The Woman I Was Born Not To Be

Alecia Brevard

4 rating

This is an excellent autobiography of a M 2 F transsexual's journey from an Appalachian sissy-boy who, "should have been a girl" to a mature, introspective woman in her early 60's. She grew up never pleasing her father but with early support from her sister and eventual aceptance from her mother. Her experiences include:

four failed marriages, self castration, TS surgery, a Marilyn Monroe clone at Finnocchio's, a 6' model with copper colored hair, waitress, stripper, several rapes, college student, drama instructor, movie and theatre actress, playwright and author.

The 21 pictures in the center of the book show the progress of an attractive person evolving from a pretty boy to an exotic sex goddess to an attractive and mature human being that I'd enjoy as a neighbor. She gives the 'Ain't Necessarily So' rebuttal to Freud's comment that "anatomy is destiny." Finally, her psychological evolution and personal insights are summarized in her closing chapter.

If you haven't figured it out by now, I liked this book because I could identify with the growing self awareness towards full humanity.

The Lazy Crossdresser

Charles Anders

Greenery Press 2002, ISBN 1-890159-38-7 

4-rating

 $13.95 Books & Co. 

 This book is aimed at the emerging crossdresser and his initial effort to mimic women perfectly.  Here are five paragraphs from pages iv & v of the Introduction.

          “I first met a group of transsexuals when I joined a transgender group in Jesse Helms country.  Some of them looked like Donna Summer, some of them looked like Donna Reed.  But the one thing the people in this support group had in common was that they were trying to live as women.  They went through a lot of hardship to blend in and make their way in the world.  I knew instinctively I wouldn't ever do what they did. 

          Most crossdressers I know only put on their glad rags behind closed doors with the shades drawn.  They never let another soul see them.  They may be held back partly by shame, but probably also the fear of falling short.  I stayed resigned to dressing up very rarely and secretively for a long time.  I fantasized and read badly written porn stories in which sadistic women turned men into, “shemale slaves.”

          I didn’t relax until I decided I didn’t need to be a diva like the drag queens, or appear female like the transsexuals.  I’m amazed how long it took me to figure that out.  There are zillions of crossdressers out there, and they don’t have much in common with most drag queens or transsexuals except for wearing women’s clothes.  I wouldn’t be writing this book if I didn’t believe that for every visible drag queen and TS, there are a hundred mostly invisible men who just like to wear pretty things.

          These days, I have tons of fun dressing up.  And if you offered me the chance to do Captain Kirk’s body swap, I probably wouldn’t take it.  I enjoy being a man in women’s clothes.  Once I mastered all the tricks of gender transformation, I realized how easy it was to cut corners.  I’ve been cutting them ever since.

          A lot of short cuts can be summed up in one phrase: I don’t try to look like a woman.  Making people believe you were born female is the Holy Grail for many crossdressers.  But I don’t worry about creating any kind of “illusion,” either glamorous or womanly.  I want to look good and have fun.  To have fun, I have to feel comfortable and banish worries about getting away with deception.”

There is much more material and I recommend this book.

Crossdressing With Dignity (The Case for Transcending Gender Lines)

 Peggy J. Rudd Ed.D 

4-rating

(Read Below)

My Husband Wears My Clothes (Crossdressing From the Perspective of a Wife)

 Peggy J. Rudd Ed.D 

4-rating

(Read Below)

Crossdressers and Those Who Share Their Lives

 Peggy J. Rudd Ed.D 

4-rating  

These three books are popular classics in the crossdressing community and vary in age from 5 to 10 years.  They are from a woman married to a psychologist in 1980 who revealed his crossdressing to her after the wedding.  Although initially a shock, she made a decision to work on the positives and is now a leader in the Texas gender community.  She and her husband Mel/Melanie now regularly sponsor annual “Dignity Cruises” for crossdressers and host an annual “SPICE” conference aimed at wives dealing with crossdressing.  The Biblebelt writing style makes me suspect ghostwriting, but even so all three books have a lot of good thoughts that I can agree strongly with.  It may be that the “Biblebelt” writing tone is only a reflection of the close association between crossdressing and spirituality.  One thought is that crossdressers are “gender gifted.”  (I always wanted to tell my mother that the early treatment as a girl had been helpful in my later relationships with co-workers.)  What I draw from her example is that her high level of education was probably an indicator of potential acceptance.  The more education the wife has the higher the probability that (m2f) crossdressing can be successfully integrated into a marriage.

Fantastic Women

 Annie Woodhouse

4-rating

 I first read this book several years ago and later re-read it extensively because it dealt with a feminist psychologist in Britain trying to find whether M2F crossdressers and transsexuals had anything to offer the feminist movement.  I was very disappointed that she found no positive connections and was also shocked when she reported a case of a crossdresser beating his wife, something I thought never occurred.  It is part of my mythology that transgendered males and the Women’s Movement are complementary within a common gender revolution.  The failure of her research to support this idea is (I believe) due to the psychological immaturity of the men she interviewed.  She, like many other gender researchers, failed to differentiate between subjects in their initial erotic phase and those in their later spiritual phases.  She overlooked her primary helper whose I,Thou boundary was outside himself and focused on helping others.  I have a paper on this topic which I call, “Stages of Transgender Development.”

Transgender Warriors (Making History from Joan of Arc to RuPaul)

 Leslie Fineberg

3-rating

 This Beacon Press book contains a series of stories about gender-crossers and political revolts such as The Stonewall Riots.  It was an interesting book from a historical perspective and I recommend reading it.

An Unconventional Family

 Sandra Lipsitz Bem 

3-rating

Sandra Bem is a Cornell University Professor famous for devising the Bem sex-role inventory test to measure gender role orientation.  This book describes how her two children (boy first and a girl second) turned out after her best efforts at gender-neutral rearing.  The children have left home and she is separated from her husband, but still on friendly terms.  I didn’t get any clear message from this book as to the difference it made to the children except for her son who occasionally wears a skirt.

Unbending Gender 

Joan Williams

1-rating

It is from the perspective of a female attorney and is concerned with the economic, social and racial inequities based on sex. The authors remedy is to use the law to fix social problems and divorce problems in particular

Trans-Sister Radio

Chris Bohjalian

4-rating

It is set in a small northeastern town and
revolves around 4 main people, one of which is Dana,
The book pick's up about 6 or so months ahead of her
surgery and takes you all the way through and after
for several months. The author does not sugarcoat
anything, the reality is often harsh. The research
done by the author is quite good though, and helps
make the book more compelling, and hard to put down.

Sex and Gender in Historical Perspective

Edited by Edward Muir & Guido Ruggerio 

(rating 0).  

This book was given to me by my oldest son because he knows of my interest in gender issues.  While I appreciated his thoughtfulness, It seems terribly dull and what little I did read referred to Medieval Italy and lacks modern relevance.

Surpassing the Love of Men

 Lillian Faderman 

2-rating

  I found this book about 6 years ago in Seneca Falls New York at the Women’s History Museum after touring Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s home.  I read it entirely, but don’t recall much except for it’s primary theme of love between women.  There was a description of “Boston Marriages” between prominent women, which had the effect of marriage.  There also was an extensive section detailing how love between women was very common before the rise of the mental-health industry’s’ pejorative labeling in the late 19^th century.  Apparently no one worried about it previously as women couldn’t get each other pregnant and men generally didn’t see it as a threat.

The Man in the Red Velvet Dress

J. J. Allen 

4-rating

This book is from a long time married crossdresser with many interesting observations.  It is well written by an experienced author, but his conclusions are probably still evolving.  He makes the important point that most (M2F) crossdressers wonder all their lives about why they crossdress.  He has some very good pictures of crossdressers from about 20 years ago including Virginia Prince who started organizing crossdressers worldwide under her FPE (Foundation for full Personality Expression).  He also has a picture of what is clearly a fetishist in the early stages of psychological development.  He also talked about the “Black Lace Prison” of addictive crossdressing and same sex activity.  He also fails to recognize the effects of psychological development on crossdressers.

 Miss Vera’s Finishing School for Boys Who Want to Be Girls

 Veronica Vera

4-rating

  I found this paperback about 2 years ago in a Barnes & Noble bookstore.  It is a witty explanation of how an adventurer in the porn industry became the headmistress of a school for men wanting to explore their feminine side.  The author is a first rate writer with a tendency toward the frequent use of double entendre.  The book isn’t in front of me now, but I still recall her comment about “wearing the pants in her life by helping men wear skirts in theirs.”  One favorite student, a former nuclear engineer studying to be a veterinarian, appears in many of the photos and is joined near the end of the book by a very attractive & supportive lady friend.  This was a fun book to read that I also found fairly accurate in describing the needs of men imitating women.

The Gendered Society

 Michael S. Kimmel

3-rating

  This is a textbook from a male author working in academia and unsatisfied by the current “gender” literature.  It wasn’t a particularly riveting book for me but did seem to have a broad grasp of the problem.  Sometimes I think we who deal with the “gender problem” are like the blind Indian wise men describing the elephant in that we lack a common perspective.  Most of what I see at Books & Co is either by feminists wanting affirmation and economic equality or males who are in the early part (i. e. erotic phase) of their journey through gender.  Apparently this author is neither.  He mentioned that most crime is gender based; I don’t know where he got that.

Transformations (Crossdressers and Those Who Love Them)

 Mariette Pathy Allen

5-rating

  I have had this book since about ’91.  It is a book of pictures and text by a photographer who met her first crossdressers at a New Orleans Mardi Gras.  She mentions that she earlier had attended a girl’s school where she was once accused of not knowing the difference between boys and girls.  She also had studied Margaret Mead’s reports of life in other societies and their freedom to arrange the relationships between the sexes in many different ways.  I spoke to Mariette at the ’99 BeAll convention in Cleveland where she told me she had held a birthday party for Margaret Mead on her 75^th birthday.  She said they lived in the same building.  Any way this well-written book is a beautiful photo-essay of crossdressers and the people they are in relationships with.  As a long time member of this community I recognized many of the faces in the pictures.  Apparently she is making a career of attending TV/TS conventions as she is listed as a presenter in most of the gender convention literature I see.

Vested Interests (Crossdressing & Cultural Anxiety)

 Marjorie Garber

3-rating

  This author claims there can be no culture without crossdressing.  She is Professor of English and Department Chair at Harvard (?).  Although I’m unsure she would agree with me I think she is saying that the bi-polar gender model needs the crossdressing input to gain self-perspective.  Much of her arguments were over my head because they involved models from Shakespearean era literature unfamiliar to me.  However her claim that culture needs crossdressing seems valid.  The pictorials show a picture of a crossdressed Ken (from the Ken & Barbie dolls) which was apparently shipped from Mattel’s factory without inspection (it’s now a valuable collectors item).  A full reading of this book takes some time and a little work with the dictionary.

Gender Shock (Exploding the Myths of Male & Female)

 Phyllis Burke

5-rating

  This is a first-rate book on gender issues in society.  The author and her partner have a male child and there was concern that the child might suffer from the lack of a male role model.  An elderly Unitarian widow who said essentially that the “Iron John” myths from Robert Bly are so much bullshit deflates this “problem” early in the book.  The middle of the book recounts several gruesome stories of children abandoned to psychiatric institutes for gender re-education by parents apparently too embarrassed to deal with gender variance.  In the last part she has a chapter on gender independence and it’s advantages for society.  This is the best thought-out book on gender I have seen!

 Crossing, A Memoir

 Deirdre (formerly Donald) N McCloskey

3-rating

  I found this book in Denver at the Tattered Cover Bookstore.  The Author is Professor of Economics at Iowa State University who converted from male to female between the ages of 52 and 55.  Although she keeps the respect of colleagues who knew her before and after, she loses her family.  Her sister, a Harvard psychiatrist, repeatedly tries to have her committed to a mental institution.  I think her story is fairly typical for a well-connected M2F and makes interesting reading, but there are no surprises except for the marginally satisfactory surgical work.  Along with the gender crossing she changes from an atheist to a spiritual Christian.  She ends the book with a list of 50 common misunderstandings.  The first 10 are:

Gender crossing has to do with homosexuality.

It is always apparent at an early age.

Psychiatrists know about it.

Psychiatrists or psychologists can cure it.

Punishments and expulsions can cure it.

Gays wish to be women.

Gender crossers are effeminate as boys and men.

They are small and feminine looking.

You can tell.

They are lower class, never professors or business people or concert pianists.

And so on for 40 more.

GENDERQUEER

 edited by, Joan Nestle, Clare Howell, and Riki Wilchins

5-rating

The rating of 5 isn’t for easy reading but for its application to the wider society

This book is a collection of essays from the gender community with perhaps more f2m than m2f and many intersex people.  Some are easy reads and some aren’t.  The common theme is the suffering imposed on otherwise harmless individuals for gender ambiguity; for not being ’fully’ male or female.  The female linebacker, the male debutante, the gay and the indeterminate intersexual are all at risk.  It’s about the freedom of appearance in a “free” society.  Susan Wright, in her essay, “Be A Man” says, “I started crossdressing to learn more about men, but ended up learning more about myself.  I didn’t realize I’d discover how much of my personality and ways of interacting have been patterned by outside forces.  Does the clay need to know how it has been molded?  Maybe not, but I think we can all benefit from looking at life from outside the gender traps we have grown up in.  I certainly did.”

A particularly powerful essay is the “Gender Rights are Human Rights”, by Riki Wilchins, at the end of the book, speaking to representatives of the Gill Foundation recounting the presentation to Patrica Ireland and the NOW National Board for transgender inclusion.  Paragraph 6 p 290 begins, “So I looked around the room at all these powerful, very serious, and intimidating women, and said, “Many of you are no doubt wondering why a man with a vagina is standing here lecturing you on where feminism should go.”  I look down a Patricia here and notice she is now searching vigorously in her wrist for a good vein to open.  “But consider for a moment that men with vaginas are what gender looks like when it’s deregulated, and so my presence here today is a sign of your success and not your failure.”

          Riki also commented that, In the final analysis, the moral center of a movement is not defined by how well or how long we fight for our own rights.  Important as that is, it’s also enlightened self-interest: We all want our own rights.  The moral center of a movement is defined by how well and how long we fight for those who are not us, for those more easily left behind.

The Man who Would Be Queen

 The Science of Gender-Bending and Transsexualism

 by J. Michael Bailey

            I paid $25 for this book at Barnes & Noble hoping for a discussion of the ‘why’ in abstract or scientific terms.  While reading I made a lot of notations in the margins like “horse excrement” and “who says?”  First of all it isn’t about a man, it is about men transgendered in some way.  Furthermore the “science” lacks rigor as most of the book flows from his opinions.  Being a Professor of Psychology doesn’t automatically give scientific cachet.  Another alarm bell sounded when he uses references such as George Rekers and the Toronto-based Clarke Institute for Psychiatry; both have been controversial in the transgender community.

My fur was rubbed the wrong way when he began talking about gay males as coming mostly from ‘feminine’ boys.  This doesn’t seem to match the people I see.  He claims that is because gay males denigrate femininity.  The majority of the book (up to page 140) is devoted to gay males.  He specifically avoids discussion of lesbians and female gender-benders.

In Part III, he divides transgendered “Women who were once Boys” into homosexual and autogynephilic and claims it is easy to separate them.  Again my fur is rubbed the wrong way.  He proposes that ‘feminine’ boys turn into homosexual men who avoid femininity or into feminine transgenders so they can have sex with straight men.  It’s the ‘autogynephilic’ word that really sets my teeth on edge.  (Literally this means (from Greek), self-female-love and supposedly is the individual in love with their self (as women.)  The problem with this simplistic, ‘snapshot’, approach is its failure to recognize how people evolve psychologically.  His definitions are too narrow.  This rankles me because at age 74 I have been expending psychic energy most of my life trying to understand my urge to crossdress.  However much I gripe, he is the first author to recognize fading of the early, erotic component of crossdressing.  For me crossdressing provides a myth of connection with what I regard as feminine.  It does not mean I want to be a woman, but is symbolic of a female connection.

Here is my take on the ‘why’.  The libido (life-force) drives us all to seek completion beginning with the coming-of–age process, but society attempts to delay mating to avoid children born to ‘immature’ parents or incestuous parents.  Lacking realistic sex opportunities, individuals secretly experiment with alternatives to heterosexual coupling and this secrecy drives experiences into the unconscious.  Because of the secrecy and the encouragement of same-sex playmates (who may also be bullies or dominant) there is a high probability of same-sex erotic release.  Once the first powerful experience of pleasure is attained, the individual is conditioned to want to repeat the experience.  Alternatively, because of the secrecy (and inexperience), they often overidentify with the other sex to where they say they want to change sex without ever having any ‘hands on’ experience with the other sex.  Because of the separation of the sexes, children can initially only identify the other sex by hair styles and clothing.  So crossdressing is a form of “quasi-intercourse” that releases Eros.  Again this burst of pleasure drives the individual to desire repeated pleasure.  Only slowly does the consciousness recognize the spurious nature of this phenomenon.

JEB 20 June 2003