Being Transgender: What You Should Know

by Thomas E. Bevan

Written for general audiences, this unprecedented book comprehensively answers many questions about being transgender with current experiential and scientific information, including the evidence for a biological transgender predisposition.

With transgender people visibly achieving fame in entertainment, the literary world, and other arenas, increasing numbers of transgender people are choosing to publicly announce that they are transgender. All of this has brought transgender people and the associated issues of being transgender into mainstream discourse. The demand for fact-based, scientific information on being transgender has never been higher. Written by a transgender person who is also a physiological psychologist, this book is the first for general readers that explains what is known about transgender causation, what life as a transgendered individual is like, and the science involved in living a transgender life.

This book serves to improve understanding of being transgender among general audiences―including transgender readers―by describing the science and experience of being transgender. It supplies an enlightening understanding of what if feels like to be transgender, when it starts, the many paths for living a transgender life, and methods to face challenges such as bullying and rejection. It provides a worldview that transgender people are neither broken nor diseased, but rather that they exhibit transgender behavior because of a biological predisposition for which there is solid scientific evidence.

Genres: Nonfiction, Science, Transgender

264 pages, Hardcover

Published November 14, 2016

Reviews

[Kieran Holmes · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book sounded so promising but ended up being a huge disappointment. Scientific studies and findings were mentioned but not specified or elaborated on. It is extremely biased towards transwomen and basically invalidates/ignores the problems of being a transman on multiple occasions. There are a multitude of examples of transwomen and their experiences and only one brief citation from a transman. The section giving information about the transitioning process for transwomen is significantly longer and more detailed than the similar section for transmen. There are numerous grammatical errors throughout the book, increasingly towards the middle and end. And, in my personal opinion, I find it suspicious that the author, a transwoman, published this book, a book about being transgender, under their birth name rather than their trans name, but maybe that’s just me.

[Ruth · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very informative, scientifically researched and documented. Comprehensive and inclusive. I have read a lot of memoirs, but this was better at meeting the overall needs of a general audience.

[Jonny Kelvey-Brown · Rating 3 out of 5]

Another illuminating installment in the transgender world, a how to for anybody considering transitioning, and a useful manual for those around them.

[Dawsonaurora]

It was an interesting read. Though I think about transgender differently. I think dysphoria is a larger part of transgender experience rather than purely transsexual experience. The vocabulary may be different because of geographic location. Based on the definition in the book, I would expect that there are very few transmen and even fewer transwomen, which is not the experience I have based on the samples of the people I know.