composite FTM,
many useful facts might have been lost.
Because the author interviewed each subject personally,
she remembers each story separately.
But we--the readers--might find it difficult to remember
which pseudonym goes with which story.
The participants in this study might have had a wide variety
of highly individualistic reasons for wanting to live as men.
If so, these special reasons might have been lost in the attempt
to present a general picture of 'the female-to-male transsexual'.

FTM: Female-to-Male Transsexuals in Society
presents only the positive dimensions of changing to live as men.
Social science will be very interested to learn
how these new men lived 10, 20, or 30 years after their changes.
(Of course, some of the participants
have already lived many years as men.)

The study of transsexualism has been greatly advanced
by this major contribution from Holly Devor.
But it might be just the beginning of the story.

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