For months now, i’ve put off writing this review. Not because i was hoping to delay hurting a friend’s feelings or because i was failing at finding anything at all to even say about the book. But because i didn’t want to rush my review. I didn’t want to treat it as though it were just another book to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. In fact, its been sitting here on my desk, right next to my computer, for the past month or so simply so that i wouldn’t forget about it.
Self-Organizing Men (SOM), the first book to be published by Jay Sennett’s Homofactus Press, is groundbreaking. While Leslie Feinberg’s semi-autobiographical work, Stone Butch Blues, opened the eyes of many to some of the complicated realities of FtM life, SOM goes even further beyond the persynal narrative and interweaves theories and realities of masculinity, desire, fluidity, and the search for the oft-alluding self-definition and identity.
SOM, a collection of essays, poems, and art from several FtM transsexuals, does well not to wander too far off into the realm of theory, though. That’s the beautiful thing about this book. It can speak to anyone, regardless of your gender identity, and get you to question the very foundation of your existance and yet it seems so oddly familiar as if reading a diary, perhaps your own. I found myself, on more than one occassion, reading a passage and nodding my head. Not just because i agreed with the words, but because i could swear that i had written them or perhaps the author had somehow stolen them from my brain while i was sleeping.
Somewhere sandwiched
Between the bully and sissy
There was me
Trying to produce in mirrors
A man I could actually love
And want to keep
This piece from Tim’m T. West’s poem, Bent, i could swear was stolen from my collection of poems that i had written in high school. The only proof that its not is that Tim’m has composed the words into beauty whereas my book of teenage poetry was mostly dribble. While the words are quite persynal in a way shared in the experiences of one trans persyn to the next, who says you have to be trans to know what its like being forced into an identity that isn’t of your choosing? Most of us know what it means to constantly be at war with our attempt at self-identification and the invading forces of social norms and standards. Life is a constant path of creating and re-creating ourselves into someone that we can love.
SOM is a book that takes your hand and lets you walk that path with a group of men who are doing just that: creating and re-creating themselves and the entirety of masculinity, as well. Its not easy for any of us, but as the journey of SOM’s narrative shows; for those of us whose very existence is an incoherent disruption to the core of social construction, its far from a paved path.
Self-Organizing Men is certainly a book that i’ll be keeping with me to read from time to time. I suggest you do the same.
