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