How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States by Joanne Meyerowitz

From the Publisher

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 transform their bodily sex. In the last century when many challenged the social categories and hierarchies of race, class, and gender, transsexuals questioned biological sex itself, the category that seemed most fundamental and fixed of all.

From early twentieth-century sex experiments in Europe, to the saga of Christine Jorgensen, whose sex-change surgery made headlines in 1952, to today's growing transgender movement, Meyerowitz gives us the first serious history of transsexuality. She focuses on the stories of transsexual men and women themselves, as well as a large supporting cast of doctors, scientists, journalists, lawyers, judges, feminists, and gay liberationists, as they debated the big questions of medical ethics, nature versus nurture, self and society, and the scope of human rights.

In this story of transsexuality, Meyerowitz shows how new definitions of sex circulated in popular culture, science, medicine, and the law, and she elucidates the tidal shifts in our social, moral, and medical beliefs over the twentieth century, away from sex as an evident biological certainty and toward an understanding of sex as something malleable and complex. How Sex Changed is an intimate history that illuminates the very changes that shape our understanding of sex, gender, and sexuality today.

Publishers Weekly

When ex-GI George Jorgensen changed his sex and took on a new identity as Christine in 1952, the lurid journalism that followed focused on questions of Jorgensen's genitals, her sexual performance and her sexual availability set the tone for how U.S. media understood and discussed transsexuality. So argues Meyerowitz, professor of history at the Indiana University, at the beginning of this first complete history of American transsexualism. Carefully tracing the next 50 years of science and public attitudes surrounding transsexuality, Meyerowitz charts a number of fascinating historical moments: the complicated relationship between the gay rights movement and transsexuals in the mid-'60s; the deeply negative response that transsexuals had to Gore Vidal's Myra Breckenridge (Jorgensen thought of suing him); the complex battles to grant transsexuals a different legal sexual identity; how transsexuality became "sexy" through the careers of performers such as Coccinelle. While the book is scholarly in orientation, Meyerowitz's easy, readable style makes her thorough research in a wide range of fields accessible and enjoyable, even when she is detailing such subjects as internecine fighting among psychiatrists over the merits of sex-change operations. Meyerowitz thinks we have a much broader appreciation of gender and much more tolerance of gender variance these days, but she also sees that media visibility as not entirely positive, since most portrayals show transgender people as "freaks" or comic oddballs. On the whole, the book is an invaluable introduction to how ideas about gender and sexuality have evolved. (Oct.) Forecast: This title should be a lock on campus via syllabi and library collections, and get national reviews on the basis of its status as the first history of transsexualism. Trade sales should be solid and steady, especially if displayed with the below title by Amy Bloom, which should also get significant attention. Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Christine Jorgenson wasn't the first person to undergo sex-change surgery, but her media-savvy personality and glamorous looks made her a household name in the 1950s. Historian Meyerowitz chronicles 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." She also shows how the phenomenon of transsexuality led physicians and academics to make elaborate distinctions between gender and sex and to ponder the origins of both in nature and nurture and how these ideas slowly entered common discourse. Although this book is accessibly written and is the first book to treat transsexuality exclusively, the narrowness of the subjects recommends it primarily for academic and research libraries. Smaller public libraries need a less specialized text such as John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman's Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America.-Mary Ann Hughes, Neill P.L., Pullman, WA

Booknews

As early as the 1930s, but certainly after the well publicized sex change by Christine Jorgensen in 1952, scientists, doctors, and the public began to grapple with questions regarding the nature of sex. Meyerowitz (history, Indiana U.) traces the evolution of the discourse to the present, and projects it to the next generation. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Kirkus Reviews

Fascinating account of how transsexuality has challenged American concepts of sex, gender, and sexuality in science, medicine, law, and popular culture in the 20th century. As defined by Meyerowitz (History/Indiana Univ.), transsexuality refers to conditions in which people hope to change the bodily characteristics of sex through hormones and surgery. Sex changes in animals were attempted in Europe in the early decades of the 20th century, and during the 1920s, German doctors performed sex-change surgery on patients, but few Americans were aware of the phenomenon before 1952, when the story of Christine Jorgenson's transformation from male to female made headlines. Magazines, newspapers, books, and B-movies sensationalized the topic, while scientific literature began debating the biological and social basis of gender and sexuality. By the 1960s, with more men and women calling for the right to determine their own sex, a small number of American doctors were acceding to these demands. Meyerowitz describes the two sexual revolutions that followed: one, the open eroticisation of male-to-female transsexuals; the other, an effort by doctors and transsexuals themselves to distinguish transsexuals from homosexuals and transvestites. She recounts how the latter effort led in the 1970s to the establishment of clinics, professional standards of diagnosis and treatment, research programs, and support groups, and how different concepts of gender led to friction between the emerging transsexual liberation movement and the gay and women's liberation movements in the decades that followed. With her sympathetic reporting on the lives of individual men and women coming to terms with theirtranssexuality-especially Jorgenson, who lived until 1989-Meyerowitz gives serious social history an engaging human face. Informative and absorbing. (20 b&w photographs)

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Table of Contents