How I became the man I had always been. Narrating the self in recent English and German life writing by trans men.

The literary corpus of this research consists of 21st century life writing by trans men in the UK, North America and Germany. It falls broadly into two categories in line with Ruth Pearce’s distinction between trans-as-condition and trans-as-movement. Using Binswanger’s and Zimmermann’s notion of palimpsestic queer subjectivity and Paul B. Preciado’s somatheque (trans body-as-archive), a series of close readings shows the commonalities of these two groups of texts within their respective categories and to some extent between the two. It concludes that any interpretation of trans people’s narratives needs to account for the position the transition narrative proper is assigned in the text. Some writers go into great detail to create a coherent and comprehensive lifespan account, others focus on key episodes, and yet another group, more commonly on the side of trans-as-movement, avoid autobiographical depth in favour of a focus on the near present in its social and political contexts.