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Transsexual CEOs, Crossdressing Cops, and Hermaphrodites With Attitude
Jul 05, 2015DorisWaggoner rated this title 3 out of 5 stars
This book, by great writer Amy Bloom, began as articles for the "New Yorker." They read as three distinct pieces in this brief book, which purports to be about the "stories of people." It has too many statistics and facts, however, to make me feel the people who live with bodies most of us consider abnormal. The first, mostly about male to female transexuals, is the best. Some of her stories make us feel the pain of knowing, sometimes since toddlerhood, that the male body one inhabits isn't the "right" body for oneself. She also interviews surgeons who help in the creation of the "right" bodies for these people. Her sympathy and empathy for transpeople is clear. In the next segment, she goes on a cross-dressing cruise, where men dress up in their finest women's clothes, and their wives hang out, feeling very rarely OK, but mostly that this is not what they signed up for when they got married. Almost none of these men look like women, so they can only crossdress in a setting like this, or their own homes. It's very sad. The third section is the most "scientific," in which Bloom talks with doctors who try to explain "intersex," those very few babies born with ambiguous genitals. Until recently, surgery would be done in the first days of life to try to make the child look like the gender it most appeared to be. Nobody told the child; often nobody told the parents. Sometimes this worked. Sometimes the child, years later, turned up in a trans clinic, wanting a sex change. This section was most unclear to me. Read the novel, "Middlesex" about an intersex child, to get a much better idea, and a funny story to boot.