Sorted: Growing Up, Coming Out, and Finding My Place (a Transgender Memoir)

YouTuber Bird draws on “over five dozen physical journals” and “hundreds more digital diaries” in this frothy memoir of his journey as a trans man. Originally conceived as a zine, the book retains such arty touches as hand-lettered pages, small black-and-white photos, and screenshots. Bird opens with a glossary of transgender terminology before recounting his experiences growing up in Michigan, Texas, and New Mexico; having a pregnancy scare in college; binding his chest (“Looking in the mirror and seeing my flat chest felt so innately right that it would flood me with a rush of endorphins”); coming out to his mother; picking his male name; and undergoing reconstructive chest surgery. Bird admits to suffering “cringe attacks” when reading his old diaries, and readers may similarly recoil from the occasionally overwrought prose: “Words flowed with a raw mellifluence unlike any I’d experienced before.” But Bird’s sense of humor and lightness of touch elsewhere—as when he likens the assigning of gender identity to the Sorting Hat in the Harry Potter books—help to offset such pretentiousness. This jokey, brighter-side account will appeal to younger readers bogged down by the doom-and-gloom heaviness that can cloud the trans experience. (Sept.)