I am J by Cris Beam

I got I am J, which is narrated by a trans boy, over the summer, and hadn't gotten around to reading it yet because it didn't come out until March I had plenty of time.  Then, as it got closer to March, I happen to come across a post from Megan Honig's blog.  Megan expresses her disappointment in Almost Perfect by Brain Katcher winning the Stonewall Children and Young Adult Literature Award.  She was disappointed because she felt that while Almost Perfect did some things well is giving a voice to transgender individuals, ultimately it played right into the stereotypes that surround trans men and women.  Her point was that acceptance is not enough.  I have not read Almost Perfect so I can't judge, but it made me realize that I knew pretty much nothing about transgender individuals, and if I was going to be able to truly review a book about a trans boy then I better start doing some background reading ASAP.  So I did.

Luckily for me, Megan Honig had a number of helpful links from the above post I could explore, and I picked up the book Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Women on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano, which was kind of amazing.  Through it I was able to gain a better understanding of trans men and women.  None of the "man trapped in a woman's body" stuff.  People are assigned a gender at birth, and luckily for most of us that assigned gender matches our subconscious gender (these people are referred to as "cisssexuals").  It doesn't work like this for everyone, and when it doesn't there is a feeling of dissonance and wrongness.  Serano talked about her own transition, but also looked a femininity itself and feminism.  I'm not going to explain it all here, first because I want to focus on I am J, and second because I don't think I'd do her argument justice.  And so with mildly better understanding than before, I read I am J.