A chorus of transgender voices

Journal of Sex Research, Nov, 2004 by Dallas Denny

Finding the Real Me: True Tales of Sex and Gender Diversity. Edited by Tracie O'Keefe and Katrina Fox. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003, 293 pages. Paper, $17.95.

Reviewed by Dallas Denny, Gender Education & Advocacy, P.O. Box 33724, Decatur, GA 30033-0724: e-mail: aegis@mindspring.com.

  Challenging our own sense of self, looking inward to find who we
  are, using the process of autobiography that we know so well, is
  producing some very interesting answers that challenge the very
  binary structure of the complacent world in which gender was
  invented, and by which it has become obsessed. (from foreword
  by Stephen Whittle, p. xi)

Strange as it may seem, gender-variant people--those who were out of the closet, at any rate--made almost no contributions to the professional literature on gender variance prior to the 1990s. Exceptions that come to mind are Magnus Hirschfeld in turn-of-the-century Germany and transgenderist Charles (now Virginia) Prince, who presented at sexology conferences and authored and coauthored a number of articles in medical journals from the late 1950s on (e.g., Prince, 1957). With regard to transsexuals, there were no exceptions; not a single transsexual had written or edited a text or been even the second or third author of a journal article.

Transsexuals nonetheless made their voices known. They did so by writing autobiographies. Between 1952 and the end of the millennium, as many as 100 different transsexual autobiographies were published. Even as medical journals speculated on the causes of transsexualism and debated the advantages of different surgical techniques, transsexual men and women were revealing in print their innermost feelings and describing the steps they took to find comfort in their lives. And, in considerable numbers, the public was reading and learning about transsexualism and adjusting its attitudes.

Today, of course, transsexuals and other transgendered people have a significant voice in the literature of gender variance. Still, there is a continuing demand for transsexual autobiographies. They continue to be published in significant numbers (e.g., Boylan, 2003) and continue to influence public attitudes. This is not the case with non-transsexual transgendered people, however. It's almost as if the criterion for acceptance for publication of an autobiography is a 3-hour genital operation. The personal stories of crossdressers and transgenderists--and for that matter, intersexed people--are rare.

Fortunately, there are several collections with autobiographical chapters by nontranssexual gender-variant individuals (Gender Identity Center of Colorado, 1996: Matzner, 2001). Although there are few contributions by crossdressers (perhaps this is in part because many individuals who would once have called themselves crossdressers now embrace a transgender identity), these collections provide a variety of perspectives on the transgender experience. Although transsexuals are liberally represented in these collections, many of the chapters are written by individuals who have not had and do not plan to have genital surgery, and many are by those born female.

Now Tracie O'Keefe and Katrina Fox bring us a third collection of short autobiographies, Finding the real me: True tales of sex and gender diversity. In just under 300 pages, 26 gender-variant people tell their stories with dignity, aplomb, and often wit. Within this limited space, the editors do a remarkable job of illustrating their term sex and vernier diversity. Indeed, the contributors are a diverse lot: young and old, natal male and natal female, from the U.S., the U.K., Australia, Europe, and Japan. Their occupations range from sales and marketing to writer and poet to broadcasting to chef to sex worker, and several are students. Some identify as transsexual, some as transgendered, some as neither man nor woman, and one as physically intersexed; one identifies as "bisexual metagender, post-Christian theologian, pagan spiritualist, and lycanthrope" (p. 283). Possibly one half are transsexual, although some who are crossliving full-time claim transgender rather than transsexual status. One author writes of regretting the decision to have surgery. Race is not addressed, but I know several of the authors are Asian.

Alienation is a common theme across the chapters. The older authors who grew up in a period in which gender variance was ignored or punished and opportunities for self-education were scarce speak to this, but even the young authors like Cynthya BrianKate describe their experiences of not fitting in being bullied and attacked, and searching for support. Another theme is change--toward the masculine, toward the feminine, or toward androgyny. Other themes include sexuality--many of the authors describe their attempts to make sense of their sexual attractions in light of their evolving gender identities--and struggles with religious beliefs and interpersonal relationships. Some of the authors describe the great lengths to which they went to ignore, conquer, or deny their transgender feelings.