"Through an examination of the experience of transsexuals, this book enhances understanding of how gender can and does function in powerful, complex, and subtle ways. The author, who has herself been surgically reassigned, has conducted extensive interviews with transsexuals from many walks of life. Her personal experiences, which inform this book, have given her access to her subjects that others would likely be denied.
While highlighting how the gender identity of transsexuals relates to hormonal and surgical changes in the body as well as to changes in dress, the book investigates the pressures and motivations to conform to expected gender roles, and the ways in which these are affected by social, educational, and professional status. Differences in the experiences of those who change from male to female and those who change from female to male are also examined."
Claudine Griggs earned her BA and MA in English at California State Polytechnic University, Pomona, and she has worked as the writing center director at Rhode Island College and a visiting professor of communication skills at Soka University of America. Claudine Griggs' publications include three nonfiction books about transsexuals along with a several dozen articles on writing, teaching, and other topics. She also writes fiction and science fiction, her first-love genre as a teenager.
"I met Biber at a time when I mistrusted most of the medical profession, yet Biber seemed like a good old country doctor who actually cared about patients. And he was imperiously confident in his skill, which was exactly what I needed at the time. I had been terrified of some of the physicians I’d met in past years and worried that they might kill me on the operating table through incompetence. I once said that Biber seemed a mixture of Huck Finn and Genghis Khan. Just what I needed to prevent a complete emotional meltdown at the time."
Available via goodreads.com
Photo via Heroines of My Life.
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