About the Book
What does it mean to be a husband?
What does it mean to be a trans man?
What does it mean to be an American man, speaking up and speaking out in today's divisive climate?
Ryan Sallans, transgender educator and lecturer, follows up his successful Second Son autobiography with this thought-provoking look at life in contemporary America. While the term "trans" has become much more visible, the undercurrents of what it actually means still rumbles beneath the surface. In this second searing memoir, Sallans leads his readers on a trip through domestic bliss and family fractures, speaking successes and online harassment, personal heights and dizzying falls. In Transforming Manhood, the author confides what it means to be a public personality, showcasing how his profile has earned him adulation, as well as accusations.
This follow-up to Second Son will inspire anyone who has ever fought personal demons to become the best possible person they had imagined. Through eye-opening discussions on college campuses, heart-to-heart talks with worried parents in America's heartland, and scary real-life stalking experiences, Sallans has overcome much and has grown from these encounters. Transforming Manhood is a book that chronicles Sallans's everyday struggles to transition into being a better husband, son, and man.
It's a book that pleads for the LGBTQ community to come together and place their differences aside. In today's political climate, it's a call for mutual understanding and for standing up for what you believe in. Transforming Manhood continues the story of Ryan Sallans's life, but more than that: it spotlights his hope and encouragement for a better, optimistic, unified future for everyone.
About the Author :
Ryan K. Sallans is a Nebraska native who resides in Omaha. He graduated Sigma Tau Delta from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln with a Bachelor of Arts in anthropology and English, Master of Arts in English, and Master of Arts in educational psychology. Sallans is the author of Second Son: Transitioning Toward My Destiny, Love and Life. He has written essays and forewords for the books The Gender Quest Workbook, Manning Up: Transsexual Men on Finding Brotherhood, Family & Themselves, and My Body, My Words. He has published the books What's Normal Anyway? A comic about being trans male and OUTsider: Crossing Borders. Breaking Rules. Gaining Pride. Along with writing, Sallans travels the nation as a professional speaker where he provides keynotes, presentations and training to corporations, health care institutions, federal agencies, nonprofit organizations, and colleges and universities. You can learn more about him and his work by visiting his website: RyanSallans.com, or by following him on social media underneath the handle: Ryan Sallans.
Review :
With his powerful memoir, Transforming Manhood, Ryan Sallans has provided the world with a true gift. With each chapter, Sallans bares his soul with intention, vulnerability, and power. In doing so, he invites the reader in to not only his gender journey, but also to delve into our assumptions about our own gender assump- tions. This memoir stands along with the great ones -- Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues and Michelle Obama's Becoming. With each page, there is tenderness, respect, and love even beyond our gender journeys that readers will feel for this thing we call "life." Sallans has issued a call for us to truly live our lives while we can. I didn't want the book to end, and that alone is one of the messages Sallans leaves the reader with about our own lives. A true gem!
--Anneliese Singh, PhD, LPC
Professor and Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, University of Georgia, and author of The Racial Healing Handbook and The Queer and Transgender Resilience Workbook
Ryan Sallans' Transforming Manhood is not just about contemporary trans issues, but about the human issues associated with human transformation such as mor- tality, finding peace and love within oneself, facing and accepting fear, and the complexity of family as a work in progress. Sallans is at his most vulnerable. While his "scars from the gender-affirming surgeries have faded, some now unseen," his story is his body, a beautiful "trail map of life's journey."
--Loren Kleinman, If I Don't Make It, I Love You
We learn in Transforming Manhood that Ryan K. Sallans comes to us not as a trail- blazer but a trail maintainer. And that he does-honoring the generations of trans- gender people that came before him, inviting us to carry on the legacy of fighting for the rights of every person to live with pride and confidence in their true gender, with full support from those around them and compassion for those not yet there. With openness, empathy, brilliant insight, and a wide-angle lens, Sallans shares his personal journey from little girl to lesbian to trans man to human being. No other writer has come close to giving us a window into that evolutionary process, includ- ing the beginning of ageing-never a walk in the park but always bursting with new discoveries. A must read for anyone who wants to know, both inside and outside, what transgender looks like from transition to transformation to integration of all that we are that makes us mindful human beings.
--Diane Ehrensaft, Ph.D.
Author of The Gender Creative Child and Gender Born, Gender Made Director of Mental Health, Child and Adolescent Gender Center, University of California San Francisco
To read Ryan Sallans' new memoir, Transforming Manhood: A Trans Man's Quest to Build Bridges and Knock Down Walls, is to understand what it is to be a transgender man of Generation X, an activist sandwiched between the legendary (and, more often now, deceased) pioneers of the Baby Boomer generation and the Millennials. Does it matter? Most certainly.
--Diane Anderson-Minshall
Editorial Director of The Advocate
Author of Queerly Beloved: A Love Story Across Genders and four novels
