Illuminated by journal entries spanning childhood to adolescence to today, he candidly recalls the challenges and loneliness he endured as he came to terms with both his gender and his bisexual identity. In this "soulful and heartfelt coming-of-age story" (Jamia Wilson, director and publisher of the Feminist Press), Jackson chronicles the ups and downs of growing up gender-confused. He barely remembers meeting anyone who was openly gay, let alone being taught that transgender people existed outside of punchlines. Growing up in Texas in the 1990s, he had no transgender role models. Jackson didn't share this thought with anyone because he didn't think he could share it with anyone.
When Jackson Bird was twenty-five, he came out as transgender to his friends, family, and anyone in the world with an internet connection.Īssigned female at birth and raised as a girl, he often wondered if he should have been born a boy. (Sept.An unflinching and endearing memoir from LGBTQ+ advocate Jackson Bird about how he finally sorted things out and came out as a transgender man. This jokey, brighter-side account will appeal to younger readers bogged down by the doom-and-gloom heaviness that can cloud the trans experience. Bird admits to suffering “cringe attacks” when reading his old diaries, and readers may similarly recoil from the occasionally overwrought prose: “Words flowed with a raw mellifluence unlike any I’d experienced before.” But Bird’s sense of humor and lightness of touch elsewhere-as when he likens the assigning of gender identity to the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter books-help to offset such pretentiousness.
Bird opens with a glossary of transgender terminology before recounting his experiences growing up in Michigan, Texas, and New Mexico having a pregnancy scare in college binding his chest (“Looking in the mirror and seeing my flat chest felt so innately right that it would flood me with a rush of endorphins”) coming out to his mother picking his male name and undergoing reconstructive chest surgery. Originally conceived as a zine, the book retains such arty touches as hand-lettered pages, small black-and-white photos, and screenshots. YouTuber Bird draws on “over five dozen physical journals” and “hundreds more digital diaries” in this frothy memoir of his journey as a trans man.
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