Book Rating: ★★★★★ (5 / 5 stars)
Audio Book Performance: ★★★★★ (5 / 5 stars)
It’s hard to imagine being born in the wrong body – especially when you identify with the gender assigned to you at birth. But in this hilarious but honest, Samantha Allen provides a description of her experiences that manage resonate with most audiences. Her story is one of self discovery, and mostly everyone has these moments of doubt.
Despite being a cisgender woman, I related so much to some of what Samantha joked about. I was on the elliptical when she went into a tirade about the public women’s restroom and I started to laugh so hard. But while the humor and anecdotes are amusing, it allowed me to see a few things: 1) how transgender individuals undergo and make choices about their transitions and 2) womanhood through the eyes of someone who was assigned the wrong gender at birth.
Samantha Allen (despite saying how much she hates her own voice) also was a fantastic narrator for this audiobook. I was so sad when it ended, because I really felt like I had entered her life and gained a new slice of understanding.
I highly recommend this book to anyone who wants to understand the transgender experience and womanhood just a little bit more. It’s fun, amusing, but honest…and I absolute adored it.
What’s it about?
Samantha Allen, award-winning journalist and author of Real Queer America, delivers an intimate look at the unexpectedly hilarious moments of her gender transition.
In this poignant audio piece, Samantha Allen takes listeners along for the wild ride of her own transition: the good, the bad, but mostly, the funny. Because once she began this life-changing journey in earnest, Samantha realized that while the emotional trials of gender dysphoria and self-discovery could be harrowing, there were so many laugh-out-loud moments along this winding road.
Think about it: While her 20- and 30-something peers were settling into the people they were going to be for the rest of their lives, Samantha was going through puberty all over again, taking the whole womanhood thing step by glamorous step – from learning the differences between men’s and women’s public restrooms to figuring out how to take off a bra without taking her shirt off first. Recognizing these moments of humor brought her joy in times she needed it most – and sharing them, she learned, could be revelatory.
Part deeply personal memoir, part comedic adventure, and part insightful exploration of how gender informs the ways we see the world, M to (WT)F is a delightful listen that proves how powerful it can be to find humor in hardship.
E.S. Barrison 