Beyond "man" and "woman"

Progressive, The, Dec, 2002 by Amanda Laughtland

On picking up How Sex Changed, I'd expected more reflection on present-day matters, particularly the relationships among gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender activists, given the ubiquity of GLBT organizations. And Meyerowitz's remarks on current media representations of transgender people offer strikingly less detail than her discussions of news coverage from pre-1960. She does make reference to a number of contemporary scholars, however, and readers seeking further information can find plenty of resources in the fifty-plus pages of notes she provides.

Like Meyerowitz, Bloom gives plenty of space to the voices of individuals. With her two collections of short fiction and her novel, Love Invents Us, Bloom has found a sizable body of readers who appreciate her honest portrayals of the most private aspects of her characters' lives. In her first nonfiction book, Bloom incorporates a series of personal interviews to offer a sensitive introduction to a selection of varied, boundary-blurring experiences of sex, gender, and sexuality that may be new to her readership. Normal is a quick and engaging read, comprised of three distinct essays on the topics of female-to-male transsexuals, heterosexual male cross-dressers, and intersexed people.

A regular contributor to publications like The Atlantic Monthly and The New Yorker, Bloom writes to an educated, open-minded audience of people who, like Bloom herself, have generally "encountered transsexuals only the way most people do: in Renee Richards's story, in Jan Morris's Conundrum, in Kate Bornstein's books, and on afternoon talk shows." What Bloom's slim volume lacks in size, it makes up for with enough evenhanded and intriguing information to encourage further reading.

Her first essay starts off with a questionable comparison between the burgeoning awareness of a transsexual identity and living "the life of Kafka's Gregor Samsa." The suggestion that a person might wake one morning and find his or her identity completely transformed isn't quite what Bloom intends, but the implication is unavoidable, given Kafka's story. Fortunately, she quickly moves past this comparison.

Throughout the text, Bloom uses a first-person writing style and acts as a participant, a kindly investigator chatting with transgendered and intersexed people and their allies, sometimes while visiting family homes and other times while attending events like conventions of cross-dressers or plastic surgeons. In several interviews, she talks with experts who are well known in their respective fields, such as Dr. Donald Laub, whose surgery center has done, Bloom reports, 798 female-to-male surgeries, and Cheryl Chase, the "modest, relentless, sleepless army of one," who founded the Intersex Society of North America (ISNA).

Bloom's empathic interest and therapeutic background are apparent, and most people seem relatively at ease while talking with her about their sometimes-painful histories. Her attention to the wives of cross-dressers and the family members of female-to-male transsexuals and intersexed people make her book an especially useful tool. If I knew a family whose members were trying to understand a daughter's desire to live as a man or a husband's desire to dress like his wife, I'd readily recommend Normal.