P. Carl tells the story of his transitioning from a woman to a man. He is an academic, teaching at Emerson College, and was recently visiting at Princeton University. He is very familiar with much of the academic literature about trans people and gender. But he does not necessarily buy into all those theories, and talks largely from his own experience, giving his own history. He didn’t identify as a girl even when very young, and explains that he was never a woman or a girl but he was a daughter and sister. He refers to WEB Du Bois’ idea of double consciousness, and also says that that has experienced some dissociation. He often writes as if his body communicates with or even controls him. So his language presents challenges for understanding. He gives the impression that while he is now a man, he was in some ways always a boy or a man, but he was also a lesbian. He is a man with a female partner, but he still identifies as queer. He experiences his transition as the death of his former self and a rebirth as a man. It also causes a crisis in his marriage to his spouse Lynette, who is a lesbian and who is not interest in sex with a man. It all gives the impression that no single consistent set of descriptions is adequate for his experience. His experience is itself not just diverse but even contradictory. Indeed, at one point, he writes “we are all contradictions.”

The book itself is short. 227 pages of large print or 5 hours 20 minutes for the unabridged audiobook, read by P. Carl himself. It is not a traditional memoir starting at the beginning and going until the present day. Rather, it has 13 mostly short chapters that address his thought, theory, history, and social commentary. One chapter is a letter to Lynette. The writing style is lively and the book goes quickly. He describes some of his own process of transitioning, and his experience of having a male body, his relationships with his family and his wife, his discussions with this therapist, his hanging out with other guys, working out at the gym, his ideas about the categories of trans and trans*, and other parts of trans theory, whether to tell people he meets that he is trans, and more. 

Becoming a Man is not a guide to the trans world, or a survey of academic thought on gender theory. Rather, it is a record of P. Carl’s thought and experience as someone who has gone through transformation. Readers will find a lot here to like, and probably some parts that they don’t react well to. 

Christian Perring is editor of Metapsychology Online Reviews. He teaches philosophy in the NYC area and is an APPA certified philosophical counselor.

Categories: Memoir, Sexuality

Keywords: memoir, trans, transgender