My wife is a stone butch, and the book is meaningful to her and other butches. I only got through about half of it, I can't stand that much sexual violence.

In terms of whether the book is about being butch or being a trans man, in the 1940's no one was trans, so lots of people ID'd as butch who would ID as trans men today. We've had a lot of interesting discussions about this in my friend group, like is there an actual difference between the people who remain lesbians vs the people who decide to transition? Obviously trans people would say yes, and many gender critical people would say these "trans men" are butch lesbians who were duped by a cult/ couldn't overcome their internalized homophobia.

The book was written to be about butches though, many of whom had to try to pass as men to survive back then and also attract female partners. The world is still hostile to gnc people, and obviously more so 80 years ago. Of course TRA's will do whatever they can to rewrite themselves into history just like they did with Stonewall. For whatever it's worth the author continued to call herself a lesbian and used she/her pronouns for her whole life, but made some comment about being okay with lgb people calling her other pronouns in the same way that gay men jokingly call each other "she".

I found it very hard to read. I dealt with a lot of self loathing as a teenager and the stories of men raping the protagonist boiled my blood and haunted me about my own experiences. I think it is read as 'more trans' now, rather than being about the experience of being a butch lesbian, and needing to pass just to exist.

I read this book about twenty years ago. I didn't see it as a transgender novel then, just about the difficulty of being a stone butch back in the day. The cops raiding bars and raping them was pretty awful. Of course, twenty years ago transgender wasn't really a thing. It was butch and femmes.

I loved it when I read it at 18.

I recently re-read it and found it rather dull. Many of the characters were poorly developed and sort of bled together.

It's an interesting and important story but poorly written.

There are several transgender characters in it, yes, if that's what you are asking.

I have, from memory it offers good insight in to the butch lesbian reasons of their transition.

I think there a problematic parts of it, but largely it deals with the conflict and acceptance of internalised homophobia, and societal homophobia at the time.

From memory anyway, I read it when I was 20, which was nearly two decades ago.

Later in her life came out as Trans. So the 20th Anniversary is goings to reflect the dogma of they were always Trans.

You can download the older version from on line for free and compare the differences.