Customer Reviews

Sexual Metamorphosis: An Anthology of Transsexual Memoirs

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I was quite impressed with this collection of first person narratives about transitioning from one gender to the other. The editor has chosen extracts from autobiographies of various (mostly famous) transexuals from the 1800's until the present. Christine Jorgensen, Renee Richards, Loren Cameron, Jan Morris and many others are all here. Harry Benjamin, the "grandfather" of sexual reassignment surgery is included, and so is a chapter from Krafft-Ebing's 1886 text "Psychopathia Sexualis". So it's very diverse -- covering very different kinds of transitions by very different people under very different situations. But the common thread is that they have all thought deeply about their journeys and are able to communicate their reflections in a very articulate way about them.
All in all, a very good collection for anyone interested in the subject.

This is an excellent anthology, truly well done, carefully-compiled and deeply informative--voices of transformation gathered together at last. One of the things that I appreciate most of all is the range of transgendered experiences.

"We're the hippies of the nineties," a pre-op TS told Ames (as recounted in his introduction). Alas, Ames follows the media trail to a lowest common denominator in this putatively meat & potatoes anthology (Jorgensen, Morris, Richards, Boylan, et al. chopped into prose hash). Although Ames was fortunate enough to have none other than Aleshia Brevard flirt with him in a bar, he squanders the anecdote by ending his prefatory essay with an unforgivable Kafka analogy. No, Ames, TS's do NOT wake up as cockroaches!