I found this book to be a fascinating insight into Thomas McBee's life, however, as it is a memoir it made for very uncomfortable readiing in places, so you have been warned.

The reconciling of masculinity as a coming-of-age is a common enough trope, McBee adds a fascinating twist by choosing to become a man. Reconciling your true gender is fraught enough, the whole, poor prospects and having to completely change not just yourself but also reconcile everyone around you with the change. McBee explores what it's like to add in a considered and real exploration of what masculinity could look like when all your close role models are lacking. This is a important addition to the discussion couched in a deeply personal narrative.

Thomas Page McBee’s account of his decision to move from passing to full female-to-male transition is testament to how a personal story can be told simply but with huge power and heart. It isn’t an easy story to read, I can’t imagine how it was to live, as McBee explains his childhood abuse at the hands of his father and his struggle to come to terms with the potential relationship between this abuse and the development of his gender identity. Because at the heart of this story is the question, who and what makes a man? This man, who was born female. This part of the story, though difficult, is not graphic. It is told with delicacy and remarkable restraint, McBee trusting to the reader’s empathy rather than supplying them with intense details. Alongside the chapters that deal with the events surrounding this abuse McBee tells of a mugging he later describes as “the best thing that ever happened to [him ]”. A dangerous and dramatic moment that provided a burst of clarity and perspective about his future and his identity.

Not only is his story one that needs telling he can also really and truly write. The interweaving of the threads of his narrative cleverly expresses how these events in his life created, and allowed him to create and discover, the man he is. His intimate, honest style has a clarity of voice and vision that packs an enormous amount of power into a few pages. There’s real poetry in his his ability to capture moments of transcendence and insight in a few powerfully and perfectly chosen words (“the warble between the shape in my mind and the one in the mirror,”) and this is only highlighted by the complete absence of sentimentality or sensationalism. It’s a tender, poignant and powerful story about being the best you and defining yourself in the face of all the people and events that might attempt to do it for you.

Some have suggested that the lack of a wider transgender context, the struggle for transgender rights, the place and theory of masculinity is a failing of Man Alive but I’m not convinced that this criticism is entirely fair. While the context is always valuable and they’re is a significant need for complex theoretical and political works on gender it is also vital just to recognise transgender life and experience. McBee has dealt with these wider issues elsewhere in his columns and perhaps will tackle them further in the future but this is not what Man Alive is about. It seems to me that he has achieved precisely what he meant to do, which was to tell his own story of self-discovery and finding his place within his own skin. It is valuable enough on its own without demanding more.It was a privilege to read about his discovery of a truer self.

The author is the first trans man to ever box in Madison Square Gardens and is already an established writer in the US on masculinity and gender issues.
Moving on from his online column 'Self-Made Man' McBee successfully moves from year to year and place to place in his life. There are two pivotal life experiences that pierce the narrative - his father molesting him as a child in Pittsburgh.(from aged 4 onwards) and the violent mugging he and his friend(and later partner) Parker experience in South Caroline.
"I was born a female, that's a fact. I saw myself as a boy" There are questions about the increased desires for transitioning today - whether it is nature or nurture. Or whether it has become a fashionable move to become different from your birth gender. The author isn't writing to pursue answers or a definitive theory. His memoir is frank, violent and maybe sometimes confusing. Is MbBee seeking revenge as we read of his pursuance of his 'real' father when paternity tests reveal it wasn't the man who abused him. Then we see the trial of his mugger and the determination for McBee to travel America seeking answers to family and fragility.
Despite undergoing extensive (often painful) treatment, even when Thomas is finally called 'sir' he refers to himself as an invisible man. McBee's vulnerability is constantly on show and I don't think even the full transition can clear his mind of those deep set worries to be 'himself'.
This would be a useful book for youngsters concerned about their own gender. It highlights the prejudice and the defence mechanisms trans people have to arm themselves within society even today and even amongst those who may be family or in enlightened groups.
I am not sure McBee has found his own answers yet but I admire this memoir for its sensitive writing and a picture of America that in its evangelical bigotry may try to see such people as the author as sinners.

A journey of transition shared very openly with the reader. Easy to read and understand.

This one is a tricky book to review. In many ways, it is easy to appreciate this touching, heartfelt memoir from a transgender man as he retells - in an engagingly fragmented way - the effects of abuse from his childhood where he was raised as a girl, his experiences of violence as an adult where he feels being in a female body actually saved him from violence, and on through the early effects on his body and his relationships as he begins hormonal treatment.

After all, as you can imagine, these passages are emotional and they are certainly well written. However, this book is very short - less than 140 pages - and so the opportunity to investigate such important subjects as life as a transgender man, masculinity, male violence, and healing is pretty limited. As a result, I feel we only skim the surface of these themes in this book, rather than get too involved.

I also feel this book probably will be impacted by the fact there are so few memoirs out there from transgender men. Maybe, because of this, it will be easy to expect more from this book than it is perhaps fair to. Certainly while it is so important for men and women to share their own truths and experiences, this memoir may only feed those willing to argue that transgenderism is a response to trauma or events, rather than something natural where, unfortunately, a person has been born in the wrong body.

I feel this book does lead the reader, maybe incorrectly, to link the childhood abuse with wanting to have a male body and to live as a man. And that may again reflect on my concern that this book is too short - perhaps more pages, more writing, will have given a better scope of understanding which may have prevented anyone trying to link the two.

This book is beautifully written - Thomas Page McBee is clearly a talented writer - but I wanted more. Much more. A welcome start on hearing more from transgender men, but perhaps too short and brief to be a critical read.

Man Alive is a powerful memoir about the past and the future, capturing McBee’s attempts to move beyond the violence done to him in the past and work out how it affects who he is as he goes through transitioning. It is about being alive and seeing that life in the face of terrible things. The book is an exploration of masculinity, but also how to navigate a masculinity tinged by trauma and negative experience and still emerge with a sense of the man that it would be good to be.

Though the subject is serious and reflective, the style of the book is uplifting and well-written, keeping a kind of positive force pushing forward through the narrative. McBee plays around with the word ‘man’, punning on pop culture references and displaying how disparate and changing the term can be. Man Alive is an important book, the kind of memoir that should be published to celebrate life and provide a variety of models and inspiration for others who may or may not have similar circumstances.