Thomas Page McBee’s Man Alive: A True Story of Violence, Forgiveness and Becoming a Man is intense yet delicate; it has a sharp edge that envelops you softly. McBee’s story begins as a mugger held McBee and the author’s girlfriend at gunpoint one foggy night in Oakland, California. They were walking home after dinner late at night from the metro station before the event that would forever alter the fabric of the author’s being. The experience of running that evening awakened a deep sense of physicality, a connection with the body, when McBee instantaneously realized that the female body the author had always been walking around in wasn’t quite right.

McBee is running: “I felt myself waver for a moment between selves, all of them present: the child, the body I’d always been, and the one I would become,” McBee writes. From this life-altering and frightening event McBee’s curiosity was peaked. The mugging became the catalyst for a new existence. “Being mugged was suddenly a way to talk about a lot of things I really cared about that I hadn’t found a way to talk about before that,” he says.

Transgender issues (and people) were once thought of as nothing more than fringe issues. But online and traditional media have created platforms that show the universality of transgender experiences in nuanced and complicated ways. Man Alive is an extension of McBee’s column at The Rumpus, “Self-Made Man,” which chronicles McBee’s transition from female to male.

“New media and social media [have] democratized media and created a real opportunity for there to be a diversity of perspectives, especially in the trans community, that you really weren’t seeing before that,” Mcbee says. We agreed that it’s unlikely our conversation in this context would be happening a decade ago; Laverne Cox wouldn’t have appeared on the cover of Time except as a tragic figure and a television show wouldn’t have existed that stars a transgendered parent coming out to her family (Amazon’s Transparent). “Right now were in this moment, which is really interesting, that’s happened very quickly where trans people are very visible,” McBee says.

In Man Alive, McBee draws parallels between his transitioning experience and giving birth. McBee chooses to adroitly universalize his transition and the experiences that surround it. This allows Man Alive to transcend being solely a trans-narrative and become a coming-of-age book, the story of a man discovering what it means to be a man unto himself. “Pretty much anything that any of us experience is something that all of us can understand,” he explains. “It just requires a little translation.”

Man Alive is also an insightful primer on violence. McBee relays his keen awareness of the explosive potential for violence now that he is a man and can become the potential victim or victimizer. “There’s a weird inherent violence to a lot of life that I hadn’t experienced before my transition,” he says. Aspects of his metamorphosis held rite-like qualities, were ritualistic in the violence he inflicted upon himself to become the individual he discovered he was meant to be. “All the ways I’ve sort of bulked and hulked and changed…there is something violent about that, but I don’t think it’s a bad thing,” he says. “I do feel very aware of it.” His transition required a fairly expensive surgery, and weekly, for a time, McBee would inject himself with shots of testosterone.

McBee hopes that Man Alive contributes to the canon of documenting the human condition in a time period when trans-people have been able to move beyond being seen just as an object of curiosity. “It’s a real violence to make someone’s story fundamentally other or different,” he says. He wants his memoir to make a connection and provide a fundamental understanding of what it means to become the person you want to be.  

“What makes a man? A man makes himself,” Mcbee writes.

Evan Rodriguez is a freelance writer living in Central Texas. You can follow him on Twitter.