Life Beyond My Body
A Transgender Journey to Manhood in China
By Lei Ming with Lura Frazey
Transgress Press, 2016
Yes, this is a transgender story: the author is a transman, a female-to-male (FtM) transgender in China. Memoirs of transmen are much rarer than those of transwomen, but Transgress Press has published a good number of them. The book won Lambda Literary Award in 2016.
There is a lot that may be unfamiliar or uncomfortable to a cisgender reader, not least of which is the extent to which Christianity aided her transition. Christian encouragement is an aspect this book shares with my forthcoming book, which is what caught my eye as I browsed the catalog.
Another aspect of Lei Ming’s life is that her life into her early teens was lived in a rural Chinese community. Beijing or Shanghai would not be so strange to us as the the village in which he grew up. He had to use a communal outhouse until he left the village to attend a prominent high school in a larger town.
None of us moves smoothly and steadily through transition to surgery, and that is certainly true in Lei Ming’s case. His mood goes up and down with his circumstances, until people and forces come together to bring his dream to fruition. I found his story fascinating.
The book is available from Transgress Press and from Amazon.
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