(Part 3) Top products from r/ftm

I have many! Here are a few:


Gender Failure by Rae Spoon and Ivan Coyote This is the book version of the authors' live show that toured in 2012. They both are nonbinary, and the stories they tell are about that.


Second Son by Ryan Sallans Ryan has been a role model of mine for a long time, so I was really excited to get his book. It's a pretty basic transition memoir, but he has a really great voice.


Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein This one is a classic, and one I wish I had read much sooner! It's a transition memoir, but she also has some awesome discussions about gender in general too. Also, check out The Next Generation which is a collection of the work of trans* writers and artists.

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg I think everyone should read this. It's a memoir/fiction sort of thing, and gender and transition are shown to be much more complex than in other transition memoirs. This one is quite old though, so maybe your library already has it?

Lastly, I will suggest Red: A Crayon's Story, which is basically the sweetest story about a blue crayon that was given a red wrapper by mistake.

I think what you posted is a really good start if it's specific to your area. For additional resources, this website has a lot of info for providers on prescribing T (http://transhealth.ucsf.edu/trans?page=guidelines-masculinizing-therapy) & the WPATH Standards of Care would be a good one (https://www.wpath.org/publications/soc), but I know there's some disagreement about some of its recommendations. The book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves (https://www.amazon.com/Trans-Bodies-Selves-Transgender-Community/dp/0199325359) is a really good comprehensive overview & would be a great place for a psychiatrist who wants to learn more to start. It's basically a textbook but costs around $30 on Amazon, they keep the price low to make it as accessible as possible.

I just finished reading "Manning Up." It was really good, a little hard to read at times because it hit so close to home. I have all intentions of re-reading it in the future.

I'd definitely recommend reading it if you can. It's free for Kindle Unlimited so it may also be free in the Lender's Library if you have Amazon prime.

While I love the idea, I agree with Fluff's assessment. If you're someone like me that likes to read books with similar themes to my idea, I read a trilogy recently called Skin Hunter in which a girl enters a contest which requires her to upload her consciousness into a Skin. Skins were bioengineered with a cybernetic skeleton with organic material grown overtop. When the main character is in her Skin, all of her senses are enhanced and she feels alive for the first time in her life.

The "natural" weaning age for humans is actually a difficult thing to pinpoint because many cultures put a value on forced weaning by a certain age at this point. The World Health Organization recommends you breastfeed on demand until the child is at least two years old (exclusively breastfeeding for the first six months, at least, and then adding complimentary foods).

Katherine Dettwyler is a cultural anthropologist who seems to have the most to say about natural weaning age, and that it's generally 2.5-7 years old with outliers before or after (when kids are always able to breastfeed on demand). Because feeding behavior varies so widely by the culture, determining a "biologically optimal" length of a breastfeeding relationship between child and parent (or multiple adults in the group for societies that practice cross-nursing) is difficult. Kathy Dettwyler looks at weaning ages in non-human primates and compares their behavior to ours based on length of gestation, birth weight, growth rate, age at sexual maturity, age at eruption of teeth, and overall life span.

Here's an old article about it here. I like the book Breastfeeding: Biocultural Perspectives for the Ford study about sexual fetishization of breasts (or lack thereof) in a bunch of different cultures.

Child-led weaning is pretty common in my neighborhood, so no one bats an eye at toddler nursing. With how little Caleb nurses now (3-5 times a day, more if he gets a booboo or something), I imagine he'll be finished by 3. He keeps trying to latch onto my mom now that she's moved in, and he even investigates Wes's hairy chest all the time.

Letters For My Brothers - Zander Keig

Testo Junkie - Paul Preciado

Becoming a Visible Man - Jamison Green

From the Inside Out - Morty Diamond

Self Made Men - Henry Rubin !! author is a cis man !!


Also! If you want to read more about trans stuff along with some other people from this sub, feel free to check out our monthly reading group :)

Here's a link to our February thread

Yeah, no. I'm sorry, but this is a bad guide. I'm AMAB and live my life as male. I shave almost daily, and I have to say, this is not the way to shave, because there is no one way to shave.

Shaving is an extremely individual experience. It is different for everyone.

Everyone's beard hair grows differently. The best way to figure out the grain of your beard is to draw a little diagram of your face (it doesn't need to be accurate) or take a straight-on photo of your face.

Then, take some time to let your beard grow out, and feel your face. Move your fingers in all directions. The direction that has the most resistance is against the grain. Take your diagram or photo and draw markers/arrows indicating which direction your hair grows with the grain in each spot on your face.

Now that you have a little diagram of your face, you can use that as a reference for the future (though you should compare it against your actual face now and then in case you initially got something wrong, or missed a feature) until you've memorized the grain yourself.

Okay, next dealio is to throw away (or preferrably recycle) your cartridge and canned foam and get into wetshaving (you can get started here, here, and here).

After that, I would suggest as a good way to start out shaving your face, do a with-the-grain pass, then an across-the-grain pass (meaning at a 90-degree angle to the direction of your grain), then an against-the-grain pass. Don't be too worried about getting a baby's-butt-smooth result at first, because you'll just end up giving yourself razor burn and nicking yourself.

Be patient, be careful, practice often, and rock on dudes! You've got this!

Have you heard about Billy Tipton? He was pre everything and he passed extremely well. This bio about him is pretty good, I read it when it first came out.

For ftm books, the two I know well enough of Parrotfish and one I'm reading now is Hung Jury by my teacher. On that last link it has another ftm book I've never read but it looks really interesting.

I recently read Beautiful Music for Ugly Children and it was pretty alright. It's a MG novel about a closeted trans guy in high school who DJs on his neighbor's radio show and gets the idea to introduce himself there using the name he really wants to go by. It backfires when kids in his school start to listen to the music.

I posted here because I was so pleased. I got the aforementioned socks, clothes, and mug, as well as Diana Nyad's memoir (I'm a swimmer -- or I was, back when I got off my lazy ass every once in a while!), and a stethoscope. I feel... weirdly affirmed. They're all really good presents, and it just feels like I was seen for myself, for once. Not just as The Eldest Daughter, Top Girl Child. Maybe this will be the end of me smiling politely as I unwrapped women's sandals I begged my parents not to buy, haha.

I just bought this book on amazon for under ten dollars, body weight exercises you can do at home. It has a lot of info in it. I bought it because I am too self conscious to work out in public right now. Here's a link.

http://www.amazon.com/You-Are-Your-Own-Gym/dp/0345528581

What Becomes You by Aaron Raz Link and Hilda Raz.

Aaron gives this really eye-opening description of his dysphoria. I'm too lazy to find the actual quote in my book, but he says something like, "People with autism have a hard time seeing themselves in other people. I have the opposite problem; I have difficulty seeing myself in myself." He didn't transition until he was in his late 20s/early 30s. Really fantastic book.

> passing

One re-phrasing of this that I really liked(from a chapter of this book that also discusses why 'passing' isn't a great term, for the curious) was whether someone is read as their gender.

It moves the onus of responsibility from the transperson being the one who has to pass to other people being the ones who should read them correctly. It also removes the gross undertones that transpeople are somehow in disguise and 'passing' is just their disguise working.

Of course in a perfect world we wouldn't need termonology around it at all, but this isn't that world (yet) and people need some way to talk about their experiences.

Here's my list so far. It's a mix of FTM-specific, general trans, and gender studies books, including essays, memoir, and more academic works. In no particular order:

Gender Trouble by Judith Butler


Gender Outlaw: On Men, Women and the Rest of Us by Kate Bornstein

Gender Outlaws: The Next Generation by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear Bergman


Nina Here Nor There by Nick Krieger

Female Masculinity by Judith Halberstam

Nobody Passes - Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore


Whipping Girl by Julia Serano


How Sex Changed: A History of Transexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

Becoming a Visible Man by Jamison Green

Queer Theory, Gender Theory: An Instant Primer by Riki Wilchins

PoMoSexuals: Challenging Assumptions About Gender and Sexuality edited by Carol Queen

Genderqueer: Voices From Beyond the Sexual Binary edited by Joan Nestle

From the Inside Out: Radical Gender Transformation, FTM and Beyond edited by Morty Diamond

Second Son by Ryan Sallans

Why are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

and the must-read fiction:

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

I'll edit this if I can find any others, I'm probably missing a couple. Been a big non-fiction reading year for me!

EDIT: Edited to add links, and a few more on my wish list I haven't picked up yet.

Letters for my Brothers: Transitional Wisdom in Retrospect edited By Megan M. Rohrer, M.Div. & Zander Keig, M.SW.

That's Revolting!: Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation edited by Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore

Transgender Voices: Beyond Women and Men by Lori B. Girshick

Just Add Hormones: An Insider's Guide to the Transsexual Experience by Matt Kailey

The Testosterone Files: My Hormonal and Social Transformation from Female to Male by Max Wolf Valerio

The Ghost Wars by Cole J. Davis