Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-Dressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude. (Book Reviews)

Archives of Sexual Behavior,  August, 2003  by Anne A. Lawrence

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Normal: Transsexual CEOs, Cross-Dressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude. By Amy Bloom. Random House, New York, 2002, 140 pp., $23.95.

Writer and psychotherapist Amy Bloom is best known for her short stories, which display her gifts for detailed observation and psychological insight. Normal is Bloom's first book of nonfiction. It contains three essays examining the lives of persons who are usually regarded as anything but normal: female-to-male (FtM) transsexuals, heterosexual crossdressers, and intersexed persons. The essays are bracketed by a preface and an afterword that criticize conventional concepts of normality and suggest that understanding these unusual individuals can ...