Customer Reviews

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

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book is, ostensibly, about the history of transsexuality in the US. But it is, as its title implies, more generally about how the concept of "sex" itself has changed in the US in the past hundred years. Meyerowitz has done an amazing job of putting together activist, scientific, and popular cultural sources to produce a scholarly -- but very readable -- history. Meyerowitz's main point 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 argues most persuasively that the distinction between these arenas of lived experience were worked out through the debates over transsexuality in the US, drawing on earlier European sexological discourses.

Meyerowitz uses Christine Jorgensen as the central figure in this book, and has gone part of the way to producing something of a biography of CJ. This works really well. Another notable feature of this book is that Meyerowitz is careful to follow the different experiences of transexual men and women, which adds further depth to this book.

This book is very readable -- I intend to teach it in an undergraduate course this year -- while at the same time theoretically sound and clearly very well-researched. It answered many questions that I had, and brought together much of what I have wanted to understand about this field.

Highly recommended for anyone interested in gender and sexuality, both specialists and the general reader.

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.

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.

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.

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.