Reddit mentions of Dagger: On Butch Women

I have started and erased this comment three times now.
Basically, I don't remember how or when I first realized trans men existed. There was someone on my freshman year of high school bus who was female assigned but male identified--he used to just tell people he was actually a boy and that was that. For some reason while I clearly remember that (lo these cough 20 years later), I only vaguely had a sense that kid had anything to do with me. I'm generally pretty avoidant, so I walled off that part for as long as I possibly could.

I remember meeting some trans kids at the Chicago pride parade in like 1997--but again, while some part of my brain understood superficially that they were some variety of trans, I wouldn't let myself process it at all. I think I posted on some planetout / AOL trans threads, but not from supportive or self-identifying place at all, but more of a "trans critical" place.
My freshman year of college I finally had semi-privacy and a fast internet connection in my own dorm room...but I don't remember using it to research trans issues at all. I was involved in ...Indigo Girls and Ani DiFranco fan sites / list servs, and there were totally some trans folks on those, but I explained them away to myself as experimenting kids. HOW FUCKING IN DENIAL CAN YOU BE?????

That was the year Matthew Shepard was murdered, and I was on a small midwestern campus and was a super visible queer, and I remember we had a candlelight vigil and a guy in a pickup truck screamed at us, and for me being "gay" was more important socially that those weird gender rumblings that were going on. Strangely enough I briefly dated someone there who also went on to transition ftm, and we never even talked about what a few years later would take over our lives. lol.

At some point that same school year, I was back with my soft butch high school girlfriend (I was a big fan of butch-butch pairings), and we were in a Borders Bookstore in suburban Milwaukee and holding hands or whatever, and these two middle aged gay guys walked up to us and told us we were adorable and handed us a book they said would be "perfect" for us--it was called Dagger: On Butch Women (http://www.amazon.com/Dagger-Butch-Roxxie-Linnga-Due/dp/0939416824) and it was like a dollar or something because it was already a kind of old book (1994...and this would have been 1999) BUT AND HERE'S THE IMPORTANT PART:

THERE WERE A WHOLE TWO CHAPTERS OR SO ABOUT TRANS MEN (were those gay guys my guardian angels???)

granted, why were trans men in a book about "butch women"--well, we could debate that, but it was definitely more of a 90s thing, and I can't explain it at all.

And that book had Michael Hernandez in it, and even then he was a big bad bald bearded dude, and I hadn't even realized you could take, like, testosterone and stuff. So that book was very valuable, though it also hindered a bit because it was already out of date and talked about things like mail-order pants stuffers made out of industrial foam that some dude in California would carve into a wang for you (I'm not even kidding) or Morris Designs surgical vests as binders. It was a far, far different world when we had to like send a check to a weird address we found in a book and hope they sent us the thing.

alright, this is already too long and too personal.

There's always an in-between option, or a both option. You may wish to check out the book Dagger: On Butch Women which, in spite of its name, covers a good range of butch afab gender identity.