From Publishers Weekly
Science writer Rudacille's sympathetic and well-researched elucidation of the threads that make up the tangled issue of gender variance, most visible in transsexuals, is lively enough to be a good introduction for the educated lay reader and documented enough for the scholar. She considers the interplay between the science of gender and the human side of transgender issues, beginning with the story of the Chevalier d'Éon, who spent the mid-1700s as a man and then lived over three decades as a woman. Her narrative progresses through Magnus Hirschfeld's Berlin Institute for Sexual Science and ends with the possibility that pesticides and synthetic estrogens may be increasing gender variance by affecting human endocrinology. Seven interviews with transsexuals prominent in research or activism articulate both the theory and the practice of transsexualism, giving readers the human face of people who don't fit male and female archetypes. Rudacille adeptly discusses the controversies surrounding transsexuality, delving into the Kafka-esque issues around the psychiatric diagnosis of "gender identity dysphoria," giving time to those who question sexual reassignment surgery and covering the conflicts between transsexuals and homosexuals, especially lesbian feminists in the 1970s. Rudacille's evenhandedness bolsters her final opinion, which is that gender identity, including variance, is probably hardwired—and that "culture [should] follow nature's lead and celebrate variety."
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Booklist
In her assessment of the state of affairs in the transsexual community, Rudacille builds on the commentary that has accumulated since a Berlin physician (Magnus Hirschfeld) pioneered research on transsexuality in the 1920s, and especially since George Jorgensen Jr. became Christine Jorgensen and a worldwide sensation in the early 1950s. Rudacille approaches her subject matter sympathetically and from various angles, including the people who have addressed their sexual identity issues via hormone treatment and surgery, the clinical context of transsexualism, and the scientists who have investigated and theorized about the subject. Rudacille also includes the verbatim testimony of a half-dozen people--"transmen" and "transwomen" to use the jargon--whom she interviewed in rather intimate detail. Undergirding her report is the recurring question of male and female identity in general: Is it socially constructed or biologically determined? Rudacille's work is uniquely informative, particularly about the history of transsexuality. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
