Customer Reviews

The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights

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This is the best Gender-related book I've read thus far. It delves far beyond the woman-in-man's body metaphor to cover historical and current theories about gender and why, like any other human phenomenon, gender is represented best by a biological diversity not necessarily aligned with one's natal genitalia. It also delves with style into recent history offering a chilling echo from Nazi Germany into what intolerance holds towards gender variance. This is a book that everyone over age of 18 ought to read. The personal accounts were also very telling. Great book.

With an introduction, followed by seven chapters and a conclusion, Deborah Rudacille attempts to solve the riddle of "gender". Being a science writer at The John Hopkins University and the author of several highly praised books, she seems eminently qualified to do so.

As the inside front flap of the dust cover says in part, "Coming at the subject from several angles - historical, sociological, psychological, medical - Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new; that changing one's gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years; and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned ..."

By the time I had finished reading the first two pages of the introduction I knew that I was into a book the likes of which I had not read before. In a class by itself, this book, unlike others of the genre, is authored by one who is not gender variant. There appears to be no hidden agenda here. Thoroughly researched, and very carefully constructed, "Riddle" is a breath of fresh air, the aim of which, she states, is to "promote a greater understanding and acceptance of a group (or groups) of people who typically want nothing more than to live their lives in peace and be able to enjoy the same civil status and protection granted to others."

She defines gender this way. "My female body is made to give birth and to nurture. Your male body is constructed to seed me and to protect our offspring. From an evolutionary perspective, our common goal is to ensure that our children survive until they can reproduce themselves and thus transmit our genes to the next generation. Gender is the cultural tapestry that we weave from those fundamental facts."

Each of the seven, very powerful, chapters is followed by an excerpt from a conversation with one of her research subjects. Although these excerpts are, of themselves, quite enlightening, their purpose is to highlight and underline the subject matter contained within the chapter.

Chapter One, entitled The Hands of God, traces the treatment of gender variance from the early eighteenth century to the present. Well into it she states; "It is worth noting that though an increasing number of cities and states have added "sexual orientation" to civil rights legislation, fewer have added riders protecting people whose gender expression makes them targets of discrimination or violence. This lapse is a sign of our continuing failure to understand and acknowledge the distinction between sexual orientation and gender identity, and it has major consequences."

Other chapters, from Through Science to Justice; The Bombshell; Men and Women, Boys and Girls; Liberating the Rainbow; Childhood, Interrupted; to Fear of a Pink Planet develop Rudacille's thesis. The book is so laced with powerful statements that it is difficult to pick only a few which could be considered the most significant. For example, in the chapter on childhood development she asks, "... in the absence of a strong desire for body modification, are the "distress and impairment" experienced by such individuals due to the disorder itself, or are they a consequence of the harassment and social ostracism gender-variant people endure?" With statements like, "Although there are no Robert's Rules of gender posted at home, in schools, and in churches, the rules exist and are often harshly enforced by peers, parents, and school authorities." she challenges the reader's preconceived ideas concerning gender variance.

In Chapter Seven, Fear of a Pink Planet, Rudacille states: "If the stories contained in this book teach us anything it is that gender variance is neither a fad nor a revolution. It is a biological fact. Our continuing failure to acknowledge this fact virtually ensures that there will be more [murdered transgender people], individuals whose pain cannot be assuaged by a syringe or a scalpel and who die violent and premature deaths. Whether dying by their own hands or at the hands of uncomprehending others, these individuals have been sacrificed to an illusion, the belief that the spectrum of gender contains only two colors, black and white, and nothing in between."

Does she solve the riddle? In her own words, "Will we ever find a definitive solution to the riddle of gender? Maybe not - but as this history indicates, the questions we ask about gender tend to be more liberating than the answers. I would prefer to live in a society that gave me the freedom to ask those questions, rather than one that enforced autocratic conclusions."

In her concluding paragraph she states in part, "I have come to view gender less as a riddle that should be solved and more of a collage, which we each assemble in our own fashion. Nature provides the canvas, and on that canvas we assemble scraps of meaning from family, religion, science, friends, and the media - a kind of surrealist montage that, like children's art, is a natural expression of being, so natural that we forget that it is an art."

Once you start reading this book I challenge you to put it down before you have finished it.

It's not often that one comes across a science writer who is able to explore the issues of sex, gender and human sexuality from an objective space and present all sides of the debate. And there is quite a debate, as the terms "sex, gender and sexuality" themselves are subject to debate. The author speaks with a clear and literate voice, transcribes her interviews fairly (I know from experience) and portrays the various flashpoints in a manner which draws in the casual as well as educated reader. America is on the cusp of a paradigm shift in the understanding of sex and gender, lagging behind Europe, Canada and Australia. The old medical culture of viewing sex and sexuality through the lens of Freud and the analysts is dying off, and the old-time religions are struggling mightily to once again replace the label "mentally ill" with the label "sinner." They, too, are doomed to failure, as the youth of America who have experienced sexual diversity first-hand and have found it innocuous grow into adulthood and responsibility. Ms. Rudacille's book provides a roadmap to this new world that many still find strange (though fascinating, as it has always had a hold on American culture).

From Milton Berle and Flip Wilson to Christine Jorgenson and Republicans cavorting at the Bohemian Grove and various clubs hosting "female impersonators," Americans for decades have been fascinated by the core issue of who we are. And those who are born with a discrepancy between the various aspects of sexuality, whether affecting the brain or genitals, are the mirror in which the rest of us manage to see ourselves more clearly, if we dare. Deborah has polished that mirror as no other.

For the past couple years, I have been devouring every book I can get my hands on about gender variance, and I have read some really good ones. The one I just finished is among the very best yet. It's a recent offering (published 2005) by Deborah Rudacille. It's called The Riddle of Gender: Science, Activism, and Transgender Rights.

It is refreshing in that it has no axes to grind, and it is written by someone who is sensitive to the subject matter (she began the research when I friend chose to transition); knowledgeable of the general body humanistic thought that comes from feminism, postmodernist philosophy, gender studies and queer studies; and who knows reaearch and science (she's a science writer working at Johns Hopkins). What's more, she is uniquely knoweldgeable about the special area of environmental estrogens and endocrine disrupting chemicals like DES. Rudacille is a powerful advocate, and I believe her so proficiently bringing together the science, the history, and the voices of transpeople will have a profound effect.

As a science writer, she is, first and foremost, a talented writer. The book is especially valuable for presenting lots of different perspectives and distinctive forms of information and thought without recourse to jargon or the conventions of speech typical of academic publications.

Each chapter includes an extended interview with a trans person. Most of these subjects are successful professionals and/or activist advocates. They are articulate and experienced voices that manage to say, in their totality and unity, "We are not mentally ill. We are not moral degenerates. We are products of biochemistry, and we are interesting human beings worth getting to know."

I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and I learned a lot I didn't know!

Dan Mouer, Ph.D.

I am Transexual myself, and this book taught ME lots, let alone what it would teach the other 99.99% of the population, highly worth reading.
Plus many of the interviews are quite enjoyable!

Add on it was really easy to read, and you have a brilliant book!

10/10

As somebody in the midst of transition myself I have devoured many of the "must read" books on this subject and more besides. At this point I have started to be cautious about my selections since similar information is often duplicated, especially in the non-biographical works.

What a joy then to read this book, which introduced me to so much new information without ever feeling like hard going!

If you think this is purely looking through research for why we (TG's) exist you are grossly underestimating the author. True, she examines that research, but puts it in the context of politics, public opinion, and ethics of the time. She also asks some tough questions that made me re-consider my position on several issues.

Whether you identify as transgendered or are interested in understanding you have to add this to your compulsory reading list!

What an amazing book. Marvelously written, highly informative, i was shocked and entertained, page after page.

A compassionate, humorous, meticulous and nothing short of brilliant piece of writing.

One most definitely does NOT have to be transgendered as am i, to marvel at what is in this book. As a matter of fact, since we already know what we are going through, it should be required reading for the part of humanity that needs to know, that is not transgendered.

Bravo Deborah, bravo.

Jamie Antonia Symonanis - author of 'You're Lost Little Girl'

I was most impressed with the information that was included in the book relative to my own identity problems (?). It gave me some insight into the emotional battles that have brewed within my self over the years. I wish that I had this information many years ago. We are really not male or female, rather, we are a blend of human nature.

Thank you,

Herb

Simply excellent, although I find the subtitle "science, activism and transgender rights" to be misleading about the content of the book, there's not really a lot of what I would call "political" content. I had passed over reading this book several time because I'm not as interested in civil rights activism as I am in the medical and historical aspects of transgerderism. To my complete surprise this book and some fascinating historical information such as, who, how and when testosterone was first isolated and manufactured and the first man in the US to receive testosterone therapy.

A remarkably concise and very good book on the misconceptions surrounding transgender people and the causes of transgenderism and transsexuality, including a broad historical view. Sadly, in the course of the 20th century, an initial, and accurate, understanding of transsexuality and transgenderism as rooted in brain differences was displaced after WWII by a then prevailing behaviorlist model that saw gender as written on the blank slate of the mind. This behaviorlist view sent our understanding of these issues on a long detour, one that resulted in immense pain and vicious discrimination towards people who were already struggling greatly. Rudacille's book does much to get our understanding back on track and away from the junk science of behavioralism.

As the author demonstrates, we are clearly facing what amounts to an epidemic of transgenderism and transsexuality because of endocrine disrupting chemicals and drugs like DES, which is the paradigmatic EDC, and may have caused neurodevelopmental changes in upwards of millions of people. Society accordingly needs to reassess its view of the transgendered and transsexuals, who are different in certain ways, but otherwise just like anyone else, and far from crazy, sick or immoral, as the religious right would have it. One start might be to move "gender identity disorders" out of the psychiatric DSM and into the ICD as a neurodevelopmental and neuro-endocrine problem. An important, necessary and I think conclusive book for anyone interested in any of these issues.