By a prize-winning, young Black trans writer of outsized talent, a fierce and disciplined memoir about queerness, masculinity, and race.

Even as it shines light on the beauty and toxicity of Black masculinity from a transgender perspectivethe tropes, the presumptionsPrettyis as much a powerful and tender love letter as it is a call for change.

I should be able to define myself, but I am not. Not by any governmental or cultural body, Brookins writes. Every day, I negotiate the space between who I am, how Im perceived, and what I need to unlearn. People have assumed things about me, and I cant change that. Every day, I am assumed to be a Black American man, though my ID says female, and my heart says neither of the sort. What does it meanto be a girl-turned-man when youre something else entirely?

Informed by KB Brookinss personal experiences growing up in Texas, those of other Black transgender masculine people, Black queer studies, and cultural criticism,Prettyis concerned with the marginalization suffered by a unique American constituencywhose condition is a world apart from that of cisgender, non-Black, and non-masculine people. Here is a memoir (a bildungsroman of sorts) about coming to terms with instantly and always being perceived as other