Product Description
How Sex Changed is a fascinating social, cultural, and medical history of transsexuality in the United States. Joanne Meyerowitz tells a powerful human story about people who had a deep and unshakable desire to transfo… More >>
How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
this will be quite brief: content is very substantive, however lack of a clear structure (which probably is what the author wanted though) makes it repetitive.
Rating: 4 / 5
Meyerowitz, Joanne. “How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States”, Harvard University Press, 2004.
Looking at Transsexuality
Amos Lassen
Joanne Meyerowirtz has written the first history of transsexuality in the United States with this book. She looks at fifty years of both science and public attitudes which go along with the issue. She goes into the relationship between the movement for gay rights and transsexuals and the book is not only interesting but fascinating. This is a scholarly book that is written for the lay reader and he concludes that we now have a better understanding of gender variance and there is a great deal more tolerance (a word I despise). However media visibility is not yet positive and stereotypes still abound.
The book is the saga of transsexuals themselves, including their struggles for access to sex transformation and their continued problems with discrimination both from the conservative Right and from gays and feminists who saw them as “infiltrators.” Meyerowitz shows us how transsexuality has caused physicians as well as academics to look at the differences between gender and sex and to look at the role of nature in this.
During the last 50 years, members of the general public, medical and legal personnel and transsexuals themselves have all tried to describe transsexuality and its many ramifications. Meyerowitz gives us the contributions of leading medical pioneers, such as Harry Benjamin and John Money, and transsexuals, including Christine Jorgensen and others who are not so famous. Meyerowitz avoids some of the technical problems such as specialized language this by focusing on major trends and attitudes. She cites carefully chosen persons, organizations, and publications to demonstrate the gradual development of the now generally accepted idea of maleness and femaleness occupying a qualitative continuum rather than representing polar conditions. Detailed and informative, and well supported by references and notes, Meyerowitz’s work is commendable to anyone seriously interested in transsexuality.
Using extensive and compelling evidence, Joanne Meyerowitz shows how transsexuals, the doctors who treated them and the media not only expanded the possibilities for individual sex change but also transformed the cultural meanings of sex, gender, and sexuality in twentieth-century America.
This book is about the history of transsexuality in the US, but it is more generally about how the concept of “sex” itself has changed in the US in the past hundred years. Meyerowitz’s thesis is that “it is through a “taxonomic revolution” — initiated by the possibilities of transsexuality — that scientists, sexual minorities, and broader US society have come to distinguish between sex, gender, and sexuality, and the kinds of identities that are attached to these concepts”. She charges that the distinctions between these arenas of lived experience were worked out through the debates over transsexuality in the US and that it draws on earlier European sexological discourses.
Christine Jorgensen is the central figure in this book, this fits well. Meyerowitz is also careful to follow the different experiences of transsexual men and women, which adds a deeper dimension to the book.
This book is very readable and it is theoretically sound and very well-researched. It answers a great many questions and brings together much of what has been misunderstood in the past.
Rating: 5 / 5
I will finish my own MTF transition in less than three weeks, but as I have undergone this amazing process, I got very curious about the people who went before me. This book was the answer to most of my questions. I realize that I owe the people in this book a huge debt which I can never repay, so let me try by saying that this book is an amazing piece of history. It is very well written and, while at times a little repetetive, puts the history of transexuality clearly in perspective. Using Christine Jorgenson as an anchor, the author then lays out very clearly what came before and and what followed. I was particularly amused at some of the comments about the sixties; “The doctors didn’t trust the patients, and the patients didn’t trust the doctors”! Fortunately that isn’t the case anymore. If you are part of the transexual community or merely curious, give this a try. An excellent look at a piece of history seldom touched on by others, this is very well done and well worth a read.
Rating: 4 / 5
A very well written and informative book. A lot of info on Christine Jorgensen and the earlier doctors that fought for the rights of Transexuals. Also, it was nice to read a more “up-to-date” book on the subject too (copyright 2002). The only negative was that some info was overly repetitive and was a little jumpy in a historical time line. But, do not let that stop you from reading it, I highly recommend this book.
Rating: 4 / 5
This is a thoroughly researched and well written book. It places transsexual people in the context of U.S. history and undermines many myths that permeate popular culture about transpeople. Extremely informative and readable.
Rating: 5 / 5